I woke up early to watch an inspiring video suggested as a breakfast session by a good colleague this morning, and was not disappointed. “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch, a pioneer in the area of virtual reality, follows a tradition at some American universities to offer leading professors the opportunity to give an hour speech as if it was going to be their last lecture. An incredible Tigger-like individual, the twist with Randy’s speech is that it will be his last lecture.
Also, if you would like to learn programming in a fun, intuitive way, take a look at the Alice environment Randy talks about at www.alice.org.
Still on the topic of music and composition, LearnLicks.com is a free community for musicians hosting thousands of educational music lessons. Alternately, Wholenote.com offers an awesome integrated MIDI-player environment to actually play through the tablature on the screen, and includes a nicely organised set of lessons for beginner through to ridiculous. For a good new tabs site, you may also be interested in mxtabs.net/.
I first encountered Hyperscore on one of the many fascinating TED.com video podcasts. It is a product of the MIT Media Lab and enables anyone irrespective of age, physical conditions or training to compose music in an intuitive and fun way. The software costs US$79 to download, but whether you actually buy it or not, it’s well worth simply checking the Website: http://www.hyperscore.com/. Alternately, you can take a quick look at the TED.com video: Releasing the music in your head (Tod Machover & Dan Ellsey)
Looks like Apple has changed its tune concerning the use of its OS on non-Apple hardware. The first Mac clone since Steve Jobs banned them over a decade ago is now being offered by Psystar.
Very cool little desktop creatures that apply the laws of physics and a dash of AI to stick-figure-like automatons you can play with on your desktop. You can get Binary toys for free under: http://www.binarytoys.com/.
Brilliant visualization tool from the MIT Simile project that any would-be project manager or life-hacker should not be without, and free of charge at that! Link: http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/.
If you would like to work out how ELOquent a chess player you are, the Chess Mind community is an excellent start. Still in beta, the community numbers over a thousand, with some decent games for complete beginners and more experienced players alike. Link http://www.chess-mind.com.
Those interested in putting together a family tree in a collaborative Web 2.0 way, can do so cheaply and effectively at http://www.itsourtree.com. The resulting trees are exportable to major genealogy-software formats so even if the Website were doomed to failure, your work can be stored offline and imported into a new application. I’ve been playing around with it for a few months now and I’ve got around 130 odd people in there…quite odd actually…
Posted by Sean MacNiven 
Posted by Sean MacNiven 
Posted by Sean MacNiven 
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