CogDogBlog: Recent Episodes
None
Apparently writers with orders of magnitude more readers than I are penning saga length whinging rage posts about how terrible technology is. Oh they keep moving the buttons on me! Teams Sucks. Google Search is junk. Technology is terrible.
I don’t counter the disgust of bad software interfaces (oh reminds me I have a post to do about the interface of my air fryer, I digress). But I find reward in figuring things out that call for doing things beyond the front facing interface. Finding the end arounds. Doing some sleuthing.
Here is today’s tale, something again that started out with a speck of an idea, leading me to digging into old posts, shreds of web sites left on the internet archive, picking through some web source, and a wee bit of luck.
Now trying to write this– I pause and wonder, is this really a great story? Who cares?
Oh yes, this is for the Nobody who reads my blog. Them. Hi.
It’s about a character he came to know as The “Lo” who as the feature image goes, was definitely “cool”
The Simple StartThis began this morning’s team meeting with my colleagues at OEGlobal. I was doing my updates for Open Education Week (what you have not added anything? Get over there!). Most of the attention and things shared are events, which are fine, but truly, its webinar after webinar after webinar, zooms all the way down.
I try so hard to get other kinds of activities going, small things that let people explore or create something and share it. That’s my DS106 roots at work. I have been launching a few of them already in the DO OE Week Activities in our OEG Connect Community space. All very DS106ish. Some creative stuff with Bryan Mather’s Remixer Machine. Recasting an event title with ChatGPT to include cats. An exploration of the new Flickr Commons Maps. So far, well certainly that NOBODY character has been active there. I cant even get my colleagues to participate. I end up replying to myself or logging in as one of my sock puppet accounts.
Skipping the ennui over excuses to not participate, I was talking about ways people can share something of their global location. We had all started our meeting sharing our weather, which ranges from me right now at -28ºC and huge snow drifts to me colleagues in South Africa and Costa Rica in t-shirts talking about the heat. My colleague Heather suggested something where people do a short video showing their weather.
This started clicking off some neuron memories of something in the way way back early times of DS106, involving that legendary persona, Scott Lockman aka “Scottlo” who as a teacher of college age students in Tokyo, Japan had somehow found his way into the whacky anti-MOOC circus of DS106. Scott had oodles of media creativity and a bit of a snarky attitude. I recall he had worked as a radio broadcaster in the Army (?), knew a lot of practical chops about audio, and I am pretty sure its true that he was the first podcaster from Japan (I am pretty sure this guy is lying, but I will dig for evidence later).
Anyhow I remembered that Scottlo had put out a series of these short, like 30 second audio or video spots where he did some kind of daily update that included the date, time, and weather, and some kind of mood level.
I could not stop myself from opening the door to the rabbit hole.
The Digging BeginsI thought maybe it was something in the DS106 Assignment Bank, but nothing came up on a search for “Scottlo” (as it turns out from a later message, Eric Likness found a different assignment, with “Scott Lo” in the title, some kind of Oxford space issue?). I was pretty sure it was a Daily Create- a few hits came up referencing the guy on the current site, but none the target.
I would think it was on the first version of the Daily Create which was once online at https://tdc.ds106.us but no more. I trudged off to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, truly one of the swiss army knives of web research. I am shocked how few people even know it exists. Shrug.
I ended up paging back through the archives, starting with the most “recent” being TDC1334 the last on the old site before we moved to the current one. I tried paging back and doing a ctrl-F to look for “Scottlo” but each archive of the acrhive was not exactly consistent, and I could not seem to go back past a certain point (but I did find a few old assignments that I copied and put into the rotation for new ones in the next week or two – look for ’em at https://daily.ds106.us/ I think the one I added os scheduled for February 20.
Round 2: Sideways SearchingWas it there a reference in my old blog posts? In the early days many times I would write up a “making of” for a response to a DS106 challenge. I have 48 posts referencing the “lo” but none were what I sought (there was distraction re-reading old posts).
Next idea. I used to respond to Daily Creates in some web site that had a frog logo– no it was some kind of bird, the name was something like “fritter”? (I joke, right?) I flushed my entire account a few months ago, but thanks to some long ago genius of a wizard named Martin Hawksey, I have a full, searchable archive of my twittering (well through June 13, 2023 when the Dark Lord Elmo yanked the plug on the API, a thousand cockroaches should infest his bed).
The first searches like “Scottlo weather” or “Scottlo forecast” came up dry. But resorting to just “Scottlo” as a search got me 767 matches. I quickly scanned for something that looked like maybe my own video reply when he put this out as a challenge. About 1/8 the scroll down all results, this looked like a possibility.
The View on Twitter is dead, but the hyperlinks in the text do work.
A tweet to #scottlo with a YouTube linkNope, but it was a fun trip of a goofy cover song I did for the Lo’s birthday.
Scroll on we go, and not too long until I hit jackpot. It’s a tweet mentioning doing a @scottlo SRB Daily Update from Strawberry– that’s what this thing was called!
The tweet I was seeking! My response for a daily create number 696 as a “SRB Daily Update”Jumping to my video, well heck, it was fun, I will embed it–
In the YouTube caption I included the link to the daily create I was responding too- most likely, this would be the source. Here is another lesson in ther value of writing captions or descriptions on uploaded media- extra info.
But now I have the url for Daily Create that likely explains what a “SRB Daily update” is all about — http://tdc.ds106.us/tdc696
Going Back to the Wayback MachineTo access this Daily Create, we have to go back into the Wayback Machine, Peabody. And we find Daily Create TDC 696 from December 4, 2013 which is “Create a @Scottlo Radio Broadcast (SRB) Daily Update Video” and we know what SRB is.
Daily Create TDC 696: Create a @Scottlo Radio Broadcast (SRB) Daily Update VideoThe instructions are:
- Announce the full date “Today is December 4, 2013?
- Announce your geographic location
- Announce the current time
- Announce the current weather conditions (include outside temperature)
- Rate your day on your own special 1-10 rating scale
Daily Create TDC 696: Create a @Scottlo Radio Broadcast (SRB) Daily Update Video
But no video embed! Are we doomed? Do I go on a rant at how effing bad the web is? Nope, I go into View Source, find the iframe for the video embed.
Source HTML reveals the link we have been looking for.It needs to be pried out of the weyback machine link, but now I can plunk into a web browser http://www.youtube.com/embed/jZk7jLUKGh0 which is the full screen, I can then click the title to have the YouTube link to embed here.
This is Scottlo himself, quite young, sardonic, and in his style you think he is serious but if you know his shtick, you realize he is playing it up. But this is the definitive SRB Daily Update:
From ther YouTube page, one can find Scottlo’s profile and another style of the SRB Update from a few days earlier. This is more the style I remember, where hes shows a local scene- one does not have to do as a selfie style, and it seems more interesting to see a visual of this place in the world.
And Why Did I go to this Extent?Well that mnight take some psychological profiling. I enjoy the chase, and finding clues, not giving up. It is rewarding to use the search engine that everyone talks about as being useless, and then some intuition and some luck.
If I expect my software alone or some faceless algorithm to spit out an answer like a vending machine, I am yeilding my curioisty and inquiry thinking to a piece of software.
It ain’t about the technology or the interface, folks- its what we do with our grey matter upstairs.
Now I can write up a 2025 version of the SRB Daily update, record an example, and post it on our OE Week activity space– likel;y to sit there un replied.
But I ain’t stopping. Being creative, making things, figuring out how to end around when the systems fail? That’s delight with technology. not dreading its crappiness.
Yo, Lo, where ever you are, I hope you got your voice in a radio mic.
PostscriptScottlo let his domain and blog go, and now https://scottlo.com is an Indonesian site selling slot machines. So it goes. In one of those old archived tweets I saw a link for a Blogger one he set up I think when was in his stage of creating personas. or Internet Sock Puppets, the blog of one Otto Paertz full of DS106 assignment responses.
Featured Image: My own photo of a stove top control, it’s the details that are fun to find in the world. More fun than typing words in a box and looking at what is spit out for you. I am a Fan of The Lo flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
The humble hyperlink, ever it be so unassuming humble. Click here! It’s an invention, a pending adventure, for me, a potential distraction of the better than the machinery of social media attention sucking.
When you spot an interesting link in your info streams, do you quickly share, repost? Click that all so valuable and powerful Like button?
Me, after scanning or actually reading a linked web thingie, I admit often I look for the best summary to grab and zap to my pinboard hoard with tags for later use. Quite often the links from the links yield more. And then… many times I get curious of it;s from a site I have never seen before — I try to avoid saving/sharing links that are merely a summary on some what passes for news these days sites. I learned well, Mike Caulfield, to always swim upstream towards the source.
And if the site I am visiting appears to be e work of a person, not just some agency or entity aiming truly to have you click more ads than real links, then, there is he curiosity o know more about the writer. If they have written one thing that I get value from, surely there is more.
So on to the show…
Yeah, this journey launchs from my inbox, the writings that plop in there via the Substack machine. I’m pretty vocal on my dismay that many writers are abandoning the blog for the newsletter. But if the writing is good, I don’t care how I get it– it’s always about the words, the ideas, more than the paper/ink/whatever is the modern web metaphor.
The reading is “Your Fake Online Friends Have a 2,000-Year-Old History” from TNL.net aka Tristan Louis. Right away a good title is something that sparks me. I cringe at how little attention some people give to titles- clever ones, not click-bait listicle fodder. But in this case, previous positive familiarity with a writer helps and I have been reading Tristan’s words, likely first from his blog, since well before 2000. I can’t recall exactly (on poking around his site I find that his writing started in 1997 as an email newsletter on internet tech, so he was way ahead of the current common practice). I am deeply respectful of his annual posts on living in NYC and commeraring/reflecing every September 11- this year was a 23rd year. I recall one time when I was in The City for a conference, I reached out, and he graciously invited me for a visit.
Back to his post, which wends a wonderful history of how long ago people found a reason to create fake personas, long before internet sock puppets. Hence the delight of learning about the kid who struggling to get his writings seen assumed the persona of “Silence Dogood”.
Louis writes about the earliest days of ancient internet culture, when all was text-based, and the first utopian ideals of early net-communities. I had known in passing of the tale he outlines:
One of those environments was LambdaMoo, a server set up in California, where people would mingle 24 hours per day, logging in from anywhere around the world to occupy a world both fantastical and welcoming. A place built on words and imagination, where community norms dictated evil things being kept in private spaces while communal spaces remained welcoming.
On an evening in early 1993, one of the most shocking events on the internet to date, akin to virtual rape, would disturb the peace and lay groundwork for our future.
From Your Fake Online Friends…(and cough, see the trick I did there on the link? the humble link? I share the sorcery. With a link.
And here is where the door to the rabbit hole slides open. It’s a link to the web version of the article that published this story of “one of the most shocking events on the internet to date” published in The Village Voice, December 23, 1993. How can this bit of long writing be on the web and not covered in advetrisements and pop up call to sign up for crap?
Take in for a moment “A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society” by it’s author, Julian Dibble.
It’s far from wowing you in 2025 web design. When I read it first on my mobile, the non-responsive web text on a site named “Scribble, Scribble, Scribble” was tiny, filling 1/3 of the screen width. I had to zoom to see words. It looks web old.
Article written in 1993 by Julian Dibble still available on his web site.Visually not web pretty, but come here for the writing. The first paragraphs indicate the works of a writer, not a blog hack like me.
Call me Dr. Bombay. Some months ago — let’s say about halfway between the first time you heard the words information superhighway and the first time you wished you never had — I found myself tripping now and then down the well-traveled information lane that leads to LambdaMOO, a very large and very busy rustic mansion built entirely of words. In the odd free moment I would type the commands that called those words onto my computer screen, dropping me with what seemed a warm electric thud inside the house’s darkened coat closet, where I checked my quotidian identity, stepped into the persona and appearance of a minor character from a long-gone television sitcom, and stepped out into the glaring chatter of the crowded living room. Sometimes, when the mood struck me, I emerged as a dolphin instead.
I won’t say why I chose to masquerade as Samantha Stevens’s outlandish cousin, or as the dolphin, or what exactly led to my mild addiction to the semifictional digital otherworlds known around the Internet as multi-user dimensions, or MUDs. This isn’t my story, after all. It’s the story of a man named Mr. Bungle, and of the ghostly sexual violence he committed in the halls of LambdaMOO, and most importantly of the ways his violence and his victims challenged the 1000 and more residents of that surreal, magic-infested mansion to become, finally, the community so many of them already believed they were.
That I was myself one of those residents has little direct bearing on the story’s events. I mention it only as a warning that my own perspective is perhaps too steeped in the surreality and magic of the place to serve as an entirely appropriate guide.
Indeed, because this was written in an era where newspapers, magazines turned out good writing, not words for ad click bait
I wander around Julian’s site. I am curious. The blog link reveals the last post was in 2004. That my non subtraction-eager friends, was 21 years ago, yet here it is still on the internet. How is that possible? Elsewhere under Latest I find the newest news was 2009.
The gem is Julian’s lovingly not overly verbose but link enabled bio. He was born but 2 months before me. I leave it for you, blog reader, if you are more than a bot of AI scraper, to read what Julian describes as “the best part”. I have a feeling his life and words stay true to that hope.
My web detective work suggests this was originally written on Blogger.com and has been exported. The site icon in the browser suggests it might be WordPress, but there is no shred of the usual WordPress tracks in the source. It’s just classic self contained HTML, the stuff of the web that will last the longest.
But it’s the words I value having spent time here, the words of a genuine person. Someone who has taken on themselves to keep the words alive on the internet. This is what individuals do- organizations and companies just build pre-fab web sites and later demolish them.
One more stop as the usual exploring work is to see what Wikipedia reveals. Dibble’s bio links to the Wikipedia article on A Rape in Cyberspace. This is Wikipedia richness in detail and citation, but I find this bit from the intro most assuring on what good writing can instigate.
Lawrence Lessig has said that his chance reading of Dibbell’s article was a key influence on his interest in the field.[1] Sociologist David Trend called it “one of the most frequently cited essays about cloaked identity in cyberspace”.[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_in_Cyberspace
I leave it to you to continue the path from footnote 1. It may go on from there.
Links. One is useful. But if you put some oomph ino it, so much more awaits.
We click ’em like Pavlovian pellet seekers. But the more you click on your own, the deeper you can go and return.
Featured Image: Mine, 2013/365/13 Drive Train flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
In which I put forth an opinion grounded solely in one person’s observations, gut feeling, and in no means really expected to be accepted as a theory of merit. This is also blogging as in writing as in the Dave Winerian sense of the unedited voice of one person.
As a preface and likely point to wander off target, I’ve become acutely aware that what keeps being written and talked about as “social media” has become extremely narrow and limited to those platforms, many that exist now, that do more or less what twitter did long ago. They are really just large shared spaces of messaging. Toss in the platforms that come to mind, plus all of the variety we sp[in as collaboration tools (Slack, Teams et al).
This is hardly what I think of as social media, especially if you were arounf online in the late 2000s. Take in the extensive Wikipedia article on Social Media:
Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongst virtual communities and networks. Common features include:
- Online platforms that enable users to create and share content and participate in social networking.
- User-generated content—such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through online interactions.
- Service-specific profiles that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.
- Social media helps the development of online social networks by connecting a user’s profile with those of other individuals or groups.
The term social in regard to media suggests platforms enable communal activity. Social media can enhance and extend human networks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
Or try from the History Cooperative, The Complete History of Social Media: A Timeline of the Invention of Online Networking if you can scape through the ads and popups, there is actually text.
Social media is understood as the different forms of online communication used by people to create networks, communities, and collectives to share information, ideas, messages, and other content, such as videos.
Two things stand out from this definition:
- Social media must include online communication, meaning the history of social media cannot begin before the invention and widespread adoption of the internet; and
- Social media depends on user-generated content. This is why typical websites and blogs do not get included in the world of social media. Only certain people can post to these sites, and there are significant restrictions on the types of content that get uploaded.
https://historycooperative.org/the-history-of-social-media/
I would disagree strongly with point number 2, that looks at blogs or web sites as entities- if you think of the ecosystem of blogs that interlinked based on the choices of authors, and connected through the contributions of comments and back links via trackback pings, my contention it was very social.
And what’s funny is that many people seem to leave out the mega social media godzilla, YouTube.
A key difference for this rather narrow view of social media as mini posts that come at you like a firehose, is that the site or provider feeds them to you, with or without algorithmic influence. For the social layer of blogs, you have to take the initiative and effort to find the blogs and go there (do not get me started on the role of RSS here).
For me social media where the places that provided a service, function that was useful to me as an individual, but created a whole new layer of value and possibility done in the space where others were doing the same (e.g. social bookmarking, photo sharing a la flickr). Im many ways I think of collaborative document editing that we almost take for granted in Google Docs, had this flavor. I still recall the tingle of excitement the first time, me, living in Arizona was editing a document in Writely- the precursor to Google Docs – at the same time my colleague Phil Long was making changes I could see from his location in New Jersey (yup got a link, February 6, 2006). And if you want more waving, ask me sometime about 43 Things.
Not sure what difference it makes, but I maintain what we call “social media” is a bastardized winnowing by software barons who learned a way to suck pennies from our acts.
Back to the TopicMy self-editor is chiming in. What do I mean by attention machines? It’s hardly novel to criticize today’s narrow band view of social media, tons and tons have been written on the Attention Economy. The whole point of these things is to draw us in, encourage us to create content, cleverly design the environment to be one where you do not leave, and count, measure, store all our interactions.
In sticking a fork in Facebook (that was the second time, there was an earlier effort), much was about the slimy experience of being used in catfishing, plus the known awareness of surveillance, much was just personal. Something about the face, voice, and swagger of Zuckerburg made me sick, he was all the stuck up kids I hated in highschool. Plus, his whole vast fortune was rooted in the frat boy exploitation of rating women.
But more than that, as I recall, was a sickening feeling of how often I was getting in bed at night, or waking in the morning, and scrolling, scrolling to see what people were doing.
And that I realized was a trap. It was the pointless time of scrolling instead of doing something else with my mind. I am hardly over that, just sometimes aware that the desire to know, to be informed, aware, even amused by the streams is hard to dismiss. Yet, I still heartliy believe in the early brilliance of Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense | WIRED (archived 13 Nov 2022 15:20:37 UTC).
Yet seeing the ongoing desire for “where we we go for all the conversations about” (fill in your favorite subjects, discipline, or just education) and the choices being made seem almost more about being heard than being part of something bigger. Why go to weird and clunky Mastodon if “you can’t find anyone there” (I hear that a lot). Run to Bluesky because “everyone is there” and (this one bites bad) “it’s just like Twitter was in 2010.”
Scarp the blog and start of a SubStack?ButtonDown/Ghost so your words get stuffed into people’s inboxes.
Do you write to be writing or are you writing to get attention? If you do not get likes and boosts and reposts, is it not worth it? Remember
Likes are Cheap
I’m painting much with a broad brush, but at times it seems like we are drawn to the attention machines to get attention as much as that it sucks it from us.
Just a half baked, simmering in the head idea. Please do tell me how wrong I am. Or just Like this post.
Featured Image: Composite of my own photos Milk Machine flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) and 2020/366/40 ATTENTION PLEASE! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0). Guess the license for the combo.
Let’s hold of the self-congratulations… nope, it’s on. I am one month into the 18th year of (trying to do) taking/posting daily photos to flickr, yes 2025/365 is game on.
For 2025, I did get to the end of January for an ace 31/31Like who’s counting? C’est moi. The last two years I started strong, perfect for 5 or 6 months but fell off the boat around June, tried to climb back, but came up really short. I have all 18 years curated into one flickr collection — a collection is like a collection of albums.
The funky thing about this corner of flickr is that there is no direct link to collections anywhere. I just know from experience if you take the url for your Photostream, like mine is https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/ and tack on collections you can get to your own (likely empty, but mine’s not).
But here in 2025 for January I racked up a 60 for 60, and hope the blog pressure will make it a monthly thang. Taking a riff from being in the same boastful spot in 2024, Maybe I can pick 5 and make a story, kind of 5 Card Flickr Story-like
It’s a Pie Fine Year (so it seemed before January 20)2025/365/11 First Pie of 2025 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)From This Perch2025/365/30 Photo Perch Spot flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)Under the wonders of a big open sky, the road is limitless.2025/365/19 Totally Sundog flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)Yet When Unworldly Creatures Come to Power…2025/365/25 Bad Ass Mr Potato Head flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)I know it has nothing on having light and love in my heart.2025/365/18 Smiling Cori, Frosty Scarf flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)But the best part of this 18th round is having Cori doing the daily photo thing along side of me! We have those special times at night side by side uploading to flickr, asking each other about our best pictures.
DWDD Round 18It’s been likely blogged each year, but the root of all this points to one humble photographer/blog/and all around friend since the days of the Direct-L listerv, D’Arcy Norman, to whom which I ascribe a useful strategy of Doing What D’Arcy Does (DWDD). Again, D’Arcy had done a 356 project in flickr in 2007, which I had followed with interest. When I did his end of year recap, he twittered about doubt if he would repeat in 2008.
When I replied, “I Will if You Will” he was game, and that was the launch of a Flickr Group we set up for others to join in. (the irony is of the URL ending in 366photos being starting in. a leap year). D’Arcy later reclaimed to be doing this on his own domain where he is devotedly shared daily since. But I have kept the group alive, each year renaming it to reflect the current year, changing out the banner image and icon that comes from the pool of shared photos.
From maybe 50 people who joined in 2008, the daily photo group D’Arcy inspired now includes 1929 members who over the last 17 years have added 370,000 photos to the group. That is rather incredible, especially for what people think of these days as “social media” where this is a community of shared interest, that has almost no intercommunication. It just is.
And yep, I not only can easily find my first daily photo in this long adventure, I got a blog post too. The subject was of all things a llama named Mike I went on with friends for a hike into Strawberry Canyon on January 1, 2008. I had not remembered this detail, but my blog did- Mike the llama was named by its owners after Michael Jordon. Why that is important or makes me smile? Well it’s the connection, the story, the thread of life that an algorithm that merely averages can never tell you (yes, you can expect a zing at AI in every future blog post, at least until I write the epic one in my head)
One Day One Photo
And I wrote more 3 months in– ironically I mentioned something about how fancy pants D’Arcy was using Aperture to manage his photos. It was not long before I DWDD and Aperture to this day represents the best photo software I had the luck to use (no more, but this is another blog post).
It’s hardly anything new these days to be sharing photos. And I love seeing photos almost more than anything in the social streams. For many people, that becomes the place that stores and archives photos. Yet, in Instagram, which I have so many mixed feelings about, you cannot search your own photos (the only way to find photos is to scroll back in time), you cannot put a hyperlink in your captions to go outward. It’s a dead end place to dump your photos.
Likewise I know many wo count on Google Photos, because (a) it takes almost no effort and (b) it does a bunch of AI/algorithm stuff to organize things without any effort by you. Just dump the photos and let Google do whatever it does. I thought Dean Shareski had blogged it (he’s still at it albeit sporadically) but think now it was Intagrammed (again, no way I can find *) how google did the magic to show all the places he golfed, all the photos with his family, all the photos with smiles. I do think it’s neat, like a card trick.
I cannot sat how valuable it is to me, largely because every photo I upload to flickr, not only the daily ones, have titles, captions, tags, and of course date/time stamps, that make it insanely useful for me to find where I was or whether I even went to a place in the past.
This morning I was making a remark to Cori ob writing, about that seen from The Shining where Wendy Torrance discovers the real text of the “book” her haunted husband was “writing” -pages and pages of typewritten “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. I recalled I had visited the hotel in Colorado where Stephen King had stayed and the setting inspired his scary novel. In 15 seconds I found it.
The Stanley Hotel flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) licenseJune 22, 2015, and navigating the photos on either side, I can see the other Shining things I photographed, as well as placing this as a road/camping trip where I had camped with friends outside of Rocky Mountain National Park.
I make use of my own 21 year history archived in flickr all the time. It’s not because I dumped my photos there all named helpful titles like P927125.JPG but because I gave them all my own metadata. Captions.
This is truly the— yeah, the thing blogged before
The Web Timelined Self
I get these gains from the way I organize my stuff,. not what some algorithm someone else jigged does with it. I also have a principle of organizing all my photos first here at home, on my own machine (now with Lightroom) where I write all the titles, captions, tags before putting into flickr and definitely fore pushing them out to so called social media.
If you spray your images, your words to social media, they legally are yours, but you have gifted them to some platform and they will float away quickly down the river of time, and never serve a future purpose.
I don’t say this with any hope that others do the same, I am just staking my paws in the sand, to say I was here, I made stuff here, and I do it in a way that not only helps me, but saves the context, the meaning, that I can return to later to re-tell the story.
Like this? I love it.
Featured Photo: For each month, a photo of mine for that number. Her’s One. 2016/366/9 One Frozen Pine Needle flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
While many people are slamming WordPress because of its baby in charge, I’m focussed still on the open source software I run on my own sites that are not impacted by the tantrums. Lately I have been putting to work on several sites, the WordPress ActivityPub plugin that makes your site publish to and suck in responses from Ye Not So Olde Fediverse.
Just to stake my paw in the space, I started making this work all the way back in 2022 making use of IFTTT and a nifty recipe for posting from RSS to Mastodon (which still works)
Gizmo-ing Stuff to Mastodon
I did have a run with the very first release of the WordPress ActivityPub Plugin (before it was automattic-ed), first on a WordPress.com test blog and here on the home front. While it did work, I found it awkard to be represented in the ‘verse as the “so good they named it twice” handle like @cogdogblog.com@cogdogblog.com. But more, I felt like my blog should push stuff to my own mastodon stream, after all, it’s my stuff.
That’s why I took the other path of rigging up gizmos to post from not only WordPress, but also flickr (I have a tag for my dog Felix in flickr that triggers a post to his own mastodon account) plus I have ones that post things I tag in PInboard as cooltech as stuff in my Mastodon stream tagged #cogdogcooltech. Oh and I have a tag in Pinboard to send stuff through Zapier to our OEG Connect Community Space.
I’m not sure if I am losing my 3 readers in detail, but this is a very efficient small pieces taped together system for link sharing. I use the Pinboard bookmarklet to tag a site I am viewing (along with a description), I can give it tags that organize it for me. At the same time, some of those tags trigger sharing to other channels. If ChatGPT can do that for you, well go right ahead.
I had put this in play too for the DS106 Daily Create once Twitter put the death knell on the API which made it work beautiful for maybe 10 years.
In the meantime, I had noticed that the WordPress ActivityPub plugin had been adding features that made it / makes it more viable now, thanks to much effort by its original developer Matthias Pfefferle and I returned to it first for the podcast site I do for OEGlobal, OEG Voices which you can tune into on the Fediverse by searching profiles for @oegvoices@podcast.oeglobal.org and also putting it back to use here in the Dog Blog home as @barking@cogdogblog.com.
But of course the real gain is that if for some crazy reason someone on Mastodon replies to your federated post, it comes to your blog as a comment. And you can even reply back as if your blog was talking (which it is, right?)
A key feature is setting up how the blog publishes. The default is by author, meaning your presence on the ‘verse is by federating only thr posts you author under a handle defined by your wordpress user name.
Almost all my sites, I am the only author, or the only one who actually posts, so I now go with the blog profile only option meaning the blog has one voice.
Setting the profile to blog as just one fediverse entityNow this gets interesting, as when you go back to the welcome tab, for Blog profile, you can make the first part of the fediverse handle by any name I want. So I have gone on most my sites with some kind of verb like @sharing@…. or here it is appropriately @barking@….. That may be of no significance to you, but to me, it’s a small human touch. It shows up on the welcome tab of the Activity Pub plugin like
Seeing your blog’s own fediverse handle (the first part of your profile)As the link says, the real fun comes in the Customize the blog profile tab. Here you can do everything, choose the custom handle, create a background image, write the bio, and add the links that appear on your fediverse profile.
This really makes the profile stand out.
Making your blog’s fediverse profile very personalize. Only if you are into that.So far my fleet of sites I am federating now via the ActivityPub plugin includes:
- The home based dog house mother ship, this blog CogDogBlog federating as
@barking@cogdogblog.com - The SPLOT that no one wants to contribute to, but heck I will keep at it, Sadly Robotic AI Metaphors, federating as
@splotted@sadlyrobotic.cogdogblog.com - OE Global Voices, the podcast I do for OE Global federating as
@oegvoices@podcast.oeglobal.org/ - Open Education Week, the global major important significant world-wide event for OE Global I organize and shamelessly promote, federating as
sharing@oeweek.oeglobal.org. This a brand new experiment, and actually because of some tech issues I keep asking to get fixed, is not quite fully federating. But I am excited to not only be federating posts (my cheesy news items) but the calendar of events themselves as submitted, using a new WordPress Event Bridge plugin (“federate your events”) that extends the ActivityPub plugin to work with the Events Calendar plugin we use to run the event sharing. - The DS106 Daily Create the non-stoppable daily creative challenge that has published one every day since January 8, 2012, federating now as
@creating@daily.ds106.us– note that about two years ago, I yanked the guts that tried to work through Twitter, to push to Mastodon using an IFTTT gizmo sending out as@tdc@social.ds106.usbut I have been putting it back to federating out with the ActivityPub plugin so any direct replies are now appended to a post as a comment (see a most “brazy” example, thank you Paul Bond for being a fine model). Much still has to be done on the site to make it work to track actual responses to the challenge from the chit chat.
The only way to find these I know of now, is searching in Mastodon for the blog’s username, and selecting “Profiles Matching” – I wish there was a direct link to open in Mastodon the profile.
Finding a WordPress federating blog in Mastodon by searchThe one thing I am having a challenge with (okay one of many) is– how can I have a hyperlink from a WordPress site that is federating via ActivityPub that opens it’s post in Mastodon? In Mastodon, all of the share links are back to the WordPress URL, I need to have a link that opens in the Mastodon interface.
If someone can answer that, I will mail you a jar of home made jelly.
The other problem that comes up for many is– in the world of federation we end up with so many different handles. In the excitement of people jumping from Instagram to Pixelfed, I heard this complaint about why their username could not be the same as their Mastodon one. Heck, I had that oen too early, which is why for this purpose the Gizmo-ing to Mastodon with IFTTT, Zapier, and a personal favorite, Make.com can make sense to publish things to your timeline.
My strategy now though, is to accept the Many Accounts I will have, and its on me to boost them from my main account. Guess what? I have a blog post for this:
Federated/Fragmentated
But going forward, I am all on with using the ActivityPub plugin in WordPress, and its features keep growing.
Why are you not Getting More Federated? It’s easy in WordPress. And while answering the question, get yourself the un-official shirt.
Featured Image: Pexels Photo by Felipe Liberal free to use under the Pexels “Why-Can’t-They-Just-Use=CC” License modified by Alan Levine. I used Photoshop Generative fill to add street content to left and right, it does a decent job, plus I brushed out the Ha’Penny Bridge text and added my own “W’ORDPRESS ACTIVITY” to the name of the Pub, and slipped in a Wikimedia Commons WordPress logo licensed GNU General Public… what is the result? I toss my derivative into the grand commons via CC0.
One major branch of my family loses a key limb yet many more now are now connected, growing. On Saturday, I made the journey down to that trouble some country that a one time was united, to drop into home town Baltimore to be a my Aunt Dorothy’s funeral.
She was the last living of my mom’s siblings, the last Herondorf, fading away peacefully last week at 93. The last of those five kids growing up in the late 1920s-1930s as a family living on one floor above the shoe repair shop of my grandfather Harry, one of those characteristic Baltimore brick row houses at 710 Aisquith Street.
This journey was more solemn than sad and also more joyous to share and recant stories of Aunt Dorothy, who as I learned to others was Dot, Dotty, Dotsie, Mom, Grammie, and to herself, Dorth.
But also for the cousins, to be with family I had not seen in maybe 50 years as well as their family, and branches of the tree I was meeting for the first time. The cousins are rooted in memory of us as kids, low and behold we are now old, wrinkled, yikes, we have become our parents. The hugs were deep and the stories keep all alive, in the spirit of dodging the third death, when our stories are no longer told.
Through our family connector, my sister Judy, who relayed to me from my cousin Hank’s wife Anne (now all names that connect to faces and hugs), that Aunt Dorothy, who had been in a car home for? 10+ years, was in hospice with maybe 2 weeks left. This idea had planted, so a week before I left, when I heard from my cousin Jane that her mom had passed away, I was off booking airline tickets to Baltimore.
Jane was my connector, many years ago when I was in my job at the Maricopa Community Colleges, I flew off to Seattle for some conference I now forget. I knew through my Mom that on of my cousins lived there, she shared Jane’s contact. I called and introduced myself (i had ben decades), we made plans, and when we met! Oh it was so sympatico. Jane and I have stayed in touch, and twice when Cori and I were in Vancouver, we stayed and visited with Jane and her Steve. Jane was a bit of my “how to move to Canada” guide, as she had emigraed from the states to live in B.C.
And it was Jane who read the Dorothy stories so beautifully at the chapel Saturday, stories that filled in even more understandings of my Aunt, her forceful nature to be at the center of her family, stories that had me laughing and crying. I am sharing the text because I am remembering just bits.
Dorothy_Shofer_eulogyDownloadThis was the “famous” classic 1970s family photo that my cousins referenced. It is full of story aura.
Shofer family circa? 1975?Since my travel was late arrival Saturday night and early flight out Monday, I booked an airport hotel, and on Sunday got picked up by my Uber driver. Elliot remarked on seeing the Reisterstown Road address for the funeral home that he grew up in the area. That got us so going on stories (rival high schools, sports teams, malls) that I noticed we were heading off track west towards Washington D.C! We laughed as he routed us back trough downtown Baltimore on streets I may not have known Elliot pointed out the Montgomery Ward building (built 1925). I noticed the power plant I remember was built to generate electricity from burning trash (I only learn now via Wikipedia it is called the Wheelabrator). I am pretty sure I took a black and white photo I did as an early assigment to document a place for my 1986 photography course at the university of Delaware– yup I found a scan I did of this spot!
Baltimore flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) from a flickr album of Black and White beginnings.See how far I have wandered here from the story? Elliot asked if things looked the same to me as we continued on the Beltway around the upper left corner of Baltimore. “The Beltway never changes!” I said pointing out my highschool, Milford Mill — though Elliot had to correct me, I was pointing on the wrong side. I shared the story of how me and some high school pals (Doug? Larry? Kevin?) on a dare ran across the highway there at night.
This is all part of the story how I arrived alone at Sol Levinson, the place that has the monopoly on Jewish funerals in Baltimore. The last time I was inside was for my Mom in 2011. Following the directions to the chapel, turning the corner I heard those distinctive voices, a bit of laughter. There was a line of her family members, where I joyfully reconnected with and hugged cousins Hank, Jane (who reference me and my blog posts as the “curator of family stories”), Frannie, and Margie, plus meeting spouses for the first time, and then Hank and Anne’s kids (well they are adults) Katie, Andrew, and Lexy. What is the proper relationship term for the children of your first cousins? Like the other side of my family, where meet the grandchildren of my father’ cousin, just use the broadest sens o”cousin” works for me.
Wha do you say to family members you have never met? Of course hello, hug, you quickly start asking questions… and Alan is holding up the line! I proceed into the chapel, where there are already quite a few grey hair people, none of whom I recognize. I find a seat in a row in the mddle, slide down to leave room for others to enter. A few moments to contemplate.
A trim gentleman with not much hair on top, more on his chain, makes eye contact, and extending a hand, says, “Hello Alan.” I have to ask, and oh my gosh it is my cousin Barry, son of my mom’s older sister Ruth. We catch up quickly, his wife and kids who live north of Baltimore, me sharing about living in Saskatchewan and sharing photos of my wife Cori.
We go to the stories, and I talk of remembering the Shofer cousins having a dachshund with a forgotten name (“Frankie”?). And then Barry recants an Aunt Dorothy story, how sh decided the old family dog (not the one I remember) was too sick to go on, without anyone drove directly to the vet, who agreed to put the dog down. As Barry tells it, she never mentioned it to the family, until weeks later, some one asked, “Hey, where’s the dog?”
As legendary family stories go, despite being retold, we often have our own versions. Later, new cousin Katie sent a video from a celebration of Dorothy’s birthday a few years back (as Aunt Ruth was there), and they all tell the same story, slightly different, but same plot. Aunt Dorothy decided the dog’s days were not many left, made the executive decision and reported to the family she was taking the dog for a trip to “The Giant” (locals reference to family chain of food stores) for groceries. There was raucous lefter all around, and I can see Aunt Dorothy full of that center of the family joy, looking so much like my Mom did at that age.
Stories of family stories, I am all in. And that no story is exactly the same or “correct” makes it more special.
Fast forward, after the ceremony (I got to sit with my nieces, both my sisters were unable to attend as they were on a boat somewhere in warm waters!), there is the procession to the cemetery (I may be the only person who took a photo of the flock of Canadian geese hanging out there) and a short graveyard service. My memory of the mourners kaddish is thin (thanks again Wikpiedia- I can state the language is from Aramaic), goes fuzzy after “Yitgaddal veyitqaddash” whence I just mumble.
Then we went back to a restaurant almost across from the funeral home for the “shiva”. I recall these as a kid (my first was my Uncle Milton, Aunt Ruth’s husband) that went on for days at the family home, people wold stop by to pay respects, bring food for the family. Having it for a few hours was perfect, plus it was catered (oh my gosh I ate a tray of crab cakes, so it was not all kosher). And just stand/sit around and share stories in small groups. Hanks wife Anne had arranged a wonderful set of photos of including a favorite of the three Herondorf sisters, Ruth, Dorothy and Alyce (my mom).
The girls from 710 Aisquith Street a few years later for a birthday party for Aunt Ruth (left)The last time (yikes) I visited Aunt Dorothy was in September 2012, likely some kind of conference travel to… somewhere on that I-95 corridor. My sister Judy organized a visit to her home in Pikesville, the place I remember going to as a kid. For some reason I recall we played a board game, Mousetrap, one I desired but never got. We drove across town to the cemetery near Clifton Park where my mom had been placed a year earlier, adjacent to my Dad, and my brother David. Picking up on the importance I held for my Mom’s stories I had recorded audio on my last visit with her (an hours worth), I bugged Aunt Dorothy to tell me some stories about Mom and growing up in the Herondorf family. She refused to say anything “embarrassing” about my mom!
There is our own family story about the abstract painting Dorothy did for us (her love of art was told many times), the orange thing with something in the middle? I find photos of in her house it was sometimes hung vertical, sometimes horizontal (bonus cute kid Alan alert). At her home, full of art, both hers and others, I asked her to explain her painting style (said in such Dorothy style).
Autn Dorothy’s Abstract Art flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license (Sep 2012)My cousin Hank was able to throw some more detail to my quest to learn more about Doris Cohen, my uncle Harvey’s wife (mom’s brother) as there was some kind of fall out between my Mom and her sisters, that had something influence why I saw so much less of my cousins in my teens.
And then all of her family had stories of Aunt Dorothy’s … um… non-interest in cooking, but also they all raved about her split pea soup. I can resonate with that -in fact as I write I smell my batch of split pea soup, made for this cold winter days, wafting from the crock pot. And it stems from the other side of my family– my dad’s mom, aka “granny” made legendary split pea soup. I have (of course) a blog post and an audio clip of her describing the soup, recorded in 1994.
Soup and Memory
It was most joyous to get to know better Hank’s kids, again, me the “cousin from Canada” meeting them for the first time. As it turns out his son is very interested in knowing more about my Uncle Harvey as he is named after him and that Hank’s daughter is also interested n researching family history. We have much to share, but we are now connected.
After this heart-filling-and-gushing-over day, it was up at 3:30am to catch my flight home. I leave with these stories that are ever more important, as the people who were there are one fewer.
Yet there is another take away from this journey especially against going into the “United” States (up, scare quotes) in the backdrop of the President Whose Name I Will Not Say, seeing live news feeds on TV news. It goes back to something about my Mom’s way. As a kid, I regret to say I sometimes always cringed inside at the “embarrassing” way mom would smile and make small conversation with every grocery checker, restaurant server, bank clerk, growing on into her Florida years as “the cookie lady” in which her humanity was so cherished, and came to of all things, getting tickets and backstage pass to meet Trisha Yearwood.
Oh later in life, I learned so much from mom’s way of treating and being with people. It came to light long ago when I lived in Phoenix and was in line to drop off some dry cleaning. I observed a woman in front, dressed in business serious, she was loudly telling people what to do on her phone. The woman never stopped, threw her bag down on the counter in front of a young brown skinned clerk, picked up her slip, and never stopped her call. It was my start to make human contact with people on the other side of the counter, here merely by looking her in the eye, smiling with my eye brows raised, and thanking her.
It came back to me on this trip, as I think often of a riddle, that is as true here in snowy Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan about. “What is fluffy, rich, white and privileged on one side and brown, sweaty, and underpaid on the other?” It’s almost every service industry, especially airports. Notice who is doing the hard work out there on the frozen (or roasting) tarmac loading bags, fueling, directing planes in.
This just reinforced my “mom’s way” in not being occupied on my screen while someone was helping me, smiling, making a small joke to the person checking me in or getting me a coffee or a seat at a table. And saying thank you. It’s just about treating other person as a human, it’s that simple is what I learned from Mom, not through any lecture from her, just seeing it in action. The bonus is, that you give them some acknowledgement as a person, you exist, and it actually does something inside of you.
Again, my plan to spend a breakfast break writing a short post of my trip, ends up taking all morning. It’s again timely that today, February 5, is my parent’s 75th wedding anniversary and only 3 days later is Mom’s birthday.
All the stories should be told and retold. Keep those loved ones alive. I am so grateful I had this one afternoon that filled my heart so much.
I cherish what my cousins sent me later, it is a short video where my cousin Hank, is holding a mobile phone playing back that audio of me asking Aunt Dorothy stories back in 2012. She is laying there in her bed, listening, smiling, laughing. I will carry this mind photo a long time.
Oh, and never got to the one I heard several time about Dorothy’s elaborate thanksgiving table centerpieces, the legendary one that featured a dead praying mantis. And I also heard that the centerpiece act continues in her kids, each year re-telling and re-kindling the loving memories of Dorothy Shofer.
As I heard she would say in summation, “All’s well!”
Featured Image: Collage of family photos BA (Before Alan) from the gathering of my mother’s family ar Aunt Dorothy’s home (note her painting in the background) for the wedding of my Uncle Harvey to Doris Cohen in early 1960s. On the left, the adults, my grandparents Ida and Harry, plus all their Herondorf offspring + spouses, plus an “Uncle Max”? I got this from my cousin Susan that belonged to her Mom, Ruth, who wisely had labelled all the people! On the right are all the kids, my sisters, and cousins (this was a photo I found a my sister’s house).
The days of lamenting linkrot seem quaint and prosaic. Right now, as I type, the world is witnessing the wholesale strip mine clearcutting of the web for the ego-flexing kicks of the lunatic in charge.
Not many of us can do much as individuals (besides feel the musky stench weight) but luckily many Good People are doing the archival heroism. I have only here a nifty little trick I came across should you have a need to do one click, one off, archiving of any web page. It’s not mega archiver, just a little one for small scale.
I’d bookmarked it long ago in my Piinboard cooltech collection (speaking of archving, thanks to the Pinboarder in Chief for enabling my tag links to be public again!)- I’m talking about archive.today, a rather plain looking, like maybe a 1990s web page, but do not be deceived. A powerful machine sits below it.
Mostly I sit in article sharing, as a paywall skirter. Paywalls, subscription walls on the web make me ANGRY, and I loathe following a link to something that looks useful and slamming my brain on The Wall. There’s lots of offenders, but the worst IMHO was once the hippest internet tech magazine, one worth buying in print form. I am talking Wired magazine, which now in its later year grants you, the humble web citizen, ONE FREE VIEW per month! That kind of generosity is…. beyond Expired.
I have noticed that maybe one of my favorite authors I first read there and still follow on Mastodon (plus email newsletter) is Clive Thompson. I noticed tonight in a post that he offered a link to a timely Wired story (not linked it’s $wall) on the Evil Dark Lord of Twitter Now With His Fingers in The Government Files. F**** another no read wall. But Clive always shares an “unpaywalled link” and that one is easier to get to than the Wayback Machine method I ranted on.
I’d glanced at archive.today last June when I bookmarked it, but felt like wandering around bit. Look at this, about as unflashy as you can get. Where’s all the slickness of Reactified web scrolly widgety pages?
The dazzling lights of archive.today!That’s my thing is to dig around a web site to learn more about what else it does, see if the FAQ is really FA, who does it, what kind of human presence they have (bonus points for sarcasm and super bonus points for hidden messages when I view source).
It was the bottom search that got my prying– it’s a way to search what has been archived, as shared, the urls tell you nothing really about them, e.g. https://archive.ph/VJMq1
But check this out, by trying one of their searches, I can find find every single Wired URL someone has clicked the button to archive, that anyone can navigate to the way Sir TBL intended, just click a link and read. No greedy gate agent. Just putting the domain in the searchbox, I have free access to over 1500 Wired articles
All pages from wired.com saved to archive.todayAgain, it pays to be a reader of web addresses, seeing this link is https://archive.ph/wired.com I can just immediately do a vanity check, how many web pages from my own blog are in there? Zero? I just go directly to https://archive.ph/cogdogblog.com to take in maybe 18 blog posts, so nothing to be that excited about.
Lookie! A few cogdogblog blogs are preserved at https://archive.ph/cogdogblog.comThe fun part is further down the scroll, as there are snapshots in the older themes the blog once wore, like this archive to the 2013 era with a theme based on Welite and the design from 2009 on the hOPe theme before that.
The wild thing is that I have no idea why someone out there archived these snapshots. That;s really interesting. The act of archiving is anonymous.
Again, this is by no means a way to do a full archive of your site, but there might be key URLs you want to have a fully web functioning snapshot. Or you could just do the web a favor and random anything you see that looks worth at least slipping into the open vault.
This is really just that kind of the corner of the web, far from the limelight of major sites where Stuff Trends, but this is almost like the brainchild of a single person. I have no idea who does this or why (there are definitely signs of a persona in the FAQ).
It’s the low tech look in something that is a powerful tool to have in your web pocket.
Featured Image: I recently came across this nifty old gadget that my father-in-law clipped to his life vest when doing canoe adventures on Saskatechewan rivers. My original photo 2025/365/4 The Coghlan Multi-Tool flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) was more vertical than horizontal for a featured image. I admit here I used the Generative Fill of Photoshop to extend the sides of the wood table. I guess I AI-ed.
Tis here a bubbling goo of a post. It’s been oozing in my drafts folder, the one between my ears. And iits actually not even new.
But I have been getting these questions from a few corners, seeing the ripples everywhere. I am already lined up to vent my opinion on at least two panels coming up around Open Education Week (yes my work requires I shill for the project I manage).
A lot more people are finally waking up to the house of entrapment that we call Social Media (stay tuned for the rant on how the term has been co-opted). Zuck has sure done a lot to get people off of his bloated ships of crap. “Where should we go now?” “Where are all the good conversations for educational technology?”
I have a lot of opinions which would not be hard to guess (c.f. the t-shirt), but I am sure of one thing. I have no answer for you. You gotta decide, and you need to also ask yourself, “Am I willing to take on some effort?” or “I just want the easy way.”
I will keep annoying my pal Martin Weller with my assertion that there never was a single place, no internet town hall. Twitter was an illusion, it did feel that way, but only if you were in it. And do not get me wrong, I gained so much from my run there (2007-2024, R.I.P. Rot In Pieces). But that ship sailed off like a Tesla in a hurricane. I barely give it a thought.
Sure we can go high ground super moralistic with our departure notes and shine the virtue signaling bat flare in the sky, but the Great One, Cory Doctorow, who I should just blog by quoting his text, put it well in Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital:
It’s lazy and easy to think that our friends who are stuck on legacy platforms run by Zuckerberg and Musk lack the self-discipline to wean themselves off of these services, or lack the perspective to understand why it’s so urgent to get away from them, or that their “hacked dopamine loops” have addicted them to the zuckermusk algorithms. But if you actually listen to the people who’ve stayed behind, you’ll learn that the main reason our friends stay on legacy platforms is that they care about the other people there more than they hate Zuck or Musk.
They rely on them because they’re in a rare-disease support group; or they all coordinate their kids’ little league carpools there; or that’s where they stay in touch with family and friends they left behind when they emigrated; or they’re customers or the audience for creative labor.
All those people might want to leave, too, but it’s really hard to agree on where to go, when to go, and how to re-establish your groups when you get somewhere else.
….
That’s why people stay behind – not because they lack perspective, or self-discipline, or because their dopamine loops have been hacked by evil techbro sorcerers who used Big Data to fashion history’s first functional mind-control ray. They are locked in by real, material things.Big Tech critics who ascribe the legacy platforms’ “stickiness” to users’ moral failings or platforms’ technical prowess are their own worst enemies. These critics have correctly identified that legacy platforms are a serious problem, but have totally failed to understand the nature of that problem or how to fix it. Thankfully, more and more critics are coming to understand that lock-in is the root of the problem, and that anti-lock-in measures like interoperability can address it.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#praxis
Two Paths Diverge in the Woods, I Took The Path Most Trodden That I Entered via the Easy Button?Those yearning to grab the town hall party hats, seem to think they can just click their heels and pick up elsewhere where they left off. Or you see that recently with all the furor to jump from Instagram to Pixelfed with all the “tips” on the magic of how you can migrate all your stuff. People don’t want to start over. Oh horrors I will lose all my connections.
The secret missed is that it is healthy to prune the shrub all they way back and build anew. Its refreshing. Is it really that onerous to rebuild? I guess so.
Folks want it Easy. My friend Todd had one of the best takes… er smashes on the allure of easy.
And I have had my Mastodon go arounds with George Station about the “hardness” of getting started in Mastodon (I love these exchanges, George, and I respect ya to the max).
What’s the proudest achievement you’ve notched that was easy to do? As a teacher, when you give a challenging assignment or ask your students to solve a complex equation or unravel an obscure section of convoluted latin, do you just let them get away with, “I can’t do this… it’s to haaaaaaaaaard.”
And for the last nail in the coffin, as I Gasticated:
“But it’s complicated!” “It’s confusing?”
So is love.
So is poetry.
So is learning.
That’s opportunity.Get Federated, OER24
So lots of folks are leaping after each other into the sky. I wish you well.
Where The Skies Are Not Cloudy All DaySure, I get the appeal of Bluesky. I mean c’mon it is the exact look of Twitter before it got ad-infected and shrunk down in letters. It’s easy. Just grab your starter pack and pick up where you left off tweeting.
In one of the prep sessions for the panel I was one, someone was gushing about how great it was — “It’s like Twitter in 2010!”
That’s completely leaving out how mangled Twitter got in 2016 with its infusion of ads and shoving us s*** by algorithm, and that was only minor as the Dark Lord bought the ship, killed the API, and gutted it for his plaything.
That’s not saying this is the future of Bluesky, but, well, poster beware. But again as Doctorow pens so well on the trap of signing up for a place that has no fire exits:
This is why Bluesky is in a dangerous place: not because it is backed by VCs, not because it is a for-profit entity, but because it has captive users and no constraints. It’s a great party in a sealed building with no fire exits.
Pluralistic, Enshittification isnt caused by venture capital (direct text fragment link, are you hip to this?)
Despite how easy and friendly it is to get in, and the promise of a protocol that might gom farther, you are in large single owner house. I am perplexed by everyone gushing about how great it is- are you going to ponder at all what happens when it comes time to pay for the building? Who’s gonna shell put for the venture capital mortgage holders? Is it gonna be ads? Fees? Checkmarks? Sell your data?
Despite my tone, I do not begrudge anyone going there for some of that 2010 spirit connectivity. Send me a postcard.
This is Social Media?I’m also perplexed how the concept I recall from the hazy glory days of Web 2.0 (old internet person signal) of “Social Media” got reduced to basically this same swath of a large messaging space where you post, follow, repost, reply, slap emojis left and right, scroll through… columns of messages. All that was Social media is funneled down into this same modality.
That’s not how I remember it.
So I trudged over to Wikipedia to take in the article on Social Media, which is a doozy. Like 300 references. I did not find the exact cut and paste I’d like to put here, nor will I try to write my own. I was sure hoping there was a Clay Shirkey quote (I always thought he quipped that it was “stuff that gets spammed” but I bet I am wrong). The closest element I walked away with was:
Social media outlets operate in a dialogic transmission system (many sources to many receivers) while traditional media operate under a monologic transmission model (one source to many receivers). For instance, a newspaper is delivered to many subscribers, and a radio station broadcasts the same programs to a city
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
It was the thing about where it took a tool or way of organizing media/information that might have use for one person, and what could be leveraged and grows in value when many people do it together. It was the hey day of tags not meaning a message full of #signal cruft but beautiful and messy folksonomy.
Regardless, I think of all the wash of social bookmarking tools, and it was not only the grand daddy del.ici.ous, I remember earlier things like furl. For photos it was and f**** yes still is for me, flickr. In many ways blogging was a loosely distributed act of social media, but then again, what about Bloglines?
Yet one that was beautuful and completely forgotten but most folks was 43Things. You would list 43 goals in life as tags, and it would connect you withy others that had the same goal as well as others that had achieved it. I am struggling to full capture it well, but it was elegant, and of course, free from ads and surveillance capitalism. Thus it never made money and vanished in 2015.
Bless the Internet Archive, you can at least savor the past. My gosh I found my own! Bless the Internet Archive. Bless the Internet Archive.
Enough Pontificating and Past Glorifying, Where Do We Go?The “where” as a single response is the problem. It reeks of solutionism. So given that I firmly believe, dear Martin, the town hall was an illusion, I think we should go everywhere, meaning not looking for a single place, but leaving the doors open to everywhere, aka, Ye Olde Yet Still There Internet. And keeping your base home, do not forsake your own home, do not count on being a renter in the house of ZuckMuskEtAl.
I firmly do not want to skate across so many “places” to scroll and click, so I am staying mainly, when I chose to in the fediverse. It’s the only sensible place, for me, because I am with the fire escape dude.
Nor do I really want to pursue the things I see other people vibing to do, where the use a service to spray their messages to many channels. I can appreciate that ideal, and once I might have latched on, but frankly I do not want to pay attention to so many channels. I have blogging to do!
But that said, I am not in the place or demanding / expecting others will think the same. Nor will I say anything ios wrong if you chose to join the Bluesky party or (gag me with a shovel) blog in LinkedIn or sneak in the backdoors for TikTok. I will not peer down my nose at your choices. It would be nice if you stopped by the blog once in a while, but hey, no expectations.
2014/365/287 Open as in Range flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)You might go Here. Others may go There. I want an Everywhere as in the free, open, unpaywalled open free range internet. Where one link connects to another, unfettered. And where I can take the back roads, not just the crowded expressways.
Where are you going? Matters not as long as its the path you choose and serves you well.
Happy trails.
Featured Image: No tokens were burned or reservoirs depleted in the creation of this image. 2016/366/48 Can We / How do / We Connect? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
Getting rid of crap is very satisfying. Especially large piles of stuff that maybe once had value, but now just reeks with the stench of rotting, wet discard food.
Pressing the dump lever was quite easy. In fact, after dumping, I went on, and forgot that I had done this.
Done what?
It was actually November 15, still while I was away in Brisbane for the OEGlobal 2024 conference, I logged into the site I will only ever call twitter, and pressed the button. I did not even screenshot, this is from my browser history.
Browser history indicating the non-historic moment I deactivated Twitter. There’s not even explaining. A year before I deleted the app from my phone, I logged out, and just walked away. Maybe every other full moon I might log in as I was still getting a few people (looking at you Alec Couros, you know my email!) trying to reach me. Seeing poop like this did not engender much nostalgia.
Yeah, this is my kind of place. Can I have more root canal? (note, I used my browser inspector to improve the button. How warming is it to be invected and your onloy response allowed is “Ok”.I had heard that November 15 was the deadline to leave if you did not want your tweets sucked in for AI training. That was actually something I did not care about, if someone wants to generate nonsense from my nonsense, go for it.I was fine just letting the old stuff linger. I had so many of my own tweets embedded in my blog post, I hated the thought of creating all those embed holes (actually not much is lost since once WordPress cannot autoembed it leaves it in as a blockquote).
It honestly was a spur of the moment, why the _____ not?
While digging through the maze of links in settings I found this tidbit marking when I entered the place. And isnt that nice, the keep track of my IP address. How handy. What do they use it for (I recognize the range for my location when I lived in Strawberry, Arizona.
Twitter was kind enough to store the exact moment of entry. What was I doing at 7:24 AM on February 1, 2007? This is as close to a blog post as I could find. It was not momentus.Of course you cannot actually do the full dump. You “deactivate” meaning there is a window you can climb the mountain of remorse, and get back into the fray.
But I forget, so it just went into the wind. There it goes:
Weeks later I spotted in Mastodon Billy Meinke talking about the indecision of leaving Twitter and not wanting some one to come along and squat on his deleted account. I had seen it happen to my friend Terry Greene when I check a link for him and spotted that his @greeneterry Twitter account had changed a wee bit.
Terry Greene got a new haircut AND moved to Burbank from Petersborough, ON?To be honest my stake was so low in Twitter, I might be weirdly flattered to have my old @cogdog taken over by a bot with a tie. But I had a little bit of curioisty… so I went back, and created a new account! It gave me something like @cogdog3734 (with an unused email acccount( but I remembered there was a setting to change the handle.
So I have easily dumped all my tweets and left a blank, tweetless presence to take up space. Now I can log out and forget about it. The reader is left to their own curiosity to look.
I do have to say it seems strange that the first suggested person to follow, for an account where I entered do information, is @courosa?? How is it possible?
No creepy factor at all, eh?
There it is dump and backfill, and close the hole.
Featured Image: Dumping the Tonka Truck flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
Howdy web partners. Sad to say, the domain renewal reaper came a’ knocking, and I let my old friend the 106tricks.net go off to the graveyard.
That there web site was spun up with great dreamin’ for a Western Movie Flavored DS106 (aka #Western106) as a pardnership with Bill Genereaux for a class at K-State University class. Ole Bill was a good ride along for spinnin’ ideas and he set up the whole deal.
I forget the why and the hows but thats but legend, an’ folks whisper that a trail boss Dean pulled the rug under ole Bill’s boots.
Operatin’ like an outlaw, the Man with No Course, I tried to keep the outfit movin. Good creatin’ folks like Hatchet Bill Conaway and Sandy Jensen Brown Jensen Brown, smooth croonin’ dogtrax, and that squirrley lil creepy doll Tina played along, but 106tricks.net stopped and rusted in the desert.
How The #Western106 Was … Crumpled?
With one day short of Hover upping the domain, I cut 106tricks.net loose and now all the links sadly go to some domain sale shop. But as I am proudly a Reclaimer so I hovered up the WordPress site as static HTML archive using the venerable SiteSucker MacOS app and hoisted it amongst my pile of buried dog bones (an archive!), so the memories are at least enshrined at https://bones.cogdogblog.com/106tricks/
SiteSucker puts all the files inside a 106tricks.net folder, reachable by its own index.html home, but it also grabs a few key exernal files, like remote javascript, a few images, that end up sitting along side that. So I upload the whole shebang to by bones.cogdoblog.com directory, and slip into the top level an index.php file that works as a redirect.
Thismakes it so requests to https://bones.cogdogblog.com/106tricks/ go to the actual file https://bones.cogdogblog.com/106tricks/106tricks.net/index.html
Directory structure for my WordPress archiveOh did I have fun with all the remixes and makin’ movies with Bill. As a throwback, the trailer for “The Big 106ie” where the dude tries to tie the whole course together.
Some say the Man With No Course is still out there seekin’ to kindle up the gang, heck he’s so dead he’s still on twitter.
Archiving #4life.
Featured Image: Forgotten flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license modified by me, cropped, and screen shot of 106tricks.net and the tombstone photoshopped engraving.
I’ve not made much noise about traveling, but for what its worth I am in Brisbane, Australia where my organization is hosting the OEGlobal24 conference. I have skipped the long flight, the cute koalas, to try and quickly publish something that for weeks has felt like a mad idea.
With a bit of virtual duct tape and help from the lovely folks at Reclaim Hosting for today’s first day I pulled off not only live audio streaming of sessions, but having available at other times, a collection of time blocks of content. It’s what I have hatched as Conference of the Air, the nod to the Australia distance learning innovation of School of the Air.
This idea percolated with conversations with Maren Deepwell and Meredith Fierro from Reclaim at the OER24 conference earlier this year in Cork, and was played out so well with their DS106 Summer Radio Camp this summer. Team Reclaim offered to support with set up and infrastucture using ds106 radio.
I had rather grand, wild, and now I can see as unrealistic plans. I really wanted to set up a means for people not able to be in Brisbane to contribute maybe something different from typical presentations in audio form. I hope to get some of the people who do broadcast to do some live shows during the week. I really did not get enough advance prep done on these parts, but hey, it is a trial run.
The motivation was in some part the time difference for the conference location. Even if we could do live streaming, for many parts of the world, the timing is off. My plan was not totally unplanned, I did sketch out a concept doc, which opened with the time issues:
World Time Clock Planner for multiple regions of the worldI am hastily writing as there are two more days, so I hope I can garner some more listeners or reaction to the idea. For my time at OEGlobal I have pushed for creating avenues of participation in our conferences that is not the usual presentation-centric mode most people think of. I have coined it as the AND conference concept.
Enough blather, what is happening? First of all, with help from Taylor Jardin at Reclaim, I have set up their TV Guide like interface for having a schedule of planned live events, the radio player, and some information. So this is the place i send people to listen– https://bit.ly/oeg-radio
https://bit.ly/oeg-radioThe “normal” mode of ds106radio is unless someone breaks in with a live broadcast, the station plays the stream from WFMU. I wanted to usurp that a bit, so set up a series of scheduled “Programmable blocks” of radio shows if you will. In the Azuracast system that runs the station, this is done by uplaoding audio files, putting them into playlists, and scheduling blocks of time for the playlists. The key learning was setting the priority to 1, lower the the WFMU stream, and also, an obscure advanced playlist option for “Interrupt other songs to play at scheduled time.” The playlists are longer than the blocks of time, and set to shuffle the order.
For simplicity sake the blocks extend all this week, but since the content is randomized, you can be too sure what you get. The blank spots are where WFMU will kick in.
Now this means this is the background unless I break in with a live stream session this week.
For the live broadcasts, I requested to have set up in the back of one venue room a sound feed from the AV board that comes into my laptop via USB. I also got an ethernet connection to not be mangled by wireless.
Live stream set up an conference venueIf it was me doing the streaming, Id use Audio Hijack, but I planned on having some volunteers doing the stream start and stop. I went for a simple but useful tool, cheerfully named “butt” (Broadcast Using This Tool). This is so I can have it run under a separate user account on the Mac. The only task for this is to click a “play” button to start and a another one to stop. Its perfectly fine for broadcasting if you don’t need to mix sources.
Another nice feature is you can have butt automatically record anything it streamed. Local archives!
So again for information, I have a listening and schedule of live events and elsewhere a summary of the scheduled blocks of shows. We put out some flyers with logos and QR codes to find.
I also am trying to do a bot of roaming the conference scene using the iziCast broadcasting app. It’s fun to do but for many people the scuttle away when you say, “Hi, would you like to say hello on the web radio?”
And I also had my big dreams of having on the Reclaim Hosting swag table (thanks for sending the post cards, they are lovely), an old radio with inside placed a bluetooth speaker and an old iphone to play the stream all day.
Finding an old radio was not quite easy, so I asked our graphics wizard Mario Badilla to create an image we could put on the front of a cardboard box. Mario went one better than box, and put together a make shift one with foam board. It is sitting on the table and playing all day long (one more listener!)
I am rushing this post a bot (and its been so long since I blogged I might have forgotten how) but I wanted to toss out before day two, and ask for thoughts on the idea, as Reclaim described it, as a conference on the radio or a conference AND the radio.
A post to wrestle on the way home is about the slide-centric conference foprmat!
If you have time in the next few days tune into Conference of the Air at https://bit.ly/oeg-radio
I have to get going and set up the radio station.
Featured Image: Locked in to #ds106 Radio flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license modified with OEGlobal graphics designed by @mario shared under a CC BY license
I’m easy to toss shade at web sites who move/ change structures leaving swaths of linkrot or just do not flex their power of maintaining their own links. But in the pot name calling kettle department, I’ve got plenty of bad links under my name. So I get focussed on fixing them.
One came to my attention lately that I was unaware was broken, as they worked for me (note if you answer tech issues please know that The Worst Thing you can say to someone is only, “it works for me”).
This tale takes some rewinds. If you are looking for some kind of post about he top 10 AI tools, then, wrong blog.
A key part of my information flow / semi-management is bookmarking sites in the old school del.icio.us style of Pinboard. If you scrape back far enough, in the pile are web sites I bookmarked back in the Web 2.0 days of your when del.icio.us was a thing. I am able to save a web site title, link, my own notes or its own description, and yes, those old school tags to organize them according to my own system,
I forgot who said this long ago, it rings of maybe Clay Shirky, but the key aspect of social tools is that it first provides a value to me, that I can save links, find them again, and group them by tags, but at the same time, it can ve of value to a larger set of people who use that service or just can access it (e.g. stuff share to the same tag).
Anyhow (as the prelude grows longer and longer), I bookmark suff almost daily to my pile of suff which is publicly available at https://pinboard.in/u:cogdog/. Over time, I have set up in SPLJ style (Small Pieces Loosely Joined) actions that are triggered when I use a specific tag, using services like IFTTT, Make.com, and Zapier, relevant for this post:
- Pinboard bookmarks tagged “cooltech” and (also “smallweb”) get shared through my Mastodon account using IFTTT and a gizmo/trick I learned on how to post content from an RSS feed to Mastodon (pinboard tags have an RSS feed, yay), in a format I can modify as a template.
Maybe not significant in the wide scheme, but I like an approach where I can construct a template for the way I share, so it sounds like me, and is not just “here is something cool”, but also “here is where to find more”
- Pinboard bookmarks tagged “oegconnect” get posted to the OE Global community space. I had to use Zapier for this as IFTTT did/does not have an integration. But it was easy to set up as a free “zap”
I’ll leave this for a link to see an example, but in this case, I can include the entire description field I add/write in Pinboard, plus I can provide similar links to see other items I have previously shared.
All of this is a means to say, I was very sure that, because my Pinboard account is public, that all sites a shared under a tag that I could see were openly visible- e.g. https://pinboard.in/u:cogdog/t:cooltech/ or https://pinboard.in/u:cogdog/t:oegconnect/— the links worked fine for me. Why wouldnt’ they?
I’ve been doing this for years, maybe, but did not know until recently that if you were not logged into a Pinboard account, instead of seeing all the stuff I had tagged, you got this (I confirmed in an incognito browser window, e.g. not being logged in).
This is strange, as counterintuitively all of these can be seen without logging into Pinboard (a shout of thanks to Tom Woodward who bounced back to my Mastodon WTF post”
- All of my bookmarked links https://pinboard.in/u:cogdog
- The RSS feed for my bookmarks tagged cooltech https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:cogdog/t:cooltech
- And a format of my cooltech tagged links URL written a different way https://pinboard.in/u:cogdog/?query=cooltech
I thought easy, I pay for Pinboard and sent an email to the support address listed in my account. Nothing. I resorted to looking at its Twitter profile, which had a personal email for its creators, Maciej Ceglowski. Nothing. Sigh, sent a tweet to @Pinboard. Nothing. Finally, after quote tweeting myself (and wiping my disgust for using the Platform I Will Only Call Twitter):
It’s an unfortunate anti-crawling measure (the site was getting hammered). I’m working on an alternate way to share stuff with non-users without a login barrier.
Tweet from @Pinboard
I’m not bent out of shape irate, and more embarrassed I did not even know I was using bad links for so long.
But the beautyof your own web stuff us being able to pop open the hood of the engine, and duct tape in your own gix, for me, a simple matter of changing my broken links from https://pinboard.in/u:cogdog/t:cooltech/ to https://pinboard.in/u:cogdog/?query=cooltech
Just writing this inanely long post about how to fix a bad link, is, well silly. And not the point. It’s more about not being always reliant on a platform and finding your own fixes. It’s pure DIY.
And while I was fixing busted things, I had a page of Cool Stuff created to be dynamically updated by my Pinboard RSS feed, but I had it relying on my now dead Feed2JS service. That too was an easy fix, as WordPress has a basic RSS block for embedding feeds.
The web fixing work ever ends. And I think that’s a good thing. It’s more satisfying than just typing into a box again and again trying to get a shiny thing out of the machine.
Featured Image: Mine. I take photos of rotten apples. Why? I might need it one day, today.
Pretty Rotten Apples flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
Growing up on the east coast of the U.S. (Baltimore, Maryland), I knew nothing of Northern Lights. Perhaps there was a blip in a science class, or maybe a glorious National Geographic photo. Nor was it anything I experience after I moved to Arizona.
But when I had that wild opportunity in November 2008 to spend that month house sitting in Iceland, I was sure I would experience these first hand. I’d walk out on the side deck of the house I was at, north of Selfoss, and look for those streaks and swirls. On night I convinced myself I saw something but am pretty sure it was the moon. I had no idea what to look for– and I thought they would be as obvious as the photos.
Ironically I finally saw them on my last night in the country, when the house owners came home (we had not even met, I knew them through a mutual friend). After a dinner of reindeer stew (yup), one of them looked out the window, and said casually, like they had seen a neighbor’s cat, “Look, there are some northern lights”.
I grabbed my camera and ventured maybe 100 yards from the houses light, enduring for how long I could in subfreezing weather. And, as my flickr photos are titled, it was Northern Lights, Finally. Not really the multicolored sky spanning stuff in magazines, but still, slowly moving wisps of green glow.
Northern Lights Finally flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)Perhaps not the best as I was doing 20-30 second exposures with my Digital Rebel DSLR, I recall, maybe on a tripod, maybe balanced on a cold rock.
Fast forward to now. Now living in a rural home in Saskatchewan, with plenty of dark skies, the potential is a bit better. We saw some maybe in COVID lock down time, but my older iPhone 6 or 8 at the time was not much good.
All changed last week. Before getting ready for bed, Cori and I realized we needed to fill our vehicle with gas, so we headed out maybe 11pm to a nearby station. We go to the end of our driveway, and had to stop, as the dancing lights overhead were pretty visible.
