Produce Yourself Dangerous 120607

Automation is now everywhere
Every computer application has a command line or a method that allows you to control the application directly and in a more complex way.
Buttons are just preset collections of commands.
Use automation to take a piece of text from the internet that is in the public domain from archive.org.
Produce Machine Poetry Rap
Microsoft Word has an automation feature that makes it easy to write a macro with
Here are my examples
So get some text and do some poetry. Do a poetry reading.

Human computer
If you can't programme things out side of Word you can draw a diagram
Some basic scripting concepts:
Frames and looping
Object orientated thinking
Logic if and or
Draw some instructions for an everyday task and ask someone to follow them you discover your unspoken knowledge
Alan Murray instruction books
When you have a reasonable diagram you can easily ask someone else or a community to help you make it
Sir Isaac Newton famously said "I have seen so far because I was standing on the shoulders of giants"
The history and philosophy of the internet is very interesting (Napier edit)
Reasonably easy and permissive to access
Inventing boom

Social Manufacturing
Open Projects
Processing (Ruby etc) (Blender, open office, Linux)
Like in life communities ignore lazy people. They love people who want to do something exciting and are prepared to do what ever it takes.
The methods concept is designed to help you out
Web image ripping method remember to think like a human computer
Web pages are built using html. Look at the source html and see the order of things.
Images are tagged with "img src=" links with "href=" and text is outside all the sharp brackets text
So you can look at this web site and its html and tell me what the link to the 12th image is.
ripWebImage(url, imageNumber) returns image
News example
There are methods for all sorts of things
Web cam method to get image from a web camera
So lets look at image manipulation and start with the pixels theory.
Images are made of pixels and they are described one after another.
They are actually in a straight line and it's just the heading that tells you when to start a new line.
So each pixel has a number that is a colour and we can play with that
Colour matching example
Histogram example
Background removal example

Interaction
Interacting with a computer is an easy trick
Discussion about how to do it
Why not use a mouse or a keyboard
Talk through some examples
Hacking a mouse and a keyboard on the web
Soldering iron, solder, wires, tin foil and plastic bags

Where shall we go next?
Sound Electronics Wiring ardiuno Hackers are Go