Come Back Comrade Tom

The August 2013 GIF Challenge #5: Re-invoke a Missing DS106 Friend

Tom Woodward is not really my friend, but he is someone I’ve followed and admired for a few years. His DS106 rate of production has been dropping off a bit so I though of this.

Tom’s work first came to my notice, as far as I recall and from my blog, in 2008 when I published a post about The Peoples Republic of Non-Programistan a movement that He and Jim Groom dreamed up. They did a presentation, of which the recording still exists. This is quite wonderful, Tom and Jim maintaining cod russian accents throughout, the points they make, about open, and keeping out of silos are probably even more important today. The presentation stuck with me. I paid attention to Tom and Jim’s RSS feed from then on.

Tom kindly commented on that post, so I guess you could say I know him.

This would probably be better un-animated and with a deal more time spent on it, but I went for a walk today, it riffs off the non-programistan artwork…

Update 9 Aug, I just looked at the original on another monitor. I think I need a new mac at home. Here is a slightly cleaned up version (it looks like what I saw when I made the original!

fake4-16col

Getting ready for some DS106 smack talk

One the worrying things about ds106 is the smack talk component, you need to have steady nerves and facial muscles of steel. Many of us are not use to this mode of discourse and need a bit of preparatory exercise. There is now no need to fear the smack talk, with just a minute or two of time each day you can have a chance of keeping up with Jim Groom, order your TOTAL SMACK TALK MUSCLLIZER today!

Appalling Facial Flex Infomercial 001

This informercial was created for the August 2013 GIF Challenge #4: Where Did the Soda Go? (Tina Link), ds106 Assignments: Where did the Soda Go?.

Youtube video downloaded with Fastesttube, still ripped by MPEG Streamclip and stitched back together with Fireworks.

I am not too sure of the spelling of MUSCLLIZER corrections welcome.

What Kind of DS106 Learner Are You?

The bar was set rather high for August 2013 GIF Challenge #3: DS106 Promo Poster by Talky Tina. I ended up making a few attempts, here are two:

I am not happy with the choice of gif or design but I though the idea of poking a wee bit of fun at Learner Styles was ok.

whatkindofo

A few more ideas crossed my mind, one was to make a triple troll quote, but I didn’t attribute the quote.

The Body is mine, the fireball from an old Blade Runner Gif I made and the quote is from Van Morrison

headless13

Tina Sounds



Yesterday my friend Tina told me she liked the way I gave Jim some music to dance to. I though I’d show her, and anyone else how to play a sound when a gif (or anything else) is clicked.

I made a quick gif of a scene from Tina’s work that shows what a committed and brave actor she is, I believe she does all her own stunts.
tina_stairs

click the image to hear the soundtrack.

Video grabbed from ▶ Talky Tina — Living Doll — Two Minute Twilight Zone Project — Season 5, Episode 6 – YouTube just a screen capture using ScreenFlow.
A few frames extracted with MPEG Steamclip, pullined into fireworks and exported as a gif.

I then searched Freesound for a sound of someone falling down the stairs that was cc licensed: Freesound.org – “Falling Down Wooden Stairs.wav” by Benboncan.
In Safari I viewed the source of the page, searched for .mp3 to find the link to the low quality preview:
www.freesound.org/data/previews/80/80916_634166-lq.mp3 (I took the http:// off here as wordpress embeds if I do not)

I knew that Freeview provides previews in mp3 and ogg so that we can play then with html5 and do not need any plugins (Firefox on mac needs ogg other browsers handle the mp3, this is a moving target). the ogg files have the same url but with the .ogg extension.

I started this blog post, switching to the Text (html) view in the editor and put in an audio tag:


	<audio id="tinastairs" preload loop>
	  <source src="http://www.freesound.org/data/previews/80/80916_634166-lq.ogg" type="audio/ogg">
	  <source src="http://www.freesound.org/data/previews/80/80916_634166-lq.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
	  Your browser does not support the audio tag.
	</audio>

If you are going to do this more than once on a page you need to give the audio a unique id here I used tinastairs.

You could copy the block of code above, replacing the id and the urls.
Update: The way wp adds paragraphs, it is best to take out all the line breaks when you use this.

This addes the audio to the post, it is preloaded, and will loop when played, but it does not show on the page (I’ve left out the controls parameter).

I then added the gif in the normal way. In the text view this gives me:

<img src="http://johnjohnston.info/106/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/tina_stairs.gif" alt="tina_stairs" width="420" height="260" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-854" />

I added a snippet of JavaScript to play the sound when the gif is clicked:
onclick="a=document.getElementById('tinastairs');if(a.paused){a.play()}else{a.pause();}"
As a parameter of the image tag like this:
<img onclick="a=document.getElementById('tinastairs');if(a.paused){a.play()}else{a.pause();}" src="http://johnjohnston.info/106/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/tina_stairs.gif" alt="tina_stairs" width="420" height="260" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-854" />
You can see I use the id of the audio tag, again you could copy this code and use a different ID.

Hopefully Tina will love this?

tinaeyes

I used the same process here, with different IDs but exported mp3 and ogg from Audacity, after recoding the sound from youtube.

Jim in the Air(plane)

After yesterday I can’t get JA out of my head.
jim_groom_dance_JA

click the gif to hear what Jim is dancing to.


I hope I managed to shroud Jim is a couple of wisps of cloud, and knocked dow the brightness and contrast in some sort of effort to match tone.

The Music is not quite JA but it is CC.
Using File:JA Crown-Of-Creation.jpg – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and TalkyTina’s improvement of my template which I snagged here: August 2013 GIF Challenge #2: Dancing Jim All Over the World | I am Talky Tina
Audio: Freesound.org – “psy trance.wav” by mechwarreir2 Creative Commons — CC0 1.0 Universal