based on cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo by cogdogblog: http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2904818586/

The StoryBox has been sitting for a few months in my closet. All alone.

But it is about to go on a big trip with me starting Friday, and I am revving it up for a brand new round of media collection. I’ve not yet put out the details on this, and many of them are still jelling. But what I know is:

• March 2-11 I will be in Yokohama Japan. The whole making of this trip was an invitation from Julie Lindsay to be a part of the 2013 Flat Classroom Project Conference. I’ve followed this project from its start, and have done a few things with Julie and Vicki Davis, but this is my first immersion. The conference has little in presentations, its a lot of workshops and hands on with teachers and middle school students coming from Japan, China, Indonesia, and India.
• Before the conference, I am slated for two days of visits/workshops at Yokohama International School, thanks to an invite from Kim Cofino.
• March 11-17 I am in Singapore with something set up to spend time with Jabiz Raisdana and compadres at UWC Southeast Asia. Hopefully a lot of stuff about creativity, blogging, photography, music, and whatever else.

  I’m also hoping to meet up with Clay Burell one of my earliest blog infulences and on my list of “people I’ve met online and in person”

• March 17-22, Hong Kong I’m visiting my friend and colleague Nick Noakes and doing a storytelling workshop at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. I have another one lined up for a group at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, plus a workshop/visit with colleague Ross Parker who I met on my first visit there in 2008. He has me slated for a session on Internet Openness and Storytelling for the International College of Hong Kong.

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

If you have not heard of this, I call it a Digital Time Capsule (see the 2011 intro video and other info at http://cogdogblog.com/storybox).

I’m eager to give the StoryBox a go while traveling and at some of these events. I’m thinking it will be interesting to collect both my own media and ones shared by others I meet, and see what kinds of common themes we can get between these different places. I’ve re-organized the local site that runs on the storybox. I am weaving a 3 step approach:

• Explore what is inside, to generate curiosity, to inspire ideas what to add, maybe as prompts for creative activity.
• Add new media to the StoryBox. Here you will find some suggested prompts that may help you figure out what to add. I will also have a way set up for people to contribute who are not in the vicinity of the StoryBox.
• Remix the media within, create something new, and add that back to the StoryBox. This is the most interesting part to me.

For some nudges, I started a list of prompts (this is a first draft):

• A photo of a recent meal.
• An audio recording of the sounds during your commute to work or school.
• A video showing us the view out your window.
• A photo of the tallest building or structure in the city/town you live in.
• A poem you wrote about what you like about the place you live.
• A video interview with someone special in your life.
• A photo or video of a mode of transportation you used today.
• A photo of your favorite book.
• A video of you or someone else telling a joke. The worse the joke the better.
• A recording of you playing a musical instrument.
• A photo of an open vista.
• A video tour of your school, office, workplace.
• A photo of a drawing you made of the most impressive place you visited.
• A photo of lucky charm, talisman, or something you always carry with you.
• A photo of your shoes.
• A video panorama of a sunrise or sunset view.
• A photo of an unusual object in a place you might not expect to find it.
• The sound of you and/or your friends laughing.
• An audio greeting in every language that you know.
• A photo of the palm of you hand with a message written on it.
• A recording of an elder in your life/family sharing the most important life lesson they know.
• A photo or video of severe weather.
• A photo or video of your pet.
• A photo of someone with their eyes closed, deep in thought.
• An audio recording of the sounds walking in a park or down a busy street.
• A photo of the most typical place tourists might go if they visited where you live.
• A photo of your kitchen.
• A video showing something fun to do outside.
• A photo showing your favorite place to sit and contemplate life.

Now you can only see what is on the StoryBox if you are within 150 feet of it (and I have turned it on). That’s what makes it special. But I do want to open it to others to contribute stuff, so I have a place for you to drop media:

• Create some content (e.g. text document, photo, audio file). Do not use your name to identify yourself, this is anonymous. Be sure to give your stuff descriptive or interesting file names; that is the only thing people will have to go by when they look inside the StoryBox
• Upload as many things as you like to dropitto.me/cogdog — use the password storybox.
• storybox (UNDERSCORE) tu8r (AT) sendtodropbox DOT com

I'm also going to be giving Jux a run as a tool to publish updates about the Box's travels (http://storybox.jux.com/)

Hope to see you in the Box!

