CogBlogged from ‘September, 2011’

There’s some ds106 radio smackdown looming for #bavastock weekend as to which crew has the best acts… While I have been in the EST since August 19, I am for all time zones (if you have no idea what I am talking about, just click away). Yeah, I am Bad, I am Nationwide

It’s been running as a free web service for over eight years, from my little humble PHP script hacking in 2003. Feed2JS (http://feed2js.org/) provides a tool where anyone can enter a URL for an RSS feed, choose some options, and generate a bit of cut and paste JavaScript code they can use in their own web sites. Once in place, this provides a widget that is updated automatically as the RSS feed it refers to changes. The idea owes its origin to the early work of Stephen Downes in RSS and the model of a ASP script I found created by David Carter-Todd (who I hope to find when I get to Blacksburg) In doing this, a lot of traffic is routed through the Feed2JS server. More than I may have even guessed. I developed this and ran it from 2003 to maybe 2005 on a server at the Maricopa [...]

While resting at my sister’s home in Baltimore (recovering from the crud from the road), I’ve found some bits of media flotsam/jetsam from the last few weeks. The time here near the place I spent my first 18 years has brought up some nice and fuzzy memories. Three weeks ago, my sister and I took a drive through our old neighborhood, just outside the northwest corner of Baltimore. When people learn where I am from they ask “is it the Wire?” and I say, no it is all about The Beltway, Interstate 695 which encircles the city. I was just inside the Beltway, but pretty much life was defined along it. Anyhow, we drove down the streets to our old house, and also took a look at the school fields across the strett, laughing at the hill we used to go sledding on in winter. The hill must have had [...]

More playing with ds106 assignments, here the Visual Assignment for Triple Troll Attach: The assignment is to take a photo, a quote from a different character than the one in the picture, and a name from a third character different from the other two, place the quote in the picture, and “sign” it with the third person’s name. The three characters are to be from three different, but similar in genre, series. It’s known as “troll quoting”. For an “official” definition, go here: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/troll-quotes I flobbed around a while on ideas, and settled on fishing IMDb for movie quotes, and landed on Pulp Fiction- the quote is actually from Samuel L Jackson’s bible quoting bad ass Jules. The photo is another bad boy that is a Bava favorite– Snake Lipskins (Kurt Russel) in Escape from New York wrongly attributed to Tony Montana – played by Al Pacino in Scarface. There [...]

I’m keeping up with Scottlo’s Productivity ds106 radio segments, where he plays music for 25 minutes and we try to get a task done. Here I am taking on the assignment bank from ds106. What is there to say about Pick A Bad Photo, Apply A Vintage Effect And Write Something In Helvetica — pretty direct. Not a whole lot of cerebral challenge beyond finding the right had photo- the effect is one of the Antique sepia filters in Silver Efex Pro. This runty dog was barking at me when I was walking the streets of Carlisle, PA, and IO could not have snapped a more ugly portrait. There ya go. Right from Marlon Brando.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Alex E. Proimos For some reason this image came up (among a whole raft of ones I would never use) in a flickr search for “ass” (surprise, eh?). All day I have been feeling my own pangs of regret over the shot from the hip downward critical post about the use of videos by some of my colleagues. There are times I really miss the mark, and this is one, and I do owe some apology to Martin and Stephen. I’ve written an addendum to the post, and as I believe in leaving my mistakes out in public, I won’t remove the post. Mom would have scolded me about “if you don’t have anything constructive to say…” and what I would rather have focused on, and as Zack got to in his comments, the ways to help people be more creative [...]

I’m going to out some colleagues on the defensive here, but c’mom, if you are going to use video for online course materials, for our sanities sake, DO NOT SIT THERE AND READ TO ME. Talk to me. Show your passion, your interest, your humanity. Don’t point us to video of a head talking into a camera reading stuff I can read elsewhere. What is the value? I’m talking you, the folks over at the Mother of All MOOCs (thinking of additional words to insert after “Mother”). C’mom Martin Weller, I have seen you do genius video mashups, but why are you sitting there on your video camera more or less monotoning to me what is in the web text? C’mom, this is the trailer for your session, where are the car chases and burning buildings? And Stephen Downes, you are extremely forceful as an in person speaker, why the [...]

Here’s a half-baked ds106 Design Assignment, feeding off of the MacGuffin-ing, but one to spiff up your blend and magic brush skills in Photoshop. Find a billboard or ad that features a friends or colleagues name, and modify it to personalize the ad. I got inspired while in thr DC Metro seeing billboard after billboard of Siemens ads, and could not help but think they were speaking about George not the poly-glot electronics company. Surely there are Groom companies out there (hah pet supplies!), Burtis (contractors), Timmmmmy does Home Improvement, D’Arcy does A/C… Actually, I was looking for an excuse to repost my photos, I know George got a laugh out of them (right, George? you are laughing? Don’t sic Acer on me!)

Lots of people seem to have gotten a start on ds106 radio broadcasting using Nicecast on Mac OSX and my first guide to niceasting. Since then, I’ve been modifying my method a bit, so it seemed time to update. As always, your first point of entry into anything related to ds106 radio is the shared doc at http://bit.ly/radio4life which covers info about the radio, how to listen, and how to broadcast. The setup I described the first tome around works well for the scenario of wanting to slide between your voice and audio from an application, e.g. DJing music from iTunes. This would not work, however, if you wanted to use say 2 audio apps, or if you wanted to do, say a Skype call-in show (which has been tutorialized elsewhere using SoundFlower, and/or audio mixing apps. There always seems to be a lot of audi source switching to do [...]

He got there first. Todd Conaway was onto the combination of the MacGuffin Alternative movie ending combined with last year’s craze activity of animmated GIFs. I decided to take an animated GIF I did last time around from the classic card game between Harry Gondorf (Paul Newman) first out hustles Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw) in a poker game on the train. Given I had my originals in a photoshop file with layers, I simply made a text layer of the final line, duplicated it seven times, and then did a progressive removal of text and merged to the original layers to overlay the MacGuffin line. Anyone can churn out a pile of MacGuffins in a few hours, but who can out dog the Animated MacGIFin?