#21 Mashups

For some reason I've had a real mental block about this lesson, so today I went back and looked at the Mashup Awards page again. This time I found a couple that were really interesting.

Quintura for Kids was a great search engine that let kids select a broad subject and narrow it down using tag clouds. For example, I selected 'around the world' from the main menu. Selections including holidays, Canada, countries, maps, history and others were shown. Clicking on 'holidays' gave me more options including Christmas, Halloween, Boxing Day and more. Selecting 'Boxing Day' gave me seven child appropriate web sites which described the history of Boxing Day and how it was celebrated. The page is bright, colorful and easy to use.

The next interesting mashup I found was Access Denied. This mashup was created by Global Voices Advocacy which is dedicated to protecting freedom of expression and free access to information online. The mashup maps countries where censorship has occurred and web sites have been blocked. When the bubble is clicked details are given about various sites that have been blocked. Yes, you guessed it, many of these are the Web 2.0 sites we have been learning about. The most commonly blocked site is YouTube followed by Flickr, Blogger, Typepad, Google Earth and many others. One very interesting thing about Global Voices is that they are using many of the Web 2.0 technologies on their website, including a blog, a wiki, and a mashup.

Also I finally got the Bookr mashup to work. You can see the results on this post. And now I'm finished with all the Learning 2.0 lessons! Yes!

Thanksgiving Day Basket

For some reason I seem to spend some part of every Thanksgiving break making a basket. The girls are always with their dad and it is so quiet that I feel the need to keep busy so I don't go nuts from the quiet.

This year I decided to do something a little different. For starters I actually made the base for this basket out of some scrap cedar left over from building my house. Since I haven't posted anything else about that building project I'll jump ahead and say that the staircase to the loft and the wall around it are finished in red cedar. I love the smell and the rustic look. But back to the basket. I finally found a router bit that will cut a 1/16" slot in a piece of wood which is exactly what is needed for a basket base. It's called, amazingly enough, a 'slot cutter.'

I started with a small scrap, about 2 1/2 by 4 inches to make a business card basket. An odd number of 1/4" flat oval stakes are woven in a continuous over two, under two pattern giving it a diagonal look. A 3/8" flat oval rim finished it off lashed with fine cane.

Now for the critique.

• The corners of the base should have been rounded. That would have allowed for a stake in each corner and made the weaving more even.


• The dark brown stakes really don't match the reddish purple of the base. So experiment with other stake colors.


• It is way too large because I'm not used to making a basket that small. In fact this is the smallest basket I've ever made. You could stack two lifetimes of business cards and still not fill it.

Any other critiques?

I usually give away most of the baskets I make, and then I never even remember what they look like. As I was reading some knitting blogs where knitters use their blogs to journal their knitting projects I thought that might be a great place to keep up with the baskets I make. I looked for basketry blogs, but couldn't find any.

Photoshop Actions

Like most other archives we have been working on digitizing some of our collections. Last year during our university's Centennial celebration we had many requests for photographs, and we scanned over two thousand images. All our scans are saved as 600dpi, RGB color .tifs which we keep as a master archival copy.

We then resample the digital image to make a 300dpi, grayscale, .tif use copy. We resample again to make a .jpg thumbnail, which is then linked to an Access database with the metadata for each image. We use the actions in Adobe Photoshop CS2 to batch these repetitive changes and speed up the process.

Hopefully the following directions will help someone else with this process. I always try to keep the action as simple as possible, and break up the process into two or more separate steps.

1. Open an image that needs to be resized or converted to .jpg or grayscale.
2. If the action window isn't open, open it under the Window menu as shown to the right. Alt+F9 is the keystroke to do the same thing.
   
3. The action window (below) has several buttons along the bottom. Click the 'new action' button beside the trash can, name the action and click 'record.'
4. From this point every mouse click will be recorded in the action. The image size can be fixed to a certain width or height, dpi can be changed or the mode can be changed from RGB to Grayscale. If you are changing from .tif to .jpg be sure to include 'save as' and 'close' as part of the action.
   
5. After you make the desired changes click on the 'Stop Recording' button which is the square on the left.
6. You have now created the action that you will use to batch process your photos. Before I run a batch operation I always copy the photos I'm working with to a new folder and use those copies to run the batch.
7. The batch command is under the file menu: click 'automate', then click 'batch'. The window below will open up.
8. In the second box select the action you just created and select the source as folder. You can then browse for the folder you just created.
   
