Shady Art Business

 Art, Education  Comments Off on Shady Art Business
Mar 022015
 

I’m getting ready to start the latest Pencil Kings challenge. This month, it’s the Shading Drawing Challenge, where I hope to get better at shading my drawings, so they look less like lineart and more like … real drawings of real things.

I love how Pencil Kings runs these challenges. It’s easy to pick up a lot of useful info just watching YouTube videos, but just watching videos is a one-way kind of learning, where it’s hard to ask questions or have some kind of ongoing dialogue. The time differential really messes that up, and by the time I get a response, sometime I forget why I asked a question in the first place.

But the PK challenges are a fun kind of group activity that gets everyone doing the same thing, and we have meetings online twice a week, where we can chat with one of the instructors while she goes over some of the topics we’re covering that week. I love that kind of instant feedback. I’ll gather up my questions during the week, and then fire away! The Figure Drawing Challenge in January helped me a great deal, so I expect to get a lot out of this one, too!

Live School

 Education, Music, Technology  Comments Off on Live School
Feb 092015
 

There’s a really good Intro to Ableton Live course going on right now on Coursera, taught by Erin Barra of the Berklee College of Music. It’s only three weeks long, but it’s a good way to meet a bunch of different people who are into Live, make some music, and pick up some tips.

I’ve been using it as a way to practice working with Live and Push, and as a way to create music on deadlines. That helps a lot. Having an obligation to a group inspires me for some reason, even if it’s for 4-5 people. The music is all going to be hosted on Blend via Dropbox.

And the music I am making for the class can be found on my Blend, right here.

One of the restrictions I’m putting on myself is to only use the tools in Live Suite, no outside VSTs. So far, it’s been fun. In a way, it’s freeing in that I don’t have to obsess over picking the “perfect” synth from my stupid long list of VST plugins, instead I’ll go with the instruments in Live, which are really good in their own right.

In order to get a little deeper into some of them, like Sampler and Analog, I’ve been using MacProVideo.com’s videos to go into more detail. That’s also kind of cool– using the class as a springboard for further individual study.

The assignments themselves are also fun, in that each assignment has basic minimum requirements that have to be met, like four tracks, two audio and two MIDI, and so on. The restrictions work both as minimums and as something to prod creativity.

Another nice part of the class– Ableton is letting students enrolled in the class demo Live Studio free for 30 days, and Studio usually runs in the $600 range, if I remember correctly.

Figure Drawing Challenge

 Art, Education, Technology  Comments Off on Figure Drawing Challenge
Jan 302015
 

I use art and photography to feed off of each other. So that one helps the other. Art helps me be creative with photography, and photography helps with art. Pencil Kings rebooted their Figure Drawing Challenge this January, and I had a blast. It was just enough work to learn some useful stuff and make good progress. My drawings are still too awful to share with the outside world, but I’m pleased enough with my progress for now.

I recommend checking out their site. I like their tutorials, and the challenges are great as social and artistic events.

Oct 012014
 

Paying full price is for Suckers.

Ouch, that’s harsh, isn’t it? But it’s true. When it comes to music production software and hardware, just about everything software (and some hardware) goes on sale 2-3 times a year.

There are a few products that never go on sale, but those products are a minority. A small one, at that. The perpetual sale nature of the software industry makes me question what the real value of any of this is.

It used to be that gear would go on sale once or twice a year. Now, every month there’s a huge list of companies making desperate offers to get you to buy their stuff. So, if there’s always a sale on, is there really a best time of the year to shop? Yes, there still is.

When? Around Black Friday, right after US Thanksgiving. (Check before, just in case.) As an example, I bought Native Instruments’ Komplete 9 Ultimate, which usually goes for $1100, for $575 last Thanksgiving. And I bought a few other things at very steep discounts (like SynthMaster), because I am what? Cheap! (Well, cheap but impulsive when I see a really good deal for good software.)

Komplete 9 was on sale one more time after that, and that was this past summer, but the deal wasn’t as good as it was last Thanksgiving. Same for Synthmaster. It’s been on sale, but not as cheap as it was then.

Black Friday is a great time to gear up a new studio, but sometimes companies have once-a-year deals that are outside of that time, so it pays to keep an eye on things year round.

I have a few places I check on a semi-regular basis:

  • On the front page of KVR Audio (or just follow them on Twitter), check the What’s New feed, and click on Deals.
  • Or go to Rekkerd.org’s Deals page.
  • Also, look at Rekkerd’s “Deals Archive.” That’s amazingly useful for bargain hunters like us, because companies tend to repeat the same offers at fixed intervals. (Some are regular like clockwork!)

If something has just come off of a deal, then you’re going to have to wait a while for it to come on deal again. (Unless it’s a Waves Audio plugin. I swear, they have everything on sale all the time, or so it seems. In fact, Waves has sales every weekend.)

You can also get some crazy deals at plugin resellers. The two I use the most are:

Both are totally legit, but you may have to wait a day or two to get your license codes. Plugin Discounts tends to have bigger savings, but Plugin Boutique will give you cash back in the form of a credit, which you can apply to your next purchase. Shop around!

As an example: iZotope makes StutterEdit, which is a great glitch plugin. It retails for $249. It just came off of a sale at $99 on the iZotope website, but I found it on Plugin Discounts for $88.

$88 for a $249 plugin? Yeah, I can do that.

When you do decide to start buying plugins, please go slowly. Don’t go broke buying tons of them. Buy smartly. And when you see a synth or plugin you like, make a note of it, and wait for it to come on sale. Most will, eventually.

A Few Closing Thoughts

First, when you go to pick out a DAW, make sure of a few things: does it use VSTs, or does it have its own plugin format? (Reason and ProTools use their own formats for plugins.) If you want to go cheap, stick with DAWs that use VST for now. It’s not an ideal solution, but it offers the biggest variety and the most potential cheapness.

You can hook up a VST to Reason through a VST host application, but it’s one of those things that’s kind of a kludge, and I don’t know that it’s worth the trouble. Rewire Reason into your main DAW instead.

Most VST makers will let you sell your plugins to other people. (License transfers.) Reason does not let users transfer Rack Extension licenses. You can transfer the Reason license, but not the RE license. If that’s a deal-breaker for you, keep it in mind. Read those EULAs! Rack Extensions are pretty cool from a tech point of view, and they make Reason really useful, but it’s a walled garden.

