Blackthorn Blossom, eagerly awaited, I’ve been passing on my commute, but this is the first I’ve seen close this year. My favourite.
Life in Links 41
- Primary Maths – Starting Points Maths interesting set of exercises and discussions.
- Raspberry Pi dog detector (and dopamine booster) uses a raspberry pi to notify when a dog ones past the window using YOLO: Real-Time Object Detection to detect the dogs from a video stream. I almost started replicating this but stopped myself just in time.
- Scratch
Here you can find a number of Scratch projects to teach primary pupils, and in particular to scaffold learning for students with special educational needs. We recommend teaching pupils about the concepts in order: Sequence > Input > Repetition > Selection > Variables > Other. In each section there are a number of projects you can use to explore code, modify or extend existing projects or to fix a program, by debugging or ordering code.
Looks as if it might be a good way to cover scratch. I used a few ideas during lockdown.
- INTERFACE CRITIQUE — Olia Lialina: FROM MY TO ME
Webmasters of the 1990s built homes, worlds and universes. But also, outside of intergalactic ambitions, they strongly pushed the concept of something being mine. The first-person possessive determiner “my” took on a very strong meaning – “my” because I build it, I control this presentation; my interests, my competences, my obsessions: in the trajectory from my to me, I suggest following its decline.
really interesting history of individuals on the web. found in Known Issues with the Web Garden | bavatuesdays
that’s the story of how I temporarily fended off some link rot in my small corner of the web.
Featured image my own dithered to grey with imagemagick, from an idea by Doug Belshaw who was trying to save energy. I just like the idea of these images for link list posts.
Creating an RSS feed that also works as a styled web page.
Hi Doug,
I was wondering what was going on, the old feed was behaving strangely in my reader. The new one works really nicely in inoreader.
I do get different behaviour in different browsers. Firefox, where I’ve an RSS extension, shows the RSS; Safari offers to open the feed in NetNewsWire RSS reader; Chrome shows the webpage.
Alan’s comment about pinboard is interesting, I used to have a sort of tumble blog running off the rss from my delicious links.
Limes from Below
Either Cherry Plum or Japanese Cherry according to PlantNet. Cold March Wind today.
The Margot Affair by Sanaë Lemoine
Read: The Margot Affair by Sanaë Lemoine ★★★☆☆ enjoyable quick read. Teenagers pov, secret daughter of a French politician and a famous actress. Suspicious adult friends, trouble.
We had a early walk round Loch Ardinning reserve this morning. March has got cold again. Wee bit of snow on the Campsies and the Loch Lomond hills were white. Curlews and peewits. Quiet. The grass paths are in a bad way due to lockdown walking.
daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty
Heard this on the radio on the way to work this morning.
Output with fade
Earlier in the week I saw micro.blogger Dan Cohen’s newsletter: Humane Ingenuity 36: 15% Faster which linked to DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: Deformin’ in the Rain: How (and Why) to Break a Classic Film
Dan said:
Jason Mittell provides an extremely creative, occasionally bizarre, frequently hilarious, and ultimately rather helpful “inventory of deformative practices” to uncover hidden layers of meaning in media.
The article provides a pile of great gifs and distorted videos.
I’ve played around with this sort of thing before montages, gifsets and the like. Mostly DS106 inspired.
One idea I’d kept playing with is layering of images. My plan had been to layer a sequence into a movie, I’d never really got it going smoothly. I mostly just run a photo set through a script to get 1000s of images and choose a few interesting ones.
I usually use a few commandline tools for this, imagemagick & ffmpeg but there was a rather nice idea of using the StarStaX app an application for Star Trail Photography. I loaded it up with 90 odd jpgs images from a walk and merged them. I then stitched them together with ffmpeg and added some audio “Mysterious Ethereal Song” by theojt :
Not exactly a work of art but fun, I also learnt how to fade a video with ffmpeg which might be useful.
Ardinning Morning
Lovely morning at Ardinning, arrived around 8. A hint of mist and a smattering of very light frost. No wind, loch like a mirror. Lots of birds singing. Few roe about before more people arrived. A few toads in the loch, looked like males awaiting the bigger females. A pair of dabchicks chattering. Larks and lapwings.