The Light! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)It was the real deal! And now, with the capability of a newer iPhone 14 Pro, that long exposure night mode makes it almost too easy to get night shots that previously called for tripods and cable releases and exposure guessing.
We were impressed, Felix did not seem to think it was much of a big deal!
Northern Lights? What lights? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)This was amazing… for 2 days. We drove home later last Thursday, the nights Cori teaches a seminar at the University of Regina. We could easily see streaks of green north of Highway 1. “Should we stop?” “Nah, they should be there when we get home”
And oh were they, So much, they did not seem real.
Northern Lights Projected flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)The Lights are Meeting Out There flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)What is Coming Out of that Barn? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)Admittedly, these colors and density of color was no quite what the naked eye sees, but much was still visible away from the camera. I honestly feels almost like cheating (almost as in horseshoes and hand grenades) that a mobile phone can capture these. I will still take credit!
I have no idea if there is a big message or metaphor here. The world can still present things that stun us out of our regular routines? If you wait long enough, you might experience what you thought not possible? Just look up and wonder?
Shrug.
It was just thrilling to stand out and marvel at the living sky, as its atmospheric particles were jimmied by fluxes of solar electricity. And to be humbled by something much bigger than is.
Featured Image: My own photo, no AI generated Northern Lights fake (aka Aurora Bullshit Is)– 2024/366/283 Not a Bad Backdrop for the Barn flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
Countless are the posts of people showing off the “coolest” AI thing, using Google’s NotebookLLM to generate a chatty podcast of your uploaded book, blog post, paper, shopping list. Woah. Wow. You click and listen hearing a male and female voice banter back and forth in conversational tone.
Neato, you are so onto this AI train!
When I spotted the always wise worded Kate Bowles post her assertion “I just need to bookmark this as my full-hearted nope to AI podcasting. For so many reasons. Just nope. In every language, from my heart to yours. Stop.”
Do not get me wrong, the technical accomplishment is impressive. But riddle me this– how many of these have you fully listened to start to finish? Or for more than 10 seconds?
I felt like I needed to, as the two voices say so often, a “deep dive”. I made it a goal to download a bunch of these, assemble them into a single track, and listen to them all. I used a few I’d seen my edtech colleagues share, but just searched the Google for things like “I made a podcast with NotebookLLM” – and ended up with 11 audio files (two were youtube videos I had to extract audio from. Since the pair never introduce themselves, I have been calling them “Biff” and “Buffy”
I re-named all the files “biff-and-buffy-1.mp3”, “biff-and-buffy-2.mp3” … “biff-and-buffy-11.mp3” and have emerged from being so well informed by this every chipper and knowledgable pair of botcasters. Here it is for you, an hour and 49 minutes of audio ________
My soul hurts from this stuff. But a few notes:
- The banter is remarkable, well at first. But listen closely and you can hear as one voice talking the other chipping in with “Totally”, “100%”, “that’s amazing”
- The have inflection and intonation that is really not what we are used to for synthetic voices
- I even heard a few “ums” in there. Weird.
- The clichés are strong. I heard Buffy say at least 3 times “Work smarter, not harder”
- The always refer to their “show” as a “Deep Dive”
- Biff and Buffy carry the same exuberance for every damn topic. I wondered about uploading something really banal and seeing how the hep it up.
- In one sample listen, you might be wowed. But over a series, Biff and Buffy sound like a bunch of gushing sycophants, those office but kissers you want to kick in the pants.
- Judging a bit, but to me the voices sound very middle class white. I know the response will be, “they will add more voices” or “it will be improve”.
- And they come across as hip experts on everything.
- After about 45 minutes, I am ready to throw them out the window of my truck (I listened while driving)
But beyond the point of showing that this can be done (reference the old saying about why a dog does something) – what is the use? Will people really use this as a mode to consume content? I’d reference a telling article I spent my one month’s free read on the New Yorker, Jill Leplore’s Is a Chat with a Bot a Conversation? (paywall, readable in browser incognito window) (please tell me you know how to do that) (or just try, eh?)
I am sure someone, likely based in eastern Canada, will have a different say. But I think we need to go beyond the “This is neat, look what I did” level. So many of these articles I scanned are full of outlining all of the steps needed to do this NotebookLLM parlor trick. A favorite commment on one I saw was:
“How I Turned My Resume Into a Podcast with Google’s NotebookLM AI”
Summary: I uploaded documents and pressed a button…
Is this the grand future of human creativity the prophe–profits are yodelling from the mountain tops?
See if you can listen to one hour and 49 minutes of this stuff, then come back with your comment. I am open to having my mind changed, but to me this is still a trick from the parlor room.
For reference, the sources of my Biff and Buffy show are the following, I leave it for you to figure out which one is what.
- https://sheknowsseo.co/how-to-use-notebooklm-to-make-a-podcast-from-your-blog-post/
- https://darcynorman.net/2024/09/23/notebooklm-summarizes-my-dissertation/
- https://www.buzzsprout.com/1102442/episodes/15812241
- https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/29/notebooklm-audio-overview/
- https://talkingwithmachines.com/does-anyone-actually-want-ai-generated-podcasts/
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/couros_playing-around-with-googles-notebooklm-activity-7241870968258752512-SzFF
- https://open.spotify.com/episode/16VFabNCxxtlrXUqtuGo7V?si=omji0uBdR8GQUBQ1_QBM5Q
- https://ideasandthoughts.org/2024/09/18/googles-lm-notebook-made-this-podcast/
- https://dev.to/jamesbright/how-i-turned-my-resume-into-a-podcast-with-googles-notebooklm-ai-4nji
- https://medium.com/@artificialintelligencenews/how-we-created-an-ai-podcast-with-google-notebooklm-the-results-are-mindblowing-e24c8e7bfd13
- https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ai-generated-podcasts-the-future-of-audio-storytelling/id1768892778?i=1000670948117
I had some thoughts to mimic the audio podcast summary of my almost nil LinkedIn profile, but than I am playing into the parlor game. ~~Nah~~. See below!
PostscriptIn assembling 11 audio files into one, I went back to use the ffmpeg command I have used to assemble things from my old voice mixer toy, but ran into some hangups as it required all kinds of command line updates, that then wanted a new version of xcode… I found this little trick which looked neat, just using the command line cat command, and yes, I quickly got one file.
And on my first listen I was treated to several of the tracks being chipmunked, reflecting the source’s note “Simple, right? As long as all the MP3 files are recorded at the same bitrate, it should just work.”
Just for fun, this bit of Biff and Buffy are not much different from their “regular” voice:
Post Post ScriptGulp, I went and did it. Bridging off the dude who did a LLMcast based on his LinkedIn profile, I tried mine but there was not enough info there for Biff and Buffy (by design) so I added my calling card site. Here is the bit to round up the listen to a fill 2 hours, as the butt kissing pair lather it up about me (love how they pronounce SPLOT).
Featured Image: As per my routine, the only times I use Generated AI images is to mock generative AI. I used Adobe Firefly to generate the image above, but sadly I forgot to save/publish the link. I asked for an image in 16:9 aspect ratio for the prompt “A cheerful and excited man and woman sit at desk of recording studio speaking into a microphone”. I regenerated the image to something similar. How does one license such things? Shrug. I just try to be as clear as I can.
A lot of presentation slides just slide on by. They just keep flowing. Next slide. Next presentation. Next gushing about AI solving… oops, not this post.
Yet, every other once in a while, you hear a talk, indeed the kind that a person speaks, not just reads, that well shatters your status quo.
That was my day as a virtual attendee of the 2024 Open Education Conference where I understand some 500 are gathered in Providence and another 1000 of us are online. I was a bit dismayed when I saw a talk from Robin DeRosa was in person only with a cryptically titled talk Against Hope.
But there, in loud ALL CAPS was a note:
COMPLETE SLIDE DECK AND VIDEO RECORDING OF SESSION WILL BE POSTED ON MY BLOG AT ROBINDEROSA.NET SOON AFTER THE SESSION. Everyone can have access, whether you attend the conference in person, attend virtually, or don’t attend at all.
Against Hope OpenEd24 presentation by Robin DeRosa
Can you feel some attitude? Yep. I’m a big fan of @actualham, always been. Her talk was not video recorded nor streamed, but in her blog post, Robin had published her doing the talk as a practice run (looks hotel room-ish in the background).
I’ll leave it to you to click over and take it in.
I’ll wait patiently here.
If you came back having watched Robin’s talk, I can guess how you feel. I would strongly suggest taking a walk outside, taking in a sunset, and ideally, as I did, hang out with your dog (or cat or chinchilla or….).
I am not going to offer any commentary, because she said it all. I brought it up during one of the online group discussions (I love this feature for a hybrid conference) that was a great gathering for the open folks from Canada. I was curious to hear from the onsite participants what it was like in the room.
Yeah, same impact. Bringing it up did put a bit of a chill on the conversation, but in a few minutes it picked up with conversations of typical OER stuff. Back to normal.
I get that. I had to do some more work, then make dinner then do other normal home stuff.
But this is sitting heavy. There is no answer, and Robin is clear on that she is not implying she has one.
I did flash back to that memory when after reading the book I watched the film version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Of course it’s dark and dystopic well no Barbie flick
“He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief.”
The Road
I’m not sure if anyone ever agrees with my take, but I actually saw beyond the obvious painting of a present-post apocalypse tale, that to me, it’s really a love story, the love between The Man and his son.
What’s On “The Road” Besides a Grim Future
I don’t know what to do except to thank Robin for being this brave to do more than a talk or a presentation, but to drive a marker into the now and declare the cold hard truth. I can’t urge you (the collective 10 people who maybe read my blog) to not only listen to her talk, but ask someone else about it.
It seems almost like a faded postcard to look back at a fun photo from OpenEd16 in Richmond, when Robin was one of the few people willing to take on my challenge to come to a conference in costume.
Three Open Ed Costumes flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)Wither hope, at least we knew it once. I hope. And there it lies now.
Featured Image: T’is mine. How is it I do not need to reach for generative AI for my images? Is something wrong with me?
Hope flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
I always thought it was clever that when talking about my favorite creative act (taking/making photos) that I described photography as an act of deletion. In putting that rectangular frame around an object, landscape, animal, person, you are essentially removing everything outside the frame.
With so much fervor of the “power” of generative AI to create imagery, would it’s parallel description be of filling a rectangular frame with some retched regurgitation of …. but it’s relation to the world outside that frame is null.
Sadly no one seemed to ever confirm my cleverness in my “framing” of photography, and indeed there is much more to the process that composing the view. But here it is in the evening, Cori and I are looking at the photos we both took of the same sunset, but each choosing a different frame.
And when I go back to the act, the action of going about the world with a camera, it’s the participatory act of noticing detail, light, color, unique juxtapositions in the world I inhabit. And as my own neurons flow (or so I guess), I remember back to a noticing pattern I stumbled onto in the very first days of the open version of the DS106 digital storytelling course/experience, literally day’s after Jim Groom blogged his wild idea.
I’m talking about way back in December 2010.
Oh yeah, more old web memories.
The other thing I was doing then was training to run my first half marathon. While on trail in Mesa, Arizona, thinking about the same time the idea of DS106 and also how much I hated running, I stopped in my tracks.
Right on the side of the trail was a sign with a 106 on it.
It just appeared. I took a photo, and later added some wild effects to it. It was 1 of 506 of these. Not that I knew it.
2010/365/349 Psychic 106 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) licenseI could write about this noticing, what i meant, what I saw as a powerful act to choose a single thing- a number, a word, an object, and look for i everywhere. Having this in mind was not my sole object when I had a camera out, but it bubbled in the back of my mind to keep my attention on.
Except.
Apparently I already wrote this post in 2018!
Picking a Noticing Pattern: I’ve Logged 469 Photos of 106’s
And in the 6 years, I added only 50 more to the pile. I could “generate” a whole bunch of reasons, but who cares?
So I am back at it in 2024!
10% of 106 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)And the thing is with 106s, sometimes it is just sitting here- in a room number, a phone number, road sign. Other times I “make” it with arranging sticks, berries. And then there’s playing around the edges when it is backwards, or I resort to arithmetic.
The beauty of doing DS106 is you just make your own rules. This is something that slipped by back in the day when many people were foaming about MOOCs.
So I am back on the 106 photo prowl. They will first go to my flickr stream tagged 106, but I am toying as well with crossposting to pixelfed and even made a new collection for, well now, just one 106 photo.
Like my clever concept of photography as an act of deletion, I’d bet even fewer than (0?) people really are impressed by my chasing 106 images.
And that is just a good reason ro keep doing it. It’s my thing.
Featured Image: Collage of two screenshots of my own flickr photos tagged 106. I can call this on released under CC0.
Out of somewhere came a childhood memory of a standardized test they gave us in elementary school, 1970s era. I did well on the test but I recall some analysis which said my skills would be best for some kind of bookkeeping or doing typing in my career. I was not thrilled by that given childhood dreams of something more adventurous.
As it turns out I have a school years book my mom had organized for all of her children, with little pockets of report cards, certificates, immunizations for each grade. I poked around and in the third grade pocket I found my results on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (I never knew as a kid why we got tests from Iowa, but we had no Wikipedia where I can find it now).
Here is standardized testing in 1970s ditto format (and my scored hand written in an charted):
To find your weight, you step on a scale. To check your height, you use a yardstick. To find out how well you are doing in school, you take a test. The skills taught in school cannot be measured as accurately, however as your weight and height. These tests indicate how well you have mastered the basic skills and how your skills compare with these of thousands of other pupils in Baltimore County who have taken the same tests.
I was highest in Language and Work-Study skills? I thought I was great at math! And I cannot find anything indicating what kind of future job I might land in, nothing suggesting a career spent at a computer keyboard– wait a minute! my career IS typing. Way to go Iowa.
I digress, and maybe that nostalgia trip is not connected to the big question in the title.
My career in edtech has seemed like a fortunate series of things that almost seem like I have fallen into, and it always seemed like almost unexpectedly the next thing would come along almost by surprise.
Yet lately, I stare out the window or look far to the Saskatchewan horizon, and wonder, “when is the next thing going to appear?”
For another post, I am not finding much in the two letter acronym many others are hepped up about.
And then I had another one of those memories (which like the standardized test, was incorrect) of long time ago, D’Arcy Norman had done some kind of sketch thing in his Moleskin notebook of phases of his career.
Thus, I took out a blank piece of paper and one of those pen things. I did all of this in about 15 minutes. Across the top I put time frames from my career (in boxes), knowing where the breaks were. Below I put where I was working (underlined).
Then I started adding in the technologies I was using or engaged with at the time. Next came bigger trends or broader interests (in circles). And finally added other significant points.
It was just a one off, and I am sure I missed stuff. It was a curious process. Oh, here’s the scribbles.
Career Phases flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)I am noticing now that there is the biggest clump of “stuff” in the middle, like late 1990s to maybe 2020.
The key thing is the big question mark under 2024.
Now.
All along and still today, I very much like making connections, and having spontaneous interchanges with people on the net. It’s like everything that flowed the early days in email listservs, then on the web through blog networks, then social media, and now, well pretty much “entropified” out to too many spaces.
I quite very much enjoy doing the OEGlobal Voices podcasts and running live streamed events (we have been doing them with Streamyard, published directly to YouTube) all of which are rarely scripted and very loosely structured. I have yet another new idea, I want to organize some live sessions got OEGlobal that are opportunities for demos- not just of technology, but it could be to show an online course, an OER, a technique. But in Demo Wednesday sessions there are no slides, everything is a live demo.
For me, so much academic discourse feels formal –presentations and slide talk webinars– where are the places for open conversations? I so relish a conversational format, the unexpected that arrises. For a recent example, I was fortunate to record an episode with the Tony Bates. One of my standard questions is asking guests what they thought of school as a kid, what kind of student they were. Tony mentions that at his primary school in London were two other lads named Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
OEG Voices 074: Tony Bates and A Personal History of Open Education
This is what algorithms and vector representations of internet content can’t do, they hover at the median, not the interesting outliers of human experience.
Plus, going back to the days of going live on DS106 Radio (there is a reason this is on my mind, but that’s another post) that freeform going live on the air or the video stream, even if there are no listeners. It makes for a sense of excitement, what in the early planning day stages of the open DS106, Jim Groom described as a “sense of eventness” — something is happening over there, I want to be part of it.
Heck, it goes father back that I think of it, in my mid 1990s days at Maricopa, I was doing a presentation at maybe a League for Innovation Conference with a fantastic dynamic faculty Donna Rebadow. She had a way of getting the audience riled up, I believe at the very start she mentioned the long day of sitting, and she got them stand up and give each other back rubs. We joked much as we did talks like a later one on Technology and Learning as Magic or Reality. But at the one I remember, we had so much laughter and loud audience energy, that people started filtering in from neighboring rooms to see what was going on on our session. Some of them were from a Douglas College in Vancouver, and it led to my invited trip to another institution.
It was just tricks and games, we had substance too. But it never needed to be drilled as reading bullet points from slides.
So now I have really gone off tangent, and slid down into the past. But hey, past as prologue, right? I am finding though what I seem to be liking doing are gathering for open, less structured activities. My colleagues and people I rope into these things seem to think I am good at this. I have a different idea of a realistic dialogue being talking with people, not yakking at an LLM on my phone.
So the arc of my career is to catapult me into being some web talk show host?
Nah, that’s not it. But at least it’s exciting to be doing.
And while I may miss out on The Big Thing That Will Consume Us All, I’m willing to miss full jumping on the AI boat. Not that I am totally against it, as it seems like you either get cast into being an all out champion or labeled as critic who just hates the stuff. Donald Clark blogged that “An interesting paper just published showed that much of the scepticism on GenAI comes from those who have not tried it. Lesson – for any real critical thinking or analysis, some use is necessary.” Note the lack of any real reference for said paper, much less that discounts skepticism based on experience.
And this is not even my post about my AI skepticism. And despite pundits claims, I have done more than trying it.
So the what’s next remains an open question. That’s always how the other things on my sketch came to be, they just seemed to organically emerge out of the experience of exploring and doing “other stuff.”
We’ll see what gets tossed on the paper next.
And now the most ironic thing is that the whole reason for doing my sketch thinking that D’Arcy had done one about his career timeline was wrong. I posted my photo to Mastodon, and deft as D’Arcy is, he found his original image. It was actually a timeline history of his blog!
From the D’Arcy Norman International ArchivesAnd as often I ended up Doing What D’Arcy Did, and sketched by own History of Blog (as of 2007)
A D’Arcy Inspired History of Blog flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)So my remembering something incorrectly led me to do something that turned out to be an interesting exercise. This is serendipity. This is not what you can from doing everything through a great Averaging Grey Slop Producing machine.
I crave the unexpected, the outliers. Have fun with everyone else in the crowd at the middle of the bell shaped curve.
Featured Image: My own photo. Yes, I could have generated some fantasy type graphic image, but why is this needed when I have my own photo representing looking into an unknown?
Seeing into the Next Dimension flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
Could there really be a world wide web without hyperlinks? To me, the most durable, valuable, and potentially serendipity laced magic ones are made and managed by an individual.
All those “posts” tossed into LinkedIn, The Platform I Will Only Call Twitter, the One I don’t Use That has a face and a book in it, even my beloved Mastodon… those things indeed have a link to can point to, but they mostly just flow quickly down the stream, never to be readily found or used again. They are links, but rather ephemeral to me. And you cannot make sure they don’t vanish.
It’s the permalink, the permanent link, the ones you can keep from going down the storm drain, now those have power.
Take this trivial example. I get these emails often, some SEO wafting person tells me about a link on a 12 year old blog post is broken. How nice. How caring. But what they want is me to use one they are paid to get hustled and pushed onto sites. How can it be worth someone’s time to be sniffing out dead links on old web pages on some fringe blog?
Meet Tyler, the CEO/Founder of some company that pitches text prep resources, who writes:
Hi Alan Levine,
I came across a broken link to a “how to edit your hosts file on Windows, Mac, or Linux” resource in your page “Highs and Lows of Technical Problem Solving â The CogDog Show” under the anchor text “edit the hosts file on your computer”. Our research indicated that you were the right person to contact about that page.
Broken links can reduce your Google search ranking and confuse readers. If you’d like to replace the link, here’s an article from Achievable’s blog that covers the same topic: https://blog.achievable.me/tech/edit-hosts-file-on-windows-mac-or-linux/
Thank you,
Tylerunsolicited email means you give me the rights to post it, that’s my rule!
I am impressed that the CEO of a Big Company (?) has that much time to be looking for dead links on 9 year old post on a web blog/portfolio I did for a TRU fellowship in 2014-2015 (I am suspicious of their research that “indicated that you were the right person to contact about that page” – nowhere is my email address on that site, the “research” most likely is they bought my contact info and links from some personal data reseller).
Thanks for the heads up on the dead link, Tyler! But before I got just mindless swapping in the link you are shoving my way, I will do my own “research”. Indeed the original link to HowToGeek.com I had in my post:
https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/27350/beginner-geek-how-to-edit-your-hosts-file/
is dead. 404. Kaput. But in about 10 seconds, I search the HowToGeek site, and find it lives now at
https://www.howtogeek.com/27350/beginner-geek-how-to-edit-your-hosts-file/
which I can fix on my original post. But seriously, there is another lesson here. Someone at HowToGeek.com changed the link structure of their own web site, they removed the /howto in the original URL. I know that this can be done with some edits of a web site’s .htaccess file or in their domain control panel. Heck, maybe HowToGeek could manage to write this one up.
The lesson here is that when you, be it an individual or some IT team supported outfit, changes your URL structure, for ** sake, take the steps to create a redirect from the old URL you broke. And a big thanks to Thompson Rivers University for keeping the lights on my ancient site on TRUbox!
Being part of the web, to me, at least, means not only publishing content, but doing some diligence to keeping published URLs in tact. Or not leaving them hanging in the wind for some dude named Tyler to be out there pushing his replacements.
Yes, I am responsible for many broken links on all my site. But If I am going to change them for a reason, I do everything I can to not leave a previous made external link to my stuff go to the dead zone in room 404.
I respect Ben Werdmuller and read his blog regularly (hallo RSS) but have to say that in response here
I have zero expectation of producing “brilliance”. And while I agree with Ben that the value is the regular flow of writing, the true secret of blogging, and just making your own web sites by any means, is being able to create, and take care of, your links that you add to the web.
Putting the permanent into permalink.
I get all kinds of echos back from permalinks I’ve created recently like one that happened this week or another from web eons ago, a post that just keeps clicking in comments to an apparently used furniture community I accidentally created.
Putting a link into the giant massive vat of other links on the web is not about getting famous or lots of reads, its creating a small beacon of transmission, that might be found some future day by a person I don’t know. They might contact me or not, but that is what blogging and doing your web site does. It makes the web.
Even if it gets hoovered up into some AI generative borg machine, that humble, single link is part of something bigger.
Make your own links. And take care of them.
Well, I for one will keep at it.
Note: no wonder I did not get millions of views on this brilliance! I thought I published it but found it lingering in my drafts.
Featured Image: It’s weird as I am able to easily find my own metaphor images of real world photos with having to type into a box to generate some cartoon synthetic generated ones. This is my own photo! Each Link Makes a Chain flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
There are little things one can still do without AC (Asking ChatGPT). But first, a word about blogging!
It was quite wonderful that after writing my post on installing the Photini app that I quickly got a comment from its developer, Jim Easterbrook. How does that happen? I’d guess he has a google alert for Photini. I just have to say that publishing a blog post, where it has a real honest permalink on the World Wide Web, enables this. Can people find your thoughts and ideas when they are dumped into LinkedIn, et al? Is your stuff sent out by email newsletter discoverable?
Well Jim had noted that on Windows/Linux installs, there is a means to offer a one click icon on the OS I launch the app, but it does nor work on Mac OS. Here, I need to launch Terminal, and invoke three lines of commands (which could be wrapped into a shell script, but blargh).
I was fairly sure there was a means to set things in motion on a Mac with some AppleScript, well actually it is Automator. Wow, everyone says web search it toast but I got an answer in 2 clicks and 30 seconds.
So I launch Automator, use the option to create an application, and in the Library, it’s under “Run a Shell Script”. Double clicking in the pane on the right opens the window to paste in my commands.
I save it as an Application called Photini.app inside my Applications folder. I can go the extra step and download the Photini logo from Jim’s site, open in Preview, do a command C to copy. Then, on my new Photini.app do a command I for Get information, click the icon on the top left, and do a command V to paste.
Check out what’s in my Application folder!
Just a double click, and Photini launches (and then I can keep it on my doc).
As I said. It’s the power of writing up your own stuff in your own damned site AND finding ways to do things yourself that are meaningful to me. Go ahead and enjoy your fast food creating with Bert or Claud or Brad. I like cooking my own solutions. Be more maker.
Featured Image. Mine, humanly created.
Be a Maker flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
While I’ve hung up collecting Amazing Stories of Openness I never tire of coming across inspiring acts of it– as Nancy White had said in one of the first of these videos, “Openness is an attitude.”
This week I participated in the online Open Texas 2024 conference. In a town hall session we were spun out into breakout rooms to share ideas on what a big dream for the future of openness might look like (much was collected in a padlet, mine is there credited to “Artistic Kangaroo”).
As breakout rooms go it was actually more interesting to meet others there, such as Michael. He introduced himself as someone with 30 years of experience in the music recording industry, relatively new to teaching this, and not knowing anything about open education. The group pitched in on the elements, but he admitted the challenge in the music field as so much is tied up onto intellectual property of creative works.
I wished I had not found this link I got later in an email by the Good Dr Glu (inside joke), Gardner Campbell, and NPR story “How a catchy tune became the soundtrack to TikTok’s silliest videos” — which does not get to the key for me, but either click or listen to the 5 minute segment.
The jump for me is that musician who had written this catchy tune ten years ago was a name I knew very well, Kevin MacLeod. I’m dismayed that NPR did not even link to his site, I know it from memory as https://incompetech.com/. I’ve made use of and recommended it for a long time (it was a go to recommendation for my DS106 students working on audio/video projects that needed themed music tracks that were also openly licensed). And I do recall from the early days when MacLeod had his own crafted open license, that later was changed to Creative Commons.
Then Creative Commons came along, standardizing royalty-free rights. While some composers and industry people argue that such sharing undermines composers’ ability to make a living, MacLeod says he just wants his work out in the world.
“I just want my stuff to be heard,” explains MacLeod. “You know, you gotta make it as easy as possible.”
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/24/g-s1-23951/monkeys-spinning-youtube-tiktok-viral-social-media-music
He subtly drops in that while he gives away music that he “earns a six figure income.”
Michael, wherever you are in Texas, I hope that link finds you.
Kevin MacLeod is a true success and be inspired story to the spirit and act of being open. It’s quite easy to do. Heck I just used MacLeod’s track Pleasant Porridge for intro music to my lightning talk video for the 2024 Open Education Conference. I’d much rather find and reuse openly licensed music made by a person than click generating some synthetic gunk that I can’t credit.
But indeed, the Monkey Spinning Monkeys story is Amazing.
Featured Image: My own photo 2014/265/158 Free as in 45s flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) modifued with added the CC BY licensed version of the Creative Commons logo and in the front of the box a screenshot of the incompetech.com web site
Whew, I really thought I had my blog title pun game back on, but this one just did not work. This is mostly, as blog posts ought to be, for myself as a note of trying a new to me photo tool called Photini.
As it turns out (BIB, Because It’s Blogged), the name has nothing do with cocktails. It’s mostly useful for editing metadata with photos, that’s it. And why care about photo metadata? Well it very valuable information about your photo that travels with the image (or should) wherever it goes, including credit to the photographer, a reuse license, all the specs about the camera that took it, geolocation, and more.
But for me it is more of a sensible work flow. I prefer editing and managing my photos on my own hardware/computer and uploading after. This way I am no up a creek if my online photo service goes bye bye. And all of the info I add after editing– title, description, tags, can be sent with it, for me, where my photos are on flickr.
This gets lost so much when people rant/rave about where they store photos online, they count on the service to be their main collection. So when Google Photos of SnazzyPix goes away, they are scrambling/praying/whinging about losing it or sweating a export.
The big thing I learned long ago is developing a local photo management strategy/practice. Organize locally, export online. For a very long time I built mine around editing/managing my photos with Apple Aperture and using a Flickr Export plugin, I stretched this as long as possible running an old operating system because Apple stopped supporting the software in 2015 (which did not stop me using it for like another 7 years).
I was forced to upgrade from the Yosemite OS for another key software used for my web work, and reluctantly decided I would move my game to Adobe Lightroom (since I had a license for the $10 monthly fee for Photoshop) (yes, I know there are lo of alternatives and Adobe’s rep is sliding, but I have my game strong in Photoshop, so… shrug, Not ready. Yet).
Frankly I have not been loving Lightroom. Yes, it has remote storage of the source photos (they love in file and folders), but learning to edit has been a bit slow, the interface is all over the place, and … well, I will sop my complaints. I am getting there, but I have been blaming it for a backlog of un-uploaded Daily Photos (like April-August!).
But I digress, the Lightroom battle is its own post.
Putting on my Fediverse cap have been dabbling some, and want to be more active with my account on PixelFed, where I infrequently post through the web interface. Idly, I was searching last week to see if there was a Lightroom to Pixelfed plugin, but came up dry beyond one unanswered pos in Reddit. But somewhere in there I came across a reference to Photini which had listed features that it can upload to Flickr, PixelFed, and other services.
Photini is not an image editor nor a photo manager, it merely (not so merely) lets you edit the metadata in your photos. Installing Photini is a command line judo dance of using python and a package manager (saying like I know what I am talking about). My approach is copying commands from a web site, watching gobs of mumbo jumbo text flow by, and hoping the darn thing works. This is second hat for many tech folks, but I am a faker at sys admin. I had to refresh my head to virtual environments in Linux, update/upgrade old stuff. It took an hour one night to even get it running, and another hour next night to chase down errors.
As far as I can sense, running it on my trusty (old) (ancient) 2013 Macbook Pro requires this command line sequence in Terminal
cd homesource photini/bin/activatepython3 -m photini
I guess I could make that a clickable applescript.
This post is not much of a how to, and I am not even sure how I will work this into my photo flow. For now, I first do all my edits in Lightroom- add titles, captions, tags. Any photos I wanto use in Photini, I export with the options I forget where they are to include metadata.
In Photini, I open up the new images, and for each one on the bottom, I can inspect metadata. Here I have opened a photo which loads with info Lightroom saves. I does not come with Alt Text, but in Photini I can add. Pixelfed uses real alt text, Flickr sadly does not, it just uses the photo title (I tried to ask for this feature). I can also fix my frequent typos, or add new ones.
Reading/editing Descriptive Metadata in Photini..Next is ownership metadata, this already comes from Lightroom, but you can also create a reusable template.
Editing Ownership metadata, credit, license, rights statement. Camera metadata seen in Photini. This all comes from my camera(s) and is saved in Lightroom. I see no need to edit, but you could change these items.Now I can use the PixelFed upload tab. I login in to authenticate (i remembers you are logged in for next time). The caption field is blank, as Pixelfed does not have a separate title field. I click Generate and Photini combines my titles, description, and tags into on caption. You can also add the photo to a PixelFed collection you have made for groups of photos.
Now I can upload it to PixelFed. Here is my very first sip of posting to PixelFed with Photini:
Just for fun, right from here, I posted the same photo to flickr
That Sky flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)I think this can work now in my flow, adding a step to post to PIxelFed:
- Import new photos to Lightroom
- Edit images and add titles, descriptions, tags
- Publish to flickr, along with extra automated steps to add certain tagged photos to albums
- Export any photos I want to sent to PixelFed to my designated export folder
- Use Photini to add alt text and upload to my PixelFed
The downfall of metadata is that all the info that was se in my original photo is not preserved if you save a copy from PixelFed. I will see about requesting this, Likewise for photos uploaded to flickr, you only get your original metadata if you download the original size image.
And anything sent out elsewhere, cough Instagram, is purely exhaust. My whole point is to preserve and organize not only the photos themselves, but also the information as metadata I add while editing
More experimentation to come, but more importantly, I need to work on my daily photo backlog! The pile is huge.
Featured Image: I inserted and distorted a bit the Photoini logo created by the software author Jim Easterbrook to put atop my own image 2010/365/190 Stirred Not Shaken flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
Tag, we are it. I love me free form tagging. A bit before there were #hashtags there was the Web2.0 frenzy of folksonomy, and wealth that Wikipedia is, leads me to the birth of a term used quite widely.
It rounds counter to the rigidity and forced rules of Official Metadata, in that people, groups, mobs, make free form organizational classifications. It’s at play here on this blog, and WordPress pitches both formal taxonomy of categorys versus informal of tags (cough, cough, COUGH), where I still socially bookmark alone, and of course, in flickr. It’s messy. It’s fun.
Mainly for me, I have big plans to organize stuff, but typically, it becomes a pile of mess. And it still works to organize stuff.
There are certain photo platforms (rhymes with Binstablam) where people stuff more tags in than words in their descriptions. I think it has to do with gaining traction. But maybe it’s just an informal language. I do remember way back when at University of Mary Washington, where the great poet/teacher Claudio Emerson, had her creative writing students blogging where they developed free form messages via LongRidiculousTagsThatBecamePlayfulLanguage.
Where was I going? Yes, in flickr, I use tags a few tags pretty regularly, and as I can see, often mispelled, mangled, repetitive, messy. I make one for each year of my daily photos (2020, 2015, on and on), ones used for doing #ds106 #dailycreates (see what I did there?), and for my most special person.
I don’t tag everything, about a third of my 72000 photos are tagless.
All of this is what I want to get to, and again what makes flickr a joy for me, and more than what people seem to think of online photo places as just being a place to dump photos. There are some 25000 people sharing photo of Stick People in Peril. But there is also a fascinating and almost infinite number of fringe and outlier groups– one of the earliest ones I got invited to was Vegafitti (18 years old and still there!) and Rusty Mailboxes.
I am most proud of the group I made, in which, Groucho Marx style, I am the only member, hideous hotel carpets.
Thus I now get to this new and way out on the edge group Maksimuma Etikedo — I cannot find any clue what the name means, but the intent is there in the group url. It came my way via someone I bump into online I know mostly as s2art (in flickr and mastodon) actually Stu or Melbourne photographer Stuart Murdoch.
The premise of this group is top share photos to which you have applied the maximum amount of tags flickr will let you add to a photo. Any guesses on that number?
Yup, it is 75. So in the blog post 75 TPP is 75 Tags Per Photo. The tag line of the group is “Seventy five Tags! Is it as easy as you think?”
It’s not.
Of course when Stu invited me to the group I had to try. This was the photo I chose, as it had 3 different vehicles.
2024/366/103 Very Vintage Vehicles flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)I swear I had added 75 tags and submitted to the group (they approve all submissions), but I did not see it in the pool. When I found the photo, strangely it only had like 8 tags, IO knew I did it! So I just went back and added tags AGAIN, to hit the max 75 TPP.
And I have to tell you, it is not easy.
So in thinking of this again, I took another recent photo, and sat down to go 75 TPP. Visit to revel in my taggedness. Or laught.
ZOMG it makes you tired. Follow this photo to flickr to see my 75 tag swarm.
2024/366/261 This is As Far As We Go flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)Again, this took a good 20+ minutes. Those last 15 are really hard.
This does not have real value, and I am in some ways creating tag polliution.
But its a fun challenge, and a weird one, and I like trying.
Okay Stu! Please accept my photos!
Maximum Tagger. I try.
Featured Image: Maxium Tags allowed = 75? My photo, nuttin generated. 2018/365/177 Maximum Sky flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
Before the rise of social media as the web’s public conversation space, where I felt it happened well, was across the comment space of blogs. As distributed as it was, it might have been a “distribuverse”- and was woven together by the use of hyperlinks and maybe trackback pings.
Given the abuse of comment spammers making it a PITA to manage, many bloggers turn them off, or use some fancy new hip static publisher that does no support comments (aka D’Arcy). Or it happens away from the publishing source, maybe tied back with something like ActivityPub. There the depth of the response is thin, quick, all the intensity of an emoji or some meme gif.
So when I get a genuine, non spam blog comment from a real person, with maybe complete sentences that indicate they actually read what I wrote, not glancing at in during a scroll session, it’s quite a gift.
What’s funny is that you can write long and hard on something you think is insightful or profound or will instigate reactions… goes out with an un-commented thud. And then some little piece you just write quickly on a whim or a weird hunch, draws a long train of comments.
That’s the kind of post that drew a comment today, Secrets Beneath a Chair where flipping over a piece of furniture uncovered some curious numbers that opened up a whole world of people who cherish Temple-Stuart furniture… even drawing in the grandson of the company that made the chair.
Someone named Karina wrote
Alan, that is so cool! I sit here reading and think of all the hard working people that made both of your chairs; probably made just days or weeks apart. Real furniture! Not flimsy imported stuff!
https://cogdogblog.com/2017/03/secrets-beneath-a-chair/#comment-1262580
The weird thing about the comments are half express their love of the old American Brown Furniture and orthers try to pitch sales of theirs. In in other blogged words:
When a Blog Post About an Old Chair Turns into a Furniture Flea Market
In the long ago heralded ages of blogging as something that necessitated having a blog, I wrote about Comment As Blogging after reading (in his blog) a stunning example of what Matthew Kirschenbaum described as “Comment Blogging” — where a colleague named François Lachance blogged in the comment space of other people’s blogs:
I can predict the range of theoretical positions such a “blog”(should we call it a comment blog?) might be said to occupy: this is blogging in the margins, distributed blogging at the interstices of the discourse network. François appears on no one’s blogroll, his entries are not tracked by blogdex or weblogs.com or similar sites. He is an utter non-entity in the standard ecological renderings of the blogosphere, yet he unquestionably has a presence “here.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20060213022358/http://www.otal.umd.edu/~mgk/blog/archives/000215.html
I took this on as a little mission for four years after reading this, I would take a week to turn off writing on my own blog and instead spend the week writing bits in the comments of other blogs.
Blog Muzzled: Fourth Annual Comment Blogging Extravaganza
I’m thinking as a new old experiment of striking up again this old habit. At the time, I did some database query tricks to generate the comment activity on my own blog. I had not really updated in a while that I updated and track in a google sheet. Here’s the comment trend on CogDogBlog, peak commenting was 2011.
Luckily with my MySQL rust, I had copied the formulas ino the sheet, just the date ranges need be altered for different years, examples below for 2023 data
Total Number of Posts in a Year
SELECT count( * ) FROM `wp\_posts` WHERE post\_date >= '2023-01-01' AND post\_date < '2024-01-01' AND post\_type='post'
Total Number of Comments in a Year
SELECT count( * ) FROM `wp\_comments` WHERE `comment\_date` >= '2023-01-01' AND `comment\_date` < '2024-01-01'
Total Number of Commenters in a Year
SELECT count( * ) FROM `wp\_posts` WHERE post\_date >= '2023-01-01' AND post\_date < '2024-01-01' AND post\_type='post'
Who’s Your Commenters?Part of my old process was recognizing those who gave me comments. I resurrected the old query for 2023’s activiy, which matches the low end of the curve of activity. This is the query:
SELECT comment\_author, count( * ) AS acnt FROM `wp\_comments` WHERE `comment\_date` >= '2023-01-01' AND `comment\_date` < '2024-01-01' GROUP BY comment\_author ORDER BY acnt DESC;
The few who still comment and also commented here include (note, this list was updated as it was faulty!):
- cogdog 71
- Stephen Downes 10
- D’Arcy Norman 9
- Tom 4
- Eric Likness 4
- John 4
- Kevin Hodgson 3
- Brian 3
- Algot Runeman 2
- Jim Groom 2
- Dave Lane 2
- Tineke 2
- Kate Bowles 2
- midlaj 2
- TERRY ELLIOTT 2
- Paul R. Pival 1
- Mark Ahlness 1
- Steven Crawford 1
- stuart 1
- Robert C Gordon 1
Draw your own conclusions.
What Posts Have Gotten The Most Comments?While I was remembering how to query direcly in PHPmyAdmin, I tried to fumble through a query to do this; I knew it needed to join the comments table and the eposts table. Of course everybody these days reach for ChatGPT. I got there just as or more quickly using the old fashioned google search which everyone says does not work anymore, but shrug using “wordpress sql to find posts with the most comments”
I found most of it in the second google result, a link to Stack Overflow. Since i was written for PHP, I had to rename the tables, and I removed the condition for just the last week since I want all time.
My query worked (with extra SELECT statements to label results, get te blog URL, and the year:
SELECT comment\_count as count, ID, post\_title as title, guid as URL, DATE\_FORMAT(post\_date, "%Y") as year FROM `wp\_posts`, `wp\_comments` WHERE wp\_posts.ID = wp\_comments.comment\_post\_ID GROUP BY wp\_posts.ID ORDER BY comment\_count DESC LIMIT 0, 10;
Saving the results I got a table of my top 10 most commented posts:
| count | ID | title | URL | year | | 96 | 6454 | Into the Great Wide Open | http://cogdogblog.com/?p=6454 | 2011 | | 76 | 9103 | The 60,000 Times Question Remains Unanswered | http://cogdogblog.com/?p=9103 | 2012 | | 62 | 9371 | Meet Rachel… Anne…Tiffany… from Card Holder … | http://cogdogblog.com/?p=9371 | 2012 | | 61 | 64254 | Secrets Beneath A Chair | http://cogdogblog.com/?p=64254 | 2017 | | 48 | 4786 | Join Me- Ban Spam Supporters Ubiquity Hosting From… | http://cogdogblog.com/?p=4786 | 2010 | | 42 | 4881 | The Seven Circles of Canon Rebate Hell | http://cogdogblog.com/?p=4881 | 2010 | | 40 | 54073 | Seeking Evidence of Badge Evidence | http://cogdogblog.com/?p=54073 | 2016 | | 38 | 48472 | Facebook as Catfish Paradise: Its Community Standa… | http://cogdogblog.com/?p=48472 | 2015 | | 37 | 5759 | More Than Something to Share(ski): Make a Mark | http://cogdogblog.com/?p=5759 | 2010 | | 35 | 9476 | The Question Should be: Why Are You Not Blogging | http://cogdogblog.com/?p=9476 | 2012 |
More of this was more my own self satisfaction of seeing if I could still wrangle my way around the WordPress database.
But more is a recommitment to being a gift giver of blog comments. I’m going to pick a week soon to revive my comment blogging challenge. Getting blog comments are gifts and worth gifting it forward.
Featured Image: Yup, one of mine, near as I can figure by adjacent photos in flickr, this was the visi to Jerome Arizona I did the year Cori first visited me. Find Gifts Where The Are flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
That’s the plan (and actually better pace than the stack of partly reads on my nightstand table).
The book is “A Year in the Woods” by Norwegian writer Torbjørn Ekelund– the sad state of web search yields no author managed web site, just links to book sellers or book reviews, I link therefore to a stubby Norwegian Wikipedia article.
This was a bookstore shelf guess grab I made in December on a tradition where Cori and I buy a gift book for ourself, ideally to be read over the holiday break.
I’m not writing a review here, but the book is Ekelund’s year long mission to spend one night each month a year in the forests not too far from home. He writes about his youthful idea of what a natural explorer does, his love of the land and forests instilled by his grandparents, but also with the balance of his content life in modern culture. His idea, then is to visit the woods for this monthly outing, to share how one place changes over the year.
Knowing my slow reading rate, I decided a gimmick of a strategy was to read each month, the chapter Ekelund wrote for the current month. Hence, I just read the September chapter, “Camp Life”
Starting chapter seven, pen in place for marking up my book, when i am done, maybe I will have gotten this uploaded to flickr, where then as now, it is shared into the public domain using CC0.I enjoy the author’s description of the land and forest, noting the differences and similarities wih where I live, maybe not at the species level, tough spruce and moose figure prominently. I also appreciate the opening quotes or references to naturalists I do not know of such as this chapter’s reference to Helge Ingstad, and a book titled “Pelsjegerliv…. The Fur Trappers Life Among Canada’s People”
That leads my to look up Helge Ingstad, who gave up a life started as a lawyer to instead be an explorer (living as Ekelund loftily them), and spent much time as a fur trapper amongst Indigenous people in the Northwest Territories. If I understand correctly, this was almost an end of an error for this trade, as after it was altered by the use of airplane to track the game. I think the “Fur Trapper’s Life” was republished as In the Land of Feast and Famine, still available from McGill Press.
But Ingstad did much more, being the discoverer with his archeologist wife the significant ruins of a Viking village in Newfoundland. Let Wikipedia say it better:
In 1960, he discovered the remains of what later proved to be a Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows at the northernmost tip of Newfoundland in Canada. It is the only known site of a Norse or Viking village in Canada, and in North America outside of Greenland. Dating to around the year 1000, L’Anse aux Meadows remains the only widely accepted instance of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact and is notable for its possible connection with the attempted colony of Vinland established by Leif Ericson around the same time period or, more broadly, with Norse exploration of the Americas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helge_Ingstad#Viking_settlement_of_North_America
Ahh, see how I wander from the book? But that’s what a good piece of writing out to do, raise curiosity to go more, not to explain everything.
Ekelund is all together respectful/honoring of nature, family lore, but also a bit cheeky and sarcastic, and balances both the urban and wild land sides of his life. The chapters are quick, concise, reflective and humanly raw. It’s not all solo treks, in June we went out with fishing pals, and August was with his four year old son.
There’s much wisdom, I keep underlining. But I will [happily] not finish the book until a least after December. It’s an interesting approach to reading in bits rather than trying to plow through all in one motion (which I rarely do).
I have a few weeks to read the next chapter.
Featured Image: This was my photo of unread books in 2016 (I finished 2, those were high percentage days, if anyone actually reads this, guess which 2.) So It’s #NationalBookLoversDay flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
After so many years of taking/making photography, from an undergraduate photography class at the University of Delaware, to a darkroom in my grad school apartment, to first digital photos with an Apple Quicktake, on through DSLRs, and the alluring capability of an iPhone 13, I’ve been firm on representing the world I see. Even if digitally enhanced, the photo itself, definitely to me, is a representative of truth.
Not absolute truth of course, and digital fakery has been long going on the web. Plus Errol Morris in his book Believing is Seeing have already poked holes in the truth in photos question (here’s my take on this fab book).
As The Verge reports, standy by as the photograph as evidence of the world —
No one’s ready for this “Our basic assumptions about photos capturing reality are about to go up in smoke”–
An explosion from the side of an old brick building. A crashed bicycle in a city intersection. A cockroach in a box of takeout. It took less than 10 seconds to create each of these images with the Reimagine tool in the Pixel 9’s Magic Editor. They are crisp. They are in full color. They are high-fidelity. There is no suspicious background blur, no tell-tale sixth finger. These photographs are extraordinarily convincing, and they are all extremely fucking fake.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/22/24225972/ai-photo-era-what-is-reality-google-pixel-9
Compare the AI altered photos and ask if you glanced how you would react. Don’t count on the inserted metadata google will say is useful, editing photo meta data is easy. Maybe an expert can tell from up close analysis of the image data, maybe. But think of the rest of the world without forensic photo skills/tools.
Don;t get me wrong- what is being done is beyond being technically impressive. I’ve done my share of Photoshopping out distracting from photos I did not compose ideally (using the clone brush), and yes, on request I have edited friend’s photos to remove a family member’s weird divorced spouse. So there is capability to “clean up” photos easier.
But I leave it for anyone to imagine where this can/might/will go.
I will continue to enjoy making/sharing and messing aroudn with my photos. They are to me, my truths, as I was the one who snapped the pic. But when they go out in the world, now, well, its on every one to accept/reject/question, or just keep passing it on.
It shall be… interesting.
A note on the image I made for this post. This was a “selfie” I made in 1988, taking in a mirror reflection of the bathroom that was my darkroom. That’s my old (gone) trusty Nikon Nikkormat film camera I used for my Geology field research.
Selfie circa 1988 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)I imagined making an overlay for half the camera of what Generative AI could do to modernize the camera into something futuristic. I worked with Adobe Firefly to generate an image based on the camera. I guess this will show how bad my skills are at Generative AI, and I am sure someone who has been at this can do much better. But my efforts are closer to what most early/normal users will generate, not a prompt-master.
First prompt: “Front view of a classic metallic Nikon 35mm film camera. The body has been modified to include futurist features of Al. Photorealistic.” Ugh. I meant the camera body!
I tried again, and used my photo above as a “reference” which kind of worked for getting the shape right. I wondered what was the lens thing on the left, but realized it was the lens cap hanging on my original. Hah. The prompt here was “Front view of a classic metallic Nikon 35mm film camera. The camera is covered with electronic circuit parts that suggest it is powered by futuristic technology”
I ended up going with the one on the top right (and the photoshop tool for selecting the object to mask worked out well). I can’t say these are really what I imagined or hoped might be generated to surprise me. The “futuristic” element means glowing blue tones and patterns in the background. I find it…meh.
Also for both of these prompts. I got some kind of warning that a word in my prompt was removed / flagged for not being appropriate. No idea what word it was– maybe “body”. Shrug.
Just for grins I dipped on more time in to let the AI figure out a futuristic view of an old camera with the prompt “Futuristic version of an old style Nikon 35mm film camera.” I guess it’s interpretation of “futuristic” means the style of the image, not the camera I asked for. Bleh.
It was a bit fun to try different things, but the overall tonailty of results was so similar, and, well, boring. I wonder too about how much time this was “saving” me versus image searching for something to make a composite.
Again, if you really are good at this and can render something better, sure, go ahead. But right now, I am a basic user, and for all the hype and promise of AI, more people will generate crap like this. Is that what the world needs? Is this really saving me time from “boring tasks” so I can lounge at thew top of Maslow’s pyramid?
Wither the meaning truth / reality in photos, I shall continue to make and share my own, maybe the hoovering into the machines will make a differen— hah, what a joke.
Featured Image: A composite of my original photo Selfie circa 1988 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) with a masked portion on the right side of the camera generated with Adobe Firefly using the prompt “Front view of a classic metallic Nikon 35mm film camera. The camera is covered with electronic circuit parts that suggest it is powered by futuristic technology”
Woah, two blog posts two days in a row? That has not happened since, like… 1942 (that’s a joke for Cori and I). The blog is not dead!
But indeed, I got some of the nice, chest thumping “chuffed” feeling (as my friends on the other pond side say), for a recent flickr photo I posted of a sunset got picked for flickr explore, their regular feature for highlighting photos shared on the platform.
The formula supposedly is algorithmic, and I gather because of the exposure generates, people theorize all kinds of ways to get a photo “explored.” You will in the main pool lots of awesome landscapes, animals, people, odd objects. Can you really name the pattern?
I only knew because I got a notification that my photo was added to the group “in explore” which I remain unsure is part of the official process or something done in another way. Its noticable as my photos spike from the normal single digit number of views to a few thousand, and then congratulatory comments come in.
Well yes, I am ~~some~~ ~~a few~~ many ways bragging, because it feels good. I’ve been fortunate to have had now 31 of my photos explored — for those that have URL literacy you can find your own photos that swim in a flickr groups pool by taking the main URL: https://www.flickr.com/groups/inexplore/ then add pool/ then add your flickr user name that leads to your own photos, e.g. for me, cogdog.
But actually it’s been almost 5 years since the last time it happened. I can conjure all kinds of reasons, “my photos are boring” or “i don’t get many views/comments” or “Saturn is in remission”.
I mean I felt like this was a nice photo, but believe me, we get colorful sunsets almost daily (well at the end of the days!)
2024/366/249 Poplar Sunset Spot flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)This was an evening Cori and I were walking a part of our property where the poplar trees have been rhizomatically spreading and springing up saplings, well now some of them are 15 feet tall in a few years. But the sunet was magnificent, with that low swatch of swirling clouds. We were both snapping pics on our iPhones, and I admit, I saw Cori first taking a similar one with the top of the poplar in the frame. So indeed, I “stole” the photo, Cori!
Is it really unique? Shrug. Nice colors, a close to rule of thirds alignment, I do like the grey reach like shape of the cloud, and very far, another home’s light on the horizon.
Yeah, I like the photo.
But how was it selected? Why? It had a handful of views, and one comment from my Australian flickr friend Michael.
It’s the mystery and unexpectedness that is special. You can’t just jimmy the system (well I hope).
And it reminds me of that value of giving recognition, sharing the work of others. Sure, in my social streams I might send out my blog posts or Big Headed Ideas or links to My Stuff, all in the name of sharing, right? That’s the premise of sharing?
Yet I think more valuable to another person is when you do something that give them a shout out, or send people whio might stumble on your blatherings. And it just feels reassuring to get one out of the blue.
To be heard.
Seen.
And not just for the numbers.
Thanks flickr, another reason to love ya added to my list. I know Dave Lane does not agree, and will shake his head (maybe, he is too nice to be mean), but 20+ years in, flickr still gives me much internet joy.
Featured Image: Yup, mine. Do I really need to dip into GenAI to get some cartoon gopher or robot peeking into a blue tinted telescope? Nah, I got my own photos. This is one from the Grand Canyon, and it fits.
More to Explore flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
To break my own languishing of writing here (to which nobody notices), I reach for the bloggers oldest topic, blogging about blogging. Right? And so I reach back, way back, to my own Pre-Cambrian blogging era, the first post, to which, true to form, I pun[t] on the descriptive title for what I think might be a clever play on words.
And frankly, because my own site, has everything written here neatly (well ignore the dusty corners, and the bent nails) organized by time, in one click I can dial back to my first blogged words. These words here shall not be the last.
I missed out much of the DS106 Radio Summer Camp even because of previously made plans for a family vacation. I did manage from the road to crash in on the Jim Groom closing plenary panel, spun in Groomian vibrance as “Blog or Die.” It was not just a bunch of old grey bloggers wringing their hands (but good to see folks like Tom Woodward, Christina Hendricks, Tim Clark, et al), but I leave it to you to decide/enjoy/cringe —the recording is available along with everything else from summer camp week.
One thing I thought I said was something like, I can’t explain it, but it’s the writing out loud that makes me feel best, the part of the process before I click “Publish”, not what happens after. Anything after is bonus.
To show a lack of “back in the day” nostalgia I deliberately left out a reference to the 2010 Northern Voice Blogs Are dead session (old blog post full of dead links) I was part of with Chris Lott and Brian Lamb.
Yet, I glance back at those times we were posting multiple times a day, or banging out posts right after a conference session. My reaction time now is on the scale of weeks? Months? Again, nobody counts.
I’ve enjoyed a rather long series of mastodon volleys with George Station and Kate Bowles, who share different experiences, cultures, they find in Bluesky vs Mastodon.
I can’t even capture it here, especially since I’ve decided I don’t want more than one social media space. My colleagues, who I respect (and read their blogs long ago), are looking much in these spaces for connection, community, conversation, and also like many of us, in the post twitter diaspora blues.
And while I put into some kind of spoken poetry my call to Get Federated I have few expectations that the hurdle of entry in Mastodon versus the bird like familiarity of the Blue Sky interface and the ease of Threading if you are already aboard Instagram, can be overcome. I’ve resigned myself to the disaggregated nature of the net, which it always was. It’s going to be many places. At this point, I don’t feel right putting my chips in another company owned tent.
I resolve to be MO (back end of FOMO).
It does seem though that the Mike Caulfield’s brilliant essay about the stream and garden in 2024 shows big giant torrents streams, and maybe just a few islands of small (web) gardens, not that it was never a choice that was one or the other. But the gardening is where I feel best.
Still, I remain convinced of the value of tossing out my own bits right here. The same network effects of them cast out like small radio signals, or seeds of potential serendipity, still happen. Just as recently as this:
Amazing Still Happens. The Incalculable Odds of Clicking My Way Back to Phenix
And a followup mastodon post tagged #smallweb by a writer named Mike Grindle I never knew before, sent me spinning on this unprobable connection. Mike came back at this as a sign of the value of this act, in his post telling his side of the story, The Blogosphere Lives!
An image in a post from 2016 ended up in the eyes of its creator in 2024 via a share on a relatively tiny platform from a guy who lives across the Atlantic Ocean. Moreover, no algorithm – only humans – played any part. Alan later wrote about the experience in a post, and it sounds like he and Jeffrey (who may also be writing about this soon) are now in regular contact via email.
To me, it shows what happens when you regularly write, publish, share and hyperlink into the void that is the web: the void speaks back.
https://mikegrindle.com/posts/blogosphere
While these kind of amazing stories (someone should collect them!) perhaps do not need the blogosphere, I think putting out your stuff on a link that will live as ling as you do or care to make them live, is a stronger spark to create that serendipity.
And as much as many pin the future on AI powered search, the thing I like about the old faulty web search is, that sometimes, you get results you were not really looking for, but they turn out to be interesting, There is something to some slop in results. I’m happy to sift the river for a fleck of gold.
For social media spaces, I am less looking for being caught up in conversations and debate, I am looking for them to serve me the links outward to people, sites, stories, I would not find otherwise. I am seeking the interesting outliers, not the trends. The unexpected, the novel, the new, the heart and pulse of the #smallweb not the Big Mall.
Maybe I should write a blog post.
Or many. It’s time to shake the dust off.
Not dead yet.
Blog or die? I choose blog. Always.
Featured Image: A 100% Non-Generative image. Mine. Shared into the public domain.
The Dead, Frozen End of Everything flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
Just when one might think the glorious, joyful, unlimited potential of the internet has cratered to an ad-laden pool of machine generated goop, amazingness happens again.
The odds of what I will lay out here seem improbable. Well, someone can likely do a back of the napkin estimate. While I have hung up efforts to collect Amazing/True Stories of Openness, this would have been one in the past I’d be making a video to add.
The Small WebIt starts, yes, in the regular scroll of my Mastodon feed. I follow a #smallweb tag which provides an ongoing sampling of human crafted web sites that are counter to the ad-crufted, SEO chasing, AI infested corporate crap that has almost ruined the web experience. Or take a better written explanation by Aral Balkan also, a regular #smallweb tagger.
The Small Web is for people (not startups, enterprises, or governments). It is also made by people and small, independent organisations (not startups, enterprises, or governments2).
On the Small Web, you (and only you) own and control your own home (or homes).
The Small Web is the Single Tenant WebSmall Web applications and sites are single tenant. That means that one server hosts one application that serves just one person: you. On the Small Web, we do not have the concept of “users”. When we refer to people, we call them people.
https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/
We all might frame it different ways, I see the smallweb as efforts of individuals to share for the sake of sharing, pursuing their own interests, not for the gain of audience or for profit. It’s far out on the distant coordinates of the Long Tail.
Into the Tunnels I GoThe thing about these journeys for me is that tingly sense of gobs of links, that one might lead me down the lesser traveled web routes into something of interest, that I did not set out to seek.
And that happened when my eyeballs landed on a post by someone I do not follow or know (at the time, Mike Grindle, sharing someone else’s blog post:
That’s something I note- it’s one thing to toot your own posts (I do, yes), but even more giving to post someone else’s, a pass it forward type of thing.
So I end up reading a blog post called This is a Blog by, again, a blogger I’ve never read named Jeffrey Pillow. It resonates, as here I have oft blogged about blogging. I will leave it to the reader here to click away and take in Jeffrey Pillows asserting of what his blog is about.
Yes, it resonated. In message, and as well a poetic flow style of writing.
When that happens, I get curious. Who is this person? What else do they write about? I seek and find the blog’s About page:
My name is Jeffrey Pillow. I’m an American short story writer, memoirist, and poet. On the Internet, you could even call me a personal blogger. I grew up in the small town of Phenix, Virginia, population: 200, and now live in Charlottesville with my wife, two kids, and a dog named Mozzarella Cheese.
https://jeffreypillow.com/about/
For some reason, knowing that somewhere in the world is a dog named “Mozzarella Cheese” warms my heart. How fun to call that dog’s name!
I admit I skimmed the bio stuff, the books written, what stands out for me is a list of linked blog posts listed under the heading, “What you can expect from this blog”. I could have copy/pasted the text with all the links, but that’s a job for a link-clicking reader. I scanned the list to pick one o read:
I could have picked the Canadian goos one or the cow pasture rock’n roll band, but something about the las link caught my attention, having remembered his opening line of growing up in a small town (for some reason the name of the town did nor register despite the fact if you add an “o” you get the city I live in like 20 years).
As the subtitle goes, the author wrote In response to Phenix Being Named to the 10 Small Towns In Virginia Where You’d Never Want To Live as “A dude who grew up in Phenix, Virginia, responds to a dude who has never been there.”
The writing is razor sharp sarcastic and rings with the joy of taking down some other writer who puts down a place who does not know it as a lived experience.
I smiled and enjoyed the read, and was ready to go back to the task I had gotten distracted from. At the bottom, author Jeffrey Pillow gave attribution for the Creative Commons licensed photo used at the opening of the Welcome to Phenix town sign.
My draw dropped.
The attribution was to me, that was my own photo that I did not even recognize!
It’s Great to be Back in Phenix flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) licenseFrom the 2012 date, and also in flickr scanning the photos before and after, this was from the time I was living in Fredericksburg and working with the DTLT team at University of Mary Washington. I had driven a scenic route on the small (blue) highway 40 going eventually to visit my friend and colleague Gardner Campbell, then at Virginia Tech.
Odds Please?I could have easily missed this link in my scroll of stuff in Mastodon. It was a small chance I clicked. I could have command-w the journey there. But then I click around Jeffrey Pillow’s blog. And when I saw those lists of posts, I could have clicked any of them (it was 1 of 11).
This to me is the small web at its best, when you can find something improbable.
There are no comments on the blog, but I left a message in it’s contact form, thanking the author for finding, using, and attributing my photo (without this I would not even have realized it was mine!).
Time went by.
And then I got an email (as it turns out my message got flagged as spam).
Talk about a small world. Nice to meet you via the world wide web. Not many people on this planet have visited the big town of Phenix, Virginia. I remember years ago when I wrote that post finding your photography on Flickr. You definitely took the scenic drive from Fredericksburg to Blacksburg. But I totally get it: that’s what I do half the time I drive to a new place. I love the little out-of-the-way places you can find that are mere dots on a map.
The original version of that sign, the physical structure, I once had in my bedroom at my parents’ house. The mayor allowed me to take it when the new sign was put up. Your photo is of the newer sign which still stands today as you enter town.
This is just one stop on the small web. Like state highway 40 and the little town of Phenix, you ought to take the offramp from the shiny malls on the super highways, and go for a ride into small web country.
Featured Image: That time I drove through Phenix and forgot about it, until the small web sent me back. It’s Great to be Back in Phenix flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
I recently managed to fix an issue with a water pump I use for our irrigation projects that someone else had put together for me.
The fix was round about. I did some web searching, found the culprit was likely a pressure switch, ended up swapping the whole pump out, rewiring it the same, and finding no flow happening. As it turns out, I found the issue was completely elsewhere, a faulty in line water flow switch.
For me, it’s hard to beat the satisfaction of fixing a machine or tool all with my own tools and methods.
The same for finding my own end arounds with web stuff. That DIY joy is the best stuff.
So here is the issue. I use Discourse for running the OEG Connect community site. Back when I started it in 2020, I used a little feature that allows you to publish what is typically a discussion topic as a stand alone page- a series of them I made as a users guide. It removes all of the Discourse interface, and looks like a regular web page- rather than the ‘/t’ in the url for topic it has ‘pub’ — see https://connect.oeglobal.org/pub/connect-guide.
A weird issue I found was when I go to edit, it takes a ton of searching/scrolling to find the original published content as a topic, which I can edit was the content owner.
My reflex came to view HTML source (like maybe 0.0001% of web users likely do), expecting the real URL was in there. Sure enough it is as a <link> tag in the header, a canonical link.
And sure enough that URL gets me directly to the source. So I can when needed, view source, find the link, click or copy/paste and be on my merry editing way.
But tick tick tick, my head goes, this is also a simple job for a browser bookmarklet– these are still some of the most useful things I use on a daily basis. And they are all just simple Javascript code, stuff I make by hand.
So I give you a magic link you can drag to your bookmark bar. For any web page, when activated, if there is no canonical link, you see an alert. If it does find one, it displays and asks you if you want to take a trip, with OK and cancel options.
If you prefer the very simple, Alan’s Brute Force Javascript, voila
javascript:c=document.querySelector("link[rel='canonical']");if(!c) { alert('No canonical link found.') } else { if (confirm("Visit canonical link " + c.href +" ?")) window.location=c.href};
This is really trivial on the scale of programming feats. And its likely not even elegant. But it works. For me. And I hashed it out myself. I am sure I could have gone the route most people go now to ask ChatGPT et al to spit out the code. I likely would have had to go back and forth several times, likely not saving any time over what it did to do it myself, trip through my own syntax goofs, and finally get it working.
But I get more satisfaction doing this myself. Even for this drably simple task, I’d rather DIY it.
Make your own tools. See what it does for you.
Multitool flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
It’s more than tattered and a while since I blabbed about the spurious nature of online practices of attribution.
I was somewhat inspired here by interesting analysis of Why I Attribute made by Stephen Downes (who’s busy biking somewhere, why do I need to write this?) based on a simple series of online posts/shares that goes down a layer signal to noise thought stream.
I remain more on the ABA — Always Be Attributing, more on the side of gratitude. But ya can’t expect it at all.
This unraveling came from the report from pixsy report that lets me know of places my flickr photos are matched “out there”. I know pixsy’s rap is bad because nefarious entities use it to set up take down scams. I only check it to peek at where my images appear, just for my own curiousity, and I never click any buttons to harass someone because, heck, I give away all my photos under mostly a CC0 license.
It just get’s interesting, and top of the report tonight was this fun photo of Felix in the first year I had him, with a tattered toy in his mouth.
2016/366/121 “Damn, I am Cute” flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)And look, I am ridiculous because (a) I am attributing my own photo, I don’t HAVE to do that, right; and (b) It’s shared into the public domain where the rules say I don;t have to attribute.
But I do because it puts the practice out there. If I just follow rules, I set an example of non-attributing.
ABA.
I digress.
My head swam when Pixsy reported matching this photo on 536 web sites.
With CC0 for me it will always be 0s all the way across– Cases, Income, Takedowns. That’s not what I’m after here.
And sure enough I can find Felix and his chew toy on a blog “My Dog Killed a Raccoon! 4 Tips on What to Do Next“, a facebook post by Best Buddy Trainer, and on it goes. My photo, all the way down. I can’t count, but pretty much all results are unattributed, or have useless ones like attributing to other photo sites.
My heart is not broken, I am not seeking the credit, I am more curious in the habits people do when making their web pages. Heck, actually I am proud of how far that cute photo has flown. That people will socur the web, find the photo somewhere, and say, “that’s the perfect photo for my post!”.
And it goes even more wider on a reverse image search in Google, where Felix appears on “There’s No Such Thing as Negative and Positive “Reinforcement” , All You Need to Know About Resource Guarding (And How to Reduce it), Fast Facts on Foreign Body Ingestion, and out to where I tire of scrolling.
No matter what you do with images, or the way you license them, if you put ’em on the web, they will get used like this. And you know what, I’m really okay, because it just shows how vast and wide the web is, you think you see a lot, but you don’t.
And if you think you can really “control” what other people do with your stuff? Good luck. My mode has been to just give up on it, and enjoy the weirdness of it. Yes, it’s weird to see my dog’s photo on 500+ web pages, but I get the better end of the deal.
I get to be with the dog.
Featured Image: My dog, my photo, go ahead and slap it on your web page! 2016/366/121 “Damn, I am Cute” flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
Podcasting, it’s still a thing, eh? Everyone is doing them, posting them in their substa– no not everyone. But to play my old man internet card, I was rambling Podcasting Schmodcasting back when the people who would spin out the bird site were deep into making Odeo. I was recording with that bubble gum pack sized iRiver mp3 recorder… editing in Audacity (still using it).
Yawn, enough olde time tech blather! But there’s more to do compelling audio than just recording a bunch of people rambling… there are those rarer shows that actually have an artful form. When I was interested in digital (and non digital) storytelling, in the ds106 glory years, nothing set the standard more for audio storytelling than This American Life and those fabulous videos by creator/host Ira Glass.
I got intrigued by those early listens when Glass spoke of growing up in Pikesville, Maryland and got his start in local public radio. Hold the bus, that was very near where I grew up. And it went one level farther when I looked up Ira Glass in Wikipedia, and smack me on my forehead– he graduated from Milford Mill High School in 1977. That’s my high school! I missed crossing paths with him by one year, as my freshman year there was the school year after he graduated.
I drove to Flagstaff in 2014 to hear Glass do a talk at Northern Arizona University…
Going to Hear Ira Glass flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) licenseDuring the Q&A I raise my hand (I forgot the question I asked) but opened with some kind of cheesy reference to being a fellow “Milford Miller”, with some kind of fantasy he would invite me to the dressing room for a visit or maybe we’d go out for coffee at Macy’s.
Imagination.
Let’s get back to the story here (who is the lousy script writeer???) What is so inspiring enough, here in 2024 the consistency of the This American Life is they are still doing it so damn well. For me, its eminently listenable, not predictable, and hardly self promotional. It’s in my regular podcast listening rotation for the drives to and from town. Note the hook of the intro that is not just BLAH BLAH THIS IS MY PODCAST PLEASE RATE US ON SPOTIFY AND SUPPORTS US VIA PATREON.
It’s. Just. Good. Storytelling.
All of this leads to TAL Episode 835 Children of Dave which is a fabulous listen of family stories– but the hook that walloped me was Ira Glass’s prologue about 1119 Bayard Street in Baltimore. Ira Glass describes how “1119” was the pin number wireless code his Dad used, named for the Baltimore neighbourhood where his grandfather, Isadore ran a neighborhood store.
Hold the bus, again! My mom’s family grew up at 710 Aisquith Street in Baltimore, where her father was a shoemaker. She always claimed 710 was her lucky number, she won a few times on small lottery prizes. Could my family have been neighbor’s of Ira Glasses ancestors? Alas no, Google maps showed they were an hour’s walk apart.
But there’s more. Glass talks about how he was named after his great grandfather, Isadore.
I’m actually named for my great grandfather, Isadore Friedlander. My parents chose Ira instead of Isadore because Isadore Glass is a parsable English sentence– “Is a door glass?” My mom once told me that they picked Ira over the alternatives because it sounded less Jewish to them, which just goes to show how completely, utterly Jewish their entire world was back then.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/835/transcript
Holy moly– I was named after my father’s father, Abraham, but my mom thought that was a little too old fashioned, and she updated it to Alan.