Some DAWs, like Studio One Artist edition, won’t allow the use of external plugins. Whoops! Gotta buy a more expensive version there! Studio One is a good DAW, but read the fine print. Same goes for the Studio One Vocaloid Edition. It only lets you use the Piapro Studio plugin. The rest are all Studio One only. If you don’t mind that, Studio One is an excellent starter DAW you can usually get for around $80-$90, and the full version is around $200-$300.

If you want to use Nerve and Serum in your music, you better make sure they’ll run in your DAW first! Read the developer’s website, and check for compatibility! Some plugins just don’t work with some DAWs, and you won’t know until you pay and suffer.

When it comes to copy protection, there are a few different ways companies do it– the worst in my opinion are the USB dongles, because they ruin your ability to go portable. How can I hook up gear if I have a dongle in every USB port? iLok and eLicenser are the more egregious ones. I can’t run Cubase without a dongle, so I tend to run Ableton more often. Native Instruments and Ableton both have very good copy protection, in that it’s not aggressively annoying.

It’s sad, but I tend to avoid perfectly good software if it uses iLok or eLicenser. I hate being shunted off into that kind of copy protection, especially when I’m a paying customer. (Even if I am cheap.)

This leads me to my final advice: learn how to program! I mentioned it briefly in part two, but making your own gear in Reaktor, Max For Live, Bidule, or C++ is a great way to save a ton of cash. It’s also a great way to learn more about audio and how those sounds are made.

Stay cheap, do your homework, and don’t forget to make some kickass music!

The Cheap Guide to Making Music, Part 2: Free/Cheap Synths, Effects, Sounds!

 Education, Music  Comments Off on The Cheap Guide to Making Music, Part 2: Free/Cheap Synths, Effects, Sounds!
Sep 252014
 

We have our DAW and maybe some gear. One perfectly valid strategy is to simply use the included plugins in your DAW of choice. If you’re using Reaper, then it has all you need to learn with for now. Master that stuff, and come back here when you’re bored with it. Whenever that is.

If you want some external synths and effects, please go easy! It’s really tempting to get a bunch of synths, thinking, “I AM POWERFUL! SEE MY SYNTH ARMY AND WEEP!”

But the only one doing the weeping will be you. Because you won’t know which freakin’ synth to use. You may even forget which ones you have.

Get one plug-in or synth at a time, learn it, know it in and out, then it’s okay to get the next one, if you need it.

Some of the best artists limit their choices to free up their creativity. “I’m only going to paint with blue.” “I’m only going to draw dudes bowling.” “I’m only going to write angry songs about my ex.” In your case, how about, “I’m only going to use one synth?” Try to stick to that for at least a month.

Here are a few good starter synths, and they’re all free:

Get a Few Free Effects

What goes for synths goes double for effects. Go easy on the effects, because there are even more effects out there than synths. How many reverbs is enough? One, maybe two for now. Same goes for compressors, limiters, gates, and EQ. If what you’re trying to learn isn’t in the effect you’re using, then by all means, keep looking, but know when to stop and go back to making music.

So, here are some good sources for free plugin effects:

  • GVST has a ton of free effects plugins. (They have synths, too.) Their effects plugins are great for learning the basics, because they don’t fill up your screen with a lot of crap. They don’t necessarily sound the best, but they’ll do the job for now.
  • The KVR Developer Challenge is where devs go all out, make free plugins, and fight for prizes. It’s a great way to look for something new/free/cool.
  • Also, check out KVR’s list of the most popular plugins, and check out the Free category.
  • Also check out their Free News category, for the latest on free plugins.
  • Xfer Records has a page full of free effects to play with.
  • Limiter No. 6 is awesome, too. Download here.
  • George Yohng’s W1 Limiter is a nice Waves L1-style limiter for free.
  • Tokyo Dawn Records has some really good free effects, and some you can buy.
  • Voxengo has a nice selection offree effects plugins.
  • Audio Damage’s Rough Rider is a great free creative compressor. It adds a lot of squash, dirt, and crunch to sounds. It’s really good on percussion sounds you don’t like.
  • Luftikus is an awesome free equalizer that’s similar to the Maag EQ (download). It even has an “Air Band,” which will make everything sound like it was made at 11.
  • The Klanghelm IVGI Saturation and Distortion plugin adds some warmth and grit.
  • Sound on Sound has a list of their favorite free plugins, too.
  • Drummic’a from Sennheiser, available only from their German Site, is an incredible drum library. It comes with the free version of the Kontakt player. Grab a buddy who can sprechen Deutsch, and go at it. You’ll need to register with the site, activate it by email, then use the code for activating the sounds. It comes as a Kontakt library, but it’s awesome. And it’s free! We like free! (And it’s by Sennheiser, who make great mics!)

I’ll add more as I find them. There’s a staggering number of good free plugins out there.

Or, if you own Native Instruments’ Reaktor, Max For Live, or Plogue’s Bidule, you can make your own Synths and plugins, and save a ton of money. (Minus the cost of the programming environment, of course!)

Samples, Patches, and Instruments

This is a short section, because it links to some massive content. (Pun intended.)

This Reddit thread that contains an insane amount of drum samples and Massive patches should tide you over for a while. It’s useful more for the drum samples than the Massive patches, because we’re cheap here.

Here’s another Reddit thread on readers’ favorite free VST instruments.

Pay a Little, Get a Lot: Computer Music and DTM.

I recommend Computer Music magazine, specifically it’s 200th issue, because it comes with some great stuff, like the full edition of Cakewalk’s Rapture synth. Get the electronic version of the magazine through iTunes or Google Play, set up your username/password, and go download a bunch of free plugins. (If you use Google Play, when you go to download, tell them you got the magazine off Zinio. It works that way. There’s no drop-down for Google.)

One note about Rapture. Yes, it’s the full synth, but read the license carefully: it says no commercial use on the synth. So… yeah. Use it as a practice synth, then go buy the real thing, I guess.

A few of the included plugins are full versions, but most of these are “CM” versions of commercial plugins, which means that they’re functional, but kind of stripped down in a few places, because it’s hard to make a living off of free, and they really want you to go out any buy the full version.

It’s a great way to play with an unlimited demos. SynthMaster CM is essentially a “lite” version of SynthMaster you can play with as long as you want. (SynthMaster is one of my favorites, but not free. It goes on sale once or twice a year, though!)

It’s also a good place to get some free samples, because each issue comes with free samples. Buy a few issues, and you could build up a seriously crazy sample library.

