Archive for the ‘openonline’ Category

 

Kung Fu Hustle

Sunday, June 10th, 2012

I am fond of animated gifs, but haven’t had time to make any. After seeing Jim Groom’s Master of the Flying Guillotine Animated GIFs I went over to YouTube to see if I could find any kung fu. Kung Fu Hustle – YouTube which I had watched in the cinema. Very much a comedy. I downloaded the movie and grabbed a few gifs:



I didn’t spend much time on these, but there is something fascinating about animated gifs.

To download youtube videos I use youtube-dl a command line tool. It seems to work better than some GUI tools I’ve used.
To grab gifs from the movie once downloaded I use Movie2Gif this is just a GUI front end for the Gifsicle command line application. It works on a Mac and you can download it from a link on the Movie2Gif post if you want to give it a try.

More after the jump:





Letter to Camp Week 3

Sunday, June 10th, 2012
I’ve not been around the camp as much as I hoped this week, so am sending this note. It has been a busy week here in Scottish Edu Tech land.
I did keep up with most of my daily chores, mostly by using my phone and not taking too long about it. I particularly enjoyed the 6 minutes past the hour day, an interesting activity. I’ll embed the various tdcs below and a set from the 6 minutes past too.
I’ve bumped into quite a few campers along the way, mostly on flickr comments http://www.flickr.com/activity/ is a useful way to keep up with this traffic. I’ve also visited a few of my fellow campers assignment posts and had a few chats.
Strangely I’ve not seen any/many of the folk from my Bunkhouse, the Wäscälly Wäbbits in passing, I’ve not made it into minecraft at all this week. I did watch, in a school I was visiting, some 11 year olds co-operation to build various things in minecraft on iPads. Inspiring and I hope to get up and running in there soon.

My week 2 daily creates:

My 6 past the hour set for tdc ds106 day in your life – Take a photo at 6 minutes past the hour for an entire day.

I’ve installed the Before After WordPress Plugin. I’d used the Javascript before so was please to find a plugin.

Triple Troll Quote: Harrison Ford vs. John Cazale

Sunday, June 10th, 2012

Just so that people don’t think I am relying entirely on animated GIFs for this week’s visual assignments, here are a couple of Triple Troll Quotes. What’s more, they are themed—both of thee triple troll quotes are centered around an actor who was in a number of amazing films in a very short period of time.

First, between 1977 and 1983 Harrison Ford was in Star Wars (1977), Apocalypse Now! (1979), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Blade Runner (1982) (all within 5 years!). What’s even more remarkable about this is he couldn’t act to save his life. Ford was an icon for me as a kid, but in the 2000s I began to like him less and less given his dismissal of Charles Bronson’s career, which I’ve already discussed on this blog. Regardless, he was in the holy trinity of films for me as a kid: Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Blade Runner—what ever I may think of him now, that’s a pretty sick run.

And while Ford’s run is impressive, it doesn’t hold a candle to John Cazale’s—who actually could act!—he was only in five films over his entirely too short career, but every single one of them was a masterpiece (I’ve written about this before as well). That’s a hard act to follow. The five films are: The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974), The Godfather II (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and The Deer Hunter (1978).  Wow! Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney Lumet, and Michael Cimino. He died way too early, but he leaves behind him a filmography few, if any, could ever match.

My Eyes Are Wide Open

Saturday, June 9th, 2012
Monochrome
The Daily Create 150 – Monochrome

After reading this week’s resources on photography I have only started to realise how much I have to learn. I never considered myself a great photographer and I am quite happy to let other people hold the camera. Whenever I wanted to express myself creatively, I used words. This shows in my Daily Create activities, especially in the first ones, where I felt the need to supplement my photo with words:

Yesterday
The Daily Create 146 – a photo that represents destruction

If I wanted something to be in the photo and it wasn’t there, I used words to conjure it up:

Stone, Water and Clouds
The Daily Create 147 – a picture containing stone, water and clouds

But I persisted. I took a photo a day, often after I had come home from work. I worked with what I had and what I didn’t have that late at night was natural light. So, a pattern started to emerge. Minimalistic and mostly monochrome.

When you rely on what you have, you start using metaphors and then you realise that telling a story through photography is not that different from using words. The Daily Create 149 gave us an impossible task – to take a photo at six minutes past the hour for an entire day and to share only one picture. I decided to take a photo at six minutes after the day had passed:

Sixpast

I recycled the above image and used it as a CD cover ( you can see the relevant post here). I am grateful to Chad for this idea.

This picture shows envy:

Envy

 I do envy people who can eat cakes and not put on weight, so I recycled this picture and used it as a demotivating poster. You can see it in my previous post.

I also envy people who would have done a better job with this photograph than I did. I took the photo through a shop window and it shows. I tried editing it and it got slightly better, but I am still not happy with it.

While I am not particularly good with the camera, I am quite happy to use picture editors. Ever since Picnik got invaded by ants (rest in peace, Picnik), PicMonkey has been my faithful friend. I used it to edit all of the above photos, but it really came in handy here:

OldBuilding
The Daily Create 153 – the oldest building in my neighbourhood

I have to be honest with you – this building is from the 1980s and it is, in fact, the building I live in. It was really hot outside today and I was too lazy to leave my air-conditioned flat. So I took a picture of what I could see from my balcony and aged it artificially using PicMonkey. I can’t tell you exactly what I did – I kept clicking on different effects until I was happy with the result.

I experimented with different types of focal effects here:

Jasmine
The Daily Create 148 – Out of Focus

To sum up: What have I learned this week?

1. That I am slowly beginning to get addicted to photography. That I don’t care whether I am producing art or just fooling around. As long as it is fun, I will continue doing it.

