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SLC Workshops

Greenifying SLC Info Session

When: Wed Oct 8, 2008 12:30pm to 1:30pm  EDT

Where: Library E2 classroom
Event Status: confirmed
Event Description: What can you do to help greenify SLC, your home, and your community?

In Depth Web Design Workshop Series

When: Thu Oct 9, 2008 1:30pm to 2:30pm  EDT

Where: Esther Raushenbush Library E2 Classroom
Event Status: confirmed
Event Description: This three workshop series will get each student comfortable with creating an accessible, valid, usable, nice-looking complete website from scratch. We will start with writing HTML and CSS and end with an introduction to Dreamweaver. This is a series so plan to attend all workshops! Open to staff and students only!

Audio Recording & Editing with Audacity Workshop

When: Fri Oct 10, 2008 12:30pm to 1:30pm  EDT

Where: Heimbold Visual Arts Center 209A
Event Status: confirmed
Event Description: Using the free software, Audacity, we will cover recording, editing multiple tracks, and working with different kinds of audio files.

Intro to iMovie8 & iDVD

When: Tue Oct 14, 2008 1pm to 3:30pm  EDT

Where: Heimbold Visual Arts Center 209A
Event Status: confirmed
Event Description: Don't be confused by the new layout of iMovie 8! Learn the basics of importing, organizing files, editing video and audio clips, and burning your videos with iDVD. Prerequisite: basic familiarity of Mac OS X

Image Hacking Handout

Digital files are just data. By cracking them open and taking a look at the raw data, we can manipulate it directly to creatively mess with images, video, etc.

Procedures:

TextWrangler. Any text editor will open files as text, but this one is particularly robust and handles large file sizes. TextEdit, for example, won’t open files larger than 8 MB or so.

  1. Open TextWrangler. Prefs -> Disable Quicktime translation and playback.
  2. Find a file to hack and open it. Look for all files, not just readable formats. You usually want to duplicate the file first so you don’t accidentally destroy the original.

    NOTE: Don’t rewrap or hard wrap text (won’t open as original format).
  3. Look at the header for file format clues. For instance, the format and creator name codes (”JFIF”, “ADB”)

    NOTE: You can look up these codes for clues on Wikipedia. Information about the organization of data in the file will help determine what you can hack and what you have to leave alone.
  4. Modify data below the header (otherwise you might make it unreadable). Go nuts!

Check out the original of this example jpeg file.

Try deleting data (e.g. 70s MerckxColnago-hack.jpg)

Try find and replacing a small string, Search -> Find… (e.g. 70s MerckxColnago-hack2.jpg)

Try recording a script of your actions, Script menu -> Record, and running it on other images!

Scripts kept in ~/Library/Application Support/TextWrangler/Scripts

NOTE: Video files are more complicated. Quicktime will not display messed up video in many cases… but VLC usually will! The player makes a big difference. Even images will appear differently depending on what app you use to view them (cute japanese bunny!-hack.jpg — appears viewable in Finder, worse in Preview, super bad in Photoshop, and crashes GraphicConverter! BTW, here’s the original.) So you can use this technique to reverse-engineer software as well as image formats.

Further Ideas:

Any file can be hacked. In fact, some procedural files can easily be hacked. Photoshop’s Liquify filter saves .msh files. Hack ‘em!

With some more complex scripting, you could pull fresh content into your search and replace script, e.g. insert google results from keywords… it’s wide open!

– If you attended this info session, please fill out the evaluation. Thanks!

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