Google Translate Fail

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In this 2 star assignment, I had to find a website that was in a foreign language and laugh at how awful the translation is when pressing the translate to English button using Google Chrome. This was pretty easy assignment because I already had an idea what website I was going to look at in a different language.

That site was the Spanish NBA website, which I had heard about in one of my other classes this semester. So I went to the website using Google Chrome and pressed the translate button after reading what it said in Spanish. I was able to read what it said because I took Spanish in college, and I had the ability to read Spanish very clear after taking the course; the only thing that I have trouble with in Spanish is speaking and listening to it.

From translating it to English, the only mistakes that I could find was examples where the English translation didn’t pick up some of the Spanish, so it was kept in Spanish still.

Other than this clear mistake, there weren’t any other mistakes on the website, so I have to give credit to Google for having a pretty accurate translation tool. For 2 stars, this assignment was characterized perfectly and I wish there were more easy assignments like this one. Here is a link to the website where I used the Google Translate.

Spanish NBA Link

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Google Says … I am Not a Number

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“Google … I am not a Number …,” animated GIF by @aforgrave

I like Visual Assignment 1244: Illustrating Odd Autocompletes. I’ve done it a couple of times before, although I can’t find any examples in my Media Library and it’s not showing up in the Assignment Bank examples. Maybe it’s in the Assignment Bank more than once? Like maybe in the AnimatedGIFAssignments?

For this one, I didn’t necessarily illustrate the odd autocompletes, but there are a couple good ones in there.

“I am number four.” (Six would not say that.)
“I am not a robot.”
“I am not a nugget shirt.”

Anyway, I knew what I was expecting with this one, and Google did not disappoint. The real fun was getting that tiny little visual summary of the opening credits to animate in the search results. (2 & 1/2 Credit Units)

Process

This challenge is essentially driven by adding letters one at a time into the Google search bar, but taking a screen shot after each new letter so as to capture the autocomplete suggestions and hopefully capture some interesting gems. I also like to try to capture the odd text cursor, and put in a few “pauses” where the cursor blinks as if waiting for input. That’s simply done by repeating two successive frames (one with the cursor and one without) a couple of times. A 0.5 second interval seems to be appropriate.

Image Capture Tools: Snapz Pro X2 (left) and Skitch (right)

~~Snapz Pro X~~ Skitch?

My long-standing screen capture tool of choice, Snapz Pro X, doesn’t play nice under the latest versions of Mac OS X, and unfortunately it appears support for updates is not forthcoming, which is sad. I’ve used it for over a decade.

Recently I’ve been making use of Skitch for my screen captures. My limited familiarity with Skitch has me having to pause after each snapshot and save the file out to a determined location. (Snapz Pro X and even the native OS X screen capture tool just save to a predetermined folder automatically.) Given that the save-each-capture-every-time slows things down considerably, I investigated the Skitch integration with Evernote. (Turns out Evernote bought Skitch 4 years ago.) Authenticating Skitch with your Evernote account allows for a single “Save” button, and the files go to Evernote automatically, numbered in sequence. Fortunately there was an easy Save Attachments command in Evernote that let me get the images back down out of the clouds. The nice thing about Skitch that makes it work nicely is the Previous Snapshot Area command, which allows you to grab successive images from the same section of the screen — something that really comes in handy when you want to layer them for animation later on. And the integration with the cloud and access on multiple platforms is a benefit when you need to share files between devices. But I think I’ll be investigating something that I can count on locally for when I’m deep in the throes of creating. Uploading just to download don’t make no sense.

In the meantime, I think I need to find the duplicate entry of the Google autocomplete assignment. I know I’ve done it before. Or someone I know has.

#BeSeeingYou

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August 2013 GIF Challenge #14: Fruedian Alphabet

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“Friends are True Friends” animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina

Well, I went to the Assignment Bank to get today’s assignment, and the Animated GIF Assignment 977 “Fruedian Alphabet” by Tom Woodward (@twoodwar)looked like fun, except for the typing in “I Hate …” part, so I changed mine to a nicer one “Friends Are True Friends” and I got a whole bunch of nice stuff to make a great GIF for my Friends, New Friends, Open Friends, True Friends, Super True Friends, Still True Friends, Real Friends, and other people who aren’t my Friend yet but will be one day.

I hope you like it as much as I had making it for you. All the words came with the pictures just the way they appear, except for if I changed them like I say below. But the words right at the end are my own words to my Friends.

All of the Images I Found

Here listed down below is where I found the images using the Google. Some of them I tidied up a bit to make them look less pixel-ly or whatever the problem was. Or made them bigger. Or smaller. Or square to fit. Or got rid of a border. Or re-did the text in a cleaner font. Or made the colours more the same if they weren’t. Or made a transparent back. Or like I said before, whatever.