Computer Music (CM) is also great for reviews. They’ll tell you if something sucks, so you’ll save money. (So will the posters at Gearslutz. In fact, they’ll tell you a lot of things suck. If they all say something is good, then it’s probably godly good.)

CM also has a ton of tutorials that come with each issue. Not to sound like a shill, but for a few bucks a month, it’s a great deal.

If you don’t care about Rapture, then just get the latest issue of CM, and you can still get some sweet gear for “free.” Well, minus what you paid for it. I think it’s like $5 an issue, or $40 a year. Your money, your call.

If you’re into the Japanese music scene, can speak the language, and can spare the money, try to hunt down DTM magazine. They also have a lot of tutorials, reviews, and free plugins. But it’s paper only, each issue is around 1500 yen, and that doesn’t even include the shipping, which can get ridiculous. (And I did say it’s in Japanese!) Cheap-ish if you live in Japan or near a Japanese bookstore, though!

Spend $130 to Never Buy Patches Again!

Now that we’re spending a little money, I’ll recommend one other thing I know, and that’s Syntorial. It will save you a stupid amount of money on patches, because you will learn how to make your own damn patches. (As you should do, anyway!)

It’s a program that teaches you how to use a synth, one knob at a time. Then it teaches you how to use your ears to figure out how sounds are constructed. It’s brilliant.

You watch a short video, then do exercises, watch more videos, do more exercises. You can quit whenever you want, but it gets addicting.

In my next (and last) post on this, I’ll give you my “How to buy plugins like a cheap badass” advice.

The Cheap Guide to Making Music, Part 1: Get a DAW!

 Education, Music  Comments Off on The Cheap Guide to Making Music, Part 1: Get a DAW!
Sep 222014
 

To make music these days, you need a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation.) There are dozens of different programs that will do the trick, and most of them have horrifyingly high price tags. So to save yourself from the ultimate beginner misake, which is, “Oh my god, I bought this DAW, it cost $700, and I hate it more than doing my taxes,” let’s look at this rationally.

Getting a DAW from my point of view is a process where you’re going to first learn how to use a DAW, and then go shopping for the DAW you’ll be using for the next few years.

How do you learn how to use a DAW without a DAW? Easy. Get a starter DAW. Use it to learn what the basics of music production, then you can shop for a DAW intelligently.

There’s no better starter DAW than Reaper. (Or any DAW that comes bundled for free with software you buy, I guess, but I’m going to assume you’re not buying anything, because this is for Cheap People.)

So why Reaper?

Because Reaper has an extremely generous demo. You get a 60-day full working demo. After that, if you keep using it, you should pay the $60 for the amateur license. (Because nobody likes leeches.)

Download the 32-bit version for now.

Why 32-bit? Because you can run all the plugins that way. Not all plugins are available in 64-bit versions yet, and some older plugins will never be available in 64-bit, due to their age, or because the developer doesn’t want to re-code them. You’ll only need to go 64-bit when you start making monstrously huge tracks. Until then, 32-bit is fine, and yes, 32-bit Reaper will run in your 64-bit OS.

Seriously, Reaper will even run on OS X versions 10.4-10.5 on PPC macs. It’s amazingly flexible.

Now go learn the basics of Reaper. Try Tutorials for Reaper’s YouTube Channel for starters. Or just do a search on YouTube. (This is the cheap guide, after all.) If you happen to have a subscription to Ask Video/MacProVideo.com, they have good tutorials on Reaper, and a ton of other stuff, but it costs money, and this is the Cheap Guide.

You can also read the fine manual.

What About Hardware?

Ah, you need a keyboard, monitors, and a USB audio interface, right? Well, maybe.

Since you’re just starting out, and maybe you’re just seeing if it’s interesting to you, I’d say hold off for a bit. This is a hobby that can get really expensive, fast.

A new crappy MIDI keyboard, runs $100. (Good ones can go over $1,000.) A USB audio interface runs $150 for a cheap one, and a cheap pair of monitor speakers starts at $100, and $100 monitors really suck. Really, really suck.

If you have to get anything, then I’d say it’s okay to a MIDI keyboard, but hold off on the other stuff, unless you need to record live instruments… in which case, why are you going cheap???? Read some other guide.

Cheap MIDI keyboards are all the same, with sloppy action, few controls, and a general cheapness that means they won’t last long. M-Audio makes a good generic crappy MIDI keyboard. If it’s like my old M-Audio keyboard, it’ll mysteriously die after a year or two. Not even my pencil could save it.

For a USB interface, I like my Focusrite Scarlett 2i2. It’s a stupid-cheap USB audio interface. It’s not the sexiest or fastest, but it gets the job done for me. I use it with some KRK-6 monitors I got on sale. They’re not great, but they’re good enough. But even those cost around $350 on sale.

At any rate, we’re not aiming to release a record right off the bat, so it’s okay if your gear is on the OEM janky side for now. Improve it as your budget allows.

My Two Iron Rules of Music Production

Before you go shopping, keep these two rules in mind. They will save you a lot of cash, and a lot of headaches down the road.

Rule One: If you can, demo the hell out of everything before you buy it. If you can’t demo it, make sure there’s a good return policy. (At least a month.) If anything feels off or uncomfortable, don’t buy it/return it. That slight discomfort in the keybed you feel? That isn’t ever going away.

Rule Two: Ignore the hype and look at the product carefully. Every single product out there has a slick marketing video with professionally made sample tracks alongside it. Don’t get suckered in. That guy making sweet music with the cool box of lights or whatever random VST? Yeah, he’s a pro. He’s got years of experience, and he probably spent at least a few weeks working with the product in question, and knows it way, way better than you do. Take the hype and dial it down a notch.

I’m not saying some of this stuff isn’t awesome– some of it is! But it’s like a great pair of size 9 yellow shoes. If you’re a size 9, and like yellow, then hot dog! This is for you! But not all of us are size 9, like yellow, or even need another pair of shoes.

So do your research and buy gear carefully, or just do it later, when you have a better idea of what you’re doing. (I recommend the latter, but I understand the former.)

Next, we’ll start looking at free synths and effects plugins! Yay, finally!

The Cheap Guide to Making Music, Part 0: Get Some Knowledge For Free!

 Education, Music  Comments Off on The Cheap Guide to Making Music, Part 0: Get Some Knowledge For Free!
Sep 202014
 

I’ve been kicking around the idea of making this kind of guide for a while. Why? Because every day on Reddit, I see 2-3 posts of the, “I want to get into EDM or EMP, but I only have 35 cents in my pocket right now. How do I do it?”

