John – Page 12 – 106 drop in

A #DS106 DailyCreate Twitter Bot

I’ve always liked random and automated random things. While these are not strictly part of storytelling I’ve managed to bring them into DS106 whenever I can.

A while back I set up @DailyCreateBot for some reason or other. Obviously a Twitter bot of some kind to do with the Daily Create. I do remember having trouble with the OAuth requirements of the more recent Twitter API and giving up.

Last weekend, on a rainy day I blew the dust of my raspberry pi and got it online and set up as a server. I was not too sure what to do with it at the time.

During the week I did revisit a project to use the pi to flash some lights depending on a Twitter search. I don’t have hardware for that but I was interested in how simple the project was. There seems to be plenty of libraries that can sort out Authentication to Twitter for you now. A bit of googling and thinking, mostly googling and I have a Twitter bot set up.

The @DailyCreateBot will reply with a suggestion of a photo challenge of you mention him on Twitter. I am using the same list that Alan Levin provided for me for the photoblitz.

The @DailyCreateBot runs on Python. This is where the pi comes in I would not even know where to begin to find out how to host a python app but the pi lets me do that easily.

I am not proposing to write a step-by-step guide here but it is worth mentioning that several things went wrong or did not work as expected. All were beyond my 2 weeks worth of Python on the mechanical mooc . All were solved by a wee bit of googling and sometime just repeating things till they worked. The delight of working on a pi is that I knew I’d I totally messed up I could just reformat the SD card, install an so again and be back to square two.

I had already:

installed one of the basic OS FOR THE PI
Set up SSH access so that I can get ‘on’ to the pi from the terminal application on a mac and via SSH apps on iOS.
set up the pi as a web server and sorted out the DNS

*I found a python library and example code that replied.
*I added logic to reply with a random string taken from a list of challenges.
*Tested it a bit.

Then I posted to the DS106 Google + group and a few kind folk tested it a bit. Rochelle asked:

That is cool +John Johnston . It worked for me right out of the bot box. Do we upload to Twitter, tag them DailyCreateBot? I’d like to see what others have done. 🙂

Which got me thinking. A quick google found a php/JavaScript solution to showing tweets with the hashtag #dailycreatebot and I’ve got this up and running.

All very much a work in progress. There are few things to be ironed out:

the Python bot falls over every now and again complaining about UTF8 I need to google that some more.
the web page showing images just uses the styles used in the demo of the code. I need to tidy it up and perhaps skip tweets with the hashtag but no images.
there is also the problem Rochelle pointed out that if you reply to the bot you get another prompt. I wonder if I could turn off replies if there is an image in the tweet?

Anyway if your expectations are low you can join in:

Tweet @DailyCreateBot and get a prompt.
Tweet your photo with the hashtag #DailyCreateBot
See what other folk are doing.
Let me know of any interesting problems.

Free the Groom

Now this is weird.

jim_groom_dice jim_groom_dice-dance

Given we can’t waste time I dug out a processing script I’d used before. I can’t recall where I got the original, or what changes I made, but it looks like I simplified it a lot and exported a series of frames to gifs. Stitched these together in FireWorks.

Cutting Noir Corners

When you have been in this game as long as I have you get a little slow. No way I can keep up with the young operatives without cutting some corners.

We were asked to keep an eye on Davey Gordon a pug without much of a chin. I looked over some surveillance footage and cutback on the groundwork with some tech.

I’ve got 880 shots on the light box, Killer’s Kiss, which lets me look for clues (here is how I made the lightbox), some just jumped out at me:

stairs01

Not so much noir but Kubrickian symmetry, remember Kubrick // One-Point Perspective on Vimeo.

I am keeping an eye on these characters:

alley01

Shady!

The police seem to be on the case:

And here are some great shots:

Coming out fighting:

The Postman’s Noir Cat

Not got much time for typing. Just finished working through this week’s demands. Strange things afoot. I am no sure how seriously to take cats in a story. But you have to do some research in this business no matter how strange. I’m not making the right connections but some things are aligning up….

And this is what I am hearing:

The audio was knocked up in a few minutes, Paul has a nice voice. The technique I used will be in a post tomorrow or the day after. I am planning a supercut tutorial too.

Character Cutting

So Burtus was on my case pretty fast last week, trying to get a fix on me. I guess I didn’t drop enough clues. The deal was I should reveal some history, some of my favorite places, that might have given her a clue. For the folk less agile that Burtus, I’ll spell it out. I’ve been down south where the sky ain’t sentimental. I ran into a bit of bother, nothing I couldn’t handle.
Anyhow I was intrigued enough to listen to the second message on my machine. When you have more than one client things can get tricky, and this is tricky times four. 
This week Groom seems to be sucking up to Burtus big time.
 I saw a couple of Burtus other performances too (here and here). She is trying to come over cashmere, soften the message a bit, but she is still all steel. Wants everything her way, reports for Sunday night.
All 4 of the clients are demanding, well they can keep that up, I’ll steer my own course through this business.
Another familiar face showed up here last week. Quite a character for such a sweet face. Worth keeping you eye on Tina if you are in this game.
So, among this week’s unreasonable demands was instructions to dig into some character. I started leafing through some old cases. I got interested in Frank Bigelow, but that turned into a wild goose chase.
The Words and pictures just didn’t line up. I dived back into the files. I was looking for words and pictures at the right time and struck gold:
You can tell a lot about a character from watching others talk about them. These guys are pieces of work.

Supercut note: srt files don’t always line up with the video. I tried a couple of apps to adjust and match srts I downloaded to go with D.O.A. They didn’t work. SubShifter – Online SRT Subtitle Resync Tool looks promising for another time.