dailycreate – Page 5

Can We live Outside Google?

It is only those who do nothing who makes no mistake.

― Pyotr Kropotkin, Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings

This daily create started out with the memory of the common Anarchy graffiti, with the A is a circle.

Anarchy by Jonas B

I presume that I must have had the definition in the back of my mind.

I thought I’d plant a giant A over the Wikipedia screenshot.
On my iPad I took a screenshot and opened in in brushes. At that point I though it might be nicer to use a relevant quotation and of course though of:

If I can’t dance it is not my revolution.

I decoded to do it as a gif and started writing exporting to my photo library as I went.

When I got to ‘dance’ I changed it to gif.
I imported these images into 5seconds, which I find the best ios gif app and made a gif.
Unfortunately the speed slider did not work this time (too many frames?) to I needed to export to Dropbox and open on a mac in fireworks.
Once in fireworks I set the frame rate and did a very quick edit on the colour of gif.

if-i-cant-gif

I decided not to post the image to flickr as I really do not like putting gifs there. Given this was throwaway I just posted it to Google+
I’ve been really enjoying the ease of using google plus for ds106 as well as being dissatisfied with it’s locked in nature. I had even been musing about blogging about it and thinking about possible systems that could replace it. Given the amount of conversation in g+ in this round of ds106 compared to blog comments it is pretty obvious that a lot of folk love it.

And my gif got comments, and I got called out:

g+comments

Quite rightly so. Hopefully the short notes above are enough to cover the daily create. Google plus is another matter.

Google Plus’ minuses

When I first joined g+ I did not like the experience. To much, to confusing. It was only when I started using it for community activity, first with etmooc, then Mozilla webmakers and now the headless round of ds106 I begin to see how it could be used. The way it can pul different sources together quickly and easily and the simplicity of adding comments makes it an addictive experience.
The first flaw appeared quite quickly, in etmooc I was happily clicking plus one to keep a track of posts I was interested in. In a browser to eg a link to the post you need to pop a menu, choose link to post and then copy the link that shows up. You then need to click ‘done’. Not quick. There is no feed or api for getting information out of G+.
Earlier in the round of ds106 I complained about this, I tried to avoid commenting in google for a week and following the blog flow, but after a while I found that it was the easiest place to follow the action. I still don’t like the fact comments on my posts don’t stick with the post, I am afraid I like comments, conversations and ideas from others. So I end up in g plus, living for the moment, losing my history.

I think one of the reasons that g plus has worked so well for the headless ds106 is that we have a pretty small class size. I do not think it would work so well if more people were posting, but I could be wrong.

The differences between g+ and twitter include a couple of things that are relevant here, the #ds106 tweets are lost in my timeline, I follow too many folk to see much of what passes. I could just run a search or keep one alive in tweet deck but I don’t use tweet deck any more. The other difference is that twitter, despite killing the RSS feeds does have an api, this means something could be built on top of it or it could have been built in.

I really hate the way g+ is designed to keep you locked in, to have such useful facility and not have any easy way to share on another system might be good business for google but it grates against my idea of a fee, open and loosely joined web. Unfortunately for me the people involved in ds106, their activities and generosity keep pulling me back.

What would be great would be something that functioned like g+ but was open and sharable with RSS/APIs etc. If it both posted comments to and displayed comments from the original sources. Of course this would be a can of worms. Some blogs have comment feeds that would work out ok. Then there is youtube, where my comments now seem to be linked to google plus, more problematic, flickr and twitter would need different methods.

A start along these lines might be something like my DS106 Activity Dashboard (very much the beginning of an idea)

After all this thinking I need a couple of quick triple trolls to clear my head:

alan-kropotkin

Young_Kropotkin

Late Creates

I have been completely missing from DS106 this week, time to catch up?

Today I had a a pile of stuff I wanted to get done, websites to update, blog posts to write, a pile of audio from TeachMeet to edit and publish.
I decided to go for a hillwalk instead, the wind was fair the weather looked as it was too. I needed to be back fairly early so headed for Glen Findlas, half an hour or so drive from Glasgow.
As I walked up the farm road at the start of the walk I realised I could kill a few daily creates at the same time. I could also manage a photoblitz.
I’ve done the photoblitz suggested on the Headless ds106 Week 5: Telling Stories in Photos before using haiku deck to display. I decided to use my wee app and knock up a new list:

Please specify a Flickr ID for this gallery

Obviously the ear and a wheel were going to be difficult. So I jsut skipped them.
I did get a good pair of ears later in the day:

Half way up the first hill I stopped and listened for the dailycreate 628: Sit for a few minutes in a quiet space. Write about what you hear.

On a hillwalk, I pause to listen, I do not sit down the grass is wet. At first all I hear is the wind, my breathing and heart thumping, my breathing and heart calm. The wind is blowing, quite hard, in my ears, across the opening, through the reeds and grass nearby, over the hills on the other side the reservoir below. Down the glen a buzzard mews. My eyes close and I hear more, a lorry 3km away on the Loch Lomond road, the outlet from the reservoir.

And at luch I did a quick timelapse, not quite right for Make a time lapse video that shows a transformation. as there is no transformation.

I took a lot more photos: Glen Findlas Sept 2013 – a set on Flickr and had a great walk, more Glen Findlas notes.

I also fell down on making comments this week, only three, Pinboard: bookmarks for johnjohnston tagged ‘headlessweek5’. I am starting to try and keep a record of comments I make on pinboard, but do not alway remember.

I have not been completely uncreative, I’ve been playing with JavaScript on thimble again, somewhat cogdog tweet inspired: 5Dogs and flipcard. I also got distracted trying to find a way to create a map with content from a question on a mailing list, this is my solution: a wordpress blog a plugin and a google map.
Next week I must get back on the ds106 horse. I’ve also had a nice idea for a personal ds106 dashboard on a page in this blog, should keep me busy (along with all the stuff at the top of this post)

Headless Week 4 – on a break

I was on holiday this week. I did have broadband in the cottage I was staying in, but was out and about most days away from a connection. This meant that I didn’t do ~~much~~ any of the listening required for Headless ds106 Week 4: Introduction to Audio- Listening First. I normally listen to audio when commuting. I did manage to here most of the first Scottlo archive and have the others queued up in instacast (my podcatcher) for listening next week.

Daily Creates

I did pretty well with these:

Please specify a Flickr ID for this gallery

I was taken to task by Tina, for not reading the instructions, so I’ve put that right (not sure if right is the appropriate word).
tj-crop

I also completed the What is Philosophy to you? Record an audio definition in 30 seconds or less create:

and yesterday’s video:

I had a lucky accident in the video, I was trying to keep to the one take rule and making a ‘cut’ I swiped across the lens with my thumb to make the cut. On opening the shutter (my thumb) again I gor an interesting fade in from headless by an accident of light, here is the gif:
ghostin 1
Quite strange.
I also made a bumper, messed around with NiceCast and figure out a useful mobile broadcast workflow for ds106 radio (and other icecast servers).
I made a shot 10-10-10 chicken podcast, where I did talk a wee bit about listening to audio, so that might do for the reflective bit this week;-)

headless ds106 portrait

Today’s daily create was Create your headless ds106 portrait..

I’ve done a wee bit of this before, but I though I’d have another go, first as a jpeg:

And then because gifs seem fashionable:
headless-ipad

Not so Daily Creates

Hate the gif, make your own.

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.