Category: Other Stuff

Tasty mash-up

I must admit that when I think of a “mash-up“, food rarely enters my head (even though most people in the UK associate the word “mash” with mashed potato).
Anyway, what do you get if you mash-up the following: a picture, an RSS feed, Helene Blowers, a cake?

Just in case no-one said this on the day, Helene — you look good enough to eat! 😉
I’m kinda curious how the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike licence attached to the image applies to all this… The licence allows you to make derivative works (e.g. a cake) but I guess you are not allowed to sell the cake. You have to share it (yay, I like cake!) and “distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to this one”.
So, does that mean the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County has broken new ground by creating the very first Creative Commons cake?
All the very best with the new job, Helene!

Move over Bernard Herrmann!

One of the sections in Brendan Dawes’ book is about generating images from music.
Whilst messing about with the “North by Northwest” images (see previous blog post), I began to wonder if you could create music from images?
Anyway, here’s the first 90 seconds of my replacement soundtrack for “North by Northwest” 🙂
It was created by grabbing a frame from the movie every half a second and working out the average colour of the frame. That colour is then split into its red, green and blue (RGB) components, and their values are used to generate a guitar tablature file which is pumped into the MIDI::Tab Perl module. The first chunk of the tab looks like this…

    D6: --1-5---3-4-4-4-4---4-4---3-4---3-3-3-
    A3: 0---1-2-3-4-4-----4-----4-----4-----4-
    E2: 0-----0-1---1-----1-----1-----1-----1-

Going for a 3/4 timing seemed to give the most pleasing output. That seemed appropriate, as Hitchcock often used waltzes in his films 🙂
I wasn’t too sure just how it would sound, but it’s actually not too bad!

“North by Northwest” squished

After reading Brendan Dawes’ “Analog In, Digital Out“, I’ve revisited the colours of “North by Northwest” (see earlier blog post).
Rather than squish every frame to a single horizontal line, this time each frame is squished vertically — see if you can spot the “crop duster” sequence:

( full sized version on Flickr )

Dear Facebook, Huddersfield is not in Northern Ireland

I was really tempted to create a protest group in Facebook but, for some reason best known only to themselves, the people at Facebook are insisting that Huddersfield is really somewhere in Northern Ireland…
stupidfacebook
Even though the correct option is there (“Kirklees, United Kingdom”), it always changes it to “Huddersfield, Northern Ireland” when you click on the save button.
I wouldn’t mind, but there isn’t even a Huddersfield in Northern Ireland!
To get to Northern Ireland from Huddersfield, I’d have to drive for about 8 hours, catch a ferry to travel 50 miles to another country, change all my money into a different currency, and I’d have to remember to take my passport with me.
So, please Facebook — Huddersfield is in England, which isn’t the same thing as Northern Ireland!!!

Librarians — in their own words

I’ve spent the last couple of days being inspired by Brendan Dawes‘ book “Analog In, Digital Out“, and playing around with ImageMagick and PerlMagick.
This evening, I felt like doing something for Kathryn Greenhill to commiserate with her for not winning the “Best Librarian/Library Blog” Edublog awards, so here’s what you get if you take ImageMagick, 30 minutes of furious Perl coding, a little bit of random font rotation, a suitable JPEG source image, and the RSS feed from Kathryn’s blog…
kg_001
I thought Jessamyn West‘s photo might also make for a cool textual mashup too…
jw_001
In other news, Michael Stephens has gone a little dotty…
dottymichael

“Engaging the Xbox generation of Learners in Higher Education”

Just a little pointer towards a report recently released by Jebar Ahmed and Mary Sheard in the School of Education at the University of Huddersfield:

New generation learners seem to be surrounded by technologies everywhere, at home, at school and in their pockets. Computers and interactive white boards are available in the classrooms, but how do these learners engage with technologies to actually learn? And what can we learn from them to inform teaching in HE?

The Executive Summary is available here.

OPAC keyword cloud

This is crying out to be done like the visual word map in AquaBrowser, but here’s a browseable tag cloud based on data from nearly 2 million keyword searches on our OPAC.
shakespeare performance
The code looks for other keywords that were entered as part of the same search (e.g. “ethics of nursing care”) to draw out the most commonly used words. For example, the most common keyword used with “performance” is “management”. The size of the word in the cloud is determined by how often it appears with the search keyword.
nursing
I’ve not removed keywords that generated zero search results, so the cloud for “acrobat” includes “abode”. (I’ve now removed zero result searches)
I’ll have to have a play to see if there’s a way of incorporating the cloud into the OPAC — for example, if you used a vague/general keyword such as “health“, then maybe the OPAC could suggest more specific searches for “health care”, “mental health” or “health promotion”?

Woohoo – my brother is in Wikipedia!

Not sure if he knows it, but I’ve just spotted that my older brother Simon gets a mention on the Pennine Radio Wikipedia page. Sadly he doesn’t appear in this video…
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYX3BUBkzAU]
…I can’t believe their original jingle was “Pennine 235, that’s the sound goin’ into your ‘ear’oles”!