I of Abraham
So I have just coincidental similarities to the host of the best radio show on the net. Shrug. But what is not shrug is the powerful means Glass describes this bit of scratching the old photos to hear the murmurs of the past, when his parents and visiting family would make their pilgrimage to 1119 Bayard Street.
I always found those trips disappointing. We’d take a picture and hang around there on the sidewalk. It’s not a store anymore. It’s just somebody’s house. It doesn’t look like anything. A rowhouse in a block of rowhouses. At some point a few years ago, somebody painted a cheerful Christian mural on one side of the building with a quote from the Book of Mark.
Every time I’ve gone to 1119 Bayard and stood on the sidewalk, I’ve tried to picture it, my family there long ago, Frieda in her 30s, at the cash register against her will, my dad as a little boy, opening boxes and putting stuff on shelves. I’m not great at that kind of thing. It’s like trying to summon ghosts with a Ouija board, and the little pointer refuses to budge.
We’ve all got these spots from our family’s past, and we go to them. And they’re like Civil War battlefields that have been washed of blood long ago. We pause there and look at the trees and the grassy fields. And we want– what? Some connection to something. I am who I am partly because of this place. But now it’s mute.
So we take a selfie and try to tune into the past, like a distant radio station whose signal we can just barely make out.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/835/transcript
That’s me in trying to parse what bits I can find of old family and friends now gone stories, as those who knew them are gone. Yes, I want “some connection to something. I am who I am partly because of this place. But now it’s mute.”
I know exactly where to tune into This American Life, not at all a distant radio station signal. That’s something to grasp onto as the rest of the internet sinks into — oh stop me from ending this on a downer note. Try this photo I found at my sister’s house, it’s my namesake grandfather where all I know is by some handwriting of the name of a lake, and a year which tells me he was only 32.
Abe At Kauneonga Lake flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)I can just hear the crackly sounds of that distant radio station.
Featured image: Composite of two of my own photos– My Initials flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) and Abraham Levine Styling flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) so together they end up as (CC0)
Claims of technical death are always overrated, but in the hell mell rush and glee for the synthetic cartoon garish sadly robotic “style” of generative AI imagery I for one remain thrilled by the small acts of thanks.
These acts are “generated” from the closing in (if I can catch up on the backlog) of some 72000 photos I have shared under predominately CC0 in flickr since 2004. The burst of microjoy is when a message like this hits the inbox:
I wanted to thank you for putting images on Flickr’s public domain. It’s so helpful to others who are in need of images. I used one of them today and wanted to share the post with you: https://cycleforward.substack.com/p/creating-a-new-we
email from Amy Camp https://www.cycleforward.org/
if I am summarizing as I do with my human eye, Amy consults and writes about “trail towns”, communities and trail tourism. For this post she made use of this photo taken on a long ago visit to colleague Mariana Funes, who took me on a walk with her dog and introduced me to a neighbour, Malcolm.
As Neighbors Do flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)As I remember it, Malcolm allowed walkers and school kids in the community to “trespass” on his land — his expression was a genuine “The world’s made better by sharing.”
Despite that many people don’t really give flickr much of a fair shake (it’s 21 web years old and has never broken its own API) a very subtle feature ofhttps://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/40785461135/in/photostream/ a link to a single photo is you can navigate forward and backward in time from there, like a time stroll, to see what else was photographed the time around it.
So I can enjoy the smile of this fine person I met
Farmer Malcolm flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)and also recall that fine stick chasing spirit of Colin, aka Gif-a-dog
Colin Wants the Big Stick flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)I just have to again mention my fascination with the CC0 public domain dedication (see Nate Angell, I know better than to call it a license). Most creators avoid it like “that means anyone can take my stuff and make a million dollars on it” thinking of Creative Commons not as a vehicle to enable sharing, but wanting it to be some cloak of protection.
But worse, I read again and again when people “teaching” or “training” about open licenses as describing public domain or all the stuff from Unsplash/Pexels/et al like “you can use it for free and you do not even have to give attribution.”
I will argue to my last non ChatGPT authored breath that that is a minimum condition- why would you ever not choose to attribute the use if some other’s work? It offers a means for a reader/viewer to find related works, but more importantly, attribution is a means of saying thank you. It’s human gratitude, not just license compliance, that matters. Or–
If Anyone Gets My Concept of Public Domain, It’s Musicians
My motto is ABA- Always Be Attributing — whether I “have to or not” and even if I am attributing garish synthimages of robots on horses. It’s a small crowd, of like maybe, none, who go along with that.
So I go back to Amy who found and used my image. She could have grabbed, downloaded, and moved on to writing. But she not only took the effort to attribute the image (see the post) but she tracked down my email and sent a message of thanks.
That’s the web I came here for.
Featured Image:
I am a Professional Photographer flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
I have a thing for cactuses… grammatically I ought to say “cacti” but that always sounds high brow.
What did I know of them as a kid growing up in Baltimore? Nada. Maybe as cartoon scenery in Road Runner cartoons, and cliché background props of western movies.
Here at our acreage in Saskatchewan, in the front yard is a rock garden, with bits of rusted old tools and implements, and amongst them a thriving garden of prickly pear and ball cacti, all of which grow quite well here. For spring time planting, Cori surprised me with two new Opuntia and with a good bit of unusual frequent rain, have already busted into showy, short lived, one day flower blooms.
Still Pretty and Prickly flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)My unalgorithmic memory went back to a photo I recalled taking when I lived in Phoenix, and had shoved some found pads of prickly pear into the rocky soil. Yes, flickr has that photo, which was posted 20 years ago (cough, love flickr, why do more people not appreciate its longevity and value? just try to find your own old photos in Instasham, happy long scrolling).
I am fairly sure this was a photo taken with this stuff called “film” and digitized with a flatbed scanner. I recall marveling at its detail, even to seeing bits of pollen flecks.
Pretty Prickly flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)I moved to Arizona in 1987 to attend graduate school and selected it primarily for being an environment most atypical of what I had known growing up in Maryland.
The Sonoran desert grabbed my interest from the very first drive into the blob of Phoenix, coming down that descent from the high country near Flagstaff. I felt almost at ease seeing the first saguaro silently greeting me on the drop on I-17 south of Cordes Junction, a dramatic drop in elevation to Black Canyon City.
The desert was not at all desolate, it was wonderous, and I learned to crave the Spring time show when a little bit of rain created a show of wild flowers and big bursty ones on pricky pear, hedgehog, and of course the big grand saguaro.
That a species could adapt the harsh elements of desert heat, drought, and here in Saskatchewan, winter sleeps of -40º (either scale will do here). And then they put on a show of beauty.
I continually tease my Kamloops friends for their assertions that because there are cactus growing there (high desert prickly pear, their range will boggle your mind), that somehow they are part of some remote northern reach of the Sonoran desert. All of this is based on the claims of a brochure from a golf course. This is really just a joke I like to “poke” with and also in love for our dear friend now passed, Irwin Devries, because he was most adamant about promoting this falsehood. For Irwin, I will let him hang on to his Sonoran dreams eternally.
I’ve seen cacti in New Zealand, Australia (thanks Michael for your photo), even the very southern tip of Canada in Point Pelee.
I found cacti to be easily transportable/transplantable. Literally, you can cut (carefully) a pad of prickly pear, shove it in the ground, and with a little bit of water (in case the sky does not provide), it not only survives, but grows. I took cacti from Phoenix and planted them in the 6000ft elevation of Strawberry, watched them live through snow, flower, even bear fruit I made into jelly.
We go out to key places here in Saskatchewan (not revealing), to “borrow” found cacti, and bring them home.
They are beautiful and tough and the same time, and don’t ask much of anyone.
Be more cactus.
Featured Image: Composite of two of my own flickr photos, posted more than 20 years apart- Pretty Prickly flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) (2004) and Still Pretty and Prickly flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) (2024)
I’m feeling that reach of my Dad’s smile, from across time.
One of the best photos I spotted while visiting my sister in April was this gem of Dad holding his first son, my brother David. Could there be a more apt Dad smile?
Dad and David flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)This is all more meaningful to note that my brother was born without enough oxygen at birth, rendering his brain undeveloped and a life of that stinging name of “mental retardation.” This being my parent’s very first child, that you can see was loved with full intent. Could a man not be more proud to be a dad, and can that joy not be more reflected in his son? Could he not me more in the moment?
And it was that same Dad smile I remember from the old family 8mm silent movies, where I make my first appearance as the fourth child. The clip is Dad wearing that same smile holding baby me next to him in that old green hammock. The smile then later widening even more to see him silently mouth, “Say Cheese.”
The smiles reach to our Father’s Day here today, visiting Cori’s Dad, who shines her with the his own powerful Dad smile, and transmits a love you can just see, and spreads it my way too.
The Dad Smile, it’s a thing.
Happy Dad’s Day, to the Smiling Dads everywhere.
Featured Image: Two family photos, one smiling Dad.
I can’t use my favorite words “share” and “open” too much, though these days… well, I will skip the droll comments. There, its twice in the title.
This post started and is mostly (at least when I start writing, I tend to wander) about sharing [openly] a very nifty service / feature / tool for sharing to the expanding range of federated services, that was crafted by Ben Werdmuller, whom I’ve been lucky to blog/social media/in person cross paths with, going way back to the days of elgg and later known. Ben blogs with a high rate of frequency like a good dog and I picked up on this sharing thing by following him in mastodon.
I’ve had my own small forays into mastodon sharing, from the ways I have set up my blog to share new posts automatically, to some sharing capability I’ve added to a few web sites, to also simple tools from sharing any web page. What’s come out of this is considering first that saying “share to the fediverse” sounds simple, it’s in many ways a multitude of modes/ways of sharing.
The kinds of tools/features we’ve seen added to sites, end up being some kind of smorgasbord of icons to specific services. What may not be readily apparent, or for that matter, even meaningful, is that using a means to share to a single social media service that allows it, ends up being relatively easy as it is known which site it goes to, and how to pass the information through a url parameter. It’s a single approach (unless they decided to not allow it).
For anyone to share something to their Mastodon account, doing this is easy as adding to the URL for their instance or server, the parameter /share?text=blahblahblah — so I can build links, buttons, bookmarklets letting me share on my specific server
You cannot however make this a general service for anyone else, since there are many possible urls out there to route it through. It’s easily done, but it’s just one more step needed to allow someone to specify where to share, and some way for their browser to remember this.
That’s a lot of mumbo jumbo pre-amble, but says much about the difference of working with just one single social media provider to a system of many possibilities.
So to stretch this out, let me first jump to ShareOpenly, then my own bit of fiddling to do this myself, and then a bit of consideration of what/how is meant by sharing to the fediverse.
Shine the Light on ShareOpenlyI recall Ben posting there a question polling about fediverse sharing apps/services –more than Mastodon, allowing sharing to multiple federated services, or as Ben blogged
You know all those “share to Facebook” / “share to Twitter” links you see all over peoples’ websites? They’re all out of date.
Social media has evolved over the last year, yet nobody has “share to” links for Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, etc. There have been a few attempts to create “share to Mastodon” buttons, but they haven’t taken the larger breadth of the new social media landscape into account.
So I’ve built a prototype, which I’ve called ShareOpenly.
https://werd.io/2024/share-openly
Indeed the answer to Ben was, the one I always like seeing, “I’ll build one myself”. It’s a fully open service running now at https://shareopenly.org/ And there is now also a WordPress plugin — I’m glad I delayed on building one myself, it’s now running on my blog here at the bottom of every post.
C’mon, give it a try, share my post, please! Look for the link with the icon at the bottom of this post. Or go manual, you can even make a link to do a share. On following that, ShareOpenly will let you enter which fediverse server to use, or add your own instance (which is remembered as an option the next time you do this).
The fabulous thing here is that this opens more doors than thinking of sharing to the fediverse as just mastodon. See?
That was the direction I first went with on my own projects, thinking solely of Mastodon.
My Share to Mastodon FiddlingI have used on other sites projects a great service, MastodonShare (blogged here first as Mastodon Link Play) of which I also have my own bookmarklet tool I use while roaming the web for sharing sites I find to Mastodon. This means I can share anything I come across, to my Mastodon stream. I use it often for sharing my flickr photos.
If you are bookmarklet aware you can drag this Toot! link to your browser bar or make use of the code:
javascript:(function(e,t)%7Bwindow.open("https://mastodonshare.com/share?url=%22+encodeURIComponent(e.location.href)+%22&text=%22+encodeURIComponent(e.document.title)+%22¬e=%22+encodeURIComponent(%22%22+e.getSelection()?e.getSelection():e.document.getSelection?e.document.getSelection():e.document.createRange().text)+%22&v=1.1%22,%22\_blank%22);%7D)(window)
Let’s say I am reminiscing the taste of old Baltimore I sampled in April, a flickr photo of the codfish cake or “coddie” at the Essen house I can only click generate a share link I can zap to my Mastodon:
Yummy, eh?
I also was able to add MastodonShare as a means of link sharing on the OEG Connect Discourse community using the Social Share component with my own settings – there is a more detailed post on how this works in OEG Connect though recently I have now replaced it with ShareOpenly.
And I also have added sharing buttons using MastodonShare to my fleet of silly random generators. because who would not want to share to Mastodon Woopty do!
Let’s say I generate a nifty EdTech Metaphor (the original generator based on Martin Weller’s first one), look, I can share to Mastodon or some other weird network:
And look! I just did this in one click to the best sharing option (note for the most part I have removed the connection to the service I will only call Twitter; I set my generators with options to let you decided to use one, both, or neither).
Tooted it just now!
It is possible to offer a share to mastodon button/link without the use of an outside service, it can be stand alone, I had to do this to have a button to create a response to the DS106 Daily Create because– now I forget? There was some kind of problem with URL encoding the message with MastodonShare. Did I blog it? I must have I cannot find it. But I know I used the Share on Mastodon code found in GitHub.
So for a recent Daily Create number 4536 there is a button you can use that starts a response with all the stuff needed to post.
Just to show you it works:
All of these achieve the sharing to fediverse through some means to first let a user specify to what service/URL they wish to post through, and having it saved in a browser via local or web storage — a much simpler and less slimy means than browser cookies.
The Ways of SharingMy experience in these bits of playing around suggest when we say sharing to social media, its one of a few variations of how and why.
- I want to share my own stuff to my fediverse account automatically when published (pushing my stuff to my accounts). For say WordPress, this is now something a lot of folks are doing via the ActivityPub plugin which turns your WordPress site into its own fediverse instance. Sort of. I tried that when it first came out, but then put it aside, but have comeback to it again. The thing that does not work for me is that my blog is me and I really want it blogging to my main Mastodon, not some things of its own. I ended up and still use my gizmo means of using IFTTT or make.com to monitor RSS feeds and then having it post to my Mastodon feed of choice.
- I want to make it easy for visitors to my site to share my posts to their own Fediverse account (pushing my stuff to other accounts). That’s where ShareOpenly shines. Especially now with the WordPress plugin. But you can also achieve this on any web site with MastodonShare or likely a fleet of other services. Or just do it all within a site using Mastodon Share (that’s a different one, the stand along code).
- I want to be able to share anything I find to my fediverse account (sharing almost anything from a URL). I don’t hear much of this, but I do it frequent, can can be done as a browser bookmarklet using ShareOpenly or MastodonShare.
Share / Shrug ?This is most likely more nuts and bolts than anyone cares about. It’s a good lesson why I stand by my poem of Get Federated – it’s the internet DNA of not being fixed to a single provider for sharing and also that we have an array of tools we can use of the shelf, like ShareOpenly or MastodonShare, and without going too deep into the geek programming world, bend them to our own sharing use cases.
Well, at least that’s how I see it.
And ShareOpenly breaks the door even wider than sharing to Mastodon, and I intend to be using it to update some of my examples listed above. Thanks Ben for demonstrative and elegant means of sharing.
Give it a whirl below via the icon link. And do more sharing openly.
Featured Image: One of mine! For some reason, I do not need to use Generative AI when I have photos with almost all the metaphors I ever need. This from a time of construction at the Vancouver Art Museum, the message of Art Makes Us Share contradicted by the Keep out sign. Sharing seems simple, but sometimes….
The Contradiction of Sharing flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
The stream of posts here trying to find the threads back my family stories is less about mourning and loss, but more of, to me, the importance of retelling stories of people and things that are no more.
I waver if somehow I am getting some kind of cross wiring of James Bond movies, is it you only live twice or do we just live and let die? One should not find philosophical meaning in pop culture, but hey, thats what I was fed on. I digress. Let’s put 007 aside.
Not too buried in the memory banks (well except for missing the source) was something a person I forgot told me long ago, and look, see how memory is not at all a computer hard drive. Now this is my imperfectly recorded but indelibly recallable memory.
This person relayed an experience of living with or spending extended time with a family in central Mexico. This family had a tradition of gathering around a wall of family photos, ones who had passed on, and retelling the stories of the time grandmother survived this bizarre circumstance or Aunt so-and so traveled here ton her own to do that. Often the stories were told for the little ones who were born after these people had died.
This person was told in the local culture, there was the understanding of people experiencing three deaths. First is the physical death, when the body stops to function. The second death happens when the body is buried with a service or gathering. But here is the key– the true and third death was when people stopped retelling someone’s stories.
This shred of a retold experience has gotten woven into the way I not only think of family, but the key act of retelling the stories in ways I have learned, with text, audio, photos, and a flourish of maybe imagined detail.
I have tried in vain to find any source of this idea of the three deaths and that the final death is when one’s stories are not told. My internet so-called sleuthing yields restatements, even by rap musicians, but no real source.
I have found many attributions to Hemingway having “said it” but I did not find anyplace Ernest wrote it.
Every man has two deaths, when he is buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name.
Ernest Hemingway, according to many blog posts, reddit threads, quotes collection
This quote is from a book by David Eagleman, self stated “Neuroscientist, Author, Technologist, Entrepreneur” TED talker, etc.
There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
David M. Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives quote from Goodreads
Did Eagleman make this up? Did he recraft it? Did he source it (I do not have access to the book) Other books say it’s the opening to one of his chapters.
Here is another iteration, by rapper Macklemore
I heard you die twice, once when they bury you in the grave, And the second time is the last time that somebody mentions your name
Macklemore “Glorious” (lyrics) (video)
He rapped it, did he cite it? Well, let’s give applause for annotation, a raft of information found on this lyric at genius—
In an interview with The Breakfast Club, Macklemore said that this line was actually inspired by his wife while he was revising the song at the dinner table.
Annotation contributed by user “Eva” and “JBLO” in genius
This annotation yields more iterations, no “source”– oh yes, Mrs. Mackelmore? The annotation mentions Eagleman’s book, cited above and another one from psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom, certainly expressing the sentiment:
Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead – when I exist in no one’s memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies, too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?
Irvin D. Yalom, in his book Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy.
And also worth mentioning and usually coming up in reddit is reference to Banksy, who is repeated, but where cited?
I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.
Banksy “said” this according to many redittors. Sure, it sounds like “him”
It’s likely a much older and unsourcable saying, I have caught references to Ancient Eqypt and also lore in Africa.
In the end (well the current one), finding a true source is elusive, impossible, maybe irrelevant, but also fun.
If it’s said enough it feels true, right? Less than where it came from is more the idea of finding value/meaning in it. This is what drives me to write here, in my blog, not someone else’s free rental space which will certainly not likely make it to the first death.
But it’s also that act of writing, re-writing not just stories, but everything, that reifies its “breath” if you will. I plan to keep doing that, til at least one of the deaths, but FFS do not dump my stuff into an LLM to keep parroting me. That is death right away.
If anyone know more sources or versions, I am keen to know.
UpdatesGo team fediverse!
I had to look up Coco (Wikipedia, YouTube) but absolutely, here’s the same story, wrung through the Pixar recipe book. The connection of my original hearing of this as a tale from Mexico is clearly aligned with Día de los Muertos.
Featured Image: I shudder to think of the crap imagery I’d get resorting to GenAI. I don’t need that when I have my own and can find ones created by real people. This one has a story too, at least one of these, if not more, were thee wooden spoons from my mom’s kitchen. I can retell that to myself each time I pick one up and stir something up.
Three Spoons flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
It’s meaningful to me even if “nobody” blogs anymore, these things still work as generators of potential serendipity.
Earlier this year, I rummaged through some old photos, online databases, exploring what small shreds I could find about my mother’s brother, my Uncle Harvey. I have the barest warm glow shreds of memories his wife, my Aunt Doris, but no photos, and getting AI to generate something was just pitiful cartoon goo.
Finding (not generating) Stories of Aunt Doris
But as the internet turns, an interesting thing happened. Another post a few months earlier shared more memories and old photos honoring my Mom’s youngest, and now only surviving sibling, my Aunt Dorothy. Quite unexpectedly, that post got a comment (who out there in blog geritol lan remembers blog comments?) from my cousin Susan, who I liekly have not seen in close to 45 or 50 years!
Let’s navigate the tree- Susan was the oldest daughter of Mom’s older sister, Ruth. I remembered her a bit as an artist, drawing and painting, and loving books. That’s about it!
We began emailing, and as I had just visited my oldest sister in April, where one night we looked through her own box of old photos.I had found one of all my cousins on that side of the family, posing for some event. Look at the kids, with the full range of expression,
Cousins from my Mom’s side of the family. In the back, left to right is Barry,Linda, Albert, and Susan (Albert was son of Aunt Dinah, the others are children of Aunt Ruth). In the front are my sisters Judy and Harriet, and from my Aunt Dorothy, my cousins Frannie, Hank, and Jane in front)I recognize the abstract painting in the back as one of Aunt Dorothy’s I saw when I visited in 2012 so guess this is at her house. Since I am not here, I’d guess the date as 1963 or earlier.
But then in an email and photo exchange with cousin Susan, she shared a photo her Mom’s photo album had of the adults of these kids posing in the same place, and written on it was the caption that the gathering was for wedding of Harvey and Doris. Susan confirms this took place at our Aunt’s home.
The adult counterpart to the kids images, my parents on the left, and other of mom;s siblings and parents on either side of Doris and Harvey, bride and groom. I appreciate that my Aunt Ruth added labels for all.So thanks to the re-connection to cousin Susan, who found me via this blog, I now have at least one photo of my Aunt Doris that I sought, very grainy, but a photo nonetheless. I can’t say it’s how I remember her (which is not at all), but is certainly more desirable in fuzzy grainy old photos than what generative AI goo shat out.
Doris Cohen and Harvey Herondorf on their wedding day, likely 1964.The last bit of irony was getting a message from my sister Judy, the same week I re-connected with my cousin, that she ran into her while shopping at Costco.
I cannot give credit to my blog, that’s just real serendipity.
Yes, my little bits of family photo-sleuthing is pretty minor on the scale of say, climate change or AI bromeisters, but to me, it just rings that little bell of reminder that we can take ownership of our small corners of the internet, toss something out there, and let coincidence work some magic.
Featured Image: Composite by my of cropped versions of he photo of family members shown in this blathering blog post.
Oh my, the Ai sauce is oozing from Google’s search, for which many are predicting the Fu of Google Search is gone. Yeah, it’s a mess, but frankly, I still have my fleet of hone bookmarklet gizmos and customized search engines that I still get effective use out of.
Quite a few of the wrenches and ratchets in my web toolbox go long long back to a time I recal Jon Udell speaking to some students, educators at Virginia Tech in a session Gardner Campbell had orchestrated. In his every so insightful way, Jon stressed the literacy of reading web URLs especially for the search parameters, all that gobbledy gook s=yackack&gist=988 stuff after a ? — that with such literacy, you can literally program / change the results of the link.
All this came back today when I saw Fredrik Graver’s post:
The Ars Technica article provides a magic wrench like twist to google’s search to shut off all of its AI suggested crap just by adding a `&udm=14`` to a search result.
I had to try it out.
The “new google” search for a particular breed of dog, half of which is in my pal Felix, presents what they think we need/want. As Clara Peller might bellow, “where’s the results?”, where just by adding a &udm=14 to the URL changes everything.
The “new” google search for Catahoula buries the damn results!Look at that! Add a few letters to a web address, and vanquish the new search cruft to get the traditional, old skool, list of result links.All nifty indeed, but of course, who besides me and maybe a small number of web heads would be bothered to manually enter google URLs, which frankly, are pretty unreadable even to someone who has that literacy.
That’s where what the Ars Technica article suggests to create a custom shortcut to do the work as by a “managed search engine” (works in Chrome, Firefox, maybe even Safari). This has been in my arsenal since maybe 2013, when I learned this from Chris Lott during a workshop in Fairbanks, Alaska.
For the Holidays, The Gift of Time
I have a fleet of these in my browsers, so one more is in the toolbox. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to find where in their browser preferences this nugget lives —the Ars Technica post gets you close but heck I guess all the cool kids now just ask ChatGPT.
Here is mine:
Adding a site search to nuke Google’s AI stuff.There are three field to edit:
- Name is just a label ao you know what it is when listed with all your other custom searches, but it also appears in the browser bar when you use it. Enter any name you like.
- Shortcut is just a code you can remember to use when you want to invoke this, I followed the suggestion from Ars Technica for “gw” being “google web”. Again, it does not matter what you use.
- URL with %s in place of query This is where you need to be specific, You can make one of these for any web search that has keywords in the URL for search results. Usually I get the search working like how I want (often searching for “dog”, go figure) and then I just copy the URL and replace “dog” with “%s”– which is just a placeholder for whatever keywords you want to search on when you call up this magic genie.
Now you get to play. Go to your browser’s URL display. Enter your shortcut (“gw”) and press TAB. Boom, you should see the name of your search thingie. Then type one or more keywords, and press RETURN (or ENTER)- you should then get the old style Google search results. The steps look like:
A nifty thing is that you can then add more keywords in the results display to modify a search, and it keeps the old skool search layout.
Figure this stuff out, and you will impress your friends, families, co-workers, random dudes in coffee shops, etc.
I can’t say how long this will work. But Google cannot mask it’s URLs, it can obfuscate them or change them, but all search results have the full set of query parameters in the displayed URL.
Speaking of Google Changing It’s GameOn of my finer and oft used URL tricks I foist on Google (like the really feel it!) is how I can make an google image search forced to give me results that are Creative Commons Licensed
Forcing Google’s Image Search to Provide CC Licensed Results by Default
I initiate this the same way as above, a different search shortcut (I use “gcc”) that has the search parameter for making it a CC licensed set of results. But I recently noticed it stopped working! With some fiddling, I found that they changed the URL parameter for CC licensed results that was before “tbs=il:cl” is now “tbs=sur:cl”.
This is what Google does, it pulls the tools from you and changes the way their products work. Previously a search for images had a parameter of “&tbm=isch” but now it looks like it uses “&udm=2” — I modified my special keyword shortcut for google images that return results only licensed for Creative Commons
And that’s how you use your own wrenches to make google do what you want (for now). Just fit the open end of the wrench on the parameter string and remember “lefty loosy, righty tighty”
Featured Image: My own photo with my own remixing, no GenAI poop. Why Do Tools Get a Bad Rap? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) modified by pasting in a long google image search URL and masking the tools in photoshop
The web as whatever we thought we knew it is all going to poop, eh? I don’t disagree about the large parts of it most see on an every day basis. I do wonder though how much we can make these grand assumptions when so many un-explored bits and crevices exist out there that are not covered by the same media stories we repost.
I have started tagging in my old school one person social bookmarking space the small glints of light as smallweb which I have duct taped flowing into the fediverse.
The web is out there. You just need to look in the corners, scrape through the goo.
Anyhow, wading into the waters possible labeled NOSTALGIA AHEAD, it is not for the looking back to the web past, but seeing it in the now.
This week I dropped in to listen to a futures session from the University of Regina’s Open Education Bootcamp, pretty much as this was a gathering organized by folks I have known long, hosted by Alec Couros and featuring Stephen Downes, Valerie Irvine, Brian Lamb, and David Wiley. The gang!
In passing, Brian flattered me with his story while teaching in Mexico of learning HTML from a free web tutorial… that I had made, this was long before we knew each other and collaborated so much, we found my work through the web. This was maybe the first public web thing I ever made, the Writing HTML tutorial I created as a young instructional technologist at the Maricopa Community Colleges (backstory blogged somewhere).
It’s long disappeared from the original web server, but when I left my job there I took all my web assets on a hard drive, and so the old thing lives on my own domain at https://mcli.cogdogblog.com/tut/ – while it bears a Creative Commons License now, those did not exist in 1994. The power I saw in HTML was you could pack up any web page and move it somewhere else, or share from an old floppy disk. The web was portable.
I made this for a workshop I did at Maricopa, but it made sense to me then to put the entire thing on the web, and in that way, anyone could use it. There was a feel free to make a copy but please attribute statement on it – and that on its own spawned people to make translations into Spanish, Italian, French, and even Icelandic.
Enough about that.
The thing was Brian just mentioned this, I added to the chat simply “and its still on the web”: but did not drop the URL. But Shauna the host went and found one maybe from a university in Minnesota. I thought about piping in with my “official” link, but why? I did not need to.
Later out of curiosity, I dumped into the search box (maybe the last waning days of relying on Google search before it all goes to AI goo) “Writing HTML” “maricopa” and its rather startling, humbling to see how many places around the world, left ignored, unvisited on so many web servers, is my little piece of web work.
This is not to brag, I do that enough here, well hack, maybe I am. But its more this clanging siren that by the simple act of just giving away this chunk of content for free, it has lodged into so many corners of the web, like wild flowers. Even if my web site crumbles and the internet archive’s lights go out, it just will live on.
Smoking Dandelion flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)I cannot extrapolate my premise experience to everything, but I have found in so many times, if you make something reusable (ideally useful too), package it so its self contained, and give it away, you do not have to worry about it disappearing from the web. The web is archiving my stuff in an organic way.
It’s like enabling little seeds of the small web that carried in the wind.
Sure you can hoard and protect your stuff. In one fragile place. I’d rather let my stuff go.
Featured Image: From a photo I took yesterday for a free local newspaper box and in the background screenshot of the Writing HTML tutorial found all over the dusty web.
I was thinking about calling yet never got around to it.
For months, I had been getting word by direct message via my friend @pumpkiny- screenshots of Facebook posted photos shared by Carl Berger, typical scenes of St George, details of a bird, and light. Always seeing light (she knows I am not inside Facebook).
Alas, her most recent message was dreaded one, that Carl Berger’s life camera had stopped.
I knew from earlier shared messages his health was not good. I did see a few of his photos show up on his flickr account, as always, he was experimenting with some new geek technology- a Paper Shoot camera. I commented on a few, sent emails, but gathered his attention and energy might have been low. But he kept taking photos, the last one I saw was uploaded to Flickr April 15.
I’ve already written of what Carl Berger meant to me, the influence he was on my career, his genuine interest as an experience educator, and just how we loved to geek out together. He was a tech supporter/enthusiast, but never for technology’s sake, he was always interested in how people learn.
Mr Tech Support flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)Wow my memory post of my interactions with Carl was more than a year ago.
Little Cameras. Gigapan(oramas). Big Hearts.
I wrote that “time is essencing” but again I lost track of it. I am most grateful and fortunate to have the visits to his St George home in 2010 and 2015, our photo treks to Zion National Park and Snow Canyon State Park, and mostly, just the earnest conversations.
From my 2015 visit I remember how we were sitting in his living room and, curious as he was, he asked my about what was my heavy involvement in the digital storytelling world DS106 and specifically, DS106radio. I suggested, of course, that we go live and have a conversation, using from those old days, the Nicecast desktop broadcasting software.
We scored the high mark of zero listeners, but I did record the conversation, and I am fortunate to be able to have a bit of Carl’s voice forever. I wish I would have called him in the last months, but cherish this.
I send my deepest regrets to Carl’s wife Shari and the rest of his family. He was a great spirit, curious, eager to listen, infectious with his excitement, and just one fine human I was lucky to get to go out and take pictures of rocks and flowers together.
Stalking the Perfect Photo flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) licenseEven at 79 on our last outing to Snow Canyon State Park, Carl was out there chasing the light, climbing the sandstone, living fully.
There he goes. Always.
Where in the Sandstone is Carl Berger? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
Featured Image: From our last photo time together in St George, Utah. Always loving being behind the camera, I miss you Carl. The Eye of Carl Berger flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
Today’s Daily Create made me do it! That listicle glorifying title would never have gotten past my clumsy on the keyboard fingertips.
I was sent to Portent Title Generator to randomly generate a title about DS106. to put in a title. Yes, I deploy the Creative Tool No Artist or Writer Should be Without in May 2024 (a textbox and a button) and the magic creativity of Artificial Bullshittery gave me a blog post title, and now I am supposed to write a post?
Heck look at the excessive use of plural and also the negligent absence of hashtags– “Portent” is not important.
This is not how we do things around here, and I refuse to comply. The answer is effing obvious for anyone who has been a part of, sniffed the history of, or just stood on the sidelines in mock confusion, about DS106 now 13 years into to the web game, and sill kicking.
Protesting in old photos, non-generatively cropped out of the world by me. I won’t write blog posts with Generated Titles.
May Day Protest (how effective was this in 2010?) flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)STOP THE PINES (“another failed protest”) flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) licenseHowling My Innocence (Felix protesting his innocence despite being surrounded by incriminating evidence) flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)But this counts for the DS106 Daily Create, if anyone is counting, Maybe Todd Conaway is?
Featured Image: Look at these Arizona Paid Protestors flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I bet they are going to be paid again in 2024.
There is a myth. Cue the string section.
That there was once a place for all to gather, share, be festive, develop new connections, every course a hashtag, topple a few governments, people power.
Then came an evil billionaire who ruined it all, those who gathered were cast out, a diaspora.
No end.
Yes the Musky One was/is a horrible scourge, but all he did was hasten a decline. The birdhouse he bought was already uwinding in the mid 2010s with more algorithim cruft, more ads, more malfeasents. In my 2016 year end post, having been one of the world’s stupefied witness to the script of a reaility show election right out of the Black Mirror
My primary social space, Twitter, for many of my friends is now a place to avoid, or quit. People are huddling in other new spaces or just poising to exit.
“This is beginning to be the end of Twitter for me. Nothing we
say here matters and it is all a waste of time.— Intrepidteacher (@intrepidteacher) December 21, 2016
https://cogdogblog.com/2016/12/year-of-the-d-o-g/
It’s too simple, too convenient to scapegoat it all on that smelly tyrant, the reason for the dispersion is we dispersed. And it’s not a platform thing, it’s that thing in our hands.
Think of all the messaging places your attention goes into. It’s not a criticism, I am there too.
There’s no turning it back. I did make my best attempt at the OER24 conference, in my end of conference Gasta session. Heck I sported a nifty t-shirt. I was serious!
Get Federated Got Gasta-Ed
Still, it’s not really an answer, there are no technical solutions. I did see a that conference when people would put their contact slides up,”You can find me on X, Threads, Mastodon, Blusky, Purple Onion Peel” (okay I wen to far).
Frankly for me, I am not interested in being in all the spaces. One is enough. I can accept a good amount OMO.
Accept the distributed, disaggregated ness of it all. And really stop looking external for the place, and get back, get back, jojo, to that place you used to blog.
Of course, my advice is just for me, go seek the One Tent to Rule Them All. There never was a single place and there sure as heck will not be.
(swoon of the string section here)
Reprise / Coda / Forgotten StuffI left many things out that were in my brain at one point. One is that what we have here is a classic Pogo problem, a reference I guess few know, and I won’t ask ChadGPT to barf out flowery text to elucidate. I made this long ago for maybe a presentation or likely just to make bird noises in the bird place that once had another name:
With apologies– no thanks to Walt Kelly, most likely a violation, but I cling to my rught to do parody.But more, I left out a large bit of my own part in this, plus seeing a decline o almos evaporation of views and comments here on the old blog. I get a fraction of the former and a fraction of a fraction of the latter. It’s no surprise that people have taken their publishing to the newsletter format, where i gets shoved into inboxes.
Not that attention is my purpose or goal, but really, there is so much more stuff out there, that we are swimming in it. But heck, a small but of validation goes a long way, and I don’t see much by some heart click icon. I was not just bird thing, but the et al, that have pulled attention to other places (do people still talk about an “attention economy”?).
Also rare, yet treasured even more thes days, are comments in my flickr stream. I forget this has been noy only an outlet for my photographic habit, still noting that composing a photograph is an act of deletion of everything in the world outside the frame. Whereas spitting at a GenAI image is an act of dumping the soup of everything into a frame.
I digress.
And thus, in the next fill in the blank span of ime, I’m rethinking where I spend my attention budget.
Featured Image: My photo of a conference venue in Canberra, Australia, 2007. At the time, I was raving about the potential of a silly networking app named after birds. Lecture Hall flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
Me and Dad were but 5 days apart on the birthday calendar, aand today, were he here, I’d be calling to tease and say, “How is 98 feel Dad?”
There’d be that pause and a throaty left, with something like in reply, “Not bad at all, Junior.”
I had a good round of memory sifting a month ago when I took Cori to visit my home grounds Baltimore. My sister Judy hauled out a box of mostly unlabeled photos my dad’s mom had left her. We had lots of laughs and a number of puzzles trying to figure out who some of the photos were.
Those three of Dad in this post’s feature photo was him as a playful kid on likely an Atlantic City, New Jersey Beach, the middle also there with his younger sister, Eve, and their mother on the boardwalk– Dad maybe looking a little uncomfortable, and the one on the right, the dapper look likely in his high school or college days.
There’s much to be imagined, trying to guess where they were, or on what occasions. With no fact checking, we could just enjoy the vintage scenes.
My Dad’s family seemed to have done a lot with them, there were photos of them in front of an old propeller plane, maybe going to Florida to meet relatives, photos in parks or orchards. The assortment of photos is just whats left, in no way proportional to the places and times spent.
Levine Family, left to right , Dad as a teen?, his sister Eve, his Mom (my grandmother) glancing askance, his Dad (my grandfather I never knew) looking very Dad-like.The family house on Ridgewood Avenue in Baltimore, labeled 1949. My parents moved in Dad’s parents when my grandfather passed away. We moved away when I was 2, so only memories in old family photos and silent movies.My dad and his dads, all the dads. What do we know from the scene? We can only imagineHappy day of birth, old man! I always think of you smiling best on that Ocean City beach. You are 98 on the timeline scale, I can always hear your voice back there.
Featured Image: A college of old family photos seen at my sister’s home, just captured with quickly as snapshots on the phone. Photos of old photos.
I never thought I’d learn something from dumping paint.
Once upon a time when I was living in Arizona, I decided to do the right thing and dispose of my cans left over paint. The Gila County dump had a special collection day for disposing of paint, so I arrived with my box of various cans. I had no idea how paint was disposed, but its chemicals, so I imagined some kind of special container.
As it turns out, the three men standing around a large open vat gave me a lesson. They do not dispose paint, they just dump all those cans of Violet Indulgence, Daytona Salmon, California Haze etc together to produce… grey. All of the variety of colors mix dumped together produce what I called Highway Gray. And they told me they use this lovely color to paint over grafitti on highway bridges etc. All the colors mix to neutral.
Despite all of the bemoaning death of the web and cries of enshittification (which I echo), still on an almost daily basis, I experience the weirdest kind of accidental connections, what I have always called web serendipity, that are seemingly statistically improbable. Stuff you could not generate from a mechanism that mixes all of the internet together to a vat of grey goo.
Now about John McPhee.
My photo of my own book, eventually to be uploaded to flickr to bear a CC0 license.Sometime in my graduate school years in the Geology program at Arizona State University, I came across McPhee’s first book of geology and geologists, Basin and Range. It’s both an insight into the formations and landforms of the western US, a province in the sense of a region, a name for that topography used in Geology. But McPhee’s style is narrative through people, as he spends time in the field with geologists studying the region.
More storytelling than textbook. It’s about the people who make this their work, passion.
A morsel I always remember is McPhee’s describing that any time you see a golf course, its an effort anywhere in the world to replicate the geomorphology of Scotland.
I’ve had that book on my shelves a long time, but it might have been since the mid 1980s that I read it.
Books, like geology, sometimes just sit quietly for long stretches of time.
Yet, in one week, random links from two different social media entities, brought me back to the book. Both of these readings are from individual blogs. Both of them resonate with beautiful, crafted writing that is more than statistically stringing together text by some probability distribution. Both reference John McPhee.
First up is Death is a Feature by Doc Searls, that someone (maybe Tim Bray?) posted in Mastodon. Searls is in the class of early web wizards, maybe one of the first group of early bloggers.
As a great writer, notice the opening sentence (an exercise left for the one or two blog readers). It does not indicate where it is going.
The theme is that life, well and everything, comes from death:
To explain why life needs death, answer this: what do plastic, wood, limestone, paint, travertine, marble, asphalt, oil, coal, stalactites, peat, stalagmites, cotton, wool, chert, cement, nearly all food, all gas, and most electric services have in common?
They are all products of death. They are remains of living things or made from them.
Consider this fact: about a quarter of all the world’s sedimentary rock is limestone, dolomite and other carbonate rocks: remains of beings that were once alive. The Dolomites of Italy, the Rock of Gibraltar, the summit of Mt. Everest, all products of death.
https://doc.searls.com/2024/04/04/death-is-a-feature/
He goes on to use a quote from McPhee’s Annals of the Former World that iron, the basis of the modern age, came from dead things, the very first life forms of anaerobic bacteria that added oxygen to the atmosphere, allowing dissolved iron elements to become oxidized to produce the banded iron formations from which the civilization is still building from. “More than ninety percent of the iron ever mined in the world has come from Precambrian banded-iron formations.”
I had never read Annals of the Former World, so I was curious (as I always do when I can hover a link and see where it goes), and aimed to find what would likely be this book on McPhee’s own site, see http://www.johnmcphee.com/annals.htm
Except…
That link lands you on one of thos domain squatting sites, with links to tempt you ro various click bait web pages under a domain parking sludge pile.
If I read Searls right, from this link death, there should be something that arises from it. I go looking.
He does not seem to have his own site anymore, the most common find is a page on his publisher’s site. I bust out the Wayback machine to see whither the johnmcphee.com site went. Sure enough, I can find around 2013, his domain was set to redirect to his current site at macmillan.com. Another domain of one’s own bit the dust.
I can find McPhee’s own site back around 2011, and the archive looks like it can be traced back to 2000, a very old school style site.
My link chasing deflects from the brilliant read the Searls provides, he takes us on his own McPhee-ist tour of more geologic examples of how much of our world has come from what died, and a pessimistic view of how the “modern” world seems to be just burning itself out.
On the economic side, we spend down the planet’s principal, and fail to invest toward interest that pays off for the planet’s species. That the principal we spend has been in the planet’s vaults for millions or billions of years, and in some cases cannot be replaced, is of little concern to those spending it, which is roughly all of us.
https://doc.searls.com/2024/04/04/death-is-a-feature/
I leave it to any readers left to find the strong closing. This man can write, in colors that are far from Highway Goo Gray.
So I had that one nice throwback to McPhee. I thought I was done.
But then, for some reason I fail to remember, I actually logged back into Twitter (the platform I will only call Twitter), I think because I got a notification of a DM from my good friend Antonio (ciao! I owe you a reply!). I hardly look there any more, I just log out and leave it.
As weird luck goes, I spotted in my timeline (I guess the algorithm can deliver, but I wont give it credit), I saw a tweet (that’s what they are) from Nate Angell referencing maybe what is one of the most brain stirring bits of writing I have looked at in a while. This is On Opening Essays, Conference Talks, and Jam Jars by someone named Maggie Appleton, with an alluring subtitle “How to open pieces of narrative non-fiction writing, conference talks, and sticky jars”.
Again, and fitting her concept, the opening grabs me in:
Most of the narrative non-fiction opinion pieces I read online do not grip me in the first sentence. People often start pieces somewhere sensible, but boring. Like the chronological start of a story.
…
The beginning is almost never the most compelling or important part. It’s just the bit you thought of first, based on your subjective chronology.
Or far worse, people begin at The Beginning Of Time. Invoking paleolithic people is an overplayed way to convince us your topic is cosmically important.
…
Another bad way to start a piece of writing is with a statement of what you’re going to write about, followed by a definition.
…
“Bad” is obviously subjective and contextual here. I find up-front outlines and definitions dull for narrative non-fiction writing. But they’re standard practice for technical documentation and academic papers. Signposting what you’re going to write about is good, but starting with an exhaustive list of definitions is extremely boring.
To be clear, I make these mistakes too. I am a mediocre opener trying to become a good opener. Opening well isn’t just about snapping up someone’s attention and keeping them reading for a few lines. You can’t write good openings without having good ideas, good arguments, good structure, and good storytelling skills. Everything hangs off that starting point, so it’s worth learning how to nail it.
https://maggieappleton.com/openings
When I went to grab a quote, I swore I would not grab a swath, yet I did anyhow. Each of those “…” in my quote above is an example Appelton includes, and what makes her argument strong is the clear examples and non examples of “good openers”.
And she hits as well on openers for presentations, yup.
This all flickers back to the days when I did stuff on digital/web storytelling and made so much of the power of the opening.
If you are amongst the dwindling few who do not want to outsource their writing chops to ChadGPT I can’t urge you enough to stop reading my ramblings, and bookmark, absorb, and share madly this essay. It has something for everybody.
And then Appleton brings in John McPhee. Just a mention, a link to his Draft No. 4 On the Writing Process
The long-awaited guide to writing long-form nonfiction by the legendary author and teacher.
Draft No. 4 is a master class on the writer’s craft. John McPhee shares insights he has gathered over his long career, and has refined while teaching at Princeton University, where he has nurtured some of the most highly regarded writers of our time. He discusses structure, diction and tone, observing that ‘readers are not supposed to notice the structure. It is meant to be about as visible as someone’s bones’. This book is a vivid depiction of the writing process, from reporting to drafting to revising—and revising and revising.
I feel now I need to fill out my John McPhee shelf, because Basin and Range has some good company out there.
This all would not have been rekindled if not for two acts of link curiosity, and as usual, following the links upstream.
McPhee’s writing, Searls’ writing, Appleton’s writing… all rise above the cruft of investing in Highway Grey for a world of much richer colors. Oh if you want a sample of McPhee’s craft, some university student somewhere probably has a PDF tucked away in their web directory.
Thanks, weird internet happenstance.
Featured Image: I could not find a photo I took when I turned in my paint, so I found my own photo from a time I did use gray paint on my old deck.
Paint Tools flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
Surely I am not alone in wondering if time has been following the same portal as lost socks. But it has been— checking the calendar and not doing the math– a “while” since I left the venue for the OER24 conference in Cork, Ireland.
Secret tip: Whenever possible, skip the automated transportation and walk. Even if it takes an hour.
I’m scratching my head at the days when I’d be blogging from the conference, or madly on the way home, or at least the day I got back. I’m now old and slow? But it like looks I believe Mags Amond has been tracking post conference blog posts in a Google Doc, and number 18 was just 3 days ago. Late is in the eye of the excuse maker.
So time to stop blogging about not blogging.
Thanks OEGlobal!I was rather fortunate my organization, OE Global organized its in person staff meeting 5 days prior to and in the same location as the OER24 conference. The OER[0-9][0-9] Conferences (how about some regex humor) was and this year, confirmed as a conference I’d go to whenever possible. I was on a four year cycle, the first one I attended was 2014 in Newcastle followed by 2018 in Bristol. The frequency dial was sped it to 2 years with 2020 online, 2022 the online side of hybrid, and now 2024. Tada! Is 2026 my next?
The why for why I think this conference is great? Partly the size (~200 or less attendees), but more than that the energy and the people who go. I said a few times at a large conference you might find 10-15% of the attendees who seemed like they were doing the same stuff or the same interests you are, but at OERxx it also seems like way at the top end of the percentage scale. It’s also the approach the conference organizers ALT-C takes, it feels grass roots, so its more like a community gathering than an ego preening fest.
Hardly a quantitative diagnosis, but that’s how they have felt to me.
The Key KeynotesI’m sure the 18 preceding #OER24 blog posts have covered the two fabulous keynotes, and I am a bit biased in knowing both presenters as long time colleagues and friends. What I do want to point out, is how humanly and in an engaging manner, gave more than a presentation, but something to be experienced. Something more than the presentation slides.
For the opening, Rajiv Jhangiani wrapped his usually well-crafted big picture messages in a warm bit of storytelling. In “Betwixt fairy tales and dystopian futures” he riffed with the flavor of the local scene, but more than that, provided a powerful storytelling practice of leading us along and then catching us in a turn that ran counter to our expectations, unwinding the original story to dig deeper. It was brilliant, and even. more so being in the room.
I was fortunate to chat with Rajiv before and he hinted at how he recasted the presentation a few days before while visiting Tom Farrelly, the joy of making a video on Tom’s kitchen table with an iPhone and some rigged lights.
No Sora needed for storytelling.
Also, it was typical Rajiv to open with a heartfelt dedication to our friend Irwin Devries.
Not that there is any topping, but the one/two combo of OEER24 keynotes with Catherine Cronin and Laura Czernowicz on day two was another high point of this conference.
Their opening (follow in the slides) grabbed us with their (adorable) childhood photos from the 1960s, then mid adult years in the 1990s, and jumping to today, with what they were doing paired with what the world was doing. An unexpected small bit that stayed with me was how they charted the latter with world population in 1960 of 3 billion and CO2 levels in the low 317ppm to today where the world has 8.1 billion humans and CO2 levels of 442ppm.
That is jarring, making clear in more detail, the polycrisis state.
What I appreciate in their keynote was that we in the audience were part of it, not just to be shown slides. I love the 3 people thought reflection in the beginning (a nod to Kate Bowles), the calls for responses to questions, and the asking of the audience to dwell on What could we do right now?
Kudos too for their being more to the presentation- in Catherine’s followup blog post, you have access to the slides, the essay version of the keynote, the video to rewatch, an editable resource list as an invitation to add more, plus a synthesis of the audience responses for the what could we do right now question.
This was, for me, a fantastic demonstration of a presentation being something to experience and participate in, not just a slideshow, and something that has a coda or more to interact with after.
The Spaces in Between Schedule SlotsI so appreciate having the generous times between sessions, including lunches, for not only conversation, but information conversation. Yes, in my first conferences I was too much of a nervous kid to talk to people I did not know, or ask questions, but that’s a powerful part of the experience, and OER24 provided this well.
Just saying hello to the person behind you waiting for coffee or saying hello to a person you do not know opens opportunity, more than just hanging out with the colleagues you work with. The first morning I wanted just to say hello to Lawrie Phipps, who was standing by the entrance, not knowing that he was actually doing a bit of welcoming and guiding for people entering the refreshment space. It turned out a great way to meet all the people Lawrie knew as well.
Another opportunity that the conference presented, that I appreciate, was being on the campus of Munster Technological University (MTU). Conferences can grow to force them to be at convention centers, but you cannot beat the influence of being on a real campus. Hardly anything is memorable about a conference center, but that feel of the open courtyard and being in classrooms for sessions, and walking down hallways seeing learning spaces, makes a difference.
And then there was the time spent walking through that campus from the large session venue to other buildings- walking is such a great way to meet people, learn about projects. I’ve been influenced on the writing by Dominik Lukes about the affordances of physical conference spaces such as hallways that we do not often think about when doing events online.
In the last block of the schedule, I was delayed getting to a workshop, and peeking in the door, I saw it was likely not something I could jump into. That became an opportunity to for coffee and casual conversation with Maren Deepwell and Meredith Fiero where we hatched a future idea that (shhhh) involves radio, and a wild conversation with Bryan Mathers where we debated the upside down (or was it inverted) conference session format.
You might aim to maximize a conference experience but stuffing yourself in as many presentations as you can, but siotting one out for open conversation (not reading email) is extremely valuable.
I recall after one session on the walk to lunch, being so caught up in talking to the presenter of a session that I forgot to put my hood up and got to lunch all wet. That is what conversation should be like.
OER24 also provided a balance of after conference options, one night a hosted reception but there was in other nights the times for individual reflection, group dinners, and activities like the pub night honoring for Martin Weller.
Social time is also connection time.
Hello Back ChannelsIn another era there was a healthy set of ongoing conversations, session sharing, with both conference attendees and people not there. I forgot the tool, it had some kind of bird icon There’s still a healthy, distributed amount in multiple places (I know people lament the lost one, but hey, I had a suggestion, but who listens to me?).
A lot happens in messaging apps.
The conference did offer Slack as a “backchannel”- there was a good amount of introductions and hellos, but I have to grumble that 90% of it was presenters offering links to their slides. There was not a whole lot of conversation.
Oh Yes, PresentationsOf course, there were presentations. Wrestling with which ones to pick from tracks.
My conference goal is to learn what I do not know and from people I may not know. I often try a method of picking a session in a topic that seems of least interest from people I do not know. I always get something unexpected out of that strategy.
OER24 has a format for breakout sessions with blocks of four fifteen minutes presentations with an extra fifteen minutes for q&a for all sessions. The conference venue of classrooms with long tight rows turned out to be a positive feature, as it was not really feasible to session hop, so it ended up encouraging at least most of us it seemed, to stay in a room for all four sessions.
The last discussion round was mostly dynamic in the sessions I picked, and I saw at least two or three times that some presentations that seemed like they might not have overlap actually did, and it manifested itself in the discussions.
These Slides Are Dangerous flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) licenseI do have to harp a bit about presentations. A lot of presenters did not make good use of that short window. I saw way way way too many dense word slides and read scripts. What ever happened to the ideas of Presentation Zen? I have to wonder about all this effort to travel for a conference, and what gets communicated in a slide talk is something I could read in a blog post.
As I saw in the keynotes, and yes, they get to be keynotes by developing effective communications skills, a presentation should be an experience. As an audience member, what am I getting out of being in the same room as the presenter, if I am getting just spoken information? It’s not about being a performer or showpersonship, but how do you use the presence (presenter and audience in the room?).
I reach back for Kathy Sierra (blog long gone) writing in Presentation Skills Considered Harmful her approach of crafting a presentation as a user experience for the audience.
When you design for a user experience, you quit focusing on your skills and start focusing on their skills. What experience can you help them have? Can you give them a more powerful perspective? Can you give them a new idea with immediate implementation steps they can’t wait to work on? Can you give them a clear way to finally explain something to others that they’ve been feeling but could not articulate? Can you give them a new tip or trick that has such a high-payoff it feels like a superpower? Can you give them knowledge and insight into a tough topic, so they can have more interesting, high-resolution conversations in the hallway?
And now we’re truly at the heart of what matters most in a presentation. Look at the previous paragraph of experiences you can help them have. What’s the common thread? It’s not really about the user experience they have during your presentation. Like your presentation, their experience of it is also just the enabler for something bigger. Because what matters most is NOT the UX but the POST-UX UX. What happens after and as a result of the user experience? The best software and product designers know this. The best game designers know this. The best authors know this. The best filmmakers know this. What happens after what happens happens?
When they walk away from the user experience, then what? Are they different? Are they a little smarter? Are they a little more energized? Are they a little more capable? Are they a little more likely to talk to others about it?
That’s certainly what Catherine and Laura did in their keynote
I look for the hook at the start, and not a bullet list of objectives. I want to be drawn in, I want to be riled or revved up, I want to join your cause, or take your course, or try your software. So if you are presenting about a project you did, a vide you produced, a course you created, my simple advice (once called by someone Levine’s Law) — Start with the &#*#ing Demo! Don’t spend time on your vita or the history of your department, or the timeline– show me something! Please!
Maybe my expectations are out of alignment or unrealistic, but please, SHOW more than you TELL. Like Rajiv’s keynote, create an arc for your story, it’s not just information to push out on people.
I have to say I saw more than I’d like to see of underwhelming slideshows… but most at least made up for that in the 15 minute of time for conversation.
For me, I’d rather have the time spent on conversation and the time spent on talking over word slide to be inverted.
As if I have any say.
I must credit OER24 and being on the home turf for Tom Farrelly that the Gasta sessions are a fantastic lift for the last slot. I’m not going to talk about my silliness on Gasta, but I encourage anyone if they have a chance to sign up to do one. I encourage you to use it as an opportunity to break out of the normal slide talk mode.
Conferences: Everything But the Presentations
Hey, is anyone still reading? I have a bit of a rationale to this long whinge post. Maybe. I wanted to indicate that there is so much that is valuable in the OER24 conference experience that is outside of the presenting slides to people trapped in chairs. I attempted a bit of Venn-splanation, that likely fails on many fronts
If it needs a caption, I am suggesting what most I think would agree, the conferences are much more than presentations– what is that much more that intersects?
Why am I asking? Well, the planning is in works for the OE Global Conference, November 2024 in Brisbane Australia. My first year working for OEGlobal, 2020, there was this pandemic thing, so the conference, like all others, was forced online. A huge takeaway for me was hearing from how many people it was the first time they were able to be part of this conference. And in 2021 there was an online version followed by in 2022 an in person counterpart held in Nantes, France. As it turned out I was one of many who could not travel due to COVID.
I sought to institute an “AND” conference approach, not a hybrid one that tries to make it an online conference, but providing other ways of participating if you were “Not in Nantes” (live web streams from Nantes, a few Twitter Spaces live audio chats, asynchronous activities in our online community). The community space offered info on the sessions in Nantes, a place for “Not in Nantes” Unconference style activities, and the Interaction Zone as a middle space.
I have been trying always to interject some means of remote participation into in-person events. What I often find is when I say “ways to participate if you cannot be in person” many people almost always go to the problems of doing presentations online.
I too believe that online presentations are not always viable, you do not have the audience capture in those small rooms like we were in at Cork. When you are “home” for a conference, your attention is spread to all the other work, family, home activities. When your employer sends you to another country for a conference, you are going to be present because you are almost constrained to the physical space.
I keep asking- aren’t there more ways to participate in or experience a conference then having an audience listen to you talk over slides? That’s what I tried to outline above- that my conference experience at OER24 was more than about the presentations.
Help me out- how do I get more people on board with thinking of online activities that are not presenting? Is that always at the center?
Feature Image: My photo, nothing was generated except for displaying the light that fell on my camera sensor. Bring Your Presentations! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
More in the little web joys of selk tinkering. Rewards you never get by pouring your houghts into some packaged medium sized substack of a LinkedIn space.
Self-stylin; as it were.
Way back in the pre lock down era of January 2020 I added a little bit of CSS to this blog thang that put a small icon adjacent to any hyperlinks to the internet archive. This is, as on an ongoing basis, I find more links other sites from here have bit the 404 dust or just have been clearcut by a discarding of entire sites. Iften when I am rummaging around the corners of CogDogBlog, I find old posts with missing feature images, malformed HTML, and more often than not– ye new dead links.
So it seemed worthy to have a visual indicaor of links to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The CSS I used as based on some early 2000s stuff when I wanted to make clear links to PDFs or other file formats. So a nifty gizmo is you can create a CSS class that snags hyperlinks o specific sites. My style I added in 2020 used a little image stuffed in my server pile:
a[href*="web.archive.org/web"] { padding: 0px 0 0px 22px; background: transparent url(https://cogdogblog.com/images/social/archive.png) no-repeat center left;}
There was nothing wrong with it, but as sometimes the internets spit out something you were not looking for, in Mastodon I was combing though the local feed of my instance at https://cosocial.ca/ . For some reason this caught my eye where this person was making clear their Wikipedia links. It was similar, but looked a bit more modern than mine, so I was curious to style my own styles.
I updated my CSS to use a svg icon that was a whopping 2k but also uses the :after subclass or whatever its called to append the icon after a link.
a[href*="web.archive.org/web"]:after { content:url(https://cogdogblog.com/images/social/intenet-archive.svg); display:inline-block; margin-left:.25rem; width:.8em}
Could I have asked ChatGPT to do this for me? Of course, but why? Where’s the craft in that? Why prompt for stuff I can do? I want to keep the rusty code muscles limber.
So what the beans does it do? Well, for an example, I recently was combing the Wayback for an Australian publication from the mid 2000s that I remember an issue of the Knowledge Tree written by my colleague Nancy White, (do you see what it does?) this maybe in the first days I got to know someone I was fortunate enough to work with, visit, and add to my friend circle. I emailed it to Nancy, and as one did often in those days, she blogged about it.
For me, I like having this visual indicator of how much of a blog post I have managed to keep partly alive by nurturing the dead links with archived ones. You can see a lot of the icons on the oldest post I have with links to the Wayback machine, a 2003 moldy oldie on “Comment Blogging” (what comes around, I might come back for that).
Not sure what this matters, but I derive small satisfaction in tinkering under the hood of the machine.
UpdateAs expected, ChatGPT (cheap 3.5 version) was first able to provide more or less what my old code did. When I asked it to improve to use the :after pseudo class it belched out an ugly blob of CSS. I knew it would be a waste of time and for 2 queries I expended 0.004kW of electricity.
Featured Image: Mine. Human generated. My dad’s old shoe shine box. Dad’s Shoe Box flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
It’s no surprise that Jay Hoffman writing about The Analog Web caught my eye, not for nostalgia, but something that circles forward. I’ve been following Jays History of the Web writing since, well I can’t remember when, and am pleased to see he has gotten federated.
Of many points I could grab as a Gardner Campbell gold sprinkled “nugget”, his mention of net.art clanged a neuron.
For instance, in the much earlier days of the web, a group of artists and writers found each other out amongst the nodes of the network. They began creating websites unified only by a shared interest in what could be achieved on the web. After a while, they gathered under the banner of Internet Art, or net.art for short. Their online creations ranged from hypertext poetry and avant garde stories to websites that extended performances into the real world or challenged the idea of what a website even was.
I refer, as I have before, to Rachel Greene in reference to her book about Net.art and the importance of the movement:
I refuse to let commercial interests dominate the history and perception of the net because I think they would exclude the most important and dynamic internal content – the aesthetic, creative, radical, political ideas and experiments
https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/the-analog-web/
On a whim in 2010, during a visit to the hallowed MIT grounds in Cambridge, I picked up some books in the MIT Bookstore.
Books Scooped at MIT Press Store flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) licenseI was working for some now defunct organzation that had “new media” in its moniker, but actually did not know the stuff inside had this name of “net.art.” The books content was fully available (once) on a wiki, and all of the exhibits inside were of course visitable on the web.
In 2010.
Sometime much later, I took it on myself to run my own project to revisit the sites, collecting updates, archive links in a tumblr site (wow did I have a time remembering how to login and navigate tumblr-ville) a called (re) New Media Art.
Each entry included a screenshot, a link if it existed, if not, an internet archive link. Yup, I guess I blogged about it too it looks like I did a thing with the tumblr RSS feed and ancient syndication trickery to republish them in my blog. My gosh it worked, small pieces loosely taped together.
My entry for a revisit to the Life Sharing project from the original New Media Art book.I only got a portion of them done, well maybe only 6 yet another started, partly done CogDogBog
When I taught the Networked Narratives course, I did give my students an assignment to research the ones I had not completed, and generate the entry for which they got credit – e.g see the “researched by” credit for the revisit to My Boyfriend Came Back from the War. The four newest ones on the site were done by students (and one by the venerable participant in everything @dogtrax).
The point here is Jay’s mention of net.art sent me back to look at my site, its still there, and just out of curiosity, I followed the original link for the Life Sharing site, where the domain itself is art http://0100101110101101.org/home/lifesharing/index.html to find a redirect… woah it is now part of a Rhizome exhibit of Net Art Anthology that is much much better (more media and references) than my crappy tumblr.
Net Art Anthology entry for Life Sharing (well worth a scroll stroll)I have to see the whole Anthology is a rich trove of net.art. That is alive, with a pulse. That’s a lot because it is published in those old formats that still work. You want durability over the long haul? Stay with HTML.
One link leads to another to another (and Alan getting distracted!)
Featured Image: Simple Net Art Diagram animated GIF by MTAA. The Net Art Anthology states it is licensed under a Creative Commons license” but the old school source page indicates it is placed into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0. See Nate Angell! Some of us make the distinction clear!
I hardly have to ask the internet (hey you!) to ignore me, but I am trying one more post as an ActivityPub enabled blog check the formatting when it goes out- this time I have changed the format of the posting to include a title intro, am added excerpt, and a stuffed in hashtag.
Already some success as my last post did get Fedi-posted, I can’r embed it as the link for it, as it should be, is the original post.
But, when I replied in Mastodon, the comment came into the blog. And my reply from the blog also went back out.
So i am a federation of one person, 2 accounts, talking to myself. Hence the “silly polo” (I have been waiting to use that public domain image).
Featured Image: Wild West Polo, Coney Isl. (LOC) flickr photo by The Library of Congress shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons) modified me to have a top text of “@Topdog@CoGDogBlog.com Fediverse Posting Polo, Mastodon”. Kind of weird how I do not need to use GenAI to make pictures, eh?
I was thinking of the times when I would, now totally sounding naively, exalt about the bigness of the internet which today, which we pursue trendingness to be seen, noticed, affirmed, liked and re-liked. Who wants to spout out and not be heard?
I come to celebrate today the small, unnoticed. One of my weirdest to describe efforts, now brown on the edges with aging, was ye old SPLOTs those hand crafted WordPress themes designed to let people build out sites for collecting/sharing content easily (well what passes for easy).
One sign is that the internet is big enough for many things named the same– I am not the first to latch on to a name. Will the real SPLOT please stand up (all rise).
I’ve barely updated, added, tended to SPLOTs, but I do get glimmers of seeing them out in the wild. And even in person, like at the OER24 conference I got to see Frances Bell who is most enthusiastic, gracious, appreciative with the use of two SPLOTs in the Femedtech web site– so enthusiastic she gave me a SPLOT coffee mug!
A SPLOT mug Frances Bell gifted me at OER24, thanks to Sheila Macneil for the photo, I can guess we would slap with a CC-BY linense.And this morning I got an email from Suzanne who manages the Lansing Community College Starscapes site, using SPLOTbox for students to post/share media (images, videos, documents) describing projects shared at a college event promoting student creativity.
Starscapes student projects submitted for 2024She reported for 2024 they have more submissions than before:
Being able to offer StarScapes online has doubled the number of students who participate in the event. Right now we are trying to grow the in person event again, as that used to be the only option before the pandemic.
Suzanne B on use of Starscapes site
It’s out there in the bigness of the internet, right?
I still feel compelled to built out image collector sites, even if I am the lone contributor. If anyone ever adds an image, it will be noticed somewhere.
At one time I had the idea to make a SPLOT where people could upload text and then make it available to do blackout poetry, but evnetually someone came along and did this in a much better form, see Emerge Poems (that was likely you @dogtrax, great find).
In these days I am finding solace in the tiny over the big. At least that’s what I whisper to myself. Anyone else out there celebrating the tiny? There’s more of it than you think.
Featured Image: Modified my own image Those Peaks Are Tiny flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license to put the SPLOT logo I created inside the fingers, make it all CC BY and call it a day.
There was a moment at the [brilliant] #OER24 conference keynote duo by Catherine Cronin and Laura Czernowicz “The future isn’t what it used to be: Open education at a crossroads” when they asked the audience to Menti respond to a question about what we should do as an action.
Watching the responses roll by when I saw one that said “Blog!” I leaned forward and tapped Martin Weller on the shoulder to whisper “I see you!”
Let’s say I have been slow on that front (as Martin keeps punding them out), I have still a draft on in my brain from the conference.
That’s not this one.
I am actually just attempting to open the blocked blog flow here, with just a little nothing note, that as of this post, this WordPress powered blog (so old fashioned, eh?) is now, err once again, pumping out the posts, when/if they actually happen, directly to the Fediverse, to Mastodon, via the ActivityPub plugin.
Zzzzz. Hardly worth a blog post, is it?
Well I did a short run with it before it became part of the Automattic ship, back in maybe November 2022. it worked indeed publishing as an entity known as @topdog@cogdogblog,com, but for me, I was really looking for the means to publish to my existing Mastodon, after all it’s my stuff, and I want to reply to replies if there were anything, as me.
I went down a different route, using a duct taped approach of an IFTTT applet that listened to my blog’s RSS feed and posted to my Mastodon account via a webhook. I’ve since made a batch of these, some to post stuff to Mastodon I have tagged in Pinboard, even having my flickr photos tagged with my dog’s name posted to his own Mastodon account (this approach got nicked when IFTTT took away the ability to use web hooks from the free accounts, and I have been moving some to make.com which is vastly more powerful service).
I like having stuff flow into my own stream, not some other one. Plus with these tools, I had some flexibility to customize the output, you know , my personal touch, like putting “Just CogDogBlogged:” before the title and slapping a hashtag on the end.
But I have been seeing more use of the WordPress plugin and mentions of more features. Just on a whim, last week, I added the ActivityPub plugin to the OE Global Voices podcast site I managed (on WordPress) just to see how easy it was to set up.
Dead easy.
And then, one of those little things happen than remind me the human connections in this ginormous ball of web yarn is what makes it worth it.
I am fortunate that someone like Jon Udell follows my posts, and replies, and as its done, he mentions Matthias Pfefferle who is the genius behind the plugin, and then Matthias is asking me questions about my set up for podcasting, and lets me know of a new audio feature coming out this week.
If somehow my spitting out a mention of a small experiment leads me to talking directly to the person who builds the software? well heck, that is something I would latch on to rather than foaming on about prompt engineering.
And hence, IU am thinking, why not set it up again here on the home blog, my roost since 2003. That’s something you don’t get cashing in your chips to blog on Wix or tossing it all into email newsletter platforms. I am of the dwindling mindset of those who not only want to own my own web corner and platform, I want to play with it, tinker, and pop the hood once in a while to admire the engine.
Well this was more than a Hello World thing to test how this will spawn out into the Fedivserse. But that is my human, far from efficient way to do things.
It will thus be spit out twice to the fediverse, using each approach. Like anyone cares about my repetition and redundancy.
Now that the blog gate is open, maybe more words can get out the door here.
Featured Image: My own remix of Botticelli Birth of Venus as an homage to the blog loving Jim Groom, with the faces of the original DTLT team admiring his blog form.
Tell Me Again About My Blog! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
The Gasta is now passed-ah.. Oi that does not exactly work, but here I am on the return trip from the OER24 conference, out my window pink light over Greenland, trying to write a blog post, offline.
Because, after all the AI tremors have stilled or knocked down all the castles, the blog, the act of blogging, remains for me, the reason detre.
