I've dabbled in working with Docker ever since it first became available for the Mac as Boot2Docker but I never actually did anything with it. Not too long ago I started working with the idea of creating a Docker app to store all the tools I use when writng or creating a front end application. In building this container I will describe the basics of building a Dockerfile and using it to interact with your local filesystem. This will also go in a Github repo in case I need to duplicate the project at a later date. Quick Docker overview...
I'm not a fan of doing this but there are use cases when we need to retrieve an image from the network and place it in the page. One case that comes to mind is the need to retrieve generated images from a real time application to display in web pages or other parts of a web application. In the example below I've added comments to the specific lines to discuss. javascript fetch'https://rivendellweb.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/IMG0813.jpg' // 1 .thenresponse => { return response.blob; // 2 } .thenimageBlob => { let img = document.createElementimg; // 3 img.src = window.URL.createObjectURLimageBlob; // 4 } // 5...
This post updates my April, 20016 post: Gulp Workflow: Looking at Gulp 4https://publishing-project.rivendellweb.net/gulp-workflow-looking-at-gulp-4/ and provides additional insights to what has changed and how to update existing Gulp 3 files to Gulp 4. Even though Gulp 4 is still at Alpha 2, I will begin moving my projects to Gulp 4. I will use Babel first to make sure the projects work with older versions of Gulp and will move away from Babel to using @std/esm as support for es6 becomes more widespread. Yes, Gulp 4.0 is real. Yes, it has been in development for a long time but it appears...
Does anyone remember Google Glass and their deployment nightmares? Stories like the Seattle restaurant that banned Google Glasshttp://www.cbsnews.com/news/seattle-restaurant-bans-google-glass-wearers/ citing privacy concerns presents one of the first challenges to public AR and VR but not the last or, by any means, the only one. For more information see this Huffington Post Summary Posthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/google-glass-ban/ and this Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jun/11/google-glass-banned-cinemas-us-drafthouse outlining why Google Glass was banned in theaters. But the changes go beyond physical comfort with the technology and reach deep into what the technologies can do to people's real lives. In A Rape in Cyberspacehttp://www.villagevoice.com/news/a-rape-in-cyberspace-6401665 Julian Dibbell tells the story of a "virtual" rape...
!Empty Star Trek holodeckhttps://res.cloudinary.com/dfh6ihzvj/image/upload/cscale,w500/fauto,qauto/holodeckempty?a=BAMAPqeE0 A holodeck from Star Trek: The Next Generation The Holodeck is a lot more complex than I thought it was when I first started working on putting these ideas together. The stories we tell, how we tell them and how much they become the reader/participant's stories is still being fleshed out and a lot of the work will fall to designers and developers. Story Ideas We've talked a lot about the how and what technologies to use when working in AR and VR storytelling. The following section will work on the what, ideas of types of...
We've looked at three events I consider ancestors to our modern AR and VR efforts, we've looked at some of the technologies, both hardware and software, we can use to create AR and VR experiences. Using beacons is easy. Telling stories with beacons, or any sort of AR and VR, gets more complicated. I've chosen to play with interactive story telling as a way to tell stories in the metaverse. Using tools like these allows me to build both the main stories and the branches for it... how we translate the stories is the real challenge. The more I think...
We've looked at using beacons and we've began our discussion of digital storytelling using Augmented Reality. Now we'll look at a fully immersive experience using Virtual Reality Gear. This section is less about code and more about the possibilities inherent in telling stories in this medium using a small set of technologies: Leap Motion to provide a set of interaction gestures WebGL 3D environments to build the world we'll be interacting in A-Frame Possible voice interfaces to add further interfaces to the stories we tell Speech Synthesis API Unity 3D environment As we explore these tools we'll also look at:...
One of the things that has really caught my attention is place-based story telling. How can a place tell a story that is different depending on the occasion or the type of story we want to tell. The two biggest technologies for this type of story telling are augmented reality and beacons/Physical web. Using beacons to tell a story Beacons, iBeacons or the Physical Web all refer to the same group of technologies that use Bluetooth Low Energy to broadcast information to devices and apps that are ready to use them. In this section I will concentrate in the Physical...
Building the holodeck I've been in and out virtual worlds since I was an undergraduate in the mid '90s and man how have things changed between now and then. This series of essays outline some of the historical context for some ideas for augmented additions to the real world and fully immersive virtual environment. In 1987 we were introduced to Star Trek: The Next Generationhttps://www.wikiwand.com/en/StarTrek:TheNextGeneration and the multiple new technologies it introduced, the holodeck chief among them. > A Holographic Environment Simulator, or holodeck for short, was a form of holotechnology designed and used by Starfleet. They were installed aboard...
Pandochttp://pandoc.org/ is a converter to and from different text formats. What attracted me to the tool is that it allows me to work with Microsoft Word documents and convert them to Markdown or any other formats. Figure 1 shows the formts that Pandoc converts to and from. !Pandoc Input and Output Format Visualizationhttp://pandoc.org/diagram.jpg Pandoc Input and Output Format Visualization Since I already work with Markdown this is a valued added tool as it allows me to convert Markdown to formats that would be very difficult or impossible to do without a tool. We'll explore converting Markdown to epub3, an ebook...
