If you consider yourself an amateur musician or composer you might want to dabble a bit with the Noteflight music notation editor, and online music editor that lets you write and print music notation without having to install any expensive software like Finale or Sibelius. I’ve played around with Noteflight on several occasions and I really do like the interface. It is fairly easy to write music using this online service and the price couldn’t be better (free).
One of the things they are trying to do to draw more attention to the site is offering a $500 prize to the composer who submits the best arrangement of good old Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. So go online and take a look at Noteflight and try your hand at arranging Mozart’s classic in your own uniqe way.
I have an addiction to those RedBox movie rental machines that are popping up all over the place. Every time I go to the grocery store or WalMart I see them on the way out and have to stop and see what is available. At only one dollar per rental they are really cheap, but I am even cheaper than that.
Thanks to my very frugal wife (who has saved our family of six over $2500 this year by using coupons) I found that the Free Redbox Codes page on the Inside Redbox web site actually has an up to date list of free video rental codes for several different stores. Another site named retailmenot also carries a list of regularly updated Redbox Codes for free one day rentals.
You can also find the occasional free Redbox code in other places as well. Simply by signing up for SMS messages on the Redbox web site you can opt in to their weekly emails and get a free redbox code directly from the Redbox company itself. Other stores often post free Redbox movie codes in their local weekly ads to entice you to come in and browse around the store a bit. It kind of makes me wonder if at some point grocery stores and others are going to get smart and put the Redbox machines at the back of the store (like they do with the milk and bread) to make you browse through all the other stuff on your way to pick up your free Redbox rental.
I have been spending a lot of time reading this summer (I so rarely have time to do it during the school year when I am teaching), and a few titles have really stood out at me so far. I am a big geek, and enjoy stories laced with technology as well as little science fiction thrown in. Here is my current reading list along with links on places to pick them up (some are even free). Enjoy!
Ringworld – by Larry Niven
I must admit this one was not a true “read” book for me. I found it as a free audiobook rental through my local library so I decided to give it a try. I nearly wore my iPhone’s headphones out on it as every spare minute I had to plug in to get the next chapter or two. Ringworld is pure science fiction, set in a futuristic landscape where Earth is no longer alone in the Universe, where matter transporters allow a person to flash from one side of the Earth to another in a milisecond, and where a strange race called the Puppeteers has discovered a Ringworld, a ring built around a star with a fully earthlike ecosystem thriving inside of it. The hero of the story is an adverturer named Louis Wou, who together with a Puppeteer and a strange ratlike warrior creature called a Kzin travel to the Ringworld in search of its secrets. In the process they crash on it and must meet with the locals in order to find a way off.
I Robot – Cory Doctorow
Doctorow is a true geek’s geek. He has released most of his writing under Creative Commons licensing, meaning that anyone who wants to can download his short stories for free. I Robot is probably the most popular, bearing homage to the Isaac Asimov book turned movie by the same name. In it Doctorow tries to tell a story of what actually led to society becoming so reliant on the robots that eventually turn on their masters. It is short but a pretty good read, and is available in many different formats including a free version that you can download to your iPhone using the Stanza ebook reader.
Deviant Art's Pictorial Guide To Computer Hardware
I tinker a lot with my computer and have torn apart and reassembled dozens of computers over the last ten years. All that time this new Pictorial Guide To Computer Hardware from Deviant Art would have come in handy. I may even buy one anyway just because on some strange level I think it is kind of cool. Basically the poster shows images of every interface, port, and cable connection found on personal computers going back all the way to before the IBM PC days. It even includes photos of RAM memory chips and motherboard power connections. It is available in sizes up to 2 foot by 3 foot through the Deviant Art web site.