I’ve still not come to a grand idea what to do with the media I collected last year in the StoryBox. Some I am using as I work on spinning new stories and tales in Cowbird (where I continue to lag a month behind last year’s schedule).

One of the gifts that has continued since I wrapped things up at the end of 2011 is that my friend and fellow traveler GNA Garcia has continued to send bits of media, photos, audio, and video from where ever she goes. Sometimes 2 o3 3 a week. Heck, I just got a funny one just a few minutes ago.

After watching the Unplug’d 2012 video she and Giulia Forsythe assembled I got inspired to use the same side by side technique in iMovie and remix a lot of the stuff GNA had sent me. Just a little thank you for being a faithful one Storybox contributor:

The key for this in iMovie (versions 8 and later I believe) is to go to the preferences and enable the advanced tools. This gives you the ability to do more when you drop clips in (I have used the PIP before to insert a video within another). If you drag a video or image clip over another, you get a menu of more choices:

Selecting Side by Side works well with GNA’s typical vertical format! In some ways this gives you aspects of video editing of multiple channels (I stack audio as well in iMovie- the audio options for ducking, fading, and controlling volume are very handy)

I know people who groan at iMovie, and I heard Andy Rush gush the last few months about the new Final Cut Pro, but I am able to do most of what I need to do for video editing and ds106 work with iMovie. I have tons of sympathy for my students stuck with Windows Movie Maker (which sadly in this decade still does not natively support MPEG4 video?)

Anyhow, thanks GNA! It’s a treat to see this little surprises arrive, without announcement or expectation, kind of like a little note.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by alexkerhead

I’m toying with a new idea for a public interaction device with the StoryBox/Piratebox but the DIY part is something I could use suggestions on.

The idea is to have a device out in a public space, that is within range of the wireless network created by the Piratebox, ideally like here house in a retro phone or telecom device. When someone picked it up, it would play a random audio prompt from a directory on the box. These would be in the form of questions meant to elicit a response, like:

• When you dream of flying where do you go?
• Tell me a time you cheated or lied.
• What is the place in the world that makes you feel the most relaxed?

e.g. all things meant to elicit anonymous audio responses. After the prompt plays, a greeting would say, “please press the green button to record a 3 minute response”. This would then be recorded, and transmitted back to the storybox (via ftp??).

Alan Liddell, student tech extra ordinaire at DTLT, is experimenting with a prototype mobile app to serve this function, but having a real retro device to me would be fascinating.

So the question is, what sort of thing would give the ability to download and play a random audio file from a given directory on the pirate box, be able to record a new audio, and send it back? The Raspberry Pi seems like an obvious choice, but I’d like to know what it would take to put this together. Another option might be some sort of netbook hidden in the base of the comm device.

Anyone want to help me build this thing? Hallo?

In exploring some new tools for rich media publishing, I took a return visit to http://jux.com a site for publishing magazine style media sites, that fill the screen. In many ways, it could be a blog-ish like thing, or a portfolio, or a tumblr that is not just another tunblr.

Maybe I don’t know what it is, that’s why I play with it. Each time you reload the front page, the items shuffle around a bit. And it also changes the display to fit a mobile browser

You have 6 different kinds of content, slideshows, single photos, video, articles (like a blog post), countdown (not sure yet what that is), and blockquote.

Images can be uploaded or yanked from photo sharing services; videos can come directly from youtube or video. There are some basic layout editing tools for fonts, size, colors (the fonts seem not all work across browsers)- not super sophisticated, but to me, geared towards doing simpler layouts.

So for my experiment, I am creating another site for the StoryBox, and playing with releasing some media that is from inside the box (single photo and a slideshow) and other things like the mashup I blogged about recently.

Jux also offers embed tools (though it seems to curiously be available only to the author when logged in, WTF?), like this summary of the PirateBox

(which sadly is cutting off the bottom of the text, the font sizing from jux appears to be inconsistent).

i’m going to monkey a little more with this as a publishing tool, it has a very “un-web page-ish” feel that appeals to me.

Uh oh, the people in my session are just tuned into their devices.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Awesome, that is what I wanted, my session was billed as a BYOT one. This represented the new plan I hope to have for the content I collected last year during my travels. I first thought when I got back, I would turn all the content back to the open… but one person in particular clued me into the thiung that made the content special was that is was NOT on the internet.

