planet TAFE

September 12th, 2006

Another GIMP experiment. This time I took advantage of the cloudy weather to create a panorama of my workplace, Bathurst TAFE, before converting it to a planet (using Polar distortion) and plugging the result into fd’s Flickr Toys. The result: Planet TAFE.

Circling a star in the outer arm of a small spiral galaxy, planet TAFE is searching for intelligent life (’cos there’s bugger all down here)

Notes for future attempts:

  1. Take the panorama on an overcast day, or at midday, to minimise variations in aperture/shutter speed. Don’t forget to set the camera to manual mode.
  2. Don’t kick the tripod halfway through the panorama shot, or if you do, start over.
  3. Make a generous overlap between shots, about 50% seems to work well.
  4. Take the shots in an anti-clockwise direction (not essential, but it suits the default options for pandora)
  5. Try to take the photos when there aren’t too many students walking around (it’s hard to match them up otherwise)
  6. Start the panorama from an organic section (the trees would have been a much easier spot to blur and join the polar distortion than a section of architecture).

(tags: gimp photography tafe bathurst flickrtoys poster planetafe planet)

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On the professional development front, I found an interesting social website for educational bloggers: Popular Stories – EdBloggerNews. This is similar to Digg but for Education Blog posts, good for folks who love to read (and write) EduBlog posts but are finding it difficult to get through all of the articles in their RSS feeds. I’ll be watching it over the next few days to see if it’s got the critical mass necessary to be come a valuable resource.

(tags: aggregator blogging digg edtech education elearning news resources toread edublogs ***** TALO)

TAFE, TALO, Uncategorized, aggregator, bathurst, blogging, digg, edtech, edublogs, education, elearning, flickrtoys, gimp, news, photo, planet, planetafe, poster, resources, toread | Comment (0)

Creating a galaxy in a teacup

September 10th, 2006

 
The teacup galaxy: N310-B
I had a spare weekend to get together with the Gimp and this is the first offspring of that union (there’s a kind of pun here, but you probably need to have lived in the UK to understand it – the poms have a much different idea of what the word ‘gimp’ means than the yanks, in much the same way that ‘rubber’ means two different things to the two cultures).
 
To build the image I started with a picture of my favorite teacup full of black tea, taken under plain incandescent bulbs in my kitchen (this might not have been the best light but I was impatient – daylight would have made the exposure time shorter, and would have resulted in a better, more sharply focused image).
 
After downloading the image to my PC I went hunting for a galaxy to paste in – browsing through the Hubble space telescope’s fantastic, copyright free image gallery
 
Having found a likely candidate, I opened the Gimp where I resized the large image, and adjusted its perspective to look like a swirl in the teacup.

 
Then it was a matter of adding the teacup image as a new layer, selecting the tea, and making a gradient mask on it which would progressively reveal the galaxy in the layer beneath. 
 
A little smudging of the two mixed down layers and voila… a galaxy in a teacup.
 
I was impressed with the Gimp, and inordinately pleased with the results. For my next project I plan on making a storm in a teacup.
 
(tags: teacup galaxy tea stars cup saucer teaspoon stargazing gimp photo)
cup, galaxy, gimp, photo, saucer, stargazing, stars, tea, teacup, teaspoon | Comment (0)

Auto-blog entry from del.icio.us links

September 9th, 2006

Ha, lazy blogger trick #1: create blog entries without actually writing anything. Now I just have to come back every now and then to give a little spiel on why I found these links worthy of inclusion in my del.icio.us stable. Yesterday’s crop:

Scan, copy and fax with your camera phone or digital camera

a service that lets you capture information contained in paper documents or whiteboards. 1) capture the image using your mobile camera phone or digital camera 2) send the image to scanr 3) get back an email which includes a searchable digital PDF file of your image this works best with a high res image (1 to 2 GB), but looked promising for capturing that end-of-lecture mess you’ve created on the whiteboard – ready to post on your blog or something

(tags: scan tools pdf Mobile photo mlearning interesting todo)

artomat

retired cigarette vending machines that have been converted to vend art – pretty obviously, this link came about while writing my last post.

(tags: art artomat art-o-mat vending fun todo)

Mobile, art, art-o-mat, artomat, fun, interesting, mlearning, pdf, photo, scan, tools, vending | Comments (2)