Writing of the experience at OER24 is its own topic, here is my still riding the adrenaline wave of doing something so far out of my wheelhouse, there’s not a shred of the box left. And as I expect the blogging will get long paragraphed, I will start with the thing I did, then talk about it in excruciatingly droll detail.
Two days ago, for the very last day of OER24 I did this a speaking format I’ve never done before:
So crossed off my conference bucket list is doing a Gasta presentation. Even if you read the explanation, watch the videos, I’m not sure you can feel the electricity when the raw energy of Tom Farrelly lists out a call to countdown (learn to cp\ount in Irish) with a wee bit of H5P.
I have to admit that in hindsight, I had a similar experience maybe first in 2004 at the old NMC conferences Five Minutes of Fame.
My idea came the weekend before the conference proposal deadline, when Cori and I were on a 3 day holiday in a cabin in the West Cypress Hills. My OEGlobal colleagues weee urged to submit presentations as plans were made to hold in person meetings for our staff there in Cork, Ireland, a few days before the OER24 conference.
I could have conjured something related to my projects but I did not feel anything really of importance to package as a talk.
But I have been long musing on the stream of educator lamenting over the sewage spiral of twitter and questions like “Where will everyone go?” To me, that notion of Twitter as a “town hall” was an illusion— don’t get me wrong, I hade so many valuable and fun and zany things that came from there, but it did not seem like it was the place itself. What happened to the idea of us building so called personal learning networks that were a multitude of platforms, with a blog rather central.
Yes Twitter had X-Ed the building of intenest to me (much because of how many of my small project forays were built to interconnect with bird space. And I have been tuning into the writings of Cory Doctorow on the enshittification of the web we are living in.
In May or June 2021 (check) I found myself reinvigorated with Mastodon (I had an account since 2016) and more broadly, the fleet of other apps that could connect or syndicate from Mastodon. I thought my organization could get out in front of this by setting up our own instance/server as maybe a member offering or just another open educator community space. Being the fediverse, natch, means it does not matter where you set up, but a common space had appeal to me.
However my colleagues, who frankly do not really do much personal use of twitter, were not interested. The expression in the response im got was that we should take “a measured approach.”
No matter, a server/instance was not necessary to rally interest, and thanks to my colleagues Wayne Mackintosh and Dave Lane of the OERu, they let me and others set up on their social.fossdle.org home Again, the concept of the fediverse means it does not matter where you hang up your toots , as you can follow and communicate with any Mastodon user.
So I launched other blobs of intertest with posts in our OEG Connect discourse community. I added a profile feed for users to add their mastodon handle and pitched a Fediverse Directory for the communityl
Thus I felt compelled to concoct an OER24 session as some kind of call to be part of the fediverse. Its been a while since I have done an audience presentation and the idea of talking over slides felt dull. I had seen Gasta done online from other OER conferences. The format seemed to be calling for something outrageous and, well maybe loud or disruptive.
I then thought of the spoken poetry and poetry slams I have gotten to see my wife’s high school students do. Cori has an exceptional instinct for word choice, arrangement, and delivery. As the kind of person she is and I love, when I brought it up on the drive to our weekend getaway, Cori has not only supportive but eager to coach me through the process.
Given that, I said that I should write my proposal as a poem too. Cori said to write my ideas as a few paragraphs, and in no time she whipped it into poetic form. Thus the proposal:
ReferencesAmplifyFE (2023, September 5), AmplifyFT Communities of Practice Sector Audit Reports 2023, #ALTC23 Annual Conference 5-7 September 2023, Retrieved Nov 9, 2023, from https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mbIkhYInWEx8Djrn4u4jyPsIAe1_YBLx/view
Koebler, Jason (2023, October 20), Mastodon Is the Good One, 404 Media blog, Retrieved Nov 12, 2023 from https://www.404media.co/mastodon-is-the-good-one/
Get Federated OER24 Gasta session proposal
It was submitted literally an hour before the deadline. I kept my expectations in the range that any review committee would look at this and laugh it into the reject pile. But of course, the OER conferences are not your best laced conference formats.
Weeks passed and Hahahahagastaha they accepted my proposal. Now all I needed to do was write the full poem, which I successfully procrastinated to the week before I would jump on a plane to Cork.
Well actually I did do something earlier— the T shirt! Months ago I had made a PhotoShop mashup image in response to something Stephen Downes posted in Mastodon about “getting Federated”. My associative trails brain went to the opening scenes of the original Get Smart TV show when Don Adams ax Maxwell Smart entered the CONTROL building through that series of cl as aging secret doors.
Get Federated! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)I made an image from a frame of the opening scened, clone brushed out the “SMART” text and replace with closest match I could find, Georgia. Because I had the Federarex text created already, I simply deleted the car layer and recreate the “Get” in the same Georgia font size.
Get Federated T-shirt by me, CC BY– Text in Georgia Font Fediverse logo proposal by Eukombos (CC0)The t-shirt was printed locally maybe 2 weeks before I headed to Ireland, what else would I need? Hmmm!! Oh I had to write the poem I would read.
Cori suggested 5 minutes was long for a slam poem so I came up with the idea of the opening sequence being something like the WWII era MovieTone news reels where I talked like a radio announcer about the going from the glory days of academic twitter to the state of the internet now. But even broader.
And as good fortune goes, after having Anne-Marie Scott in a live stream OEWeek session, she messaged and asked me if I knew what I had gotten myself into. I thought so, an energetic, unconventional format for a talk. What Anne-Marie carefully described was two approaches for Gasta, to finish just in time and avoid Tom Farelly getting the crowd to count me down. “that’s all fine, you will get polite applause.”
The other path to take was to design to get Tom trying to countdown, and try sometime to rouse the crowd and disrupt him.Anne Marie shared a clip of Jim Groom doing this at OER23 where they laughingly were shouting at each other and crushing the audience.
Need I tell you which route spoke to me?
For quote/unquote slides, I went for an animated GIF for the news part, and then just the fediverse logo over one of those internet maps.
I did not want to tie it to a specific series of slides, so the poem would be with just one image.
The poetry writing came together like the abstract, I wrote a few paragraphs, and Cori broke up into chunks and a rhythmic structure, It was thus written, but that’s hardly done! I had to read it through many times, where Cori patiently guided me on how to speak it, where to keep my voice low, where to go bam bam bam.
(see the Get Federated poem in a Google Doc)
I read the script several to many times, and trying to gauge the timing to get the desired effect. On Thursday my stomach was a bit churned as I questioned myself if (a) people would say WTF and not understand or (b) the call to get Federated would sound outlandish.
Well… it was damned fun. And if you do not know it, I am a card carrying Meyers Brigg IMTP introvert.
Thanks OER24 for putting me in stage, thanks everyone for getting in the spirit, and thank you my darling Cori for believing in me so much.
It was fun, but also, I am serious about getting g more people on the federated train. My real goal is to organize something like a 2 week series of posts in our OEG Connect space where anyone interested could do a daily 20 minute activity (or do it all in one sitting) all aimed at getting a group up to speed in creating a Mastodon account. setting up profile, finding and following others, and maybe, just maybe building a networked connective body of educators.
But that’s enough blathering about the making of– the moment of doing it was pure fun, even if people had no ides what I was ranting about.
Rousing up the Gasta, photo by Cori Saas who was watching live from Moose Jaw.If you even have an opportunity to do a Gasta, and I was honoured to be among a group of 9 others who braved the count down, I say seize the chance, and also, push your self to so something that will make Tom Farelly’s eyes twinkle.
Featured Image: The best I could do working from my iphone on a plane, a combination of my Gasta Badges and the get Federated logo created with the diptic app
Not that it means a hill of garbanzo beans to anyone, but I’ve pretty much stuck a fork in Twitter, the platform I will only call Twitter. I’m not deleting, I just logged out.
Still, I have a number of projects, web sites, of trace importance to most but me, that are still encrusted with Twitter features. The big looming one is the theme I made for the DS106 Daily Create where I have made small steps to have it post new Challenges to Mastodon, caltered the prompts with instructions to do so, and lately, also added a Share to Mastodon button. I still have to get deep in the old code and change out the harvesting from Twitter for replies (which the Dark Lord of Twitter killed when it took away the API).
I also managed to add share to mastodon buttons to my fleet of edtech generators — try this version of the original Ed Tech Metaphors first spawned by Martin Weller, each spin has two share buttons (I left twitter is an an option, but it can be removed if you make a copy of the code). The Mastodon sharing here uses the nifty Mastodon Share service.
For some reason I was looking at my old pechaflickr gizmo, which I have to admit is one of my favorite web things I made, still running as it was intended to since 2011. It let’s you generate a pechakucha style slide show made from randomly selected photos chosen from a tag in flickr, all making for a fun improv style activity. Minutes of entertainment.
A round of pechaflickr not only ends with a Share to Twitter button, but the front page featured an embedded twitter timeline for the #pechaflickr hashtag, which has not been updated since that functionality too was taken away by musky melon head.
That’s all gone, after a round of coding that took me way too long! I am rusty. I could not use the Mastodon Share method because the text I wanted to include included characters that eneded up encoded. I went with the approach I found for the Daily Create, a Share on Mastodon button that just runs through local HTML and Javascript (it remembers your instance using local storage, no cookies).
Plus since there are three different modes of play –regular photos from tags, then Heather mode, which displays photos but makes you guess the tag, and a fun mode that draws only from the flickr commons.
The end of a round of pechaflickr provides a button to share to mastodon, it includes a link to run the same settings.The post includes the number of photos shared and the tag, plus the link to repeat the same thrilling experience:
Now for the front page of the site I was lucky to find the Mastodon embed timeline widget, that with HTML and Javascript adds a widget to display all kinds of timelines from Mastodon, and specifically for me, one for a hashtag.
For now, I am the only one on the fediverse using the #pechaflickr tag— but you can join the party by doing a round of pechaflickr and using the magic button to share your results.
Okay, 13 years after slapping this tool together — it uses the phpFlickr php wrapper (old and not PHP 8 friendly, thats for another day) and the Vegas slideshow Javascript library for running the images on a timed sequence.
Oh, and imagine this. I did all of this stuff without a single reach for a prompt box. Pfttttttt.
Stop reading, go play pechaflickr, and share your results…. to Mastodon only.
Featured Image: Hagenbeck’s “Jenny” in North France (LOC) flickr photo by The Library of Congress shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons) modified to include the pechaflickr logo on the truck and new caption added to the top.
In the spirit of Tom’s short tech notes to oneself…
I archived a WordPress site I made a few years back for Cori’s high schools students to do some (anonymous) online writing. The site is really just to keep as an archive (and honestly it would be better to convert to static HTML, put that on my list).
But it gets hammered for some reason by login attempts, all stopped by the Limit Logins Reloaded plugin. They cant do anything since all the user accounts have been set to subscriber. I just wondered what else I can do to cut them off before trying- I am sure there are w variety of Other Things One Can Do, so I just spent a little time poking around the webz.
The first suggestion was disablinbg XMP_RPC which whatever it is enabloes login from other devices, services. This weas an easy add to the custom child theme’s functions.php template:
add\_filter( 'xmlrpc\_enabled', '\_\_return\_false' );
The other suggestion was to install the WPS Hide Login plugin which redirects all attempts to use standard WordPress login URLs, and all non-logged in efforts to hit wp-admin (used the default redirect to 404). It then allows me to create a super secret, non standard URL to access the WordPress login.
I’m just curious if this cuts down the activity more, but really I should just archive it fully as a static HTML and that means a STOP to all the annoying efforts.
It is illustrative to witness, at a much smaller scale than what your humble network managers see every minute, how much traffic there is in these cracking efforts.
If anyone has better or working solutions, my ears are all open.
Featured Image: Mine. Who needs AI generators when I got 76000 photos? Somebody STOP: flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
Given a draft of a post is withering/dying where I fail to conjure something meaningful about the Two Letter Acronym That Rhymes With Hey Bye, I’m reaching back to the old stuff that still matters, the magic of what I call unexpected web serendipity that spring from something we shared, did, uttered in an internet […]
This thing is still on, even if it has not sprouted much in a while. Just posting to make sure it works. And to add one more shredded post to the pile of likely the oldest blog topic. That’s all. For now. Hi. Featured Image:
Here we go. Again. That old web magic is still there, the stuff I lump as web serendipity, what happens when unexpectedly, something tickles the curiosity, it leads to something else, lather, rinse, repeat. It’s my variety of Vannevar Bush’s associative trails, what I like to play with the title “As We May Link”, especially […]
Look at the pup’s photo. Why so sad, Kay? This flickr photo of you I took in 2014 while visiting your human, Richard Elliot, at his home in Auckland, has just been added to the home grown collection of my flickr photos that have been reused elsewhere. Maybe it’s boasting or self vanity, but discovering […]
I love Creative Commons, ok? I’ve followed, used, the licenses since the start, I have the t-shirts. And like many, I can rattle of the stack of letters and explain them. But in my internet roaming, especially for my other strong interest, photography, I come across things in practice, well, that are much less cut […]
For perhaps the first half of my Type-1 diabetic life (October marks 53 years without a properly functioning pancreas) I invariably walked around with a roll of these in my pocket. Yes, it did take some explanation to other school kids when suddenly I started shoving them in my mouth “Hey! You’re diabetic, you can’t […]
Oi. My clever blog post title generator is not really jelling this morning (the unArtificial quasiIntelligence needs more coffee). The VHS tape for #ReclaimOpen 2023 has reached the end spool, and people are dusting their blogs off to reflect on the tri-part questions of the Open Web: How We Got There, Where We Are, and […]
I sure miss the days of supporting the H5P Kitchen project — if anything really hits the elements of the olde 5 Rs, to me, it’s the portability, platform independence, downloadability, reusability of H5P plus, the thing fe really love, built in metadata. So when I spotted a reshare of this University Affairs online article […]
Google Docs will have it, Microsoft is brewing it, PhotoShop is doing it, so is zoom…it’s high time that the advanced technology of CogDogBlog hop on the artificial intelligence inevitable train. As demonstrated this week at the Reclaim Open 2023 conference, behold the new generation of blogging powered by AI Levine: This is all the […]
I was trolling the olde blog settings for the WordPress Jetpack plugin and spotted something that confirmed I had aleady learned– the nuking of Twitter’s API meant the Social module could no longer tweet new posts. Old news. But what I did see was a new option to connect my WordPress blog to publish new […]
People still read blogs. Well, maybe a few of them. I was happy to see others get intrigued and interested in my sharing of the ways Descript had really revolutionized my way of creating podcast audio.
Changing Up, “Decripting” My Podcast Methods, Eh, Ai? Eh?
More than likes and reposts there’s not much more positive effect when you can capture Jon Udell’s interest as it happened in Mastodon and as he shared (aka blogged) about an IT Conversations episode he re-published.
And as it often happens, Jon’s example showed me a portion of a software that I was unaware of. This was as I remember one of the most evident aspects I found in the 1990s when I started using this software called PhotoShop- each little bit I learned made me realize how little of it’s total potential I did not know, like it was infinite software.
You see, I made use of Descript to much more efficiently edit my OEG Voices podcasts – but my flow was exporting audio and posting to my WordPress powered site. Jon’s post pointed to an interesting aspect when audio was published to a Descript.com sharable link.
Start with my most recent episode, published to our site, with audio embedded, a link to the transcript Descript creates.
OEG Voices 057: Sarah Kresh on her OE Award in Emerging Leadership
If you access the episode via the shared link to Descript, when you click the play button in the lower left, the transcript highlights each word, in a kind of read along fashion. That’s nifty, because you might want to stop to perhaps copy a sentence, or look something up.
Descript audio playback where the transcript shows the text of the audio being played back.Even more interestingly, you can highlight a portion of text, use a contextual menu, and provide a direct link to that portion of audio. Woah. Try this link to hear/read Sarah’s intro from the screenshot above.
Yes, Descript provides addressable links to portions of audio (note, I have found that Descript is not jumping down to the location, maybe that’s my set up, I did post a request in their Discord bug report).
But wait there’s more. You can also add comments (perhaps annotation style) to portions of he transcript/audio.
You do have to create an account to comment, so you might not appreciate that. It looks like it’s more aimed at comments for production notes, but why cannot it be more annotation like?
Anyhow, this was nifty to discover, and I would not have known this, had not Jon shared his own efforts with a link.
This is how the web works, well my web works this way. And refreshing to explore some technology and not with the din of AI doomsday or salvation day reverb (although there is a use of AI for Descript in transcription, but it’s at a functional use level, not a shove it your face level).
I am confident as always there is more here that I do not know with Descript than what I do know (I need learn the Over Dub tool).
Featured Image: There’s always that one thing…
Curly’s Law flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
It’s about five days since a key date but, there is, after all, something about the fives. Get ready, here it comes.
What rocks more than Schoolhouse Rocks? Well, spell it C-O-R-I!Yes, one of 365 blocks on the calendar is rather key here at Ursa Acres…
“June 1 is here” photo by me eventually to find its way to flickr and be shared there and here now as CC0.Five years ago was when Cori and I “did a thing” and tied our lives forever together on the porch of a special cottage in East End, Saskatchewan. There were roses when She Said Yes on a visit to me then in Arizona.
2018/365/92 She Said Yes flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)As there was five days ago when we celebrated with a fancy dinner at Moose Jaw’s Grant Hall. As most things go we find our spirit more here at our home.
Cori and five roses, expect a huge bundle in 50 years, darling.That sure feeling of our fit when we started is even stronger, more deep, and more wonderful today. From Mogollon Rim tied to the Canada Prairie, chasing light and dreams together. Five days later (it’s even better!) it does deserve noting, posting, sharing here amidst our crazy list of things we are doing in June. That is just one of the long list of “whys”.
I love our life, darling, know it, and how we are pursuing our natural landscape remaking here on our acres, with long grass, a future forest plus foxes, geese, deer, grouse, coyotes, frogs, rare cougar, eagle, owl, ravens, and those deep, long, and vibrant skies.
Five and five and more, forever,
Featured Image: A combination of my own photos of five roses and the five cupcake card atop of vow mugs as always openly shared just because that’s what we both do.
While there is plenty of academics undergarment wadding over AI generative text (and please stop referring to it all as ChatGPT), I was first interested and still in the generation of images (a year ago Craiyon was the leading edge, now it looks like a sad nub of burnt sienna).
Get ready for everything to get upturned with Adobe Photoshop’s Generative Fill, now in beta. I spotted it and some jaw dropping examples in PetaPixel’s Photoshop’s New ‘Generative Fill’ Uses AI to Expand or Change Photos but was drawn in more by a followup post on So, Who Owns a Photo Expanded by Adobe Generative Fill? This gets into even more muddy, messy, and also interesting (time curse like?) waters.
That latter article has some really fabulous pieces of ?? Extended Album Covers found originally in the twitter stream of Alexander Dobrokotov. I’d post the tweets here for you to see, but twitter broke the capabilty to embed tweets.
The concept is rather DS106-ish a central image of an actual album cover is embedded into a much larger imagined scene (see the Petapixel post for the examples) where all the imagery around was created with this new Adobe Photoshop beta feature.
I have seen this many times with AI, you see these jaw dropping examples that imply someone just typed a phrase in a box, clicked the magic bean button, and it popped out. Most of the time, if you can find where the “making” of is shared, you will find it took hours of prompt bashing and more likely, extra post processing in regular Photoshop.
Hence why my attempts usually look awful (?)
Now I could just share say image (like the Katy Perry cover of her sleeping in soft material that turns out to be a giant cat) and say, this is cool! But I always want to try things myself. So I downloaded (overnight) the beta version of Photoshop.
The way it works is you use the crop tool to create space around a source image. This fills with just white. But then you select all that blank space along with an edge portion of the seed photo, and watch something emerge. In many ways it’s impressive.
I started with my iconic Felix photo, the one I took on his first days with me in 2016, the one I use often as an icon.
2016/366/98 “Did Someone Say Go for a Ride?” flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)In Photoshop Beta, I enlarged the Canvas to the left a lot, and a little above, and let the magic go to work. Perhaps this is not the best example, since my truck in the background is blurred from depth of field effect.
Not quite magic.
Generated fill attempt 1 (click to see full size)That’s a rather awkward vehicle there. And since AI has no concept of a porch rail, it would likely extend those posts Felix is peeking through into the stratosphere.
I decided to try again, and added a prompt to the generative gizmo saying “Red truck towing a camper”
Generative fill 2 attempt with prompt of “red truck towing camper” (click for full image)Well, that looks awkwarder too. But it generates something.
I took another stab, thinking how it might take on extending a wide landscape that is well known. This is tricky because if one knows something of Geology, they canyon to either side extends to a broad plateau.
2018/365/80 Grand is an Understatement flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)I did one first where I went about 50% wider on each side
Grand Canyon Generative Fill 1 (click for full size)It certainly continues the pattern, and is not all that weird. You do get 3 variations, this one is about the same:
Grand Canyon Generative Fill 2 (click for full size)It’s odd, but not really too far from pseudo reality. I riffed off of this version, adding again another chunk of empty space on either side. Now its getting the geology pretty messed up and messy.
Grand Canyon Generative Fill of a Generative FillThese are just quick plays, and there are also the other features in the mix to add and remove elements.
This definitely is going to change up a lot things for photographers and digital artist, and what is real and what is generated is getting so inter-tangled that thinking you can separate them is as wise as teetering off that canyon edge.
But getting back to the Petapixel leading headline, “So, Who Owns a Photo Expanded by Adobe Generative Fill?” oh my is ownership, copyright, and licensing going to get mashed up too. So all of those creative album cover expansions? It’s starting with copyrighted material. But the algorithmic extension, is that so far changed to raise a fair use flag? Heck, I have no idea.
At least if you start with an open license image, you stand on slightly less squishy ground.
I’m going back to my shed to tinker (that’s for Martin).
Featured Image: 100% free of AI!
Fill ‘er Up flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
You know you’ve been around this game a grey haired time if you remember that podcasting had something to do with this thing called RSS. I found shreds of workshops I did back at Maricopa in 2006 “Podcasting, Schmodcasting…. What’s All the Hype?” and smiled I was using this web audio tool called Odeo who’s founder went on to lay a few technical bird droppings.
I digress.
This post is about a radical change in my technical tool kit, relearning what I was pretty damned comfortable doing, and to a medium degree, appreciating for a refreshing change, something that Artificial Intelligence probably has a hand in. Not magically transforming, but helping.
I’ve had this post in my brain draft for a while, but there is a timely nature, since this coming Friday I am hosting for OE Global a new series I have been getting off the grind, OEG Live, which is a live streamed, unstructured, open conversation about open education and some tech stuff… really the format is gather some interesting people and just let them talk together. Live.
This week’s show came as a spin off from a conversation in our OEG Connect community starting with a request for ideas about creating Audiobook versions of OER content but went down a path that including interesting ideas about how new AI tools might make this more easy to produce. Hence our show live streamed to YouTube Friday, June 2 is OEG Live: Audiobook Versions of OER Textbooks (and AI Implications).
I wanted to jot down some things I have been using and experimenting with for audio production, where AI likely has a place, but is by no means the entire enchilada. So this tale is more about changing out some old tech ways for new ones.
Podcasting Then and NowEarly on I remember using apps like WireTap pro to snag system audio recorded in Skype calls and a funky little portable iRiver audio recorder for in person sessions. My main audio editing tool of choice was Audacity, and still something I recommend for its features and open source heritage. I not only created a ton of resources for it in the days of teaching DS106 Audio, I used it for pretty much all my media project I did over the last maybe 17, 18 years. Heck Audacity comes up 105 times in my blog (this post will make it hit the magic number, right?)/
Audacity is what I used for the first two years of editing the OEG Voices podcast. Working in waveforms was pretty much second nature, and I was pretty good at brining in audio recorded in Zoom or Zencastr (where you can separate speaker audio seperate tracks), layer in the multivoice intros and Free Music Archive music tracks.
This was the editing space:
The multitrack editing in Audacity, waveforms for music, intros, separate speakers.After editing, to generate a transcript i used various tools like Otter.ai and Rev.ai to generate transcripts, and cleaning up required another listening pass. This was time consuming, and for a number of episodes we paid for human transcriptions (~$70/episode), which still needed some cleanup.
Might AI Come in?Via a Tweet? a Mastodon Post from Paul Privateer I found an interesting tool from Modal Labs offering free transcription using OpenAI Whisper tech. Just by entering “OEG Voices” it bounced back with links for all the episodes. With a click for any episode, and some time for processing, it returned a not bad transcript, that would take some text editing to use, but it gives a taste, that, AI has a useful space for transcribing audio.
Gardner Campbell tuned my into MacWhisper for a nifty means to use that same AI ______ (tool? machine? gizmo? magic blackbox) for audio transcription. You can get a good taste with the free version, the bump for the advanced features might be worth it. There is also Writeout which does transcription via a web interface and translation (“even Klingon”). And likely a kazillion more services, sprouting every day with a free demo and a link to pay for more. Plus other tools for improving audio- my pal Alex Emkerli has been nudging the new Adobe tools.
There is not enough time in a day to try them all, so I rely on trusted recommendations and lucky hunches,
Descript was a ,luck hunch that panned out.
Something Different: DescriptJust by accident, as it seems to do, something I see in passing, in this case boosted by someone in the fediverse, I saw a post that triggered my web spidey sense
I gave Descript a try starting with the first 2023 OEG Podcast with Robert Schuwer. It’s taken some time to hone, but It. Has. Been. A.Game. Changer.
This is a new approach entirely for my audio editing. I upload my speaker audio tracks (no preprocessing needed to convert say .m4a to .wav nor jumping to the Levelator to even out levels), it chugs a few minutes to transcribe. I can apply a “Studio Sound” effect that cleans sound.
But it’s the editing that is different. Transcribing the audio means most (but not all) editing is done via text- removing words, moving sound around is done via looking at text. The audio is tied to the text.
Editing podcasts in DescriptI can move to any point via text or the waveform. It does something where it manages the separate audio tracks as one, so if I delete a word, or nudging something in the timeline (say to increase or decrease the gap above), it modifies all tracks. But if I have a blip in on track, I can jump into the multitrack editor and replace it with a silence gap.
But because I am working with both the transcript and the audio, but I am done editing, both are final. I’m not showing everything, like inserting music, doing fades, invoking ducking. And it took maybe 4 or 5 episodes of fumbling to train myself, but Descript has totally changed my podcast ways (Don’t worry Audacity lovers, I still use it for other edits).
You can get a decent sense of Descript with their free plan, but with the volume of episodes, we went with the $30/month Pro plan for up to 30 transcription hours per month (a multitrack episode of say 4 voices for 50 minutes, incurs 200 minutes of that). That’s much less than paying for decent human transcription (sorry humans, AI just took your grunt work)
And i am maybe at about the 20% level of understanding all Descript does, but that’s enough to keep my pod.
But it’s not just drop something in a magic AI box and out pops a podcast, this is still me, Alan, doing the editing.
Yet, if you like Magic stuff, read on.
Magic Podcast ProductionEditing podcasts us work enough, but all that work writing up show notes, summaries, creating social media posts, maybe there is some kind of magic.
Well, a coffee meetup in Saskatoon with JR Dingwall dropped me intro Castmagic – “Podcast show notes & content in a click, Upload your MP3, download all your post production content.”
That’s right, just give AI your audio, and let the magic churn.
I gave it a spin for a recent podcast episode of OEG Voices, number 56 with Giovanni Zimotti (- a really interesting Open Educator at University of Iowa, you should check it out. It generates potential titles (none I liked), keywords, highlights, key points, even the text for social media posts (see all it regurgitated).
On one hand, what it achieves and produces is impressive. Woah, is AI taking away my podcast production? Like most things AI, if you stand back from the screen and squint, it looks legit. But up close, I find it missing key elements, and wrongly emphasizing what I know are not the major points. I was there in the conversation.
I’d give it an 7 for effort but I am not ready to drop all I do for some magic AI beans.
Ergo AII’m not a Debbie Downer in AI, just skeptical. I am more excited here about a tool, Descript, that has really transformed my creation process. It’s not because of AI and frankly I have no idea what AI is really doing in any of these improbable machines, but maybe aided by AI.
This stuff is changing all the time. And likely you out there, random or regular reader, is doing something interesting with AI and audio, so let me know! My human brain seeks more random potential nuerons to connect. And please drop in for our OEG Live show Friday to hash more out for OER, audio, and AI swirling together.
Meanwhile, I have some more Descript-ing to do. You?
Featured Image: Mine! No Silly MidjournalStableConfusingDally stuff.
Improbable Machine flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
The Musky Dark Lord of Twitter has finally cast the fun loving, roll-in-the-grass-like-a-happy-dog DS106 Daily Create off of the tweeting lawn. This marks the end of 3811 successive never missed a single day of tweeting fun creative challenges openly and the last 2813 of them had, until today, been able to have their responses collected and harvested on the site.
Why? How?
Since the beginning of the year, He Who Shall Not Be Named has been declaring from his tower that the Twitter API a thing which since long ago when Middle Twitter was a festive green enabled people, companies outside to read and write to the land freely, enabling alternative apps, fun bots, and even the DS106 Daily Create to be able to read and write content.
Alas, now this is a fee service, where basic access comes at $100 gold coins a month.
Festive green is now fetid greed.
First of all we have no way for the Daily Create WordPress site to tweet out newly published challenges. Not with the WordPress JetPack plugin. Nor with the last solution, using IFTTT– from hem yesterday was the double whammy- first free accounts there are down-graded from running 4 applets to 2, and any action that published to twitter required a pro plan. What has happened is that they are forced to pass on to users the API fees Twitter imposed on them.
Now I have maybe 7 IFTTT applets spread across 4 accounts that tweeted o maybe 5 twitter addresses. I briefly gave thought to upgrading to keep the lights on, for maybe $4 a month. I could consolidate and stay within the 20 applet cap. But then I found out tweeting to multiple accounts required a pro+ IFTTT account.
Pass. I just created a new IFTTT account (hey I can generate email forwarding addresses until the sun stops shining) to spread my stuff within the 2 limit.
That’s publishing.
The thing that made the Daily Create nifty (based on the Daily Blank SPLOT WordPress theme) was it could use the Twitter API to do things like:
- Collect Responses to a Specific Daily Create (using the API o read mentions of @ds106dc and a specific daily hashtag,like #tdc4138
- Track activity for the current year in a leaderboard
- Create an archive for every participant that shows all of their responses.
As of today, no more of that will happen.
11 Plus Years of the Daily Create (and it ain’t stopping)The DS106 Daily Create story has been (repeatedly) told elsewhere, but was built and launched by Tim Owens on January 8, 2012. It has not missed a day since. For the first generation site responses were made by different means, using a tag in flickr for images, a tag in youtube for video (when those could be harvested), and some other means for audio in soundcloud that no longer works.
I got the idea in 2014 during my TRU Fellowship (known as the Birth of SPLOTs) to redo this in the way of the original Daily Shoot– a web site could send out a challenge via twitter, and responses collected by replying with a hash tag.
This version went live on September 3, 2015 at https://daily.ds106.us/tdc1334/ and has done its job every day since then.
In digging in the backlog of @ds106dc I found that we did start tweeting the old challenges on December 9, 2012– its likely these were done manually https://twitter.com/ds106dc/status/277831499724759041 –look, more twitter decay as it appears tweets are no longer auto-embedded in WordPress.
Get offa my lawn…
What’s NextSee what the Twitter Greed Lord hath done? I am resorting to using screenshots of tweets! How 2005….
What’s on the better lawn:
- The DS106 Daily Create will publish every day at https://daily.ds106.us. It is #4life.
- You can get notified of updates by email there via a signup form.
- Or go even more retro- ask your internet grandparents about Feed Readers and subscribe to
http://daily.ds106.us/feed - Better yet, extract yourself from the stinking rotten turd bucket of twitter, and get into the Fediverse, create a Mastodon account.
- From there you can follow @tdc@social.ds106.us-and yes because Mastodon is no owned by a greedy failed billionaire, the API works, and we can publish there each day via IFTTT,
- If you respond to each Daily Create there– once I get my act together and revamp the Daily Blank theme, the site once again can collect responses BECAUSE THERE IS AN OPEN, NOT$$$$$ API
Twitter is smelly. This act of killing the API is more than signal, it is the presence of a completely eviscerated fail whale. Why freely give your content, your value to that failed enterprise, for free? In tweeting you are feeding Sauron.
A Tooted TDCThat image today was a response to the first daily create that was sprayed with RoundUp
tdc4149 #ds106 Swap out some words in an AI-generated paragraph to create a more interesting story.
I decided to have ChatGPT regurgitate a “story”.
Alan: Now create the HTML and CSS to render a blackout poetry version of this story, where all words are covered with black except for “a billionaire struggling with a deep desire of fostering uncertainty, now the sun set on the business”
to which it replied, full of its sappy bravado and arrogance:
In the bustling city of Prospera, a humble billionaire named Oliver Greyson emerged as a beacon of compassion and innovation. Witnessing a struggling business on the brink of collapse, he selflessly acquired it, driven by a deep desire to revive its fortunes and uplift the lives of its employees. With his boundless wisdom and ingenious strategies, Oliver transformed the failing enterprise into a resounding success, while fostering a culture of collaboration and empowerment. The employees, once burdened with uncertainty, now flourished under Oliver’s guidance, their spirits rejuvenated. And as the sun set on a remarkable journey of revival and camaraderie, a vibrant rainbow arched across the sky, symbolizing not just the triumph of the business, but the beauty that emerges when selflessness and brilliance intertwine.
This is how despot billionaires view themselves.
My plan was to change the story as blackout poetry. Why not have,ChatGPT do it for me! That is the new form of creativity, right? The inevitable future?
Alan: Now create the HTML and CSS to render a blackout poetry version of this story, where all words are covered with black except for “a billionaire struggling with a deep desire of fostering uncertainty, now the sun set on the business”
It’s so pleased with itself!
Certainly! Here’s an example of how the HTML and CSS could be structured to render a blackout poetry version of the story:
And I get a fully what appears to be code se of HTML and CSS, plus it over explains what it did. As usual, what ChatGPT regurgitates looks like the real deal, but it gets it wrong– see it’s version at https://lab.cogdogblog.com/dailycreate/tdc4149/wrong.html
Rather than wasting more time re-prompting, where I’d likely end of yelling at the screen, I just did i myself, see https://lab.cogdogblog.com/dailycreate/tdc4149/ (I ended up changing it a bit).
Here is a Mastodon response as an example (and also note that unlike bird poop place, I can embed a post here)
Twitter has lost my interest, and I hesitate to freely give it my stuff when it wants to charge mt to use it via an API.
The DS106 Daily Create is playful creativity, but Twitter does not want it rolling in the grass any more. Besides, since ds106 is going on trial in June, the question is, can you handle the #ds106 creativity? Twitter cannot.
Wee UpdateJust because I can, I made a slight addition to the Daily create site to indicate the end of the twitter era (see it in action).
Featured Image: This was my response made for the daily create that was first noticed as having been kicked to the curb by Twitter adding yourself to an iconic scene. I used the photo from the Trump Yells at Lawnmower Kid meme, brushed the kid out, and inserted instead my photo of Felix rolling in the grass– The Big Roll flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0). For this post, I added some meme text tables for the characters depicted.
Hey @ds106dc get your rolling dog self off of my Twitter Lawn!
Keep the internet weird and un-expected, not managed by machine languages and corporatized algorithms, but by the small human acts of sharing. Ok?
This has happened to me countless times yet never gets old. So via Mastodon, all the way from New Zealand, my colleague Stephen Harlow thinks to share this:
Indeed, in a YouTube video of The Buggles, all grey haired played a live set in Dallas, TX, on. April 30, 2023, playing their notable hit Video Killed the Radio Star on that stage in front of graphic display that included effects projected through an old TV set that has a DS106 logo on it.
The Buggles are singing in front of screens using a graphic I made in 2013.Of all the old TV images in all the sites in all the web, the Buggles sang in front of mine…
Turn the Dial Back to 2013When I saw Stephen’s post I recognized the image as something created for DS106, that dirty font logo has been there since maybe 2011. Luckily for me, I have this thing called a “blog” where I can search for and find details of things I did, made, and though about (it’s quite handy!). The image was part of a bunch of a wacky retro a keynote I did for the 2013 TCC World Online Conference with a TVish theme based on the movie Network.
it was the parallels I thought I saw in the plot of the 1976 movie Network where the sacred history of TV news was undermined by corporate interests with today’s “higher education is broken” mantra, where the sacred history of education might be undermined by corporate interests.
https://cogdogblog.com/2013/04/mooced-as-hell/
And in that blog post’s post presentation wrap up, I included the usual DS106 write-ups of the “making” of a media piece. I wrote about the slides done in keynote using an old TV set as a frame, where screen shots, and other silly green screen images of me with a talk show style city background.
The background transparent PNG image I made as a mask for my presentation slides in 2013. Somehow the Buggles stage show people found it to use as a backdrop for their 2023 concert.One slide where I tried to make myself into a TV talk show host. Hah.But where did I find the TV image? My blogging was not complete. A reverse image search hit my own posts (and weirdly a spotify track that used the image). I do keep all source images I download for projects like this, and sure enough, in my presentation folder for this talk I found an image named OLD SCHOOL TV.jpg (my habit is to save source media in its original file names).
info on source file OLD SCHOOL TV.JPG – Creation date is the date I downloaded and saved the file. It indicates a source of “Picassa” the predecessor to Google Images.There’s more metadata in the file info, in fact a URL for the image source.
Metadat from the OLD SCHOOLYV.jpg image indicates a sourceThis at least indicates I found the image in a blogger.com site published before April 10, 2013, the image is still there at http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-iL3VgGJUVR4/T-CPl8vmTFI/AAAAAAAAAMM/zv2ZKuxbhYc/s1600/OLD+SCHOOL+TV.jpg. I had some vain hopes there was some method to deconstruct this URL into something that might include at least a reference to the blog name, but that rabbit hole dead-ended.
I did some reverse image searches on that original OLD SCHOOL TV.jpg image and found it om a kazillion web sites, included as licen$ed sources like iStock Photo and supposedly free on numerous pinterest accounts. The point is, images on the web can be impossible to unravel as a definitive source.
The most curious result was an After Effects subreddit where I found the TV posed with a question that gets no real answers, but just shows that I was in good company in picking this image.
Who else recognizes this TV? Is it the most commonly used retro TV in motion graphics?
by u/JUMPOFFS in AfterEffects
So What?I have no idea why I have chased this old TV image around except the weird thrill of seeing a DS106 version behind the concert performance of a late 1970s band singing a song of some significance. If you are not aware of this bit of history, the Buggles’ song performed in front of a DS106 retro TV was in fact the very first music played on the launch of MTV August 1, 1981. If you want to relive this moment, I found a video of the Apollo Moon Landing opening and this first music video:
I can remember this early 1980s excitement as an 11 grade high school student, we had just gotten cable TV. I do not think I saw this opening, but remember being mesmerized by what felt like a fresh music experience, and many were bands I had never heard of.
Anyhow, the memory is part of this magic, and I am by no means trying to brag (much) about this graphic I made for a whacky online presentation ending up on a concert screen in Dallas. But also the magic is that I would never have known this had not Stephen Harlow, way over on another side of the globe, knew that I had a connection to that image behind the Buggles, and that he wanted to share this. That’s the way the internet really works (for me), a place of potential serendipity that happens not because of algorithms or large language models, but because of people.
And yes Clint, I wondered too about making a new tale to drop into True Stories of Open Sharing which if you bother to peek, is possibly due for a November revival.
Go Buggles, now we know you are #ds106 #4life:
They took the credit for your second symphony
Rewritten by machine on new technology
And now I understand the problems you can seehttps://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/buggles/videokilledtheradiostar.html
PostscriptI was pretty sure Jim Groom had done some riffs or remix of the Buggles tuned, or maybe used he song as an internet metaphor (it was a reference to a unit of DS106 in one round). John Johnston faithfully took my bait and inserted dancing Jim GIF onto this new iteration of the song.
Featured Image: Screen shot of The Buggles, Live at The Music Hall, Dallas, TX, April 30, 2023 YouTube video at the 28:51 point.
Alas, the first three months of the year I kept to my goal/obsession to stay on form for daily flickr photo posting and daily #ds106 daily creates.
Yes, I hit the mark for January, February, and March. Alas by April 30, 2023, day 120, my slippage is showing, with 118 daily flickr photos and 108 daily creates (and in May I am 20+ off the top of the leaderboard).
Who cares? Of course no one. It’s not about perfection, it’s the opposite, and the joy is in the trying. I predict more slippage into the future, and this is going to be the last whinging post about this year’s cracked daily double downs.
For the photos, the positives have been the fun of the amazing camera in my iPhone 14
Night Cranes flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)But the slow down is also partly finally to retiring my process of using long expired Apple Aperture on my 2013 MacBookPro (moved that set up to my even older 2009 machine), and trying to learn to use Lightroom.
I feel like a rookie and am rather lost in re-learning, and figuring out some new plugin for uploading to flickr. This software just thinks differently about how to do things, and re-learning is a valuable/humbling endeavor.
Excuses.
The daily creates fall off have been without much excuse, the imminent demise of Twitter API, which supposedly happened in January? March? end of April? means the Daily Create site won’t harvest tweeted responses, but as of May 17, 2023 is still working. I have known of this for months, and have started a few steps to make it work via Mastodon responses but have been slipping too in getting around to updating the Daily Blank WordPress theme.
My own step has been to move my responses to the Daily Create to be done in Mastodon
I am sure that this is keeping the Musky Dark Lord of Twitter up at night.
Ahh, rules that no one cares about, meant to be broken. There is still the joy in the doing, the editing of photos rather than just whittling away tossing reframed prompts into a box. I want to do my own creativity, not have it done for me.
Even if I am off-perfect.
Featured Image: Combination of screen shots of Daily photo 102 2023/365/102 Warily Close flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) and my Daily Create response tweet posted April 13. Call it whatever CC license you want, I say CC-BY-WHO-WILL-EVER-WANT-THIS.
Don’t let people tease you for wearing jorts, they are just a useful pair of shorts, expanding the life of their predecessors.
And they are also now supported by the SPLOTbox theme, not necessarily the greatest improvement to my wordpress theme stable, but worth doing. Especially because it came from a happy user of SPLOTbox, Suzanne from Lansing Community College who puts the theme to great use as Starscapes, a showcase of student creativity and innovation projects at LCC.
https://starscapes.openlcc.net/presentations/Suzanne wrote about another issue but had noted that last year students had submitted video URLS for “YouTube shorts” but they did not embed. These are old man YouTube’s attempt, maybe, to be hip like that other video site with the clock sound. I think I had noticed them when a video I uploaded ended up with a “shorts” URL.
Now yes, these videos will autoembed fine in WordPress like any other YouTube video, but the SPLOTbox theme depends on some URL matching patterns to identify a submitted URL as a media form it supports (the code is by no means elegant, but, shrug, what am I, some AI generative code machine? Nope).
So it was a quick fix to the media sensing code, which is now in action at the SPLOTbox demo site. Got a SPLOTbox site to update? See the docs.
I’ve not done much updates to SPLOTs, so it warms my heart to hear from Suzanne how it is useful for the LCC program:
We have our first in person student research fair Wednesday and Thursday and have less than 20 students registered (before Covid we had over 100), but the online website I set up has already gotten more entries than usual at this time in the semester. Thank you so much for creating the SPLOTbox! I love it and it is so much fun to see the student work streaming in each semester.
We got this comment from a student when we moved the event online.
“This is so cool! I love it that I can still look through the posts, even past the event dates”
Suzanne feedback on SPLOTbox
SPLOTbox always had a special feel to it, as it was maybe the most configurable SPLOT (choose which services to support) and even the built in audio recorded works fairly well. I’m not sure anyone caught on to the idea of how it could be a deployed as a podcast publishing site, most people these days seem to rely on hosted third party sites, when really, WordPress still does it all,
Anyone else using SPLOTS? I’m still open to making changes, even trying to build new ones.
But until then, they are as fitting as a comfortable of of jean shorts, where your jorts with pride!
Featured Image: Jorts flickr photo by indieinterviews shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license modified by me to sport the SPLOT logo.
Sigh, one cannot avoid The Topic, the Only Thing as it has been grailed. At least it provides fodder for some mocking.
It’s so easy even with the merest of ChatGPT et al interaction to respond under the influence of the Weizenbaum effect made visible in the verbs we choose.
And like Laura Czerniewicz wrote in Completely authoritatively made up I enter the prompt box with no expectation that what is regurgitated back is anything but Colbertian factiness:
Made up, and yet not lies exactly, I think, since lies do imply intent. Rather, two “hallucinations” in one: Generative AI pretending to be human and authoritatively and confidently making up information.
https://czernie.weebly.com/blog/completely-authoritatively-made-up
It was quite clear when I tossed it a question about a subject I knew very well from a published research paper I did long ago, it was evident that ChatGPT has not in anyway drawing its responses by “looking up facts” as it assembles things like URLs and citations that only resemble these entities on a statistical guess, it does look up anything. Well actually I don’t know what it does, but I feel like when people discover the falseness of returned facts that ChatGPT just has done sloppy research.
Even in some experiments where I asked it to produce code for a WordPress plugin or a Javascript bookmark, it was impressive at first glance what it returned, because it very closely resembled those things. But my efforts never actually worked, and then I was debugging.
I know others have much greater success, so I am going to accept I am a lousy prompt engineer. I question if I really want to be skilled in such a thing.
Yet I Fall Into My Own TrapStill, I faltered again. I have been doing some work trying to learn how to get into Wikidata and leverage the query power of SPARQL. I took a course in November, but then let it lapse, so my query skills are really rusted.
Without going too deep, after a really great OEG Live Webcast with guests discussing climate change as shown in film narrative I wondered about trying to see if I could extract examples of this genre, given that there is a Wikimedia category for it.
Alas, my queries kept failing, and in a despicable act of desperation, IACFH (I Asked ChatGPT For Help) (I am as bad at acronyms as my AI prompts).
Alan: Write a wikidata SPARQL query to list title and date of all films in the Climate Change genre.
Almost instantly it returned with much confidence what resembled a solid query:
It warned me too “Note that this query may take some time to run, as it is searching through a large database.” so when I asked it to maybe limit the results to 100, it added the proper statement.
But look, I did not even stop to think. There are only 44 films listed on the Category page I found, why would ChatGPT give that warning?
I got 0 results, so I reported that back. Again, the obsequious ChatGPT replied with again full of that authoritative tone:
And what I find is I am slipping on my own intuition. The first example it game my was listed as an attempt to find the Climate Change Genre using property Q32971 which if you plop into a URL is https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q32971 The grand intelligence if ChatGPT’s first attempt was to look for a genre identified as “Alice Cogswell” Not even close.
And upon questioning, it shuffles off with great sorry filled blabber to say, Oh My, I used the wrong property, try Q884794 instead. And I did. That borked too. Of course it would, that is trying to find a film genre identified as “list of state leaders in 1349” which is even more off base.
Of course I would get zero results. I report failure. Now here is where it gets curious. Again, it falls over with this syrupy aplogy blather.
Note the claim it makes:
I have tested the query myself and was able to retrieve results, so I’m not sure what could be causing the issue on your end.
ChatGPT, making **** up
Wow, ChatGPT went out, ran the query, and got results. It’s operating from the old tech support handbook, “It worked for me, so you must be a chump”. But note that it is also claiming
The genre ID for “climate fiction” is Q21246176:
ChatGPT, Artificially Intelligent
Well, not even close, now I am calling it out. The property it suggested is found at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q21246176 is actually a species of fish known as Caristius digitus.
I have to lecture ChatGPT:
Alan: That cannot be right. Q8383103 is not climate fiction. The genre for climate change films is Q8383103
Why do I have to look s*** up for this machine? Again it apologies, corrects it’s query, which I try… and get zero results.
I can’t let this slide.
Alan: You said “I’m sorry to hear that the previous query still did not work. I have tested the query myself and was able to retrieve results,” but when I tried the exact same query, I got zero results. Please explain and demonstrate how you tested the query and show me the results you received.
This seems reasonable! Look at the way it weasels out of the hole it has dug, it blames me.
None of the queries it provided me work, and I have shown that they are all faulty for the properties it is using. And doesn’t this seem like lying? It is telling me it got results.
Alan: But if you were able to retrieve results then you should be able to show me the results. Therefore you are lying. That is not respectful.
Results are results, right? They should be reproducible. But look how it explains itself:
Again, this sure sounds like lying, right? It says it cannot even get results, and that all it is really doing is checking syntax and expressing its confidence as “I believe”. This is preposterous. After more obsequious blabber, it then reverts to claiming it gets results.
None of this makes sense, because I am trying to reason with something that has no capability of reasoning. It is merely iterating through patterns to resemble results, to resemble writing, to resemble thought, but it is none.
So yes, I think we need some help from Kirk and Spock and Harry Mudd.
ChatGPT is not lying or really hallucinating, it is just statistically wrong.
And the thing I am worried about is that in this process, knowing I was likely getting wrong results, I clung to hope it would work. I also found myself skipping my own reasoning and thinking, in the rush to refine my prompts.
PostscriptI should add that no matter how many times I could have asked ChatGPT for assistance, it would never succeed (despite its protestations) because of a flaw (human induced) from the outset. You see, I had assumed wrongly that because there is a Wikpedia category for Climate Change films and an associated Wikidata item for this category there is no use of climate change as a wikidata item for film genres.
This was revealed because I asked for help from Wikidata Will (Kent) who helped me understand the reason why I was getting no results.
And I am not making a stand for victory of human over machines, as for well constructed queries and many tasks, AI is doing wonders for me (transcription for one, and I am impressed with my runs with Elicit). I wrote this more as to make a case that ChatGPT and generative AI in general are not (yet?) any good at reasoning and in our use, we need to not park our own reasoning abilities just because its fun to be conversational with it.
Featured Image: Animated GIF of some old slides I had used in a 2005 TCC Online Conference Keynote actually based on a Star Trek metaphor that I re-edited slightly for 2023. Probably not legally kosher, mostly for parody. Shrug.
Just for fun, this was the abstract from that 2005 presentation (and bless you Bert Kimura for going along with this!) And the “slides” as it were are still available as a Flickr set.
“Harry Mudd, Small Pieces, and that Not Widely Distributed Future”
~ Where it (or IT) is for Educators ~Predictions of the future are easily analyzed in hindsight and ought to be skeptically questioned — you will have to tune into this session to see the connection with an old Star Trek episode. However, author William Gibson’s insightful quote, “The future is here. It is just not widely distributed yet” is the framework I use to peek at the future. For the use of technology in teaching and learning, where is this “not widely distributed future?” I am not sure, but in this session, we will take some guesses at places you may find the future.
The present form of the web was visible, but not widely distributed in 1992. Is there something of this scale already here? Will text messaging displace email as a communication mode? We will look at the drivers of consumer used technologies that become disruptive? For example, digital cameras have taken the lead in the consumer photo market and MP3 players are re-shaping the music industry. And how about those multitude of technology gadget web sites? Are small pieces of “loosely” joined technologies (often open source) displacing large comprehensive commercial tools?
The future is here and it (or IT) is not. Explore hands-on some of the interesting “social” and connection technologies such as “tags”, RSS, wikis, podcasts, and perhaps whatever else pops up between now and the conference.
Happy day of birth “old man” aka Morris aka Mickey aka Dad… This would have been a cake with 97 candles flaming on it.
I don’t have to ask ChatCPT to say anything about what it means to remember a loved one. But I did take a black and white (or is it sepia and white) photo I had digitized long ago, there was a date if 1927 written on it, so you could have been 7 months to 19 months old here:
Dad in the Buff flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) licenseSo I did an AI thing and let Hotpot.ai render a color version used as the featured image for the post. I have to say, it looks a bit natural, and you were darned cute, but I’d have a heck of a time explaining to you exactly how it works. I do know you’d ask me.
Judy shared the classic Lawnman photo, your joy at finally getting that riding mower you always talked about and likely thought about the 25 years you pushed that green mower up and down the yard.
The Lawnman flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) licenseYou’d sure be proud of Cori and I know you would love talking to her about the zero turn mower she uses here to define our walking trails. She is going to recreate your photo once we get it out for the first cut…
My John Deere Gal flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)Why am I going on about lawnmowers? Because my neural net is not programmable! I vaguely remember the old mower you had that lacked wheels, it ran if I recall by hovering power of the spinning blade– yeah maybe it was a Flymo?
Flying Mower- found on pinterest rights,license, WTF?Hmmm, given that my reuse of that photo is questionable (or illegal), but it serves a point. Yes! AI IS THE ANSWER….
I turn to DALL-E and prompt it with “A vintage Toro hover mower floating above a green lawn” and to prove again my appalling lack of prompt engineering chops, look at this rubbish:
Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Hah, this is what DALL-E produced for “A vintage Toro hover mower floating above a green lawn” doing passable on the lawn, bu maybe only image 3 is close, and look a the bad proportions. AI sucks, or I suck at AIOkay, Dad, I have wandered way off point here. For your 97th birthday, I give you no explanation of AI but I do give you my ever longed thanks for being my Dad.
See you next year, Lawnman.
Featured Image: A rendition of Dad in the Buff flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license colorized with Hotpot AI Photo Colorizer.
I have more things to write about than old web stuff few care about, but since this was something that started 20 years ago as some of my first blog posts… I can say for sure today that my long running Feed2JS service is no longer functioning.
Death has been declared a few times before, but now it’s definite. I have been rummaging around my first month’s blog posts I am fairly certain it was May 5, 2003 I first posted a PHP script that accepted input of an RSS Feed (future readers will have to ask some AI to tell them what that means) that dynamically inserted it into a web page (including Blackboard!) via Javascript. That first post mentions an RSS Parser I used called OnyxRSS. As the web worked back then, a few days later it’s developer ED Swindelles commented that he got a ping about something we later came to praise as “re-use”.
And the idea for this was not mine, but something I had seen David Carter-Tod (someone later I got to meet for dinner in his home in Blacksburg, Virginia) do on a Virginia Community College do to embed news feeds using an .ASP script. I just figured out how to replicate it with PHP, and over the years it became its own thing at https://feed2js.org with the first version known as rss2js running on an Apple Xserve at my office at the Maricopa Community Colleges. The source script has some history (D’Arcy Norman is first contributor).
The oldest version I find in the Wayback Machine is from October 2003.
The whole thing relied on an ancient library called MagpieRSS. In its working days, when it failed to return a result it was nearly always because of something in the feed that did not validate. But over the last few years, it failed more and more often, for other reasons that I cannot really diagnose. My own blog failed:
Every feed sent through Feed2JS will return this error. Nothing more can be done (by me).A few weeks ago I was dabbling with another old web page and a the time, the fix I found was to run a feed through Feedburner e.g. my own blog gets “rinsed” there as https://feeds.feedburner.com/cogdogblog. It did work, but upon checking today to an issue reported, even that fails.
So it’s time to just bury Feed2JS. I had previously hosted it myself externally, then had generous offers from Aaron ?? and latest from a guy named Brian Teller who still has it running (I cannot even contact him any more) so cannot update the web site either!
The feed grinder has ground to a halt… The domain auto-renew is turned off so Feed2JS will vanish on June 23, 2023. There is even an untold story of a requested use I will share only with close friends, shhhhh.
Just more blogging about old web stuff. What else is there? Oh yes, the obligatory ask of ChatGPT asking, “What is the history of Feed2JS?”
I guess ChatGPT is okay when it’s flatteringly accurate! I did ask, “was there an earlier version under a different name?” and it failed, well, sort of. I did not even remember a “Feed2JS Lite” (Google search leads my to guess it is stochastically parotting from un-related info from a MagpieRSS page):
To the best of my knowledge, there was not an earlier version of Feed2JS under a different name. However, Alan Levine did create another tool called Feed2JS Lite, which was a simplified version of the original Feed2JS tool. Feed2JS Lite was designed for users who only needed basic RSS feed display functionality and did not require the more advanced features of the full version of Feed2JS.
ChatGPT response to asking of history of Feed2JS… going into that flowering BS mode.
Thanks for all the feeds!
Featured Image: A bit of tombstone rewriting by me, a human being, in Photoshop from my own photograph– 2011/365/255 I’ve Been Here Since 1793 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
Just typing the “t” word brings all the smelly fetid connotations. Still, twitter can be a swell place, Wally.
The writing on the wall is happening for a string of my web sites and some silly experiments that likely the world will not suffer to be without. And while this week we are hearing of the withering of the blue check marks (I am proud now of never seeking nor getting one), worse is ahead as the great business minds at the helm are just tossing the enterprise over the sides.
This is their “plan” to kill the capabilities (stated more watery buzzworded as “deprecating”) of the version 1.1 API (it’s more defecate than deprecate) in lieu of a new one… that they expect “hobbyists” to pony up $100 a month for a basic plan. It’s been looming a while but my indicators came in notices like:
Two of 5 similar messages I’ve seenThe grand offer of the “Free” API is only useful for the first message, which is a twitter bot, because the only thing you can do for free is to publish tweets via the new regime’s API. Many of my other sites are ones like the DS106 Daily Create where the Daily Blank WordPress theme (one of the oldest SPLOTs!) uses the API to read replies to @ds106dc to post as responses. I also got one for an API key I used at the OEG Connect Discourse platform, which was used merely to generate embeds of tweets.
Over the past week, I have jumped through the hoops for about 4 twitter accounts to get them “unsuspended” (the twitter developer site is if anything a maze –not amazing) and my apps are again working… for maybe this month.
Supposedly this will crash to the ground April 29 when they turn off the version 1.1 API, meaning all of the old sites and scripts would need recoding to use different endpoints.
I will skip the explanation and leave it as-this is effing stupid, but if anything, it will spurn more people to just stop using their service, leaving it for the bots and billionaires.
Forget about the blue checkmarks- the knifing of the API is a serious and insidious blow. This is what is getting tossed into the bins.
So Long Twitter TAGS worksheetAlready gone is the brilliant TAGS script enabled Google worksheet created maybe 9 years ago by Martin Hawksey. It used the API to archive tweets based on a hashtag and or other search parameters, it summarized date, and most beautifully, it generated the valuable interactive visualization of everything it grabbed as the Conversation Explorer (see example).
Alas @mhawksey thanks for all the years of Twitter TAGs.
Looks like it's been musked out of the API. Now I just have to deactivate all my sheets. pic.twitter.com/PF9DTXWynu
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) April 18, 2023
I must have created 50-70 of these and put to use for almost every project, class course that used a hash tag. I found one from January 2013 for the first ETMOOC.
Martin’s creation was truly genious and it worked as recent as for Open Education Week in March 2023.
Alas, Twitter killed its API and thus Twitter TAGs.
So Long Google Spreadsheet Twitter BotsIn the 2017 and 2018 Networked Narratives course co-taught with Mia Zamora, we had our students exploring of all things the classic ELIZA generator, but also what was emerging as the phenomena of twitter bots.
https://netnarr.arganee.world/week-12-0/As an activity students created their own bots using a clever Google spreadsheet created by Zach Whalen– students waded through steps of creating new twitter accounts, then getting API keys, but the creative part was using the spreadsheet to generate a sentence structure that could generate randomized statements, even to include the handles of others in the class to make them part of the class conversation.
I rather get a kick because until this week, I saw at least three of our students bots from maybe 2018 that where still chattering away. These may be some of their last utterances…
Darkness is meek regurgitation, angelic drug of beauty~ #arganee #makebelieve
— Nox Sióg (@noxsiog) April 21, 2023
Your pteradactyl fragrance
— NounjectiveBot (@nounjective) April 21, 2023
Chance flowed gentle beneath the dim of your eyes flashed back, red bleeding into dawn so we shared a month
— ?????? (@mooneyed_girl) April 16, 2023
In the anguish of politics of 2016 I felt compelled (not inspired) to create @isamericagrate using this approach (I think this is where I learned it). This bot got one of the Twitter API suspension messages. I took the liberty to post a non-bot message:
Hey! Twitter has suspended my API, that’s not grate at all. Yo Apprentice Elmo, if I could I’d yell “You’re fired!”
— Is America Grate? (@isamericagrate) April 15, 2023
I ventured into the Twitter Developer Dashboard to see if I could bend my way around, especially as the task this does through the API should be kosher under the new regime. It took a lot of clicking to finally get my Free status enabled. First of all, since I had already created an API key for this account, I had at least access to the “portal” (otherwise you have to request it) and only via the Products link I found I had to click a button to “Downgrade to Free”.
Then I created a new Project for the new API, and added my existing API app to it. After this, I generated new API Keys and API secret strings, popped this into my Spreadsheet, and I was back in business.
Did I beat the system? Hardly, @isamericagrate has resumed, but knowing that all the scripts in the spreadsheet are using API 1.1 endpoints, when the “~~deprecate~~” defecate this version, it will die.
It really resonated with me that my previous students in Network Narratives, who long moved on to other things, were in a way still creating narratives in rhe network:
Out there in the dusty fringes of twitter space are echoes of #netnarr student created bots from 2017 that keep speaking to everyone and no one (and me).
As generated text goes, in tiny samples, one might say is prophetic. Or gibberish. pic.twitter.com/T5l2bfkNxT
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) December 31, 2022
Alas, when Twitter defecates its own API and my bot and my students old bots will die.
So Long Daily Create et al Collecting Tweeted ResponsesThis is one I have known about and have been dragging my coding feet to address. Since September 2015 the DS106 Daily Create (which had been rolling daily creative challenges since early 2012) has been using the Twitter API to collect responses to @ds106dc and filing them under the appropriate post on the site (all done via the Daily Blank wordpress theme first hacked out by me in 2014).
See an example that has collected 60 responses. The theme even generates a leaderboard which I think is cool.
The main DS106 Daily Create Account has not gotten the Twitter API Scarlet letter but a few variants I have made e.g. the NetNarr Daily Digital Alchemy and the UDG Agora Daily Try (both inactive) did get their API suspension slaps.
If the API gets defecated, the sites will keep publishing challenges and maybe even tweeting them, but what won’t work is the ability for them to collect and track responses. What I have been dragging on is making the template work to fetch responses from Mastodon. There is a Mastodon ds106 daily create account posting there via IFTTT and I got the basics of fetching replies via the Mastodon API.
Fetching Stuff from Mastodon (simplest brute force approach)
But I have been slow at updating my theme.
I did want to see if they really did break things, so I ventured into witte developer land again for @netnarr, downgraded to the Free API tier, and noticed that my app was still listed as a standalone API 1.1 app.
So I renerated my tokens and keys, plugged them into my Daily try site, and zoom! I looked like I was back in business (sent some test tweets, yes twice) that were picked up– see https://daily.arganee.world/dda378/.
Maybe I beat the system? My suspended API was back in business and reading tweets, all that should be verboten under my Free account.
Not so fast, boss.
This is working because the Twitter API 1.1 is still working. At some point, and it’s never clear since the timing is operated by apparently an un-magic 8-ball, Twitter will defecate this API. Even if I was able to recoded the twitter API calls, under the new regime of the crippled Free account, I could not read tweets.
I just did this so I could keep the lights on a little longer and maybe get my butt into gear to recoded the WordPress theme to make use of Mastodon to access the responses — and you can find activity happening there by ds106ers who have made the jump.
Alas, when Twitter defecates its own API, all of the Daily _______ web sites will no longer harvest responses.
After the Great Defecation…Life and work and things go on. Nothing on the web created by a third party lasts forever; the only things you can manage are the content you create and manage. And this gives me pause as so many colleagues have forsaken their own domains for publishing in MediumSubstackGoogleplexWhatever because it has been made easy.
Easy now rules. It’s why creativity is being subsumed by AI Promptism (another post in my head). my good friend Todd once smashed the Easy Button:
Todd Conaway Another Easy Button flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) licenseBut that’s what we seek now. Click Like. Click Repost. Click Emoji. Click Write. Click Make. Click Think?
Thanks Twitter for defecating your own platform.
Who Crapped in My Yard flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)That’s the way it goes. All the bots and apps powered by the Twitter API are now headed for the digital landfill.
Featured Image: Modification of my own photo 2021/365/229 Toss Your Bots Here flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) where I superimposed Twitter logo from Pixabay image by kreatikar– all done by me, a human.
Twitter has tossed your bots and apps and other defecated items. Actually they just left them laying around to rot.
Blogging, that’s so 2007, right? Actually for me it’s 2003 because that was the year, on this very day, that this pile of posts spit out its first one.
That’s a big fat who cares, 2-0.
Please no cards or flowers.
I have put to use my own WordPress little plugin to list all the posts every done on April 19. Ironically I seem to never post anything on this birthday. I seem only have acknowledged on the 11th and the 19th ones.
I’m still at it! Pry this blog from my cold dead hands.
Anyhow, from years past, I found other things to write about then blogging about blogging.
Blogged on April 19There are 23 posts previously published on April 19th
- 2022
- For #OER 22 Me and a Penguin Want You To…
- 2019
- One Day / Two Online Presentations
- 2017
- After ~50 Years, I Learn to Tie My Shoes
- 2016
- Life With Dog; Hey This Data Collection is Creepy / Hey This Data Collection is Cool
- Literally [Ear] Buddies: Virtually Connecting at #OER16
- Welcome to Slack with Slackin
- 2011
- The Last Hurrah-zon Preso
- 2010
- That Two Timing XML File
- 2009
- Hash Tags, Trash Tags, Hack Tags
- 2008
- My iPod Will Not Crash Your Airplane
- Worst Interface Designers Are The Access Gougers
- 2007
- To Quote a Spammer
- 2006
- Second Life Staff Meeting
- Odeo Me About Podcasts
- i m noob
- 2005
- The New Phone Book is Here! The New Phone Book is Here!
- 2003
- Making the RSS Feeds Even More Useful
- And Boris then TBs the Same Object
- Lora TrackBacks an Object
- BackTrack to TrackBack
- Meet Lora..
- About Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX)
- I Blog Therefore I am…
Featured Image:
Twenty Feet in Every Direction flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
Thanks to Pat Lockley from who I learned the phrase Gotchya Day, this week I knew to mark April 6 as the day in 2016 that I adopted Felix from the Payson, Arizona Humane Society.
@felixadog celebrates our 2 year “gotchya” day with a visit and donation to Human Society of Central AZ. They all remember “Fix It Felix” nods to @patlockley pic.twitter.com/s1BL9XWLOH
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) April 12, 2018
I had the original photo taken for me by a staff member as I left the facility my “new” dog. I also happen to have the same t-shirt I wore that day (from a trip to Tasmania in 2011). Cori helped with an attempt to redo the photo in 2023.
Until April 2016 as much as I wanted to have a dog, the extensive travel I was doing for work then (a lot of variable length freelance stuff) made it not feasible. Everything changed when I signed on to an 18 month project with Creative Commons (helping craft the design of what has become the Creative Commons Certification).Having solid work mostly from home for that length of time opened the doggy door, as one might say.
Here’s the thing about memory. My internal story was that the week I signed my contract I went down to the Human Society to look for a dog, but since I have contract files (and more reliable, a blog post), I actually started Creative Commons work March 16, 2016. My flickr photos I went to North Carolina 2 days later for an Indie Ed-Tech meetup at Davidson College.
So maybe I pondered the dog idea for a month. I started looking at the Payson Humane Society web page, taking note of what kinds of dogs were available.
I did make my visit to the Humane Society on April 4, 2016. I had met another dog first, some kind of Australian Shepard, named maybe? Jasper. I almost went with him, but thought it wise to just take another for a test drive.
Felix was one in a cage in the front corner, so newly arrived he was not on the site. He was making quite a noisy excited fuss which almost made my ask about the black labs further down, but I asked to see Felix out of the cage.
They let you set outside in a medium sized enclosure to wait to meet a dog. I was sitting on a low curb when they brought Felix out. He sat right next to me and leaned in to my side. That was it, I was chosen.
First pic:
Meeting Felix flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) licenseI put down a deposit, as I knew I wanted him, but they encouraged new adopters to go home, check out their home, and come back to claim a dog.
I was back on April 6, no hesitation. After signing and paying the $75 fee, they brought him out to me. Here he came with now what I know as his typical excitement:
I’M BUSTING OUTTA HERE! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) licenseAnd then they offered to take the photo of us together used above.
I remember walking out to the truck and the thought came flying in my head- I have no idea if he;s going to want to jump in a strange vehicle. What do I do if he recoils in fear?
It was no issue. I opened the door, he jumped in faithfully (like he has done 4000 times since), and we drove home. He loves rides. Still.
“I’m Liking Riding in Red Dog” flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) licenseThe next day, April 7, was our first one together. He stuck his head out the rails of the front porch and gave me the iconic look that I have even out to use as my social media icon.
2016/366/98 “Did Someone Say Go for a Ride?” flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)It’s been lots of adventures since, tracked in his own photos (2146 of them!) and tweets. And here we are together 7 years later, living on a rural acreage in Saskatchewan with a Cori in his life plus 2 cats and a world of snow to roll in and rabbits to chase.
April 6, happy Gotchya Day, Felix.
Featured Image: Composite of my own photo from April 6, 2016– Dog Smiles flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license and a redo photo today taken by Cori Saas to be posted later to flickr under a CC0 license.
Gotchya Day 2016 and 2023… still gotchya too, old TAS t-shit!
Not that anyone is keeping score… well I am! For 2023 my double daily habits, the DS106 Daily Create and my Daily Flickr Photo routine have notched another perfect month, bringing both to 90 completions at the end of March, the 90th day of the year.
This follows my streaks for both January and Feburary. Can this blistering pace be maintained? Welcome to March,in like a daily creator and out like a daily photographer, celebrated in the images above of both challenges on the third day of the third month.
For Flickr on March 3, my daily photo….
2023/365/62 Cartesian Sunrise flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)\And my Daily Create response for March 3 covers my new outlet of “AImocking”.
@ds106dc s #dailycreate #tdc4067 #ds106 Prove that you are human… good thing you did not step in it! pic.twitter.com/cfFlYBaFQj
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) March 3, 2023
Not sure who cares to see what I am doing here, but given the reduction of creativity to what pops out of a black box after entering the 34th version of a prompt… all of these are generated by”CI”– CogDog Irreverence. For this month, maybe just a few more pairs of responses by date.
March 11The Daily Creates this month featured a nifty range of challenges using web generators or randomizers I’ve not seen before. The prescription generator for TDC4075 was one that did on small thing well:
@ds106dc #tdc4075 #ds106 Listen to Dr. Hackenbush, not a hack in the bush at all… pic.twitter.com/WthLPhfhpC
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) March 11, 2023
My photo for the same day? My favorite prescription for making use of those bananas that have been out a bit too long.