The “slides” for my talk are actually all housed on the StoryBox (it is a series of images and a jQuery slideshow gizmo) but I put a copy online as well. I also broadcasted it to ds106 radio and have an archive (hey @mgershovich, Always Be Archiving!)

Create Something from the Storybox presentation

Besides referencing my original video for the call to participate

I was happy to have a new video by Noise Professor where he explained his ideas for I Left This Pirate Box Here For You To Read

I find the whole PB concept to be entirely fascinating, both for its potential as an expression of the copyleft impulse, and from the perspective of culture jamming, but also as great example of an ephemeral phenomenon. A secret, hidden-in-plain-sight (from a network perspective, if not necessarily a physical one), and fleeting besides.

But the real goal for the session was to have people upload stuff (I tracked at least 31 new pieces of media), as well as asked them to download it and produce something new, or remixed from the content.

This is my new concept- the raw material stays on the StoryBox, so the only way to acces it is to be in its vicinity, but I am encouraging people to build stuff out of it and release it on the open web.

I made a few examples on the plan ride down, the bigges was a video made from photos shared from the New York City Occupy movement (shared by Michael Branson Smith) and my own photos/audio from seeing Occupy activity in Toronto and Asheville (NC), and a few more photos in the box of men in suits and police. But the real gem was an original song composed and performed by Mike Caulfield. Yeah, the box is supposed to be anonymous, but I knew the stuff was from them ;-)

I am releasing the remix I made here

I wanted more than video, and to show some easy examples, I discovered there are actually some nicely formed templates in MS Word, and I made a few fun ones using StoryBox content. This is a movie poster for a scary film about Cats, using a photo from the Box, done as a movie poster

click for PDF of movie poster

Wow, I never knew Word had this in it I made a few more (all PDFs)- Badges for a Crazy Conference, and an invitation for an artsy fartsy movie, plus a comic:

click for full size comic

I am not sure what folks will do with the stuff, I told them I would be around the conference te rest of the time with the StoryBox turned on, si I hope to see some remixes come back to it. If you do get access to my stuff and publish it online (that is my ultimate goal), please let me know via my Google Form http://bit.ly/storybox-published.

I heard some interesting ideas from at least two teachers, and someone from Des Moines who said they already had built three storyboxes to set up in their community to collect ideas for the city planning process- that is just stunning.

People seemed to have a lot of fun today (I sure did!)

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

The future of the StoryBox is subject for a new post. Let’s say my new approach is to find ways to release the content by making it available for people to create remixed new works out of the pieces. The original media shall remain in the box, in the time capsule, but can be released by remix.

Here I wanted to share three things I made out of the StoryBox content, as the first public examples.

This video includes a segment of a great set of acoustic guitar that I know by the voices is Grant Potter and Bryan Jackson. In the StoryBox I found a photos and videos of trains, and mountains (well I actually put them in), so it made for good match to the song.

I had really enjoyed the 40 minute set that Grant and Bryan did- they did a fair bit of talking in the middle which touches on the craft of music; and that theme is part of another audio recording with someone else I hope to pull together one day.

I was inspired to do this one because I recorded the audio myself- it was a computer generated voice from a water found on on the NYC High Line trail that gave the 2 minute lecture on water. A lot of the video was waterfalls and rivers I photographed in Washington State and Idaho.

My ast remix is not a video, but an animated GIF assembled from photos I took during my visit to the Durnin farm in Ontario

Go, Pigs, Go!

So once more, my StoryBox concept is to set up ways for people to have access to the box, and give them some process/guidance for making new stories out out the contents. I am going to be making this a project idea for my section of ds106; I am going to turn on the StoryBox in every class and am asking students to share some of their un-uploaded media. I am also planning to do this as a workshop March 6 at SXWSedu.

The last bit is that when I run the workshops or events, I am going to direct people to a form where they can let me know the URLs for places where StoryBox content has been let back into the wild– http://bit.ly/storybox-published

I am eager to see what emerges:

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

The StoryBox project will end its gathering of media at the end of 2011, so there is still time to share any media before the time capsule closes- see http://cogdogblog.com/storybox for ways you can drop media files.

During my 15,000 mile, 5 month 2 country, 29 state/province travels I collected a Shareskian “wack sock” of media- 1230 image, video, audio, document files:

• audio recordings: 127
• documents: 18
• music: 41
• photos: 891
• videos: 147
• remixes: 6

And there is room for more! But to keep it true to the time capsule concept, the last media I will add will have to get to me by Dec 31, 2011 (at 12:59:59)

What happens then? My plan is to return all of this content online, in a yet to be created web site that would allow, ideally, people to add tags/descriptions to help characterize the content and use tools to build new content out of that (e.g. remixes). I am hoping this is something that Omeka might provide (expect an email soon, Patrick! I might need help).

