Tag: Google

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Illustration: Okay Google – what year is it? cc-by lemasney

Okay google, what year is it cc-by lemasney
Okay google, what year is it cc-by lemasney
Okay google, what year is it cc-by lemasney
Okay google, what year is it cc-by lemasney

Inspiration

I wanted to illustrate what I thought the Google Home might be like in 10 years. I saw it as floating, hovering by way of low-energy drones. The device would be like an eye, always looking, listening, and recording. A disoriented human asks “Okay Google, what year is it?” in wonderment. This design is related to my concept for their future automated car.

I was inspired by an email based how-to on creating hashing, or cross hatching, in Inkscape. I thought the example seemed straightforward enough to deconstruct in my mind:

open Inkscape, create a circle, duplicate it, add a linear pattern to the topmost dupe, convert to path, shape into a shadow, place over circle, done.

But when I started doing it, to test whether it was just that simple, I was surprised at how many steps were really involved. You have to find the right pattern, you have to try a few on, you have to realize that you can’t easily add color to your patterns. You get some neat benefits though — real, deep calls to pop-based modernism, paying ideological royalties to Warhol’s Brillo Boxen and Jasper Johns’ frisky template based stories. So I decided to take it somewhere. And this post is the result.

What am I doing here?

I wrote ‘To be honest,’ but I loathe when people say that. We may be honest always, but what a stark surprise that would be, and the resulting pain that would potentially be inflicted seems an easily avoidable horror. So here, I’ll offer some harmless honesty: I’m not sure what i am doing here. I want to be productive, create and publish things of value, but I think that the audience has to find the value in you doing what you love, if any value is to be found at all. This may the closest digital alternative we have to Busking, posting on tools like WordPress (or worse yet, Facebook). But today, as I write this, it feels right. This is what I feel I should be doing: Writing about, illustrating, and sharing my experiences and results and insights and outcomes in the hopes of feeding into the collective insight of humanity. I have no idea if anyone will care, or even respond. But maybe. Only by trying will we find out.

Okay Google, so, what year is it?

So I was working on the practice of creating cross hatching in Inkscape, finding the stark contrast of the linear elements a bright, sharp change in my style. I began to make the circle into a kind of orb. The cross hatching became a futuristic fin that both altered direction and provided thrust. Each overlapped circle added a new dimensional layer of electronics or protection, all perfectly interlocking and freely moving.

A pupil and iris emerged. A short story about the future that writes itself in one’s mind resulted. The title of that short story is “Okay Google, what year is it?”, and the orb you see is some nearby year’s equivalent to the amazing Amazon Echo, except it uses quiet drone and magnetic stops technologies to float about your house, answering any question, turning on and off million colored micro LEDs under your feet and overhead as you walk along the heavily corridored apartments of the future. All of our houses start as shipping containers in my version. The main character asks the title question and the orb responds “I don’t know how to answer that. “

At any rate, a fun trip in the mind and I hope you enjoyed it.

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What I love about Google Calendar: Productivity abundance cc-by lemasney

What I love about Google Calendar thumbnail and title
What I love about Google Calendar thumbnail and title

What I love about Google Calendar cc-by lemasney

The Playlist for my weekly video series “What I love about…” is growing! This week is what I love about Google Calendar — the answer is productivity.

Number two of fifty-two is on one of my essential tools for productivity, time management, customer relationship management, task and to-do, and scheduling, Google Calendar! This was prompted by a conversation I was having with Peter Bromberg and friends on Facebook about what I use for productivity and time management, and I said Google Calendar. When I got some feedback that their experience was less than stellar, I decided to share a screenshot of my GCal:

Google Calendar Week of Dec 6 2015
Google Calendar Week of Dec 6 2015

When they saw it, they asked if I would share my experience to demonstrate Google Calendar, and this week’s video is my answer.

I would love the opportunity to help you, wherever you are, when you are ready. I always enjoy talking with groups and people on topics like technology, training, open source, and design. If there is some way that I can help you with these and related topics, please contact lemasney at lemasney@gmail.com, 609 553 9498 or Let’s do something great together! This content is released under a creative commons attribution license, some rights reserved. cc-by lemasney

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What I Love About… cc-by lemasney

What I love about... cc-by lemasney
What I love about… cc-by lemasney

is a weekly video series in 2016. I’m using it in the same way I used 365 Sketches: to learn, to share, to master something I should be better at.The playlist is growing! Stay tuned throughout 2016, thumbs up and subscribe please, and thanks as always for your support!

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Who are you now?

