Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wes Fryer

Category: open source

  • Interactive Fiction Database and CYOA Video Stories

    Interactive Fiction Database and CYOA Video Stories

    I grew up in the 1980s and loved reading “Choose Your Own Adventure” (CYOA) stories. From time to time, as an advocate of “Playing with Media” and “Show What You Know with Media” pedagogy and learning, I’ve created my own CYOA stories and helped others create them too. Today I learned about the “Interactive Fiction…

  • Burning DVDs in 2025

    Burning DVDs in 2025

    This evening I successfully burned two DVDs for the 40th Anniversary of the Mint Hill Historical Society, which is coming up on Saturday. For several years now I’ve been volunteering with the MHHS, helping with oral history interviews and their website. For Saturday’s event, they want to play a silent slideshow of 1087 photos on…

  • Sharing Mastodon Lists

    Sharing Mastodon Lists

    I am a BIG fan of the federated social media platform Mastodon, and this evening I used Claude.ai to generate code in an HTML file which allows me to quickly share my LISTS on Mastodon with others. Unlike Twitter, lists on Mastodon are PRIVATE and not directly sharable with others. I spent some time both…

  • Packet Defender 1.0

    Packet Defender 1.0

    Today was the first day of our spring semester, and I’m teaching middle school web design again. As part of our introductory class, we watched the video, “The Internet: IP Addresses & DNS” from Code.org and then played a Kahoot I made with AI about it, using the video transcript. As we learn to create…

  • Internet Radio Dreams

    Internet Radio Dreams

    This morning I’m dreaming of Internet Radio: My OWN Internet radio station patterned after the amazing example of ds106 Radio. Let me explain. In December 2012, I published the 3 minute photo story, “Live Internet Radio Broadcasting from a Bus.” In it, I shared “a story about webcasting a live radio show from a bus…

  • Social Media Text Prepper

    Social Media Text Prepper

    It is now possible to use generative AI / artificial intelligence platforms, like ChatGPT 4, to create simple to relatively complex web applications without knowing the precise syntax of programming languages. By formulating detailed prompts for the AI chatbot, it is possible to create code in various languages (including javascript and HTML) which the user…

  • Updating My Food Blog: Cook with Wes!

    The past two nights I’ve spent several hours updating my food and family recipe website sharing site, “Cook with Wes,” and I’m happy with the results at this point! I’ll recap my updates (in WordPress) in this post. I dabble in web design and WordPress customizations rather infrequently now, so this was a significant catalyst…

  • DVD Subtitles with Handbrake

    For the third year I’m teaching an adult class at our church, and I’m finding it helpful to use the free / open-source software program “Handbrake” to create short clips of videos we’re using in lessons from a DVD. It’s a bit tricky to select the correct options within the program to “burn in” the…

  • Ad Blocking Lessons Learned with Pi Hole, Google (Nest) WiFi and AppleTV

    Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a relatively inexpensive and straightforward way to block all the advertisements in YouTube and other apps on the AppleTV? (Besides paying a monthly subscription for YouTube Premium?!) Wouldn’t it be great if this same method provided advertisement and malware blocking for ALL Internet-connected devices on your home network?…

  • Using ffWorks and FFmpeg for Video Compression

    Almost every week on Wednesday nights I co-host “The EdTech Situation Room” (@edtechSR) webshow and podcast with my friend and fellow educator, Jason Neiffer (@techsavvyteach). My Thursday evening routine, therefore, usually includes post-production of the show so it’s shared on edtechSR.com, with both audio and video archive versions linked from Amazon S3. In this post I’ll…