9. Check 'override action open commands.'
   
10. Select 'save and close' as the destination and run the batch.
    
11. If you are converting from a .tif to a .jpg it is important not to check 'override action save as commands.'

Again I try to keep the action as simple as possible and it runs flawlessly. It did take many deleted actions before I was satisfied with the results and when we upgraded to CS2 I had to figure it out all over again, but once the actions are set up to your satisfaction they will streamline the process of resizing and converting mode and file types significantly.

Mashups - Bookr - Building on Faith

After looking at the second mashups lesson I decided to go back to Bookr and see if I could make it work. It did and I have a cute little photo book of the 2007 Building on Faith Blitz. Warning though, if you have dialup you may not be able to see it before next year. It works great with a fast connection though.

Minnie's Dedication

I have neglected to cover the finishing up of Minnie's home. Less than three months after the ground was broken for her new home she was able to close and get moved in. Of course there are still some small things that need tweaked.

The end panel by the dishwasher is just floating, it needs fastened, around the bathtub needs caulked, a shelf needs to be installed in the laundry closet (we got the shelf, but I haven't made time to put it in, prioritize!), and a few other small items.

Her dedication was October 20th at noon. It was a beautiful day and there was a great turnout. Our old pastor, Tiger wrote a beautiful letter to Minnie and her family which was read by Denise. Terry presented the owner's manual, Marty presented the key and Hank presented the family Bible.

About fifty people who had helped on the house came by to celebrate with her and her family. Jenny provided lunch and it was like feeding the fishes again (I told her to cook for 25-30), but everyone had plenty. The next weekend she finally closed and moved in. "O Yea!"

Gas Mileage

Since my car is now 12 years old and my daughter is getting her license in 2 weeks (yes, I am scared) I've been half-heartedly looking at cars. I say half-heartedly because over the summer I took the Dave Ramsey Financial Peace University classes and am really making an effort to get out of debt. On the good side I don't have much debt, except my mortgage, which seems huge to me, but on the bad side, with three teenage daughters there isn't much room to save anything. Especially the amount it would take to buy a car.

But that wasn't where I was going when I sat down to write this post. As you can probably guess from the title, I was going toward gas mileage. I remember the energy crisis of the 1970s when gas first started going up. Granted I wasn't paying much attention to gas mileage back then, but I also remember my parents buying a Toyota that got about 30 miles per gallon in about 1980.

That was 27 years ago. In 2007 the general consensus is still that 30 mpg is good gas mileage. Am I the only one who disagrees. Look at the computer industry, and the advances in speed and storage over the same time period. Look again at the prices, if anything they have gone down, especially when you compare what your money bought then and now. But the price of cars has doubled or tripled and we as consumers aren't expecting anything extra in the way of fuel efficiency for those dollars.

My daughter doesn't want to hear this, but I really don't want to buy a car until I can get one that gets 50 mpg at an affordable price. Riding a bike to work is looking better and better. Look at the benefits:

• It's good for the environment
• It's healthy (maybe I can lose that extra 25 pounds)
• It's good for my budget (right now I spend almost $200 a month just in gas)

Disadvantages:

• Time (but I walk about 1 1/2 hours a day already)
• Weather (on bad days I can drive)
• My kids and everyone else think I'm strange (but they already do, so what's new)

OK now I'm rambling, so it's time to get off my soap box and do something productive.

#19 Podcasts

After a lot of digging I found an interesting series of podcasts created by Palinet relating to institutional repositories. Unfortunately they only recorded 4 interviews and don't seem to be active now. But these interviews gave me a brief introduction to Digital Commons before the session we went to earlier this week.

The podcasts were interesting and I like the portability of them. I usually listen to books on my mp3 player when I walk, but one morning I downloaded all four podcasts and listened to them. Instead of searching for libraries, I usually search for archives (not an easy search, because you find lots of archives of things, but not archives as a subject) and archivists and there don't seem to be as many podcasts or blogs or anything relating to archives. But I am hearing more and more about Archives 2.0, so that should change soon.

On the lighter side I subscribed to the Lion Brand yarn Yarncraft Podcast about knitting and crocheting. The worst thing about all the web 2.0 stuff is the tremendous amount of information that is available. How do you weed through all the cool stuff and get down to just what you are interested in or need. Part of my problem is too many interests, but there seems to be such a large core of information that is needed just to be able to make good decisions about things we do everyday.

Ok, maybe the answer is to just do, not to think about what to do.