But they’re not in the same order as in GIF. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

• http://tomatokisses.deviantart.com/art/true-friends-131627197
• http://hdshootz.blogspot.ca/2012/08/true-friends-true-friends-wallpapers-hd.html
• http://smsbyheart.com/sms/friendship-sms/
• http://www.wordsonimages.com/photo?id=112057-We+live+in+fact+in+a+world+sta
• http://www.wordsonimages.com/photo?id=104992-True+friends+vs+fake+friends+q
• http://www.wordsonimages.com/photo?id=90575-An+honest+answer+is+the+sign+o
• http://www.wordsonimages.com/photo?id=2334-hard+times+will+always+reveal+
• http://www.cytguides.com/MakingTrueFriends/
• http://m7mdghazi.blogspot.ca/2011/01/what-true-friend-is.html
• http://www.dudelol.com/a-true-friend
http://www.celebquote.com/11506
• http://www.fanpop.com/fans/zanesaaomgfan/gallery/image/653739/lol
• http://www.petamall.com/memorials.asp
• http://www.fbmaza.com/Cover/1071/A+True+Friend
• http://clarkbunch.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/true-friends.jpg?w=583&h=587
• http://lurieen.blogspot.ca/2008/09/poem-true-friends.html

My message at the end is true.

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The Good-Looking Internet Committee

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It’s remix time! For my first remix assignment, I’ve decided to Create My Own SuperPAC!

The handy-dandy Super SuperPAC Name Generator mentioned in the assignment was very helpful, as I didn’t have any solid ideas for how to approach this. It generated the following gems:

Hype The Nanny State Foundation
Rock Free Pizza Horde
Resurrect Outdoor Grilling Collective
Enrich The Stars and Stripes Foundation
Super Chill Not Being Tread On Horde
Ebullient Not Listening Legion
Good-looking Internet Committee
Affirm The Purple Mountain Majesty

Each of these names was fabulous in its own way, but I decided to go with Good-Looking Internet Committee. It just seemed to have so many possibilities. The SuperPAC content follows, but first I wanted to discuss the sources.

It was very difficult to find usable material. The poster was easy, but creating a video remix is challenging. I’ve done it before (my favorite being Chewbacca Explains It All), and every time it takes significantly longer than I expect to find clips that I can use, and I usually have ideas for sources that I end up having to cut out entirely because they simply don’t fit.

In the case of the political ad, I wanted to use a number of clips of celebrities (after all, anyone associated with the cause should be good-looking). I might have eventually found clips from each celebrity I brainstormed, but it would have required watching *a lot* of footage. And even then, sometimes it seems like a good fit until you start editing your mash-up, and then suddenly everything falls apart. There was an interview with Leonardo DiCaprio that I thought was perfect for this, and I ended up not using a single soundbite. (And I’ve misplaced the details on it, so I can’t link to it. The clip is from an interview he did with The Early Show about The Departed, available on YouTube if you feel like doing some digging.) I ended up using Matt Damon’s rant on Sarah Palin and an hilarious Tim Gun video from his Liz Claiborne days. And that was it.

I’m happy with the result, but man, that was a lot of work.

The Good-Looking Internet Committee

A SuperPAC For the Information Age

Platform: Who cares about “open access”, online piracy and copyright compliance, or freedom of information? We want the Internet to be good-looking! And we don’t mean attractive web design. We want the Internet to only feature good-looking people.

Candidates We Support: Those who are attractive, or have attractive spouses (let’s be real, Obama is not much of a looker, but Michelle is a fashion icon)

Candidates We Oppose: Those who only care about SOPA and whatever the ITU might be up to, and can’t be bothered to put some effort into their personal appearance. We’re looking at YOU Donald Trump.

War Chest: We invested all of our funds in Facebook stock. Oh well.

Principle Donors: The Internet. That’s right. Cuz the Internet cares about this. (To clarify, “the Internet” is Google, YouTube, Facebook, Huffington Post, Gawker, Perez Hilton, 4chan, Reddit, yada yada yada.)

Ad that you will see at least three times every time you watch anything on Hulu:

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Wait, Where’d That Pioneer Come From?

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The Assignment:

This assignment by shannotate is as follows: “Photoshop someone(s) (or something(s)) into a picture that isn’t supposed to be there.” I thought the original photo produced was absolutely hilarious!! apparently, the Chinese government took pictures of three officials inspecting a road. When the propaganda people got to them, they said the background wasnt interesting enough, and proceeded to crop the officials out and change the background and their positions. The chinese public noticed and photoshopped these officials EVERYWHERE, on the moon, in natural disasters, with dinosaurs, and even President Obama. I was cracking up so much in class that I decided to do this assignment with our pioneer: Grace Hopper. Enjoy.

