Chicken Nice

chick-wall
A few notions around the use of audio and some notes on nicecast.

‎www.idlewords.com/audio-manifesto.txt
advancednicecastusage – sirdarkstar
ds106 – Community – Google+

After all the nicecast changing and testing of effects I’ve been doing the audio on this one is pretty rough.
I also got some, quite a few, sections of silence.
Screen Shot 2013-09-21 at 20.31.59
Not sure where they came from, I am putting it down to nicecast flakyness, perhaps due to the fact I’ve been hammering it (had a crash just before broadcast).
download chicken-nice.mp3

Credits:
Mel Blank and sound effects Man – Chicken farm song Creative Commons license: Public Domain.
Gif from NYPL Labs : Stereogranimator.

DS106 Radio Bumper Dub Number two

I love audio, but am fairly scared of music making. I am a bit of a klutz musically, can’t clap in time or keep a tune.
I’ve already created a couple of bumpers for ds106: Jim Says, Listen to the LoDown and DS106 Confusion. both relied on music from someone else, one a GarageBand loop the other a steal.

This time I though I might step up and make a noise. Given the lack of musical talent I decided to try a Magic Garageband production.
This allows you to make some ‘music’ by choosing a genre and playing with the variables (instrument styles). I did this for a while and then passed it on to the ‘real’ garageband interface. There I chopped it down to a very short segment and added my voice. Some effects added to the vocals. Then I dropped out a few bit to give it a dubish feel.
I ended up with this:

I quite like the announcement feeling from the brass. I made a quick edit of the ds106 skul and crossbones to make a skull and trumpets.
My GarageBand screen looked like this:
Screen Shot 2013-09-19 at 21.48.56
The number two in the tile comes from the fact I ‘saved as…’ at one point where I did’t want to lose something that sounded better than nothing.
The text plays on the idea of ds106 being open, I am more of a ‘romantic socialist’ than a business man. I am also thinking of ds106 being play rather than work.

Week Three: comments and code

Please specify a Flickr ID for this gallery

I think I have started to find my level with the headless course.

I am not trying to do it all. Each week I aim to do a few daily creates, one thinking post and one assignment and a chicken cast.
I also hope to post several comments on other blogs.

This week I’ve been thinking of comments quite a lot. The podcast Chickens Clucking discussed this and gained some interesting comments, mostly on G+.

I’ve been mixing in a bit of html, css and javascript this week. Starting with the image on the What’s the story? post. I then added a we bit of css to the blog via the WordPress Google Fonts Plugin this let me avoid thinking to much by adding notes in ‘handwriting’ rather than writing a real post.
There was no real assignment this week, but we were encouraged to tackle a five card flickr story. Again I diverted myself with some css and javascript to make a slide show from the story.
I wonder if an html/css/javascript section would be good in ds106, I’d be interested in what others think.

I meant to do a bit more reading, thinking and commenting today, but I started playing with my new raspberry pi. That took a lot more than I expected.

The best thing this week has been reading other folks posts and comments, too many to mention given the late hour here. As usually it is amazing to see folk come together online. I’ve been trying to read a few about pages too, fascinating to find out the back story of some fellow learners.

Next week is the intro to audio I am not sure if I’ll be doing much. I am off for a few days holiday and don’t know if I’ll have an internet connection. I am also aiming to spend as much time outside and disconnected as the weather allows.

Flicking a Five Card Story


Five Card Story: leaving

a Five Card Flickr story created by johnjohnston


flickr photo by dwtno


flickr photo by Serenae


flickr photo by bionicteaching


flickr photo by katerha


flickr photo by shareski

 

Thro the fence,

A mossy climb,

Deeper.

Leaving the city:

Into a cleaner space.


This week it is suggested that we try a Five Card Flickr story, I took a run at it yesterday.

As I clicked trough the activity, I kept getting ideas that would turn away as I loaded another set of cards, instead of going with the flow I restarted a few times. Better perhaps to just pick up the cards as they are dealt? I didn’t end up with much of a story.

Today I though I’d post it and my mind turned to styling the code provided a little, it then wandered onto maybe making a slideshow, the result is above.
I started off by adding a wee bit of css to add a frame/border round the photo.
You need to use the text/html editor in WordPress (similar in other systems too) to paste in the code from Five Card Flickr, I edited a bit in a text editor first as this is easier than using the blog editor.

First I wrapped the paragraphs containing the images in a div, putting:
<div id=”5cards”>
Before the first p tag and:
</div> after the last.

I then added a style block:
<style type=”text/css” media=”screen”>
#fivecards{height:320px;width:500px;} #fivecards p{text-align:center;; }
#fivecards img{max-width:500px;max-height:300px;border:solid 1px;padding:10px;box-shadow: 5px 5px 2px #888888;margin:5px} #fivecards a{color:#000}
</style>
This gave the images a border and a shadow.

U
I then needed some JavaScript to sort out the slideshow.

First I need to hide all but one of the images:
div4search=document.getElementById('5cards');
var someas = div4search.getElementsByTagName('p');
for (var i=1; i < someas.length; i++) {
someas[i].style.display ="none";
};

Next I need a timer to hide the current image and show the next one.

I found a nice timer class: Object Oriented Programming with JavaScript : Timer Class – Daily Coding which looked as if it would do the trick.
So added the code for the class to the post inside the script tag.
I then added a timer_tick function which will be fired every time the timer ticked:

function timer_tick(){
	document.getElementById("div1").innerHTML =index;
	var someas = div4search.getElementsByTagName('p');
	for (var i=0; i < someas.length; i++) {
		if (someas[i].offsetWidth>0){
			someas[i].style.display ="none";
			if (i==someas.length-1){j=0;}else{j=i+1;}
			someas[j].style.display ="block"
			break;
		};
 	};
}

This is not very elegant, instead of remembering which photo is showing I just run through them all and the one that is visible is the current one. If it is the last I show the first, else I show the next.
I added this to the script block.
The other thing I did was to take the javascript and run it through Minify Javascript Online this put it all one one line. I think you need to do this in wordpress or the editor messes up by adding p tags in the middle of the script.

Not a particularly good way to approach this in a general way, but a nice wee problem for pushing my babysteps javascript a bit. I often wonder if there show be a wee bit of htlm/css/javascript in ds106 and I frequently use messing about in this way to avoid the main question;-)

Chickens Clucking

rooster 01

Some comments about comments, here are some of the posts I was talking about:


chicken_clucking.mp3

update Quite a lot of interesting discussion on G+ around this.