Thing #10

And now, Thing #10: Play around with Image Generators. I scanned through most of the image generators listed on the Nebraska Learns 2.0 website. A couple of them didn't really appeal to me, so I passed them by. However, I did blow the better part of my evening playing with this stuff.

Of the ones I played with, I'll start with the ones which left me with nothing worth showing you.

With Dynamic Einstein Picture, I had Einstein writing "I will not tear holes in space-time" over and over, like a kid staying after school. It wasn't really funny enough to save, and I can't imagine that there aren't several thousand variations on that theme out there.

The Comicbook Speech Bubbler was stupid, yet great fun. However, the saved images were defective. The text was perfectly aligned in the word bubble on the screen, but the lines were squished together and slightly overlapping in the jpg I downloaded. I tried multiple times, with the same result. So I just deleted them. Boo.

The Generator Blog lists scads of different image generators. Many of them are silly time wasters, good for a laugh and not much else, but one in particular really stood out for me: Hide Text, which allows you to convert text into an image. So if you have something (like your e-mail address) that you want people to be able to read with their eyes, but which will be invisible to search engines and robots, this is the way to do it.

FD's Flickr Toys included a link to Motivator, one of the few image generators I have played with in the past. About two years ago, I used it to make posters of Ranganathan's Five Laws featuring screenshots from the anime Read Or Die. If you've seen R.O.D., you might be amused by these. If you haven't seen it, you might just be bemused.







I scanned through FD's other entries, and cheered "Cheezburger!" when I saw the Lolcat Generator. This is my long-suffering cat Luna, who was very unamused by my shenanigans. In case you're not a mythology fan, the monsters are a griffin and a chimera.



What made my discovery of the Lolcat Generator truly funny, however, was the fact that mere minutes earlier, on the Custom Computer Keyboard, I had made a lolcat key.



Can you tell I'm a huge fan of I Can Has Cheezburger?

Then, after all that silliness, I came to ALA's Mini-READ posters. Look at their website. So austere. So dignified. I know READ posters are supposed to feature people reading books, but I don't have any pictures of myself reading (and I'm having a bad hair day, so I don't want to snap one now), and I won't post a picture of a friend or family member without their permission, so I went with this massive pillar of books which was on display in the National Library in Prague in 2005. Nothing says "READ" like a mountain of literature.



I'm going to finish with the first image generator I looked at this evening, because it actually turned out to be my favorite. Dumpr has an "Amazing Circles" generator that held me mesmerized. I made a dozen bubbles out of my 2005 Czech Republic vacation photos. I leave you with one of my favorites. If you want to see the rest, check out my other blog.