CogBlogged from ‘October, 2008’

My iPhone excitement is nothing new here, given how long it took me to get one, but there is wave after wave of discovery of new things, I am forgetting I have only had it for 2 months. But last night… I found an app that is, to me, explosive, in terms of opening potential for what a portable, networked, web connected media acquisition device can do. I am projecting the children of so-called “digital natives”, the ones that will make those natives seem foreign, will look back at our use of keyboard driven computers the same way I might look at a Victrola or a telegraph machine. So, first a tip of the blog hat, a linktribution to David Warlick for sharing in his post, an iPhone app called SnapTell. It is a visual parallel of one of the other most amazing iApps, Shazam, which lets you hold the [...]

Telegraph Hill Tilt Shift by cogdogblog posted 19 Oct ’08, 12.10am MDT PST on flickr Inspired by a link from kotke to the Fenway Park "Model", I experimented with the Fake Model method. Essentially it is a PhotoShop play of careful gradient selection and lens blur to create effects that convert real photos to images that look like miniature models or train set models. This one is from my original photo taken near the top of Telegraph Hill in San Francisco I was more curious to see how hard it was to create one of these- the lens blur filter in PhotoShop gives the short depth of field that a macro lens would make on a real model, and some toying with color curves is supposed to make it pop more like a plastic model. Again, according to the site with the instructions: With a very little effort, you can [...]

Twitter: the music video- A great compendium of visual message about twitter by Martin Weller, its uses, not, and groovy music by Death Cab Cutie I Will Posses your Heart For more fun catch Martin’s EduPunk video Hee fun to see my Twitter Life Cycle in the mix.

I flipped to Academia.edu after reading one blogger referring to it as “Facebook for Academia” and while it has a few FB-like features (updates) I could not think of a more opposite description for a social network. My analysis here is admittedly first impressions and shallow ;-) What it seems to provide is a social networking for faculty, to find academics with common research interests, to browse by departments and roles. The structure is a rigid tree. There is “universities” at the top that you scroll or navigate horizontally by name, departments underneath, followed by and orderly listing of people by roles, faculty in top, then post-docs, then… I have a gut level negative response to an org chart structure which feels as 18th century as can be, and some of this in the midst of thinking about the discussions of networks and chaos theory in the ongoing Connectivism and [...]

A japanese houseplant has its own blog, and updates it on a regular basis: If houseplants could blog, what would they say? To find out, Kamakura-based IT company KAYAC Co., Ltd. has developed a sophisticated botanical interface system that lets plants post their thoughts online. A succulent Sweetheart Hoya (Hoya kerii) named “Midori-san” is now using the system to blog daily from its home at bowls Donburi Cafe in Kamakura. Read about it on the Pink Tentacle blog or go directly to the source (the plant blogs in Japanese). So what does a plant blog about? Usual stuff– politics, silly Youtube videos, punk music, drinking binges, soil pH levels, phosphates…. So if a houseplant can blog, why can’t ____________________ ? (fill in the blank)

PhotoSynth Strike Two by cogdogblog posted 14 Oct ’08, 11.32pm MDT PST on flickr After my first miserable attempt to create a PhotoSynth in my living room, I sat down and read the RTFM, took 300 photos, but only got to 70% synthy. Needed more angles and connectors. This one took 2.5 hours. See Strawberry Cabin Part Deux Trial and error, trial and error.

With travel, work-load, and self-imposed laziness, I maintain my firm position on the very far edges of participation in the Connectivism & Connective Knowledge. But as I intuit from the Stephen and George show, that really does not matter, and we need to get over that. photo credit: Pulpolux !!! Week 6 is Complexity, Chaos and Randomness, topics I can say I “grok”, though the grokness this week (with more travel Wednesday) may turn to grogness. The first reading, Developing Online From Simplicity toward Complexity: Going with the Flow of Non-Linear Learning, while set out in relevant wording, left me a bit wanting. Sure, some of it is age (it is from 2003); if I could paraphrase the essence, “We got nice comments for students in an online course we re-wrote from linear web pages to web pages arranged in groups they could choose their own readings from along with [...]

Photosynth was one of those “cool demos I saw and bookmarked for later” that I was recently nudged to go back and look at– this week I saw a very cool scene created by the folks at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. In a nutshell, PhotoSynth magically creates a navigable scene that lets you move through a 3D space made by stitching together photos of a place or object taken from different angles. Sure it is a Microsoft thingie and only works on Windows, but sometimes, a cool thing pushes one over their threshold. If you had not seen the demo from last year where Blaise Aguera y Arcas wowed the Ted-ites, it is worth a peek: I’ve had this interest in the last year with complex scenes rendered from photos, e.g. the nifty explorable stitched images created with the GigaPan… but the beauty of PhotoSynth should be it does [...]

Show me the money by Kees (km-fotografie.nl) posted 20 Mar ’08, 10.37am MDT PST on flickr This exhibition shows the full contract from – if I remember it wel – a Swiss Bank for lending out money to the museum. Behind every page is a light source. In the middle (where my friend is standing) is a window where you see the actual pile of money. Van Abbe Museum – Eindhoven, March 2008 Olympus OM-4Ti, Zuiko 24mm F2.8 on Fujichrome Provia-X 400 I am by no means ungrateful for all the kind things people say and write to be about 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story. It was a wacky idea that emerged a year ago and has become a regular shtick. People all over (they were ROTFL in Japan) love the Blabberize Talking Alpaca. This is great… but here comes the whinge. Where are the examples of [...]

The Future is Here? by cogdogblog posted 24 Sep ’08, 7.11pm MDT PST on flickr Spotted on the streets of Hong Kong, I am pretty sure in peeking in the window I saw lots of “Connectivism in a Box” ;-) Go George Go!