Author: John

Once you are on the DS106 Train

A new chapter of ds106 is starting.

ds106zone is an idea Dr. Garcia had about framing the Summer session around a Twilight Zone inspired thematic

from: bavatuesdays | a “b” blog

I’ve not idea about the twilight zone, well off my culture radar, so I am speed reading wikipedia and it looks like I’ll need to take a youtube trip. But DS106 is irresistible! A quick check to see if my blog is still in the mix:

So:
test

A little fast, but I am working quickly. Giffing through the night.

window

It will be a scream on the DS106 Train.

trainscream

A train ride you never wake up from!

wake

I am not counting, but ds106 Assignments: From the Twilight Zone, and Beyond … and ds106 Assignments: All Aboard The GIF Train.

Ripping up a Shredder Head

So a new rather interesting DS106 assignments, For The Remix!

A series of photographs taken by Jonathan Worth of author Cory Doctorow are now available for you to remix, regenerate, and to make new art, especially in light of the themes and topics of his books.

The deal seems to be you should think deeply, share your idea and processes. More details: FTR! For The Remix! | remixing cory doctorow and How Do You Think Yoda Got So Wise? – CogDogBlog.

So I had a look a the pictures, watch Jonathan’s introductory video and though I might stretch to a quick gif.

Looking at the thumbnails, Mr. Doctorow’s office is impressive, with a nice range of cables and kit. I was hoping to play with the idea of printing some of the head shots, riffing of the idea of Jonathan sharing digital copies for free while selling prints. This idea he borrowed from Cory’s famous publishing method.

On downloading the high rez image I found what I though might be a useful printer was in fact a shredder, so I got rid of that idea:

shreader

I like the idea of taking a 45mb, 4000 dpi, 8000 odd pixel image and ripping a 500 pixel, 128 colour, 72 dpi gif out of it.

Here is how

Unlinke most ds106ers I use Fireworks for giffing, mostly because I am familiar with it as I got a really great deal on Fireworks 8 but being a teacher years ago. Fireworks has some nice features for giffing. An image can have layers and frames, layers can persist across frames.

Here is what I did:

  1. The downloaded image opened automatically in preview.
  2. I cropped out the shredder and switched to Fireworks.
  3. Created a new document, Fireworks assumes you want to use the clipboard and set the image dimension to that, about 3000 pixels.
  4. Paste in the clip.
  5. Switch back to preview and copy one of the cory heads from the thumbnail sheet.
  6. Back to fireworks.
  7. The original layer is set to be shared across frames, I make a new layer, not shared. (This from the popup menus in the layer palette) and paste in the head.
  8. Draw a white rect for a frame and group it with the head. (I think I saw a polaroid ref somewhere?)
  9. I then used the polygon tool to cut out the lower section of the shredder.
  10. Make a new layer, set to share across frames, paste in the bottom half of the shredder.
  11. Move this new layer to the top, so that the head, animation layer is sandwiched between the two other layers.
  12. Move the animation layer so it is about to go into the shredder.
  13. Using the frames palette, I duplicate the first frame. Move the head into the shredder a bit.
  14. Repeat.
  15. Use the frames palette to adjust the delay on each frame.
  16. Resize the whole image to 500 pixels across.
  17. Export to animated gif.

method

Some folk still want to print

After all that I still wanted to print, so a quick search of flicker finds Printer Tiger

THis was a little trickier as I needed to skew the head a bit, I think photoshop has better tools for this.

print

Credits

Images of Cory Doctorow, Jonathan Worth, Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0

Printer Tiger, Marco Varisco, Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic — CC BY-SA 2.0

Dancing Jim Over the World

Last night a old gif of mine got tweeted:

and I replied:

As I love recycling, I dug out the old gif, which I also use for my Jim Groom Internet glasses and giffed it up a bit:

jim_groom_office
jim_groom_white-house
jim_groom_peking

I think there are already assignments that this sort of fits into. ds106 Assignments: Noiseprofessor’s Jim Groom Art perhaps, but perhaps giffing Jim around the world could be one in its own right?
In case you want to join in here is a Dancing Jim Template An animated 9 frame gif with transparent background. The back ground is pretty big to make it easy to edit. Here is how I do it with Fireworks.

  1. Open the gif
  2. Make a new background layer that is Shared across frames
  3. Add an image to this background layer
  4. Move background around to get Jim in the right place
  5. Optionally cut out part of background and past into new foreground layer, so that the figure is partially behind, EG the shoulder of the office guy above.

