Well, my Still True Friend Alan (@cogdog) is having a birthday today and so I made him an Art and posted it on my Flickr. It is up above these words, so you already looked at it. One good thing about Alan is that he is not clumsy on stairs, because that is not a good thing […]

Joe Lambert's Seven Stages Storywork webinare series is highly recommended.

Some convergence of “selfie” ideas came to my mind yesterday, with the DS106 Daily Create riffing off creating a “bad selfie” to someone sharing the cute video and CommonSense Media posting an interesting piece about girls and selfies and body image, and then I decided to do my own version of the Ellen selfie, but […]

Experimenting with a new toy by John Johnston:

We are designing a new #DS106 Assignment and wanted to experiment with the tool. Here was the brief we discussed on the twitter:

Play the PechaGif once only and record video 
Think of a topic for a presentation
Improvise. 
Record and audio track of the ‘presentation’ 
Use the animated gifs you recorded as your slides to talk from!
Have fun!

The worst part of it is that I have been plagues with techno glitches today. It has taken forever to get the video on YT. I tried to upload to Tumblr and failed. I recorded the voiceover and it did not record. Blah!

All that said it should not take long to do. 

I set the delay in PechaGif to 5 seconds. Promised myself I would use the first take - no cheating. Used Quicktime Player to capture video. Imported to iMovie. Created the voiceover as an improvisation exercise - the idea was think of a topic and wing it using the animated gifs that appeared as your slides. Todd Conway made an awesome example. John Johnston kicked us off with this example, where he used the tool to explain the tool! Get him all meta meta :)

Awesome tool to engage our creative improvisational brain!

"Wake up! Use Pechagif the best tool there is for a DS106 assignment" says John. Thank you for making it, John. I do not think it is silly at all.

Those of us who understand the psychology of creativity know that the type of exercise this tool forces on us is a desirable difficulty if we want to keep our creative muscles toned. Improvisation is not joke, says CNN.

creativesomething:

“The best ideas…” (Hint: let it load.)

If in watching this lovely gif, you wonder how to teach your crowded mind to take time to get ideas or just be still then you could do worse than my curated page on Scoop it on Lived time. 

A postcard from space! You can see the interactive version here and thank your Anna Cow for the inspiration. 

I did edit the photo in Photoshop - just cropped to taste and got rid of a few colours and a little dither.

Credit photo to NASA Ames Research Center

Train your attention now

No time to lose

when things fall apart.

In this very life,

Wise up.

I decided to comply and do yesterday’s daily create properly this morning. In reviewing several spine poems I noticed I was attracted to short ones ( i.e. those that had fewer books) and I noticed one in particular that lined up the titles of the books as if it were the written word. I liked that. I worked quite a long time with the composition of the photo and when I opened it in Photoshop, there was nothing I wanted to edit. Result. 

A random Gif A while back I posted about the DS106 random gif api, a rather daft piece of fun: 106 drop in » Blog Archive » Gif Scraping and a DS106 Gif API. The api seems to be working well and I’ve used it on DS106 GiF TV which is still a work in […]

In writing up the current ds106 lesson on telling stories, I provided some updates tips in how to download video form YouTube (and other services). In the past I have recommended KeepVid (requires Java, so its no go in Chrome). Since learning about it from Tim Owes, I switched to pwnyoutube, specifically the bookmarklet tool. I’ve seen it not work for periods, and lately Chrome has been tossing up a click through unsecure script warning. But last time I passed by pwnyoutube I noticed a new service– and it has smoother dance moves than the others. SaveFrom.net not only can download video from YouTube URLs, but also another 40+ different audio/video sites. But the cool moves begin when you install the helper extension.add-on — it looks like it works for IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and more. And this is what makes it best- in YouTube, vimeo, and more, it adds […]

Waking up to the world after a long illness.

You see in this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend: Those with loaded guns, and those who dig (Leone 1966). That line comes from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Sergio Leone’s classic spaghetti western. In the … Continue reading →

““Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by...

Yesterday’s research group in The Internet Course took a look at online dating. This is a fascinating topic because it has a historical aspect (computer matchmaking goes back to the 60s), an economic aspect (apparently it’s a bigger business online … Continue reading →

Well I started with the best for first. Because that is the best of the Pearls of Jim Groom Oyster Pictures from the World that I have. I hope you enjoy it and appreciate the funny joke part of it. Plus, it is a True Art, I think. By the way, these pictures are all for […]

Everything since then has been a matter of paying it forward.