First, you need to get the right attitude towards doing this. It’s going to take a while to get good at it (I’m still not good), so you need to have your expectations set at the right level.

It’s Okay to Suck at First

Listen to Ira Glass, who is talking about producing news for radio, but this advice applies to everything. See? Even he sucked for a long time before he started to get good. So it’s okay for you to suck.

Now, I hope you’ve adjusted your expectations accordingly, so you don’t feel like you want to jump off of a building if nobody likes your first song, or even your first fifty.

It’s cool! We’ve all been there. That’s how we learn.

It helps if you focus on not sucking. (This is a great article to keep in mind.) But it’s hard to not suck at first, especially when you don’t know what you’re doing, so don’t beat yourself up too much.

The same guy who wrote the article on how to not suck wrote this excellent article that you need to engrave upon your soul. You really need to read this before you make the mistake of wasting a lot of time and money on stuff you don’t need.

Step 0: Now Get Some Knowledge (But don’t go overboard.)

Before you do anything, buy anything, whatever, go get some knowledge, but don’t bury yourself in it. Get enough so you know the basics, understand what you’re doing, then move on to making music. Don’t get caught on the hamster wheel of over-training. There’s a fine line between getting knowledge and never getting off the starting line.

This also goes for things like shopping for gear, talking on forums, etc. I’ve talked about this before with respect to Japanese– it’s the meta game. It fools you into thinking you’re doing X, but you’re not. You’re talking about X, you’re preparing for X, but you’re NOT doing X.

With that caution in mind:

Coursera has a bunch of free music classes. Look for the Berklee classes:

Or you can just take apart your favorite songs, and try to rebuild them yourself. Your call. I found the classes to be pretty useful.

Other resources:

  • Dave Conservatoire, which is kind of like Khan Academy for musicians.
  • Music Theory, the TL;DR version is a free/pay what you want PDF book.
  • Musictheory.net has a lot of resources for learning theory on your phone or PC.
  • Hooktheory is another phone/PC app/book combo with some cool stuff in it, too. Hooktheory’s “Theorytab” is really useful for figuring out chord progressions from a lot of famous songs.
  • Kunst der Fuge will give you total access to all of its MIDI files and PDFs for a one-time 20 EUR fee. Analyze away, or just add the MIDI files to your chord progression database.
  • The Dance Music Manual is great if you want to get into EDM. It’s a brilliant book. Rick Snoman has forgotten more about producing than you’ll ever know. Yes, you have to spend money on it. But it’s not much money, and you’ll get a ton out of it. This is a good way to avoid sitting through 8,000 hours of videos.

There are some great YouTube channels out there, too. In no order I like:

  • ADSR Sounds for Reaktor and Massive in particular, but they do a good job on all Native Instruments software.
  • Sadowick for Ableton and general music production advice.
  • Seamless for FL Studio, IL’s plugins (like Harmor!), or Serum.
  • ArtFX for Massive and other plugins.
  • SonicState for witty banter, music production news, and reviews.
  • DubSpot for a variety of tutorials for a lot of DAWs
  • Point Blank Music School for all kinds of tutorials.
  • Tom Cosm knows a ton about Ableton.
  • ScanProAudio has some great Push tutorials, and a lot of other useful info.
  • Pensado’s Place, because he is a god of ProTools, and even if you don’t use PT, he knows so much about producing, it’ll make your head spin. Really good stuff.
  • ReasonExperts for Reason
  • TherSiteZ also for Reason (and his awesome voice!)
  • This video is part of a series on How Music Works. A good watch.
  • Part two, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five of that series.

And many more!

Pick one or two primary sources, finish them, and then see what you want to do next. Use the YouTube videos as sources of inspiration.

While you’re at it, find someone to teach you piano or keyboard. If YouTube doesn’t do it for you, then check out your local community centers. You might find something cheap there.

I love the Older Beginner’s Piano Course. Book 1, Book 2.

And remember to make music!

Mac Pro Video

 Art, Education, Music  Comments Off on Mac Pro Video
Sep 152014
 

I own a couple of Macs, but the newest one is a Mac Mini from 2006 or so. So why did I sign up for Mac Pro Video? Well, it wasn’t for Mac-anything. I found a good deal on their site– $15/month for as long as I want. And since I also finally bit the bullet and signed up for Creative Cloud, MPV looked like the best compromise for me.

I’m really into music production, but I’m also really into visual arts, web design, and programming, even. MPV has some absolutely awesome video series on music production, covering not only theory, but also DAWs, and some of the harder-to-get-used to plugins. And while there are a lot of great dudes on YouTube with great info, MPV has some great tutorials. I especially loved their series on Ableton’s Push.

And now that I’m getting in to Creative Cloud, the tutorials should come in handy,  rather than spending a couple of hours trying to find good YouTube videos. It should be a nice complement to Pencil Kings. (The Photoshop tuts there were great, as are a few of the drawing tuts I’ve been working on.)

The JOI of the N1.

 Education, Japanese Language  Comments Off on The JOI of the N1.
Sep 012014
 

I just registered for the JLPT N1 again in December. This time I’m really serious about it. As in, I’m pulling out all of the test prep stops! Or at least I’m not going to go get a cert in the middle of studying for it, and sabotage my efforts.

I signed up for classes on JOI again. I like their system. You buy some tickets (the more, the cheaper, and the longer they last), and use them on classes whenever you can take them. I generally buy them in yen, because they’re slightly cheaper. (And since the yen is plunging, it’s a good deal.) They have classes aimed right at N1 level people like me (or who aspire to pass it, anyway!), and they also have special courses in vocab, grammar, conversation, and test strategies. It’s all really helpful.

And I like it more than a MOOC. Maybe I’m a little old-fashioned, but I like real human interaction in my learning, especially when it’s something like Japanese, which requires some immediate feedback.

My other strategy for the test is something I’m already working on, and that’s working on vocabulary. I have my big book of 2000 N1 level words I should know (meh, not really, but I’m going to!), and a few other books, like one on 慣用語 (idioms, I guess?) and a Kanzen Master N1 book on 漢字.

I’ve also ditched Anki for now. Farming vocab, doing data entry and all that is too much of a pain. Instead, I got some Campus vocabulary notebooks over at JBOX, and I’ve been rapidly filling them up. This is where the 0.3mm Kuru Toga shines– at filling in the small boxes! Writing vs typing, which is faster? Neither, really, but this is working for me. It’s a nice change of pace.

