Mar 11, 2013
Tonight’s problem: how do I make a subtitled animated GIF from a streaming TV show?
- Google Chrome: Watch TV Show with Random Streaming Site
- QuickTime Player — ⌃⌘N — New Screen Recording
- QuickTime Player — ⌘T — Trim
- iMovie (Make a new project and drag in the screen recording)
- iMovie Share > Export Using QuickTime… > Export drop-down: “Movie to Image Sequence”
- Finder — Applications Folder > Adobe Photoshop CS5.app > ⌘I Get Info > ✔ Open in 32-bit mode
- Adobe Photoshop CS5 — File > Import > Import Video Frames to Layers
- Make a layer with the text of the subtitle on it and move it to the top of all the layers
- Animation Palette Menu > Match Layer Across Frames…
- File > ⌥⇧⌘S Save for Web & Devices… > GIF 128 Dithered
…ridiculous. Someone should make me an app for that.
I would’ve stopped sooner, but the GIF’s content was relevant to the problem.
edit: all that and it doesn’t even show up right. I give up.
Mar 6, 2013
Richard Strauss — Don Juan
Berliner Philharmoniker
Daniel Barenboim, Conductor
So I must not be the first person to have this horn call stuck in their head. I searched “don juan horn” and Berlin’s got it nicely cropped just for people like me. Thanks, Berlin Philharmonic. You get me.
In other news, I need to buy myself a subscription to Digital Concert Hall…
Mar 3, 2013
“Give A Little Love.” Abandoned song from 2010 (outtake from ADP?). Found on old hard drive. Break me off a piece of that Kit-Kat bar.
Feb 28, 2013
We vainly try to hold a shaking umbrella over forms of difference that are rapidly blowing away with the vectoral winds. And then we find out that the umbrella of identity has blown away, as well.
This new experience of difference is an experience of an active trajectory between places, identities, formations, rather than a drawing of borders, be they of the self or place. This is antipodiality. Antipodiality is the experience of difference created by the vector. The acceleration of the vectors of transnational communications makes this antipodiality more common, from Kosovo to Kansas. With satellite TV beaming into every part of the globe, with the Internet spreading from west to east, many people are experiencing it. In the overdeveloped world, both the culture of everyday life and the culture of scholarly thinking about the present seem to me to betray the traces of unease if not downright paranoia about antipodiality. Yet it is the emergent experience that yields new possibilities for art and life.
— McKenzie Wark, (from “To the Vector the Spoils”)
I came across this quote in my reading and absorbing for a paper I am writing for Colin Koopman’s NetPhi seminar. The context is about the power of “vectors,” Wark’s conception of a new way in which we order perception.
A “third nature” is emerging, one of new patterns of proximity, prosperity, and poverty represented by the relations and flows of information, money, jobs, and livelihoods. The focus is no longer on sources or destinations, but the flows between them.
Feb 21, 2013
tUnE-yArDs — Bizness
Feb 20, 2013
“As we’re talking about all these ecologically sound companies, we really need to think of the Internet as an environment that we need to protect, and if we want to continue to make money on the internet, we need to think about hybrids and how we preserve this kind of openness. It isn’t just about running around and chasing deals.”
Feb 10, 2013
Brian Eno — Ambient 1: Music for Airports
We have this album on cassette tape in my living room. I discovered that on the inside of the cassette case is a fold-out with graphical representations of each track on the tape. It’s cool when artists try to tell me about their ideas in more than one way.
Also, I kind of want to listen to this in an airport now.
Feb 7, 2013
America — A Horse With No Name
Here’s an interesting problem I was having for a few weeks:
I had a very specific melodic part of this song stuck in my head (the la-la-la part). I didn’t know the track name or the artist who sang it.
How do you input a melody you have in your head into a search form? (short answer: you don’t really, yet)
To expand the problem outside the scope of my specific situation, I believe the real constraint here exists in how we relate to our input methods.
Musical ideas have always been challenging to externalize. Some of us spend years of our lives studying an instrument, and still feel like we aren’t accurately communicating our internal ideas to the external world. Add another layer of mediation to work through (a digital layer, in this case) and this communication becomes even more difficult.
I knew I had first heard this song on my media server — I curate a 35,000-item digital media library with my roommate on a server in our living room and it’s a great way for us to share taste and discover new music. However, unearthing one song in tens of thousands without any search terms is not a realistic task.
I ended up singing to my roommate like an idiot and describing that it “sounded like Fleetwood Mac” and he knew right away what song it was. It worked because we’re both musicians. Human still trumps machine, I guess.
The question still remains: how do we digitize this process?
How do we digitize musical ideas for the purposes of informatics?
Jan 28, 2013
2012 Portland Youth Philharmonic Alumni Orchestra
Jacques Offenbach — Overture to La Belle Hélène
David Hattner, conductor
performed on 26 December 2012 at Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall
I still get giddy when videos from my performances come out. Here’s the video from the most recent PYP Concert-at-Christmas. We alums look pretty good, for a bunch of old scrubs!
Jan 27, 2013
Apple 1984 Ad
What an ad. I came across this again this weekend, and as I thought about its context, I realized this was a pretty gutsy move for a computer company in the 1980s. When will we see another computer company making statements like this?
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