Author: John

Hitching a Lift on the DS106 Express

Recently Alan was musing on the drop off in open online participants in DS106, this was continued on Zombies for Peace (or narrative)

Some comments suggest that ds106 has too much tech and not enough story, I guess it can go that way, the tech is certainly the easiest bit of ds106, but participants, particularly the umw students are pushed towards spelling out stories, either of creation or what is behind the creation. I was myself recently and I appreciated it. Alan defends this pretty well imo

So our students are not strictly asked to become multimedia storytellers, they are asked to explore the elements of story as told in media, as framed in the culture of the web. Yes, they are learning media creation skills, not as an end in themselves, but to have those kinds of creative abilities available as they move forward in their studies.

from: Zombies for Peace (or narrative) – CogDogBlog

I think the two main difficulties with trying to join in DS106 are the size of ds106 and time.

When I first saw ds106 it was a wee bit intimidating, there were some folk doing impressive things, and given that participation was in public it took a bit of courage to join. The DS106 site is now a lot more complex, and although there is a lot more documentation it does look like a lot of work.

I’ve dipped in and out of DS106 for two or three sessions, one, Camp Magic MacGuffin, I tried my best to keep up with in a full time way. I made it a few weeks in before struggling to keep up. One of the things that really helped was being put in a bunkhouse with a smaller group, easier to keep track of and try and comment on other folks work.

Interestingly and probably obviously the pice I enjoyed most was the exercise that I initially disliked even the idea of, the one that involved most group participation and went deepest into story telling: Impending Zombie Apocalypse

So I think while I can’t answer Alan’s questions about increasing participation I can recommend that you jump onto the DS106 bus and hold on as tight as you can.

A Story

I started thinking about this post this morning as I read my RSS reader, I have a holiday today and had a list of blogging/tech test and computer tasks to get to as the weather is poor. Unfortunately I also read this post Hitchhiking’s Time Has Come Again – NYTimes.com via Hacker News. (I glance over the hacker news occasionally, after played with Dave Winer’s OMPL editor and river of news, but that is another story).

Fortunately this was an interesting story, I used to love hitchhiking back in the late 70s. The article told of how the authorities discouraged Hitchhiking after it was taken up by subversive types:

But it was the ’60s and ’70s counterculture that embraced hitching as an anti-consumerist, pro-environment celebration of human interdependence. Students were hitchhiking to antiwar demonstrations. Civil rights advocates thumbed rides to register voters in the South. The American automotive industry, by then, had gone into overdrive: there were more cars than ever on the road. Yet an entire generation of young people, it seemed, was on the move without buying them.

This, apparently, irked local police officials, as well as the F.B.I. First, in the late 1950s, the F.B.I. began warning American motorists that hitchhikers might be criminals. A typical F.B.I. poster showed a well-dressed yet menacing hitchhiker under the title “Death in Disguise?”

so I am beginning to see a bit of DS106 in this story, homing in on the still from It Happened One Night, the plans for the day begin to unravel. Time for some comfort food.

Dancing to the DS106 Tune

I was quite please with my picture yesterday, but Alan called me out (as I believe they say in ds106):

His comment made me update the post with as much as I could recall of the backstory. Who is the monkey got me thinking:


Original Organ Grinder picture from: File:Organ grinder with monkey.jpg – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia public domain
I cut out Cogdog from: Alan Levine and Graham Wegner at Dinner | Flickr – Photo Sharing! by mikecogh Some rights reserved

Image mixed with fireworks 8

Monkeying Around in Time

Last week I saw Who’s That Cute Kid on The Beach? – CogDogBlog, started in on it. This that and a MechanicalMooc got in the way of finishing and I am glad they did.
Today I came home from work to find my #DS106 t-shirt had arrived. A no brainer:

I grabbed the original photo from flickr scanned from my mum’s shoe box and got my daughter to take a quick pic.

On the iPad I used Superimpose to take out the background from the now picture. Then in Photoshop touch I made a triple layer images with me sandwiched between two layers of the old one. A bit of rubbing out, export to camera+ for cropping, Snapseed for a bit of grunge and finally Diptc for a while border.

By no means a great job, but quick and fun. I could have done a bit of a better job with the cropping and rubbing out and there is an obvious disparity in the tone (or grain or something) between the photos, perhaps more grunge would help.

Update 3 Nov 2012

Alan called me out ds106 stype in the comments and on twitter to tell the story behind this photo. I must say I didn’t really think of the story. I’ve very few photos of myself at a young age and just grabbed one I though would work visually from twitter. I am not sure if I can actually remember the event or just the photo. Anyway:

The photo was taken, I’d guess, at the end of the 60s or perhaps at the start of the 70s. I was born in 1958 my brother 3 years later and I am guessing on appearance.

