malvasia bianca

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but learning Japanese continues to increase my sympathy towards kids who are learning to read and misread words in ways which seem inconceivable to me. My brain is pretty much incapable of looking at a word in English and not reading it immediately; the same is far from true […]

I bought my first mp3s online today; I am very happy to report that I didn’t do it through Apple. I don’t plan to make a habit of it – CDs have served me well for the last 21 years, and I see no reason to stop buying them now – but “And Try” by […]

I was quite impressed by Apple’s recent iPod announcements. Most companies, I think, would have been coasting for some time if they had as dominant a product as the iPod. Apple, however, is continuing to push ahead with a constant stream of improvements ranging from the subtle to the groundbreaking. Which is awesome: what I […]

Apologies for my recent silence; the cause is a combination of watching movies (well, DVDs, mostly Last Exile) and being pretty busy last weekend. But now I am, for once, caught up with my other odds and ends (i.e. reading blogs) early enough at night to actually be able to write something. As I mentioned […]

On Thursday evening, I tried to log in from home. My computer got an IP address, but I couldn’t connect to any external web pages. I fired up a terminal, and did some name lookups; that worked. At least more or less – it gave me an address, but also said something about not getting […]

I ran across a couple of video demos of interesting music hardware recently. Both are basically sequencers with unusual user interfaces: First, Tenori-On. (Found via GayGamer): And Reactable. (Found via Lost Garden, which throws in some neat ideas of its own.) I don’t have much to add; I’m curious how they work in practice. Especially […]

As I mentioned before, I’ve started tagging my saved items in Google Reader. I did this partly because of a general worry about the saved items getting out of control, but also because there were three specific categories of saved items that I was afraid were getting buried: items that I wanted to read but […]