The original gif is getting a wee bit tatty now, having been through the gif wringer and at some point it may be worth revisiting the original film and extracting another.

All backgrounds from Morguefile.com free stock photos, no attribution needed.

Update: I made this an assignment: ds106 Assignments: Dancing Jim all over the world

5 Sound Stories a toy for #ds106

I’ve been working on a version of Alan Levine’s Five Card Flickr for audio rather than images. Very much a work in progress. Only tested on a mac (FF, Safari & chrome) and Windows 7 (IE9), no support for iOS (limitation of how iOS plays audio and my lack of knowhow).

5 Sound Stories

I’d appreciate any tests or playing around if anyone has a spare 5 minutes.

5 Sound Stories is a way to create short soundscapes and save them along with some texts. It was inspired by Five Card Flickr and the suggestion of pascale colonna, @colonna69, in a tweet or two.

The idea is to load a set of sounds, either from a list of keywords or at random and create a soundscape. The result can be embedded here is an example:

 

FreeSound

I am using the Freesound API which allows you to browse, search, and retrieve information about Freesound users, packs, and the sounds themselves

Freesound is a collaborative database of Creative Commons Licensed sounds. Browse, download and share sounds.

Freesound is pretty easy to use, I had a bash a while back with flickrSounds so had an idea of how to use it. Unfortunately my JavaScript skills are pretty limited so the code is a horror story at the moment. I am using jQuery to handle the requests to free sound and produce the players and interface. I suspect that there is some really neat way of doing this with object orientated coding, but I’ve just got a bunch of functions and placeholders on the webpage.

Saving to a Database

The other piece of coding I had to do was to save the generated soundscapes and associated information in some way. I’ve just copied this from Five Card Flickr. Alan supplies the source code and this is really easy to copy and alter as it is very well commented indeed.  Since this is shared under the terms of the GNU General Public License I think that means I have to make the code of this available too. The JavaScript is easy enough to see (and wince at) in the browser, but it is part of my plan to finish this, clean up as much as possible and add some comments then share it.

Twitter Help

The web aplication still needs a lot of work, I’ve had some great feedback from Alan and Pascale Colonna (colonna69 on Twitter) over a few tweets.

Pascale came up with some ideas of how this could be used in primary school which I hope, with her permission, to add to the site and Alan has pushed me to refine the UI a bit.

Pascale also noted that this doesn’t play well on an iOS device. This is due to the lack of the ability to preload audio on iOS (I guess to save bandwidth) I think I’ve figured out a workaround but it is going to be a while before I get that together.

I’d love to get more help and suggestions either via twitter or in the comments here.

Learning by Doing and Riffing

This seems to fit my learning style, I’ve tried code academy , books, tutorials but none get me into the groove as much as trying something that is a bit to hard for me. Google is a great help, although for this sort of thing it always seems to end up on Stack Overflow. Working my way through a tutorial, I never run over time, miss what real people are saying to me. This is the power of learning #ds106 style, dive in and do.

wecodejam_econo

Of course one of the dangers of learning this way is a lack of rigour, no one is checking my work, there is a lot of sloppiness in my code, this is were dipping back into the likes of code academy helps. My Javascript is improving a little and my occasional visits to tutorials, learning sites etc is helped by having something to reflect on, hopefully, revisit and refactor.

The other real powerful thing about #ds106 is that participants are encouraged to borrow, copy, steal and riff off their fellow learners (with attribution). Here again I am riffing off @cogdog, Alan Levine.

This is not a MOOC,  and I am not going to label it with anything in particular but learning with pals is powerful.

I hope this will make a useful assignment or two for DS106 and I’ll be submitting soon.

Not an animated gif

Using this png and CSS sprites.
jgsprites

Copying CSS sprite sheet animation – jsFiddle
Using my much reused favourite (of the ones I’ve made) animated gif. I converted it to a long strip.

So the CSS without the vendor prefixes


.jg {
	margin:auto;
    width: 203px;
    height: 203px;
    background-image: url("jgsprites.png");
	animation: play 1.5s steps(9) infinite;

}

@-webkit-keyframes play {
from { background-position: 0px; }
to { background-position: -1827px; }
}

I had to strip all of the returns out of the CSS and paste it into the WordPress blog editor to get it to work.