Posted on
by
Liked The end of podcasting, chapter 58 by Andy (andysylvester.com)
My response: WHO CARES! I started two podcasts (Convocast and Thinking About Tools For Thought) without any media empire support. Did I make any money? No, but that wasn’t why I created those podcasts. I did it for fun and to share information/perspectives with others.

I’ve podcasted both for fun and as an learning experience for my pupils. This rings true.

Posted on
by

In Search of One Last Song: Britain’s disappearing birds and the people trying to save them Patrick Galbraith ★★★☆☆

The author’s meeting with a cross section of folk working in bird conservation, talking about the birds they love. Not the usual conservation suspects, but farmers and keepers along with poets and RSPB types. The subjects sometimes had very differing opinions from each other. They also often differ and argue against the usual conservation narrative. This made for interesting reading.

Reading this in short bursts rather than a few longer sittings I was sometime confused by jumps between different conversations and subject. Each voice appeared and left without out much of a formal introduction & conclusion.

Thanks to 4th Estate & William Collins and NetGalley for this ebook in exchange for an honest review.

Posted on
by
Reposted https://twitter.com/Banton_Pr/status/1531976623607541760?s=20&t=RxDusygwtZjhr4fYdSKtLg by Banton Primary (Twitter)

Good Ruler – Bad Ruler https://dlvr.it/SRQy7N pic.twitter.com/ghtx9LJzW7

The Biggies had a bit of fun thinking about what that would do if they were good or bad rulers. Making graphics with layers, transparency, copyright free images, clip art an their own photos.

Posted on
by

I occasionally use Word Cloud generators for school use, for example a header on a blog post. Each time I just search and try a couple until I find one that is free, doesn’t need a sign-up and does what I want.

I’ve also occasionally used iPad apps, but never found one I like enough to remember.

This week I needed one again but given I has 30 minutes free I searched for commandline wordclouds instead. This took me to amueller/word_cloud: A little word cloud generator in Python.

A bit of copy pasting in the terminal got this installed. I can now make lists of words in a text file and quickly create a word cloud with something like this:

wordcloud_cli --text spelling-list-1.txt --imagefile spelling-list-1.png --width 800 --height 400 --colormap tab20

It only take a few seconds. I could batch process a pile of lists all at once.

The app has a lot of features, colour schemes, size variations, fonts and the like and is beautifully documented: Command Line Interface — wordcloud 1.8.1 documentation.

The featured image uses text from Get Drunk! a handy test text.

wordcloud_cli --text get\ drunk.txt --imagefile getdrunk-3.png --width 800 --height 400 --colormap tab20 --fontfile /Library/Fonts/GiddyupStd.otf