2. That I want to learn more about photography and that I will continue learning.

3. That looking at the world through the lens is not distracting. On the contrary. It makes me more aware of my surroundings.

4. That ordinary things and everyday objects have their own beauty.

5. That this is my life. Whether I am manipulating an image of myself until I look like my grandmother did 70 years ago or taking pictures of yesterday’s shopping list, this is who I am.

See you in the next Daily Create.

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A few years off

Saturday, June 9th, 2012

Create a new you — MISSION: DS106 an easy one for 2 stars, if I was counting. I just took off a couple of year so fairly subtile. Read a couple of googled tuts for photoshop: Removing Wrinkles – Photoshop Tutorials and another one I’ve lost.

more intersting, to me, is the Before After WordPress Plugin. I’d used the Javascript before so was please to find a plugin.

Unlikely Intersections visual assignment for #DS106

Saturday, June 9th, 2012

I spotted these street names signs and remembered there was a DS106 assignment for this, Unlikely Intersections. Well the combination of street names is not really all that unlikely, in fact they kind of go together. The unlikely part is the survival of the photographer as the only way to get this shot is to stand out in the road.


To round out the story, this intersection is in a mostly residential suburban area, though the corner with the street signs houses the fire department and across the street is a large private high school and convent. The other two corners are private homes. Blossom road is a main feed road from the city and this intersection is about a block from an expressway ramp. Clover street here is residential and there are some very nice looking houses there.

The hardest part of this assignment  (aside from taking pictures while standing in the road) is finding an appropriate intersection. So its good to be aware of the assignment in case you come across one. It’s also helpful to have a camera on hand when that happens.

That’s my story. Any Questions?

 

 

Venus Transit Swede Animated GIF #DS106

Saturday, June 9th, 2012

On June 6, 2012 millions watched the transit of Venus across the sun. While millions watched, many others missed this rare celestial phenomenon. Some people missed it because they were looking the wrong way or they live on the wrong side of the planet. Others missed out simply because the didn’t give a hoot, or they were nestled deep underground tunneling through their mine craft worlds.
Whatever the reason, if you missed it, here is a  re-enactment  based on detailed eyewitness accounts.

 

I don’t know which ds106 assignment this really belongs under.  I used Swede a Scene even though this is an animated gif, not a video.

That’s my story. Any questions?

photo credits
Orange:cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by richard_north
Venus: Wikimedia Commons

Messing About with Mood in Image Composites

Saturday, June 9th, 2012

Taking another stab at visual assignments, I opted for Switch up the Mood, mostly because I had a few photographs that I had taken with a colleague’s top-shelf digital SLR camera the other day. Consequently, shooting in RAW format, I … Continue reading

Slow Life Down with Photobooth

Saturday, June 9th, 2012

lazy weekends call for lazy art, right?

It’s the weekend, time for a few errands, grocery shopping, mending a bit of that landscape edging you promised your wife you’d get to a month ago, and spending some time with the kids. Truth be told, our weekends are usually all sorts of busy here in the Rimes’ household, and I’m sure any other family with younger children will agree, it’s far too easy to find yourself working harder on a Saturday than you might have during the week. We’d like to think of Saturday and Sunday as “lazy” days in which we can relax with our family and friends, and just enjoy the brief time we have before heading “back to the edu-coal mines” on Monday. Reality though, typically means that we plan more activities and structure instead of playtime on those two precious days (at least it feels that way in our house many weekends).

So I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone by capturing a silly moment, and completing a ds106 assignment (yes, even ds106 can feel like one of those weekend chores if you’re trying to “play good” and complete the right number of assignments).

But that’s beside the point! How in the world is this applicable to the classroom? Quite often I see teachers in my district using Photobooth for one of two projects; either photos of everyone at the beginning of the year to go up on walls or special bulletin boards, or “special effects” photos for big projects. It’s a shame that they don’t have access to the Macbooks more often (each elementary only has 2 MacBook carts, the MS and HS 3 carts apiece), because Photobooth would make an excellent visual journaling tool for capturing daily learning experiences, moods, and just the general well-being of learning going on in a classroom. Photobooth does stills and video, so you could switch it up from day to day, maybe even taking subsequent shots to stitch together as an animated gif, or create a series of video reflections from a bunch of students after a rather large project.

Today, I just used it to capture the kids and me being silly around the breakfast table. The “Warhol Effect” was appropriate, and rather than print it out, post it on a nice bulletin board to make the hallways or classroom walls “more presentable” like I see at school, I’m just going to post it here in a quick “this is what’s going through my head right now” manner. No doubt the kids and I will stumble across it in a few years time (I’ve dumped it into my iPhoto album as well) and have a nice memory of this morning.

Off Script with Keeme and scottlo – 001

Saturday, June 9th, 2012

A Podcast is Born

I had the extreme good fortune to be joined by Keeme Brown for today’s Daily Rounds. I’ve known Keeme since just about the beginning of my first journeys into Second Life in 2007. There are few people I’ve met who are as much fun to both talk and listen to.

Our plan was to chat on camera for a couple of minutes about some recent news from Corona Cay and our preparations for Second Life’s ninth birthday celebration (SL9B). But when two seasoned and grizzled podcasters get together with an open mic, things have the potential for going off on a tangent or two.

Thirty minutes in to it, we both seemed to realize that our talk was probably better suited to an audio podcast format than a static video of two dudes standing in front of flowers and an old radio on a platform in the sky. And that’s when the Off Script with Keeme and scottlo podcast was born. No telling if we’ll do another episode or this is a one off deal. Bottom line for me is that it was a blast. I guess the future depends on whether or not people want to hear more of this such stuff. That’s what the comments section is for.

(download audio)