I realized early that the default file list view might be unwieldy, so from the start I have been moving content into subdirectories by media type. Still, even shorter file listings are hard to scan, so over the last few months I have been creating graphic browsers for the media types.

I did find that the single view of 800 icons for the photos was a drag to load (e.g. when I had Vicki Davis’s students all hit the box at the same size, that won for a PirateBox stress test), so I have been adding a paged pagination, involving some dusting off of my Javascript skills- because the PirateBos is a python based server, and I neglected to learn python, andy interaction I have done has been in HTML and JavaScript – but I have a lot of things humming now.

For the photos I run a local php script on the mirror of the StoryBox on my laptop; this script (based on one from WebCheatSheets) is used to generate 800px preview and 100px thumbnail copies of all photos. What I do is have a directory for new photos I plan to make thumbnails for, and another one to write the new files to (“thumbs”), and this make_thumbnails.php script at the top- I can call it from a localhost/makethumbs.make_thumbnails.php url on my machine:

<?php
// credit to http://www.webcheatsheet.com/php/create_thumbnail_images.php
function createThumbs( $pathToImages, $pathToThumbs, $thumbWidth,  $thumbHeight )
{
  // open the directory
  $dir = opendir( $pathToImages );

  // loop through it, looking for any/all JPG files:
  while (false !== ($fname = readdir( $dir ))) {
    // parse path for the extension
    $info = pathinfo($pathToImages . $fname);
    // continue only if this is a JPEG image
    if ( strtolower($info['extension']) == 'jpg' )
    {
      echo "Creating $thumbWidth px image for {$fname} <br />";

      // load image and get image size
      $img = imagecreatefromjpeg( "{$pathToImages}{$fname}" );
      $width = imagesx( $img );
      $height = imagesy( $img );

	  if ($width > $height) {
		  // calculate thumbnail size for landscape orientation
		  $new_width = $thumbWidth;
		  $new_height = floor( $height * ( $thumbWidth / $width ) );
	  } else {
	  	  // calculate thumbnail size for portrait orientation
	  	  $new_height = $thumbHeight;
	  	  $new_width = floor( $width * ( $thumbHeight / $height ) );
	  }
      // create a new temporary image
      $tmp_img = imagecreatetruecolor( $new_width, $new_height );

      // copy and resize old image into new image
      imagecopyresized( $tmp_img, $img, 0, 0, 0, 0, $new_width, $new_height, $width, $height );

      // save thumbnail into a file
      imagejpeg( $tmp_img, "{$pathToThumbs}{$fname}" );
    }
  }
  // close the directory
  closedir( $dir );
}

// give php extra elbow room
ini_set('max_execution_time', 0);
ini_set('memory_limit', '-1');

// call createThumb function and pass to it as parameters the path
// to the directory that contains images, the path to the directory
// in which thumbnails will be placed and the thumbnail's width.
// We are assuming that the path will be a relative path working
// both in the filesystem, and through the web for links
createThumbs("./new/","./thumbs/",100, 100);

// now use the same function to make the preview size versions

createThumbs("./new/","./previews/",800, 600);
?>

Anyhow this creates a 100px preview and a 100px thumbnail for all of the new images to process.

The way all of my browser directories work is I run another local php script that generates a _gallery.js data file, which is just file to declare an array of all file names for each document type. I can then reference this in any web age as a way to have access to all of the content types. Each time I recreate the data file, I shuffle the file names so it makes the content more random.

For photos, the gallery looks like this; it presents 80 thumbnails at a time:

and clicking any thumbnail presents the 800px preview in a thickbox overlay:

It might be hard to see in that screen shot, but at the bottom are “next” / “back” link so you can wade through the images like a slideshow, and there is a “random” link to pick a random photo. And there is another link to download/view the full size original.

I’m still tinkering to get the thickbox placed right on a mobile browser.

I began to think a few weeks ago that I could do this for all of the media types, if I found a way to generate thumbnails for any kind of file. I tried a few apps, and did not get far, but through some googleing I found a command line interface that uses the built in thumbnail generator the OS X finder uses- qlmanage. I found some sample scripts from superuser that I mamanged to do a few one at a time, but thought this could be batched.