The notebook has 3 columns– Foreign Word, Pronunciation, and Japanese. I put the word I want to know (kanji or hiragana, if there’s no kanji for it commonly used) in the Foreign Word column, the pronunciation in hiragana in the Pronunciation column, and either English or Japanese definitions in the Japanese column. Whatever helps me remember best.

It’s nice, because I can just grab a notebook, half-open it so that only the Foreign Word column shows, and scan down it to check my understanding and pronunciation.

I use the Page column to put a horizontal mark next to words I have trouble with. If a word has a lot of marks, it gets more attention.

It’s really the same thing as Anki, I just find it faster for me to review– no pressing buttons, or guessing whether it’s a 2 or a 3, or dealing with percentages. I keep staring at words until I remember them. Also, I keep separate notebooks, one for the N1 book, one for the 漢字 book (because a lot of it is verbs), and one for the 慣用語 book. And I have a few others, too, and a stack of blank books.

Reading-wise, I’m reading the editorials on Shasetsu Hikaku-kun whenever I can. I’m not a fan of reading right-wing Japanese editorials, but the vocab is useful. So is the reading practice! When it’s N1 time, there’s just NO time to do the reading, so I want to smash it to bits.

Listening is the only area where I don’t have a perfect countermeasure yet. I’ll probably go with my old Drill and Drill book.

Here’s hoping I can finally kill that N1 with fire!

Ya Big MOOC.

 Education, Technology  Comments Off on Ya Big MOOC.
Aug 202014
 

I went back to Udacity in order to finish up some programming courses, and because they were offering a deal. It’s been a while since I did any work in Python, but it’s funny how quickly it comes back to you. (Well, mostly.)

The only thing that’s kind of weird is going back over all the work I’ve already done. It feels like someone much smarter than me has already done a lot of this.

I’ve also been finishing up a Coursera MOOC on Music Theory, just to refresh a bit. It wasn’t bad, but the class felt kind of rushed towards the end. Really rushed! It was a good class, but the final exam was a little unreasonable, based on the amount of experience a lot of the students had.

I think the faculty had a “Well, this is obvious, isn’t it?” moment, when, “No, this is not obvious to a beginner. This is far from obvious,” is what they should have realized.

Still, right up until that point, it was very good. And I still got my PDF diploma (or whatever), so it’s all good.

And now I know what a hemisemidemiquaver is. But I’m still going to call it a 32nd note. And no way will I call a quarter note a crotchet. Makes me feel dirty.

But other than that, it was pretty good!

I’ve taken a lot of MOOC classes, on a bunch of different platforms, and I like the Udacity model the best– there’s no “You can only take this class NOW” problem. Take it whenever you want.

Coursera is too traditional in its approach, from my point of view, and some classes place far too much emphasis on the social aspect of learning. Honestly, I rarely, if ever, have time to use the forums. I barely have time to do the classes, and you want me to waste time in the forums? No thanks. If I want to socialize, I do it in the real world, or at least over Skype or voice chat.

The time pressure of Coursera isn’t fun, either. If I’m learning for fun, I want to learn at my own pace. Especially if I’m paying for it.

But! Coursera has an outstanding variety of classes, especially in Business and Music. I finished up a Marketing class offered by Penn’s Wharton School of Business. That was pretty interesting. And the music courses offered by Berklee are interesting. Sometimes I’ll drop the $50 for the certified certificate, but I have a hard time justifying that for something like Songwriting.

Oh, I took a look at the edX Linux class. My eyes glazed over at the cost. Really, guys? I get that you’re a non-profit, but that’s a crazy amount of money for what I can get from some YouTube videos and RTFMing a bit. A lot of the first week’s videos were just ads for the Linux Foundation, and that did nothing for me, either. I dropped it. I don’t have time for it.

It’s too bad. I was really excited about this course, and about edX, but the amount of money they ask for is just way too much for what’s essentially a DIY course. Coursera has already set my expectations at the appropriate level– $49 for a certified piece of paper is about right, considering it’s “college lite.”

I’m not a huge fan of the amount of money Udacity wants for its certified courses, either, but the coaching is useful. edX just wants the money, no coaching. As mom would say, “Das geht nicht!”

Pencil Kings

 Art, Education  Comments Off on Pencil Kings
Aug 042014
 

To improve my photography, I work on my visual sense. So I draw. To work on drawings and photography, I use Photoshop (and other programs). But my drawing has always kind of… what’s the word?

Sucked.

Yeah, that’s it.

Well, I kept hearing good things about Pencil Kings, so I’m in the middle of giving it a shot. In particular, I’m working on Sycra Yasin’s very thorough tutorial on painting in Photoshop. It’s a really good way to sharpen up those Photoshop skills. For photography, I use Lightroom more often, simply because I think it’s a better tool than Photoshop for dealing with a giant pile of photos without that… Photoshop look.

So far, I’m digging the info in the tutorial, even if I’m sick of drawing the pears and apple. Oh well. That’s how practice is. You draw the dull stuff to make the cool stuff.

It’s worth giving a look. The pricing isn’t too bad– $99/year or $250/lifetime. I’m giving it a year, and if it works out, I’ll do the lifetime thing.

Kindle Paperwhite: Powerful for Japanese Study

 Education, Foreign Languages, Japan, Japanese Language, Technology, Travel  Comments Off on Kindle Paperwhite: Powerful for Japanese Study
Jun 052014
 

I finally bit the bullet and bought a second Kindle Paperwhite, this time for my Japanese language library. And I don’t regret it one bit. It has become an incredibly powerful tool for improving my Japanese, because I read more books, faster, with the Paperwhite than I have with any other reading platform.

And I’ve tried a bunch of different ways to read Japanese books.

Note that some of these are perfectly fine for English language books, but I’m judging them on their usefulness as Japanese learning tools.

I have tried:

  • Paper Books and an Electronic Dictionary.
    • Disadvantages:
    • Not portable
    • Slow lookups disrupt reading
    • Tiny text kills my eyes.

 

  • Vertical Text Viewer (for Android).
    • Disadvantages:
    • Lookups are easier, but require an external app, which can’t search online dictionaries if I’m on a plane, so EPWING dictionaries have to be added.
    • Only Aozora Bunko formatted e-books work with it. That means I can access a library of out-of-copyright books, but nothing current. (Not legally, anyway.)