I’ve always been fascinated with space and with the astronaut corps in general. Like many kids when I was young I wanted to be an astronaut. Growing up in the early days of the shuttle program I made my fair share of space shuttle models and cried myself to sleep the day the Challenger exploded. Even though my ambitions eventually turned to music and writing I still have a very soft spot in my heart for the topic, and picked up a copy of Buzz Aldrin’s new biography about the first lunar landing, Magnificent Desolation
a few days ago at our local library. It gives a very interesting look into Aldrin’s life and career, and serves as yet another reminder that climbing the highest mountain also means that you have farther to fall.
Aldrin starts the book by detailing the specifics of the Apollo 11 launch, moon landing, and return, but this is only the first quarter of the entire book. From there we get a look at something much more personal, a proud American hero who, after achieving what only 11 other people in the world have done, found himself in his own personal desolation. He suffered terribly from depression, partly from his constant quandry that after being one of the members of the first lunar landing expedition, “what do I do now?” He also had some serious genetic issues stacked against him (both his father and mother committed suicide). While other famous astronauts also went through similar bouts of depression Aldrin was the first to be brave enough to seek help, a decision that in the old Air Force climate cost him a promotion to General and effectively ended his career in the military.
Aldrin came out of this depression a better man. Today he works with a foundation that encourages the commercialization of space, making it accessable to everyone instead of just the elite. His ideas and tactics have not been appreciated by all of his fellow astronauts, and truthfully the idea of making the Rocket Experience rap video with Snoop Dog still baffles me.
NASA
I have always been fascinated with the moon landings even though they took place before I was even born. Ever since they occured back in the 60’s there have been a small but vocal number of people saying that the entire moon landing sequence was faked. My personal feeling on these conspiracy theorists is that they should go ask Elvis for his opinion, but still the debate raged on. Now, forty years after the launch of Apollo 11 (the first mission that actually landed on the moon) NASA has proof that we were actually there in the form of photos from the recently launched Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
I doubt that these photos will satisfy any of the naysayers. The photos are a little grainy and the resolution is not really good enough to make out fine detail, although you can see the tracks the astronauts left in the soil as they walked from the landing module to a scientific experiment site. Personally I think the images are very cool although much less spectacular than I was hoping for. Without the help of NASA putting arrows and markings on the photos I doubt I would be able to figure things out on my own. If we have sattellites that can see my car in my driveway you would think that they would put something equally as powerful on this space probe.
It just so happened that a few days before the anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch I checked out Buzz Aldrin’s new biography, Magnificent Desolation
. It’s a good read. Maybe I’ll blog about it tomorrow to give a little review.
Tower Bloxx by Digital Chocolate
I am a fan of several iPhone games from the company named Digital Chocolate. I have spent many lazy hours flinging penguins around playing their Crazy Penguin Catapult Lite game, but now I have a reason to splurge and buy the full version. Not just of the Crazy Penguin Catapult game, but of several of Digital Chocolate’s other iPhone games such as Tower Bloxx Deluxe and Jungle Bloxx (a game very similar to the popular Boom Blox game for the Nintendo Wii. All of these games, and several others from the same company are on sale for a short time for just $.99 each. Check them out on the iTunes Store while they are still on sale!
I just heard about this one while listening to the Giz Wiz podcast over at Leo Laporte’s Twit.tv podcasting site. This new flashlight from a company called 511Tactical uses a new kind of power storage technology called an ultra-capacitor. Essentially it is a battery, but a battery that charges incredibly fast and does not “leak” energy during storage. The company claims that the flashlight can be charged in under two minutes and can run for up to two hours on it’s lowest setting or 15 minutes on it’s super bright setting.
The flashlight is obviously geared toward the police and fire department market, but it is receiving a lot of press and interest from consumers as well. At the time of the writing of this blog post the backorder ship date was already four months out. I would love to get one of these, but at $170 it is more a luxury item at the moment.
This blog is intended to be a place to store all the cool gadgets and ideas that I hear about that don’t fit into my established blog and web site over at MusicEdMagic.com. I hear about so many cool things that have nothing to do with music and I want to share them in some way or another so this is it!
Computer Software | admin | 
July 30, 2009 12:43 am | 
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