Edward Tufte has an interesting Wired article entitled PowerPoint Is Evil. The main point is that PowerPoint forces people to create presentations in a certain way, and he especially comments on the problems of bullet points. I have made quite a lot of PowerPoint presentations over the years, and I clearly see his point. It is, indeed, easy to fall into the habit of creating lots of bullet points covering everything you want to say....
Interesting comment from Create Digital Music: What I find especially interesting is how far ahead of the curve music software is — just the opposite of what you might expect. We have most drivers already shipping, with nearly all software either shipping already for Intel or promised in the next few months. While support is a bit spotty at the moment if you use a lot of plug-ins, I think most Mac musicians will be able to comfortably switch to Intel by the summer....
Douglas Hofstadter is discussing music and artificial intelligence: Back when I was young – when I wrote “Gödel, Escher, Bach” – I asked myself the question “Will a computer program ever write beautiful music?”, and then proceeded to speculate as follows: “There will be no new kinds of beauty turned up for a long time by computer music-composing programs… To think – and I have heard this suggested – that we might soon be able to command a preprogrammed mass-produced mail-order twenty-dollar desk-model ‘music box’ to bring forth from its sterile circuitry pieces which Chopin or Bach might have written had they lived longer is a grotesque and shameful misestimation of the depth of the human spirit....
{#image113}Dan Trueman and Perry Cook at Princeton have set up an undergrad course called PLOrk: Princeton Laptop Orchestra, where they have 15 workstations consisting of Powerbooks, sound cards, sensor interfaces and spherical speakers. The idea is to give students the chance to improvise and experiment with electronic music in a really hands-on way (more info). Great idea! We should try and set up something like that in Oslo.
The Fogscreen is a new invention which makes objects seem to appear and move in thin air! It is a screen you can walk through! The FogScreen is created by using a suspended fog generating device, there is no frame around the screen. The installation is easy: just replace the conventional screen with FogScreen. You don´t need to change anything else - it works with standard video projectors.The fog we are using is dry, so it doesn’t make you wet even if you stay under the FogScreen device for a long time....
Have been testing the online word processing tool Writely, and it works quite well. It also allows for several people to work on the same document at the same time, and the different edits updates quickly. Zohowriter is another (currently) free online word processor, and it seems like all the major software companies are working on similar concepts. Surely we will see a switch to more internet-based computing in the coming years!...
{#image80}I have been thinking about setting up an automatic backup routine on my laptop for a long time, and finally decided to do it. Found what seems to be the two most popular solutions for OS X: Rsyncx and Unison File Synchronizer. RSync is a backup tool while Unison can do two-way synchronization (also between different platforms). I am mainly interested in a simple backup utility, and Rsyncx looks more user friendly, so I have decided to test that first....
{#p75 .imagelink}Quicksilver is a program, quite similar to Butler and LaunchBar, for launching applications and finding files quickly under OS X. Quicksilver is free, open source, looks good, and it seems to be very responsive.
I found a way of getting access to the music files on my windows-formatted iPod on a mac over at Ecoustics: Launch the Terminal.application and type: find /Volumes/[iPod’sNAME]/iPod_Control/Music -print | awk ‘¬ { gsub(/ /, “\ “); print }’ Substitute the name of your iPod for [iPod’sNAME]. Any spaces should be replaced with underscores (_). This will print a list of all the songs inside the Music folder with \ in place of spaces....
d.tools is a hardware and software system that enables designers to rapidly prototype the bits (the form) and the atoms (the interaction model) of physical user interfaces in concert. d.tools was built to support design thinking rather than implementation tinkering. With d.tools, designers place physical controllers (e.g., buttons, sliders), sensors (e.g., accelerometers), and output devices (e.g., LEDs, LCD screens) directly onto form prototypes, and author their behavior visually in our software workbench....