Category: dailycreate

Wandering Links

Today’s daily create: #tdc1457 Do Some Research on Spaghetti Westerns | The (new) Daily Create

wandering-fw

I followed a wandering trail picking up some links on the way:

To be continued…

Hitting The #Western106 Trail

The pony express delivered a message from The Man With No Course this morning. Looks like it is time to kick over the traces and git started.

I’ve already started some of the daily chores and adding to this here tally-book.

We have already come a way down the trail, so it might be time for a look back:

In December Mariana handed over the reins to @cogdog #tdc1444:

Was my response after a quick google for cowboy dogs.

The next day we looked west:

and a couple of days later I arrive at the barn:
Barn Glen Douglas

I’ve bought my hat:

Yesterday we gather round to watch the sun go down:

Note to self, this was a gif uploaded to twitter, for some reason I deleted the original, this is a download ot fthe twitter video!

Mine was not the most cowboy of skies so I borrowed a pile from the Honcho 1 and whipped up a video with an old lariat.

Food for thought:

I’ve not really watch cowboy movies for a long time, and there is a lot to dislike in the politics of the cowboy. The movies I remember best, High Noon & The Searchers hopeful push against this a little.

Handy Links

Old West Speak Generator Translator | LingoJam
106 Tricks

  1. Honcho – Often mistaken as a Spanish cowboy term, this word actually originated during World War II and is derived from a Japanese title for a military squad leader. In current usage, it means a foreman or other person who exercises control over workers. Free Cowboy Dictionary – Letter H – useful words of the cowboy lifestyle – definitions, terminology, slang, jargon, word origins ↩

pixel sortin’

I am not sure if western106 is going ahead, but I was interested in using it to play around (starting with some gifs).

I’ve discovered an interest in pixel sorting although I am not sure I really understand it. I installed EVA-01/pxlsrt the other day and played around a bit.

Today I grabbed a public domain image of Monument Valley and messed around a bit:

out.png

jjmv

Today’s daily create looked as if it might fit in with this idea, but I wandered off into a photoshop tutorial

wanted-jj-

A #DS106 DailyCreate Twitter Bot

dailycreate-botThe DailyCreate Bot

I’ve always liked random and automated random things. While these are not strictly part of storytelling I’ve managed to bring them into DS106 whenever I can.

A while back I set up @DailyCreateBot for some reason or other. Obviously a Twitter bot of some kind to do with the Daily Create. I do remember having trouble with the OAuth requirements of the more recent Twitter API and giving up.

Last weekend, on a rainy day I blew the dust of my raspberry pi and got it online and set up as a server. I was not too sure what to do with it at the time.

During the week I did revisit a project to use the pi to flash some lights depending on a Twitter search. I don’t have hardware for that but I was interested in how simple the project was. There seems to be plenty of libraries that can sort out Authentication to Twitter for you now. A bit of googling and thinking, mostly googling and I have a Twitter bot set up.

The @DailyCreateBot will reply with a suggestion of a photo challenge of you mention him on Twitter. I am using the same list that Alan Levin provided for me for the photoblitz.

The @DailyCreateBot runs on Python. This is where the pi comes in I would not even know where to begin to find out how to host a python app but the pi lets me do that easily.

I am not proposing to write a step-by-step guide here but it is worth mentioning that several things went wrong or did not work as expected. All were beyond my 2 weeks worth of Python on the mechanical mooc . All were solved by a wee bit of googling and sometime just repeating things till they worked. The delight of working on a pi is that I knew I’d I totally messed up I could just reformat the SD card, install an so again and be back to square two.

I had already:

  • installed one of the basic OS FOR THE PI
  • Set up SSH access so that I can get ‘on’ to the pi from the terminal application on a mac and via SSH apps on iOS.
  • set up the pi as a web server and sorted out the DNS

Next:

*I found a python library and example code that replied.
*I added logic to reply with a random string taken from a list of challenges.
*Tested it a bit.

Then I posted to the DS106 Google + group and a few kind folk tested it a bit. Rochelle asked:

That is cool +John Johnston . It worked for me right out of the bot box. Do we upload to Twitter, tag them DailyCreateBot? I’d like to see what others have done. 🙂

Which got me thinking. A quick google found a php/JavaScript solution to showing tweets with the hashtag #dailycreatebot and I’ve got this up and running.

All very much a work in progress. There are few things to be ironed out:

  • the Python bot falls over every now and again complaining about UTF8 I need to google that some more.
  • the web page showing images just uses the styles used in the demo of the code. I need to tidy it up and perhaps skip tweets with the hashtag but no images.
  • there is also the problem Rochelle pointed out that if you reply to the bot you get another prompt. I wonder if I could turn off replies if there is an image in the tweet?

Anyway if your expectations are low you can join in:

  1. Tweet @DailyCreateBot and get a prompt.
  2. Tweet your photo with the hashtag #DailyCreateBot
  3. See what other folk are doing.
  4. Let me know of any interesting problems.

#DS106 Flickr Daily Creates Pummelvision style

I’ve been playing around with downloading groups of flickr photos and making very quick videos from them. Just blogged some of the process over on my main blog. Being a wee obsessive about this sort of stuff, I’ve created a script that will download all my photos with a particular tag, say dailycreate, and string them together into a movie.

You need to have the commandline ffmpeg application installed and have created a flickr app so that you have an api key. You need to know your flickr id too.

This works for me, copy the code below, replace the bold bits and paste into the terminal. Probably best to run this in a folder. Depending on how many photos you have it cold take a while.
FILELIST=$(curl 'https://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.photos.search&api_key=YOUR-FLICKER-APIKEY&user_id=YOUR-FLICKr_USERNAME&tags=THE-TAG&extras=url_l&per_page=200&format=rest' | sed -ne 's/.*\(http[^"]*\).*/\1/p');echo $FILELIST;for i in $FILELIST ; do curl -O $i ; done;a=1;for i in *.jpg; do
new=$(printf "%04d.jpg" "$a") #04 pad to length of 4
mv -- "$i" "$new"
let a=a+1
done;sips --resampleHeight 768 *.jpg;sips --padToHeightWidth 786 1024 *.jpg;ffmpeg -f image2 -i %04d.jpg -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p firstmov.mp4;ffmpeg -i firstmov.mp4 -filter:v "setpts=4.0*PTS" flickr-dailycreate.mp4

This wee bit:

ffmpeg -i flickr-dailycreate.mp4 -i backgroundloop.mp3 -map 0 -map 1 -codec copy -codec:a aac -strict experimental -b:a 192k -shortest flickr-dailycreate-audio.mp4

would add some audio if there is a backgroundloop.mp3 in the same folder.