{"id":21518,"date":"2025-11-21T11:28:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-21T11:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/?p=21518"},"modified":"2025-11-21T12:29:48","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T12:29:48","slug":"daily-create-tdc5055-catch-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/daily-create-tdc5055-catch-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Daily Create #tdc5055 catch up"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’ve been thinking about the DS106 experience recently due to my marginal involvement in the combobulating<\/a> experience. This was very much focused on The Daily Create<\/a>, a bit of fun I dip into occasionally. One of the things that I thought about was the fact I often got more fun out of the DS106 assignment bank than the daily tasks. Today Alan’s post<\/a> reminded me why. It made me dig into this post, notes for which were sitting the my drafts app, spiff it up a bit and post it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other day I saw the #tdc5055 #ds106 ASCII Art<\/a> on The Daily Create<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Use the\u00a0ASCII Art Paint site<\/a>\u00a0to create something interesting with the thematic symbols.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

It immediately reminded me of figlet<\/a>. Took me a couple of minutes to remember the name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Figlet<\/a> makes big ASCII text on the command line. You just type in “figlet “#DS106” and you get something like this in the terminal:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 _____         _   
|_   _|__  ___| |_ 
  | |\/ _ \\\/ __| __|
  | |  __\/\\__ \\ |_ 
  |_|\\___||___\/\\__|
                   
<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
You can try figlet out online if you don’t want to use the terminal and install it: Asciified<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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asciified is a small webapp that gives you the ability to create figlets using the figlet package<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
I had a dim memory that figlet had the concept of “fonts<\/a>” so checked the help. The fonts were stored in a folder. As there didn’t seem to be an easy way to preview them, I thought I’d just write a script. This would loop through all the fonts I’d copied to a text file, and  allow me to pick the best version.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
while IFS= read -r font; do\n    figlet -f \"$font\" -c -S \"Daily Create\"\n\tsleep 0.5\ndone < figfonts.txt<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Watching them scroll past then made me think a screen recording might be interesting. I cleaned up the list of fonts1<\/a><\/sup> a little and recorded my window, posted it to YouTube and replied<\/a> to @creating<\/a>. Job done2<\/a><\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The next day I wondered if I could do a better job of this: automate the screen capture by grabbing screenshots and then taking them and stringing them together to make a “video” with ffmpeg. And indeed I could.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
#!\/usr\/bin\/env bash\n\nWINID=$(osascript -e 'tell application \"Terminal\" to id of front window')\n\nscreencapture -l $WINID  -o  0000.png  >\/dev\/null 2>&1\n\nwhile IFS= read -r font; do\n\tpngfile=$(printf \"%04d.png\") \n    figlet -f \"$font\" -c -S \"Daily Create\"\n \tscreencapture -l $WINID  -o  $pngfile  >\/dev\/null 2>&1\n\tsips --resampleWidth 1200 $pngfile  >\/dev\/null 2>&1\ndone < figfonts.txt\n\nffmpeg -framerate 5 -i %04d.png -c:v libx264  -vf \"pad=ceil(iw\/2)*2:ceil(ih\/2)*2\" -r 24 -pix_fmt yuv420p figfontfun.mp4<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
screencapture<\/code> can capture just a window if you give it a Window ID. A search showed me how to get that<\/a>.  sips resizes the images. I sent the output off screen with  >\/dev\/null 2>&1<\/code>.  Taking a screenshot of the window without shadow, the -o<\/em> <\/code>bit,  made for neater images.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The loop give me  a bunch of png files which are concatenated into a video. I’ve done that a few times. Unfortunately I don’t use ffmpeg enough to get that right the first time. Video codec and many ffmpeg paramaters seem very complicated. Again a few searches put me right3<\/a><\/sup>. And I had a short script that would work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here is the result:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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