Jedediah Higgins House, Princeton, NJ, Interior, Buddha and lotus wall piece, cc-by lemasney
Jedediah Higgins House, Princeton, NJ, Interior, Buddha and lotus wall piece, cc-by lemasney
Jedediah Higgins House, Princeton, NJ, Interior, Buddha and lotus wall piece, cc-by lemasney
Jedediah Higgins House, Princeton, NJ, Interior, Buddha and lotus wall piece, cc-by lemasney

A very good friend asked me, “Who are you, now?” She asks because I had a major life event this year, in February, that changed my life. I gained some clarity about the answer, and here it is.

I am a consciousness here.

I believe that I am a part of the universe, a part like any other, moving along, exchanging materials, nutrients, and other effects, as best I can. I work towards the end of my time, making notes of my insights and ideas, so that my experience and record can potentially further the rest of us, and their ancestry, and so on.

I am a part of a collective cooperative evolution.

Our experiences are a collective knowledge. We are just starting to see tools, like Google, whose effort is to collect and make available the knowledge of the whole. It is an exciting time in mental evolution. It is moving quickly, and becoming unstoppable. I am relieved by this. Now for the process to maintain or improve its ethics is my new concern.

What is the purpose of life?

The purpose of life is to make it better than it was. To grow what is here into something better than all of us could individually. If our society saw this, we would change what we know as education, and let people simply be and grow into whatever they would like. I did not get that realization until later in life:

I am not wrong; I am not right. I just am.  I am not everything, nor nothing. I just am.

I feel like I am a good organism, as opposed to a virus. I feel like I leave my ecosystem better than I find it. It is the best aspiration I can think of: To be a good organism; I’m a beneficial part of a holistic system.

This helps me to make many decisions. For instance, I want to be cremated because I feel like that would be just one more thing I could do, quite literally: to fertilize and help grow that which comes after me. I want to do this in life, as well.

Who are you, now?

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Pressly: The DIY Almighty Smartphone Button

Pressly: The DIY Almighty Smartphone Button
Pressly: The DIY Almighty Smartphone Button

“Most physical keys have been chased off phones, thanks to the rampant rise of touch-screen technology, but here’s a DIY project that wants to bring a smarter kind of physical key to your smartphone. Pressly is a hardware button connected to a 3.5mm male audio jack that plugs into the headphone jack of your Smartphone or Tablet. It is compatible with both Android and iOS(Jailbreak required) platforms. So, for instance, if you always wanted a shortcut to snap a photo and upload it straight to a social network you could create that function in the app which link to Pressly. Of course there are apps that can do this sort of thing, but the point about Pressly is that it’s a chunk of hardware that sits within easy reach of your fingers — thereby cutting down on the number of actions required to perform the function you’re after. Pressly is compatible with a number of apps listed further in the Instructable.” – Pressly: The DIY Almighty Smartphone Button, http://goo.gl/dt1i5L

Please follow me on Facebook at http://on.fb.me/1JydUQu

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The recording of the senses cc-by lemasney

The revised Google motto by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #Inkscape #Google
The revised Google motto by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #Inkscape #Google

The revised Google motto by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #Inkscape #Google
The revised Google motto by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #Inkscape #Google

Summary of On Recording the senses.

Go Pro vs Glass, and the importance of us recording senses that we can’t normally, such as the ability to taste, such as the ability to spell, such as the ability to touch.

We already have the very clear record of what we see and we have the ability to hear and record what we hear. We are just beginning to understand how to record how we touch with haptics, like in remote robot gloves.

But we don’t really understand yet how to record smells, although perfume begins to speak to it, and we also have no idea how to record tastes. Recipes are really important because the combination of flavors and ingredients in a food lead to that particular taste but there may be other things that we are missing; if we do perfectly it may not have exactly the right taste, and we may not know why, because we haven’t done a very good job of recording why something tastes the way it does.

The recording of the senses.

Other senses are rather difficult to record. If you ever wanted to record a touch, for instance, you’d find how few tools exist for the task.  Poetry and great literature begins to do it, because something that is well written and explains something leads to a sense of touch in the mind, but it’s not exactly the same as a GoPro recording a bike ride. It’s not exactly the same as recording something with a microphone, where you have a much clearer idea of what was heard or what was seen.

Why GoPro as a head-mounted camera gets a different response than Google glass with its head-mounted camera.

If the concern is only about the camera, then why are GoPros not encountering the same kinds of issues that Google Glass has? That’s a concern for me because, honestly, a phone is capable of everything that Google Glass is, but people just don’t like the idea of Glass right there on your face; They feel like their privacy is being compromised in the presence of Glass, but they certainly don’t feel like their privacy is being compromised in the presence of a GoPro. This is odd, in my opinion.

It seems like, maybe socially, we are not ready yet for Google Glass, unfortunately. I think that it is the next step in the way that we begin to think about recording our whole experience, including geolocation, video, pictures, voice, and anything else we opt into. Anything that can be digitized can be shared, can be apps, can be searched. There used to be arguments against laptops in the classroom, but of course if we look at the benefits of a computer over a sheet of paper, and all the pros and cons of each, there is no question that the laptop is superior. The same is true of Glass over glass.