2023/365/70 If There Are Over Ripe Bananas… flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)March 18The photo for this day was easy to pick as it was the first day we spotted our local fox dad named Watson standing guard outside the den where we know/hope the pups are coming out soon. Spotted out the window with the telephoto lens.
2023/365/77 You Can Call Me Watson flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)I can only arm wave a connection to the Daily Create for that day (I posted a day late) to “Write (in blue font) a one-liner, wish, wise-crack, proverb (a.k.a Old Dutch Tiles) on a blank tile” Yes, I did a wisecrack about asking ChatGPT to describe themselves in 4 words (“modest” did not make the cut).
@ds106dc #tdc4082 #ds106 Tegeltje-LeegGPT, empty in, empty out. But why not assert your own intelligence? pic.twitter.com/Gs27DvddFw
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) March 19, 2023
March 24Here is a secret…Daily Creates are maybe more fun to make than do. I rather like it when I can pull one from a colleague’s online post like today’s to make a “goofy” face in response to a Mastodon post by @ResearchBuzz (showing off a bit by embedding in the Daily Create but not showing off as I still have not coded the site to accept Mastodon responses) (soon?) (maybe?).
I already had a goofy photo of me following the end of a full Open Education Week doing 14 live webcasts but took the next step to graft on to my head my dog and cat.
@ds106dc #ds106 #dailycreate #tdc4088 A goofy face for @ResearchBuzz and her granddaughter.
This was me celebrating and energetic after doing 14 live webcasts for #OEweek with my pals Felix and Maggie.
Looking forward to your feedback on the goofiness level. pic.twitter.com/Uw9FLUN1nW
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) March 24, 2023
My photo for that same day? Just about as opposite from goofy as on can get- it was a black and white rendering of a foggy morning view of our eastern end of the property, which looks rather spooky.
2023/365/83 Spooky Scene flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)Shrug?This habit of monthly recaps is one more self-imposed obligation atop doing these daily acts. They still do as they always have done, gives me a small creative outlet, a chance to see how quickly I can make a response with my own mind, tools, and memory.
I wonder about the DS106 Daily Create, it keeps humming along in its 11the consecutive year but as the leaderboard shows, participating has fallen in 2023 to only 14 participants, of which half have been doing it at like a 90% level.
Is it worth doing?
Hell yeah.
Line me up both daily doubles for April.
Featured Image: Screenshot of my flickr daily photo for March 3, 2023 combined with a screenshot of my tweeted response to the DS106 Daily Create for March 3,2023. Heck I made them, call this licensed CC BY.
Screenshots of my own stuff!
What kinds of web footprints are you leaving? Or does it matter since they just blow away? Where do you choose to do your walking?
I am not talking about your data trails, am talking about the trails you make as a contribution for others.
I know my answers, which are just mine, and are not likely anywhere near yours. But with each day of 2023, the web I walked into in November 1993 with the widest sense of wonder (I wonder about when I last wondered about wonder), is fraying away, or being left behind for the commodified mall of platforms. Ot just left as error messages. The 404 web.
I could go darker, I say to my 3 or 4 readers. But. The Wonder is still there, I need to trust in that, and perhaps just extremely unevenly distributed as the past future used to go.
1.I don’t know why I reached for numerical headings, but am again borrowing your style, Kate Bowles. You see, like the current inevitable technical overlord, my mind is “trained” on stuff (though training is a narrow word for what I think my grey matter CPU does). All I have read and seen is in me, and then I generate something from it. Who ya callin’ Artificial?
There was an online discuss–well thread? blip? where some others I do “follow” and are friends I have been in the same room together, were talking about a certain aviary named technology dying.
My internal storage database went rummaging around for an article a long time ago I read from a rather prominent writer who had driven an interesting stake into the heart of claims that technology “dies”. I remember they had pulled a random page of tools (like implements) from a 1890s?1900s? Sears Catalog, all would be echnologies one would guess are dead. But the author found somewhere in the world, some artisan was still making them.
I could not for the life of me remember the author’s name. I tried the old oracle of knowledge with searches like “writer who found tools from old catalog still in use” and came up empty, just stuff about library catalogs. A few more failed. Is it the search fail or my weak prompts? Because apparently, all future work will be typing prompts into boxes.
Then I remembered I had likely blogged about it. My blog, my outboard brain! And shazam, my own blog search on old catalog tools still being made hits it as a first result- from Feb 1, 2011 Not One Tech Extinction reconnects my neurons! That was Kevin Kelly, a big shot that back then I had as a guest for an NMC online show I did (those footprints of course are wiped out, as is the recording done in old Adobe Connect).
But I did find what I sought, Kelly’s 2006 blog post on Immortal Technologies:
One of my hypothesis is that species of technology, unlike species in biology, do not go extinct. When I really look at supposed extinct species of technology, I find they still survive in some fashion. A close examination of by-gone technologies shows that somewhere on the planet someone is still producing it. A technique or artifact may be rare in the developed world but quite common in the developing world. For instance, Burma is full of ox-cart technology; basketry is ubiquitous in most of Africa; hand spinning still thriving in Bolivia. A technology may be enthusiastically embraced by a heritage-based minority in modern society, if only for traditional satisfaction. Consider the traditional ways of the Amish, or modern tribal communities. Often old technology is obsolete, that is, it is not very ubiquitous or second rate, but it still may be in small-time use, as many old-fashioned ways are.
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2006/02/immortal_techno.php
Yep, these days a blog is “enthusiastically embraced by a heritage-based minority in modern society, if only for traditional satisfaction” its posts in small-time use, left as durable footprints on the web, right there sitting where it was 17 years ago.
2.Someone’s re-share in Mastodon (oh yes boost), maybe it was Roland Tanglao brought a sad note to see from Boris Mann (who I crossed paths with long ago in the Northern Voice Vancouver days)
Boris’s message marked the passing away of Darren Barefoot, who was the co-founder of Northern Voice. In his last days before cancer closed the lights, or maybe it was ahead of time, Darren’s blog left his last web footprint, a post on his own blog/domain, They Were All Splendid.
I will not even taint it by trying to summarize. Read it yourself. I had some memories of seeing his earlier posts (tweeted maybe by Boris or Roland?) or perhaps in flickr photos of Darren’s Splendid things.
His site lists a long set of footprints, his first web site in 1999, but what I remember, his post describing the idea that lead to a survey that led to the first Northern Voice conference in 2005. I became aware of it of course because Brian Lamb blogged about it (more web footprints still visible), and I think reached out to me as I went to Northern Voice for the first of several times in 2006.
I can’t say I knew Darren, I probably met him, but I was there in that era, when nothing was proven and everything possible for the web. I can say I was there.So many things for me came as an outgrowth of Northern Voice, the connections, friendships, photos.
Web footprints that will be there for while.
2.Sadly, Darren was not the first Northern Voicer to blog their own last post- I remember being astonished/amazed at the web footprint left behind by Derek Miller in 2011, alas also a victim of cancer.
Northern Voice attracted a bunch of digital photography nerds, running informal sessions where people would gather and share/talk about gear, software, and invariably, go out on the Vancouver streets for a photo walk.
That’s where I met Derek. I cannot remember interactions, but that he was always gracious. The thing that is hard to describe about those Northern Voice conferences, is how there was no prestige hierarchy, it was flat, even though it drew upon people from not often overlapping Venn regions- tech nerds, educators, and social activists.
I remember using Derek’s example photos for How a Camera Works, showing visually how aperture shutter speed affected images.
Speaking of web footprints, I forgot Derek’s penmachine.com domain from one of my own Northern Voice talks in 2011- Looking Through the Lens where I tried to make analogies between the functions/settings for photography and learning.
But looking at that old site (broken links, dead flash embeds), are URLs that spark memories- I always liked using Kris Krug’s story that went behind a photo that went beyond viral on flickr. Kris too was like a rock star photographer, yet treated me as a young tech head and just starting in digital photography, as an equal.
It Was Him flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0). Yes,I am wearing here at the 2008 SXSW conference my Northern Voice 2006 t-ahirt.I see in my links something stunningly relevant, a post from Kris’s blog:
What we leave behind is our digital footprint (Kris Krug) http://www.kriskrug.com/2011/02/01/what-we-leave-behind-is-our-digital-footprint/
With sad irony, that digital footprint link ends up at a domain for sale sign. Fortunately, ghosts can be summoned from the Wayback Machine.
Our future is being documented by us in our present. Each and everyone of us who has a digital camera, a cellphone, a computer or even a camera phone has the task of creating our living digital history in real time. Our digital landscape has changed drastically from the meaningless dribble that once was in a stream of collective consciousness that is being contributed to by all of us. Collectively everything that we capture is part of our digital footprint that will exist as a living breathing legacy of ourselves online.
…..
The combination of our collective task of documentation and incentive of sharing has joined forces with the thriving Open Source culture. Not only are we inspired to create and then share but we are also infusing the two into spaces, like unconferences and camps, which allow for both situations to transpire. These spaces are open to everyone, sustained by all and owned by none. It only makes perfect sense that our changing interaction with our present state would happen collectively in our own making.
What we leave behind is our digital footprint Kris Krug, Feb 1, 2011
Hello from 2023.
3.To go back to where this started, mobius strip like, I said “dying” not dead.
I am not contemplating my mountain of web sites as some kind of legacy that matters. Taking care of and preserving my web tracks is not about my last blog post as a goodbye. If anything, it’s perhaps about the first one, and all the ones in between, all of my Pinboard bookmarks (and earlier ones imported from del.icio.us), my flickr photos, the bits and bobs of my archived web sites and ones I have rescued from the dead when others closed shop.
I firmly believe in the web we have woven ourselves (not done by others for us) and the one we care for as individuals. I hate being responsible for breaking any link I have created.
Digital Durability? My Money is on the Individual
If your followers, likes, and LinkedIn connections are the tracks you care about so be it.
My stuff matters. To me, and I care about that fading dream of the web. Without it, what is there?
- There’s always stuff to add after publishing! I wonder if I should comment on my own posts (it helps with the illusion that no one reads me). But sitting in an open tab was Jason Kotke’s marking of his 25th year of leaving footprints
I realize how it sounds, but I’m going to say it anyway because it’s the truth. When I first clapped eyes on the World Wide Web, I fell in love. Here’s how I described the experience in a 2016 post about Halt and Catch Fire:
When I tell people about the first time I saw the Web, I sheepishly describe it as love at first sight. Logging on that first time, using an early version of NCSA Mosaic with a network login borrowed from my physics advisor, was the only time in my life I have ever seen something so clearly, been sure of anything so completely. It was a like a thunderclap — “the amazing possibility to be able to go anywhere within something that is magnificent and never-ending” — and I just knew this was for me and that it was going to be huge and important. I know how ridiculous this sounds, but the Web is the true love of my life and ever since I’ve been trying to live inside the feeling I had when I first saw it.
https://kottke.org/23/03/kottke-is-25-years-old-today
I too want to be on the web and “live inside the feeling I had when I first saw it” (back when we had to refer to it as the “World Wide Web” and not simply “the web”).
Featured Image: A combination of two of my own photo, which have their own tracks– Steps into Time flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) and 2016/366/292 The Web is a Tentative Thing flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
Toss together equal portions of luck, fortunate, serendipity, and a sorely needed dose of genuine humanity all went into the mix of the most current episode I am just blessed to click buttons for the OEG Voices Podcast I have been doing for Open Education Global.
This was easily more than just a podcast, this was a moment of sheer positivity that seems more rare these days. I don’t think most of my colleagues truly grasped how powerful a thing we had made possible, simply by offering an invitation to talk, without script or structure.
I’ve already alluded to this episode in my rush of excitement to be part of a series of live, unstructured events for Open Education Week. On the middle day of the week, that just so happened to be International Women’s Day, we had coordinated a conversation with Tetiana Kolesnykova, Director of the Scientific Library at the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies, made possible by librarians Paola Corti and Mira Buist-Zhuk (I remain in awe of Mira for her super heroic translation skills to go back and forth between me in English and in Ukrainian for Tetiana).
I had suggested setting this up maybe 2 weeks prior in an email to Paolo who had invited Tetiana who had said she would be there “if she had sufficient electricity.”
Let that one sink in.
Now I am tempted to describe it all over again, but it’s more or less been blogged already by me, and you get as well the full audio of course, transcripts in English and Ukrainian, but mostly, take the time to listen to Tetiana tell how she and her colleagues managed to keep their university mission alive through a war time invasion– just a year ago.
OEG Voices 051: Tetiana Kolesnykova on the Open Resilience of Librarians
Just to summarize, just three weeks after bombs fell on Dnipro, Tetiana and her colleagues put into operation a crisis plan developed during the pandemic, organized how to provide all kinds of support, including course, library, and research, and she and her staff were at their library just 3 weeks later carrying out this heroic effort.
And it was not like Open Education had to swoop in to offer the OER goodies as a new offering of benevolence; Tetiana and the Scientific library had been practicing, facilitating open access publishing, OER awareness since 2009.
I could not be more honored to just have this time, and in fact, after an hour when I offered and out, Tetiana wanted to keep talking.
After I had published the episode, I drafted an email of thanks to Tetiana, relying on Google Translate to try and turn my words into Ukrainian. She replied (in turn I think by translation):
Hello, dear Alan!
You made me and my family extremely happy people late last night!In my previous life (before the war), I would never have thought that I would be a part of such a wonderful international project. In addition, you created a very cozy and friendly atmosphere in which I, as a guest, felt very comfortable.
At the beginning of the meeting, I was very nervous because: firstly, I didn’t have such experience in recording; secondly, I didn’t have time to prepare; and thirdly, I didn’t know what questions you would ask me.
But your kindness and sincere support, the enormous help of Paola and Mira, as well as the pleasant faces of Marcela and the other participants in your online studio, removed all barriers.
Thank you very much, Alan!
You, along with Paola and Mira, gave me wonderful emotions!Alan, my colleagues and I (librarians, teachers, researchers) are also very interested in creating opportunities for collaboration. I would be happy to bring your suggestions to them. I look forward to it.
Thank you very, very much to you, your friends in the studio, your family and everyone who supports Ukrainians in this terrible war.
Your help is invaluable.
email from Tetiana Kolesnykova
I remain firmly convinced that open education is often too focused on the stuff- the resources, licenses, courses, platforms, when really, the most important factors are just being able to have human conversations and connections like these.
Just sit down and say ??????.
Featured Image: My own combination (no artificial intelligence even allowed) of a screenshot of the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies web site, a screenshot of the zoom session where we recorded the podcast, and 2011/365/63 On The Air flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
Against all common wisdom, I have been running an old operating system (10.14.6 Mojave) on my old MacBookPro (2103) to mainly use the photo management software Apple dropped in 2015 (Aperture).
Yes, newer software is out there, and I have access to Lightroom via my Adobe plan I pay through the month for to get PhotoShop, but the Aperture Strategy I have used since honing it in 2009 has just kept working smoothly for me. Especially for adding metadata to all photos and also the (long gone) Connected Flow Flickr Exporter that until recently deftly posted photos, sending titles, tags, captions, said metadata to my flickr and also writing back to Aperture the flickr url.
I did learn recently, from some stellar Flickr support, that the reason many of my photos have gotten mis mapped to the opposite hemisphere is my old software. I was willing to live with my barn photos being located to the Russian village Botsiy.
Flickr Flips the Longitude: Greetings from Botsiy, Russia
But the dying has gotten worse. For about the last two weeks, my uploads have been regularly failing like 20% out of a bach with API errors:
Four photos did not make it to flickr.And another plus for the old Flickr Exporter is that it provides tech details in a “problem report” (a log of the comm between Aperture and flickr).
At the same time, I, like many others got a weird email from flickr about impending changes to the Flickr API, they were adding a requirement to include some other data in the transmissions, all played out in a torrid exchange in a flickr forum.
I was invested in this since two of my long running creativity tools (from the days when creativity was not relegated to typing text prompts into an AI box) Pechaflickr and Five Card Flickr Stories depend on the Flickr API to grab random photos based on tags.
I was able to the best of my more hacker than programmer skill set to modify the old phpflickr library that still works. And I managed to make them work in the API change testing window.
All for naught as Flickr announced a day later, in best Emily Litella style– “Never Mind!”
Regardless, I saw other mentions in the forum of others reporting API failures.
The clock is ticking. So I am accepting that its time, 14 years later, to hone a new strategy.
I’m not bothering to try to import my mega Aperture Library into Lightoom. I will leave it as be, but I do have to update my old MacBookPro to some newer mountain named OS (Big Sur I think is as new as I can go). My plan is to leave Aperture running on my even older older MacBookPro, a 2009 dented from a HD killing fall to concrete Just In Case I ever need to re-edit something (not sure when that might ever happen). All my photo originals are on external drives (luckily using Referenced files a long time ago).
This old photo dog needs to learn some new Lightroom tricks.
Thanks Aperture, you’ve been great to me for like 60,000 of my photos (I used the Wayback Machine to find my total in 2009 was about 9000 photos, and look at who I see in the stream there, hiya Scott! BG!).
Onward….
Featured Image: 2015/365/14 What The Lens Sees flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) with superimposed on the lens a screenshot of my flickr/Aperture error and Pixabay image of Cracks by b0red.
Ain’t that llama a cutie? What is that smile about?
Ah, it’s how this person (a.k.a..me) can stand the fact that someone is making money off of a photo I took and shared on the internets. Doesn’t a license protect me?
Welcome to my unconventional corner of the Creative Commons tent, already explained in 2016:
[Trying] Going to Flickr Zero, CC0
So counter to thinking some other flavored Creative Commons license will protect me– I have opted to give my store away. Since I never intended to profit from my photos, how can I lose what Inever “moneytized”? I am fine with people making commercial use of my photos, of taking and using without asking. This has been my ongoing experiment for these seven years, to find out how much I will suffer by putting my 70,000 flickr photos in the public domain.
In fact, I have gotten more in return than money… gratitude and stories.
If Anyone Gets My Concept of Public Domain, It’s Musicians
But What’s With the Llama Face?One perk of the Flickr pro account is access to Pixsy, a service that can locate much more reliably places on the internet my photos have appeared. This service is set up to aid in “going after” stolen images, bu my use is mainly to just enjoy seeing sites where my photos have gone to. Sometimes I have gone through just to add to my album of photos that have been reused (283 so far). You know, a little self-flattery.
But it also does provide something I have had to swallow with my giveaway choice described above:
Downing My Public Domain Stance with a Swig of Castor Oil
That was he first time I discovered that there are “people” out there who scoop up public domain photos, upload to a stock photo outfit like Alamy, and earn a gazzilion (or 20) bucks. I should be OUTRAGED. But then so should be the schmuck who pays $60 for a photo they could get for free from my flickr.
Recently, I looked at my pixsy updates which reported finding 33 of my photos floating round on Alamy, like heck my goofy llama. You can get it free from flickr or pay Alamy £29.99 to use it on a web site.
Who is smiling goofy now?It’s interesting that entity who added my photo kept my original title (the “2010 365” indicates this was one of my daily flickr photos for 2010). Following this, I can play some search gimmicks and find for sale on Alamy:
- 10 of my daily photos from 2010
- 24 of my daily photos from 2011
- 59 of my daily photos from 2013
- 115 of my daily photos from 2014
I could go on… How do I know these are mine? There is no attribution, but it’s easy… I took ’em. But they are easily found in each of my flickr albums for daily photos.
I just have to wonder too about someone how there having to laboriously download my photos and then upload to Alamy, a job of minimal artificial intelligence.
Shall I Play Alamy?No I am not changing my public domain tune, But in the interest of being curious how this shady game is played, tonight I created my own Alamy account, and uploaded 3 of my own public domain images as they require for “Quality Control”— can I pass muster with my own images?
Here is my pledge- if anyone is goofy enough to pay Alamy for my public domain photos, any proceeds that pile in will be donated to the local Humane Society.
It’s a public domain face a llama mother could love.
Featured Image: Yours for the taking, sans watermark.
2010/365/2 A Face Only a Llama Mother Could Love flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
Despite the apparent demise of blogs the flat line of the RSS-ograph blips with a pulse from David Kernohan “on chatbots.” FOTA is alive!
Unsure if my comment gets through the gate (a first one generated a critical WordPress error, sorry, David), but I have to at least assert my assertion, as if it blips anywhere in the raging discordant discourse, “Intelligence might be based on pattern recognition as Stephen [Downes] asserts, but it should not be mistaken for intelligence.”
So when David passes a linked reference to the Colossus as the dawn of pattern guessing to decrypt war time messages, my pattern recognition goes to where no GPT can fabricate:
2014/365/125 Just Part of Colossus flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) licenseThis photo was taken on my own visit to the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park, that being a memorable day when Dave and his partner Viv drove me all the way from Bristol where I visited them to Milton Keynes where I spent a week at the Open University.
Maybe a machine could mine the facts from my blog posts and photos, but it would never make connections, the feelings, to the experience of being there that are not digitized or accessible to wholesale scraping. Never.
Or is this my own flailing effort to raise a pitifully tiny flag of I am Human in front of the advancing, inevitable horde of machines? For an image I could have plopped a prompt into a DALL-EMidJourneyStable Diffusion but why, when I can deploy one of my own making?
2023/365/63 Infinite Clones flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)I could try my best to weave more words around my emerging thought patterns, yes ones that I generate from my own sum of vast experiences. And truly, I could say that I myself, with this nerve network plugged into a 3 pound skull enclosed non-battery powered device, merely have been training 50+ years on written, visual, auditory media,much of which I did not ask explicitly to use, from which I generate through some mystical process, my “own” words? my “own” imagery?
Everything is a Remix but AI Does Not Remix Like an ArtistWho better to turn to than Kirby Ferguson to wisely delve into Artificial Creativity?
Stop, watch the whole thing. I mean the whole damn series. I can only yank quotes
Of all Humanity’s technological advances, artificial intelligence is the most morally ambiguous from inception. it has the potential to create either a Utopia or a dystopia. Which reality will we get? Just like everybody else I do not know what’s coming but it seems likely that in coming decades these visions of our imminent demise will seem campy and naive because our imaginings of the future always become campy and naive.
Everything is a Remix Part 4
He takes AI to “court” on three counts, and makes a point that many don’t want to accept, that harvesting all of the “stuff” readily available is maybe not the point of ethics to hang the purveyors. If you buy into his theme that everything is a remix, that means everything is available, as he has done in his video.
But do not take this as suggesting there is a free ticket to just grab content for the classic “because you can” reason. Follow Kirby Ferguson’s statement about all the media he has remixed into his video:
On some videos about AI the big reveal is that this video was actually made by AI. But this video and this series is the opposite. Nothing has been AI except where I cited AI art. This is entirely human made, the words are all mine but they’re merged from the thoughts of countless people. Everything you’ve seen and heard is from real filmmakers and musicians and game developers and other artists. All these thoughts and all this media were remixed by me into something new and yes I did it all without permission.
Everything is a Remix Part 4
The big difference is that this filmmaker provides credits / attribution to he sources. It is very clear what was used. There is no mask of source content or how it was used hidden behind a facade of a commercial purveyor whose very name has washed open with techno-clorox.
Also, lost in the court section is a very valid question-
Training AIs on individual artists work does seem wrong everyone should be able to opt out of all training sets and maybe AIS should simply not train on images from active art communities. Also some company should make an image generator trained on public domain and licensed images which would avoid this Hornet’s Nest entirely. Somebody please do this.
Everything is a Remix Part 4
Why is there no ethical entity out there creating training from public domain or openly licensed materials? Or why does quote/unquote “OPEN” ai DOT com, which already trains its machines on Wikipedia amongst everything else, just create a version limited to truly open content? About the only thing I found was an image generator on hugging face that looks like it does this, but I am not clever enough to make it do anything.
There is a free idea for anyone to pick up.
Finally, Kirby Ferguson ends with a compelling (to me) assertion of the essence of creativity.
AIs will not be dominating creativity because AIs do not innovate. They synthesize what we already know. AI is derivative by design and inventive by chance. Computers can now create but they are not creative. To be creative you need to have some awareness, some understanding of what you’ve done. AIs know nothing whatsoever about the images and words they generate.
Most crucially, AIs have no comprehension of the essence of art, living, AIs don’t know what it’s like to be a child, to grow up, to fall in love, to fall in lust, to be angry, to fight, to forgive, to be a parent, to age, to lose your parents, to get sick, to face death. This is what human expression is about. Art and creativity are bound to living, to feeling. Art is the voice of a person and whenever AI art is anything more than aesthetically pleasing it’s not because of what the AI did it’s because of what a person did.
Art is by humans for humans.
:
Everything is a Remix is a testament to the brilliance and beauty of human creativity. In particular it’s a testament to collective creativity. Human genius is not individual it is shared.
Everything is a Remix Part 4 (emphasis added by me)
Please watch this video! All of them!
Back To The Hammer HandAnother Old Thing flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) licenseBut it’s not as clean as just going John Henry and making an untenable slice of human versus machine. Artificial Intelligence “stuff” is a tool, but it’s not “just a tool.” I am reaching back to something I often rely on from Gardner Campbell’s explanation of Marshall McLuhan
“There is no such thing as “just a tool.” McLuhan wisely notes that tools are not inert things to be used by human beings, but extensions of human capabilities that redefine both the tool and the user. A “tooler” results, or perhaps a “tuser” (pronounced “TOO-zer”). I believe those two words are neologisms but I’ll leave the googling as an exercise for the tuser.
The way I used to explain this is my new media classes was to ask students to imagine a hammer lying on the ground and a person standing above the hammer. The person picks up the hammer. What results? The usual answers are something like “a person with a hammer in his or her hand.” I don’t hold much with the elicit-a-wrong-answer-then-spring-the-right-one-on-them school of “Socratic” instruction, but in this case it was irresistible and I tried to make a game of it so folks would feel excited, not tricked. “No!” I would cry. “The result is a HammerHand!”….
http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/doug-engelbart-transcontextualist/
So no “just a tool,” since a HammerHand is something quite different from a hammer or a hand, or a hammer in a hand. Gardner has given me more directly, in email:
I got to that in part because of McLuhan’s famous dictum “the medium is the message.” Most folks appear to think he meant that the medium shapes the message. If you read the piece in which the phrase appears, however, you can see that’s not what he meant. Instead, McLuhan thought of every medium as a message about what we are and desire as human beings. He said the electric light was a message. Every medium should tell us something meta about itself, and something vital about humanity. A medium is not just a channel for transmitting stuff. A medium is also itself a message, a transmission. Can we understand the medium’s message about itself, and thus about us? That’s why the book is called Understanding Media. What is the message these media convey about themselves? and about mediated experience generally?
So with that, I built on Alan Kay (and I think others as well), who said “we shape our tools, and after that our tools shape us,” bringing in the idea of man-computer symbiosis, putting it all within the context of Engelbart’s integrated domain, and then re-reading McLuhan to find a way to express what I took to be something essential about his ideas of human transformation in the development of mediated experience, and I came out with hammerhand.
Gardner Campbell, personal communication
Much of the educator reaction to ChatGPT (which to me is narrow as there is much more we should be wrapping our heads around), so focused on the fear/worry/change factors rather than ” ideas of human transformation in the development of mediated experience.”
So This Thing Happened Today Which I Defy Anyone To Experience By Typing Prompts Into a BoxGoing back to where I started, with David Kernohan’s On Chatbots post, he gives just a short bit at the end to maybe the larger idea of his two, under the heading “A Matter of Semantics”:
I want to close my argument by thinking about the other major strand of artificial intelligence – an associative model that starts (in the modern era) with Vannevar Bush and ends with, well, Google search. The idea of a self-generating set of semantic links – enabling a machine to understand how concepts interrelate – is probably closer to the popular idea of artificial intelligence than toys like ChatGPT.
http://followersoftheapocalyp.se/on-chatbots/
meaning (I think) that the interconnected web of ideas imagined by Bush that influenced Engelbart and actually was instantiated by Tim Berners Lee, is the connectivist idea that the web itself, changing with every new bit linked on to it, offers more potential for making something akin to intelligent than chatbots that are merely regurgitation parts of it in a way that just parody intelligence, not embody it.
So this happened today. It is of no significant to any discussion threading out in the ghosted public square of twitter or the de-aggregated butvibrantcorners of Mastodon, certainly not dead to ne where I will never vention spew pots of (f*** it I cannot call it “Meta” its always Facebook),or the iteration of the America Online is to the real Internet as Linkedin is to ______________… Oh I might have lost my thought completely, as it humanly happens.
Can I get help?
This makes this blog sound like some marketing cheese.This is what people have their undergarments wadded about? Seriously? I push back
One cannot get more Gurgitating Parroted Trash than this. If you are worried about AI generated text, then maybe look some in the mirror at your own human generated text.Okay, I am left to my own story making.
Today I sat down to catch up on a few DS106 Daily Creates, it being the very essence of acts of human creativity assisted by tools (using a “TDC HAND”). This was one challenge from a few days ago which in true TDCness, gives a nudge, and opens a door to respond in almost any way.
tdc4081 #ds106 When randomly generated people from different countries meet each other…Lots of ways to run with this, so I just start with the random names generator that suggests possible names from different countries. Cool! I love random stuff and never saw this one. There’s 12 countries listed, each with 10 names. I just decide to be quick and use the first names in the middle row:
4 random made up names from Romania, Hungrary, Spain, and Sweden.Before getting to where / how they meet, I decided I need pictures. Before everyone got wrapped up in Generative text posing as intelligence, there was the phase of all the generative adversarial network (GAN) tools making realistic photos of people and thing that do not exist. If you want a real diversion, see This X Does Not Exist. But I went for the one I remember for generating people, thispersondoesnotexist.com but that now seems gone and only goes to some AI outfit.
But I did find a similarly-URL-ed version at https://this-person-does-not-exist.com/ that was interesting,as there are a few more options to choose from (gender,age range, a few ethnicity options, so I generated 4 non-existent people for Ionut, Lázár, Angel, and Elenor. I imported into Photoshop using one of the Panorama collages which spread them out like photos on a table.
Then I tried to think if where to place these non-existent people. I first reached for a new browser window thinking of some sort of technical image, like a computer circuit board. This is when unexpected-ness happened.
You see I use the Library of Congress Free to Use Browser extension that puts a random public domain image in my screen each time I open a new browser tab. I was fully intending to open an image search, but there, but random chance here was my answer, a road sign for Hanks Coffee Shop, even better, because it was from Bensen Arizona, a place I have been before.
Hanks Coffee Shop sign, 4th Street, Benson, Arizona (LOC) flickr photo by The Library of Congress shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons)So now it all came together, these people who do not exist, met up for coffee at Hanks in Benson. A bit more Photoshop editing to make a cloud background, superimpose the names of the four, and I was done.
@ds106dc #tdc4081 #ds106 Ionut, Lázár, Angel, and Elenor materialized at https://t.co/DKTTg3iMq5
Through magic randomness of LOC Random image in a new browser tab, met at Hanks Coffee Shop, in Benson, AZ, which does exist, see https://t.co/MDHKBoI7h3 pic.twitter.com/WLDN6ucC5M
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) March 19, 2023
“So what?” is certainly a reasonable response. Couldn’t I save time and just type into an image prompt box, “Photos of 4 people displayed under an old time coffee shop sign”? And maybe iterate a few times until it’s “good enough”? Yes, but is making art about the process or the product? Maybe sometimes it is just getting the thing done, turn it in, as they say.
But what is the connection to it? Would an AI remember driving through Benson, AZ on a memorable road trip to camp in the Chiricahua mountains? Would it remember a completely un-related connection from these photos in the Flickr Commons and that there was a call a while ago for examples of galleries of themed images from the commons? And would it then decide, for no productive reason, to search for other Arizona road sign images in the flickr commons, create a gallery, and then share it back?
I’d say, plausibly, eff no. I want to be doing stuff described as “Art is the voice of a person and whenever AI art is anything more than aesthetically pleasing it’s not because of what the AI did it’s because of what a person did.”
I’m not saying at all don’t do AI. And I absolutely intrigued by what it might offer, we have hardly even scratched the surface. But it does not always mean we have to just line up as robot servants to the AI Industrial Complex.
If we lose our ability, interest, to be non stochastically human in our tasks, then we end up being “derivative by design and inventive by chance.”
FinNever. But I am hoping maybe to see before not too long, another just thinking blip from FOTA.
Featured image: Humanly created and selected, mine
Beware the Machines! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
How often do we get to participate in small group open discussions of our practices? I am not talking about blipping in social media. Last, I chose to to be organize/be in 18 of them, and energized more energetic than any zoom webinar.
That week was full on for my organization, Open Education Global with the annual celebration of and awareness raising for Open Education Week.
As it has been done every year since like 2014, OEWeek promotes institutions, organizations, inspired individuals, to plan events/activities during the first year of March that are organized into a single calendar (255 total this year). The goal is to make visible a world wide attention to open education through events and it also collects assets (aka resources, 173 of them this year) to it’s library.
So it’s a completely distributed event. There is always of course too many things to take in, but that’s okay. I’ve tried a few things to encourage people to share back what they experienced in our OEG Connect community, even offering open badges for sharing.
Eventness?In thinking of some ideas for generating more excitement, connection between events, I naturally fell back to previous experiences, and as often it goes, I draw upon my DS106 experience.
What comes back again and again, is the voice of Jim Groom in that very first year of the open DS106 course and likely around the concept of DS106 radio, or maybe it was just the exuberant days of early twitter as a fresh concept- what Jim described as trying to create a sense of “eventness.” This is when there is a hub of excited energy, be it a group of people in a conference hall lobby, or a hashtag on twitter, that emanates outward, that there was something exciting going on. That others would notice it and say to themselves,”I want to be part of that.”
To me, I find it energizing to do unscripted live broadcasts, be it for DS106 but also later doing it for Virtually Connecting.
So I came up with a crazy idea- to do twice a day live webcasts during Open Education Week. Partly to give updates and highlight what was happening, but more so, to ask people to enter a virtual studio and be more or less like a live radio show. On the web.
My colleagues were very supportive of the idea (as they seem to be for a long list of previous ones) though I sense they did not understand the concept. Likely I had it more in my head than I could put into meeting notes.
Old TV – Time Tunnel – Cameron Highland flickr photo by liewcf shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license 1 modified with insertion of OEWeek Banner by @Mario licensed CC BY, making this image also Creative Commons (BY-SA) licenseSo I just did it, I created a web-based show– OEWeek Live! Without writing out all the details few care to read, I plotted a schedule, created a google signup form, sent out requests, and responded with calendar invites. The production was done using Streamyard which provides a studio space for participants; viewers watch on YouTube, but can send comments/questions to the studio, which can be put on screen. The livestream URL becomes the recorded archive, automatically. I really like what you can do during a live stream to switch layouts, put other messages on screen, and anyone in the studio can screen share.
It’s rather refreshing in feel and form than the dreaded wall of zoom bricks.
Okay, enough, blather, on to the conversations.
12 OEWeek Live SessionsThe full slate was posted in our OEG Connect Community space (a big bonus of Discourse is that event times can can beentered to display in the viewer’s local time). A quick recap (is quick possible with me?)
- There ended up being 9 in my two time slots as no one signed up for the late Friday one, and no one needed to see me blab alone.
- If I count correctly, we had 44 participants on screen, from the US, Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, the UK, Scotland,France, the Netherlands, Egypt, Nigeria, Spain, Portugal, and India.
- I’m sure there are stats out there from YouTube, but every session had people there who did more than watch, but put questions and comments into the discussion.
- None were planned in advance beyond collecting on the interest form possible projects participants might want to share.
- I originally saw the opening to include a summary of upcoming events, like a weather forecast but once on air, it seemed not useful to iterate what people could easily gather from the web schedule. It turned out better to use the full time with discussions.
- I hoped to have our new Executive Director join the first show to kick off the week, but another speaking engagement conflicted, so we did a separate one on one conversation in its own slot.
- We reserved a Wednesday slot for my colleagues to run a session completely en español (I was backstage operating the stream)
- My director requested and arranged the weekend before two additional non-English sessions, one in Portuguese and an additional one in Spanish.
- An experiment to bring in organizers of the OER23 conference team via their Discord meeting space did indeed work.
- A more techie session was fantastic to have demos of both Openverse and Docsify-This, where by the end, each presenter was using each other’s tools.
- My experiment to run a mixed English/French session did not materialize, mainly because the conversations just were flowing so well.
But the real joy was so many open, in all ways, conversations that happened in the sessions. After people shared projects/activities, we ended up getting into conversations that crossed between what might seem as separate focuses. We got to topics like finding the joy in learning, the ever present hanging cloud of unknown about AI, and also wha emerged maybe Thursday from a tweeted question, a fantastic round of sharing of what gives people hope.
Even as I write this, I am falling short of really describing what these were like. Perhaps you can get a sense from the recordings, all available linked from the main event list, but also as a playlist.
But wait there were more open conversations!
Open Conversations in the Podcast StudioAnother element I have added to Open Education Week is doing two recording sessions during the week for the OEG Voices podcast. The open part is extending invitations to any interested in sitting in to listen or participate, keeping seats open for 8-10 extras in the zoom studio. In many ways it’s not much different from the way these podcasts are run year round, but I feel like the idea of having more people present maybe changes the atmosphere?
I aim for all of the OEG Voices podcasts to be conversational, but the topics do revolve of course around the work and interests of guests.
This year included two beyond outstanding sessions:
https://oeweek.oeglobal.org/events/2023/oeg-voices-delmar-larsen/I honestly have been eager to meet/talk to Delmar Larsen, the dynamo behind LibreTexts for a long time. His human character comes through on cross twitter/OEG Connect exchanges, and even more in this conversation. The excuse was that LibreTexts won 2 OE Awards for Excellence, but what a joy to learn more about Delmar, the origin story of LibreTexts, how he manages to run a company while at the same time teaching as a full professor of Chemistry, and his humble plans of “world domination.”
I did not think it was possible to top that session, but one that we were able to arrange for Wednesday, that in full synchronicity coincided with International Women’s Day, was maybe the most inspiring conversation I have been lucky to be part of:
https://oeweek.oeglobal.org/events/2023/oeg-voices-open-resilience-award/I was also eagerly waiting to record a podcast about the OE Award for Excellence in Open Resilience that recognized Tetiana Kolesnykova, Director of the Scientific Library at the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies for the efforts made just a year ago using open education resources and practices to support education under the war conditions of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.
My idea to do this emerged maybe twos prior to Open Education week when I reached out to Paola Corti, the SPARC librarian who helped coordinate a stunning collaboration. The phrase “long shot” was in my subject line. Paola responded almost immediately. She volunteered to organize not only the participation of her European Network of Open Education Librarians (ENOEL) colleague Mira Buist-Zhuk, but also to arrange to have Tetiana herself in the conversation “if she has sufficient electricity.”
Read that line again? Look up resilience in my dictionary, and it links to Tetiana.
“Amazing” would be a major understatement for this open conversation, especially heroic was Mira’s deftness and translating between English and Ukrainian.
In the podcast studio connecting from the US, Canada, the Netherlands, Italy, and the Ukraine!I apologize that you will have to wait for my slow podcast editing to bring you this recording, buti short,know first that Tetiana and her colleagues have been supporting and promoting Open Education at the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies since 2009. But beyond that, after the bombing started in Dnipro in February 24, 2022, from their basements and bomb shelters, this University implemented the crisis plan already in place. And while courses were disrupted and students dispersed to safety, Tetiana was back in the library supporting educators just 3 weeks later.
This conversation was __________________ (fill in any synonym for amazing and then emphasize it much more).
Stay tuned to voices.oeglobal.org for both of these episodes.
A CyberSalon Conversation With Todd’s ColleaguesAs synchronicity happens, my long time friend and colleague Todd Conaway invited me to participate in another open conversation session that he runs to support faculty as part of the University of Washington-Bothell’s Teaching & Learning on the Open Web— specifically sessions called Epiphanies where he invite in– oh let him explain it:
At the start of the 2021/2022 school year our learning community decided to invite monthly guest speakers to share “epiphanies” they had experienced in the field of teaching and learning. It turns out that the epiphanies they had helped us have our own.
From December through May, we spend an hour each month with some really remarkable educators. We used a Google dic to write some reflections on the topics discussed and then posed them here on the website. The writings are filled with resources and examples that others can see and share. That is of course the ethos of our learning community. To be open in our work and to share our ideas. Is there anything more useful?
https://uwbopenweb.com/epiphanies/
Todd invited me and more importantly two of my former colleagues from Maricopa Community Colleges, Alisa Cooper (still innovating in teaching at Glendale Community College) and Shelley Rodrigo, currently the University of Arizona. The ask was to share with Todd’s colleagues the story of Shelley’s creation while we all were at Maricopa of the “CyberSalon.”
This happened in a time after the end of a key system wide effort at Maricopa to coordinate faculty and technology staff to brainstorm and collaborate on educational technology (the thing once called Ocotillo, hey look and seem Martin Weller, an old metaphor). Mmissing this means of convening and sharing, Shelley proposed to her network to go outside the system, and meet once a month in a local restaurant or bar that had wireless, and anyone interested would come with their laptops (this was the era pre-smart phones) and “geek out.”
It was one of these sessions that Todd, who worked at a different community college 2 hours north of us, showed up, and eventually became a life-long friend.
This (open, unstructured) conversation seems timely for what Todd has been trying to organize at UWB, as official support for what was a university learning community, has been removed. But they are looking to keep going, unofficially (I hope I am getting the story right).
As much as this (unrecorded) conversation was looking back, it really meant to get at what a participant driven/organized community could do simply by convening (maybe around food?)
Todd agreed in turn to appear on the OEWeek show the day before his session, where he shared this concept. I reminded Todd of his description of the Yavapai College 9x9x25 Writing Challenge (which was replicated in the other formulations, e.g. Write 6×6 active now at Glendale Community College)– as a response to observing that faculty have so few opportunities just to sit down and have open conversations about pedagogy. His concept was to aim for that through networked open reflections in blogs, with a formula geared to provide prompts for regular writing.
Again, it is refreshing to have unstructured open conversations. But the flame is on at University of Washington-Bothell.
But, wait there was one more conversational gathering last week… an impromptu serving of #educoffee.
A Cuppa #educoffeeHere was another version of unstructured gatherings for conversations spawned during the pandemic by another good friend and colleague, Ken Bauer, professor of computer science at Tec de Monterey in Guadalajara. He opened for a long time weekly drop in sessions for local colleagues and students plus distant ones to an open zoom room shared as #educoffee.
Hey, I just remembered that I asked Ken and participants to record a session in 2021 to be used as an OEG Voices podcast:
OEG Voices 022: #educoffee With Ken Bauer and Friends
When Ken posted in Mastodon how busy he has been (his teaching load is unreal) and how much he misses community
I of course could not resist replying with my Google Translated Spanish suggesting an educoffee session. And he opened one up, on Friday of Open Education Week.
Often these are small groups, but what a joy to open to a screen of 9 others in the room! Here is a peek in featuring people from Mexico to Oklahoma to me in Saskatchewan to Windsor and even to the U.K.
EduCoffee March 10, 2023 flickr photo by kenbauer shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) licenseNothing more than an hour of coffee and conversation. How simple is that?
What Happens When I Add to together 12+2+2?The answer is much more than 14. I am hopeful to continue more of these live “shows” at OEGlobal (my colleagues may be shaking their heads).
And it goes back to Jim’s idea of live energy and “eventness” mattering even more in 2023 with the added noise of social media (which looks like conversations, but it’s a poor substitute) and schedule saturation of structured video meetings.
This photo I used below was a very early live bit when Jim, myself, and Martha Burtis were attending an EDUCAUSE conference in Washington DC, and he went live on DS106 radio for a conversation in his open DS106 class.
Where does all this land for you? Is unstructured conversation time valuable? Or is it madness? I add up 14 and 2 and 2 and get a “hell yes”.
Featured Image: The “madness” of going live for Open Education Week!
I Pray That Live Streaming Works flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license modified with the OEWeek Live! image/logo (see above for credits), plus a wee bit of overlay from the last scene of the Bridge Over the River Kwai where [spoiler alert] seeing the bridge blow up Major Clipton yells “MADNESS! MADNESS!” Maybe that is my metaphor? There are so many things mixed here, I have no idea or am too tired to untangle licenses.
Strap in (or hit eject) for a long blog ride. This has been one of those percolating drafts, meaning it has not progressed far from my head. But time is essencing.
As there are a wave of steps to weave together, I am borrowing in all sense of honoring, not stealing, a section convention from Kate Bowles’ blog.
1.Once again because almost no one cares for making the case of the power of RSS reading, I keep finding more reasons not to buy into the “twitter does it better” theory. I have a set of photography feeds I sometimes skim through at the title level. I cannot even deduce the reason why I got a nibble of curiosity for “The $10 Camera Photographers Are Snapping Up” (Fstoppers).
Curious clicking that was the opener to this whole run.
The author makes a case for the versatility of the old mid 2000s style pocket digital camera, but in this style I loathe in at least a lot of photography sites, asking me to not read, but watch a video of two photographers doing an outing with their $10 cameras. Loathing is because there’s not much skimming one does from content in a video.
The video is well produced, and obviously the two had fun, but I find it all a but more style over substance.
That’s me.
The thing is the video opened a memory stream, as I do not need to find one of these cameras used on eBay, I just need to rummage through my box of camera STUFF.
Weird Glow flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)Memories flood in.
2.My cameras are a thing I keep track of– by photos. Though it has been 14 years since I wrote of my lineage of film and digital cameras there is only one more not on that list, my current DSLR Canon 7D…assorted iPhones, a few forays trying some vintage cam— I got off track already.
The thing is in 2005 when I plunged into the first DSLR, the Canon Digital Rebel, I saw no direction going back to small pocket cameras.
Shift to 2007 while I was working for the New Media Consortium. Quite a few in that crowd were avid digital photographers. Two colleagues and fellow camera geeks I respect much kept going on and on to me about their little Canon digital cameras. I will call them Phil and Carl for now… well those are their names. These two made a case for what was then rather high image quality from the little cameras (7 MP), but more the affordances of a pocket camera for street photography, and unobtrusive photographer, in lieu of putting a Big Camera in front of your subject.
I took the plunge and bought that PowerShot 800 SD IS. And that was pretty much my main camera for a few years. On a 2008 trip to Japan I could not resist picking up an updated model (IXY 3000IS) that offered maybe twice the resolution and was not even available in the US.
I knew Carl would smile at those specs.
3.Back in 2002 I was organizing district-wide technology initiatives at the Maricopa Community Colleges. In collaboration with then IT Vice Chancellor Ron Bleed, we organized a series of collaborative events/workshops called the Ocotillo Technology Visioning Forums.
This has much to say about the heady times I was lucky enough to be part of at Maricopa. The rationale of these activities was preparing for a bond election to fund the system, including instructional technology, which as noted there, from the previous planning in 1994 had not included the impact of the world wide web (as the web then was called).
Under the umbrella of bond planning, Ocotillo and Information Technologies Services (ITS) are sponsoring a series of Technology Visioning Forums that will bring to Maricopa a series of distinguished professionals, who will inspire and challenge our thinking about instructional technology and facilities for learning.
For the next X (3? 5?) years, what is the next “web” we might need to address for the future? What is the learning environment of the future look like? What do models of “hybrid” courses mean for planning? What sorts of technologies are we planning for? What do Learning Objects mean for course developers? How do we provide better physical (and virtual) learning environments?
Each Maricopa college will form a team to participate in the process, leading to a collection of outcomes to be further developed at the year-end Ocotillo Retreat.
Ocotillo Technology Visioning, 2002-2003
One of those “distinguished professionals” was a colleague (and friend) of Ron’s from the University of Michigan named Carl Berger, who spent two days in December leading us through discussions guided in his theme of “Back to the Future: After WYSIWYG, What is the Next Killer App?”
Carl Berger speaking at Maricopa December 6, 2002The excitement Carl spoke with was infectious, while at the same time backing his ideas with examples, experience, research, and a focus on pedagogy. Amongst the media I found from my old Maricopa MCLI web server archive (all was wiped out after I left in 2006) I found two 320x240px video excerpts from his talk- I patched together to share:
I also found a copy of Carl’s presentation slides!
killer_app.pdfDownloadHere in 2002 he pointed out emerging technologies (just respect this from looking back 21 years) were wireless networking, these brand new tablet devices, learning objects, integrated administrative systems, open learning platforms, research tools, and a vision of a learning platform he called “the Real Processor” explained through a narrative Maria, a professor using a platform that looked LMS-ish but was richer in complexity.
But these forums were not just slidedecks and cheese sandwiches, there was a whole lot of group discussion, brainstorming, and collaboration between faculty, technology staff, and administrators. And, can see it because I found an archive of photos from these events, assembled in a funky Javascript slideshow thing I built in maybe 2000 called the jClicker (I am shocked it even works!):
Ocotillo Technology Visioning Forum Photos 2002-20034.When I took a leap from Maricopa in 2006 to work with the New Media Consortium, it was a more than pleasant surprise to be at the conferences and connect again with Carl. Here he is gleefully uploading photos he is taking with one of those small cameras at the 2006 NMC Conference in Cleveland.
As I learned Carl was right there from the birth of NMC and was at it’s first conference in 1995. Later, on a visit to his home, he pulled out and gave me a mint condition T-shirt from tha conference (I still have it).
Classic NMC T-shirt flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)And always Carl was beaming with his excitement about new Apple technology, the latest photo editing software, and always with some new kind of camera. He was active always in the era of NMC’s Second Life period (look! I even found him in the directory as an avatar named Carl Oxberger).
In more image rummaging, I am so happy to find Carl in a photo listening intently to another fantastic friend colleague, Bryan Alexander, here at a 2009 EDUCAUSE ELI Conference.
Carl and Bryan flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)The photo becomes even more special to me because of the gracious comment of another influential colleagues/mentor, George Brett, who passed away in 2015.
For no one keeping track of the camera stories here, at this time I was using much that small Canon as well as my first iPhone. But the small camera came back in a big way through an unusual device.
5.Once again,toward my latter years at NMC, I was the beneficiary of a lucky connection. A new colleague named Keene Haywood knew of my interest in camera, and told me about his Austin friends at an outfit called Charmed Labs were developing beta versions of a thing called a “Gigapan“. I was a robot controlled mount that would move a camera methodically through a grid pattern and worked with a stitching type of software to create potentially a GigaPixel panorama image.
I was curious, and Keene hooked me up, and I bought I believe one of the few beta versions of the metallic box rig.
Punching in Gigapan flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)At the time, it could use only the small cameras, and I did a bunch with that first Canon Elph, seen above. It became an object of curiosity in public spaces when people would watch it go through its robot maneuvers, moving a bit, the robot rm clicking the shutter, tilting a bit, and repeating. See it in action:
I recently came across the box where I had stored the rig; it’s been 10 years maybe since I even used it. I assumed that the software that made the images was long gone and after showing it to Cori I said I did not see a need to keep it. “No way!” she said. “That’s part of your photography history, put it on the shelf with your camera collection.”
Out of curiosity I did the Google thing and found out how wrong I was- the software is still out there and the Gigapan site is alive. I even found my own collection of panorama images, all there. I give em a CogDogBlog howl of praise for keeping a web site going 15 years later.
One scene popped out, a panorama image I made on my last day of my 2008 Month in Iceland adventure, when I drove out to see Þingvellir (that place where they were doing democratic forms of government in 930AD).
Typical of most off the highway places I explored while living in Iceland, I saw no people when I got there. So I set up my Gigapan rig to capture a scene.
GigaPan at Thingvellir flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)Then car pulled up! Three American college age students came out. I was shocked when one guy looked at my rig and asked “Is that a GigaPan?”. As it turns out, he had worked at the Carnegie Mellon University where it was first developed.
Now calculate me the odds of that.
Speaking of long odds, I got an email request in 2011 to use the scene I had made that day for use in a book. They wanted the biggest highest resolution possible, I remember doing some hijinks in PhotoShop to generate the format of a TIFF file.
And here is something I know would make Carl smile, a photo stitched together from that little Canon camera was printed in the largest picture atlas ever, a book that is six feet high! That has to be my biggest (literally) credit ever.
My Biggest Published Photo
6.I kept in touch with Carl, and it was rewarding to see he had retired and settled in St George, Utah. The last NMC Conference I was part of was the 2010 one at Disneyland, never a place that was on my list of destinations, but conference location picking was not my department. Since I was living then in Northern Arizona I made a decision to skip the air travel and drive to LA, the way out taking the dull Interstate 40 route.
But this made for a scenic backroad return trip, which I had arranged to pass through St. George, at an invitation to stay with Carl. He was eager to show me his latest Lumix camera, but the big part was an outing he set up for us to do some photography together in Zion National Park, one of his favorite places.
Carl in Motion flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)What a glorious and ideal a day! Carl was as usual so xcited to share with me his experimentations with HDR photography, later resulting in my buying at Carl’s suggestion a copy of Photomatix Pro software.
Here is an HDR image I later made using that from a photo, which if you read the flickr comments, credits Carl and the software from rendering a fantastic image from originals that were not so great.
2010/365/166 Ginormous Cottonwood flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)I also steered a trip through St George in 2015, on the end of the longway back from a 5 month stint at Thompson Rivers University, in Kamloops BC. I took an even more back way across Nevada (The Extraterrestrial Highway) before pulling up to Carl’s home in St George.
Again, I got a huge warm welcome from him and Shari, we chatted, he showed me his latest geeky toy, a Cardboard VR Camera. If you look at the table, he has more toys out!
Carl Always Explores New Technology flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) licenseLike previous visits together Carl urged me try another photography software, Intensify. So again, I bought software Carl said I should use– and to this day this is maybe the main photo editing tool I turn to whenI cannot tune the image the way I like with my normal controls. I use Intensify usually on 1 or 2 images of my daily photos.
Thanks, again, Carl!
And again, Carl has no limit on his energy and enthusiasm. He suggested a photo outing to the luscious sandstone scenery of Snow Canyon State Park, where we spent hours poking around, climbing sandstone bluffs, taking photos.
Look at this scene– forget Waldo, can you find Carl?
Where in the Sandstone is Carl Berger? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license7.That was eight years ago I visited Carl. Over time, I’d still “see” him active in his flickr stream and we’d “talk” occasionally in comments. I slacked a bit in emailing after I moved to Canada in 2018, but saw some new flickr photos in December. I commented once or twice, asked if he still used his same mac.com email.
Now if you think all of this is written in eulogy like fashion, you are wrong. Well… I got an Instagram message from a mutual colleague who shared that Carl posted in Facebook that he was in hospice with maybe 3 months left to live. But they said he was posting photos a few have come in flickr usual scenery stuff and his little dog, Thor. As my colleague knew I was not on Facebook, they relayed this message from me to Carl.
Hi Carl, I don’t use Facebook but was excited to see a new Flickr photo today of Thor. There’s nothing like the companionship of a dog! I’d give anything to be now walking with you in a Zion canyon, geeking out on cameras, HDR, and hearing your joyful laughter. I regularly use the Intensify CK software you recommended! No need to respond just keep taking photos. With you in spirit, friendship always, Alan
I cannot say enough (well I tried) about the 21 years I have been lucky enough to know and be friends with Carl. They do not even make these kinds of leaders and visionaries any more; ones like Carl who are not in it for ego or spotlight, but because he cares about and loves his work. Carl has been huge influence on me as a mentor, and moreso as a friend.
Hanging Out With Carl flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) licenseFrom little cameras to big panoramas, I am fortunate to have known to the genuine laugh, love of life’ love of teaching, and the big heart of Carl Berger. Keep on clicking the shutter, Carl!
Featured Image: A collage image made from a photo of my old Canon Digital Elph (that Carl inspired me to buy in 2007) That Little Camera flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0), with on the screen a photo of Carl from our 2015 outing — The Eye of Carl Berger flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license plus a screenshot of the Gigapan.com web site.
The daily habit is on for a two month streak! Picking up in the January pace of batting 1000 for the DS106 Daily Create and my Daily Flickr Photo habit, by the 59th day of the year being 59/59 in both.
As the kid asks…
Daily Flickr PhotosA february sampling of a 28/s8 month
https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/albums/72177720304937239A bit of…
2023/365/35 Everything and More Here flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)Not quite the Ghostbusters premonition…
2023/365/29 Charlie and Felix 2/3: Skeptical flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)Felix has pioneered the fatigued look of BoredGPT
2023/365/47 BoredGPT flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)No shortage of lovely light…
2023/365/58 Gates of Glory flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)Daily DS106 Create
I had to do a bit of backfill to get my full card punched on the Daily creates, 2 were tagged wrong and 3 I had posted in Mastodon. Since my effors to integrate Toots into the TDCs is still a WIP, I had to slide some over to Birdspace.
But look as of his morning (March 1 is day 60) I’m surfing with the top tier of the leaderboard.
https://daily.ds106.us/leaders/Ka-ching! From both spaces, a bit of word chopping
Some bad AI images from an Inception line
Once more with correct tags! @ds106dc #tdc4059 Incepting the Leaderboard! https://t.co/JF430fBAVn
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) February 26, 2023
And flipping the hippies side door thang
The mapping of a cliche
@ds106dc #tdc4058 #ds106 As Mickey Rooney, Mesa Arizona says, you can always pass Failure Canyon, Utah on your way to Success, Saskatchewan pic.twitter.com/XNGPC8Pjbn
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) February 22, 2023
And one can always take shots of things that Twitter is breaking
@ds106dc #dailycreate #tdc4044 #ds106 It remains unclear whether @Twitter is breaking the public API or not, I guess we just wait and see what happens.@felixadog is confused too as to why anyone would destroy such a nifty thing for just sharing stuff. pic.twitter.com/iLIh3zcSzk
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) February 8, 2023
That’s Two! (months)And better than I thought I might be. Shall we go for three? Anyone for a snow roll? Mocking AI?
Doubling up on the double dailies!
Featured Image: The long road of doing daily stuff, keep on keeping on!
2023/365/31 Forever Road flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
File this in the gut conjecture category, not grounded in anything beyond my failable non artificial questionable intelligence in my own grey matter (King, 1978).
Plus, I am sure it is better crafted elsewhere.
It’s no secret that my own practices and beliefs remain around this value of outloud outboard brain (tell-tale that this precious link lives solely in the WayBack Machine) approach of writing in this web site, on one of a few domains that’s been my home since 2003. Twenty years later I see many folks, including colleagues who took this path early, outsourcing their writing outputs to email newsletter platforms, medium et al, and strangely enough, LinkedIn (with its front of always seeking logins reeks to me of being this decade’s AOL). Even if Martin Weller asserts Blogs Are Back, Baby, I doubt there us that much sign of a resurgence, more people firing up their dusty space to write one post about it being dusty.
It’s too much effort, work to claim reclaim your stuff anymore, to own your own ideas. Just toss it in the cloud.
There was this period that for me ran from the early real MOOCs then DS106, that swelled for a while as an education approach of “Connected courses” where students locus of effort was not in a system or a course space, but their own. Things were readily connected by some voodoo acronym that these days is the internet equivalent of an waft of Bengay cream.
The other assertion that just confounds me is that what I maintain to my dying day is:
The Indispensable Digital Research Tool I can Say, Without Lying, Saves Time
There is either an argument I hear from colleagues who once were on this train that the stake through the heart of Google Reader meant the end of using a feed reader. On a technical level, that never grokked for me. I took my exported list of feeds from Google Reader, and continued the same habit in NetNewsWire, Feedly, and for the last few years, Inoreader. In one space, I can sift scan, read deep or quick, the stories from the sources I have selected, not ones pitched me through some algorithmic churner.
I use it daily. The darn thing not only works, it works as efficiently and effectively as always.
The other assertion that gets my goat is (sorry Martin, I am just borrowing from your comment and expanded into a post, and at least you have never left dust):
it was a such a shame that Twitter effectively became everyone’s RSS and we stopped subscribing to blogs (mainly)
https://blog.edtechie.net/weblogs/blogs-are-back-baby/#comment-30780
Do not include me in that everyone, Yes, ever since the days of “what I ate for lunch” even in the darkening end of times musked 2023 era, I do regularly find key nuggets, links, people of interest there. But it by no means is efficient- I have to scroll and weed through a lot of palaber, and check my distraction level.
There is no way Twitter is an RSS replacement. Martin picked it up again in a follow-up BLOG (hah) post:
I loved RSS, it seemed like magic, you could just pull stuff in from different places, subscribe easily, aggregate feeds. Your blog reader was a little daily newspaper of quality content. It was the essence of what the web was made for.
I blame Twitter for killing this magic, increasingly people didn’t promote, or even know their RSS feeds, and social media became a much more effective way to distribute content. RSS often operated in the background still but you rarely saw the little RSS icon on people’s sites any more.
….
But with social media fragmenting and people either turning away from it completely or using it less, the absence of RSS awareness leaves us with a problem – how do we get all this lovely blog content out there? I know some hardcore people will still adhere to their blog readers, and I salute you. It’s possible that RSS will have a relabelling and a resurgence as I’m arguing blogging is experiencing. But until then, all that precious blog content is going unread.https://blog.edtechie.net/weblogs/the-newsletter-as-rss/
To me this is conflating a tool for sensibly consuming ingesting content with ones meant for broadcasting outward. If the aim is mostly towards getting attention from your blog, that’s find for some folks. But that’s not why I am here (hence most of my posts are not widely read or commented); anything that happens from someone reading what I wrote is a bonus not a goal. Social media for me is always the secondary exhaust fumes of what I publish first in my own space.
For me I am not invested in pouring my content in a place (a) I cannot keyword search to find past content; (b) I cannot easily find what I was doing on a given day; or (c) I cannot freely decide to remove if I choose. This value only comes over the long haul but I can swiftly zero in one what I was working on/thinking about on any given date back 20 years… Say, May 17, 2018 I have something written or places I was via flickr.
That is what I value; I hardly expect others to feel the same.
You Said Something About a TheoryIndeed! I get distracted as I write. That means I would fail as a dutiful worker in the ChatGPT word factory.
Again, I don’t expect heaps of people to treat their time online like me. There are so many emoji buttons to click (uh oh, bias snuck out again). And why would I expect the approaches and ideas from 2012- the mid 2010s would continue? Stuff has to change.
I don’t think it can be blamed on Twitter/social media or another technical company bogeyman. It was this:
4 Students 4 Phones flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)My theory it was the flip from time spent on larger computer/laptop screens to the small ones in our pocket. That photo was taken on a 2008 visit with university students in Japan. I had asked them about their use of computers at home for their school work, which baffled them. They had no other computing devices owned beyond the ones they put on the table for me.
I am just as much a part; I cannot imagine going anywhere now without the smartphone in my pocket. I do not even want to look at the stats that yield my time on the tiny screen.
Look where the crossover happened:
Desktop vs Mobile Market Share Worldwide, 2011 – 2022 (Statcounter)Or just the five-fold increase over the same span in number of devices sent out in the world:
Global smartphone units shipped, StatistaAnd looking at time spent in social media, this graph says what, an extra hour per day since 2012? Well, the sayings about statistics appy.
Average Time Spend on Social Media 2012-2022 (Oberlo)Maybe if I spent less time here, I could… well that’s maybe not valid either.
But time spent on that small screen is not really where I would be doing much writing or reading… right?
This is not an anti-phone rant, but just reaching for an understanding of a decade long shift from modes of writing/reading.
Please feel free to torch my theory or just ignore it. I have something else to write.
See you on the small screen.
Featured Image:
Your Call Could Not Be Completed as Dialed flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
The clock is ticking for me to modify the WordPress theme that powers the DS106 Daily Create given that the slippery slope timeline for free, unfettered access to the Twitter API will sooner? later? tomorrow? hit the bottom.
Just to be clear, nothing here stop the DS106 Daily Create site from publishing it’s 4050+ day consecutive streak of daily challenges. Having them appear each day in Twitter might still work, depending if the Dark Lord of Twitter’s foulings affect the ability to tweet via an IFTTT recipe.
What it likely will mean is the website will no longer be able to get replies or mentions of replies in twitter to add to the site as a response. Since 2014 this has allowed responses to not only be added to the associated daily post (see that example via tweets including @ds06dc and the matching daily hashtag, there #tdc4057), but also provide a single user profile of lifetime activity (see an exemplary example).
Via Mastodon?It’s obvious this can be continued by providing the same capability from Mastodon. The first steps in the process was started in late November 2022 setting up the posting to a new account via again IFTTT spawned from the RSS feed of the Daily Create site (you know, that dead technology no one uses).
Then I laid out my todo list, now indicating completion with a ?
- Create a DS106 Daily Create Mastodon account ? (see/follow @tdc@social.ds106.us)
- Get the Daily Create WordPress site to auto publish new posts to a Mastodon Account ? (done since Nov 25, 2022 using IFTTT, see blog post)
- Figure out how to get replies to that account via Mastodon API
- How to parse the replies to find hashtags
- Add each reply as is done in twitter, to the WordPress content type that houses them
- Figure out how to embed the Toots from a URL ? (autoembed, working here in this blog, code available, see blog post)
- Other stuff I am forgetting
Maybe the progress is not so bad. But #2 vexed me for too long.
Finally, API Success!There’s plenty of good documentation for the Mastodon API, of which I have a rudimentary understanding. To work in the WordPress site I need some code that will let me site make regular calls to the API to find mentions of our account, one of the types of Mastodon notifications.
The funny thing is that since 2014, for getting responses from the Twitter API this theme made use of the oAuth Twitter Feed for Developers WordPress plugin for which I made a slight tweak to return mentions rather than a timeline. It’s worked flawlessly. I just needed to pass it the API keys and it provided functions for fetching tweets.
I had hopes for Mastodon, but ran into nothing but dead ends with the listed libraries for PHP. Many of them require running through composer (which for too long a story I cannot get running on my old laptop I use for development) and even the end-around solution I found lobbed a paywall in front of me.
Plus many of them had more complexity than needed. I don’t need to run through an authentication loop since I can easily generate a development token like I needed for IFTTT.
I stalled.
Ask A GuruI finally did what I should have done earlier- ask for help. I reached out to Pat Lockley because I thought I read somewhere he was messing around with the Mastodon API (or just because he is smart). It’s worth reading Pat’s Daily Dive posts because it’s more rewarding than social media scrolling (I would suggest doing what I did and subscribe to his RSS feed but there are apparently only 4 people left who do this).
He not only provided me the answer (11 lines of code doing requests via cURL) but believe I got sub-daily-dived.
It was enough to get me going; I was able to get my accounts notifications coming in, and I could conditionally test to process ones for mentions. A few more bouts and I was able to rig the request to only return mentions.
Fetching but Not Yet Built InThe theme pulls data from each valid response (a tweet containing the host account @ds106dc and a hashtag in the form of #tdc****) and creates a custom content type for each one (thus making an archive):
WordPress content type created for a Daily Create ResponseThus what is needed to parse from the API is:
- username of tweet author
- ID for the status
- URL for the tweet
- content of the tweet
- hashtags in the tweet
- date posted (left out from diagram above, but it becomes the publish date)
These are all available in the Mastodon API, so now I have a means to check for new posts, they can be processed almost the same way. I imagine I might add a new metadata field to identify the response as a tweet, toot (or something else that might come later). Any with null values will be considered tweets.
I have a simple PHP test page running generating as called the output like below:
So, I would process only ones containing a tdc****value in the array of tags (Kevin’s post at #3 worried be but his is just a reply to another post, not dailycreate response).
Da CodeI will post a copy of my working code if you want to play. The necessary step is getting your access token for the account you want to be checking. Just go to Edit Profile -> Development then click the New Application button. The title can be whatever you want, web uri optional. The key thing is deselecting all the options for scopes; the only one needed is read:notifications. This gives the app you are creating very specific capabilities, just to be safe.
Once saved you can inspect; the string you will need to save for use is labeled Your access token
I set up my demo so the account info including this access token is declared at the top. Certainly fiddle with the output.
You can download a gist with the full php- edit with your own info, slip online somewhere, and call the URL.
It’s basic, but it works. I can add checks for items 3 and 4 on my list.
Since the Daily Create is set up to request once and hour the API calls should not stress or load your instance. I will look for ways to reach back in time. Maybe.
What’s NextThere is a heap still to do to add more options and logic o the theme (allow use of both or just one service, though if twitter goes down the Pay For API I am not sure who would. Some mods are needed to change the instructions, and other bits for parsing username into URLS.
I expect our frequent participants will want me to somehow resolve combine their responses from both twitter and Mastodon… sorry but the odds of that are massive!
This is maybe too much explanation, but I always finds it helps in the process to write it outloud.
Slowly, it’s on its way! The DS106 Daily Create will go on and soon be fetching from Mastodon.
Featured Image: Skinna the Icelandic sheepdog I knew back in 2008… she was a master fetcher!
Fetch! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
Flickr does some very fun things for me, and my pink and blue dot loyalty planted in March 2004 remains true. One of the fun things it has done numerous times over the past 6+ years is, without much a recognizable pattern, decides to locate my photos somewhere in rural China and remote regions of Russia.
Case in point, there is an edited photo of a valentine rose posted last week to flickr posted from home here in Saskatchewan but Flickr decides it is a bit farther away. Screen shot version here:
How was in Russia this week and did not know it?It’s happened so often that I mostly ignore or do not notice, but at least the all seeing eye of Stephen Downes noticed after I shared the photo in Mastodon:
Ah yes, greetings from Botsy (as Wikipedia spells it) “(?????) is a rural locality (a selo) in Dzhidinsky District, Republic of Buryatia, Russia. The population was 550 as of 2010. There are 5 streets.”
Got Longitude?Maybe the mis-mapping is some issue with the GPS data captured in my iPhone, but as the EXIF data shows on this photo in flickr, the longitude (around 105 W) is correct.
GPS data for this photo shows a reference longitude of West and a value of 105° and changeSo if I click the link for flickr’s location in Russia, it reveals 64 of my photos taken around Botsiy!
All my photos flickr maps to RussiaThe clue is in the URL parameters (see why it pays to be curious about URLs?)
https://www.flickr.com/search/?lat=50.46908&lon=105.71585&radius=0.25&has_geo=1&view_all=1
it references longitude as lon=105.71585 which is Longitude EAST. If you flip that value negative to lon=-105.71585 you get some 2386 photos correctly mapped to my area in Saskatchewan.
The question for flickr is- why can you map 2386 photos correctly why do you mess up in the other 64?
