Category: weekly review

The Postman’s Noir Cat

Not got much time for typing. Just finished working through this week’s demands. Strange things afoot. I am no sure how seriously to take cats in a story. But you have to do some research in this business no matter how strange. I’m not making the right connections but some things are aligning up….

noir-cat

 

And this is what I am hearing:

The audio was knocked up in a few minutes, Paul has a nice voice. The technique I used will be in a post tomorrow or the day after. I am planning a supercut tutorial too.

A Week of Creates

It has been a while since I gave the The Daily Create much attention. When I started having a longish train commute I though I do more of this, but the British Rail free wifi blocks flickr and I lost the habit.

I do look in on the home page and see tweets and last Tuesday I saw Write a Smart Alec Haiku, I always liked Haiku and similar short forms for teaching and at least some of my pleasure in the daily create is being a smart Alec. So: Concise

Given extra time,
Instead of this wee haiku:
a one word poem

I hope that my smart Alec reference was clear enough.

The next day, I glanced at my phone in the office and saw: Make us an experimental water photo, unconcerned for the need for stated need for focus, time and consideration I glanced out of the window:
Cloud Dock

Cloud Dock | Flickr – Photo Sharing!.

At this point I am feeling as if I starting a roll, but forgot all about tdc until late on Thursday night where the challenge was: Make a baby or something else. This seemed far to much bother for bedtime, but I raided my daughter’s old bedroom for a soft toy and Ductapeasaur roamed the couch.

Ductapeasaur

Given longer I would have tried to make a kale forest, but when I started chopping I was in danger of waking my wife so went to bed.

On Friday I was on holiday and planning a bit of a walk, Make a sound Map looked ideal. The instructions are great, Creative activities: sound maps. Sensory Trust. and tucked away for future reference.

Lack of cardboard near at hand made the decision to rely on my memory. Having the ideas in mind made my whole walk much more about sound than usual. A bright breezy day. Although I did lie down in a dampish patch for five minutes with my eyes closed it was pretty quiet.

The map represents a different five minutes walking the path beside the loch. I missed the sound of the mountain bike that sped by, making me jump out of my skin, from the drawing. I also forgot all about it when I got home and ended up submitting on saturday morning.

Sound map

Sound map | Flickr – Photo Sharing!

The Sound map was the most interesting of the week, it affected my whole morning walk by focusing my mind on sound.

Safe Havens

Everyone has a safe haven where they go to be alone and clear their mind. Take pictures of yours and make a collage.

This is a walk I’ve gone on a few times over the last couple of years. I’ve yet to meet another walker on the route.

Alt Oss & Loch Oss

Alt Oss & Loch Oss | Flickr – Photo Sharing!

Sunday’s
We have so much to take in that we forget to look in, puzzled me enough to tweet Mariana: but by the time she had explained I’d finished, using Photoshop Touch on the iPad.

tdc1036

Not sure how interesting that was but photoshop touch makes this sort of thing a snip.

A geek magnetic poem, please? rounded off the week nicely. This reminded me of playing with flash around 10 years ago, making toys for kids. I added a background of my mac colour classic which I dug out from flickr.

beopen

It feels pretty good to be back on the daily create, a wee bit of commenting and looking at other folks productions helped me enjoy the week even more.

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:
Untitled

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:
Untitled

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;-)

Week Three: comments and code

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I think I have started to find my level with the headless course.

I am not trying to do it all. Each week I aim to do a few daily creates, one thinking post and one assignment and a chicken cast.
I also hope to post several comments on other blogs.

This week I’ve been thinking of comments quite a lot. The podcast Chickens Clucking discussed this and gained some interesting comments, mostly on G+.

I’ve been mixing in a bit of html, css and javascript this week. Starting with the image on the What’s the story? post. I then added a we bit of css to the blog via the WordPress Google Fonts Plugin this let me avoid thinking to much by adding notes in ‘handwriting’ rather than writing a real post.
There was no real assignment this week, but we were encouraged to tackle a five card flickr story. Again I diverted myself with some css and javascript to make a slide show from the story.
I wonder if an html/css/javascript section would be good in ds106, I’d be interested in what others think.

I meant to do a bit more reading, thinking and commenting today, but I started playing with my new raspberry pi. That took a lot more than I expected.

The best thing this week has been reading other folks posts and comments, too many to mention given the late hour here. As usually it is amazing to see folk come together online. I’ve been trying to read a few about pages too, fascinating to find out the back story of some fellow learners.

Next week is the intro to audio I am not sure if I’ll be doing much. I am off for a few days holiday and don’t know if I’ll have an internet connection. I am also aiming to spend as much time outside and disconnected as the weather allows.