Tag: api

Accidental Allure

In the past I’ve made a few experiments with randomly layering and combining images: Glen Finlas -evaluate-sequence subtract and Averages (The Prisoner) for example.

A couple of weeks ago I started playing with combining images in the browser. There are several ways to go about this, I found a nice script to blend two images on a canvas and gave that a shot. It worked well and gave interesting results.

I though that using the Flickr API I could gather a list of images and randomly blend them two at a time.

Flickr’s API will return a json list. I started using the flickr.interestingness.getList which produced some interesting (sic) combinations. However when I started to get the license of the photos most were not labled for reuse.

I switched to using a standard search (flickr.photos.search ) which allowed me to search for license that allowed reuse.

I also switched to using CSS and background-blend-mode, this allows you to have multiple images set on a background and blend them.

For example using these images:

And this code:

<div style="border:solid 1px;width:500px;height:400px;background-image:url('https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7587/26482589423_daa3bbdbd1.jpg'),url('https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7012/6677861899_ef6e012bc8.jpg');background-blend-mode:multiply;"></div>

give me this:

With this in my toolbag I could pull in a flickr feed, extract image URLs and info about each photo and randomly combine them. They are displayed for 10 seconds each.

This gave me this:

Random Flickr Blendr

Here are a few random blends, screen captured:

I’ve found the pictures quite compelling.

On interesting this was the change I noticed when I swapped from the interestingness list to a search for creative commons images ordered by interestingness-desc. The images became more subtle and less HDRish, i think thy are more interesting and less glossy. An unusual win for Creative commons.

Over in DS106 land the page was used for a daily create:

#tdc1588 Turn @johnjohnston’s Random Image Pairing into a Self-Help Book Title | The (new) Daily Create

Which turned up some nice images and a fairly crazy bunch of titles.

My Own:

tdc1588

What was also interesting was some responses to the page:

So I an quite pleased with the result of this bit of experimenting. I’ve learnt a little more about CSS, images, JavaScript and even practised a bit of git. On the git front I’ve installed ezyang/git-ftp which is a quick and efficient way of pushing changed files to a website via FTP and works very well indeed. Saves working directly on line or opening an FTP application.

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.