Forum for HelpI decided to reach out for help in the flickr forums with a post explaining the situation. Alot of user replies came in, suggestions, people tried even reporting my photo and got the same result. Oh, and others confirmed its an old bug. But nothing from Flickr Official.
Someone even noted mine was a duplicate post, I had asked the same question in 2021 (but forgot, there’s nothing that really helps me find my posts in these forums).
The key result I did get was that as a FlickrPro user, if I send via a bug report form, I would get direct service. Where is that? I ended up web searching to find it at https://www.flickrhelp.com/ a site that looks different from the vintage layout of the user forums.
The only thing I did find was via a Contact link to a general request form, which, if you read the top sounds like its more about issues with account access. But I will try anywhere! And BOOM! The response was in maybe 2 hours:
I appreciate you letting us know that you are experiencing an issue with the geolocation mab box on your profile.
At this time, our engineers have been alerted and are working to resolve the issue.
While I do not have any exact timeframe for when this will be resolved, we are doing everything we can to get everything smoothed out again as quickly as possible.
from Amanda at Flickr Help
To which I replied:
It’s not a significant issue for me, I more wanted Flickr to know if this problem. I have seen it happen numerous times over the years; before 2018 when I lived in Arizona, I saw 100s? Of my photos mapped to remote parts of China (my only visits there was to Shanghai and twice to Hong Kong)
Do you need me to find more examples?
Again it really does not bother me, but as a huge fan of Flickr since 2004 I want to help identify any problems.
Digging into Flickr APII went deeper in digging for info on the rose photo that set this off using the Flickr API for the method flickr.photos.getInfo and the photo id 52690089339 the API reveals the wrong location data — longitude="105.715850"
```
<exif tagspace="GPS" tagspaceid="0" tag="GPSLatitudeRef" label="GPS Latitude Ref"> <raw>North</raw> </exif> <exif tagspace="GPS" tagspaceid="0" tag="GPSLatitude" label="GPS Latitude"> <raw>50 deg 28' 8.69"</raw> <clean>50 deg 28' 8.69" N</clean> </exif> <exif tagspace="GPS" tagspaceid="0" tag="GPSLongitudeRef" label="GPS Longitude Ref"> <raw>West</raw> </exif> <exif tagspace="GPS" tagspaceid="0" tag="GPSLongitude" label="GPS Longitude"> <raw>105 deg 42' 57.06"</raw> <clean>105 deg 42' 57.06" W</clean> </exif>
It looks like to me somewhere the conversion from 105 deg 42′ 57.06 West longitude to numerical is fouled. But I have no idea how it works.
Doing My Own MappingMy curiosity got to me- was my memory correct? I dug into the Flickr Oragnizr where I can use the bottom options to select my geotagged photos (like 23,000), and then via the Map button I could get a view of all these places in China, Russia, Mongolia where my photos were mis mapped
Flickr has mapped over 1100 of my photos to places I have never been!More than 1100 photos of mine are shown in parts of the world I have never seen. But I can spy the patterns, The locations marked lots south of Irkutsk Russia is where I live now in Saskatchewan. The other area with lots near Henan province in China are ones I took when I lived in Strawberry Arizona. In between these two are photos I took from my early road trips back and forth.
Those ones down in Laos? Some of those were from my times in Guadalajara Mexico.
What we have here is somewhat of a reverse image map of where I have been and roamed over the last few years… let’s see if I can get a comparison map thing going (the location map has to be reversed so the names are backward):
To help flickr I found examples that are explicitly obvious:
- Kamloops, BC https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/33564084071
- North Dakota, US https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/35638697831/
- Death Valley, CA https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/26280891669/
- Mount Rainier https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/29711637615/
- Grand Canyon AZ https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/40057019595/
The one from Kamloops is telling as others have noticed- my good photo friend from Australia, Michael Coghlan commented in 2017:
You’ve taken pix of this photogenic place before…..but seems Flickr thinks it’s in Mongolia!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/33564084071/#comment72157678621828423
Leave ’em FlippedI actually don’t care or even want flickr to fix my locations. I like the quirkiness. I just think they should know in case it matters to other people.
As for me? Yes, go ahead and believe I have been up and down the 5 streets of Botsiy, or lived for years in ???, ???, ??, drove through a desert to sea level in ??, ???, ?? south of Jinana, drove through a canyon in Avdzaga, Bulgan, Mongolia… I like the notoriety!
But Flickr, you might want to know what flips the longitude, because it makes a map difference to some folks.
Featured Image: One correctly located!
News in Reverse flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
Perhaps there needs to be more romance in the world of Artificial Intelligence? For a while, I had some thoughts back to good old ELIZA. What does she think of all this stuff? Most likely she would not say but deflect back with more questions.
I had not realized … that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.
Joseph Weizenbaum in computer Power in Human Reason (1976)
What he describes has been called the ELIZA Effect, “the tendency to unconsciously assume computer behaviors are analogous to human behaviors.”
ELIZA, Meet ChatGPTI solicited Doc Brown to drive the DeLorean back to 1964 but he was unavailable…
You can find many web-based implementations, my favorite is one is E.L.I.Z.A. Talking where you can simulate on a machine of her 1964-1966 era, and even speak to her.
Talk to and hear back from ELIZA https://www.masswerk.at/eliza/So I had to play an intermediary setting them up on a blind date, shuffling questions and responses between the two of them.
ChatGPT screen with my opening prompt “You have shown up for a blind date with someone you only know as ELIZA. When you meet her, what will you say as an introduction?”To set the scene, i asked Stable Diffusion Online to create some visuals (I must be terrible at this because none of them were what I had in mind, maybe the first one top left is close?) using a prompt “an older woman and a younger bearded man seated at a restaurant table on a date’ photorealistic.”
Pick your own scene for this blind date:
Four images generated by Stable Diffusion, each as awkward as this date must be.I had to intervene a few times, but let’s listen in to this blind date:
Transcript of the ELIZA ChatGPT converstionDownloadTo create this I just shuttled the responses back and forth between the two interfaces (ChatGPT sometimes needed me to nudge him, he was nervous?)
I turned to another AI service Murf.ai to render the audio. I am not quite sure where the AI comes into this versus the standard text to audio capabilities I’ve used before (the voice from https://www.masswerk.at/eliza/ is much better)
But shrug, if you put AI in the name, who know really what it does?
You should be able to “Murf” it yourself via https://murf.ai/share/lebr6p6e
The Murf.ai interface for rendering the conversation as audio. The voices are Ethan saying my lines, Claire saying ELIZA’s lines, and Ryan doing ChatGPT.I was not going to pay for the download fee, so I did the lazy route of playing audio from the Murf site and recording in Audacity on a second laptop.
Back to the PresentI did this exchange a week or two ago but it lingered as files. I was inspired a bit last night after Cori and I went to the classic Mae Wilson Theater in Moose Jaw to travel back in movie time to 1985.
Back to 1985 on the Big Screen flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)So this blind date really was some time travel!
It’s also about as much as I feel like doing amongst the tidal wave of fervor over AI… like ten years ago, I turned to mocking a hyped edtech trend, here I start a new trend of mocking.
Again, turning the time machine back to ELIZA’s creator, from the Wikipedia article on the ELIZA Effect
Joseph Weizenbaum considered that not every part of the human thought could be reduced to logical formalisms and that “there are some acts of thought that ought to be attempted only by humans”. He also observed that we develop emotional involvement with machines if we interact with them as humans. When chatbots are anthropomorphized, they tend to portray gendered features as a way through which we establish relationships with the technology. “Gender stereotypes are instrumentalised to manage our relationship with chatbots” when human behavior is programmed into machines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect
How can we not interact with machines as humans when they are seemingly talking to us? Many of the things people are saying seem to be leaping ahead of the reality that what they are seeing is really approximations of what looks like conversation by [quickly] autocompleting ahead. Of course the references ChatGPT names are not real because it is not doing research, it is just generating something that statistically approximates the appearance of a relevant reference.
This ties to to Maha Bali’s criticism of any reference to starting communicating by “I asked ChatGPT to…” as really an abdication of care not even an automation of it. Because again, what this black box for which we have no intuition or understanding of how it produces words (cue the hypocritical name of the company)– does not automate or even generate care.
It is just generating something that statistically approximates the appearance of care. Humans should know the difference.
My main use of ChatGPT is to… make fun of ChatGPT. Can you help me, Eliza?
Asking ELIZA for help with my ChatGPT obsession (text below)
| ELIZA: Please tell me what’s been bothering you. | | YOU: I just want to make fun of ChatGPT | | ELIZA: Do you say you just want to make fun of chatgpt for some special reason ? | | YOU: Yes, because so many people seem to take it seriously. | | ELIZA: You are sure. | | YOU: Yes, what do you think? | | ELIZA: I see. | | YOU: Do you? | | ELIZA: What are your feelings now ? | | YOU: I want to go outside and roll in the snow. | | ELIZA: What would getting to go outside and roll in the snow mean to you ? |
https://www.masswerk.at/eliza/
Next up on AImocking… who wants to guess?
Featured Image: Made by me combining in Photoshop a screenshot of Talking Eliza, another screen shot of ChatGPT, text generated at Back to the Future Font Meme, and one of the Stable Diffusion online generated images for “an older woman and a younger bearded man seated at a restaurant table on a date’ photorealistic.” All kinds of re-use grayzone here, but if I can assert a license it is CC BY.
I just can’t stop the SPLOT, which has been into my blog veins since late 2014.
Speaking of late November, that was when I got a kind email from Daniel Villar Onrubia asking to guest author an article on online infrastructures for open education for the EDUTEC Journal he is co-editing. As he has been familiar with my quote unquote work Daniel did suggest a few topics like Domain of One’s Own, the Networked Narratives course, and yes SPLOTs.
These are things I collaborated with or talked about with Daniel when he was at Coventry University’s Disruptive Media Learning Lab. I have blabbed more than enough on SPLOTs and let the idea simmer for a while… and the pilot light went out.
But after seeing some more of the innovative ways Jessica Motherwell MacFarlane has been recently using TRU Collector at the OpenETC the light flickered on as I got thinking that there was a bit of a story in looking at that one SPLOT, TRU Collector. Because it really started out rather simple in early 2015 as a way to collect sample found images from an open license workshop to having much more going for it in 2023.
I believe there is something key about what was really a practical choice in the beginning to build SPLOTs as themes built on WordPress- I did not have to design a full application, and the improvements and advances in the WordPress core (put aside your feelings about the Block Editor, okay, please?) means my SPLOTs have been able to keep running.
More than that, though, it means that while not required to use the SPLOT, if a site creator has some understanding of the ways WordPress manages information (pages/vs posts, the dual taxonomies, adding functionality with plugins, even changing the default chronological post front door… well you can bend this SPLOT tool even more to your whims.
I was not thinking as much about the technical stuff (though I have a hard time avoiding), but how the ideas for the current version came not from me, but folks like Daniel (who suggested adding the rich text editor for longer writing, and the ways it can be used as a directory of a class or a conference attendees, his Coventry colleague Lauren Heywood who’s idea evolved to be the way the Customize can be used to tailor the submission form to fit the audience it was being used for. And even more recently, Jessica’s method of having students use a secret code as a tag for their work led to making it so certain views can be sorted differently than the default blog reverse chronology.
You see all of these ideas that flowed into the version would never have been there if it was only left to me to dream up.
But there was more, I went back to some stuff I read long ago about Eric von Hipple’s concept of a User Innovation Toolkit (was that idea from Jon Udell?), more from the world of manufacturing:
Toolkits for user innovation is an emerging alternative approach in which manufacturers actually abandon the attempt to understand user needs in detail in favor of transferring need-related aspects of product and service development to users.
von Hippel, Eric; Katz, Ralph (July 2002). “Shifting Innovation to Users via Toolkits”
And more nerves went firing to some things I recall Gardner Campbell framing Marshall McLuhan’s medium/message idea by the idea of that something “just a tool” like a hammer really becomes something different when it is in the hands of a person, it is a new tool, a “Hammerhand”:
So no “just a tool,” since a HammerHand is something quite different from a hammer or a hand, or a hammer in a hand. It’s one of those small but powerful points that can make one see the designed built world, a world full of builders and designers (i.e., human beings), as something much less inert and “external” than it might otherwise appear. It can also make one feel slightly deranged, perhaps usefully so, when one proceeds through the quotidian details (so-called) of a life full of tasks and taskings.
http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/doug-engelbart-transcontextualist/
So now I am more interested in the relationship of a tool/hammer like TRU Collector when it is in the hands of an educator. The best tools are not just a tool, and they are also not mega systems that browbeat our creativity into form box submission (hello LMS), and even worse when they are black box AI labeled things which we cannot even perceive their nature.
And now I need help.
If you have ever used the TRU Collector SPLOT for a class, a project, an organization, or even just to build something for yourself, I am trying to collect examples of them to (a) show the wide variety of creative uses it has but also (b) to pry open what this interplay with tool and educator hand means for our inventiveness. For maybe a post Prompt in the Box era.
Would I go an email a bunch of questions to some folks? Make a form? Set up interviews?
And then I got one of those whacky ideas.
I came up the idea of showing the affordances of this Simplest Possible Learning Online Tool by using TRU Collector itself as the collector of information… woah Neo! And thus, I built in maybe 2 hours… The TRU Collector Collector And yes, there is a SPLOT hammer on the front cover.
https://splot.ca/collecting-collector/I ask you to share any use(s) of TRU Collector.(sorry fans of TRU Writer, I love that SPLOT too, but I am focussing solely on Collector!) I set up the default detail entry with some questions as headers, but whatever you feel like writing is a help for me. And because TRU Collector asks for images, I suggested finding an image of a metaphor for what kind of tool TRU Collector is for you. Fun, eh?
Can you help? Please? Check out my hastily made site and click the share button.
Again, I thought I was back sliding to my old standby SPLOT love, but really some new ideas are bubbling. It is a deeper (maybe) look at what edtech tools ought to be, not what we are foisted upon. Thanks Anne-Marie Scott for making some suggestions and sharing this thought:
Edtech is not a tool. Pedagogy and technology are not mutually exclusive; they are entangled and mutually shaping. This is a fancy way of saying learning and teaching can be bent out of shape by technology and we can bend technology out of shape for learning and teaching purposes.
Anne-Marie Scott https://ammienoot.com/brain-fluff/procurement-aka-the-crack-in-everything-that-lets-the-bullshit-in/
Entangled up in SPLOT (is there a Dylan remix happening in the background?)
Again, please SPLOT with me! Got a hammer or a hammerhand?
Featured Image:
Alike / Not Alike / Together flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
Current hyped mythology includes the idea that from the outside of one of the MagicalAI machines you can somehow conjure up what produced it. Or can you loop back?
Promises, promises.
But the ride might be interesting.
As he does frequently, my friend and colleague Grant Potter slides me so many interesting sites and tools, I mostly end up re-sharing them through my Pinboard #cooltech (and posted as #cogdogcooltech to Twitter while it lasts and Mastodon).
Like just today:
Sure I could tag, bag, and boost, but I prefer running these things through the paces.
The premise of Img2Prompt is from an image ~~created~~ ~~spawned~~ spit out by Stable Diffusion it can go in and magically suggest/produce a prompt that can create it. Then you can run it and test— can you make a full round trip?
To give it a try, I went to Stable Diffusion Online (free, no login, can it last?) and started trying to make a suitable image. But instead I reached for one suggested “an insect robot preparing a delicious meal” — thus I get these:
Yeah, robot insects cooking?Sure the images are better quality than those quaint craiyon ones, but I don’t find them really great. They have the same degree of … sameness. The ones on the left are not really preparing food, so I chose the top right one, lt looks like a metal insect standing in a bowl of taco mixings.
When uploaded to Img2Prompt, what did I get?
a robot – sized bee, salad. it’s hard to believe the power of a machine – made from it. i think this machine is the real one.
prompt generated from an image, rather chatty, eh?
I cannot say I was impressed, but I wanted to try the full loop, and had it generate a new image from this prompt concocted from the first image.
Well yes, I got a bee, not robotic, not salad, not real.
Some round trip.
Well the site suggested trying an image from something not generated by Stable D. I have a few, I took this one to toss in the machine:
I Have An Alibi flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)I tossed Felix and the busted toy in Image2Prompt, which yielded… stand back for the wows….
a large dog in the middle of a room, with green slime and some brown stains on the floor, hyper realistic 4k
some kind of prompt?
I am not sure where green slime came from, but this image seems to have slimed the dog.
At least the wood floor is shiny and has some realistic light sources.
It’s interesting, but…
Featured Image: Historic Columbia River Highway – The Rowena Loop by Brett Hansen placed into the public domain as a US Government work.
It seems like many worlds ago, when “MOOC” was not a term I mocked, but as it happens, this month marks the 10th year since Alec Couros launched ETMOOC, the Education Technology MOOOOOOC.
Susan Spellman Cann has been heroic each year in organizing a tweeted reunion
ETMOOC 10 Years TOP 10 https://t.co/B0ln6mDK1b
— Susan Spellman Cann (@SSpellmanCann) February 7, 2023
The linked “smore” site suggest ways to participate
- Write a blog or vlog of 10 ways #ETMOOC made a difference to you and post to the hashtag #etmooc
- Join us for an online gathering on Friday , Feb. 10th 7 p.m. MT
- Donate to the Mario Couros bursary that ETMOOC created for educators. Ask @courosa how you can contribute.
- Come up with your own way to celebrate and share to the hashtag #etmooc
https://www.smore.com/n6y9c-etmooc-10-years-top-10
I’m not sure I will make the list of ten, but, hey I got a blog post started.
This came from the heady days of cMOOCs, following the inaugural MOOC 0 the Connectivism jam of Siemens, Downes, and cormier of 2008 (for which no site remains). I was more vested in the digital storytelling community of DS106, which not only still is online, but the web sites still work, and I still do the DS106 Daily Create.
Still, for the most part, academics and scholars and such hardly gave any respect to DS106.
No MOOC Respect
But the heart that still pulses and beats there is the magic of the Feed WordPress plugin (still works) to run what came to be known as a “Connected Course” where participants did their work, reflections on a blog/web site they controlled/managed, but their posts could be syndicated to the main site using Feed WordPress.
Can I say again that this old technology still works? I know Ken Bauer might still be using it and Maha Bali as well, and of course the mother ship DS106 still syndicates as “the flow” where it has collected some 92,000 syndicated posts (some intrepid scholar might consider that as a research topic, but no one likely will).
Anyhow,,this significance for ETMOOC to me was it being the first site I created a FeedWordPress syndication hub after learning how to do it for DS106. I cannot recall how it happened, but I guess Alec asked me.
I built for ETMOOC a 3 part site via WordPress multisite including:
- The main site with course info https://etmooc.org
- A FeedWordPress syndication hub https://etmooc.org/hub that over time syndicated 5358 posts from 517 #etmooc blogs– they should all be there
- A Twitter Hub https://etmooc.org/tweets – Back in the olde days one could get a Twitter RSS feed and bring those in with Feed WordPress
. I noticed a while ago, it was pretty broken! I’d helped Alec a few times with his WordPress sites as it seemed like his htaccess file kept getting deleted. Tonight, I went in to fix, and it took a while to locate the proper one to fix it, and I added an SSL plugin to make sure all links went to https. Something was still funky on the two subsites, no images appeared in the media library… it ended up taking a custom pair of rewrite rules to resolve the old way WordPress created URLs to images.
Anyhow, the ETMOOC site is back for the party and some historical purposes (it likely is broken elsewhere).
Getting this working made a path for me to refine the syndicated blog approach for a few other sites, and organizing my approach as a guide:
Building Connected Courses: Feed WordPress 101
A lot of this was a result for applying the DS106 system to ETMOOC.
But there was more to it than just web sites… it was in the days when educators were openly sharing and building those network connections, many of which are alive for me today, 10 years later, when Twitter is a simmering pile of poop, and most folks have given up on their blogs.
The thing I did not have for ETMOOC was the gravity forms($) plugin that enabled the automatic adding of a new feed to the syndication hub. I did ETMOOCs old school manual thing with a Google Form, and I ended up first checking the feeds for 500+blogs and adding them directly to Feed WordPress (it seemed 30%+ got things not quite right finding the RSS feed for a tag/category). But the upside was — I got a glance at every participants blog!
I have a few lingering posts tagged ETMOOC a few of them the nerdy WordPress details of building the site, but it was fun to discover the 2013 version of a Mastodon #introduction as a video
It was such a rich time for networked learning and oh oh oh so innocent. I think if you described the net culture of 2023 to us 10 years ago we’d be shocked (or disbelieving).
So thanks ETMOOC for what it was, and Susan for keeping the spirit alive.
I’ll see your 10 and raise you another 10. See you in 2033.
Featured Image:
A Perfect 10 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
It’s that time of year, with a calendar reminder or not, to think of the span between these three days of February. Three days and many years now.
February 5, 1950–now 73 years ago–marks the date Alyce Herondorf married Morris Levine and set out on that life together that gave me, my sisters, my brothers, and everything I know to be. Because of them. The wed in an even numbered year that makes the mathematics of the passing time easy to calculate and hard to accept.
Three days from now will have mark the date of would be Mom’s 94th birthday. She would explode in laughter were a phone to work — we’d joke about time, and cookies, and memories of times together in Ocean City.
Today, Cori and I got to spend time together snowshoeing around our property, laughing, joking, and her enjoying my silly goofiness.
2023/365/36 Yes! We Are a bit Crazy…. flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)Mom and Dad would have so loved knowing Cori as a daughter. I can imagine those weekly phone calls where they would want to hear about all we are up to, them full of questions of our lives and always, lots of laughs and joy.
I can feel their togetherness in thinking about them and can feel them with us.
On these three days, and beyond. Forever.
Featured Image: Unpublished photo I took of my parents on their Florida porch, licensed CC BY (bye)
Mom and Dad, circa 2000?
With grand intentions to stick to a schedule of daily challenges, by skin of my calendar teeth I am 31 for 31 days in both daily flickr photos and ds106 Daily Creates.
I’ve held this pace before maybe 2 months? Does it really matter to get a perfect score (no)? But parsing some time to try something new even if not to the daily metronome I will always maintain is valuable. More so than scrolling through ___________ (fill in any social media stream).
Daily Flickr Photoshttps://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/albums/72177720304937239Sometimes there is a 2-3 day catchup, but the photos have been taken every day. Lots of snow, sunsets, dog, the occasional taco, this is maybe the most compulsive habit I have aimed for now for the 16th frigging year.
For fun I made a spreadsheet to make some stats and chart gunk. Since I started there have been 5510 days and of those I posted a daily photo 5205 times for a 94% percentage. For years, I have batted as low as 62% in 2012 and hit the 100% buzzer in 2009, 2015, 2016, 2017, and so far, 2023.
Charts!
I feel like I am nothing but [frozen] net
2023/365/17 Winter Ball? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)But the fans are dubious.
2023/365/29 Charlie and Felix 2/3: Skeptical flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)They are saying… “Show us your charts in February!”
Game on.
Daily DS106 CreateI’ve spouted and presented and yowled about how great the DS106 Daily Create and while I have done (and created) many of them since 2012, I’ve never sustained a run at the top of the leaderboard.
Well for 2023, I am running 31/31!
I just love this bit of data tracking (the good kind) that runs in the now rather old, but despite the Musky One’s Meddling, still works via the Daily Blank WordPress Theme. Even more, everyone who ever participates has their own archive built in– mine is at https://daily.ds106.us/hashtags/cogdog/
Woah, that’s 581 TDCs under my belr!That makes my batting percentage 581 / 2710 days or a .214 hitter. Maybe not so impressive after all. But it’s still fun to see what I can conjure in about 20 minutes–
@ds106dc #tdc4031 #ds106 I'm flying far with Helene Dutrieu, next stop…. MARS! pic.twitter.com/OjJoFYdfLH
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) January 26, 2023
@ds106dc #tdc4029 #ds106 Depluralised the entire PoTA franchise… can't even squeeze a sequel from this much less 5. pic.twitter.com/3REubDu45N
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) January 25, 2023
It’s been a good mix of challenges in 2023.
For more stats and people to be in awe of, see the all time leaderboard. Heck,even Todd Conaway is ahead of me!
This year the pool of players is only 14. Without a current or recent ds106 class, theparticipation has fallen. But also the sagging spirit of twitter may be at play.
I do have the site posting to Mastodon at https://social.ds106.us/@tdc but admit I am sluggish at getting my head into some code to pull mastodon responses into the site (and the board). The main task is finding or thrashing some PHP code to fetch replies to that account.
If you want that, keep bugging me.
That’s One! (month)I may not keep this pace, but I am going to be at it as much as possible, as this is more valuable use f time than venting about ChatGPT.
What are you doing for a daily constructive habit?
I’m doubling down on the dailies! Bring it on, February.
Featured Image:
Double Prints flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
In Chapter 32 of the “You Cannot Make this**** Up Book of Internet Stupidity” I submit for your disapproval perhaps evidence that GPT AI is in use already for marketing pimple brains.
It was more than 10 years ago I began some relentless debunking of the oft-cited 60000 times faster assertion — “Researchers at 3M have shown that humans process images 60,000 times faster than text.” Even when cited, the source turns out to be a PDF of 3M promotional brochure. I spoke with 3M employees, other visualization experts doing similar research at the time claimed, and there is bubka’s for evidence. With the help of an ace research librarian, I traced it back to a computer magazine opinion columns from 1982 where the trail went cold.
If you ever see this claim question it severely. I am 100% sure it is not supported by any evidence.
I do get sporadic comments and rackpack pings from people who have questioned it, turned to the Google, and found my stuff (insert pat on the back). I feel I have contributed a tiny drop of sanity in demystifying of internet BS.
Until today.
I get a trackpack ping from a post from some consultants I will not give any more google juce by naming, but peek for yourself at Video is Still King!
The human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text (source: 3M Corporation). (VISUAL) Video not only helps you remember, but it helps you connect. People connect to the company, connect to your brand, and tend to trust your brand more when they see your video.
Some Consultants from Mars
Look, they cite 3M Corporation as a source of evidence of the claim…. with a link
The link supporting my claim goes to my blog!They have asserted a false claim by backing up as a source one of,my blog posts that debunks it!
The 60,000 Times Question Remains Unanswered
I could not make this up. I would certainly line up to here these consultants, you should too! I just hope my blog does not alert them with a ping, it would be a shame to lose this specimen of poop on the web.
And I am only able to conjecture that ChatGPT is going to be the marketers dream for spitting out crap copy, not to mention authoring more realistic sounding phishing email attempts.
Thank you internet for putting the turd cherry atop another one of those days.
Featured Image: One of my own, a sort of internet reality distortion modulator…
Incredible Lobby flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
As it happens while looking for one thing (now forgotten) in my piles of web stuff, I stumbled across a directory of audio conversations I recorded in 2007. Just sitting there in a web directory.
It reminded me of one of the classic early Web2.0 Storytelling stuff I used to trade with Bryan Alexander— I Found A Digital Camera in the Woods (original forum post is gone, a copy is available).
I found a reference to this in a blog post written before a 2007 circum-Australia tour– I think it was material I hoped to use in presentations, but I am actually not too sure what I asked folks.
Here they are as a playlist:
A quick blast on Engelbart's ABC layersCDB Talks to Gardner CampbellGeorge Siemens ConversationPhil Long ConversationScott Leslie ConversationVidya Ananthanarayanan ConversationGreat to find these voices of colleagues from the past– now what the heck was I using it for?
Oh well, found audio is fun.
Featured Image:
Radio Royalty flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
I already took a blog dip on the biggest craze in education since the ditto machine, but as you cannot take a scroll in social media and the news without tripping over 5 takes on ChatGPT… well, I could not help myself.
Well, I could, but I did not.
With all the efforts to take big swings at Chat GPT, I did appreciate seeing Maha Bali’s announcement of a workshop coming up this week (online/free), see her post and info within (sidenote, I have to commend her immensely on that metaphoric image, which led me down another whinging hole as I have noticed that the Pixabay copy/t attribution has no link to the original image) (that’s another post for another day)
https://blog.mahabali.me/educational-technology-2/equity-unbound-workshop-how-well-does-chatgpt-or-any-ai-tool-do-on-our-writing-assignments-how-do-we-adapt-openai/What is refreshing is that Maha and co-conspirator Anna Mills have planned not another slide deck of info nor a bag full of links, but a real activity and discussion. The rabbit hole grew very large looking at Anna’s examples of essays generated by the gizmo, which are valuable to see her commentary and an approach of fine tuning the interrogation of the AI.
Another piece I liked was they opened a doc early and asked for people to suggest different assignment prompts that potentially could be used as exercises in the workshop.
ChatGPTing Blog Post TitlesI could not help myself but to play with one…er… two tries. The first, is the dated already approach of getting Chat GPT to talk about itself, the prompt was:
Write 10 different titles for a blog post about the conflict between human creative endeavors and algorithmic generated ones. Use metaphors based on the history of machines and inventions. A bit of sarcasm could help.
It look like its been docified to be part of the workshop. I have to say that the results I got were pretty, well, not so great or how I would have gone. The most curious lack of creativity is the repeated format of a blog post title seemingly requiring a colon.
“The Battle of the Titans: Man vs. Machine in the Arts”
“Creative Evolution: Can Algorithms Keep Up with Human Genius?”
“Robo-Artists vs. Human Masters: Who Will Prevail?”
“The Industrial Revolution of Creativity: How Algorithms are Changing the Game”
“The Luddite’s Guide to Algorithm-Generated Art”
“The Machine Age of Creativity: Will Algorithms Replace Human Artists?”
“The Automation of Aesthetics: How Algorithms are Shaping the Future of Art”
“The Algorithmic Uprising: Are Human Creators Becoming Obsolete?”
“The Digital Disruption: How Algorithms are Changing the Art World”
“The Mechanical Muse: How Algorithms are Inspiring and Challenging Human Creativity”ChatGPT thinks these are good blog post titles. That dude will never write for me.
I did try an push it a bit, with a variation
Now create a list of 10 blog post titles done listicle style.
Read these and you can tell ChatGPT sucks at understanding net culture
“10 Ways Algorithms are Changing the Art World”
“Top 8 Advantages of Algorithm-Generated Art”
“5 Ways Human Creativity and Algorithms Can Coexist”
“7 Examples of Algorithm-Generated Art That Will Blow Your Mind”
“The Pros and Cons of Algorithm-Generated Art: A Listicle”
“9 Artists Who Are Experimenting with Algorithms in Their Work”
“10 Predictions for the Future of Algorithm-Generated Art”
“6 Ways Algorithm-Generated Art is Challenging Traditional Art Forms”
“The Top 3 Controversies Surrounding Algorithm-Generated Art”
“A Beginner’s Guide to Understanding Algorithm-Generated Art: 10 Key Points”ChatGPT’s attempts at listicle titles.
My other effort was maybe more out of the scope, but I had a curiosity– I asked it a question that I koew should draw significantly from a source, a paper I co-authored in the 1990s when I was a PhD candidate in Geology.
I sort of already wrote this up in a Google doc as I was just taking notes, so am just copying here.
Can ChadGPT Write About Fluid Dynamics of Volcanic Flows?Yes, I wrote “ChadGPT”– I think of ChatGPT as that know it all character Cliff Clavin from Cheers, guy at the end of a bar who is always spouting off about everything in a way that sounds knowledgeable, but is not.
I even had DALL-E create an image so I can make Chad feel more alive to me.
“ChadGPT” image created by Alan Levine with OpenAI DALL-E 2 from prompt “A know it all man like Cliff Clavin sits at a wooden bar talking like an expert, photographic style” shared under OpenAI terms of use but anyone’s guess on a license (I would use CC0)I decided to ask ChadGPT questions related to a published topic I know well (or did) a research paper I co-authored and published long ago as a grad student in Geology
Alan H. Levine, Susan W. Kieffer; Hydraulics of the August 7,1980, pyroclastic flow at Mount St. Helens, Washington. Geology 1991;; 19 (11): 1121–1124. doi: https://doi.org/10.1130/0091-7613(1991)019<1121:HOTAPF>2.3.CO;2
I have a full copy of the paper’s contents on my own domain https://cog.dog/pubs/1991/11/15/msh/
Okay ChadGPT, show me your stuff!
DOT DOT DOT [insert thinking time and the magic of the response] [no actually I did this before so I refer the interested reader, all 1.5 of them, to my doc with the responses and my refinements].
First of all, if you are looking for the first response from Chat… ChadGPT to be just what you need, then you are not playing well. The game is in the refinement.
The first response sounds reasonable (see response to round 1), but its very generalized, and does not distinguish this particular eruption in 1980 (August) from the big blast in May. It does that circling back thing where it ties every up in a neat bow, because it can. And it included no momentum or flow equations, none at all.
For Round 2, I pushed it for more details:
Rewrite to include a more explicit explanation and representation of the momentum equations. Also, add reference citations.
This version had a few more details (see , and a few equations, but is not really relevant. The two references it gave is a book title that does exist and one that does not. It also did not cite any specific references.
Now in Round 3, I apply more pressure, get more specific, Chad! And you suck at citing references…
You left out a few references for the August 7 1980 eruption, please add more in text citations.
As shown in the comments in the docs, it keeps the same fluid dynamic references (one is fake). The two ones it adds for the requested references for the August 7 eruptions use the title of a relevant report (USGS paper 1250 is pretty famous, I have a copy) but that is a large multi paper report, that includes both the names listed as authors, but their contributions in that volume are not related. So two more bogus references.
Now, finally in round 4, I push to get them closer to the paper I co-authored
Include as well a discussion of the feasibility or problem with applying physics of fluid dynamics to a gaseous medium of a pyroclastic flow using gas dynamics theory. Include a discussion of how such a volcanic flow may have or could not have experienced the equivalent of a hydraulic jump generated by channel instructions or reduction of slope at the base of the volcano.
Chad waxes on but its really just stuff that sounds credible unless you have done this kind of research. What it is describing is not the eruption of August 7. And honestly, a google search gets better reference results, but as we know, ChadGPT knows not of the world wide web, in in place of being relevant, it just tries to appear statistically relevant.
Chad should hook up with Elicit.org and write papers together, at least Ellie some AI yields more relevant resources (and summarizes them).
So WhatI’ve somewhat fallen into the trap of trying to go deep with one example, foray. It’s again really hard for the 99.9% of us who are not LLM specialists to grok what is going on inside the box, so we just infer from our various pokes.
And I also lost myself in the pointing out the invalidity of its responses. It has no experience, nor does it even have a stake, or interest in what it spits out.
I have been thinking about a post in Mastodon by Kate Bowles (I’m somewhat hesitating these days to embed toot/posts, I wonder if that is appropriate??)
Following a trail from John Naughton’s article about the fediverse restoring human communication, I read his previous article on ChatGPT, and that took me to Murray Shanahan on human language, and LLM models as predictive sequences of words designed to seem likely.
“Sequences of words with a propositional form are not special to the model itself in the way they are to us. The model itself has no notion of truth or falsehood, properly speaking, because it lacks the means to exercise these concepts in anything like the way we do.”
https://aus.social/@kate/109731104243090193
I could link all those references, (you can find them w/o an AI) (right?) but this leaps out at me: LLM models as predictive sequences of words designed to seem likely.
ChadGPT has nothing to with truth, ideas, getting to an understanding, sensemaking, it is all a fabrication to be statistically knowledgable, to look like an informed source, not to be one.
Or, to go out on a farther limb, as a comment I think I left on Dave Cormier’s blog post with a title that says my lines above with more metaphorical beauty (what ChadGPT fails at repeatedly) — ChatGPT search – Autotune for knowledge. I pondered:
Here is a question: Would you prefer to do the hard work to love and be loved or to just get it easily to have something just looks like love?
Me commenting on Dave’s post
And the whole circus of this is the reactive froth we are in. Be the time educators get their heads even tuned/autotuned into ChatGPT, the 4.o version will be out, as will Google’s play, and all the other outfits scrambling to outdo OpenAI (if someone can do it better and cheaper…).
Who’s ready for Constitutional AI (it is not a right to it!)
With Constitutional AI, we need only a few dozen principles and examples to train less harmful language assistants. With prior techniques, we needed tens of thousands of human feedback labels.
— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) December 16, 2022
Or heck, see what Charlie The Intern does next!
A few notes:
– Charlie joined us last June as an intern
– He's now full-time, because of things like this
– He's the first person to apply this new technique to a real task
– He had a prototype up 4 days after the paper was published
– We had the feature in production in 2 weeks https://t.co/i0Btm3Arpb— James Brady (@james_ought) January 11, 2023
It’s interesting times time for sure.
Featured Image: That’s my ChadGPT image used above, “ChadGPT” image created by Alan Levine with OpenAI DALL-E 2 from prompt “A know it all man like Cliff Clavin sits at a wooden bar talking like an expert, photographic style” shared under OpenAI terms of use but anyone’s guess on a license (I would use CC0) superimposed on my own photo maybe Mt Raineer? Clearing the Volcano flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
ChadGPT: Volcano Research Expert (or a statistical approximation thereof)
I am going to regret this, but 8 years after a tortuous mess of an extraction from (yecch I just hate typing in), well that “professional” social network that rhymes with “StinkedInn” I have been foolish enough to step back in there.
But there was a work thing that really demanded me to see some posts, and because this network only pretends to be of the web, I got weary of all the end arounds it took to get to see more or less something that exists on the web, behind the blue velvet ropes.
I got the info I needed, and already feel wave of regret.
Yes, I know conventional saying is that it’s important to be in there with all the other adults.
I decided I would make my profile the dullest lamest one ever and that it would just sit there in an obscure corner.
I am vying for the lamest LinkedIn profile ever.Save your time and do not look for me, ok?
I’ve not been following, not returning links, nor clicking on the 3 kajillion emails it sends me, the best ones with subject lines like “Alan, you’re really getting noticed”.
If you have clicked to follow and feel dissed that I have not reciprocated, it’s because I want to be a small thorn inside the algorithm, an outlier that clunks like a rock in the machine works.
Yeah, right, as if it makes a difference.
I am not playing the Linked** game, I will not eat click blue eggs and ham, Sam I am.
Featured Image: 2014/365/57 Ignore All Warnings flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license the sign reading “road closed ahead” modified to read “Dullness Ahead” and in the background is a slightly transparent screen shot of my lamed Linked** profile.
Given there is always a kerfuffle of understanding the use of various Creative Common licenses, I am dubious about efforts to even add more to the pile (I have a sarcastic sweet spot for WTPL). But I am trying to at least be aware of stuff like TakeNode).
I came across this via some stuff I am doing with the folks at the Free Music Archive who have been very gracious and even granted me access to experiment with a Curators area for OEGlobal. This all began when I emailed trying to understand why my playlist I made for the FMA tracks I use for a podcast required an FMA login to view… note, this has now been fixed. Check out my public playlist of a popular genre of music.
Okay, this is not about music. While talking to the folks at the FMA and also via a link on their menu, I came across TakeNode:
Governments work on internet copyright laws. Big commercial publishers and digital platforms lobby to shape government policy to their favor. Independent content creators however are hardly involved in this process. TakeNode gives creators a voice.
….
TAKENODE.org offers content creators a practical, power tool to register their ‘Terms of Use’. Relevant information about the file, creator and intentions packaged in an unique TakeNode Certificate. Sharing the TakeNode certificate as part of the content offers digital platforms and their users an easy to understand mandate.https://takenode.org/info
Well yeas, and there is a clear step by step process of how it works, but I learn most when I DIM (Do It Myself).
So I rummaged around my flickr, and found a photo of a common topic
Felix in the Fields flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)which as typical already comes with a clear CCO public domain declaration (always remember, technically not a license) which is also baked into the photo’s metadata.
Do I need a certificate? shrug. But I made one at TakeNode https://takenode.org/certificate?id=7cca72d5-7a3e-46df-9c2a-c3d1194c54ca which delivers to me as a text file:
TAKENODE CERTIFICATE ID:
7cca72d5-7a3e-46df-9c2a-c3d1194c54ca
1. Information about the file
Filename:
35317652343_43ed4a520a_o.jpeg
File type:
picture/video
Unique file ID:
fd2c63bf794708ad447cd21b5f37e03fabee2a499b48b794e140a7f5811fc40f
2. Information about the uploader of the file
Name:
Alan Levine
Upload timestamp:
1674238901 UNIX
2023-01-20 19:21:41 Europe/Amsterdam
Contact info:
https://cog.dog
3. Declaration of intention
This picture/video is copyright protected and I own all related rights. You can freely adapt, share and build upon this work even for commercial purposes. Make sure to credit me as the owner of this work.
More information about TakeNode Certificates? Check https://takenode.org
It sounds kind of blockchain-ish but its not. What do I do with this? I am not sure.
From what I can understand, it supposedly offers artists (and likely of interest to musicians) some way of having a certificate of authenticity or terms of use associated with their works? So they can go after copyright stompers?
The terms of use I am offered are pretty much the spirit of Creative Commons, but it’s not a license.
I am intrigued by this, but I fell like I am missing a step or a piece of what I do with my TakeNode thingie.
Help me, Obi Wan or blog reader, help me understand?
Featured Image: Felix in the Fields flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) with text of this photo’s TakeNode certificate superimposed on it, so the whole mix can also be declared CC0 because its mine, all mine! And yours if you want, youts@
This is like one of those things where by the time you find a solution to a problem it has already fixed itself (see also, rebooting). And it hardly merits a blog post, but heck, I can write about what I want to write about.
If you’ve been around the blog a while, you might notice I bark a lot about flickr. I seem to be searching it for photos frequently mostly using the still valuable 10 years later, thanks Chris Lott, the Gift of Time where I can type f TAB cactus snow in the URL bar and instantly search my own flickr photos for one of those desert plants I adore in the white frozen stuff.
For a few days this week I have been noticing this unwanted, strip of not my photos sitting atop the search results I wanted, under a heading of “From the Print Shop”. WTF are you doing flickr? Always the same photos.
What is this “Print Shop” cruft, flickr?I ignored it a few days, but after seeing it again today (and the same 3 photos) I took a sniff in the flickr help forums and read of others asking the same question, Can you disable “from the print shop” in searches?
The answers seemed to be “no” – but also it was a beta feature, and as described in a blog post, it seemed as others pointed out inserting ads into the interface of Flickr Pro members, who pay for, amongst other things, to not see advertisements.
I decided to investigate, and in the Browser inspector I did find that putting a little bit of CSS in, I could hide it at least in principle.
.search-prints-results { display: none;}
But that won’t stop it everywhere. I remembered Tom Woodward making use of the browser extension Stylebot, which allows you to create custom CSS to apply at a domain level (and more fine tuning with patterns).
I installed it, created a new pattern for the url flickr.com and entered the CSS above, and BOOM! The Print Shop cruft was gone.
Victory!
I posted my “solution” (aka internet duct tape) in the help forum and anticipated/hoped for some adulation or maybe a thanks or a wow.
As it turns out a few hours later there was a report that Flickr had heard the outcry and removed the Print Shop from search results.
So yes, my Stylebot cleverness was now rendered obsolete, pineal eye and all.
But the gain in all of this is a wee bit of hands on knowledge and better awareness of Stylebot. Somewhere down this line, I will need it again. And just in case I forget some details, my blog has this record.
And, as well, because I can, some snow on a cactus.
The Obligatory Snow on Cactus Photo flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)And that was how I spent my lunch break today. In and out of a shorter web rabbit hole, maybe without a significant find, but a good little shred.
Featured Image: Mine! Found with flickr search and nary a Print Shop bling in sight.
delete or enter? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
Oh noes! A favorite thing was broken today.
The subject or object of a number of posts here I think of as the Opener of Glorious Rabbit Holes is the Library of Congress Free to Use Browser Extension. Each time I open a new tab in my browser (like 50 times a day), rather than a blank screen of the blarg of google, this little gem inserts a randomly selected public domain image from the Library of Congress.
Often it gives me pause, or just makes me wonder about the story… here, I just opened a new tab and get a view of a man and a woman seated at the back of their classic cars at the State fair in Rutland, in 1939. I bet it’s Vermont, I’ve been to that town! I like it that they have a box of BLISS in the back.
A new tab gives me a random public domian photo. Isn’t this more interesting than a blank screen?I can share it, download, it with links to the bottom right, or from the title in the bottom left I can go to the image’s full entry page at the Library of Congress and see it’s meta data (and yes, I am correct, this is Rutland, Vermont). If I really want to wander, the right and left arrow buttons will serve up even more random stuff.
Maybe it’s just me, but I just love this bit of randomness in my web browsing time.
But today… I started seeing error messages rather than my lovely photos. I went to my Chrome extensions page and saw a note that there was an error:
Free to Use Browser Extension Generates and error!I have no idea what Manifest versions even are. The link has a bunch of stuff I don’t understand either. Can I fix this with no knowledge of what I am really doing?
First I delete the extension, and download the new version, and re-install as per the instructions (this is a not a store hosted extension but can be loaded manually, kind of like installing a WordPress theme manually).
No change, still and error.
But I am looking at the error, and it looks like some json data… what if I just pop open a file and find it? I already have all the files opened from the zip file I dpwnloaded.
The files inside the Free to Use Browser ExtensionLucky me! An easy guess is the manifest.json file. I open it, find the line reading
"manifest_version" : 2,
and change it to read
"manifest_version" : 3
Just a wild guess… I delete the extension and upload this new one… and BOOM it works!
I do a bit of a victory dance.
And then I am rewarded because on testing, as a random image, I get one I really know! Here it is in flickr
Dog Bark Park Bed & Breakfast, Cottonwood, Idaho (LOC) flickr photo by The Library of Congress shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons)I know Dog Park Park because I stumbled across it myself while driving through Idaho in 2011 and took almost the exact same photo.
I had a rule on that trip, where I traveled only secondary highways, that if anything caught my eye, I would not hesitate to stop and investigate. A two story high beagle spotted easily from US 95 certainly fit that category of curiosity.
2011/365/196 Big Dog / Little Dog / Big Dog flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) licenseIf you check out my photo, you will find a comment from the owners… I had a fantastic visit there and was treated to extra stories by Dennis.
Meet Dog Bark Park Dennis
and even learned through the flickr tag that these were known as mimetic buildings.
Lots of trails come through these random photos.
One additional bit in the toolset- the links provided by the extension go to the record at the Library of Congress. If I read the notes in the code, the extension is pulling from the ones shared to the LOC’s account in flickr. To make it easier to find the images in flickr, I can select a bit of the title and rev up my flickr commons bookmarklet to locate them in flickr.
It is worth it to make this little extension work for me every day.
Featured Image: Helen Ware, Grace Schnebe, Chrystal Herne, Frances Starr, Gladys Hanson, Lucy Weston (LOC) flickr photo by The Library of Congress shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons) modified by Alan Levine by superimposing screen shot of a google chrome error screen.
As we must do in 2023, a disclaimer comes here that no imagery nor writing here was generated by any large language models or statistical data system. It’s all me, with my typo-prone keyboarding and propensity to make up titles.
Yet, I am tempted to consult my conjured expert ChadGPT because I operate by natural sarcastitelligence…
I have instructed Chad to remain hushed. But imagine him scowling dismissively at me as I declare that I have been poking at AI actively since June, in an experiment using the OEG Connect space as a pseudo mini-blogging space. My opening was that I know the machinery of it all was likely beyond my skill grade but I could do more than repost articles in social media, that by public dabbling in the stuff, maybe I could better approach some kind of informed intuition:
But I do know I can better come to my own understanding if I can do more than read papers and blog posts, but actually dabble in a technology.
https://connect.oeglobal.org/t/understanding-doing-some-ai/4013
The early stuff was the first versions I found of public DALL-E image generators morphing into craiyon all of which months later looks really crude compared to the latest DALL-E and pals like Midjourney and more.
My strand ran long and several more topics spun out. While many people were caught up in the (important) issues of what content was used for training and the unclear copyright implications, I honed some time on the question of how the heck we reuse/attribute the imagery the magic boxes spit out.
And all of this seems quaint given the intense furor, worry, soul wrenching, (cheatophobia?) hype soaked conjectures over the implications of this stuff.
Here I go with two Vennish overlaps.
Accept Its Inevitability? Definitely the AI bro-ponents but also critics are proclaiming the far reaches of AI as a given, that it will replace artists, teachers, google. It’s unavoidable! You cannot hide! Glorious (for whom?)
We are just entering an AI-powered golden age of writing, art, music, software, and science. It's going to be glorious. World historical.
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) January 5, 2023
I proudly accept a label of whistler in the wind, that AI is inevitable as the inventions of agriculture and industry. Do we once again have to pull out the long scroll of supposed disruptive technologies?
While I appreciate critics and critiques of AI, it feels like whistling in the wind. "In humanity’s history, there have been two cases of such major transformations, the agricultural and the industrial revolutions." https://t.co/MoLRhBygCd
— George Siemens (@gsiemens) December 27, 2022
Yet I am not on the doom and gloom train either, I find a bit of fascination over things I have seen pop out of the AI toasters, the feat that it can be done is impressive-witness This Voice Does Not Exist, Riffusion, Victorian-Era People Who Never Existed, Flawless, Elicit, Consensus, Never Heard Before Sounds— if you are solely focusing in ChatGPT as the essay writing cheat machine, you are mibbling at the corner of the whole AIchillada.
Plus in a weird too way I have to be impressed that the poop writing that emerges from the magic GPT ball has so many undergarments in a wad.
I’s significant…. But is it inevitable? All encompassing? Coming to steal your job? Meh, shrug, I do not believe in the bogeyman.
The Obelisk’s OpaquenessBut the thing I find more perplexing is how fuzzy and weasly the wording gets when a product or pundit attempts to describe how it works. After the buzz splash description of GALL-E or whatever is next, or that someone is raving about the new AI enabled Toaster Oven, the “how it works” or “what it does” just about evaporates.
I resorted to asking one machine (The Google) for the classic explain AI to me like I am five which produced lots of descriptions of it all by people who apparently have never conversed with a five year old human (witness one that used the expression “tabula rasa” (WYF?).
Sure, we can take out the definitions of Large Language Models or Neural Networks and describe AI as processes that operate in a fashion like the brain, but my slow burning question is- exactly what happens after you type your prompt into the box and ** is returned? As far as I can tell there is just some smoke, a jingle like sound effect then
God Of War Magic GIF By Santa Monica StudioNo I am not expecting myself or any mortal to fully understand the computer science the mathematics of these models. But what I am left with is us as users/subjects of this stuff we have absolutely no comprehensible mental model of what it does. We just wipe the glitter off our faces and send another prompt to the machine. Without any kind of internal intuition, our only source of understanding is our statistically insignificant experiences of typing something into a box turning the crank and seeing what pops out. And then we come to conclusions based on either the crap we get or the stuff that is actually tenable.
There is a long list of things being written by educators…
Among them are some really good comments from people like Derek Bruff on Three Things to Know About AI and Teaching. His statement has me nodding like a big dog
This interchange points to at least one important observation about AI and teaching: We are going to have to start teaching our students how AI generation tools work.
https://derekbruff.org/?p=3970
But what Derek describes is not really teaching how the tools work but some hands on experience seeing what they do. We are teaching Promptism- as described by Seb Chan:
My social media feeds overflowed with DALL-E and Midjourney ‘promptism’ visuals. The coining of ‘promptism’ by others nicely deflects attention from the underlying technologies to the craft of finding the right language (the prompt) to ‘talk to the machine’. Its a bit like those people who seem to have a magical ability to craft ‘the perfect Google search query’ but aren’t trained librarians and have really just have done a bit of SEO work in their past.
Seb Chan’s Fresh and New newsletter:Generative things and choosing the right words
Think about Google search. It’s PageRank algorithm is secretly hidden under a floorboard in Sergey Brin’s bedroom, but we have some idea that Google has visited a vast number of websites, read them all, indexed into some kind of database and matches our input words to some relevance of word frequency and scores based upon some factor of how many other sites link to it. That may not be exactly correct, but that as a mental model helps me at least frame expectations and a sense what my results mean.
Or for another analogy, go sit behind the wheel of an automobile. I am no mechanic, but my experience of driving makes a model that my filling the tank with an explosive liquid, can be energized when put a key in (tapping into electricity in a battery), and under the hood, this creates explosions that moves engine parts up and down that is transferred to the axles of my wheels.
I do not need to be a mechanic to at least have some internal understanding what makes my car go (or not go). Is it critical to know this? Maybe not but I think some minimal model of what an engine does is helpful to operating a vehicle.
But with artificial intelligence, are we to be productive just by becoming the feeders of prompts to a machine without even a guess at what it is doing with that prompt?
A lot of people are caught up in what is a key question of how the training of AI is done and how the stuff that gets hoovered into the machine influences what pops out.
To me we are getting a bit over distracted by the candy sliding out of the bottom of the AI machine and not having any kind of understanding, even schematic, of what goes on behind the front of the machine.
Unlike others I will not act like I have seen every YouTube video or read every single article, and I am banking on there being some resources out there that can help a non data scientist have a more informed picture of what is behind the magic wand.
And this, my human eyed readers, is what bothers me. Are we just going to accept what pops out of these opaque obelisks without asking what goes on inside?
Featured Image:
47 Public Art Monolith Installation11092010 flickr photo by City of Wylie shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license
I am forgetting who’s blog post I read recently asking about doing blog posts by email… ah yes, thank for Inoreader, it was JR Dingwal who mentioned this in a new post about revitalizing blogging.
Part of me was tempted to respond to JR and say Try Posterous! (old timer internet joke) Posterous was a nifty early aughts service aimed at making posting east, with the most useful route being posting via email. It was bought by Twitter and shelved. Heck, the domain is there (Twitter is so dumb it does not even redirect the url) waiting for something to be rebuilt.
Hello, 2008?
Blog by Email? With Posterous Maybe Even My Mom Can Blog
Now I found also in my flickr memory drawer that back in 2010 Chris Lott ran something through posterous called Ye Olde Motley Readers (bless you for the millionth time, Wayback Machine) where open participants could post by email in a shared reading of James Joyce’s the Dubliners.
“Motley Readers Postcards (outbox)” flickr photo by cogdogblog https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4345462650
shared into the public domain using (CC0)
I digress.
But I do remember WordPress having this capability via maybe the Jetpack plugin (which weighs like 90 gazillion internet pounds, but I still use it). I could not find it on any of its plugin pages… but did find a useful trick from Jetpack Central on how to find, turn on and off, all the modules in the Big Ship Jetpack.
You just tack on to the end of your WordPress site
/wp-admin/admin.php?page=jetpack_modules
and boom! I found the long list and activated post by email. It generates for you a special, secret (as in do not put it on your blog post) email address you can use to write an actual blog post by email.
There are a bunch of features you can use to include via shortcodes, like adding categories, etc. I do not see how to add a featured image, but that can be done after post (or I could use the shortcode to post as a draft).
Heck, I am doing it right now (maybe, will know after clicking send).
This is about as easy as possible to be blogging, or blogging about blogging, oir blogging about not blogging or blogging about JR or….
Featured Image: (added post publication, this could possible be remedied on one of those plugins that makes the first image in a post the featured image) (also for future reference, the post arrives as a Classic Block).
Motley Readers Postcards (outbox) flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
I’m playing with words. As usual. I ain’t no chat ai thing just a frail human. “Right” here is not in the sense of correct or justified (although someone on the internet might be correct at this very moment), but right as plugged in to its essence, the original wizards staying up late sense, as in being of the web, not just being on the web (my old trope).
blah.
To get here I have to take the reader (as if there is one but I will imagine said audience) on a trip through a diversion of the day.
It starts with today’s DS106 Daily Create. To start the new year I have so far (one week in) stayed on pace. And tomorrow is pretty significant as it marks the 11th year for the daily create, which, unlike me, has not missed a day since TDC1 on January 8, 2012.
Today’s was one that could have been dashed off quickly, as the should be, but sometimes I cannot help myself…TDC4012 was “You Number One Album” – the task was to pick an image from a fun twitter account @ImagesAlbum (Images That Could Be Album Covers) a twitter account sourced from a subreddit. It’s a nifty prompt as its one that you can take in almost any direction
I scrolled past a few images but something clicked for this one:
pic.twitter.com/vPY20ACWfA
— Images That Could Be Album Covers (@ImagesAlbum) January 5, 2023
The lone figure in the window harkened back to one xkcd comic I always seemed to remember, well, Duty Calls which dates back to February 2008.
Duty Calls xkcd comic by Randall Munroe licensed CC BY-NC.Thus framing my 30 minutes of Photoshop dinkering:
my response for Daily Create TDC4012 tweeted at https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1611751365432180738This was all fun, but I was struck by so many things when I Iooked up that original comic from https://xkcd.com/ a long running series that tailors to geeks, internet nerds, but as the tag line suggests, covers more– “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”. It’s quirky, insanely sarcastic and to me just pleasantly reeks of the drive and creativity of one person– in all ways a blog in the definition of Dave Winer as the unedited voice of a person.
One thing of note is the single page archive, with an entry for every comic published three times a week since 2006… in fact to find the date when Duty Calls was published, I had to command-F to find it, and hover to reveal the February 20, 2008. Sure a single page is long, but from the URL pattern I note that the current comic is number 2721 in the series. You can see how the artist’s style has evolved since the first one.
Perhaps more notable, and appreciated, and why I went for an xkcd comic is that each one is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. In fact, read the human essence of the license terms.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.
This means that you are free to copy and reuse any of my drawings (noncommercially) as long as you tell people where they’re from.
That is, you don’t need my permission to post these pictures on your website (and hotlinking with
is fine); just include a link back to this page. Or you can make Livejournal icons from them, but — if possible — put xkcd.com in the comment field. You can use them freely (with some kind of link) in not-for-profit publications, and I’m also okay with people reprinting occasional comics (with clear attribution) in publications like books, blogs, newsletters, and presentations. If you’re not sure whether your use is noncommercial, feel free to email me and ask (if you’re not sure, it’s probably okay).
https://xkcd.com/license.html
This is a rather fun set of terms.
There is more to appreciate all over the site. Look at that illegible text just above the licence statement in each comic’s footer. At 6px font size you have to make an effort to read the small print (rather then super zooming, I copied pasted to a text editor).
xkcd.com is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or below on a Pentium 3±1 emulated in Javascript on an Apple IIGS at a screen resolution of 1024×1. Please enable your ad blockers, disable high-heat drying, and remove your device from Airplane Mode and set it to Boat Mode. For security reasons, please leave caps lock on while browsing.
https://xkcd.com/
Sure, maybe someone can get a ChatGPT prompt to generate something like this, but rich/sarcasm is my kind of Turing test. For now.
And if you do not have enough of human presence, the artists about page has it oozing. How about this bio:
I’m just this guy, you know? I’m a CNU graduate with a degree in physics. Before starting xkcd, I worked on robots at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia. As of June 2007 I live in Massachusetts. In my spare time I climb things, open strange doors, and go to goth clubs dressed as a frat guy so I can stand around and look terribly uncomfortable. At frat parties I do the same thing, but the other way around.
https://xkcd.com/about/
Munroe not only reiterates the open reuse for non-commercial use, but even opens a geek door by sharing that every comic (or the current one) as an API that can return it’s info in JSON format- the data for Duty Calls is in https://xkcd.com/386/info.0.json
{"month": "2","num": 386,"link": "","year": "2008","news": "","safe\_title": "Duty Calls","transcript": "[[A stick man is behind computer]]\nVoice outside frame: Are you coming to bed?\nMan: I can't. This is important.\nVoice: What?\nMan: Someone is WRONG on the internet.\n{{title text: What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they'll keep being wrong!}}","alt": "What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they'll keep being wrong!","img": "https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/duty\_calls.png","title": "Duty Calls","day": "20"}
I’ve gone on enough here, but the force of human presence in keeping this web going for 16 years speaks against the total gloom and doom of AI taking over the world. All the hype seems to again look over all he human creativity alive and more than well right there in the long tail of the internet.
When I say someone like Randall Munroe and all others who independently publish weird, original human crafted openly shared stuff, is right on the internet I mean in terms of keeping its entirety uncontrollable and as unknowable by its organic vastness. You cannot paint the web with broad general brush strokes that easily.
And for all who do this outside the algorithmic grips of big neural machines , this out here human says thanks.
Featured Image: Someone is Right on this internet by Alan Levine is licensed CC BY-NC based on Duty Calls xkcd comic by Randall Munroe licensed CC BY-NC modified by cropping and changing “WRONG” to “RIGHT” and filtered, superimposed on organic growth flickr photo by jurvetson shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
Someone (human) is right there on the internet.
The unexpected responses to online activity, sharing openly, are the things that sparks my optimism the most.
This most recently happened through a flickr email notification:
Hi ! Congrats! The photo 2022/365/226 In the Cloud (that kind of cloud) you added to the group CSSS: Canada’s Thunderstorms has been selected to be its cover photo. See how it looks here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/canadasthunderstorms/ Any “safe”, public photo that has been added to a group is eligible to become that group’s cover photo.
via my email inbox
Just in case it’s not forever, saving here for my own sake, small measure of chest thumping pride:
CSSS: Canada’s Thunderstorms flickr group with one of my photos as it’s coverI had not joined the group but periodically I do get requests to allow a group to add one of my photos to it’s pool.
But I do remember the photo from a brilliantly lit up storm cloud over our acreage in August of this year. I did boost the colors a bit in editing, but it really was a spectacular cloud.
This CSSS group has been around a long time, though I am not even quite sure what the acronym stands for. Like I had described in the flickr Daily Photo group I manage this is one of a vast, maybe too vast to even take in, collections of interest based communities in flickr where really the interaction level is quite indirect (this caught the all seeing eye of Stephen Downes, who has been a faithful daily photo participant himself).
Again, this is such a tiny speck of all internet, yet demonstrates to me that the long tail of web spaces is more than any one person can know or summarize. There are too many independent weird and wonderful (and maybe not) nooks and crannies out of the reach of the latest Big Thing that Will Change Everything.
The more independent, not corporate controlled, human crafted stuff we can hang on the web, the more durable it will be.
In that vein, I am aiming to put small items here that may have previously been stuff tossed into the social media streams that just wash downstream be they tweets or toots or whatever. The stuff I hoist here at least has some roots in the shifting soils.
Featured Image: Mine!
2022/365/226 In the Cloud (that kind of cloud) flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
Sure a new year means all kinds of things (sans resolutions) for me it’s time to mark another year done at the Daily (but never everyday) Photo effort. Thus 2023 makes it the 16th year for this habit I do no want to shake.
To recast the story again, it goes back to the solo effort D’Arcy Norman did in 2007, nudging me to try in 2008, inviting others to do so via a flickr group. I’ve kept going at it since 2008, as has D’Arcy (tho in his own photo place) (and he is doing so again, maybe in 2023) (can I apply blog pressure through endless parentheticals?).
What? Another Do X A Day Project?
The 2022 WrapI took lots of photos in 2022, most every day a few, but somewhere in mid September I bogged down on the process of editing captioning posting to flickr. Why? Insert any theory … or as it is the thing to do, ask the Wisdom of Oracle-like ChatCPT:
Q: Why would someone who had completed a daily creative activity for 15 years have stopped doing so recently? What are theories for why people lapse in positive habits?
ChatGPT sez:
There could be many reasons why someone who had completed a daily creative activity for 15 years might have stopped recently. Some possible reasons could include changes in personal circumstances, loss of motivation or inspiration, increased workload or responsibilities, or simply losing the habit of doing the activity.
There are also a number of theories that attempt to explain why people might lapse in positive habits. One theory is that habits are formed through the process of classical conditioning, in which an automatic response is learned through repeated pairing with a stimulus. According to this theory, if the stimulus is no longer present or if the response is not reinforced, the habit may be broken.
Another theory is that habits are formed through the process of operant conditioning, in which an action is reinforced through the consequence that follows it. According to this theory, if the consequence is no longer reinforcing or if the action is not performed consistently, the habit may be broken.
It is also possible that lapses in positive habits may be due to a lack of motivation or a lack of self-control. In these cases, individuals may need to find ways to increase their motivation or build up their self-control in order to maintain their positive habits.
ChatGPT gibberish
What insight… as usual it starts with some relevance into the question but quickly steers into generalized pablum.
Regardless, it became a holiday task to catch up on this backlog. I am my own task maker here because I insist on writing titles, adding captions, tagging all photos. I have noticed a few colleagues which have been doing this a while doing the dump and upload method. ChatGPT can guess but it is a trivial chore.
But having info that I can use later to search photos is what makes this act of value to me. It is metadata as much as ISO and shutter speed and geolocation. Plus I believe in the potential of providing context for photos not just using it as a storage facility.
This is my way, I cannot criticize others.
After catching up on the backlog of my 2022/365 flickr album I usually go through to fill gaps, days I forgot to add to the album, or ones I named wrong in sequence. This year I spent less time doing this, which matters little as I am the only auditor.
As is for 2022 I scored 343 out of 365 days, no perfect, but a better batting average than 2021 (329 out of 365). Out of 15 years, only twice did I truly achieve a 100% score.
Again I assembled a year end review, making use of my friend and colleague John Johnston’s command line script to download photos, resize, and assemble them into a video (and yes I remember when John shared the now dead pummelvision site that previously did this). My version is slightly different to find photos from my album rather than tags, but it saves a lot of work in putting them all in a single video.
It’s my own obsessive habits that has me editing in iMovie to reverse the sequence, add titles, music, credits.
Finally, enough blog blabbering… the video!
Teeing Up for 2023A good start is resetting the habit (pfffft to ChatGPT’s lame fallback to operant conditioning, I ain’t no lab mouse). Meaning Just Doing It. January 1 photos taken? Check. Edited? Check. Uploaded to Flickr? Check, into a brand new album and tag stream. Check.
Today? My slow blogging habit warms up, still lovely light for Cori and I to get out and snap some photos.
I also make a quick edit to the Flickr Group originally set up in 2008– change the name to 2023/365 Photos, pick new cover image and icons from members of the group (well over 1800), posting a short announcement.
It’s funny as these 1800 some people, vastly I have no idea who they are, occupy this space and have no real interaction beyond doing their photo thing in whatever way makes sense to them. It’s hardly a community, it’s more like strangers engaging in similar pursuit and never talking about it, just doing it.
I kind of think this is fascinating.
Want to jump in? The water is warm and safe, see https://www.flickr.com/groups/366photos/
Onward with One Step into 2023Insert the disclaimer about hating / not making resolutions. Those sound like traps. I do this because the act of noticing interesting patterns/light and rendering them as photos always has worked for me as a creative act. Were it different I might make drawings, or music, or folded paper sculptures.
But I am noting the dispensing of my time/energy– I have slid some this year to the ease and nano-click rewards of posting to instagram , twitter, and now some to mastodon. I want to find again the priority first of getting my photos to the archive, place that matters and I control… no, it’s not flickr, but my own database in Aperture and hard-drives. Everything online is exhaust from that, but it should be flickr first, then others.
Daily photo habit for 2023 now reset, but it’s on me to follow through. And whether I do 1 or 365 matters not.
Featured Image: Composite of my first and last daily photos of 2022: 2022/365/1 The Sun Star flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) and 2022/365/365 Caf-Magic flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
[media description: Photo of a bright sun over snow cover landscape superimposed on a photo of the bubbles atop a cup of coffee]
It’s six o’clock PM, the outside solar lighting (aka the sun) has turned off, the temperature outside has warmed up from *&#^ing cold (where Fahrenheit and Celsius converge), we are cozy inside with warm drinks, silly movies, and completely unplugged, diverged from the w-o-r-k stuff.
And this Christmas eve converges with the seventh night of Hanukkah. There must be something to things coming together and spreading out at the same time.
These words feel like they are slipping towards the kind of year end summaries / reflections many are doing.
I diverge.
This is merely a moment before the next and after the last. More [maybe] to come this week (that’s a plan) to catch up on photos not sent to flickr, blog posts in the draft-space of my head, and just be out of the usual convergence spaces.
That both divergence and convergence can co-exist for and in us (complexities that are out of reach of un-natural algorithmic pseudo telligence) says much, much that rises above the noise.
We are tuning in to light and space for a while.
Featured Image: “Menorah lights on third night of Hanukkah with Christmas tree lights in background”, photo by me, Alan Levine, which when he aches up on Flickr uploads will be put into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0.
Since I know not which will be last, I am doing my own archival work here. This was my first day twittering on January 31, 2007:
11 twitter post by Alan Levine on January 31, 2007, available for now via advanced twitter search, but preserved here as an image because…. well you know what might happen. The contents are available below.This first day’s glorious messaging says so little about the future. Here is that fateful day, with tweets in chronological order:
Looking at a long list of Cole’s twitters
twittering while on a teleconference call- can they hear me typing?
setting up a google doc for a project, for once someone suggested it before me
duh, i verified my account twice
getting a bit addicted and not doing any work
twittered my background
Getting ready to blog about twitter
NetNewsWire? That is so old skool
getting ready to publish my blog post about twttter
All blogged! See http://cogdogblog.com/2007/01/31/networking/
I blame Cole for my new habitAlan Levine tweets on January 31, 2007
It’s all a bit… like drivel. Brief (those precious 140 characters), no images, no hashtags, URLs are just plan text. Alan’s normal typos.
I do blame/credit Cole Camplese, then at Penn State University, for making me aware enough (likely through his blog) to give it a try (his blog post is gone, closest I could find was via the Wayback Machine). I do recall he talked a bit about the potential of it for his PSU team to quickly, update each other on project, being more efficient than email. Hey! Cole invented Slack!
I even managed to blog about it:
If I Fall Into One More Social Network Tool I’m Going To Scream Like a Banshee
And D’Arcy Norman must have been tapped by Cole too as he has a blog post the same day, the post is intact, and also quite a bite more informational than mine:
Until last week, I hadn’t heard of Twitter. Then Cole blogged about it, and the ETSTalk Podcast folks talked about it. They’re looking at Twitter as a tool to facilitate shared awareness of organizational activities.
Twitter is essentially nanoblogging (I just made that word up) – stuff that is more of a quick “I’m doing this right now” kind of status update rather than a blog post. You create a set of “friends” and get to see updates in almost realtime of what they’re up to. Right now.
Cole’s investigating this from the perspective of “how would a tool like this affect teaching and learning, and running an organization” I’m not doing anything quite so lofty, I’m just playing.
