Archive for the ‘software’ Category

 

Early Demos from My New Fake Band

Monday, June 25th, 2012

In a few different broadcasts over the past year, I’ve messed around with some of the various filters and effects available with the free version of Nicecast and found its dials and visual interface both a lot of fun and helpful in the makeshift studios I’ve set up in my classrooms and house.

With a new one-man-band on the horizon, an extension of a #ds106 Visual Assignment, I turned to Nicecast and recorded a live session that yielded the following tracks. Ladies and gentlemen of Camp Magic Macguffin, I give you Dactyloceras lucina!

Not generally in my “wheelhouse of sound,” I was going after a certain, heavy, atmospheric texture that seemed appropriate for my randomly generated band name and album cover. “Goth soul,” Alan Levine calls it, which GNA Garcia clarifies as “rhythmic Emo-noise,” which is what I think I managed to create.

Dactyloceras lucina – Untitled Jam 1 by Bryanjack
The stupidity that keeps us from knowing any better by Bryanjack

How To: Photoshop Magic Lasso

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

I’m not much one for creating “how to” videos, at least not ones that I share publicly on a regular basis, but I felt as though I owed it to some of the people whose blogs I’m following to help out a bit with the monolithic application that is Photoshop. Don’t get too excited though, I am far from being a Photoshop expert, most of my skills having waned since being a heavy Fark.com Photoshop Contest participant in the early 2000s. When I saw Melanie Barker complete the quick, but fun “Slide Guy” assignment (which coincidentally remind me of a lot of the Fark contests), I was impressed. When she said she did it because she was afraid of Photoshop, I wanted to share just a couple of simple tools that I use for cutting and pasting elements from one image to another. Below is the image I created for the ds106 Slide Guy Visual Assignment using a still from a rather famous movie and a shot of Tim Owens joyously sliding down a child’s playground slide.

Look at that slide guy having so much fun trying to crush poor Dr. Jones!

Again, please bear in mind that I am an absolute novice when it comes to Photoshop, and the tools I show may very well be the worst tools to use for cutting, copying, and pasting images as far as a professional graphic designers are concerned, but these tools are super easy to use, and don’t really require that much to figure out, just a bit of practice to master. If it benefits you at all, please enjoy my 6 minute walkthrough of using the magic lasso tool in Photoshop. You can view it below or click here to watch via YouTube.

Bending Time

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012
"Rift in the Space-Time Continuum ... Convenient". by aforgrave, on Flickr

"Rift in the Space-Time Continuum … Convenient". by aforgrave, on Flickr

“Making night time work,
A convenient answer,
Bending the space-time.”

FlickrHaiku, TwHaiku, InstagramHaiku

I came across this solution, while seeking answers.
While still not the long-promised DayDoubler**, it’s nonetheless a start.
– At the Petro-Can, 10:10 pm.  June 11th, 2012.
______________________________________________

I would have seen a mock ad for **DayDoubler sometime in the mid-90s, posted on a bulletin board outside the technicians’ work room at our DSB. (The room later served as our training lab, our PD library, and the home to our original web and email servers.) At the time, Connectrix marketed a variety of software solutions that served to attempt to extend memory (RAM Doubler) and storage (Disk Doubler) so that the computers of the day could do more with less than they actually needed.

The fictional Day Doubler never materialized. LOL.

Searching the web this evening discovered this text:

DayDoubler is a new product from Connectrix that gives you those extra hours in each day that we’ve been asking for. Using sophisticated time mapping and compression techniques to double the number of hours in the day, DayDoubler gives you access to 48 hours each day. With the shareware hack MaxDay, you can easily stretch your day to 60, 72, or even 96 hours! Connectrix warns that at the higher numbers DayDoubler becomes less stable and that you run the risk of a temporal crash in which everything from the beginning of time to the present would come crashing down around you, sucking you into a black hole.

Should this occur, be sure to reboot with the shift key down.

Source: Nov. 21, 1994: Brady Johnson,
TidBITS: DayDoubler.

 

A few years later, a colleague would regularly compliment me by wishing he had two of me. At one particularly important juncture, he wished he had three.

Over the years, I have also tried to find the companion product Clone Yourself, to no avail.

Sigh.