Why do I draw the Geeks? Why do I (still occasionally) make music? Vaste question. I’m not going to philosophise on the intrinsic merits of art (hi or lo-brow) or anything like that. Not today. I’m going to stay much closer to the ground. It ain’t easy to think up and draw one episode a…
Catégorie : Old sknoblog (2003–2011)
iPhone Tips
I’m enjoying version 2.0 of the iPhone OS, which ushered in the era of third party apps. I spoke about a few early favorites in a previous post, to which I would add the following: VisuaRadio & Liveradio, great Internet radio apps Shazam & Midomi, magical apps that identify music that’s playing around you or…
My US Election Post
Not so long ago, I would have written about the US election, at length, repeatedly, foaming at the mouth. These days, I just flag a few things that I run across in my Google Shared Items. I feel vindicated in everything I’ve thought about the US, when I lived there in the 80’s and since…
Universal Usability Nightmare
Since I’m on a curmudgeonly streak, I thought I’d publish, once and for all and for posterity, my feelings about automobiles. First, a little history. As a child, I used to systematically puke in them. When I began to look at the world with a critical eye, I quickly came to feel that cars were…
Guitar Zero
As a composer, or at the very least as a songwriter, and as an increasingly old fart, I find it quite dispiriting to see the music scene degenerate steadily over time. This is happening in so many ways that I don’t know where to start. Popular music has rarely been anything but commercial mush, but…
20,419
Following-up on last Friday’s 20,000 post, here’s a nice, digestible article, Report: cyber-hacktivism, botnet effectiveness on the rise from Ars Technica, which sums up Secure Computing’s latest findings about the state of spam and malware on the Internet. I won’t try to summarize the summary here, except to say that these numbers and trends are…
20,000
I’ve spoken about blog comment spam before. It’s disheartening to start your day erasing spam caught by the Akismet WordPress plug-in. And this morning, I’m sad to report that I passed the 20,000 mark on the Geeks. That’s twenty thousand spam comments in 18 months. And you know what? That’s nothing. Small potatoes. The Geeks…
Tenori-On
Check out this demo of the Tenori-On, a new electronic musical instrument, based on an innovative UI. It is well thought out and actually seems usable, allowing for an interesting mix of controlled music-making and random elements. A much simplified version is apparently due to arrive for the iPhone.
iPhone Apps
When the first iPhone came out a year ago, it was criticized (among other things) for the lack of third-party apps. They weren’t allowed, except for so-called Web-apps, which were « just » Web pages. So hackers unlocked the iPhone, developers developed unsanctioned third-party apps, and eventually, Apple released a software development kit for writing native iPhone…
1 mot, 1 chanson: Enfant
I just published a new song (in French) on 1 mot, 1 chanson. Enfant was inspired by a phone conversation with a Friend, and was written with his young daughter in mind (she seems to enjoy my songs). It also allowed me to relate a delightful moment I experienced with my son when he was…