What’s kind of cool is that it makes it easy for me to track what I’m doing, so when it’s time to do the Dreaded Procrastinated Timesheet Entry mere hours before the payroll cutoff, I could just spider the list of archived updates.
https://darcynorman.net/2007/01/31/twittering/
I like how D’Arcy and I call the activity “twittering”. Maybe that will come back in vogue. Or die on the vine.
How can you find your first day? There’s more than enough posts that tell you how to find the first tweet via Twitter’s advanced search (while it lasts). Use your profile to find out what Twitter reports as your “since date” and then construct a search that wraps around it with “since” and “until” dates for search parameters. So for my bird born date of January 31, 2007, I found it worked best to use the day before as since (January 30, 2007) and two days after (February 2, 2007) as ai noticed some did not come through with more bookended dates.
Oh also key os to switch the default tab at the top from “Top” (useless) to “Latest”
What was your first twittering day look like? What will your last one look like?
Looking at your own tweets is of course navel gazing, for more perspective, I made a little tool (using a great tip from Anil Dash) that lets you dial in any date in history, and see what all the people you follow now were twittering that day. Give the Twitter Time Tunnel a spin. Here I am diving back to my first twittering day:
The Twitter Time Tunnel set for January 31, 2007Actually I can see I am actually getting up to the day before, I might have to adjust the code! But anyhow, this was the discourse then among people I follow now
The fascinating tweets of the day before I joined twitter. Short. “bank run” “sleepy” “doing music with mike” “updating all my profiles to say NYC for location”This is starkly different from 2022. I am not saying better or worst.
Time travel is trippy.
Featured Image:
Our New Old Phone flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
There’s been more than enough “takes” on the Twitter implosion at the hands of he whom I may only refer to as the Dark Lord of Twitdor. I do not dwell nearly in the muck of it as much as many colleagues. By not putting my face in the public algorithmitized stream (hello lists, columns, thanks Tweetdeck) and skimming past the doom posts, I still get many quality bits of shiny flakes from the bag of gold.
Embedded in the misplaced idea that any privately owned entity (or actually any service managed/controlled by someone other than you) is a “town square” is also that it was a place to rely on said entity to be a source of stuff you made/said.
Even with this very kind shout out from a respected colleague (hi Wes) who in talking of Twitter as one of those trash cans full of flames…
Shout out to ?@cogdog & #ds106 at? 25:29 of ?@edtechsr? Ep 274 (discussing advocacy for blogging, RSS, self-hosting, not being dependent on free hosting by tech giants…) #BigTech #edtech #MediaLit https://t.co/ofYSDv3YuS
— Wesley Fryer, Ph.D. ??? @wfryer@mastodon.cloud (@wfryer) December 15, 2022
Once twitter self destructs, in this future dead tweet Wes Fryer shared a link to part of a podcast talking about the forsaken idea of reclaiming the web.… Wes describes Twitter as a place he counted on to share his out loud thinking and the web resources he shared links for. Twitter is his archive.
I’ve only shaken my head in wonder over those (questionable) assertions that Twitter replaced the use of Feed Readers. All these people talking now about dusting off their abandoned blogs? Yeah right, go ahead and light up my lonely RSS Reader (another forsaken tool, yet still an Indispensable one that actually does save time) Sure they fell into the act of hoisting their thinking as those THREAD! 1/92 type efforts.
I’m not here to harken back to some golden days of yore, but as much as Twitter as a company has devolved, there is a bit of a Pogo Problem in that we collectively poured ourselves into some corporate coffers and neglected, despite plenty of signs, that we, or data are the product.
My practice is and has been always to think of what comes out of me into social media is just exhaust (we know its exhausting) for content, information, media I have organized in places I manage.
So that 15 Gb of stuff in my twitter data export is all expendable, and to me, it has no value or worth, it just floats as gas out of the tailpipe.
Don’t Need No Stinkin’ ArchiveThere’s lots of rushes to archive one’s twitter past. What the bleep will you do with it? I actually have been doing this ongoing for years at tweets.cogdogblog.com (actually a redirect to where they are housed in GitHub). It updates itself, all credit to the genius of Martin Hawksey. The histograms suggest my own arc of activity over time.
My co-claimed twitter archive at tweets.cogdogblog.comYes, I know people have shared the command line judo approaches to rejigging the links which will go when t.co vanishes. I am not saying there’s not a good reason to do this, but I feel fine if it all vanished at anytime. My attachment is not in the tweets, but all the connections things that emerged from them.
It’s more out of curiosity and wanting to see how it works that I have tried the Internet Archive’s service to archive one’s tweets (mine keeps failing, must be the 100Mb+ size of the tweets.js archive?). I’ve thought too about trying the WP-CLI method of creating a WordPress hosted archive but less about needing the archive and more wanting to be able to understand how it works.
Others may have different needs, but I can’t see needing much of anything beyond what I have now in those 15+years of nattering. Anything I have posted there comes from my other content.
I’m Not a DeleterHey it’s your account and you can do with it what you want, but I have no need or desire to burn down my accounts. See the statement above about its null value to me. Will that really have any kind of impact? This is not my song.
I’m a Deleter
Yes, Twitter may/likely/will dissolve and all the links I embedded, many right here will go belly up. But why just go ripping out the fabric of the web? There’s more than an ocean of linkrot, why deliberately create more? Do you really think that’s going to impact or affect the Dark Lord of Twitdor?
Twitter is Not My Link WarehouseYes my Pinboard looks so old school but what it does is powerful. If you are trusting Twitter to save your links, bookmarks, then I have that ocean front property in the desert to sell you.There’s nothing more old web school than social bookmarking, though it’s hardly a social act any more. But the same thing that made delic.io.us a giddy thing in like 2006 works now for me insanely well. I use Javascript bookmark tools in the browser and on my mobile phone to add links organized by messy tags to my Pinboard account… and it has stuff I have bookmarked back to like 2004.
If it ever goes belly up? Well the file format of export turns out to be html. Hardly much to be worried about.
This is how an exhaust strategy goes. Anything I find or share out to twitter of importance to me is bookmarked first. And I have set up a nifty thing where stuff I bookmark with a cooltech tag is automatically tweeted and now tooted out using IFTTT. I organize my stuff, it goes out to social media as exhaust.
And heck, another small pieces loosely joined gimmick- the same stuff I can embed via RSS into my blog as a dynamically updated page. Cool.
My Flickr Too is Fueled by ExhaustAnyone hanging around this blog, all 8 of them, will know my flickr love (just earlier today a hug was sent). Even closing in on 70000 shared photos there my photo process (involving using the unsupported Apple Aperture software on a 10 year laptop running Mojave OS) is one designed that all my photos are organized, captioned, tagged, stored on my own hard drives before sharing to flickr. My photos go out from Aperture with embedded metadata including credit to me and indication of my CC0 licenses.
Any place they go- twitter, Instagram (where you cannot even search or license or even add URLs in captions for your own photos) is not my primary storage, it’s all exhaust. Poof!
Maybe I’m Just Blowing SmokeI am by no means prognosticating any kind of method that would work for anyone else. But honestly, if you count on any outside party- Twitter, Apple, Instagram, that company that rhymes with Spacehook, Google, even Mastodon to be the source of your stuff that you have not organized yourself… well you are subject to their whims.
The one thing you can count in is that there is always going to be more verses this song
The Return to the Twitter Life Cycle CurveMaybe Twitter has finally come back to the origin point on my 2007 graphic and the ???? I had on the end of the curve was maybe peak 2015?
Twitter Life Cycle with apologies to Kathy Sierra is the rise of interest level in the beginning “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard off” to a peak of “I can’t stop”…This was all in the all playful sense of Twitter circa 2007, when really one’s first reaction was “This is the dumbest thing I ever heard of”… I believe we might be returning to that datapoint. But maybe not.
This whole thing was in honor of the inspiring [blog!]posts Kathy Sierra made back in the day (look even her old typepad blog is there, she’s not a deleter, or maybe just forgot about it? She’s still at it at Serious Pony). I had originally posted this on a (now dead) Wikispaces site, blogged and tweeted it and invited anyone to add their own story of hopping on the life cycle curve… hey, I just found my archived copy of this — there’s 89 stories attached to it.
As my story goes, I believe Kathy saw this and perhaps even retweeted it. After seeing her speak at SXSW in 2008 and I getting to speak at the same WordCamp conference she keynoted, I asked Matt Mullenweg how he got her to the conference. That’s a whole other story, but it ultimately led me to have her keynote at the 2009 NMC conference I helped run.
I came back to this in December 2016….
What’s My Next Online Community Life Cycle Curve?
where I quote myself:
A chunk of the public discussion and banter I enjoy has maybe slipped into Slacks. Or maybe it’s all happening in Facebook, a place I no longer exist. And recently lot of colleagues are excited about a re-discovered conversations in Mastodon others are status-ing away at a space D’Arcy Norman spun out (see the valuable list of alt-spaces D’Arcy outlines).
https://cogdogblog.com/2016/12/next-curve/
Alas at 2022 the Twitter Life Cycle curve nose dives back again … That was the dumbest thing I spent 15 years doing? No, not for me.
Why am I pulling out this yarn thread? I have all the pieces stitched from my blog posts since 2003, my flickr photo stream since 2004, all of it my very own reference system. The engine stuff that can generate exhaust.
Sure you can just jump to Mastodon and do the same thing. It’s really the same issue.
I cannot say this works for anyone else. But it does for me. Go try to wrap your arms around your exhaust[ed] tweets.
Featured Image: This is from an old VW Beetle named “Bob” owned by a former neighbor in Arizona. Sure you can find pretty photos in Unsplash, but do they ever come with a story?
Exhaust not Exhausted flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
It hardly takes much to compel me to blog something about Flickr.
Sure, lots of folks are just dumping photos to Google because it applies some data sniffing organizational features, or pouring them into Instagram for the quick like fixes (where they can never be found by search), even jumping now into the novel PixelFed space. But for me, I stay where my heart and maximal photo experience has been since 2004.
That soars even more with the news of the creation of the Flickr Foundation aimed at preserving public domain photos for 100(?) years and “stewarding this cultural treasure for future generations, and fostering a visual commons we can all enjoy.” It starts with the flickr commons, but goes father with big ideas like digital buoyancy and the data lifeboat (what are the odds Instagram provides anything like that?).
Already a Fine MachineThe water stretching machine of an eastern parachute manufacturer stretches shroud lines so as to make them more adaptable to the finished product, Manchester, Conn. (LOC) flickr photo by The Library of Congress shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons)The current flickr commons is to me already a fabulous machine for not just images, but the stories behind them (unlike other places where you look a media it is worth it to read the comments).
But as I see so many blog post, slide decks reach for the wealth of photos open to reuse from Unsplash or Pexels to me I find a bit of sameness, I imagine they are all photos done by the same photographer.
The Commons has an element of such different style- and while most of course vintage looking, why not mix it up a bit? I find metaphors quite easily…
1975 St Catherines Ping Pong flickr photo by Mennonite Church USA Archives shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons)A Wee Flickr Commons Search ToolTotally, for my own use, but can be anyone else’s, I have been making regular use of a browser tool that is almost as old as web dirt, a browser bookmarklet:
Bookmarklet to find Edyth and Friends in the Flickr Commons
I can do that because of the way flickr’s searches can be accessed outside of it’s site.
Come Improv With FlickrThe list of things I love about flickr have high among them the availability of it’s API but more than that, a long term history of not breaking it, enabling people, even code dabblers like me to create tools like Five Card Flickr Stories, which while maybe a bit creaky still enabled me to create a quick story from random flickr photos dealt to me in sets of 5.
Flickr’s API allows as well perhaps the web thing I am most proud of, Pechaflickr. A feature I baked in in 2021 allows a set of random images be served pecha kucha style from the tags of flickr commons flickr photos, and using the “Heather” mode creates it as a puzzle to Guess The Tag:
In honor of and excitement for the goals of the @flickrfdn I have a pechaflickr guess the tag challenge.
What is going on in these @flickr Commons photos?https://t.co/9JTPAmT5qJ
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) December 15, 2022
Just in case the bird house collapses, just the challenge yourself- In honor of the Flickr Foundation, “What is Going on in these Flickr Commons Photos?”
For the peak behind what is happening, yes I have my own blog post that will stay here no matter what the Dark Lord of Twitdor does:
pechaflickrcommons
The Message Is…Solar System Montage of Voyager Images flickr photo by NASA on The Commons shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons)It’s exciting times for the commons and Flickr Foundation is aiming for the big sky future.
I am eager to see all that happens, stay tuned to https://flickr.org.
Note: All images in this post were found in the Flickr Commons which should be obvious in the captions. This is part of my approach to public domain media- just because a license says you do not have to attribute, I will ABA Always Be Attributing because it makes the Commons that more visible. Oh, and I put to use another of my Flickr tools, the Flickr CC Attribution Helper, something I have used multiple times each day since 2009. It is made possible by the openness of the Flickr platform.
Featured Image: Found in the flickr commons by a search on “telescope”- and you cannot go wrong with credit given to Rene? Descartes.
An Early Telescope flickr photo by History of Medicine Division – NLM – NIH shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons)[media description: archival image of a man is looking through a telescope, the parts of which are lettered for further identification and discussion.]
All the places are full of doom, gloom, apocalypse about the state of the bird site or the impending end of _____ at the hands of AI or just the regular invoking of internet as burning dumpsters.
I do not deny that these foul things are happening nor is this head in the sand. It’s a bit like the old joke goes about “good thing I did not step in it”.
Every day I experience acts of curiosity laced discovery, that feel again, like magic, and gets back to my old question, Do You Ever Wonder What Happened to Wonder?
Here is one day’s path, it was cast into Fediverse space, my threading is likely mangled, but I always aim to anchor my content here in the blog haus.
It Starts with a DS106 Daily CreateI likely would have maybe passed this one up, but the DS106 Daily Create for December 14, 2022 was to make something to relate to “Monkey Day”. My tingly senses went off reading Kevin’s (@dogtrax everywhere) response
I vaguely remember a web site I used like 10+ years ago in digital storytelling sessions, it was a play on the million monkeys typing idea. I could not remember a name or a URL, and web searches only turned up info related to the infinite monkey theorem mentioned by Kevin.
Into the Bookmarks I GoAs often I turned to a search in my Pinboard bookmarks (which also include all the older stuff back to ~2006 I tagged when del.icio.us was a thing) hoping I had tagged it. From a search on “monkey” there I got… de nada.
As usual, the majority of pre-2010 links are dead. Well a lot in general.
Way to go, deleters of the web, sing your song.
I got a link I saw for Explorable Explanations, which my bookmarks indicate I saw it in 2017, but I have forgotten it completely. But talk about small gems!
Lion cubs play-fight to learn social skills. Rats play to learn emotional skills. Monkeys play to learn cognitive skills. And yet, in the last century, we humans have convinced ourselves that play is useless, and learning is supposed to be boring.
Gosh, no wonder we’re all so miserable.
Welcome to Explorable Explanations, a hub for learning through play! We’re a disorganized “movement” of artists, coders & educators who want to reunite play and learning.
Explorable Explanations
No wonder I bookmarked it!
It is a nifty collection of external links. I get distracted by a link to web presentation/resource by a web hero Bret Victor (definitely not a deleter) in 2015 on What can a technologist do about climate change? A personal view. Part of the path of wondering is not diving deep into everything, but at least making some mental notes (or heck bookmarking it for later).
What a Guitar!From the Explorable Explanations home page I am enticed by one of the random suggested links as front page suggestions (you have no many times I suggest to colleagues that our static web pages need these bits of randomness to serve up content thats buried 10 links deep). The one I jump to is a beautiful animated, audio interactive web piece on “How to Tune a Guitar” (Kevin as a talented musician would definitely appreciate this).
https://mathisonian.github.io/idyll/how-to-tune-a-guitar/
It not only covers the steps, but some of the physics. It’s elegant, something one person published in Github.
Interactive Guitar tuner from How to Tune a GuitarIt’s a bit like one of those New York Times scrolling “snowfall” type web sites by colleague Bryan Alexander loves to share.
It’s so damned interactive!
Learn about overtones at How to Tune a GuitarThis resource not only covers the steps of guitar tuning, but dives into the physics of sound. It’s very elegant, a standalone website published in Github. When people talk smack about innovation in technology or only spend time looking at links that are shoved at them in algorithms, I just shake my head in wonder (remember that) at how many individual web ideas of imagination are sitting out there in not just GitHub but also CodePen and many more.
You can not only enjoy the front end of this web site you are welcome to dive underneath and poke around at the parts that make it work. If you find any site published under github.io if they do not link to the source, you can get there. So for any URL like
https://mathisonian.github.io/idyll/how-to-tune-a-guitar
You can find it’s code at
https://github.com/mathisonian/how-to-tune-a-guitar
If you need AI to find the pattern… sad face.
This gets into one of those spaces I wonder (again) about the how educators think about Open Educational Resources (you know the acronym). It’s only OER if it has a license on it, or for many, it seems, if it is a open textbook. When I look at How to Tune a Guitar it’s not an OER -there’s no explicit license on the web site, but there is one if you can get into that Github source.
But that’s not my point, this is not an OER as is, but has all the potential to be part of one with context, an activity wrapped around it.
I Digress- The Next Wondering StepI always look for the footer or credits for web stuff, and here is an interesting bit at the bottom of the How to Tune a Guitar site
More curiosity links at the bottom of How to Tune a GuitarI sort of know what Sketch is )(oh it’s not that one), I have used D3.js before, but am curious about the Tone.js library. I am definitely interested in seeing what other projects at the UW Interactive Data Lab.
All possible paths to explore, but the one that jumps out is in that first sentence “This page was built using Idyll, a markup language for interactive documents.”
Deeper Into the Web I GoWhat is this Idyll? It’s another thing from University of Washington, it looks some kind of web builder based on Markdown but extended by offering a way to include Javascript.
That’s pretty slick.
I could go deeper but part of this whole practice is knowing when to pull out. The links they go on forever. So I bookmark Idyll in Pinboard, where I likely will forget about it.
Until one future day when I might stumbled on it again.
In the drama of twitter meltdown I have heard colleagues talk about all the links they shared there that they will lose. Like they saw Twitter as the place to store their stuff.
In my approach, I do not have to worry about things I have shared/found in twitter vanishing when the bird goes belly up. I got ’em right here.
And That is Just one DayI have similar adventures almost every day. They are not initiated in just in one place, sometimes its an email list, a blog post, a tweet/toot, heck sometimes just in the footer of a random web page or email.
But I have a personal rule I mostly try to stick to. Rather then merely re-tweet/toot what someone else wrote, I try the darn thing, and then share my own description.
This just happened when my good friend Grant Potter (who share so many amazing things I lose track) posted in Mastodon about something called Riffusion (yup I bookmarked it too). If you are just stuck on AI as spitting out odd images or just ChatGPT nonsense, see what happens (or not) for generating music.
Yes, I could have linked shared, but I prefer to try the thing.
That’s how my internet works. Yours is likely radically different.
For me, it’s as fun as Go Dog Go.
Featured Image:
Won’t You Read With Me? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
I had a tab open for months (no one paid it off) (no a browser tab) in the vein of ones about shaping technology (insert a Tom Woodward style footnote that goes to his blog).
What am I babbling about? It’s a way of using technology working within its abilities to shape it to do what you want, rather than you shaping your ideas to do only what the interface provides.
This all goes back to July of this year when I was pushing an H5P Food truck around in OEG Connect (trying to get some community activity going) and Alejandro asked a question:
Have you seen a way of doing a sort of “safe” where you need to enter the correct passcode to see a certain content? Like this from this Genial.ly: caja fuerte by MONTSERRAT HEVIA VALLE on Genially 1.
I thought about a Course Presentation where one slide is the safe and the next is the secret content, but I don’t think it’s possible to allow to see the next slide only if a certain content type (like fill in the blank in this case) is correct.
Maybe someone has some ideas on how to implement it.
https://connect.oeglobal.org/t/parking-here-the-h5p-food-truck/4012/43
I don’t know of anything that provides an interaction where someone enters a code and H5P can then reveal something or send you elsewhere. The idea was, I think that a learner does a series of four activities, say in a branching scenario, that completing them gives as a response some kind of special code.
Then after, you go to say a Fill in the Blank where entering the right codes reveals the “prize”, in this case, you only get one try to get it right. It kind of works, maybe not the most elegant, but, well, this is as much as I could shape.
Hint: 54 9 21 37
Sort of. There is no way to provide a hyperlink in the feedback, but a bit.ly at least does not reveal any clues in the URL. I am pretty sure that was not 100% what Alejandro wanted, but it was fun to try. That’s how shaping go, you work it as much as you can, but accept you might just have to live with some shortcomings (or try a different tool all together).
All of this comes full circle when I find a blog post from the H5P building guru, Oliver Tacke, where he has created a custom H5P content type that is designed as this kind of combination lock. Here is one of the many reasons I Love H5P– you wont find this tool on the main site or in any building interface. But you can get the full functionality bu downloading his H5P source file and then importing it into any H5P editor.
I did exactly that to bring it into the H5P Kitchen back room, where I then modified it to fit my needs. Here is a different take on the safe.
Hint: 5 9 2 3
Still, it’s only text feedback, but It Does The Job. And there are plenty of options in Oliver’s tool to change how it works.
It’s “safe” to be shaping technology! Better than it shaping/limiting you.
Featured Image: It’s Safe With Me flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) modified by adding a translucent H5P logo to the knob
[media description: A numbered dial on the front of an old style metal bank safe, with an H5P logo superimposed on the knob]
Nothing new here, is there ever? But I am a bit tired of every post to Mastodon WordPress plugin (and ActivityPub too) sends there a featured image without the alt text entered here in WordPress.
I end up getting (correctly) slapped by the Please Caption bot!
I know! It’s not my fault! I featured images have alt text, but Autopost to Mastodon and Share to Mastodon plugins ignore themSo I am switching the posting there to use the IFTTT gizmo approach I set up earlier.
And thus, I must try a post with a featured image fully decked out with alt text, and see what happens. It has in the WordPress media Library the alt text that should travel with the image:
Looking upward at a 1970s style building, plain walls, just two windows with birds in front. Words at the top of the building trim read Question – Experiment – Connect
Stay tuned (or not) For those outside of the Fediverse… you can easily see in to https://social.fossdle.org/@cogdog
UPDATE: Aack, my IFTTTing really borked, back to using a darn plugin, now trying Share to Mastodon which ironically posted the alt text of the building below but skipped the alt text for the first image in my post.
Featured Image: I forgot where in the UK I saw this building with the great verbs on it! Question, Experiment, Connect flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
[Media Description: Looking upward at a 1970s style building, plain walls, just two windows with birds in front. Words at the top of the building trim read Question – Experiment – Connect]
In a fit of desperate desire to not be awash in social media slush of the twitter muskification as explained via ChatGPT, I am resorting to perhaps the worst blog post title since… (searching them all in vain) ever.
Yes, to be honest yesterday’s foray into coding some means to extend what WordPress could do with automatic embedding of media was a need for one site, but also a prelude to the elephant from the fediverse room.
In the interest of… well curiosity, I have been mulling over the ways to embed mastodon posts (TheThingsFomerllyKnownButInSomePlacesStillAreToots) in WordPress.
The Old Skool HTML Embed CodeWhat I first demonstrated a few fediclicks ago and what I have used for a few [blog] posts, is copying the embed code you can get directly from a [mastodon] post, just under the ••• menu, for say, this kind reply from Wayne Mackintosh where the embed code is:
```
``` rendering
What is interesting is that the embed source url is generated by appending /embed to any mastodon url, or in this case, compare the difference between the post URL https://social.fossdle.org/@mackiwg/109356412565062751/ to the embed one https://social.fossdle.org/@mackiwg/109356412565062751/embed.
What’s Going on WordPress With a Faux Embed?Something funky is happening in WordPress! I am certain that there is no support for auto embeds of mastodon URLs, but something is happening when you try it– the same url for Wayne’s toot gets rendered with a giant version of his avatar and an even bigger mastodon logo!
This is not the embed you were looking for (but close)I’m curious if the mastodon urls are getting intercepted by some other oembed code OR if WordPress is in process of supporting embedded toots. It looks like the content is there but is lacking the CSS to display it?
Inspecting the source shows it has the full Mastodon embed code, and the class name suggests it recognizes the instance as a provider.
Source HTML for a sort of embedded toot.I’m only guessing from what I can see.
The Auto Embedding Toot ChallengeThe thing that makes it possible for WordPress to do an auto embed is to identify from the URL where it came from. This is easy for a single source media, it;s a tweet if it has twitter.com in it (well,and matching for a username followed by /status/ and a bunch of numbers.
But from fediland, how can you determine just from a URL that it is a mastodon post? My guess was that it’s a pattern of
https:// then a domain like some.fediverse.domain then /@username then a whole string of numbers like 109356412565062751
This would call for some PhD level regex. Maybe. I gave it my best shot with this example you can find and dabble with at https://regex101.com/r/QmxvbS/1
Test,some,toots here https://regex101.com/r/QmxvbS/1Now, I have something I can dabble with in my own blog by adding this to my functions.php
add\_action( 'init', 'cdb\_register\_embeds' );function cdb\_register\_embeds() {// handler for mastodonswp\_embed\_register\_handler('mastodon','#^https?:\/\/((?:[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]{0,61}[a-z0-9])?\.)+[a-z0-9][a-z0-9-]{0,61}[a-z0-9])\/@([a-zA-Z0-9\\_]+)\/(\d+)$#i','cdb\_handler\_mastodon');}function cdb\_handler\_mastodon( $matches, $attr, $url, $rawattr ) {// handler for mastodon embeds$embed = '<iframe src="https://' . esc\_attr($matches[1]) . '/@' . esc\_attr($matches[2]) . '/' . esc\_attr($matches[3]) . '/embed" class="mastodon-embed" style="max-width: 100%; border: 0" width="800" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe><script src="https://' . esc\_attr($matches[1]) . '/embed.js" async="async"></script>';return $embed;}
Does it work?Here I try! So put again Wayne’s toot url on a blank line in my block editor.
And ugh, I am seeing the same giant images and icon in my editor preview. Babar, is sad.
But then I view it in a preview (and what you see above) is perfect! Toot in bed…. er, Toot embed!
Success!
So there is something missing to view it in the editor preview, but published, it seems to be working.
Something is still wrong CORS et al wise as the browser console is reporting this error:
Content Security Policy ErrorNot Quite Ready for Prime TimeI am just doing my low skill grade experiments here, I would not suggest my approach is viable, I might guess WordPress will eventually do it better (there are issue requests for this going back to 2017).
But I am close!
The Chat SidetrackWhen initially thinking about an approach, I considered building a WordPress custom embed block that would take as input a mastodon URL. I’ve not done anything like it, but got a bit daunted by comprehensive guides starting with Node and React, and often, the examples created were pretty simple (for good reason).
cue trumpet sounds…
AI! AI! AI!
It was the first week of ChatGPT mania and I came across this almost unreal to good to be close to true sounding post from WP Tavern– ChatGPT Creates a Working WordPress Plugin on the First Try. Could this work?
I sent out my orders to ChatGPT:
Create a custom WordPress plugin called “Toot Embedder Block” that creates a editor block offering a field to input the URL of a Mastodon post and publishes it as an iframe embedded media.
in which I issue commands to the AI mystery machine
And it spits out Stuff That Looks Legit.
Often it would just stop in mid line. I later found I could get more by typing in “finish javascript”– but also noted re-issuing the command generated slightly different code. But sometimes it left out javascript. The embed code did not create the correct url to use in the iframe’s src. And it rarely included block.json. And nothing worked. I got no block, and after too much time trying to guess what it was missing, I kicked the bot to the curb.
“Very soon, describing the WordPress plugin you need to ChatGPT will generate a new one faster than searching for an existing one in the plugin directory,” Williams said. “This won’t be true for all types of plugins, of course. But for relatively simple plugins performing established tricks … well very soon should probably read ‘right now.’”
https://wptavern.com/chatgpt-creates-a-working-wordpress-plugin-on-the-first-try
Not now, maybe just for me.
Toot ThisI just tooted to this URL https://social.fossdle.org/@cogdog/109506785930744037 and I am going to paste it in below. Let’s see what my magic sloppy code will do
Toot, the posted message, published in Mastodon
Maybe frolicked in directly here, embedded with code by Alan
Again I am going to count on a better solution, but figuring this out now is more fun that twitterwailing.
Featured Image: The internet cannot be all bad when I can use “elephant bed” to find this image– Elephant towel animal.jpg a Wikimedia Commons image by Littleinfo licensed Creative Commons CC BY-SA
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elephant_towel_animal.jpg
[Media description: A bath towel folded into the shape of a sitting elephant with snout up in air, sits atop a hotel bed]
Oh WordPress, how I love the, let me count the ways… well one of the ways is the ease of embedding all kinds of media sources just with a simple URL.
I am surprised seeing so often authors on WordPress sites adding a link to a YouTube video, when it is even simpler to embed the thing right in the page (it’s not just WordPress, I am forever editing posts in the OEG Connect discourse powered site as people do not know how easy it is).
It’s built into WordPress through some magic called oEmbed that handles it via some mumbo jumbo API passing when a service provides the functionality. All WordPress sites come preset to easy embed all kinds of source content, just stuff from that little tube video site.
You know what is even more amazing? or curious? WordPress supports embedding from Giphy but does not list it, in fact it lists it as removed. Still Giphs for me… (ah now I am really distracted)
More amazing than living dinosaurs! https://giphy.com/gifs/shocked-jurassic-park-amazed-zz00w5nNFMnPqWith some elbow grease, you can enable support for other services not available in WordPress. I’ve done a lot of similar stuff to make the SPLOTbox theme work to embed featured media from a URL, but it’s a little different to enable autoembeds from any editing block or ye olde classic editor.
Enabling Some Audio Auto EmbedsI wanted to add some very simple ways on a WordPress site Cori uses with her high school students to post audio reflections. When you think about trying to provide upload support for all the kinds of weird audio formats you get from different devices, it gets messy.
My thought was to have students record on either Vocaroo or Sodaphonic Boombox – where you can record audio via a web interface (mobile too) that is saved as a link. The best part no accounts are needed nor is any personal identification collected. Okay, easy to record and save as a link (that also provides an embed code, but I am not wanting to ask people to deal with raw HTML). How to get in a WordPress post?
Yes a shortcode is easy to do, but people have to remember their syntax. I briefly wondered about making a custom embed block, but I just could not get very far in building that.
Then it struck me the easiest way is to add support for these services via an auto embed. Then, they just need to copy and paste that link into a post.
Conceptually it is easy as the conversion from a link like https://sodaphonic.com/audio/344uhz2j8NUJjyUkckQq to it’s embed code is really a matter of parsing that string of numbers and letters at the end of the URL to embed as:
```
``` Into the wp_embed_register_handler We GoIf you are able to deduce from a URL the info needed to generate am embed code, the way in is via the WordPress function wp_register_embed_handler. It calls for setting up a regex (regular expression) to identify a source from a URL.
I have maybe a 0.10 level of expertise in regex, it is akin to conversing in Sanskrit or base 13, but I have faked my way through with sifting through Stack Exchange posts and experimenting with tools like Regex101.
The WordPress docs offers a convoluted example based on a weird Forbes video link and I found a rather almost nil set of examples elsewhere.
I started by figuring out a regex that could match a Sodaphonic audio URL and return a match for that id part of the URL at the end. You can see, play with it, and make fun of my regex at https://regex101.com/r/v2JCWJ/1
^https?:\/\/sodaphonic.com\/audio\/([a-zAA-Z0-9]+)(.*)$
I was stumped for a while with my embeds failing, not because of my cheesy regex skiils, but that the method I saw used in the examples of the sprintf structure apparently fails when I have a “%” in my return string (I use it in the iframe to use a width of 100%). With a bit of wriggling, I swapped in my own method.
Here is working code I got going to embed both Sodaphonic and Vocaroo audio in a WordPress editor, placed in the functions.php file of the theme I was working for. It really is just a functional called in init to set up the gizmos that catch these URLs in a content area, and a handler for each to turn each URL into its embed code.
add\_action( 'init', 'cdb\_register\_embeds' );function dcb\_register\_embeds() {// handler for vocaroo audiowp\_embed\_register\_handler('vocaroo','#^https?:\/\/(vocaroo\.com|voca\.ro)\/([a-zAA-Z0-9]+)$#i','cdb\_handler\_vocaroo');// handler for sodaphonic boombox audiowp\_embed\_register\_handler('sodaphonic','#^https?:\/\/sodaphonic.com\/audio\/([a-zAA-Z0-9]+)(.*)$#i','cdb\_handler\_sodaphonic');}function cdb\_handler\_vocaroo( $matches, $attr, $url, $rawattr ) {$embed = '<iframe width="100%" height="60" src="https://vocaroo.com/embed/' . esc\_attr($matches[2]) .' ?autoplay=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay"></iframe>';return $embed;}function cdb\_handler\_sodaphonic( $matches, $attr, $url, $rawattr ) {$embed = '<iframe width="100%" height="156" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" allow="autoplay" src="https://sodaphonic.com/embed/' . esc\_attr($matches[1]) .'"></iframe>';return $embed;}
Make it a Plugin?That’s a working example. I felt the logical step is to write it into a plugin to maybe of use to others. On creating a new Github repo I found the name I chose was already taken… by me. I had previously done one at https://github.com/cogdog/wp-embed-extras
That was one I did a few years ago as a test case, where I had taken the code I made for SPLOTbox to a more generalizable one that enabled embeds of Padlet, Internet Archive, and some experiments with H5P sources, all doable from a single pasted URL.
I updated the plugin to include now Vocaroo and Sodaphonic (I pulled the H5P, it was rife with errors from CORS, security stuff I was not invested in sorting out).
So if you want some extra media embed-ability, toss the Cogdog Auto Embed Extras WordPress Plugin into your pile. It’s a crude plugin, but you could also mine it to pull some custom auto embeds into another custom theme.
I do Have a Master Plan (yeah right)Yet another WordPress built in autoembed- for a link to a Spotify trackI am fiddling with something else on the plate ripe to be easily embedded in WordPress, but it’s still in the lab.
Stay tuned.
Featured Image:
Vintage Panasonic Radar Matic Transistor Radio With Touch-N-Tune Automatic Tuning, Model R-1010, AM Band, 10 Transistors, Made In Japan, Circa 1966 flickr photo by France1978 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license[Media Description: A vintage transistor radio, a Panasonic Radar Matic, with a front facing speaker and an analog dial to change stations]
I sit down planning to write some straight forward documentation, and somehow a stick shift manual transmission metaphor slides in and I am photoshopping SPLOT logos on old book covers.
Welcome to my easily distracted mind.
Before I go too far off the blog post map, I am covering here:
- Some interesting uses of Paul Hibbitt’s Docsify This to render/embed/link to markdown source content in other contexts (and invoke the ghost of transclusion)
- Splitting out my long READMEs into meaningful chunks
- A set of generalized installation/ update instructions for WordPress SPLOTs
- Addressing a request from Reclaim Hosting for instructions on updating SPLOTs previously installed with their cpanel custom installers (thanks Lauren Hanks for being so patient)
Let’s shift this post into gear!
Schwinn Stick Shift flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) licenseDocsify This [These] SPLOTsI’d have to write a series of posts to credit what Paul Hibbitts has been churning out with Docsify This, a nifty (SPLOT-ish) web tool to on the fly display markdown content in a friendly, document style format, clear of the Github interface (if that is the source).
I began a process a few months back to use this to embed the SPLOT documentation within the Theme’s options area- previously I was manually converting markdown to HTML (and often lapsed making changes), but this way it would always display the most current documentation via an iframe.
What’s up, Doc? Docsifying the SPLOT Docs
I realized later I could again use this approach on entries in the Mother SPLOT web site. I had previously copied the list of exampe sites created with a splot, but again, I did do much copying.
But now, I am separating out from the old long sprawling readme, a separate markdown just for examples. As an example (oi), for, the TRU-Collector, see the Examples In Action as source markdown, but I can also generate a stand alone version with Docsify This, but even better, the entry for TRU Collector on splot.ca displays the same content embedded within it.
What this means is, when update a SPLOT’s documentation or example list in the Github markdown source, everywhere I display it with Docsify This is immediately current.
This to me is a huge efficiency gain and a new flavor of transclusion.
So far, I have implemented this on TRU Writer, TRU Collector, and SPLOTbox. Other SPLOTs stand in line… as well as the calling card themes (partly done with WP-Dimension).
The WordPress SPLOT Happy BookIt is a guidebook, after all…
Answers to the Secret Might Be in Your Hands flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) modified to change “Life” to “SPLOT” and add the logoActually it is the next issue that led to doing this, but I set out to write some general documentation for all WordPress SPLOTs, to cover how they are manually added and updated as WordPress child themes (and urge consideration of the fab WP-Pusher plugin that can install directly from Github source and automatically update).
While I could have just created a post/page somewhere on the splot.ca site, I felt that itch to try the same approach.
So, again, the source of all content is a markdown source in a splot repo I use as a “lab”. With Docsify, you have a stand alone readable version with navigation managed by section headings, and the same content is iframed inside a post on splot.ca (this enables being able to put other content around it for context).
Reclaiming The Updating of App Installed SPLOTsLike the old SNL act of Chico Escuela, “Reclaim Hosting has been berry berry good to SPLOT…”
Yes, Reclaim Hosting supported development time for me early on, but they did more when Tim Owens created the first of several Installatron scripts that added to every Reclaim client’s cpanel, the set of one click SPLOT (and more) installers.
Double SPLOT: 2 New One Click Installs at Reclaim Hosting
This saved people the steps of installing the custom themes but also set them up with helpful plugins, initial settings, and even some demo content. It was set also to push out updates when it checked for WordPress version updates.
I was quite proud of my stuff in the Featured Apps row (3 calling card themes there too)!
I have no idea how it worked, but like once or twice a year I would create a new Github release, send Tim a note, and updates happened.
Yet these updates always lagged behind the more frequent changes I made to the source. And that got more critical recently with the PHP 8 changes, which I am still catchup up on fixing (yes, on many sites I am using the MultiPHP cpanel to keep at PHP7.4)
I had no idea of the complexity of the Installatron scripts until Lauren Hanks from Reclaim let me know months ago that they were not going to be able to support such updates, but were willing to keep them available if developers (me?) took care of that.
In the interest of understanding, asked to have them transfer me a copy of what I thought was a simpler one to learn with, the WP-Dimension calling card theme installer. I made an account at Installatron com and Reclaim transferred me a copy to play with.
I did the best I could in guessing what needed updates, but the command line install stuff baffled me, and even with some reclaim tech support I pretty much failed on becoming a viable Installatron-er.
In November of this year, the word went out that the offering of these installers was going away.
To my mind, I am not losing sleep. And in fact, I believe that people will learn more about managing SPLOT sites if they go through the set-up process themselves, rather than having it just pop fresh out of the oven.
This leaves though two issues that lead to the creation of the WordPress SPLOT Guidebook:
- A general guide for creation of a new SPLOT site
- How to update existing SPLOTs that would have been installed previously from the Reclaim custom installers
One major improvement in a WordPress 5.x update was allowing themes like SPLOTs initially installed as uploaded ones to be updated the same way– just add a theme and upload the new version. That is quite a leap, as my usual update approach was old school FTP.
The one small hitch I had to write up was having to do some extra name changes to the Github downloaded themes . It takes a theme in a directory named coolsplot and downloads it as coolsplot-master.zip. To WordPress, this is a completely separate theme.
So for these sites there is a necessary ZIP Dance move:
There is a full section for this in the new WordPress SPLOT Guidebook.
Does this make it clearer or not? Let’s see how smooth my gearshifts operate. Vroooooom!
Featured Image:
SPLOT stick shift by Alan Levine based on Stick Shift [Transportation] flickr image by trustypics shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license modified by inserting SPLOT logo and replacing gears 4 and 5 for Update and Install, shared here as well CC BY-NC
In the ongoing commitment to keep use of my trusty old 2012 Macbook Pro, after a battery replacement last May, the latest challenge was the loss of my spacebar.
I did my diligence in watching YouTube videos of various people demonstrating how to pop of the spacebar and clean\inspect. As pried open in the toot above it was pretty grungy with dirt and hair and who knows what.
After cleaning and checking the parts, I popped it back on… not space action. Intermittent, then nada. I did call the shop that redid my battery, but that’s a drive and maybe leaving it there. I tried again last night, finding I could get a space character tapping on the base with a screwdriver tip. I checked all the plastic lifter bits, verified the placement of the little plastic bobber, pressed it back.
Well… i got a few spaces and a few non stop ones, and then– none.
Back to the thinking board, maybe there is some way to map another key trigger space characters. A web search led me to a StackExchange discussion which led me to Karabiner-Elements, a public domain app that is designed to do all kinds of modifications to the Mac keyboard, many I do not know about, but key is that I can map any other key to send a space character. And from their downloads link I could find the old version that works on my OS 10.14 ancient OS.
That’s all I need, I was able to make use of the command key on the right side of the spacebar (which I never have used) to be mapped to be a spacebar.Okay, this is not an ideal solution as it is taking extra effort to use a different key to be my spacebar, but at least I can use the old machine where all my source code lives and my photos.
So for now the right command key is my new spacebar, thanks to some searching, sifting, and finding some great public domain software.
Featured Image: My own photo of this computer’s well worn keyboard. Why any one would every need such a photo is beyond me, but I release it into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0.
[Media Description] A finger points to a computer keyboard at the space between a very worn spacebar and the command key to the right,
There has been over the last few (insert measure of time) better awareness and attention given to making information in media available (aka accessible) for the visually impaired, via alt text or image descriptions (not a new topic ’round here). But here is something counter intuitive… I suggest that alt text / media descriptions should […]
I actually am not ready to blab about the Twitterpocalypse- instead I am experimenting with a “toot” from Brian Bennett, who I have been path crossing (pre-Twitter)? via ds106. I remembered there was once a JavaScript bookmarklet for quick posting built into WordPress… it’s not in core anymore, but available as a WordPress Plugin Once […]
I’m sending a big thanks to Alec Couros for inviting me to present a one hour introduction to H5P, zooming in, to the University of Regina Centre for Teaching and Learning. As promised in my intro, #IDontDoSlides, so they got my Branching Scenario style show, talking about H5P by using H5P. Everything is there for […]
I rather feel like headplanting in the sand until the din and blabber (not the fun kind) of endless takes and broad claims of Twitter demise, Fediversitopia subsides. Oh I have something maybe to say, but I’d rather build stuff and tinker that toss sermons. Out of curiosity and exploration and something of a refreshing […]
Cue the music. Baddddum. Baddddum… Pinging Martin Welller… It’s been a while (maybe 6 weeks but that’s like 2 eons in blog years) since I last blabbed about the bad smell or worse or just missing items in Google Image’s Creative Commons License search. Danny Sullivan, who I believe works for Google as a “search […]
For re-refreshing change from the ever increasing Twitter fallout drama and the rising wave of AI euphoria, I was granted a reprieve last week where I got to catchup with an old friend, yes, that Blabberize talking alpaca. Alas, we could not help but slip into the musky drama of the Now. Our connection traces […]
I am not sure if what I am going to describe is some kind of condition or diagnosis (or just weird). I have a pretty good recall for landscapes or places I have seen. They seem to register in my brain more efficiently than location of car keys and missing wrenches. A few block clicks […]
My last long winded nerdy post on image accessibility veered far off the path of possible interest from anyone (or maybe everyone is too busy trying to sort out their move to Mastodon). The thing is, my brain is not done with this. Most of the things I whinged on depended on systems, tools to […]
Amongst all the Twitter upheaval spawned by he who shall remain nameless and its effect as rapid increase in Mastodon as a federated platform that should withstand those kinds of despots, a rather telling difference to me is in what we, the sighted people, never see– alternative text descriptions for images. I wanted to write […]
Please Steven Johnson, take my blog post and remixed photo as an honor and tribute to your book (which I have purchased, read, and scribbled notes in the margin). Most great ideas first take shape in a partial, incomplete form. They have the seeds of something profound, but they lack a key element that can […]
Not that I am setting any goals here but can I keep pace? Just writing this creates the potential of expectations. But this is my gig space alone. And once more, a small nugget of example what hoisting content on your own platform, your own domain, creates unexpected potential for the wonderfully unexpected. (And curses […]
The fun thing about Mastodonning is that it is all new again. I worry much about what I see as a lot of effort to just transport the Twitter mindset there. Think differently, build a new. As a small experiment, I am testing the WordPress Auto Post to Mastodon plugin to toot out new posts […]
In my ongoing stream of “how can twitter be that awful when this happens daily”, I present the case of a geological cross section that yanked me far down the web rabbit hole. My primary view into “bird space” (frankly that masto-term has as much goofiness as “toots”) is a Tweetdeck list, old school chronological […]
The churn of techno-fadism is at warp speed 9. Already left behind is blockchain, NFTs and despite the imploding star of twitter-verse, it feels like it’s AI* all the time. In trying to generate some discussion activity over at the OEG Connect community site I have been fiddling with since 2020, I tried a pseudo […]
If you stay at this old habit of writing in your own space (rather then handing it off to whacky billionaires?) a side benefit is being able to tap into your own past experiences. It’s much more than nostalgia, especially as my human memory banks tend to get leaky over time. Or maybe it’s just […]
In all the frenzied exodus from the deck of the Musk Boat, mass acts of tweet deletion, self announcements in the fediverse, I wonder about how far we’ve come from Mike Caulfield’s classic (to me) pondering of the Garden and the Stream. Pretty much the last few years the garden has been left dusty for […]
Taking the green pill, as all the crowd is doing. I have stuff to write about Mastodon, but for now, I am trying to figure something out — is there a way to extend the capability of the DS106 Daily Create (TDC) to include participation from Mastodon. Needed steps would be: Create a Tooting account […]
It has been a while since I gave thought time to volcanoes, how about you? And of all unlikely starts to the process, this came via a tweet from Stephen Downes referencing a new content site which he noted must be just starting out because 3 of the top search results included courses about volcanoes. […]
“Does Alan only blog these days about Creative Commons images?” It. Seems. That. Way. But it’s a break from SPLOT, SPLOT, SPLOT. But look, for this one you get a tool out of the deal, here it is before you have to wade through all my type-ridden, long-winded, whinge tinged verbiage. Because it’s been around […]
One of the very best things that can happen from sharing something digital I’ve built/duct taped together, is that someone actually uses it. But even better, is when they use it in a way I would have never imagined. Take my SPLOTs. Please. (bad Rodney Dangerfield joke) The ones that have been most widely used […]
Do you know one of the oldest professions on the web? Not that one — heads out of gutters– please! But then again, revel in the curioustity holes that Wikipedia can open when I looked for that link… No, it is making web pages that are list of other web sites. Educators love this dearly, […]
Yikes, I had to dig deep in the archives to find the last time I did a DS106 Assignment. I would like to think there is one in there about making an excuse for not doing them. Well there was one in 2020 when I made a DS106 Assignment for NetNarr, then the assignment timeline […]
Enough energy has been spent here combing through what Google Image Search excretes for Creative Commons licensed images. So much that it merited a new tag. And yes, they seem to have twiddled a few knobs the results have ascended from only 3 CC licensed dog images found September 27 to an astounding 114 just […]
Beware of impending clichés of deceased horse attacks (sidebar: why does anyone worry about how many stones it takes and never ask why the fascination with killing birds?) Having made the call for the broken state of Google’s touted ability to locate open licensed images getting some notice (my peak Hacker News hit) and followed […]
This is more of my own niche technical fixes that is more interesting in that I learned a new trick, added a small feature to a WordPress site, all only because I inadvertently capitalized the header column of a CSV import. Or again, my own habit of narrating my work for what I have heard […]
Well the last post on Google Image Search for Creative Commons Licensed ones being broken did get some notice. The word was that it was JaB (Just a Bug) (I made that acronym up, check it) And now the evaporation of Google CC Search is being noticed by key figures. I can’t drop this bone. […]
Except me. As of one minute ago I confirmed what I noticed last Wednesday. According to the all seeing Google, on the entire world wide web there are but three Creative Commons licensed images of a dog. People have worried about enclosure of the commons, these seems to be a whole lot worse. Or maybe […]
The notion (and act) of shaping your technology1 rather than limiting yourself to what a tool provides still (or always) is resonating with me. I’m thinking about the width of the spectrum from complete control by code to almost no freedom except what a GUI provides, for me WordPress is my go to for many […]
Hey CogDogBlog, you seem to be devoid of not only a hello world, but not too many posts at all recently. So never going out of style (here) is the genre of Blogging about Not Blogging closely followed up by Blogging about Blogging (2007 version! 2010 version!) (and a cover song “Where Have All the […]
I have a negligible update for a favorite of my WordPress Calling Card themes. WP-Dimension was the first of several I first made a WordPress theme out of an HTML5-up template. It appeared in this dimension in February 2017. This theme is also special as I use it dog-fooding style (which I have been told […]
Not in the spirit of slow blogging, this is just a slow blogger, catching up on a presentation done back on July 12. When I was a kid blogger, I’d have it written before the end of the day. C’est la blog. I do relish (possible pun warning) an opportunity to tap back into the […]
Or don’t. I always forgot about this domain, but smile when I see the renewal notice from Reclaim Hosting. They gave it to me in 2014 as a twitter contest to pick a novel vanity name. It’s one of the few contests I’ve ever won, for tweeting my idea– dontlookatmy.photos (see the requisite explanatory blog […]
This post was intended for August 27, and I could even get the energy for the tapping it in until the wee hours, slipping into August 28. This is the day to remember, honor, tell a few stories about my Dad, who left this world August 27, 2001 and my Mom, who followed him 10 […]
You know, like “two great tastes that go together great” (uh oh repeat metaphor alert) the end of August is the end of 3 month run of DS106 Daily Creates that were also set up as an activity for MYFest22. The latter was a 3 month series of “recharge and renewal experiences” coordinated by Equity […]
Documentation … chore or joy, or neither? I’ve been wanting to put the nifty Docsify-This publishing tool made by Paul Hibbitts into play. Amongst my sprawl of Github projects are the SPLOT WordPress themes each with a rather sprawling in its own rights README file that includes my efforts at splotware documentation (look at this […]
This is the words written as my brow is furrowing. This birdspace thread I was tagged into started with a question from Robin Derosa If my recent blabbed post cast some shade on “promptism” does this draw me into a spiral down on what appears to me like educators focused on platformism? There is nothing […]
I have to admit doing some bit of tossing phrases into one of the DALL-E Mini generators to gawk/shrug/tweet about what emerged. There is a bit of natural curiosity to either get a result that is a stunning graphic but what seems more common in my attempts… crap. So I like seeing my colleague Bryan […]
Whether you were present at this fest may be a future cultural touchstone, like all those who were at Woodstock after it happened. Or maybe the reputation might be as glowing as the basis of our metaphor. Huh? Today I co-wrangled a 3 hour online BCcampus FLO Lab with Jessica Motherwell McFarlane whom I can […]
It is so truthy that authors, so-called experts, and every day citizens just repeat this one because it sounds true. Thanks to blog commenter Ashraf another stumbling zombie was spotted at a niche publication called Inc, the moldy monster summoned to support a case for AI (stress the artificial portion and discard the Intelligence one)– […]
I keep peering at the name badges, but am not quite who we are referring to with some recent (in finally in the best space) blog talk about [capital] Edtech. It’s nobody I would hangout with. The end was spotted at Hack Education where Audrey Watters kicked past the curb at her own blog (yeah […]
I must get a dozen or two emails a week from so-called SEO experts asking if I want guest posts or will insert their clients link in my site. So I almost too quickly read this one from Emma at TasteWP: I have a cool WordPress tip for you! I see that you’re linking to […]
It was about time I did some feature adding to a SPLOT theme- adding support for Sodaphonic audio was super easy for many reasons. For all that is not great about time spent in Twitter (believe it or not I have dialed my attention there back) I have to give credit that I still sift […]
Despite the shift to this ornery block editor (I have made my peace with it but still regularly cuss at it) and avoiding full site editing, I still love ya WordPress. Always. Mostly. I have noticed something for a while. WordPress does not like hanging out waiting for you in open tabs. Many times over […]
Once again in the “spent too much time creating a clever title” department, I am here not to delve into Foucault analysis (and I had to look that one up). I can take the opening Wikipedia line on the article as “Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of […]
Look at the capital letter R. Just snap off the front leg, and now you are a P. In the world of Open Educational Resources, the five Rs are like chapter/verse of the induction, repeat after me: The right to Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, Redistribute… Pick your source https://www.google.com/search?q=oer+5+rs Apparently things get a bit more […]
My use of experiment is more the try “to learn something” in the definition than a well-designed test “done in order to learn something or to discover if something works or is true.” This is also framed in my ongoing wrestling with the conference experience that is (to quote myself) overly “presentationally oriented.” Compound this […]
I have been lazy in not getting into the IndieWeb game here, but look who is catching up! I activate the Activity Pub plugin but no idea how it knows who I am in Mastodon- this post gave me the clue that is not listed elsewhere- in my WordPress profile at the bottom is a […]
Ahhh the glory days of blog syndication, it seemed about all I wrote about at one time. It’s been eons since I set up a Feed WordPress enabled site. maybe NetNarr was the last. But the stuff still works- the main DS106 site, where it all started for me, pretty much untended, keeps flowing along […]
Hello WordPress editor, has it really been 24 days since cracking you open here at el cogdogblog dot com? Indeed yes. With the world ongoing plodding into now a regular incertitude I have found myself stuck on several fronts, the daily photo habot has sputtered into a bi-weekly catch-up. So what else is there to […]
Am I off my blog game or what? Can I blame Musk? Nahhh. D’Arcy Norman is on his game, and he observed how old his blog is– 20 years! That was my nudge to check my own blog birth stamp, and find, as often in my career I copied Mr Norman (soon to be Dr?). […]
WordPress is WordPress, correct? Well… apparently not. This is a WordPress.org self hosted blog, eh? So like the documentation suggests With the WordPress Embed block, you can embed WordPress posts into your posts and pages. https://wordpress.org/support/article/wordpress-embed I ought to be able to embed a post published on my WP.com site? No. WordPress here does not […]
With time and the accretion of stuff that accumulate from years of tossing things on the web, again and again I stub my toe happily onto very small bits of serendipity that quietly sits there, doing it’s own, unnoticed bit of marvelousity (yes web editor red underline, I made up my own word). Note: This […]
I dare you. I double dog penguin dare you to contribute a story for my True Stories of Openness (formerly known as Amazing) aka Magic Acts of Web Serendipity… First conjured up long long ago (2009) at a conference far far away (Open Ed in Vancouver “Crossing the Chasm” was the theme), deploying not light […]
My speed of blogging is one of those limit curves approaching a large stretch of time. But hey, no one really notices but me. I thought I had not even written up this first fun tool I made, to make it possible to generate a random mixture of different voices, reading the same text, done […]
Consider this post smack dab in the center of the author extolling themselves… hmmm, that might be nearly all of them, eh? But it’s my blog and it means all my own rules, and I found it nifty through a flickr forum that a photo I shared ended up in a video celebrating their 18th […]
Now I slide down a potentially slippery incline plane to make a case for a life philosophy based on a line from a cheesy comedy-western film. Hardly the fodder for rigorous academic inquiry. Note: This is another installment in my participation in the 2022 Write 6×6 Challenge, they must sometimes shake their heads at what […]
I have a problem. Last week, instead of investigating an issue with one of my project platforms, I was exploring via Google Streetview a town in British Columbia verifying that photos of certain mysterious creatures inexplicably had their faces blurred by Uncle Google’s algorithms. In an upcoming “thing” in a few weeks I hope to […]
Hah! I was not only off by 1 in my opening for Write 6×6 I somehow missed last week, being this thing called “Spring Break” was a bonus week (?). According to the Writing Ideas page, this is week 2, so I am off by one ahead. Do I stop? Shrug, rules need not apply […]
Because my current work now is centered in open education, and coming off of Open Education Week, I was swimming much in conversations, workshops about Open Pedagogy (often as acronym OEP). I am not here to offer Yet Another Definition (check one of the best resources). I welcome this as moving beyond Open Education as […]
While lightning may not strike the same spot twice (debatable), I manage to keep recycling this same “True Stories of Openness” talk perhaps way too many times.
It’s on tap as an Alt format session for OER22 but I gave it another warm up as a Creative Commons Lightning Talk for Open Education Week. Without repeating all too much, my premise is the same in 2022 as it was in 2009:
Open often centers on the “stuff” (resources, content, practices) but what about the unexpected positive experiences of serendipity people gain from sharing openly? First presented at OpenEd 2009, the collection of True Stories of Open Sharing remains open to contribute yours in any media form– maybe someone in the session will have one to add.
https://stories.cogdogblog.com/presented/cc-lightning-2022/
So I tried to arc from the first round at the 2009 Open Education Conference to now– thinking that whatever stage we think we are in 2 years after peak pandemic, that some serendipity stories are something to cherish. Or marvel it. Or muttter, “oh, neat”
Thanks Creative Commons for the slot, and the other sessions are definitely all worth tuning into. And you never know exactly what to expect when Stephen Downes is the emcee, that is the charm (we love ya, Stephen, cause you are reading this now in an RSS reader!). Yes, after all these years, Stephen is unsure if I am human or canine. But look, he used my image in his post. Nice, Stephen, nice.
I thought I had my timing rehearsed but I fell off the time clock elsewhere, even with my script in front of me and a stopwatch going on the phone.
Lightning Talk Set Up flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I have stalled enough, here is my 7 minutes of fumbling…
It was fun though, and I consider it the early dress rehearsal for OER22. My hunch is people are still confused why I get so excited about this, unless it’s just my retro yearning to present with CoolIris, or putting one of my SPLOT themes to yet another use.
I forgot to add to the site a new call for stories– I maybe flipping out the front page for a Stories Wanted plea
I thank Todd Conaway and Joe Murphy for stepping up to the share form.
But I’m not done yet, and I will be shaking the trees for more stories to show during my 7 minutes of OER22 stage time. Think of it this way, the more you share, the less you have to hear mine.
Got a story of anything unexpected, positive, that happened because of something you shared or participated in online. Please drop one here https://stories.cogdogblog.com/share/
Please?
Also, this made me realize I was like 18 months behind updating my presentation site, which means I had to add like 3 posts. But there they are, my Best of Show.
Oh, did I beg enough for stories? Shall I bow lower?
Featured Image: From an animated GIF I made using a TV image from pxhere (Licensed CC0), screenshots from https://stories.cogdogblog.com and “OpenEd09” flickr photo by courosa shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license. Oh plus a moving GO-GN penguin from a VisualThinkery image, licensed CC-something.
Earlier in the week I thought I might have 6 for this post as part of the Write 6×6 thing I signed up for. I was thinking of experiences I had this week that affirm or support what (I think) I know.
These were triggered by interactions this week as the organization I work for, Open Education Global was hosting Open Education Week.
Note: as a blogger I hardly ever keep blog posts around as drafts, once started I like to finish. But I do often drafting in my head, letting ideas percolate (or evaporate) until something coalesces or I just decide to start writing and see what happens (this is the latter).
First of all, my ideas are far from universally adaptable, nor are they profoundly original, nor worth glossing the title of a published book. I find these ideas more like long term wood sculptures, I just keep chipping away at, wondering if it is done. They are never done.
Thing 1 & Thing 2 flickr photo by WBUR shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license Thing 1. Asking For Help (in public) One of the activities I created this year (it does not matter much what it was, but you can ask) was a public space to ask questions about a technology. This sometimes is what I think the internet was built for. Many of you know that feeling when you type into a search box a “how to ____” search.
Google you complete me? What does google know about my toenails? I was and was not surprised when someone chose not to post a question in public, but sought out my email address to ask a question. I may not have to explain why people do not want to ask questions in public, it has to do with our own “ingrown” fear of not wanting to look … hey this could almost be wordle? S T _ _ _ D. Everybody else know how to do this but me?
A class, be it online or not is always a community, that is not a cliche. But if everything is just between one student and a teacher, maybe I could just be a vending machine. If one student has a question, more likely do. And if you design courses with public spaces, can there be anything better than an environment where other students answer each others questions?
Long ago I saw this in media classes I was teaching. Students had a forum to ask, twitter, and they had their own blogs to document their projects. I saw over and over that students would include in their weekly reflection things like “I spent an hour trying to figure out how to manipulate an alpha mask in GIMP.”
So I invoked what I call the Fifteen Minute Rule– if you are stuck on a task, a concept, trying to find a resource, if you have not found an answer on your own in fifteen minutes, stop, and ask your classmates. Not that this was a rule to enforce, but just a suggestion that it’s always better to ask, regardless of what you think it means to not know.
I have come to believe that this is a key (I don’t think skill is the right word) practices to have especially in networked public spaces. Ask for help. Often. And there is so much to be said for a class environment where other students can offer answers. The best was when it happened before I could even notice the question. I do not need to assert my expertise and Pretend I Know Everything.
This seems obvious, and here I am thinking anyone reading his will reach for a Homer Simpson DOH! meme. Here I will save you the trouble
From giphy Do you feel okay to not be an expert in public? I sure am. I prefer playing the know it none.
Thing 2. No Best _______ on the Internet The internet is pretty big, right? Can I insert another Homer Simpson GIF?
So I do get questions (see Number 1) where people want to know the Best Tool for ______ or the Best Resources for _______. Anyone who confidently answers those questions like they have seen everything is… suspect.
I find the best part of the internet is that there is always more to unturn, dig up, stumble upon.
For a number of years I have had an interest in a group of technologies that are able to provide the kinds of activities, experiences we have connected to the internet… when we are not. This has such importance for parts of the world where connectivity is slim. Or none. And there are a host of clever solutions, Internet in a Box style.
I’d like to think I have come across a lot of these. But O am always reminder that there is a giant tsk-tsk finger waving from the Orb of the Internet. Just a year ago during Open Education Week, I randomly attended a session where I heard about the use in the Northwest Territories of a platform developed in South Africa called Nimble. And people replied with other examples, like Wikifundi … then World Possible then Kolibri.
Woah. Well, after heating of these I felt rather informed.
That’s dangerous.
I am sure know I know much less about this topic than exists.
In another discussion I was introduced to another platform that, as mom used to say, “blew me away” called Kiwix, one open source tool that lets you download vast amounts (or very specific parts) of resources like Wikipedia, to run stand alone from off devices or even on a phone without connectivity.
When people offer their informed opinions, keep in mind it’s largely centered on things they know about. If you ask me about what to use to make web sites, chances are I am going to recommend WordPress. Need a computer? Well, I am likely to recommend an Apple device. My experience is heavily centered on what I know and work with.
If ever you apply Thing 1 to ask a question in public, always keep in mind Thing 2— understand that there is often more.
This again is really my experience, I cannot prescribe them for you. But that’s what this blog is for, my outloud, likely to be easily proven wrong, ideas.
Okay, that is week 1 for my Write 6×6. Gotta start the brain percolating for something new next week.
Featured Image:
Two Paws flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
I’m putting my stake in the ground to be part of the Write 6×6 extravaganza, but starting here a number 0 (also doing so to establish my tag).
Writing 6 blog posts in 6 weeks should not be a challenge, it’s more about joining a group of colleagues doing the writing challenge together.
As many times it happens, it’s the result of me tweeting some blarney about blogging (that might be the first official post). A long time colleague from Maricopa Community Colleges dared me in to join this 2022 challenge from the Glendale Community College Center for Teaching, Learning, and Engagement.
I’m hey @cogdog, if you want to joint us I can pull in a feed from a write6x6 tag or category – you’re blogging anyway … ?? https://t.co/vicx3pNGvw
— Cheryl Colan ?? (she, her) (@cherylcolan) March 3, 2022
I’ve known of this for a long time as I observed my friend and colleague Todd Conaway ran these efforts at Yavapai College as the original 9x9x25 Challenge (Oh look I did it in 2018).
And my whole career was made possible by my start and 14 years in the Maricopa system. So there might be some nostalgia in my 6 pack of posts.
Arizona Six Pack flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license But let’s not get ahead of myself with the posts. There are 6 six more to come.
And there is the nerdy computer science idea that in programming with arrays, you start the count from 0.
This is c=0 where c represents my count.
Next week is c++.
And there will not be too much more techny nerd outs. Join in the route 6×6 activity… and if you need a boost, try their writing ideas.
I’m starting at 0 to set up the blog tag, well and also, to loosen up the blogging muscles.
Featured Image: My array of 6 is being counted by juniper berries sitting in between cracks of sandstone…
Six in the Notch flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
I can’t stop the curiosity impulse and sometimes feel obliged to chase down source-less photos. So it started with a Cory Doctorow tweet (just follow him, you will not be sorry)
Circa 1970s https://t.co/5ODfTtWXza pic.twitter.com/UpMp3QkHOq
— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) February 18, 2022
Why this image? It’s just road side Americana. Was it the tweet saying “circa 1970s” which was my childhood? That guess might be based on the vintage of the photo. The models of cars might push it to late 1960s but not too far.
The tweet goes to Wil Wheaton’s Tumblr (which might be the source of the 1970s). Tumblr… yes it still exists. It was the platform that really enabled that “reblog” / repost thing. a one click way to just post to your site what someone else did. It leaves a trail of unsourced media.
Wil (can I call you by first name) reblogged this from a tumblr called Every Day Life in the Past. End of trail because no one in tumblr attributes photos. That’s so not cool there.
What do we have there? A cafe named “Magic Chef” offering “Home Style Cooking” or maybe it was the “Eat Shop Cafe”– that’s pretty damned unique. Not. Search results for Magic Chef Cafe land you mostly in appliance land.
I did find another image (via Google Lens reverse search) of the same restaurant from a vintage postcard seller (“MAGIC CHEF CAFÉ RESTAURANT PEPSI COLA SIGN OLD CARS ADVERTISING POSTCARD COPY“, this image is the same place, but the cars are older:
That could push it early 1960s? There seems to be a shop adjacent, some kind of Dance studio?
My trail ran cold. Most references to Magic Chef restaurant seemed to be ones that were later taken over and turned into other kinds of restaurants – Chinese, Filipino, one in Qatar, one in Abu Dhabi.
I thought maybe I would find a reference with an address and do the Google Street view visit, but alas, I went cold. Maybe someone else can go farther.
Not all the rabbit holing lands you some place, it just ends up some digging around. But always worth it. Well, to me.
UPDATE: March 1, 2022 See comments below as Eric Likeness has sleuthed this to the nth degree:
- See Getty image that matches the postcard one above, it’s stated as a 1976 photo?
- Also, same image from Worth Point that included an address- it was in Denver, 2459 South Santa Fe Drive.
- And finally, located in Google StreetView… not much to see now!
Eric wins the rabbit prized and also, for showing how the internet works- ask for help, offer help, it all makes for a nice circle.
Featured Image:
Same hole, same rabbit, different day, but same hilarious photo! flickr photo by johnmuk shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license
I am late on the train of exploring WordPress block development; this post at WordPress Tavern looked like a simple way to at least get the paws wet.
This little tinkering has not a whole lot of deep or even mild relevance, but the code fingers have been idle lately. And it was so easy to do, except me for having some old unused code in my local copy of my theme files, so there was a bit of extra time debugging those cheerful WordPress critical error messages.
Enough blabber! What is going on?
The cut and paste code (some went into my child theme’s functions.php and the rest is in the styles.css ) provides an extra option in the image block, a new style to give it the look of a polaroid photo taped into the blog.
It adds Scotch Tape as an option in the Image Block (the little previews vanished, not sure why)
True as Duct Tape flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license (also used as featured image) Taping the tape? Maybe I can change the CSS to look more like duct tape. After some recent whinging I am deferring for now adding any more google fonts, but that’s hardly needed.
Okay this is hardly breaking ground, but it’s at least prying the box block open. Thanks WPTavern and keep the Building with Blocks series going.
Mainly this was a needed excuse to get in and at least code something. I’ve been wheel spinning a bit for ideas and things to sink my teeth into. With all that has changed / is changing with WordPress, it’s timely to get into block making.
Featured Image: It’s taped in above! True as Duct Tape flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
Try this one. A friend, colleague contacts you and says, “Do you remember that ______ I shared at _______? The most amazing thing happened…”
You do want to know what comes next, right?
That’s the the opening “hook” of excitement, intrigue, a hint of a journey that makes up the best of stories. And experiencing these myself, pretty much as an accidental by product of sharing openly, has made it part of the kernel of my operating system long before there were things like open licenses. Sharing was not in the expectation of receiving as much as doing what others had done to help me.
I define these stories (with some help of ye olde browser inspector) as web serendipity.
I modified this definition from a screenshot of a google search for the plain kind of serendipity An important element missing in the above definition is that serendipity comes without expectation of it, as the factor of surprise. The all time story for me started with a flower in Arizona and went to a room in Hobart, Tasmania.
If you do not desire having unexpected amazing beneficial events, feel free to exit this blog post. Is anyone left here?
I thought you would stick around. Or I hoped. If you do not want to wade through my meandering long post, I am also making a plea in the video version.
Me, shilling again for stories, like 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, all the 20XXs. Hey, Check them out at http://stories.cogdogblog.com/! If anything, 2022 (how some have cleverly said this year is 2020, Too) is a time even more calling for stories that can give us some humanity to hang on to. Is that dire? Well, after many years of this, I am not ready to give up.
The excitement of these in my own life and career have always made me want to do what I can to have other people experience them. And what seems to enable web serendipity is acts of openness. That is where ~~Amazing~~ True Stories of Openness is like an old television show I would like to renew at the April OER22 conference.
Me and OERxx Conferences With the ongoing certainty of future uncertainty, one thing on the 2022 horizon I can count on is the energy of the ALT OER conferences.
I knew of them from a distance for years and count myself fortunate to have attended in person (how quaint does that sound) in 2014 (Newcastle) and 2018 (Bristol). If I believe in numbered patterns, 2022 should have been a year to be there, but as we all now, all patterns have been put askew.
This is the second year I have volunteered on the conference planning committee, and to break my pattern of meeting disdain, these are video screen meetings I look forward to.
The conference aim is to create a “spotlight on both the value and limitations of Open Education in a (post)pandemic world” and includes under Theme 1 ” Pedagogy in a time of crisis – what does an ‘open’ response look like?” I find myself, as more often as not these days, to both look back and forward, and land on the part of my path that I can always count on to find meaning- storytelling. This has been a continuous basal layer to the sedimentology of my career work (not done yet!)