We have to begin to realize that there are superior ways to record our consciousness. There are better ways of taking a picture than with a camera, or than recording a voice with a microphone. Combinations of these two sensors (cameras, microphones), along with many other signals, like temperature in the room, or heartrate while messaging, or tweets that were going on with me, or other streams that only become clear if they are being paired in ways like Glass would pair them. We might solve mysteries of the kind that only a combination of these streams might answer. If we saw the heartrate of a group of people simultaneously, you might be able to predict a riot, for instance. Without these streams, we’d have to guess. As Fitbit has taught me personally, it’s better to know.

But, we are scared of Glass. Despite its potential for ethereal, visible, recordable good.

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My first keynote presentation: Lib2.0 at Stockton

Losing Weight: John LeMasney after picture
John LeMasney

Lib20: Media Specialist Symposium at Stockton University
Lib20: Media Specialist Symposium at Stockton University

I am very excited to have been asked to present the keynote and other presentations at Lib2.0 2015: A Media Specialist Symposium, in October 2015 at Stockton University (http://www.ettc.net/lib20/). At the event, I have been asked to talk about the following topics. Details for each session are below. If you are interested in having these topics delivered at your staff day training, conference, ot other speaking opportunity, please contact me at 609 553 9498 or john@lemasney.com

Keynote Presentation: Organizational Branding for Libraries
SESSION I: Social Media for Librarians and Media Specialists
SESSION II: Creating Sharable Content for Libraries
SESSION III: Google Cloud-Based Services for Libraries
SESSION IV: Top Ten Transliteracies for School Libraries (15 Minutes TED Style Talk)

Organizational Branding for Libraries

The aim of organizational branding efforts is to make these three ideas merge:

  1. We are presenting a brand of some kind now (active or passive, intended or unintended) that we hope creates a positive, accurate perception by our stakeholders.
  2. We have stakeholders that perceive our brand in some way, and we must discover what that perception is, even if it is not positive or correct.
  3. We can do actions, enforce policies, and check stakeholder perceptions to align our brand with our intended perceptions, the very intent of branding. We are doing these things to underline and reinforce what we are, and our patrons and other stakeholders understand and agree.

Come and learn about your library’s brand, and what can be done to improve or maintain it.

Social Media For Librarians and Media Specialists

We’re in what is referred to as the third wave of Social Media: The first wave was one in which people got Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google Plus, Hoot suite, and other social media accounts to connect with others socially and casually. The second wave was one in which organizations discovered that everyone was on these services and that they should probably be there too to take part  in the conversation, without necessarily knowing what that might look like, what their intent was, or what to expect about outcomes. Now, organizations are starting to make sense of how those social media accounts can help them to engage stakeholders differently than they do in person, track and make sense of visits, interactions, and connections and how that affects the rest of their work, and develop plans for success in social media in similar ways to the way that they developed their strategic plans. Come and learn how to make the most out of your social media efforts, how to decide if what you are doing is what you should be doing, and to discover what success looks like in social media outcomes.

Infographics and Visual Literacy for School Libraries

There is a trend in social media towards the visual. Images, videos and graphics get the most attention and lead more people to your other content. Social media platforms like Pinterest have grown powerful in a short period and reflect and strengthen the trend. The issue: while many of us are visual learners, not everyone considers themselves a visual creator, and so participation in the trend often is limited to simply sharing others’ images. In this session, we discover new tools that will help you to develop a beautiful visual representation of your ideas without having to become a certified graphic designer, photographer or visual communicator (even though you are likely doing those things already without much help or guidance). Learn how to create and find great images that support your ideas.

Creating Sharable Content for Libraries

In this session, John LeMasney will share 10 key ideas to consider when creating sharable content. What makes an article, image, idea, quote or other media particularly sharable? What technologies and methods can help you to give an interesting idea the best chance of being shared? How can copyright be honored and original sources be found? Why is there such emphasis now about sharing visual media over other forms? Join us for this session to help us find the answers!

Google Cloud-Based Services for Libraries

Learn how libraries can use Google’s free suite of office, productivity, organization, and life tools to improve communications and increase visibility in your community. We’ll discuss what can happen when library staff, administrators, and patrons use Google Drive, Hangouts, Maps, Calendar, Gmail, and Google Plus to advertise, communicate, and share information more effectively.

Top Ten Transliteracies for School Libraries

Transliteracy is the ability for a communicator to flexibly use a variety of methods to communicate their ideas more fully. This skill is an increasingly important one. Communicators who embrace photography, audio editing, coding, graphic design, video editing, can speak to a broader audience more easily. Let’s look at ways in which libraries can embrace, learn and take advantage of these literacies to communicate more effectively with their communities of service and practice.