What Kind of DS106 Learner Are You?

The bar was set rather high for August 2013 GIF Challenge #3: DS106 Promo Poster by Talky Tina. I ended up making a few attempts, here are two:

I am not happy with the choice of gif or design but I though the idea of poking a wee bit of fun at Learner Styles was ok.

whatkindofo

A few more ideas crossed my mind, one was to make a triple troll quote, but I didn’t attribute the quote.

The Body is mine, the fireball from an old Blade Runner Gif I made and the quote is from Van Morrison

headless13

Tina Sounds



Yesterday my friend Tina told me she liked the way I gave Jim some music to dance to. I though I’d show her, and anyone else how to play a sound when a gif (or anything else) is clicked.

I made a quick gif of a scene from Tina’s work that shows what a committed and brave actor she is, I believe she does all her own stunts.
tina_stairs

click the image to hear the soundtrack.

Video grabbed from ▶ Talky Tina — Living Doll — Two Minute Twilight Zone Project — Season 5, Episode 6 – YouTube just a screen capture using ScreenFlow.
A few frames extracted with MPEG Steamclip, pullined into fireworks and exported as a gif.

I then searched Freesound for a sound of someone falling down the stairs that was cc licensed: Freesound.org – “Falling Down Wooden Stairs.wav” by Benboncan.
In Safari I viewed the source of the page, searched for .mp3 to find the link to the low quality preview:
www.freesound.org/data/previews/80/80916_634166-lq.mp3 (I took the http:// off here as wordpress embeds if I do not)

I knew that Freeview provides previews in mp3 and ogg so that we can play then with html5 and do not need any plugins (Firefox on mac needs ogg other browsers handle the mp3, this is a moving target). the ogg files have the same url but with the .ogg extension.

I started this blog post, switching to the Text (html) view in the editor and put in an audio tag:


	<audio id="tinastairs" preload loop>
	  <source src="http://www.freesound.org/data/previews/80/80916_634166-lq.ogg" type="audio/ogg">
	  <source src="http://www.freesound.org/data/previews/80/80916_634166-lq.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
	  Your browser does not support the audio tag.
	</audio>

If you are going to do this more than once on a page you need to give the audio a unique id here I used tinastairs.

You could copy the block of code above, replacing the id and the urls.
Update: The way wp adds paragraphs, it is best to take out all the line breaks when you use this.

This addes the audio to the post, it is preloaded, and will loop when played, but it does not show on the page (I’ve left out the controls parameter).

I then added the gif in the normal way. In the text view this gives me:

<img src="http://johnjohnston.info/106/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/tina_stairs.gif" alt="tina_stairs" width="420" height="260" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-854" />

I added a snippet of JavaScript to play the sound when the gif is clicked:
onclick="a=document.getElementById('tinastairs');if(a.paused){a.play()}else{a.pause();}"
As a parameter of the image tag like this:
<img onclick="a=document.getElementById('tinastairs');if(a.paused){a.play()}else{a.pause();}" src="http://johnjohnston.info/106/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/tina_stairs.gif" alt="tina_stairs" width="420" height="260" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-854" />
You can see I use the id of the audio tag, again you could copy this code and use a different ID.

Hopefully Tina will love this?

tinaeyes

I used the same process here, with different IDs but exported mp3 and ogg from Audacity, after recoding the sound from youtube.

Jim in the Air(plane)

After yesterday I can’t get JA out of my head.
jim_groom_dance_JA

click the gif to hear what Jim is dancing to.


I hope I managed to shroud Jim is a couple of wisps of cloud, and knocked dow the brightness and contrast in some sort of effort to match tone.

The Music is not quite JA but it is CC.
Using File:JA Crown-Of-Creation.jpg – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and TalkyTina’s improvement of my template which I snagged here: August 2013 GIF Challenge #2: Dancing Jim All Over the World | I am Talky Tina
Audio: Freesound.org – “psy trance.wav” by mechwarreir2 Creative Commons — CC0 1.0 Universal
 

Losing My Head

headless2

As the fall DS106 approaches TalkyTina ups cogodg’s challenge to the gif.

So in my head Grace Slick is now singing ‘lose your head’ and of course I lost my head to ds106 a while ago, and there is zen idea of having no head.

Gif put together from spare body parts, the ds106 radio logo (not sure who to credit for that one), a galaxy from the morgue file using Fireworks CS3.

Just some layers fading in and out.

skew
headlessbackground

ds106 Assignments: Show Us Your Headless13 ds106 Self

Not so Daily Creates

 

lines

Hate the gif, make your own.

Back at the end of June Alan Levine posted a challenge:

See how many ds106 Daily Creates you can do in July. No prizes, badges, or any crap like that. Just the reward of getting your creativity back in shape. We are not counting.

from: Get Yer Creativity in Shape! The ds106 Daily Create Summer Challenge – CogDogBlog

Alan has written a blog post for most (all?) of his!

I stared with good intentions but only managed 10 out of 31 with a bonus one today (I was not watching the calendar), here are my dozen:

  1. Packet of John
  2. tdc541 | Flickr – Photo Sharing!
  3. Backlit on the beach | Flickr – Photo Sharing!
  4. Messy-neat | Flickr – Photo Sharing!
  5. The 8 of faces | Flickr – Photo Sharing!
  6. TDC548 90 from100 – YouTube
  7. My I | Flickr – Photo Sharing!
  8. lemon | Flickr – Photo Sharing!
  9. tdc566 eye – YouTube
  10. Monarchy
  11. Son of DS106 | Flickr – Photo Sharing!

So two written, two youtube and the rest flickr.

some random thought-lets

There were quite a few I had ideas for after the event, I probably should have done some of those anyway.
Some challenges I was never going to do (singing for instance).
The Write Your Own Tw-Obituary (your life in less than 140 characters) I found to be too unpleasant an idea, I am not wanting to dwell on this at the mo. (at another time I might have loved it)
Some, TDC548 90 from100 for example, I had what I think was a strong idea, but didn’t really carry out, in fact most of them I could have improved a lot by spending more time on.
I had a reasonable amount of fun and learned from each one I did.

the best bit

The one I did spend a lot of time on veered quite far from the original challenge. It was also the one I learned most from and spent several hours on rather than minutes. I also revisited it and ‘improved’ my work a few time over the next week or so: here.

Join in with …

For a bit of fun, learning and more important connection to all sort of things I’s highly recommend: The Daily Create – Daily assignments to fuel your creativity whih anyone can join in any time.

I’d also recommend trying out the Fall 2013 Headless #DS106, the full DS106 course without a head, no teachers, a tone of friends and helpers. There is a Syllabus for the 12 week course, starting 26th August with a bonus animated gif fest starting anytime you like.