 

  • OCR Manga Viewer (for Android). Takes images, OCRs selected text, and offers a list of possible definitions.
    • Disadvantages:
    • Supported file format is scanned images, so no legal way of getting current titles, unless I scan every book I buy page by page.
    • Constant dragging and selecting finicky text selection tool gets annoying after a while.
    • Even if there are scans, if the scan quality isn’t perfect, the OCR software will have issues, so I’m back at the electronic dictionary stage again.

 

  • Amazon Kindle App (for Android). Updside: You can save a lot on shipping, and you can make text bigger. Long press on a word to look it up. (See disadvantages!)
    • Disadvantages:
    • There is only one dictionary. It’s Japanese-Japanese, and you better like it, because you can’t use any others with the simple long press function. The other option is search in another book, which is slow.
    • Most books are text files, but a small portion are scans. If you wind up with a scan of a book you want to read, you will have no way of looking up words inside the program.
    • The dictionary search function does not de-conjugate verbs, which makes the dictionary useless.

 

  • Google Play Books and Magazines App (for Android). Updside: I couldn’t really find one.
    • Disadvantages:
    • No dictionary I could find.
    • Couldn’t find any current popular Japanese books in the Play store. Couldn’t access the Japanese Play store without a VPN, and even then, Google sent me back to the US store.
    • The only books I could find were all scans of out-of-copyright books, or books I’ve never heard of by publishers I’ve never heard of.

 

Why Paperwhite?

So there you have it. Nothing really works the way I want to, well, except for the Kindle Paperwhite. Kind of. The Paperwhite is a bit of a mixed bag, but overall I think it’s the best way to read Japanese books on an electronic device.

The Paperwhite has the long press to look up a word feature that the Kindle app has, which it turns out is incredibly useful, because you can add extra dictionaries to the search. So if I can’t find a word in one dictionary, I can select another and another, as many as I have on the device. And I’m not limited to just Japanese-Japanese, I can get Japanese-English, etc. (I recommend getting one of the EDICT-based Japanese-English dictionaries. They’re cheap and good enough.)

Also, the Paperwhite will de-conjugate any verbs it comes across, making the dictionaries useful again.

The e-ink display is incredibly easy on the eyes, even for long-term viewing, and doesn’t guzzle battery, making it a good choice for long flights. Text can be enlarged, too. It looks really good.

It comes with a 単語帳, which records every word you look up, and lets you go over them as flash cards. Not as versatile as Anki, but a hell of a lot less fussing is involved. And it automatically shows you the sentence you were in when you looked up the word! If it only did SRS, it would be perfect. Oh well.

Using it, I’ve been plowing through books at an alarming rate. Alarming in that I’ve never been able to read Japanese this fast before.  I’m being serious here. I’ve tried a whole bunch of different ways of going about it, but this gives me the most enjoyment with the highest overall comprehension. And I can try books that may be a little too hard for me, because I have the dictionaries to fall back on.

Early on, manga looked bad on it. Really bad. But lately, publishers have gotten on board, and while it’s not as good as holding a real 単行本 in your hands, it’s good enough for travel. You can even zoom in on images with a comic reading mode that isn’t too bad. It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s getting a lot better. (I wish Amazon would come out with a bigger Paperwhite that did manga at a bigger size for ease of reading.)

I’m saving the biggest plus for last: what I’m saving on shipping and space taken up by books. It’s incredible. Oh, sure, I’m a bibliophile. I am surrounded by books. But I am not against using an e-ink device to read material like fiction. I just don’t care much about that. (Art and music are different. I like those on paper. Same with manga. Give me paper books… unless I’m traveling. Ugh.)

Now, it does not come without drawbacks. And they may be deal-breakers for some of you.

What it won’t help you with.

For starters, setting up an account with Amazon Japan in order to get access to the books takes some work. Amazon US has Japanese books, but the selection is a mess, and all the titles are in romaji, making it a big useless pile of nonsense words to me. I don’t do romaji, and nobody should have to in order to read Japanese books. Also, Amazon US doesn’t have anything I’d even want to read if I could find it. We’re back at the publisher problem. 20th century business practices in the 21st century. Ugh.

Also, if you already have a Kindle Paperwhite and use it with another Amazon, like Amazon US or UK, then go buy another one. The only way you can use one Paperwhite for both accounts is to constantly wipe it and reset it. Yes, I think that’s dumb, too, but there you go.

And don’t try buy a Paperwhite from Amazon Japan. Even if you use a service like Tenso, they will send you a polite warning never to do that again, or else your account will be closed for good. It’s odd, but they don’t care if you buy anything else and have it shipped to the US by a third party, but if you do it with a Kindle, there’ll be hell to pay.

The device itself tends to get slow over time. Hold down the power button and reboot it if it starts acting sluggish. I usually have to do it once a week or two.

Sometime Amazon Japan will have issues with my credit cards, for no apparent reason I can find.

I can’t find a good way to get at my 単語帳 outside of the Paperwhite. That kind of sucks. I’d love to be able to export it to Anki. So much for that.

There are a lot of books not available as Kindle versions yet. A lot of books I really want to read. And some Kindle versions don’t come out until a month or two after the print version. But with patience comes big savings, and it also keeps me from over-buying. I only buy what I intend to read right now.

Finally, the DRM. It’s annoying. But it’s the trade-off I knew I had to make when going Kindle for Japanese. On the upside, as soon as a book is available in the Kindle store in Japan, I can be reading it if I so desire, at a fraction of what I would usually pay for having the real book shipped.

Summing it up.

So my advice to aspiring learners of Japanese is to get a Paperwhite. But first set up a test account with Amazon Japan and make sure you can buy books from them. Maybe try it on another device first, like an Android or iOS device.

Were I Amazon, I would publicize the heck out of this as a learning tool. The Japanese government is desperate to get new workers into the country, and to help teach people Japanese. This device would be a great tool for that, while also giving overseas fans a legit way to buy into “Cool Japan” without hassle. Everybody wins. Really. Everybody. (Well, except for DHL.)

Apr 022014
 

Juan had a question about how I did the Anki cards for the A+ exam. I started to write a reply, and it turned into a book. So I figured I’d post the reply as a blog post instead.

I created two types of cards for this deck.

Card Type #1: Basic Question/Answer Cards

The first type of card is a basic question/answer card, with a multiple-choice question on the front, and the answer on the back. I used that for all of the practice questions and mock test questions. That was about 60% of my deck.

