Fail to Reject

You have probably heard of it by now, but if not, you should try using OpenOffice.org . It is an office suite like Microsoft Office, but it is open source. I like it because I like supporting open source projects, and I like alternatives to Microsoft. OpenOffice is FREE. I like quality free software. OpenOffice.org is mostly compatible with MS Office documents (ie, you can open documents made in MS Office, and save documents in MS Office format). I say mostly compatible because nobody knows what the MS Offics formats are. Even Microsoft Office documents themselves are not compatible with other versions of themselves. Anyways, it is a neat thing they got going on. Go to there website and download the application suite and give it a whirl. http://www.openoffice.org/

The Virtual Air Guitar project, developed at the Helsinki University of Technology, adds genuine electric guitar sounds to the passionately played air guitar. Using a computer to monitor the hand movements of a "player", the system adds riffs and licks to match frantic mid-air finger work. By responding instantly to a wide variety of gestures it promises to turn even the least musically gifted air guitarist to a virtual fret board virtuoso. Air guitarists’ rock dreams come true I am sure it is pretty limited at this point, but it is a neat concept.

http://www.ymck.net/e/sound.html This music is so happy! The joy of 8 bit music.

Breaking the rules, science on friday. http://www.wendycarlos.com/colorvis/color.html But there are pictures...

I recently have become aware of this totally awesome and free application that allows you to make paintings on your computer. It is called Art Rage . It is almost unbelievably good at realistically mixing the paint and showing the brushstrokes. And it is dang fun.

Since yesterday I accidentally did a post for music, today will be a computer application. Like anyone reads these anyways... I want to recommend another neat Firefox extension called Html Validator . This one is great for web developers, because it adds a really easy interface to validate your html. For every page you visit, the extension will check that page against the w3c standards. A little icon in the right bottom corner of the browser will let you know if there are any warnings or errors. If you view the source of the page, it shows all the errors, highlighted in the source, when you click on an error message, it takes you to that location in the source and highlights it for you. There is also a little help window about that error, and lots of other features I haven't begun to use yet. But I think this is a dang awesome extension.

In music, there is Serialism. Read about it in Wikipedia , and the music chamber . I wrote a serialist piece once, it was fun. I would love to do it again. If you want to hear my serialist piece, bug me.

Dear Readers, I do believe that you will be greatly interested in this article appearing in The Guardian titled " Don't Dumb Me Down ". It discusses science in the media. The author presents a paper on research he has conducted with some ideas on why science in the media is so often pointless, simplistic, boring, or just plain wrong. He breaks the stories down into three categories: Wacky stories, scare stories, and "breakthrough" stories, and discusses each type. From the article: "Statistics are what causes the most fear for reporters, and so they are usually just edited out, with interesting consequences. Because science isn't about something being true or not true: that's a humanities graduate parody. It's about the error bar, statistical significance, it's about how reliable and valid the experiment was, it's about coming to a verdict, about a hypothesis, on the back of lots of bits of evidence." The only weird thing about th...

Open music record label named Magnatune (www.magnatune.com) . They call it try before you buy, you can listen to the full albums online of many artists released on this label. They cover a wide span of genres like classical, electronica, jazz, metal, rock, world, etc. Pretty neat stuff, if you ask me.

I am a big fan of winamp, but sometimes I want something smaller and simple: musikCube . musikCube is an open source audio player for windows. Features include: * very low memory footprint * clean and intuitive user interface * blazing fast navigation * fully drag and drop compatible * powerful batch tagging * an integrated cross fader * an integrated cd ripper I like the fact that it is just simple. I also like the dynamic playlists, based on tags and other song meta data. (last played, recently added, etc), and you can make your own spiffy dynamic playlists. I also like how you set up the folders where you store your music, and then anytime you add new songs to your hard drive, you just hit synchronise and it updates the library with the new songs. It also has global access keys, so you can make it go to the next song, play, pause, etc while using another application, so you don't need to divert your focus to the player to take care of things like ...