This would have been a Saturday when we went to Helensburgh for the weekly shopping. I do remember feeling aggrieved that my brother got to hold the monkey. I was the one with the interest in wildlife.

I wish I could recall my feelings about the monkey, other than fascination and delight at getting close to one. I’ve had a life long interest in animals and the way we treat them and have gone back and forth on many issues: I spent my teenage years with wildlife as a main interest that veered into shooting rabbits and duck, before stopping eating meat at 21 (still don’t). I disapproved of animals in captivity but worked as a zookeeper for most of my 20s. nicely conflicted.

So I wonder how I felt about the monkey did I feel sorry for it, disapprove of it being dressed up. I can imagine being quite angry about this at certain periods of my life.

That is the story, but the ds106 story will continue in the next post…

Photoblitzin

20 Minute Photo Challenge: ds106 Photoblitz – CogDogBlog

So this is how we set it up:

Here is an exercise we did in class as a fun way to try out your visual interpretation skills. We give you a series of things to capture in photos you must capture within a 20 minute window of time. In this case, it is less about capturing artistic images, but just doing what you can to be inventive. Before you do this, pick a place that is likely to have a lot of variety of subjects (middle of town ro campus, your basement, whatever).

I’ve had this is mind as a short piece of fun since Alan posted this. I didn’t do much thinking about pick a place that is likely to have a lot of variety of subjects as my surroundings were quite monotonous(not in a bad way).

When I was on a walk to Loch Humphrey and Duncolm yesterday I decided to try this out. I did think about which stretch of the walk would be good, but was stuck for some pictures, I didn’t see anyone else to get a picture of their feet or paws in that particular 20 minutes although it is a popular walk and I passed a dozen or so folk in the 3 or so hours I was walking. I failed to make a supernatural photo too.

The exercise was good fun and would be an interesting one to do with a class of pupils. I will be repeating it myself. Perhaps using different sets of photo ideas.

Here is my set: ds106photoblitz – a set on Flickr, I didn’t pict the best 5, just piled them in.

To embed them here I decided to use Haiku Deck on my iPad. With the photos appeared in my photo stream as soon as I came home. I had hoped to search for and use the ones in flickr, but Haiku Deck didn’t find all of my pictures even after I gave them a unique tag. So I uploaded them from the iPad when I saved the Deck.

The PhotoBlitzer

When I read Alan’s post I copied the photo idea to my dropbox so I could find them whenever I decided to give the challenge a go. This had me thinking a bit. I though I could make a webpage that would supply a random set of photo ideas. I took Alan’s list, mixed in some from the, now discontinued, Daily Shoot site, and made a webpage that shows a random set of 7. photoblitzer.

I spent a wee bit of time shorting the challenges so that 7 would fit on an iPhone screen (iPhone 4). The page also show the current time to act as a start clock picture which will give the list of challenges. It might even be useful.

Update: photoblitzer is now updated with >160 photo tasks to draw from thanks to Alan Levine sending the whole of the DS106 Daily create photography section. I’ve also added a button to let you copy the html for the list as I though that might be useful for sharing a random set of tasks.

Update  9 Oct: I just added a toggle to the colours of the items listed, you can use the webpage, on your phone, to keep track of the pictures you take. NB don’t refresh the page.

homebrewing gifsicle

gifsicle is a commandline tool for animating gifs. I’ve blogged about it before, and created a simple gui for it to grab animated gifs from a movie. I checked the site for updates today and noticed that there is now a Mac OS X homebrew package.

For folk like myself who do not spend much time on the commandline this is a simpler way to install (as compared to downloading the source and compiling). You do need to install homebrew but you do that by copying a line of code from the homebrew site and pasting it into the terminal. Wait a while as a lot of text scrolls by and it is done.

you can then install gifsicle by typing:

brew install  gifsicle and pressing return.

You are then ready to convert a bunch of gif files into an animated gif.

A couple of examples:

Using a set of gifs created from these photos (and a few more), first set converted to B & W in FireWorks:

gifsicle –resize-width 500 –delay=60 –loop *.gif > eagle.gif

Using a set of coloured gifs exportedfrom the jpegs:

gifsicle –resize-width 500 –delay=60 –loop –colors 256 *.gif > eagle256.gif

If you are a ds106er who likes playing with animating gifs, gifsicle is a very useful addition to your toolkit.