Filling up the deck was pretty easy that way. I just copy/pasted the data from my PDF books (in Foxit) into a text editor, cleaned it up a little with find/replace, dumped it into a spreadsheet, then saved it as the proper data type to import into Anki. It takes some time, but it’s still a lot faster than typing every question out.

This is why I recommend the O’Reilly bookstore. All of their books come in PDF format (among others), and are DRM-free. DRM is a pain in the butt. It serves no real purpose, other than interfering with my lawful use of the material to study. I can get around the DRM with Greenshot (which takes a screen capture, then OCRs it), so it’s not like it stops anything, it just makes everything less efficient. (And it doesn’t stop real piracy!)

Sadly, Microsoft Press just left the O’Reilly store, so you can no longer get the DRM-free version of their excellent A+ prep books.

For some books, my only choice was using the Kindle Chrome app. You can’t copy/paste because “reasons,” I guess. I used Greenshot to OCR each chunk of data I wanted, and it would dump the OCR-ed text straight into the clipboard. It was generally about 97% accurate, but fixing that last 3% was really annoying.

Then I dumped the questions and answers into a spreadsheet, and added them all to Anki.

I recommend getting good mock test questions. Lots of them. Dump them in after you do the mock tests, so you don’t forget the trickier questions. If you dump them in before, you’ll lose the “I’ve never seen this before!” effect.

Also, add the study questions for things you don’t already know cold. Don’t clutter your deck with useless info you already know. (“The sun is hot,” “Water is wet,” that kind of stuff. If it’s that obvious to you, leave it out.)

Card Type #2: Fill In The Blank (AKA Cloze Deletion)

The second card type I made was a Cloze card type. “Cloze deletion” is a fancy way of saying “Fill in the blank.” You add tags around the data you want to be turned into a “_____” in the question field, and it gets revealed in the answer field as the original text. So if I tag the word “ABC”, in the question card is shows up as “___,” and on the answer card, it shows up as “ABC” again.

Anki uses HTML tags (actually XML) to mark Cloze fields. <c1> for starting the first Cloze field, and </c1> to end the first Cloze field. So it makes it really easy to turn any raw text into a Cloze card without using the editor. Just take your sentence, add the tags, and import it as a Cloze-type card.

If I need to remember, “Standard ABC has a transfer rate of XXX MB/sec,” I would set “ABC” as Cloze field 1, and “XXX” as Cloze field 2. That way, I would get two different question cards.

The formatting would look like this:

Standard <c1>ABC</c1> has a transfer rate of <c2>XXX</c2> MB/sec.

And just that would generate two cards.

One like this:

Front:”Standard ___ has a transfer rate of XXX MB/sec.”
Back: ABC

And another like this:

Front:”Standard ABC has a transfer rate of ___ MB/sec.”
Back: XXX

That forces me to think about the right answer, and try to remember it.

I find it’s best to do it one fact at a time. A card like this:

“Standard ___ has a transfer rate of ___ MB/sec,”

is more confusing than helpful. I could put in any combination of standards and data rates, and be right and wrong at the same time.

For remembering general concepts, and keeping things straight like Windows licensing options, interface data speeds, and graphics card standard resolutions, Cloze Deletion cards are really hard to beat. While I’ll start to remember the multiple choice answers over time, I’m forced to think about the answer for every Cloze card I get, because the answers aren’t pre-chewed for me.

One final trick: if you have a Logitech gaming keyboard with a bunch of programmable G-keys, you can program them to add the Cloze tags (as well as do other things) in the plain text editor of your choice. That saved me a lot of time, too! I had a whole set of G-keys programmed with Cloze tags for up to four facts.

Is all of this tedious? Hell yeah!

But is it effective? OMG yes.

And it’s cheaper than going to one of those schools that charge an arm and a leg to give you the same info you could get yourself.

Dead-tree vs. E-Books

The only way to get the data in quickly from paper books is with a cheap scanner and some good OCR software. There’s a ton of OCR software out there, and some of it is even free. I’ve done scanning and OCR for some of my Japanese test prep. It’s not fun, but it’s doable. It just adds a lot of unnecessary time. (But it’s still faster than typing.)

Alternativeto.net has a good list of OCR software alternatives. Some are even free/open source.

If you have a paper book by one of the O’Reilly publishers, you can register it on their website, and you may be eligible for a $5 e-book upgrade. Not all publishers go with this, but some do. It’s worth it to check it out. That could save you a ton of time.

Otherwise, I’d consider the money on paper books “lost,” and go buy digital editions I can work with more easily. Wrestling books and scanning every page I need is a waste of time I could use studying.

I prefer DRM-free books, but some of the best books are Kindle-only. So I bought whatever I felt was the best for me.

I only bought paper books if they came with a PDF version, or some other electronic version of the book. One of the Network+ books is like that. It uses some weird Adobe secure PDF thing that’s a pain in the butt to install, and even less fun to work with. My copy/paste is limited by DRM, for “reasons.” I can always use Greenshot in a pinch, but I don’t enjoy going that route.

It’s a big long of a reply, but I hope it helps. Any questions, just put them in the comments.

Snowmageddon Round Two? (Random Stuff Post)

 Art, DIY, Education, Music, Photography, Technology  Comments Off on Snowmageddon Round Two? (Random Stuff Post)
Jan 282014
 

Well, we’re all waiting for the snow to start. We’re supposed to get anything from 2 to 6 inches of snow today through tonight, and as I’ve said many times, we don’t do snow well here. I’m staying off the roads today and tonight, so that means no piano class.

Bummer.

If I Can’t Go to the Music School, Bring the Music School to Me!

I’m going to catch up on my Coursera classes: the Write Like Mozart class, and Pat Pattison’s Songwriting class, which I signed up for again last night.

I signed up for his Songwriting class last year, but I didn’t have time to finish it. What I saw, I really liked. He gives a really good insight into how pro songwriters write songs, and how to improve my own songwriting. (Hint: it involves lots of practice, just like anything else.)

I might also watch some Max 4 Live tutorials. That also looks really interesting.

Bitwig Studio

Bitwig Studio is coming out in late March for $399. The part that’s really interesting to me is the ability to run it in Linux. I think that’s a brilliant idea. But from what I’ve heard, there’s no ReWire compatibility yet, so that’s a big minus for me. This is a good preview of Bitwig, and you can find more videos on their channel.