This website will tell: http://www.die.net/moon/

This week I saw the movie "Primer", which is an independent film that was shown at the Sundance festival in 2004. It was created by Shane Carruth. It is a science fiction film with a theme of time travel. I really liked it and there are a number of reasons: 1) The writer tried very hard to make the scientific conversations actually real, they are talking about real technology, etc. This is great because a lot of the time I am bugged immensely while watching movies with computers and technology and everything is horribly simplified (and wrong) for the average movie consumer. It is refreshing that someone took care in making a movie that isn't blatantly wrong in its scientific aspects. 2) Although the movie is slow, and this is a complaint by most people, I liked the pace. I like other movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Andromeda Strain . 3) The movie is pretty complicated and I didn't understand it all after a first viewing. This is great, because I like...

For some reason, I have had this song in my head all morning, so I had better share it with you. It is a song by Kai Esbensen that he wrote for Bullet Lodge , the Minneapolis chapter of the Immersion Composition Society. It is science-y.

This sweet application brought to you by Mike Lin (who also made Startup Monitor and Startup Control Panel) is a great help to people who commonly copy and paste text. The application is called Clipomatic , and it is a free program you can download that allows you to keep multiple pieces of text in the clipboard. This way you have access to the last few blocks of text that you have copied to the clipboard. When I found this application I was like "Right on!" because I always thought that instead of having one "sheet of paper" on the clipboard, it should be a buffer where you can keep multiple "sheets of paper". Especially when you are doing a lot of copying and pasting and you have to go back and forth with different snippets of text. How it works it you just select text and copy it (Ctrl-c), or cut it (ctrl-x), like normal, but instead of pasting it with ctrl-v, use ctrl-alt-v, which brings up a submenu like in the screenshot above, which gives you a c...

With all the press lately about "Intelligent Design", I thought I would comment a bit on it. A) Don't teach it in schools. It isn't scientific, it is just a point of view. If parents want their kids to know about this idea, they can teach them themselves. B) It isn't scientific, it is just ideas. You can't witness any proof, nor use evidence or tests to disprove it. C) God wouldn't use supernatural means to create a natural earth. D) Science and Religion don't clash, so quit trying to exclusively embrace one and reject the other. They are both about discovering the truth, and I believe they shouldn't contradict each other. Where they meet is where we say "I don't know." Here is an interesting article about it too. This article defines Intelligent Design as "the theory that life on earth has developed by a series of supernatural miracles performed by the God of the Christian Bible, for which it is pointless to seek any natur...

On the taco shelf there was a taco, Much to my surprise; One with cheese and meat and beans, Of a monstrous, gigantic size. I tried to put it in my mouth, But it did not fit. A voice inside my head I heard, "Keep trying, sir, do not quit." I shoved and shoved and squeezed and squeezed, But I could not gulp. I grabbed the taco with my fist, And tried to make it pulp. Relieved, I was finally able to swallow it, Though nearly destroying myself, "A job well done," I sighed, and turned, Another taco was on the shelf.

This is the greatest blueberry adventure ever: Enjoy. Note: The initial little jump is great The blueberry is very adept at climbing a ladder without the use of arms The initial little jump on the diving board is cute Diving board follows laws of physics

Holy awesomeness were my first thoughts after listening to this a capella "remix" of the Star Wars Theme . This song was done by virt , each part of the full orchestra with his voice. It really is a fun thing to listen to.

Want widgets that show the system status of your computer? Try Rainmeter , highly configurable and awesome. (Better than Konfabulator, in my opinion). Having nothing to do with measuring rain, Rainmeter is a customizable performance meter, which can display the CPU load, memory utilization, disk space, network traffic, time and many more things. You can even make your own widgets easily, or download the countless plugins from the site. Also try Rainlendar , a calendar widget for your computer.