headless13 – Page 2 – 106 drop in

DS106 Radio Bumper Dub Number two

I love audio, but am fairly scared of music making. I am a bit of a klutz musically, can’t clap in time or keep a tune.
I’ve already created a couple of bumpers for ds106: Jim Says, Listen to the LoDown and DS106 Confusion. both relied on music from someone else, one a GarageBand loop the other a steal.

This time I though I might step up and make a noise. Given the lack of musical talent I decided to try a Magic Garageband production.
This allows you to make some ‘music’ by choosing a genre and playing with the variables (instrument styles). I did this for a while and then passed it on to the ‘real’ garageband interface. There I chopped it down to a very short segment and added my voice. Some effects added to the vocals. Then I dropped out a few bit to give it a dubish feel.
I ended up with this:

I quite like the announcement feeling from the brass. I made a quick edit of the ds106 skul and crossbones to make a skull and trumpets.
My GarageBand screen looked like this:

The number two in the tile comes from the fact I ‘saved as…’ at one point where I did’t want to lose something that sounded better than nothing.
The text plays on the idea of ds106 being open, I am more of a ‘romantic socialist’ than a business man. I am also thinking of ds106 being play rather than work.

Week Three: comments and code

Please specify a Flickr ID for this gallery

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.

Chickens Clucking

rooster 01

Some comments about comments, here are some of the posts I was talking about:

chicken_clucking.mp3

update Quite a lot of interesting discussion on G+ around this.

A Diverting Week Two

The scheduleHeadless ds106 Week 2: Getting Through Bootcamp / Personal Cyber Infrastructure steps things up a wee bit.

I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable About Open Educational Experiences and watched the video a couple of times (luckly my car was in the garage for an MOT and I was on the train on Thursday). I had planned, in notes and my head a fairly detailed response. As I started to write it up I searched this blog to see my previous response, it turned out I’d not really had any new ideas since DS106 Assignment 2 A personal digital space. I would recommend anyone interested in educational technology to watch this video. It is a wonderful talk filled with rhythm and humour.

I was thinking I’d manages a few daily creates this week, but looking back not as many as I thought:
I did manage a Keychain video. Cris Crissman left a nice comment about liking the line: “I don’t keep my stories locked up in my keychain.” which is what I started with when thinking the video out. Could have been better if I’d tried more than one shot.

Here are my other tdcs on flickr:

Please specify a Flickr ID for this gallery

My other daily creates ended up diverting me a little. I had commented on Stefanie’s wonderful Animated Skull Chain which provided the first major diversion, blender.org – Home of the Blender 3D I lost a good few hours on that this week, luckily the first tutorial (145 pages of pdf!) gave me the submarine daily create this week, and eventually I finished the project:

I lost most of Saturday morning on tutorial 2, getting stuck quite near the beginning. I think I’ll play with blender a bit more but might wait until I’ve a bit more time.

I also left the tracks with headless ds106 portrait ending up with a gif and now a tutorial on how I did it:

One thing I’ve been aware of this week is how time poor I seem to be. I am making sure any daily creates I do take no longer than 10 or 15 minutes, I would have liked to do Create an exciting movie trailer for your ds106 web site. Use The Voice. but didn’t even have time to think of a good idea.

My final activity was the animated gif I posted earlier today. I might as well add a few gifs I made along the way.

replicant-eye

A beautiful face

Part of week 2 in the headless ds106 is to Say It Like the Peanut Butter.

Make an animated gif from your favorite/least favorite movie capturing the essence of a key scene. Make sure the movement is minimal but essential.

I’ve done a few of these and made a wee tutorial last week for doing it with Fireworks. At first I had another dig through blade runner and La Belle et la Bête, but wasn’t delighted with the results.
Then last night I went to the movies to see The Great Beauty, which was a beautiful movie in all sorts of ways. I was a fan of Toni Servillo from The Consequences of Love and Il Divo and this increased my admiration. So here is his beautiful face, ripped from the trailer on youtube.
I duplicated the very short segment and reversed it to hide the seems. The gif started out a over 2mb and I crushed it as much as I could, eventually resizing down to 360 pixels. I am going to scale it up in the html here.

beautifulface-360