December 2013 – 106 drop in

Automating autocomplete Gifs

google_autocomplete

I saw an autocomplete poem on tumblr today which reminded me of Illustrating Odd Autocompletes | Bionic Teaching and the ds106 assignment that came out of it. Illustrating Odd Autocompletes.
On another post, Internet Ephemera – Sociology Edition Tom Woodward has a flickr slide show of some autocompletes, which made me think of creating an animated gif.
A bit of thought and I realised that this could be automated with a few bits and pieces. The main one being Gifsicle. Gifsicle is a command line tool for creating animated gifs, I used it in Simple Glitch and Movie2Gif.

This time I though I could use it in combination with AppleScript and Safari to produce some simple gifs.
Here is the script:
autocomplete-gif-applescript

It just asks for a bit of text and used that to create gifs by running through the alphabet, eg give it I love” and you get, I love a, I love b, etc. The final animated gif is saved on the desktop, in this example called i-love.gif

I just run this from the apple script editor. As the script uses System Events to ‘type’ you need to turn on access for assistive devices and applications for the Script Editor if you are using OS 10.9 (
OS X Mavericks: Enable access for assistive devices and applications)

You do need to have installed Gifsicle first too.
I’ve hard coded the crop into the script, if Safari is not filling the screen (not full screen) you would have to edit the script for that too.

I guess it has taken me a wee while to figure this out, but I can now produce as many autocomplete gifs as I like.
ds106

lots more

Update, 01.01.14 Social Media is even more, now using the google search box rather than the safari location bar.

Simple Glitch update

city
Click the image for some sounds.

A while ago I made a simple way to add sounds to gif I though it might add something to a glitch-gif, there are plenty of glitch sounds over on freesounds.
p_glitches1.wav by pulse00, Creative Commons — Sampling Plus 1.0

I’ve updated the glitch app a bit, adding some better find and replace options and fixing a bug or two. Get the new version: simple glitch download

New GIFaCHROME technology in development

hand-gifAchrome

Layercake, is a developing technology for the GIFaCHROME camera. Layercake is not quite ready for release but we have a few test images which give some idea of the affordances of the new subsystem. Layercake allows your images to take a jump out of the frame. Currently it is not known if Layercake is a lens or film format.

facegifaChrome

Technical Specs

Layercake is based on a very simple concept, adding another layer over the film stock. At its simplest a Layercake image consists of three main layers.

The traditional gif layer. Unlike regular GIFaCHROME images this extends under the frame layer..
An extended GIFaCHROME frame. This borrows from the Polaroid print and is an extra transparent, or white frame surrounding. This is a shared layer, shared across all frames.
The external layer. On each frame a section of the extended gif layer is copied above the frame layer. This layer can have an optional drop shadow.

As an aid to creating Layercake images the frame layer is hidden, or added at the end of processing. There is often a guide layer which is hidden before the final gif-printing.

Currently Layercake images are developed using fireworks processing, it is envisaged that this could easily be converted to GIMP or photoshop style workflows.

More examples and technical details are expected to follow.

Pioneering use of GIFaChrome

Recently discovered in the back of a dusty drawer is compelling evidence of the early adoption of the GIFaChrome format by pioneering female photographers.

These women were not discouraged by the predominant male view that the photographic image should be static or that the gif format was not suitable for serious subjects.

The rare filmstrip present here hints that the format was used around the world. Already archeoloGIFts are on the look out for other caches of this rare film. The film can at first glance be easily mistaken for other formats, overlooked or discarded.

Modern GIFaChrome artist Rochelle Lockridge who has done much to popularise the format was unavailable for comment at time of writing, her work on the recent history of the GIFaChrome Camera is essential reading for those interested in the format. We hope to have a triple-troll-quote from Rochelle later today.

Can We live Outside Google?

It is only those who do nothing who makes no mistake.

― Pyotr Kropotkin, Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings

This daily create started out with the memory of the common Anarchy graffiti, with the A is a circle.

Anarchy by Jonas B

I presume that I must have had the definition in the back of my mind.

I thought I’d plant a giant A over the Wikipedia screenshot.
On my iPad I took a screenshot and opened in in brushes. At that point I though it might be nicer to use a relevant quotation and of course though of:

If I can’t dance it is not my revolution.

I decoded to do it as a gif and started writing exporting to my photo library as I went.

When I got to ‘dance’ I changed it to gif.
I imported these images into 5seconds, which I find the best ios gif app and made a gif.
Unfortunately the speed slider did not work this time (too many frames?) to I needed to export to Dropbox and open on a mac in fireworks.
Once in fireworks I set the frame rate and did a very quick edit on the colour of gif.

if-i-cant-gif

I decided not to post the image to flickr as I really do not like putting gifs there. Given this was throwaway I just posted it to Google+
I’ve been really enjoying the ease of using google plus for ds106 as well as being dissatisfied with it’s locked in nature. I had even been musing about blogging about it and thinking about possible systems that could replace it. Given the amount of conversation in g+ in this round of ds106 compared to blog comments it is pretty obvious that a lot of folk love it.

And my gif got comments, and I got called out:

g+comments

Quite rightly so. Hopefully the short notes above are enough to cover the daily create. Google plus is another matter.

Google Plus’ minuses

When I first joined g+ I did not like the experience. To much, to confusing. It was only when I started using it for community activity, first with etmooc, then Mozilla webmakers and now the headless round of ds106 I begin to see how it could be used. The way it can pul different sources together quickly and easily and the simplicity of adding comments makes it an addictive experience.
The first flaw appeared quite quickly, in etmooc I was happily clicking plus one to keep a track of posts I was interested in. In a browser to eg a link to the post you need to pop a menu, choose link to post and then copy the link that shows up. You then need to click ‘done’. Not quick. There is no feed or api for getting information out of G+.
Earlier in the round of ds106 I complained about this, I tried to avoid commenting in google for a week and following the blog flow, but after a while I found that it was the easiest place to follow the action. I still don’t like the fact comments on my posts don’t stick with the post, I am afraid I like comments, conversations and ideas from others. So I end up in g plus, living for the moment, losing my history.

I think one of the reasons that g plus has worked so well for the headless ds106 is that we have a pretty small class size. I do not think it would work so well if more people were posting, but I could be wrong.

The differences between g+ and twitter include a couple of things that are relevant here, the #ds106 tweets are lost in my timeline, I follow too many folk to see much of what passes. I could just run a search or keep one alive in tweet deck but I don’t use tweet deck any more. The other difference is that twitter, despite killing the RSS feeds does have an api, this means something could be built on top of it or it could have been built in.

I really hate the way g+ is designed to keep you locked in, to have such useful facility and not have any easy way to share on another system might be good business for google but it grates against my idea of a fee, open and loosely joined web. Unfortunately for me the people involved in ds106, their activities and generosity keep pulling me back.

What would be great would be something that functioned like g+ but was open and sharable with RSS/APIs etc. If it both posted comments to and displayed comments from the original sources. Of course this would be a can of worms. Some blogs have comment feeds that would work out ok. Then there is youtube, where my comments now seem to be linked to google plus, more problematic, flickr and twitter would need different methods.

A start along these lines might be something like my DS106 Activity Dashboard (very much the beginning of an idea)

After all this thinking I need a couple of quick triple trolls to clear my head:

alan-kropotkin

Young_Kropotkin