Do I need to make a pitch of the google-able rationale of the power of one of the most universal communication genres? In thinking of something to pitch for my own presentation slot at OER22, again, I took a glance back in the blog time machine where the dial was set to 2009.
Set the TIme Machine for 2009… I had the means through my work then to make plans to be at the Open Education Conference that was hosted in Vancouver (shreds of it are found in the Internet Archive). Storytelling as a creative act that had its place in learning was in my bag of interest, from the interest in 50+ Web Ways to Tell a Story and a mutual interest with my friend/colleague Bryan Alexander in what we coined in an Educause Review article as (which sounds dated as I type it) Web 2.0 Storytelling .
The memory circuits are thin on where/when the idea came from, but looking at the program and the things of interest then, the focus in Open Education seemed to be on the Open Education stuff – content, resources, courses, MOOCs. Not on the “open” itself. And I had been so fortunate to have had a few experiences where something I shared openly on the web and somehow gotten “found” and reused or just appreciated by someone elsewhere in the world. It seemed magical, and quite motivating when one of “those” emails arrived or maybe a message of appreciation, or unanticipated reuse came via that weird newish site called “twitter.”
My thought was then to collect and share at the conference these small stories of “amazing” unexpected outcomes that came from sharing. Hence the very first iteration, August 2009 of using a retro magazine cover theme of “Amazing Stories of Openness” (I will leave out for now the copyright issue that led me later to changing the title and imagery to “True Stories of Openness”)
Remix by Alan Levine of cover of True Comics Issue #63 shared under a Creative Commons BY license The pitch them for the session feels to me the same as 2022:
While the Open Education movement focuses on institutional issues, a large ocean exists of powerful individual accomplishments simply from tapping into content that is open for sharing and re-use. As colorful as old covers of “True Stories” magazine, this presentation shares moving, personal stories that would not have been previously possible, enabled by open licensed materials and personal networks. Beyond my own tales, others have been culled from the net, and you can share your own.
http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/opened09/
Maybe now as then, this still is fuzzy without an example. And my go to story is the one that to this day is mathematically improbable. And while it lives in a blog post and a caption to a flickr photo, what I wanted to share were short videos of people telling the story in their own words.
Sometmes you have to model it before anyone else will do it.
I wanted to have these stories as signs that at the heart of all this “open” stuff and people around the world tethered to network connections, that an attitude of openness, a core way of being, was maybe more essentially that licenses and repositories of “stuff.”
To collect those stories shown that first year, I asked a lot, but most came when I tapped some people individually or when they hinted they might have a story, I would organize a Skype call and just record it (yes Skype, that’s how long ago this was), publishing a site by hand spun HTML.
As yet another aside here, a thing I was able to do while presenting was to do live from the web using a (now dead, thanks Flash) plugin called CoolIris which enabled a snazzy 3d wall of media I could navigate through sequentially or at will to play video ot show screen shot images, all linked to web sites (if you are that curious, I was able before the complete death of flash to make a video that showed it in action). At least I got several years of use out of CoolIris, it truly was maybe the perfect vehicle for presenting these stories.
But Alan, do not get caught up in usual about the cool technology.
The stories themselves landed into categories like True Stories of Photos, True Stories of Connections, True Stories of Diagrams (yes!), True Stories of Publishing in the Open, True Stories of Open Organizations, True Stories of Travel. They are still there on an old web site I maintain, still able to hear them. They still hold up well.
I had a few opportunities over the years to revive and renew the presentation. In hindsight the “amazing” adjective I used might be problematic as when asked to share, many people might shrug and say, “my stories are not amazing.” I would do anything to collect them, I would even solicit volunteers in the audience to stand up and share, and I (with permission) recorded them for posting (c.f. Alan Has No Shame in Collecting Stories, 2014).
You can see and share your own stories in 2022 at http://stories.cogdogblog.com/
Set the Time Machine for 2022 I had this inkling again to make calls again for stories. Tweets like this whisper of the presences of a story
Oh my gosh- last night at #EduKnitNight, a knitter came who knew me through @ActivateLearn , who I met 9 years ago (I guessed and I was right) through #ETMOOC. @edifiedlistener too!
— Lisa Noble (@nobleknits2) January 12, 2022
I know this as Lisa is in Ontario, and Helen (@ActiveLearn) who she mentions is in Australia and Sherri (@ediiedlistener) is in Austria, people still in touch 10 years after participating in the early ETMOOC experience. I can sense the story, but you know how tweets just flow down stream. I’d love to have a told version for the collection.
I was not there at the time but I do remember the story of a story via Ken Bauer who runs the wonderful #educoffee drop in sessions, and one of the first ones when Lawrie Phipps was there. A casual mention by Ken of his Dad’s experience in the navy led to one of those moments when they realized Lawrie and Ken’s Dad were at one time on the same ship. Amazing! Lawrie has blogged it, but the story would be so rich told in their own voices. And maybe this is not purely about pen sharing, but then again, Ken’s opening of a place for informal connection across distances, enabled this bit of serendipity to spark.
I see examples flitter by all the time, but have not made much effort to chase them. I have rebuilt the collection twice in WordPress, it’s latest iteration run via a SPLOT theme where anyone can add a story in many kinds of media (link to hosted YouTube/vimeo video, audio via SoundCloud, uploaded audio or images). The collection of past, and maybe future stories I can collect now and between the April OER22 conference is at https://stories.cogdogblog.com/ and anyone can use the share link to add one (even if my proposal does not make the cut the site remains open). Not sure what the heck I am talking about? Try the random wheel spinner to listen to one of the 103 stories collected there from 2009 onward.
So here at the trailing end of a rambling blog post, I am not even confident I have made a case for these stories or described them well. I will get myself into gear and add some more of my own.
Whether amazing or not, if you have made an unexpected connection with a colleague prompted by a blog post or a social media exchange, had an experience where your open shared content has been reused and acknowledged, or just any kind of connection over shared things that made you just whistle “wow” to yourself– those are what I seek.
And I wonder if the “feel” of stories here in 2022 maybe are a different flavor than 2009, such a naive time in hindsight. My idea may be just a tired rerun of old shows, or maybe it is a new, vital season. I hope to bring this message that Web Serendipity Matters to the OER22 conference but plan as well just to do it.
Amongst all we have weathered in the last two years and the stretch to come, these human level connections enabled by small acts of open sharing, offer a solace. At least to me. I hope it does for others.
Have failed to mention you can see and share your own stories at http://stories.cogdogblog.com/?
Note: This post being written to be cross published at ALT-C as a guest post for OER22 but just in case the penguins do not approve, I hang it here, in the space that I will never cease to stop publishing to.
Featured Image: Animated GIF remixed from pxhere tv image public domain image shared under CC0 plus OpenEd09 flickr photo by courosa shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license and a screenshot of the current True Stories of Openness web site created by Alan Levine. Oh, you might spot a few GO-GN penguins borrowed from Open your work by @visualthinkery is licensed under CC-BY-SA. Remix by Christina Vines. Wow! That makes this whole GIF enchilada licensed CC-BY-SA.
Do Google ever really commit to “Do No Evil”? They might not be buddies with Lucifer, but some news about something as banal as fonts is chilling. To me.
I await someone with more expertise to shed some light, but this is how I read a recent snipped of chilling tech news.
German Court Fines Website Owner for Violating the GDPR by Using Google-Hosted Fonts
In late January, a Munich regional court ruled that a plaintiff was entitled to injunctive relief and damages of 100 € from an undisclosed website owner for passing on the visitor’s IP address to Google through the use of Google Fonts.
Since it is possible to use the fonts without connecting to Google, the court deemed this a violation of Europe’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) because Google Fonts exposes the visitor’s IP address:
https://wptavern.com/german-court-fines-website-owner-for-violating-the-gdpr-by-using-google-hosted-fonts
Let me see if I understand correctly. Of I as a small time web site owner, use a Google font on my site that is loaded from Google’s services, I am responsible because a visitor to my site has their IP address sniffed and transmitted to Google.
Google Fonts FAQ discloses the data collection under a section about user privacy and states that it caches responses to minimize requests and serve the fonts faster. It does not specify exactly what data is collected but seems to imply that the information it collects is necessary to serve the fonts
https://wptavern.com/german-court-fines-website-owner-for-violating-the-gdpr-by-using-google-hosted-font
It’s not even clear what Google collects or why a user’s IP address is necessary to “serve fonts efficiently.”
So Google sponges user data via it’s fonts on my site, and I am subject to possible blame (well likely not since I am not in Europe, but still…)
The German court’s ruling threatens a fine of €250,000.00 for each case of infringement or, alternatively, six months imprisonment, if the site owner does not comply and continues to provide Google with IP addresses through their use of Google Fonts.
https://wptavern.com/german-court-fines-website-owner-for-violating-the-gdpr-by-using-google-hosted-fonts
So who wants to go to jail for a decorative font? They are literally franchising blame for their evil
Screenshot of some words written with Google Festive Font Now it is possible to avoid taking on the Franchise by serving the fonts directly from your site rather than via the Google CDN. Yet the steps written for say WordPress are hardly trivial.
Taking convenience as the path and avoiding doing the more complex work are part of signing on for being part of Google Evil Franchisement. Billions and billions served.
Featured Image: Franchise agreement by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Pix4free modified by Alan Levine to reference Google, different wording plus Google logo pixabay image by ElisaRiva — all of it shall be licensed CC-BY-SA
Oops. This post was not on the drafts I store in the back corners of my brain.
And only after typing a first title (because all my posts need titles first) (well after I search for the photo) of “Sound Around” did my neurons flip on the 60’s vintage Buffalo Springfield track. Plus adding the #DLINQDigDetox hashtag in knocked me into ZZTop territory.
Does anyone even need my play by play blog analysis?
I got spun down this read reading a recent mailed message from the Middlebury College DLINQ Digital Detox series, number nine being DD 5.9: Fighter Jets and Tritones: We Can Hear it, But Are We Listening? by Joe Antonelli (I am 99% sure I remember Joe from my NMC days, maybe even in Second Life, you remember the last metaverse revolution?).
Joe opens with words that evoke his audio landscape. I can hear it without having to hear it:
There is a satisfying crunch when my boot makes its way through the puffy powder down to the pack, marking each step through the woods. The metallic tags jingle on my dog’s collar as she hops over a stick poking out of the new-fallen snow. We both turn quickly to look behind us when the wind elicits a loud pop from the frozen bark of the dormant gray birch. A half a mile away there is the constant whir of early traffic, connecting all of the sounds of the winter morning walk. The environment is different than in past years; it is missing the high-pitched static-like noise from the needles of the three large pine trees on the corner. We had them taken out because they were close to falling over.
https://dlinq.middcreate.net/detox-2022/post.html?id=23996
And he continues to write about the impacts of his own audio landscape, now infiltrated by fighter planes that frequently fly over his house (and his Zoom meetings). He makes a connection I had not thought of– when we think of audio in zoom, it’s usually the ferfluffle of mics being on or off, not it’s own audioscape.
It tends to imply we are in one “room” together, but we are not, it is 25, 30 rooms, clicking in and out, but never really creating the sounds or feel of being in the same room.
It’s unmodulated.
In the digital landscape, Zoom has had a big impact on my awareness of sound in the past few years. Whether it is a one-on-one conversation, a small group, or a large gathering of digital boxes, I am constantly aware that we are not all in the same room. I can hear differences in the attendees’ environments based on their choices of computer, mic, headset, and the placement of their bodies relative to the equipment. It leaves me mentally reaching for the eq to turn up the articulation, turn down the reverb, and reset the tempo as Zoom catches up from a delayed feed
https://dlinq.middcreate.net/detox-2022/post.html?id=23996
I’ve always appreciated the sound of not no sound, but being in places that lack human generated sounds. This was true of my time spent walking in the woods where I lived before in northern Arizona and now here in the wide open spaces of Saskatchewan.
Cori and I chose this acreage we moved into almost a year ago largely because of the lack of sounds from trains and the highway we could hear in the first house we lived in. The trees that line the property help dampen it, I am fairly sure. When we looked at it a year ago November, we stopped on the road outside to hear what we could not hear… transportation sounds although there are times like today, with snow, or perhaps other atmospheric condition where we sometimes still hear the trains.
I even imagined sometimes on my walks in the vast areas of Coconino Forest, what if some created a map that indicated all areas where there was no human sound detectable (or below some low decibel threshold). I’d love to see the map of Land Devoid of Human Made Sounds. This came to mind reading the suggested actions added to this post, e.g.
Record the sound of your environment outside. Listen back to the recording and consider how much of the sound is created by nature, and how much is man-made.
I am not quite finding them right now, but I am pretty sure in teaching audio I asked participants to notice ambient sounds, maybe it for DS106 (here is a Daily Create) or maybe the UDG Agora project (ah it as a listening exercise as an intro to audio).
The sounds of our spaces subtly set the stage for doing audio or video storytelling. Right now I hear the muffled roar of the wind outside, an occasional thunk of a roof shingle, the ongoing gurgling of the radiator, the gentle tapping of Cori typing on a keyboard. If I was to record a scene taking place here, and only used voices, the lack of environmental sounds would make it feel artificial.
That’s why in my podcasting, I don’t mind if people are in a public space, or their pets make sounds, those are all part of real audio landscapes, we do not live in sound studios. I go back long ago in learning/teaching audio, from the great Scottlo, Scott Lockman, the way he would audio narrate his walks around the streets of Tokyo. He would leave gaps where he was not talking, but the listener to hear cars, street vendors, kids in the park. These sounds create real spaces for the listener.
This suggestion appended Joe’s piece jumps out as a nifty challenge to toss into the DS106 Daily Create
Take a moment to pick out a sound in your environment. Hum with it, then try to harmonize with it. Record your humming and consider yourself a collaborative songwriter.
https://dlinq.middcreate.net/detox-2022/post.html?id=23996
But the real rabbit hole opener was the suggested “reading” to listen to forest sounds at tree.fm – this was an amazing find!
https://www.tree.fm/ Clicking that button serves up a random audio scape of a forest from somewhere around the world… I ended up in Ghana. Each one provides a map link and an Unsplash image — I’d like maybe if they gave photo credit (yes I know they do not have tom but it’s nice). I inspected source, noted the image file name, and found the image on Unsplash. It was taken in Ghana, and I will hope it was taken in the forest where the sounds came from.
And the sounds are all licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-SA) and are derived from a crowd sourced project Sounds of the Forest and it is open to anyone to contribute new forest sounds.
I did come up with a DS106 Daily Create based on this, but you have to wait until February 11 to be able to see it (because it is a scheduled post, that link now is to Room 404).
I ended up straying a bit from this Detox topic, but then again, maybe not. It got me thinking about audio again as an environmental space and brought me one of those Wunderkammer type web sites that I would maybe never have seen otherwise.
Thanks DLING for sounding this out!
Featured Image: More or less a random choice of my flickr images searched for “sound” – I seem to have many of these Harmon Kardon Soundstix.
Holy Sound flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
Yes, an old Cogdog can learn a new WordPress Trick.
I’ve long gotten over the move to the Block Editor. I almost chuckle like seeing an 8-track player in a thrift store when I see Ye Olde Classic Editor (e.g. in Pressbooks). But there are things I continually fumble over.
It seems very frequent when editing in a paragraph block when I attempt to add a hyperlink (which I tend to do voraciously), I faithfully select a chunk of text, click the linky button, type or enter a URL, and when I press RETURN or click the arrow button, the link gets applied to adjacent text, not what I selected.
I have seen this happen 2, maybe 3 times in a row. I have no clue, but it seems Uncle Gutenberg is losing track of my selection location in the movement to click the link button.
What can one do?
Vent on Twitter!
Yes!
Is it just me?
When I select text in a WordPress paragraph block to add a hyperlink, 60% of the time it applies it to the wrong text and maybe 10% of the time I do not even get the hyperlink icon.
It's like a disincentive to link (and it wont stop me)
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) February 1, 2022
As I am stewing, or maybe I am doing my self glorification dance after tossing out such a witticism (okay I made up that dance part), I realize that if it’s the movement away from the selected text to snag the button click, there is a simpler way ti invoke the hypertext dialog box. It works in nearly every editor interface — select the text, and press command-K.
Keyboard shortcuts are the bomb.
So I made a demo, grabbed 4 screenshots, folded them into Photoshop to make a GIF, and again, look at my victory!
Doh! Headslap. Skip the block editor button clicks, which lose track of selection range.
Select text and use command-k to access URL entry. Never let WordPress munge up a hyperlink again. pic.twitter.com/HQkadNwHtB
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) February 1, 2022
Ah, I have achieved something early in the day. Laurels rested upon.
And then, as the twitters work when it’s not a bunch of whingeing (look, I used that word two posts in a row!) about course heroes and wordle sales, someone kindly comes in with a more elegant solution that has escaped me for my 19 some years of using WordPress.
Thank you David Wiley! Brilliant!
Actually, it's even easier than that – just highlight the text you want to make a link, and paste the URL "over" it. Rather than replacing the text with the URL, WordPress turns the text into a link to the URL. This is actually one of my favorite WordPress features.
— David Wiley (@opencontent) February 1, 2022
That is just much more elegant. Have your URL copied, select the text, and simply paste. It’s like pouring the URL over the text, no movement away, and it’s fast. Efficient. The time you save may allow you to write another blog post!
And I think I have seen it happen when I do my inefficient select text, click the button, paste, and sometimes I went so fast that I just pasted. I have seen myself do it, and usually I think I made a mistake, and redo the link! I completely missed what was happening that David taught me in a single tweet.
On writing this post I wanted to document the behavior I had observed/ whinged about. I tried about 15 different attempts on my test page, getting screenshots to show the steps. And BAM! I could not even reproduce what I had been seeing. Am I now suffering from Block Editor Delusions?
It is a possibility.
So again, there is room, reason to always be learning. And I have to imagine there are a pile of other nifty tricks like that just outside of my experience zone. And far. I will never reach anything like so- called “expert” status in anything. I never want to be an expert.
Thank you David, thank you twitter, for not only giving me a little tech trick, but a larger lesson in what we think we know and how confounding it is be confronted with a better way to do something I have done countless times.
Pouring URLs over words, it’s just elegant.
Featured Image: Barista Pour Over a Negative Space image shared into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0.
Usually it’s the kind of notification from the twitter app I dismiss without notice. But given it was the same day I dissed their other big offer
I will give a fungible $20 to anyone who can convince me why I need proof of ownership of an icon I created myself for my own twitter profile. #AskingForANakedEmperor
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) January 31, 2022
I did give some pause of twitter telling me it was 15 years ago today I signed up for their silly service. No I am not going to tweet the tweet they tossed my way, and I have plenty of fungi-able photos of the number 15.
Of course I am dialing back to January 31, 2007, and I do vaguely remember the first tweet (not monumental) being a callout to Cole Camplese whose blog post shoutout (raise your hands if you remember blogs? They were like extra long twitter threads) nudged me to give the little bird a try.
No third party apps are needed to find your first tweet, just the advanced twitter search, plug in your handle for the From These Accounts and a date range that surrounds when you started. Today was easy since Twitter said it was 15 years ago, so here is the excitement of my first twittering day.
Looking at a long list of Cole's twitters
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) January 31, 2007
It really was a good post, even if Cole’s blog is long gone. I’d heard people talk about it for weeks? months? but it really was an idea of Cole describing (relying on memory here) how it was an effective way to ping and message his colleagues at Penn State University.
The analytics on that tweet are not impressive (it’s likely too old a tweet to have garnered any ‘lytics but I think it makes a point about their pseudo-meaning)
Zeroes across the board on that first tweet. Very Impressive. It was like how Clive Thompson just 6 months later in How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense (Wired) described it as providing “social proprioception”
It’s like proprioception, your body’s ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.
Twitter and other constant-contact media create “social proprioception”. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.
https://www.wired.com/2007/06/st-thompson-4/
That hit then as being profound, at least for 2007 Twitter. There is probably a less desirable term for 2022 Twitter
I twittered for an hour, terribly exciting stuff here. Note the frequent reference to “twittering” (when did it become “tweeting”?)
twittering while on a teleconference call- can they hear me typing?
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) January 31, 2007
setting up a google doc for a project, for once someone suggested it before me
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) January 31, 2007
duh, i verified my account twice
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) January 31, 2007
getting a bit addicted and not doing any work
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) January 31, 2007
twittered my background
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) January 31, 2007
Instead, I closed the window and opened a blog post (yes, this was the paleolithic internet era, crude stone tools you NFTed TikTokking kids).
If I Fall Into One More Social Network Tool I’m Going To Scream Like a Banshee
I managed to bash LinkedIn and Twitter in one swoop! I believe Cole had called out my colleague D’Arcy Norman, and he started the same day 15 years ago (of course he quit and re-joined and quit like 5 times) as D’Arcy blogged the same day on Twittering describing it as “nano-blogging”.
I’m not even sure how it worked, because there were no @ mentions then!
Cole Camplese’s call out tweet, January 31, 2007 It so reminded me of this funny auto generated site I used in my talks about blogging The Dullest Blog in the World (web archive link, the dull has died). That thing was so clever, my kind of sarcasto-tech
Dullest Blog in the World… evolved into Twitter? Not all that different from my first day of 7 tweets, and following 3 and being followed by 3 people (likely all the same people, I see Cole and D’Arcy for sure).
My first day of tweets, January 31, 2007 But people were spitting out stuff like that in 2007. People like me. So I decided to take a trip back in the Twitter Time Tunnel I made, and set the date in the machine to January 31, 2007.
And because the internet is made of little wisps of serendipity, the tweet at the top was from Anil Dash, the guy who’s tweet inspired me to make the time tunnel. But what he “twittered”, 15 years ago, hit like an ironic THUD
in denial about having a cold.
— anildash (@anildash) January 30, 2007
That little bit of almost tiny relevance would have a whole new impact 15 years into his future. But the steady stream of little “doing this” “thinking about that” bound into 140 character boxes, no images, no hashtags, no live links, holy moly…
Yet I found the experience of networking connecting so much more seamless in Twitter than LinkedIn (which I have not seen for like 10 years):
I had really dismissed both of these tools when I heard about them, yet a little digging and not being totally close minded has yielded some interesting results. But their entire approach to Social Networking really show a marked difference on which side of the Web 2.0 timeline they started. Not good or bad, just different.
Enough blogging, I got some twittering to do.
https://cogdogblog.com/2007/01/networking/
I’m still rather a fan of twittering, despite how it has morphed into something that would sooner gift you NFTs than a simple GIF (great response JR)
users: let us use gifs in our profiles again
Twitter: how about an NFT?! ?— JR Dingwall (@JRDingwall) January 31, 2022
I’m 15 in twittering years. Woot.
Featured Image:
Trail 15 is MARKED flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
The British flavor of English provides the ideal descriptive term for what this and most of my blogging covers (and expect it to show up as a category or tag). And it fits for writing here about my Annotation Blues.
Without Grandpa Internet pulling out a memory of annotating web pages in the Mosaic browser (oops too late), let me just say that a public space for adding comments, resources, discussions to any public internet space just completes me for the idea of what the web should be.
My previous efforts to use annotation when teaching were middling. Often it ended up being One Tool Too Many after blogging, tweeting, and… well I forget the rest now. Beyond the expected types of annotation you might ask students to as part of academic reading, I always dreamed of efforts where one might use that layer (and with hyperlinks) as a narrative space jumping across the web.
Well we did get a bit of this in the first iteration of Networked Narratives where over in the “mirror world” we asked students to weigh in with Hypothesis (yes the web site is weird, it is encoded in rot13 and a mouseover is required to read) (Alan’s weird idea #6756) on a whimsical McSweeny’s parody where we acted as if a corporation’s social media mishap was actually a clever feint. Okay, the notes are still there and it was actually quite lively.
But the thing is, setting up annotation in a course is a matter of integrating into activities, talking through the mechanics, etc. The buy in is mostly there– it’s an assignment after all.
The hill is steeper when the participation needs to be self-motivated.
Thus concludes the prelude, onto the show?
The Approach to the Hill The annotation effort I describe was my idea as part of my community engagement efforts for Open Education Global. Last Spring and into summer was the planning for their annual conference, which was covid-ed online, with the idea all along to connect it to a follow-up in person congress (now May 2022 in Nantes, France).
Both events were framed, aligned to the UNESCO OER Recommendation, a most significant document and development in the world of open education. The conference plans called for some kind of “bridging” activities between the two conferences. There was significant effort to invite presentations in any of the six official UNESCO languages. While the majority were in English, the online conference convened several multi presentation webinar sessions conducted completely in Spanish, French, Arabic, and Chinese.
Conference presentations were asked to associate their sessions with one of the five Action Areas listed in the Recommendation:
- Building Capacity
- Developing Supportive Policy
- Inclusive and Equitable OER
- Sustainable OER
- Facilitating international cooperation
The official UNESCO Recommendation on OER At least as early as August 2021, I noticed the links in the top right point to the language versions at certain page numbers of a single PDF. Note that the links for Chinese and Arabic versions are interchanged. We could find no contact, no “webmaster” to communicate this problem to, maybe someone has better contacts than me. When I looked more closely at the Recommendation, it’s high level and broad verbiage, and seeing the six language versions in the source (it is one large PDF with links to portions within) the light bulb went off in my head that it would seem worthy during the conference, and after, if participants (or anyone) were invited to add notes, comments, resources, links to presentations as web annotations using Hypothes.is.
I envisioned the document lit up in overlapping yellow highlights, and rich exchanged happening over in the Hypthes.is sidebar.
Planning the Ascent I did not forsee a steep hill to get this going. I reached out for advice to my gurus like Remi Kalir who immediately responded with ideas and examples from his experience getting “crowds” at conferences doing annotation (no longer calling them “Annotation Flash Mobs”). I also contacted Natre Angell from Hypothes.is who offered help, promotion, interest.
Yes, annotation could have been done directly on the UNESCO PDF, though that would call for asking participants to install a browser add-on. The via proxy that generates links to documents and opens the annotation tools would not work on the UNESCO document URL. I did create a demo for my colleagues and our conference committee to see at least functionally how it worked.
I suggested we look at doing the whole effort in Pressbooks, where we could wrap the annotation target documents in some context, enable the annotation tools to always be available, provide instructions, list the conference presentations that were related. The different language versions would be their own chapter.
Our license experts we spoke to said this would be permissible under the UNESCO open access policy and would align with our use of a Creative Commons CC BY-SA license.
We did get support from Pressbooks to host this (thanks, PB!) but we did not get access until maybe 2 weeks before the conference. I did a bit of small testing with copying sentence by sentence the Spanish language version over to Pressbooks. The outline indexing of the document looked possible with some hand spun HTML ordered lists.
Luckily we got support in the name of a brilliant designer and Pressbooks expert, Kate McDonnell who was able rather quickly to move the French, Spanish, Chinese, and Russian content to Pressbooks. We ran in to major challenges with the Arabic version though, it was not possible to cleanly select sentences from the PDF. I was able to see from header data on the original PDFs that this language versions originated from a Word file, but we could not get any one from UNESCO who could locate the original. The Arabic language version remains on a To Do list of mine.
Okay, enough blather, the Pressbooks version was made available at https://oer.pressbooks.pub/oeg2021/
Annotating the UNESCO Recommendation on OER, the Pressbooks published, annotation ready version of the UNESCO document (cover art by our OEGlobal talented artist, Mario Badilla) After an introduction, it goes right to the language versions, where all chapters are set to open with the Hypothes.is tools enabled. I moved the background on annotation and the how to annotate stuff afterward, including setting the “about annotation” one enabled with Hypothes.is for those new to using the tool a place to practice.
Ideally this would have been ready well before the conference, and something we could have encouraged as note taking activities during the sessions, but I was just about only able to have it ready for debut in a closing session where we shared the ideas of followup activities to “bridge” the two conferences.
Still, I was not seeing much of a hill.
Introducing Rosa the Annotator It certainly was not necessary, but my remix bones kept twitching for some graphic elements for promoting this. My mind went to those war time propaganda posters, you know the We Can Do It! ones. I decided to recast Rosie the Riveter as maybe her great- granddaughter as Rosa the Annotator:
Remix of Wikimedia Commons Public Domain Image by me https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:We_Can_Do_It!_NARA_535413_-_Restoration_2.jpg I’m not sure it did anything, but I always enjoy remixing.
The Three Days of Focus Frame Things got busy after the conference with other OEGlobal activity, but I came up with an idea of using a mostly asynchronous event structure in our OEG Connect community space (the same platform where our conference was hosted). I made up previously a format called Three Days of Focus, just a set up of having over a preset 3 days (middle of the week, so it did not land on some timezone’s weekend) a series of mostly asynchronous discussion.
Given the pandemic, the holiday season, I knew December was not the best, but I want to create about an interval of doing these once a month, where each one would focus on one of the OER Recommendation Action Areas.
I shoulder tapped a number of people to get the ball rolling with the December 2021 Three Days of Focus Annotating the Building Capacity Action Area. The information main post had background information, readings and videos for background, suggestions for annotations. For example, we had links to all the conference session related to the action area (thank you, tags). In an ideal world, all presenters would have tied their sessions to a specific portion of the recommendation is addressed.
So there was a call for online discussion about the action area. Thinking that it might be hard to know where in the document to go, I created a series of posts under Getting Granular with Building Capacity where I took the sub items of the Action Area, and prepared questions and potential words they would be attached to. I then created a pre-made annotation for each, so there was a URL that could go from the Getting Granular post to the part of the recommendation it referenced, directly to an annotation with a prompt to reply (see an example).
Lastly I set up a day in the middle where I was sitting several hours in the “open annotation lab” where I hoped for people to drop in. I like the studio idea of where people could annotate together, alone, but in the same place and time (yes, I had to do another remix image, sorry). And that opens the possibility to talk about how we choose what to annotate, where to put it.
How did it go? Not bad, not really a land rush either. We made use of the Crowd Layers tool (thanks Remi and Francisco!) to generate a visual summary of annotation activity across all versions. The live sessions were fantastic, and I recorded bits (with permission) to make a highlight reel.
Still, I don’t feel we broke far or wide in the broader open education community. I did another live annotation session the following week at OERcamp.global, though it was a crowd on the order of number of fingers (one UNESCO chair was there for a few minutes).
Facing the Hill Everyone is assuring me this takes more time to catch on. I did not think that selling the concept of open annotation would be a leap for academics, who annotate all the time. Things I have heard, and accept, are of course the overload of the pandemic.
I was suggested to provide more clear outcomes of what could come from annotation. I don’t know if I can really prescribe that. I hoped that people would want to attach their projects, research, blog post, papers directly to the Recommendation on OER.
I come across things in my feeds and readings all the time that speak to me as annotation potential, and I add them, so I am the peak on the histogram. I’ve also heard that the broad language of the Recommendation is not things people dwell in, they might cite it as asserting the importance of OER or maybe when they need to reference it for a proposal or a grant.
To me the high level language is what calls for diving it word by word, or breaking down. Or asking questions.
On the Hill This Week Tomorrow would be the start of the next Three Days of focus, where the hope is to generate annotation on the Developing Supportive Policy Action Area. Yep, I have all the materials set up, scheduled tweets loaded, and again, an open annotation lab scheduled Wednesday (6 hours in zoom, yay). My optimism is a bit low right now, I just do not feel like this is getting traction. The whole idea of bridging the two conferences is, well, slipping.
I’m going to align future rounds with existing events, e.g. run a series during Open Education Week and maybe another as a part of OER22
I always have hopes for conferences to be more than presentations, hallway conversations, and receptions with hor devours, that there could be activity outside of the venue, and ongoing ones afterward.
Web annotation seemed like an obvious, low barrier, constructive activity that is 10000% open. It can be done at any time, you do not have to face a Wall of Zoom. But maybe I have missed an obvious marker along the path.
If anyone has a clue, send me a note. You can find me pushing that rock up the hill.
Featured Image: Pixabay graphic by Schäferle modified me to include screenshot of page from the OER Annotation Pressbook and the Hypothes.is logo, let’s call this licensed CC BY.
I’m back in the podcast editing saddle with two sessions parked in Audacity for the OEG Voices show and hoping I can pin Antonio Vantaggiato down (or get my own schedule in order) for an overdue Puerto Rico Connection episode.
But there is ummmm, something that I have ummmm, being pondering.
To me, a universal law of audio editing is, “Everyone hates the sound of their own voice.” And mine is, as I hear my own tracks, the frequency of my use of “ummm.” I can easily look at my waveform and see them. My editing is pretty much a meticulous replay where I remove my own “umms” and those of my guests.
But I also end up nipping what seems to me as extraneous dead space between spoken parts and when I hear intakes of breaths. At a minimum, taking them out can tighten up the length of a show, right?
I was even saving a file of the deleted ummms, mine and from my guests, this is either fun or weird:
And just to prove the unexpected nature of twitter, where your most crafted thoughtful insightful bit of tweetage goes ignored, and a toss off tweet like this generates more ripples than I have seen in a while.
The horror of editing podcasting, where I can recognize my own "umms" just by the waveform. I speak, um, at a rate, um, or about, um, 4 ums per minute. pic.twitter.com/jeH8VRFx4l
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) November 29, 2021
As always, wise, experienced advice from my friend, colleague with the impressive radio voice:
Moderation in, ah, all things. I do try not to um too much, myself. My problem is tongue-clicks when I start talking. Spiky little devils. Easy to snip. Always nice to preserve natural cadences, though, so yes some ums should stay.
— Gardner Campbell (@GardnerCampbell) November 30, 2021
It got interesting quickly
https://t.co/GJ3BRNa5QO
— .CharlotteS.NaN (@__TweetinChar__) November 29, 2021
There's research on that. No joke: umms help the audience/learners to remember better than narration w/o umms. Rhetorics classes are wrong, here. Those fillers seem to be signals rather than noise. Will try to find the study …
— .CharlotteS.NaN (@__TweetinChar__) November 29, 2021
I had never come across this concept, but it makes sense, the use if “umm” conversationally as a filler, to keep the flow going to signal you have not completed the thought your brain is sending to your mouth:
Suppose you are having trouble formulating your next phrase: If you go silent, the other person may figure that you have finished your turn at talking, and they may take over the line of conversation. If this happens, you have potentially lost your thread forever, as the conversation goes in an unpredicted new direction. So, if you are temporarily delayed and are intending to continue, it makes good sense to use a filler like um or uh. The filler is a traffic signal that accounts for your delay: “Please wait a moment, I’m not done yet, normal transmission will soon resume.” If the other person is cooperating, as people usually are, they will refrain from taking over the floor.
Despite the fact that fillers like um and uh have clear functions in conversation, we are often told to avoid them. The problem is that, in informal conversation at least, if you were to eliminate all of your ums and uhs, you would find people assuming you had finished your turn, and they would start speaking when you weren’t actually done yet.
https://qz.com/work/1175505/a-linguist-explains-why-its-okay-to-say-um-and-uh/
As a sidelight, this affirming response was a true reward
YUUUUUP BEEN THERE!!
— ?Amber May (FoxyVox) ?? (@AmberFoxyVox) November 29, 2021
Sidenote: Amber was a UMW student of mine long ago for DS106, Spring 2013 I believe, and even then she came with audio chops having done voices for a YouTube cartoons. I was able to DM her and learned she is now doing voice work in Hollywood, so she made it (and I cannot take any credit, she was an amazing student)
More research came in (I see this and can still love twitter)
Hi Mark. Trying to keep my promise: Here's the 1st article I was referring to https://t.co/zENnmDYGZn Looking for the 2nd, now.
— .CharlotteS.NaN (@__TweetinChar__) November 30, 2021
That link has already vanished (it must have been there as I have it saved as a PDF), but the Research Gate entry offers the citation and abstract:
The proposal examined here is that speakers use uh and um to announce that they are initiating what they expect to be a minor (uh), or major (um), delay in speaking. Speakers can use these announcements in turn to implicate, for example, that they are searching for a word, are deciding what to say next, want to keep the floor, or want to cede the floor. Evidence for the proposal comes from several large corpora of spontaneous speech. The evidence shows that speakers monitor their speech plans for upcoming delays worthy of comment. When they discover such a delay, they formulate where and how to suspend speaking, which item to produce (uh or um), whether to attach it as a clitic onto the previous word (as in “and-uh”), and whether to prolong it. The argument is that uh and um are conventional English words, and speakers plan for, formulate, and produce them just as they would any word.
Clark, Herbert & Fox Tree, Jean. (2002). Using uh and um in spontaneous dialog. Cognition. 84. 73-111. 10.1016/S0010-0277(02)00017-3.
Ah, research! My ums have meaning, purpose, and I can even glom on to the assertion “The argument is that uh and um are conventional English words, and speakers plan for, formulate, and produce them just as they would any word.“
Woah.
And the 2nd one https://t.co/gjlYg5bWFb
— .CharlotteS.NaN (@__TweetinChar__) November 30, 2021
Another paper by the same author, and it’s gobsmacking to find a publisher link I can actually read the whole paper– see Listeners’ uses of um and uh in speech comprehension
Despite their frequency in conversational talk, little is known about how ums and uhs affect listeners’ on-line processing of spontaneous speech. Two studies of ums and uhs in English and Dutch reveal that hearing an uh has a beneficial effect on listeners’ ability to recognize words in upcoming speech, but that hearing an um has neither a beneficial nor a detrimental effect. The results suggest that um and uh are different from one another and support the hypothesis that uh is a signal of short upcoming delay and um is a signal of a long upcoming delay.
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758%2FBF03194926.pdf
More research I should lean on- as much as my umms may make me cringe, I can relax because Fox Tree’s paper suggests that “hearing an um has neither a beneficial nor a detrimental effect.”
The other thing that has been working away at my brain is a bit of wonder that if my zeal to clean up bits between the words of my guests, and also to remove the gaps between their words– am I actually changing their natural speech pattern? Some people just speak with more — deliberate — pauses and maybe its not just “dead air” but their natural speech. Who am I to “clean”.
So what I am coming away with is that maybe I can a whole lot less nitty gritty editing… and also not feel like my own ummmage is negative. It must be how I speak because the machine records how I speak, and is a much better source of data than the imaginary bird in my head who thinks they know how I sound.
One more nugget came in the twitter replies… again, this serendipity at it’s tweeted best
Happens to EVERYONE. The tough part is to decide if you should clean them up at all. I mostly say No. If you're curious about this, I did an exercise with a well-known show that left one segment unedited on air. https://t.co/oJ1aYDuD59
— Steve Robinson (@LCCPresident) November 29, 2021
As a long time listener of NPR’s Fresh Air show hosted by Terry Gross (I listened to this much when I lived in the states and usually had NPR on all day), Steve noticed one segment that jumped out for having an excess of “filler words” “breaths and stammers” the kind of stuff I have been editing out.
I sampled the question and answer and gave it my “close editing” treatment of removing unattached filler words, stammers, and breaths. This means that words such as “um,” “like,” “ah,” etc. are snipped out if they are not attached to other utterances. Likewise, I removed noticeable breaths if they were unattached to other utterances. This method leaves plenty of repeated words, and filler sounds such as “uh,” “ah,” and “um.” Removing these completely would make the speech sound robotic. Removing these samples when they stand alone (e.g. with silence before and after them) leaves a natural yet polished sounding spoken prose that feels authentic, provided enough silence is left where the omissions are made.
Terry Gross Editing Exercise
Steve feels the editing made it feel natural and human but still unsure if it’s really an improvement. “It seems arrogant and silly to attempt to “improve” what goes on the air for that program.” His Google drive link includes the two versions so you can compare.
If ever I teach audio editing again, I might introduce an exercise like this, so students can practice doing tight edits but also do some testing to assess what kind of difference “cleaning the audio” has.
This is going to shake up (and simplify) my audio editing. I am not going to do all that fine tune editing, and only remove things that are gaffes or just not relevant. This should make me much faster at editing.
And ummm, I am going to reset my own assumption, and um, accept my um, speech pattern is what it is. I think Michael Berman summed it up most eloquently.
um ok
— A. Michael Berman (@amichaelberman) November 29, 2021
Featured Image: Screenshot of a recent audio editing session, my own voice track with highlighted the tell-tale hump shape of my “ummm” in the waveform (sharing here under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license)
If anything teaches you about being able to do repairs, it’s going for long distance bicycle rides or using one for commuting. You end up refining a set of small but flexible tools that you can carry, and sometime, far from anything, you find yourself improvising.
Or there was a time I was camping alone and awoke to a flat tire in my (then) new to me old truck. I could not locate a lug wrench anywhere! I had not even done the thing you should do with a vehicle and practice doing a tire change. Luckily I had tossed in the back an almost random set of tools, and there was one multi pronged lug wrench that fit my wheel.
You don’t want to wish misfortune on anyone but dealing with these situations, on your own, is invaluable. In these cases there is no replace choice.
And maybe these examples are not a fit for where I hope to steer this post, but I’m dovetailing to it now from my recent jubilant experience of having repaired an old electric fireplace rather than buying a replacement. This is my reflection from reading The Right to Repair as the latest installment of the Middlebury College DLINQ Digital Detox. where the theme is looking at the impacts of technology on this planet we happen to inhabit.
Bob Cole writes in this installment about the choice or even the access to chose to repair broken/obsolete technology devices rather than replace with new.
This dilemma of paying someone to repair versus replacing a device is probably familiar to anyone who has reached a potential “end-of-life” crossroads for one of their many electronic devices. There are upsides and costs to each. Yet I wondered, are these my only choices? Are there alternative paths for a self-described tinkerer and occasional fixer? Could I source the parts, tools, and repair knowledge on my own? What might I learn along the way?
Heck yes, but I am not too clear on what “end-of-life” crossroads he refers to. Yes, some devices do just break where they just will not function, but:
- I am writing this on a 2013 MacBookPro that still provides enough power and capability to do everything I want. Long ago, when I worked for a college that paid for my computers, I got new machines on something like a 2 year cycle. This current machine was one I had to pay for myself (as a freelance web geek). It is running a less than current OS (mojave) so I can still use the Aperture software I love for photos (software no longer supported but still functional).
- And there is an older 2009 MacBookPro sitting in the other room, which is a bit more worn (it had a collision with a sidewalk) but still usable to play music through the stereo.
- My DSLR, a Canon 7D, I got in 2012.
- And if anything says keeping and using old stuff it’s my vehicle- a 1998 Ford F-150 I bought in 2010 with 88,000 miles on it (now up to 207,000).
I do this because I am a bit of a thrifty bugger, but I also feels strongly about using things as long as viable. I cannot say it’s a purely environmental mindset, it’s just who I am.
Yet Bob’s article cites a tendency for technology makers to keep you from doing this, whether you believe that devices are designed to go obsolete or if they are made in a way to defy being upgraded. On my older MacBooks, I have done hard drive swaps, replaced batteries and inserted memory upgrades, but these are not really possible anymore.
The IEEE Spectrum article Bob referenced, Why We Must Fight For The Right To Repair Our Electronics, suggest my hunches are wrong, that there might be a plot to make us think replace first when something breaks.
Unlike the 30-year-old mixer on your kitchen counter that refuses to die, new technology—especially the smart devices with fancy, embedded electronics—breaks more quickly. That trend, confirmed by a recent study by the German government, applies not just to delicate products like smartphones and tablets but also to equipment we would expect to last for a long time—like televisions, washing machines, and even tractors.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/why-we-must-fight-for-the-right-to-repair-our-electronics
Speaking of broken technology, I could only read the intro to the article because they request I sign in to read it, and that bugs me. Yes it might be free, but why tease me?
Mobile phones are the ones that seem discarded the most and as Bob notes in the article, it takes some special tools and inside scoop to crack one open. I would be hesitant to do this, but I remember my colleague Tim Owens once doing a fix on an iPad.
And I remember a time I did some work in Vancouver and rented a room via Air BnB from a guy named Darcy. He had this great niche business- people who broke their mobile phone screen could contact him, he would buzz to their office on his bike, and had the tools and knowledge how to replace screens. And he had this side business, then called “Lumberback” where he would replace the back of your iPhone with a matching one made of real wood.
I had to get one just to watch him do his work. “Anything can be opened and fixed” he said.
Lovely Spalts Lumberback flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license And yes extend broken devices to broken technology. Can’t play old flash content? Try Ruffle. Mozilla hung up the great Thimble app? They gave a window to migrate it to Glitch. When Storify bit the dust and closed shop? Create an end around. This is the spirit of reclaiming your web experience, and it’s as much repair over discard.
I’ve not had much trouble location owners manuals for old devices, usually there are too many results. And you can find most any part on eBay and a whole list of other parts sites. Yes, YouTube is full of explainer videos of a wide range of usefulness, and it takes some patience to find not only the right one, but the one where the video maker is showing you something useful and not promoting their channel.
Bob hits a key point too with:
repairability provides a more sustainable response to the global challenge of electronic waste, with the added benefits of conserving natural resources, saving money, and building community.
https://dlinq.middcreate.net/detox-2022/post.html?id=23948 (emphasis added by me)
If you ever want to embrace the near infinite-ness of the internet, it’s when you end up diving down into some of school web forum of people fanatical about Ford F-150s (yes, I end up in one of many of these when I am researching an issue with mine). Outside of the glitz and scale of all the mainstream social media places is a generous long tail of small scale, and highly interest focused discussion spaces for almost any device you can name. You find all ranges of helpful, but yet sometimes argumentative (or worse) behavior, but I am rather fascinated by the social dynamics you can find in these fora (and if I was better at remembering and finding I would give you an example).
Now as a disclaimer I should slide up about 10 paragraphs, I am not overly skilled at all this fix it stuff. I cannot solder if my life depended on it. No welding, either. Many times, the answers I find are way beyond my skill level. But I enjoy the hunt for answers, and the rewarding feeling when I am able to pull through on a repair (saving the $ of replace). The reward of confidence is incalcuable.
My desire to repair over replace is not as firmly places in reducing my environmental impact. It’s more of an ethos of an attitude towards “things”, and that I am doing maybe a small part by just using stuff as long as possible (and then stashing them in a box or drawer because some day I might need a part).
Oh I also cheap ;-) so saving $ is good too.
If there is an environmental impact, that’s good too. It’s not only right to repair, or choice to repair, but also a reward of repair.
Thanks Middlebury DLINQ for running this series… And kudos to Tom Woodward for the signature style approach to the web site. I’ve seen his photos, he knows his way with repair tools too.
Featured Image:
Bike Repair Shop flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
The internet doth giveth, but sometimes you need to turn over some rocks. And get lucky. Today I saw the house my grandparents lived in around 1940… with some help from Google Streetview.
I’d mentioned in yesterday’s winded post on amazing stories about how a blog post about a friend of my grandmother whose paintings I cherished drew a number of comments from Mrs Hammer’s surviving family members. It was one comment that got my cogs moving during lunch today. Her daughter Phyllis wrote
Wonderful! Wonderful! Given more time, I think my mother might have gained some fame. My husband and I loved your sensitive blog about Nanny (Gert). Our parents were neighbors on Barrington Rd across from Garrison Jr. High school .
I vaguely remember my Mom referring to “the house on Barrington”) as one where my Dad grew up, having moved to Baltimore from New Jersey. In my Mom’s audio story where she retold how she met him, I heard her say he came from his home on “Garrison Avenue” but I recall that was a later home his family lived in.
I had been thinking it would be easy to find Garrison Jr High School in Google Maps and wondered about seeing the houses on Barrington Road. And there it all is:
My Dad’s Neighborhood? Indeed, Barrington Road is right across the street for the school. And maybe it was the house my Mom referred to, as Barrington Road is just off of Garrison Blvd, a major thoroughfare, and likely how she referred to the location. I can also see it’s close to Forest Park High School where maybe they both attended (Dad was maybe 3 years ahead).
But could I find the exact house? I went down Barrington Road in Google Street view and saw the houses across the street from the school. Quite a few.
I went back to the Google and tried to find references to my Grandfather (Abraham H Levine and Barrington) but came up short. The closes was a 1940 census record (which had his name and my grandmother’s name) of which you only see a portion for free because its locked behind Ancestry.com. I once before paid for that a few months, and remembered that I saved some family documents I had found.
I had the address all the time, as I had found there a copy of my Grandfather’s draft card!
My Grandfather’s draft card The timing suggests Abraham filled out this card in 1940, likely with the Essex Street address where they lived in Newark. In another audio clip of my grandmother’s stories she mentioned they moved to Baltimore in September, 1941 because the construction company her husband worked for (the Aufderheide-Aragona, Co, only web remnants are case law references) got a contract to build the Fort Howard Hospital in Baltimore (most web references are to listings as abandoned places, but it does have a long history as a strategic fort, Douglas MacArthur was based there for a while). Still I did find anything in granny’s stories that mentioned this address, but there on the card, it has been written likely because the family had moved to Baltimore, but they were unsure if they would stay?
There is a bit of voice in the machine as I am looking at my grandfather’s hand writing on the card. And a bit sobering to think at age 35 he had to register for the WWII draft (he was not called).
So there is the exact address of where they lived– 4013 Barrington Road, Baltimore (map link). He gave me the address! Then I was able to find the exact house in Street View:
The house in Baltimore where my Dad grew up These are good sized homes and look (from what I can see) like they are in okay shape. I cannot see more than from the street.
For a bit more not really related interest, from previous experience I know you can see photos from different time periods- not that from 2007 to 2019, the same red truck is parked in front of the house. That tells me (or I want to hear) someone is taking good care of it.
I can see this home my Dad’s family lived in, but I don’t have much more. I mean, it was fun to play internet detective, but given that all the people who know the story are gone, well I have just ghosts of a story.
Featured Image:
Seeking Something flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
When I was teaching DS106 there were not many rivals for teaching the craft of audio storytelling than to ask students to listen closely to the way what I consider the standard bearer of the form is- This American Life. I’ve gotten back to listening to more episodes lately, and they maintain that form.
Episode 758, Talking While Black, was just gripping, and turned out to be some ideal material Cori is using in a university class she is teaching this week. It was the previous episode, Ghost in the Machine that triggered some thinking of a past project I am pondering rekindling. As good connected things do, it led to one thing, then another.
The tagline of this episode hints at its stories– “People use machines to find people they lost.”
Stay with us.
The opening of episode 757 begins with one of Ira Glass’s early experiences of audio editing, the genius is how he arcs something that happened in the days when “tape” was really audio tape but to include something as modern as modern artificial intelligence to do creative writing. Maybe.
But it was the prologue that got my gears going, where Ira shared a tae two sisters who did not have memories of their father who took his life when they were very young. One sister, who was 5 when he passed, always yearned for more connection, the other was too young to have any memory experience.
The “ghost” in the machine turned out to be old reel to reel tapes a family member found and sent the sisters, they were mostly of their father practicing his love of opera singing (his day job was installing/fixing phones). The interesting parts they heard, once digitized and shared via Skype, were in between, as her father included in the taping snippets of his conversations at work or talking to himself as he composed.
The “ghost” was a portion of her father talking to the older sister then maybe 3, playing game of “who is that” as they looked at family photos. Think about hearing the voice of your father you never knew, and not just talking, but talking to you.
I felt like the floor had dropped out from under me, you know? Everything I thought I understood, it just fell away. I had seen photos of him. I knew a little bit about him, but he wasn’t accessible. And this man that I assumed was not accessible to me suddenly became so.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/757/transcript
The precious sound of the voice of a family member gone. I know a bit about that.
Ira Glass again puts this into perspective, going back to the father of recorded audio
Putting ghosts into a machine– it just happens when you record anything. You know who understood that very clearly? Thomas Edison, the person who first figured out how to record and playback sound, who created the first phonograph machine back in 1877.
In an article listing the possible uses for his new invention, one of the things he listed– preserving the voices of family members so you have them after they die. He says when it comes to this, quote, “The phonograph will unquestionably outrank the photograph.”
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/757/transcript
Again, Edison saw one of the most important uses of his invention was not to play music or podcasts or radio or drama, but for people to have the memories of their loved ones as a playable phonograph recording. Pictures can show locations and faces, but stories in the words of people who experienced them bring them to life.
And as well, Ira Glass explains the story of the well known mascot of RCA, the dog listening, head tilted, to a record player. But, as we hear, it’s not the record player itself the dog is listening to.
You Don’t Get Nipper on a Digital File flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Nipper is not tuned into the music, he is seeking his master, whose voice he hears speaking from the machine.
And this idea of using a machine to hold on to the dead, it’s also part of a famous bit of audio history, or maybe this is more like a legend. You know that illustration of a dog listening to the old-fashioned phonograph with the caption, “His master’s voice”? This was the RCA logo for years and years.
OK, Google “RCA trademark painting.” And what’ll come up– you’ll see the painting that the logo was based on. You see the dog and photograph are on what looks like a coffin, and here’s where there’s a question, OK? There’s no record of what the artist, Francis Barraud, actually intended here, but look for yourself. Lots of people, me included, we only see a coffin.
In fact, the dog, whose name was Nipper, first belonged to Francis’s brother, and then became Francis’s only when the brother died. So in this way of seeing the picture, OK, the master is dead. He’s inside that coffin, and the dog is listening to a recording of his dead master’s voice.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/757/transcript
And this is just the intro to the episode of This American Life, but goes to show, as it does often, that creating effective audio stories is a bit more than turning on a recorder and yakking into a mic.
But alas, while the power of audio recordings of loved ones is something I consider beyond just “important” but critical, I am not here to write about family stories, but the stories of unexpected positive coincidences that happen in the big machine of the internet because of its capability to enable personal connections.
Amazing ones.
Talking of time machines, this blog is one iself, let’s dial in the year 2009… I am going back to a thing I did for the 2009 Open Education Conference, the first time it was called Amazing Stories of Openness. Then, as it is now, much of open education was focused on the things- open content, open resources, licenses. I had been fortunate in my haphazard career though, to have experienced a number of serendipitous connections that I could somehow relate to have shared something openly in the internet.
I wanted not to talk of the open things, but the experiences it enabled. And I wanted to have those stories told by people, not just written. Voices in the machine. I’ve done a few iterations of the talk since then, but the description is close to the original
While the Open Education movement focuses on institutional issues, a large ocean exists of powerful individual accomplishments simply from tapping into content that is open for sharing and re-use. As colorful as old covers of “True Stories” magazine, this presentation shares moving, personal stories that would not have been previously possible, enabled by open licensed materials and personal networks. Beyond my own tales, others have been culled from the net, and you can share your own.
http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/opened09/
Getting the stories always took a lot of urging, nagging, begging, teasing, often through email or twitter. For many of them, I ended up making times to have skype conversations where I could record it. I would also during presentations ask people on the spot to stand up and share a story for their colleagues (which I recorded if they allowed me).
I got rather shameless in ways to get stories.
Sharing them was a lot of fun, because I had made use of this nifty dead technology called “Cool Iris” that allowed me to load all of the media, links into an RSS file, and it would create an interactive “wall of media” where I could arrow through sequentially, or jump around to any example.
I have tried a few times to get another wave of new stories (usually when I had a chance to share these, last done in 2015), but rarely seem to get a whole bunch.
I see them float by often in twitter (see the ghost metaphor?), like this recent example from Lisa Noble, sharing a connection experience that came out of the old ETMOOC experience
Oh my gosh- last night at #EduKnitNight, a knitter came who knew me through @ActivateLearn , who I met 9 years ago (I guessed and I was right) through #ETMOOC. @edifiedlistener too!
— Lisa Noble (@nobleknits2) January 12, 2022
These things are small, and perhaps not all the consequential if you are out there Changing Education, but… they really matter, at least to me.
This is wonderful, and garners a round of likes (including me) and retweets. But what happens to this story as it flows down the stream of past tweets, drowned by wordle tweets, etc. Wouldn’t it be worth having Lisa’s own voice tell the story, even if it’s just 90 seconds? The sound of a voice versus a tweet with a bunch of likes.
Likewise, a few weeks (months?) ago when I visited Ken Bauer’s #educoffee session repurposed as an OEGlobal podcast there was re-sharing of one of these “amazing” experiences. It was back when ken started, and Lawrie Phipps was on and and his offhand remark about Canadians turned out to be an opening that Lawrie and Ken’s dad were at one time on the same ship together.
Lawrie has blogged it and Ken too — but wouldn’t it be even more fantastic to have them telling us this story– in their own voices.
I’ve not even kept up with adding them to my own collection. I’d written a few clicks back about a friend of my grandmother’s who was a bit eccentric to me as a kid, a woman who lived to paint, her apartment literally filled with works in progress, easels in the living room (my vague memory). I have a few of Mrs Hammer’s paintings, and out of that came a series of blog comments from her own descendents who were able to fill in my own gaps of knowing who this woman was. From one that mentioned how she got to know my grandmother that literally reveals the location in Baltimore of where my grandparents lived long ago. Out of the blue a month or two ago came a tweet from another of Mrs Hammer’s grandchildren.
Myself, I need to give voice to this story. Even in just looking for some photos for this post, searching my flickr on “machine”, I came across a photo I got from a cousin I reconnected with while passing through Portland a few years ago. He has a trove of old family photos like this one, where my father’s grandparents are standing in the back left corner… there he is, “Isodore” or how my Mom said he was just known as “the old man” as he was pretty stern.
The Family Wayback Machine flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license I wish I had some recording of my parents talking about these people… the ghosts of them are rather faded.
Because of my belief in the power of stories in voice, I am just circling about this idea of trying to get more people in the “internet machine” to somehow get their stories into something like Edison’s machine.
I’ve recast the Amazing stories site a few times, but the last is the ideal (I think)- it is set up using my own SPLOTbox theme so people can contribute stories as video (YouTube, Vimeo) audio (uploaded, SoundCloud, even recorded directly into the site), or just a picture with a written story.
https://stories.cogdogblog.com/ It’s always seemed to take a huge amount of effort to solicit these, yet I see potential in so many interactions I witness.
So here’s my thought, I am thinking about making a pitch for a 2022 round of story collection for the upcoming OER22 conference. Is there ever more of a time for these kinds of stories? As Lawrie Phipps blogged in his written reflection of what I consider an “amazing story”
So this post is here only to remind me that in these times of crisis and uncertainty it is good to lean into those small moments of serendipity within the network.
I have blogged before about how we are more connected to others now than at any other time. There are people like Ken who are out there reminding us that it’s OK to be social, and that every online engagement does not have to be about this crisis, or getting your teaching online, or whatever else is “urgent”.
https://lawriephipps.co.uk/reflections-week-six-leaning-into-and-on-the-network/
Can we do even more leaning into the network? Is anyone game to step up and contribute?
Can we leave more than ghost tweets in the machine, maybe something more than a tweet flown by?
Featured Image: I spotted this Bell and Howell 16mm projector in Willow Bunch, SK, and the ghost sound of the film flickering through came back from my years in fifth grade being in charge of operating these for or assembly events. Sounds carry deep and far, and into our souls.
16mm Glory flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
One tweet somehow manages to send me off to the web experimentation rabbit hole for building a new gizmo. But the bigger lesson is that knowing how to read, edit, and modify URL parameters can give you the power over the algorithmic lords.
From One Tweet… I managed to just click this out of curiosity
Here’s what your timeline was saying 14 years ago. https://t.co/8SNxqHMD3J
— anildash (@anildash) January 12, 2022
What Anil gave is is a link that performs an advanced twitter search that returns all the tweets from accounts you currently follow, if they had any before January 12, 2008.
It can be an eye opening peek at what people thought was important back then (besides lunch), when tweets were shorter (remember 140 max, hashtags did not exist, and URLs did not even link). In my own old tweets (in the mix) I saw references to early Flickr raving (has not changed) and many references to Second Life.
It’s all done via a long URL. To many people this is goop, but if you Read URLs you know it’s a call to a server search query and it is passing in the parameters of typically might come from clicking options on a form
https://twitter.com/search?q=filter%3Afollows%20until%3A2008-01-12%20-filter%3Areplies&src=typed_query
But right there I saw potential
This is startling and quaint at once- your own Twitter Time Tunnel https://t.co/EG5Ca7ndsS
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) January 12, 2022
I had this idea digging away, what if one could make a web site that assembled a URL like that dynamically- the default could be the current day in 2008, but with a set of menu selectors, it could let you perform the same task on any desired date, not just the one Anil chose.
Retro TV Time My mind association went to the old Irwin Allen 1960s sci fi show, The Time Tunnel. I most remember the opening sequence, and that 1960s set of the tunnel room and the people working at machines, computers. I don’t recall the plot much, except people traveled in time.
Ironically, as I read the Wikipedia article, the secret government project that built this was called “Project Tic-Toc” — how is that for some weird retro-futurism? There is interplay between scientists, army generals, and politicians who demand to know why so much money is being spent.
Two of the scientists, Tony and Doug, enter the machine, travel in time, but cannot get back. The episodes include the vain efforts to return them as they travel back (mostly) and sometimes forward in time, and as typical run into situations where the time travelers acts in the pass can affect the future (hello butterfly) and even interact with their own history.
The show was canceled before the scientists could ever be saved, so i guess Tony and Doug are still out there.
The Twitter Time Tunnel I just loved the trope of the machine, and jumping into it and being swirled back into the past. Thus my machine was made:
https://cogdog.github.io/twittertimetunnel/ When it loads, it is set to launch you back through the twitter machine to the current month and day, but in the year 2008. Like Anil’s example, it will give you what your current twitter followers were tweeting (if they wore) for that date (and earlier as you scroll back)
But you can also select any Month, day, and year (back to 2007) to search a different time. One change I made was to not use the “top” tweets option, which does some algorithmic sorting, just to the pure chronological listing.
Maybe the most ironic thing was one of my early tests, when the tunnel took me back to a tweet By Sylvia Martinez mentioning a “Time Machine” (likely the Apple back up stuff, but still, ironic, right?)
turning on Time Machine. this sounds like more fun than it is.
— Sylvia LibowMartinez (@smartinez) January 13, 2008
The Making Thereof I likely spent way too much time figuring out those three menus. I found some useful scripts for generating dynamically such menus from HTML Code Generator. I could see likely if I used them I might be able to do this without jQuery, but since I grabbed a regularly used template that makes use of Backstretch.js to fill the background with an image, that I would rely on jQuery.
The tricky part is getting the right number of days. So I had to make scripts that if the month was changed, it would need to check for the months of differing day numbers (so that April’s menu stopped ay 30 days and January 31). And of course February has to stop at 28 (unless it’s a leap year). So the day menu has to change dynamically if the month or year change.
But then the button script just has to get the date format from the menus that the twitter search URL calls for.
You can find it all at https://github.com/cogdog/twittertimetunnel and as usual is not elegant of very compact Javascript.
The Thing About URLs I can always reflect on some of the talks I remember hearing from Jon Udell when he was invited to speak to Gardner Campbell’s students, I think it was at Virginia Tech. Jon was making a case for something like URL literacy- that if you could understand what those variables mean in things like google searches and amazon searches and… well any searches, you could actually bend them to make them do what you want, just by editing the URL in the browser.
It’s the same thing at work for what Anil shared- his URL is based on the results you get from an advanced twitter search. He explains it well
So, the reason this search works is because you can search Twitter not just by date, but by filtering the results to just people you follow. Using “filter:follows” can let you do things like this, the top tweets of the last week from people you follow: https://t.co/mosf2bupEP
— anildash (@anildash) January 12, 2022
This can also be handy if you know someone you follow tweeted about a topic, but you can’t remember who or when. You can search for something like “filter:follows Prince” and find that tweet you lost. https://t.co/jbLpotZrJ0
— anildash (@anildash) January 12, 2022
When you have awareness / interest / willingness to tinker with URLs it means you are not limited to what the platform and it’s algorithms just hand you. I feel like I am rewriting or taking control of sites when I can do things like manipulate URLs to do things like force Google Images to give me only Creative Commons licensed results.
So when someone replies my first share of this with what sounds like “hey it won’t work for me because of the way I manage my follows”
I think it comes down to not following broadcasters. I almost exclusively follow mutuals, and regularly unfollow those who don't follow me back or those who are unkind (especially jokingly) and those who promote patriarchy/imperialism/royalty/colonialism.
— Chris Mahan (@chris_mahan) January 14, 2022
My brain goes– okay, rewire the URL, you are not helpless if you are willing to tinker in the URL field. You cant break anything!
You can come up with other filters to search, need not be follows. Here is one for "top" tweets from any accounts before January 14, 2008 that mention "lunch"https://t.co/y0QC2aHhhb
he point is using search terms for yourself, not just what the algorithms hand out
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) January 14, 2022
This is it! You can subvert the algorithms, you can make web services give you what you want, not always what it wants to serve. And you can get more out of the experience.
Glitched It And because this all started with Anil Dash’s tweet, it’s only fitting that I slide my project from where I lobbed it first (github) into the Glitch platform he is behind. The code is there, very easily remixable but you can spin the tunnel too at https://twitter-time-tunnel.glitch.me
What can you find in the machine? Will you see Tony and Doug chasing down historical figures? Or just a glimpse into what people were sharing, posting in the deep beginnings of Twitter Time.
Featured Image: My Photoshop modification of thumbnail of YouTube video The Time Tunnel Ep 19 The Ghost of Nero, the text with Hobo font, and Twitter logo found on Pixabay I cast it out with a CC BY license
As many of the blog posts here blabber on about, I rather enjoying both figuring out web tech solutions thought often, given my internet- and self-taught skillset, I end of more often than not fixing my own stuff, ongoing.
This happened recently after being excited to blog about my latest bookmarklet tinkering. I tend to be more eager to write things up than obediently testing them, and days after I was going back and making changes, perhaps trifling ones, that were just bugging me.
I was reminded of the well know XKCD “Duty Calls” comic (“I can’t come to bed, someone is wrong on the internet”) that I ended up making for no real needed reason, my remix version – that looks kosher given the originals are licensed CC BY-NC.
Remix from CC BY-FC licensed XKCD “Duty Calls” by Randall Monroe I thought I had an idea for a blog post for this, but I must have gotten so lost in making the graphic that I forgot.
That sense of accomplishment is much greater when it comes to fixing things out here in the “real” or “non-metaverse” world. I am far from being a naturally adept handyman (I see you Dave Cormier building doors), but like coding, I love figuring out solutions, and my path is nearly always enabled by looking up s***.
There is a cartoon character I heard of but never actually have seen on the screen named Fix-It Felix, described in a Disney fandom wiki
Fix-It Felix Jr. is the tritagonist of Disney’s 2012 animated feature film, Wreck-It Ralph and a supporting character in its 2018 sequel. He is the benevolent star of the classic arcade game Fix-It Felix Jr., in which he serves as Niceland’s resident handyman and the “nemesis” of Wreck-It Ralph.
With his trusty magic hammer, Felix has the ability to fix and heal any damage or ailment, hence his name.
https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Fix-It_Felix_Jr.
I heard of him long ago, like 2016, when I adopted this Felix from the Payson AZ Human Society.
2016/366/98 “Did Someone Say Go for a Ride?” flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) His story was that he continually ran away from his home as the owners left him alone. The last time he was found, his collar had gotten stuck on a fence he hopped.
I was camping that summer with friends, and someone in the group recognized my Felix. She lived in the neighborhood where his original owners lived and told me “Fix-It Felix” was his neighborhood nickname because he always was escaping and coming to other people’s houses. Being unaware of the cartoon I had no idea of the mis-match to the character.
Anyhow, I rather like the idea of fixing any ailment or damage with a magic hammer I just cannot seem to find that hammer in my tool room.
Today I must have come close to the hammer’s essence.
This 2 1/2 story home Cori and I moved into a year ago (built in 1917 as an Eaton kit home) has in our second floor bedroom an electric fireplace insert built into a rather ornate wooden frame. It’s needed in the winters as this room takes the brunt of the cold winds from the northwest.
Fireplace Back in Action flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) We thought we had seen it working on our walk throughs. The lights worked, but we found the heat came on for maybe a minute and cut out. Or not at all.
We started researching in November finding a replacement, but no one we contacted could get one the exact size, and with Covid we could not find anyone even with one we could order as a replacement not to mention either options being kind of pricey. None of the places I called seeking help offered a repair service.
I pulled out the unit and in the back found the manual! So I knew it was a Twin Star 33e01 model from 2005. The company’s web site offered no helpful support for old models. Most searches yielded PDFs of the manual I had or links to buy parts on eBay.
In the end, Fit-Alan’s magic hammer was of course… YouTube.
I was excited to find this video by “Channel Ron” who showed how to repair a very similar looking model
I have to say I appreciate his pace and instructional style, so many of these how to videos feel more like attempts to “build audience”. Ron is no frills but explained it cleary.
In Ron’s case, the non functioning fireplace problem was a problem of gunk, hair and dirt that clogged the fan that blows warm air. I felt assured enough by seeing how he popped the op off and cleaned his unit that I might find the same problem (and there are tons of comments to Ron from people who said they were able to fix their units the same way).
A few weeks ago I was able to open our unit, but I found no clogging or anything blocking the fan. The problem was obvious though– one of the electric wires that attached to left side of the heater was not attached. In fact, the metal tab it clipped to had corroded and was gone.
I could not see an easy way to firmly attach it, but I gave it an effort by pinching the clip of the wire to the stub of the missing attachment point. The heater did work, but I knew that the wire would not hold.
So we used it a few times, but eventually it stopped. I am sure the wire detached.
The next step was considering finding a replacement fan/heater part. You can find tons of sellers in eBay, Amazon. It’s not always clear if a model will replace a unit, I aimed for something 1500W or less (the spec on the original) and what looked like the closest match.
I narrowed it to a few and a Hongso unit looked promising and for $80 it seemed worth a try (weird, as Amazon goes, the price is like $30 more than what I payed). Most of the comments indicated some guess work as it came with no instructions, it had an extra wire, and the mounting holes would not line up.
Today was Fix-it Day.
This is a replacement for the fan/heater in our electric fireplace (off screen on left), ordered from Amazon. I could see where the black and white wires from the motor would connect, and guessed the two white wires that attached to the top and right side of the heater would just clip on. There was one extra black wire on the left. The wiring was pretty easy, the harder part was attaching the base since the holes were not the same. A bit of drilling, rummaging for metal screws, and figuring out how to get a screwdriver to work through a narrow slot.
Anyhow, I am rather stoked to report that the magic hammer was with me, because everything worked. It is all patched together, and is heating the room nicely as I sit here and blog.
This is hardly major repair work, but the fact we have a working unit with a relatively cheap replacement part feels really good. I may not have had the confidence to try this were it not for Channel Ron’s straight forward video.
Be it code fixing or appliance fixing, the internet is my magic hammer. What’s next?
Feature Image:
Fix-It Felix, Jr. flickr photo by Sam Howzit shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
