John – Page 27 – 106 drop in

Not so Daily Creates

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:

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.

Boing

Click the pic to toggle sound.

This tweet lead to this post, Spring into Action this Fall by Todd which lead to Todd tweeting @johnjohnston So maybe we should add some sound to the bobbing heads? which lead to this.

Of course Todd started the headless meme with another t-shirt earlier and cogdog played along…

I was trying to think about how to explain ds106, but I guess this does it;-)

For me ds106 is a bit like non competitive tennis with self replicating balls that can be played on any court you like with any rules you like with the addition of be nice.

Credits:

Sound: Freesound.org – “Boing.wav” by juskiddink licensed under the Attribution License.

Image: Todd using the one I tweeted as a starter.

The DS106 wheels keep turning

In my day job today I was running a wee holiday course for teachers in digital storytelling. We use the Summerlee Museum of Scottish Industrial Life rather than our usual base for this. It is nice to get folk out and about taking photos and video. (we use ipad 2s as cameras and 3 flavours of the course, editing with mac, ipad and pc).

So I was taking some video which I then though would make a reasonable Cinemagram I didn’t think it turned out very well, it is hard to get the looping smooth so I decide to try and make it a wee bit smoother. I think these, done with quicktime pro 7 (which still works in os x10.8) and fireworks are a lot better.

wheel400

spinn201

these tick the ds106 Assignments: Photo It Like Peanut Butter boxes. I am going to make a quick screencast tutorial on this as I think fireworks is under appreciated in ds1o6.

Alternative Lines for the Daily Create

So Alan is barking about getting creative which pushes me towards a dailycreate or two.

Unfortunately yesterday’s Draw something abstract out of straight lines proved a bit of a problem, I stared at various iPad drawing apps, scratched a few lines and gave up.

Waking early in the morning I though about this a bit, looked at the ones that had been created while I slept and though, I could do this with HyperCard. Lacking an old enough mac and wanting to learn a little more about the canvas element in html5 I decided on a small javascript experiment.

A bit of googling and I came up with this simple page. It basically produces an image with 600 random lines.

There are a few other variations. I also looked for a nice quote about ‘straight lines’ which is added to the image (this can be turned off).

~~Now I am wondering about making animated gifs from multiple images~~. done

lines

Mashup Assignment FlickrSounds

DS106 students do not have much time left the clock is ticking…

This started as a riff on some cogdogfoo flickrSounds for #ds106 as a way of producing comic-strips of images and sounds. It gave me an opportunity to play with the flickr and free sound APIs.

It developed into a sort of slideshow of images and sound, a couple of examples.

To create a slideshow

go to flickrSounds. Put in a word to search for
When the image and sound load you can see alternatives by clicking he image or waveform
When you have one you like click Add to Preview
Repeat with more words
When you have finished click Save as AV slides
This will show you your slideshow and give you a bit of html to put into your blog (you need to be on text/html rather than Visual in the blog editor.

I do not think you can use iFrames in a wordpress.com blog but it should work fine on a self hosted wordpress blogs.

I’ve found that sound phrases, eg, tick tock or ‘drip drip drip’ are easier to get a reasonable result from than a quote.

I use one for my 404 here.

If I was counting I’d get stars for this and for creating a tutorial;-)