I mucked around a bit with some shell scripts- one challenge is that file names with spaces in them cause problems; with some more poking around the internet, I found a one lin script- mine is called “makethumbs.sh” and I have that in a directory with the source files in a directory called “new” and a writable directory named “thumbs” for the icons to be created.

#!/bin/bash

find ./new -type f -print | while read i; do qlmanage -ti "${i}" -o ./thumbs; done

I am not even sure I can explain it, but it works!

So I put all files I need to create icons for in one directory:

I open terminal, type cd and drag the icon for the containing folder so I get to the local directory, and then just run:

sh makethumbs.sh

It generates progress statements as it does its work, and I get a set of 110px thumbnails for all document, video, graphic files:

So my new video page has thumbnails for each video:

Each thumbnail links to a thivkbox overlay that plays the mp4 using the JW Player (which should provide flash and HTML playback):

It features the same navigation and random link option as the photo browser.

I was able to do the same kind of display with the documents, except the thumbnails simply link to the file, but ti works for pdf, rtf, txt files I have collected:

The last browser is for the remixes, which for now are either mp4 videos or gifs (the animated kind). Tis required a little more mumbo jumbo to do the right kind of embedding, but it works with both media types:

so a video would load with the JW Player, but an animated gif appears with an IMG tag. This is one I made from a series of images I took at the Durnin farm

The last one I need to do is for the audio files; there are no relevant icons, so I may do a generic one and list the file name in the playback browser.

I’m still tinkering with this, but now that I have all of the media types in a single .js file, I have been able to create basic HTML pages that display one at random, which can be called from any web page I create via a link, or used in the chat for an activity.

I’m also confident I can create a simple version of Five Card Flick Stories that can run on the StoryBox- it would not be able to write/save any stories, but could provide the HTML to upload to the storybox as a final– yes, I think that would work.

I am having a lot of fun with this- and I wish I could thank people who regularly sent me stuff. Like GNA who kept a steady stream of videos and audios in her travel, Giulia Forsythe who submitted lots of drawings and the first remix, Bryan Jackson and Grant Potter for their recorded music, Leslie for her lovely PirateBox song, Andy Forgrave for a variety of files — and everyone else along the way who clicked the “upload” button (I am forgetting a lot of you, sorry).

This is more fun than canines should be allowed to have.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

My visit here in Camilla Georgia was exciting enoiugh with yesterday’s tour of the alligator farm, but today topped that easily. Vicki Davis invited me to where much of her magic happens, at Westwood High School.

The first hour was spent with the entire school (elementary through high school) taking in a performance of “The Little Mermaid” that the theater group is going to be doing in a state competition. It was energetic and had everyone engrossed (well I felt that way).

But the highlight for me was getting a chance to do a demo of the StoryBox for 2 different classes of Vicki, in her computer classroom. I tried this one differently, by only telling them the basics of what it was, not doing a demo. The point was to get them to join the network and explore. And maybe contribute.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Here is a snippet of the activity recorded as audio:
StoryBox at Westwood High School

The kids got the “how” part quickly, and some went for the videos, most looked at the photos. Most popular seemed to be the roadkill, the double wide sheep, the kid holding the cats, the guy with the blue hat.

And did they ever upload stuff! This was more content then ever came in during a demo.

I liked how Vicki draws them into reflecting on the what the box might mean, or asking them questions about privacy online.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

This was also the biggest stress test- there must have been 25 connections going in the second class, and it did get bogged down where some computers were not connecting (rebooting the box helped). BUt in a few cases the load time was really slow. Painfully slow.

One fix I need to do is to re-organize the photos. Right now, I run a script on updates that makes thumbnail version of all new images, but the links are alway to the full sized images, which can be upwards of 3 Mb. What I think I will do is make the default viewing size 800px wide, and provide a link to the full size for use when people might be doing editing. On the drive down, I formulated how I want this to work, and I just need to crack open my rusty Javascript skills.

I am still hoping as well to try my hands at some python scripting.

But really today was all about getting that vibe of the high school experience (I am convinced I attended in the neo-lithic age). And mostly, a heap more respect of al that teachers like Vicki give, role modeling and being tough. And how important teachers are, it is so easy to underestimate what they do.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I’m eager to see what the kids shared in the box, I am diving in!