The Process:

I started by finding a full body picture of a pioneer and ended up with the same picture of Grace Hopper used by our professor for the Triple Troll Quote. I then proceeded to open photoshop and carefully crop her body out of the background. For this process, this entire assignment actually, I heavily relied on the polygon lasso crop tool. I zoomed in very close, and cropped as I went.

Then I needed to choose pictures to put her in. Since the original picture is black and white, I did a google search for Famous Black and White Photos, and found the one of Iwo Jima and Winston Churchill first. Considering Grace’s military history, I thought these were suitable to add her in. But only pictures where she fits suitably wouldn’t be too much fun, so I added in other famous pictures. Finally, for a little excitement, I saved MC Escher’s Relativity piece.

I adjusted her size in the original picture of her, then pasted her into these scenes. To make her covered by the foreground, I lowered the opacity on graces layer, and used the polygon crop tool to take out parts of grace that I wanted covered by the original picture. Finally I returned the opacity back to normal. For every image, I adjusted the grace’s size on the original photo, then pasted it and cropped to fit the scene. I still don’t know how to change the size, and orientation of just a single layer, can anyone help me with this problem??

For the last photo, I meticulously adjusted Grace’s rotation 5 degrees at a time to fit in the right angle on the staircases, flipping horizontally to get her facing the other way. Using Image>Rotate Canvas.

The Story:

Really if you haven’t checked out the original photo for this yet, you really need to. I was hysterically laughing in class when I saw this, and thought it would be perfect for my last DS106 assignment of the pioneers.

Grace Hopper was a pioneer of programming languages. Perhaps this blog is possible through her foundations. Other programming built off her designs and possibly led to HTML and other languages. I had a lot of fun inserting her into these historic photographs. It started with relevant images such as Iwo Jima and Churchill- She worked on programming in the Navy during WWII. Then I slowly led to more absurd pictures where she just doesn’t belong. The last picture really embodies the assignment I feel. Take pictures of people and just throw them around every different direction and post ‘em up!

I hope more of my classmates can complete this assignment, I’m sure that we can find ways to incorporate it into the next sections of the course. Perhaps someone can do the founder of Megaupload, Kim Dotcom in pictures all around the world.

Photo Credits:

Original- http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/admissions/what_is_cs/FamousWomen.html

Churchill- http://wickedreport.com/top-10-world-most-famous-photos-ever/

Iwo Jima- http://www.montney.com/marine/iwo.htm

Babe Ruth- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2Ruth1948April.jpg

Streaker- http://lh4.ggpht.com/_9F9_RUESS2E/SrfIXxndMYI/AAAAAAAABL4/Y_w1L86Dm-k/Classics-in-LEGO-Twickenham-Streaker-real.jpg

Kosovo Refugees- http://wickedreport.com/top-10-world-most-famous-photos-ever/

MC Escher- http://www.worldgallery.co.uk/art-print/Relativity-180591.html

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The Evil Apple

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Dear DS106,

Don’t be afraid of the takeover of Google. A far greater threat to our world is the evil, all powerful Apple. You see, money is the root of all evil, and Apple has a few billion more than Google.

Back in the 1990s, Apple was a sad place. The computers were awful and a joke. But then, The Almighty Jobs was begged back to his company. He slowly reinvented Apple.

Apple’s CEO The Almighty Jobs was basically the entire company. This man was a noble man. He only paid himself $1 a year. But, soon we all realized that actually this tricky guy made millions of dollars a year in other ways.

The Almighty Jobs asked us to “think different.” Which actually meant, BUY the ipod, iphone, itouch, mac book, and every new version that they came out with twice a year. The genius behind this was that even if you weren’t sold on the mac computers, you still had to have an ipod or iphone. We all got sucked into their branding of a lifestyle.

And, now they have not only taken over the market, pushing out worthy competitors, but they have also made policies to take away control from users. There are no other options. They have total control over apps and iTunes music.

Capitalism at its best.

You don’t have to be afraid of Google yet, but be afraid of Apple.

Think Different,

Jessica

*Written on a MacBook

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When In Rome: A Street View Story

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I had been playing around with the idea of using a combination of Google Street View and sound effects from the Freesound.org project for awhile now. Today’s news that Google now has Street View inside of famous landmarks is all the prodding I needed to start playing. My recommendation is to wear headphones and watch this full screen if possible.