💾 Archived View for whirling.top › avalon › English › PastStuff › websiteposts › alphasmart-and-snee… captured on 2022-07-16 at 14:30:46.
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Here we go:) typing thison my new AlphaSmart 3000. It feels just like typing on any early computer. This one' s got a wonky space key, but I may be able to fix that… and about a minute of poking at it and I managed to get it sorted out. The keyboard has a thuddy feel to it that I actually quite like.Is taking me a moment to get used to having only a backspace key and no delete button. I'm enjoying this experience immensly. But so as to not type up a complete blog entry about the machine that I'm typing it on, let's talk about Sneepsnop! I participated in the mastodon holiday digital gift exchange this year, having not known about it early enough last year to play. Each person lists some things they like when they sign up for the sneepsnop so people have half a chance of creating or finding something for them that they might like. I was assigned a gift for @amsomniac and they had listed "weird noises, glitches, linux things, the ocean, radios". So I decided to create a sound file (calling it a song would be too kind) putting together open licenced sound clips. This was actually really easily done once I got Ardour up and running. (Figuring out how to get Jack functional was a pain in my bum, and I'm sure I'm still probably using something wrong) I'd played around with a free download of Ardour in the past and for an unidentifyiable "The UI just clicks with my brain better somehow" type of reason, I find it much more enjoyable to use than Audacity, so I went ahead and contributed to the project so I could really get some work done with it. I'm hoping to get some recordings with music out sometime in the near-ish future too, but I'm back burnering that at the moment. I found clips on Freesound.org and once I had them downloaded it was just a drag and drop, copy paste untill everything was layered in a way I liked situation. Very quickly I had a 5 minute track. I then decided I should make a small video to go along with the sound file I created. I initially downloaded shotcut for this, but quickly realized I really wanted to create an animation. So to duckduckgo I went and discovered that one of my favorite new play-tools, Krita, could do basic animation! So.. I spent waaaaaaay too long adding minor animation layers over some open licence images I found on pixabay.com and created a little sequence where Tux is laying down listening to a radio, wakes up for long enough to wish @amsomniac a happy sneepsnop, and then goes back to sleep, slightly restlessly for the remainder of the track. It was a very very silly project, but I enjoyed it immensly. After I'd made a completed video, which I would not describe as good, but which I did consider complete, I uploaded it to peertube [1], and sent it on to my sneepsnopee. Haven't heared anything as to whether or not they liked it yet, but goodness I learned a lot and am really proud of myself for completing a project using tools I was largely unfamiliar with on a fairly steep deadline. I hope everyone out there had a good holiday season and are enjoying beginning the new year. Looking forward to seeing what goals people have and how they're planning on achieving them as we all move forward. Speaking of watching other people, I have been seeing a couple of webring or at least making link pages to share other blogs. I don't know when I'll get around to it, but I do intend to do something much the same, not just my links on my coffee page. For now, I'm off to spit this out of the AlphaSmart and get my first post of the year up :) [1]: https://peertube.mastodon.host/videos/watch/a98c2a33-65a4-485e-bf24-b706a74c6a45