I wouldn’t mind demoing it to see what it’s like, but $400 is a bit steep for me after G.A.S. ate a lot of my money over the holidays.

I probably shouldn’t buy another new instrument until I’ve gotten good at using the ones I already have.

Rewire and Vocaloid Editor

Speaking of ReWire, I finally found a VST that will let me ReWire the Yamaha Vocaloid 3.0 Editor into Live or Cubase. Cool! You can find it here (the site is all in Japanese). Look for this text “V3Sync ReWire Synchronizer Version 1.3.0 をダウンロード” in the middle of the page, click the link, and install like any other VST. Point the Vocaloid 3 editor to the VST, and it should work.

I know you used to be able to ReWire directly from most Vocaloid 2.0 editors. What happened with 3.0? I have no idea.

Piapro Studio is a good alternative now that it’s at version 1.2. Now you can use sound banks from other companies, too, if you register your non-Crypton sound banks at Crypton’s Sonicwire.com website. I haven’t tried it yet, but I will soon.

Monitor Stand Update

The monitor stand is working really well. I installed it about a week ago, after letting it off-gas for a few days. It adds about 4.25 inches to the height of my monitors, so it took a few days to get used to, but I’m used to it now.

Naturally, just as I say that, I noticed a crack in the wood filler on the right side, near my heater vent. That’s what touch-up paints are for.

Slide Duplicating Project

This is a project I’ve been wanting to get back to for a while. I’m waiting on a Leica Screw Mount to Sony E Mount adapter, and then I may be able to make some good progress on it. I’m going to try what someone did here and remove the FD mount from my Canon FL Bellows, then attach it to my NEX with a LSM to E Mount adapter. That should give me enough focal length to get the duplicate slides in full view.

I hope.

Or I can just throw the whole mess on the copy stand. But I’d rather use a slide copier, because I can aim that at Mr. Sun, and get natural daylight for copying the slides. Artificial light always has weird spectra, even light bulbs that say they are “daylight balanced,” only do so in a way that fools your eye. It does not fool the sensor or the software.

More Coursera Fun

 Education, Music, Photography, Technology  Comments Off on More Coursera Fun
Jan 202014
 

Prof. Donald Hornstein is a fun lecturer to listen to. I highly recommend his new Coursera class on Environmental Law. If you have any interest at all in the environment or in law, take it. (Even for you lawyers out there– it’s a fun refresher.)

I take my CLE every year at the UNC Festival of Legal Learning, and every year, I look forward to Don Hornstein’s lectures. They’re not just entertaining, they’re also fascinating. He takes a subject that at times can be really dry and breathes life into it.

I also signed up for a class called “Write Like Mozart.” It started a few weeks ago, so I’m already behind. I’m going to have to hustle to catch up, but there’s some really interesting stuff going on there. I’d like to learn more about 18th century voice leading!

Is Paddy the Coolest Thing Ever???

I was sitting here, surrounded by my MIDI gear, when I had a thought that other people have already had. “What if I could use this stuff to edit my photos in Lightroom? Wouldn’t it be a heck of a lot faster?”

The answer is yes, so long as Lightroom doesn’t break the plugin you’re using.

Paddy is a program developed as donation-ware, that lets you use just about any MIDI controller to control the sliders in Lightroom to develop photos. If you’ve used Lightroom for any appreciable length of time, you know that fiddling with the mouse to change levels for all of Lightroom’s sliders is finicky business. Sometimes the sliders misbehave, sometimes the mouse misbehaves, either way, it’s tedious.

What Paddy does is take that tedious, repetitive mouse clicking, and if you have an old MIDI mixer with some motorized faders, you can zoom through editing photos in a snap. The faders will automatically go to the positions of the current photo in Lightroom, and you can just mess around with them as you please. I love the idea of this kind of tactile feedback, as well as the idea of mixing MIDI and photo developing.

This is one of those things I need to put on the “Come back to this in a few months” pile and see how the software is progressing.

Reason Book and Other Stuff

 Education, Music, Technology  Comments Off on Reason Book and Other Stuff
Jan 052014
 

I’m starting to finally feel better. Well, except for the coughing that comes out of nowhere. I’ve heard that this cold takes a while to get over. Yay.

My Reason book showed up today. It’s huge! The type is kind of small, but the way it’s laid out, if it was published traditionally, this would easily go over 1000 pages. As it is, it comes in at around 356 pages or so. Lulu did a great job binding it, and color really makes a big difference– there are a lot of illustrations, and each one is sharp.

I haven’t had time to read the whole book yet (I just got it!), but I’m looking forward to spending some quality time with it.

Push or Maschine? Argh!

I’m still looking a lot at Push and Maschine as well. I’m leaning heavily towards getting one of them to speed things up. Since I’m not only using Reason, but also VSTs, I’m looking for something that will improve my workflow. I’m also looking for something that will help me come up with wild and crazy ideas.

Maschine has some nice features. It integrates really well with Komplete, and has an awesome preview method. But it looks like it’s geared more towards sampling, and I’m not really into that. I’m more into straight composition and using instruments, in which case Push looks much more attractive.

Push supports Live and Live Suite instruments natively, but Komplete and other third party VSTs don’t have that kind of deep support. I understand why. There’s also a third party solution that lets Push owners tweak the heck out of it so it’ll work better with third party VSTs and other DAWs as well.

I’m very glad that Ableton didn’t turn Push into a black box you can’t tinker with. I think it’s good that they welcome third party software. If anything, it should help sales.

I’d say the only bit I’m not looking forward to is configuring everything. Whoa. I sound like I’ve bought it already. I’m still thinking. It’s a lot of money.

Oct 212013
 

Man, that was nerve-wracking.

Part two of the A+ exam was trickier than I thought it would be. I know a lot of this stuff just because I’ve been messing around with computers all my life. I’ve built every computer I’ve used for the last 20 years. (Except for laptops.)

But if you ask me about cables, and numbers, and standards, my eyes (until now) would glaze over.

Now I know which version of Windows XP you really need. Or Vista. Or 7. (Yeah, that part was kind of weird, if you ask me.)

I also have a bunch of handy new skills in basic network troubleshooting, and dealing with Windows’ general random bugginess.

Finally, I have a new way of approaching problems that’s really useful.

I highly recommend getting as many A+ books as you can, and dumping them into Anki, then dump the questions into Anki, and review the bejeezus out of them.

Now on to N1 prep, and Career Forum prep.

A+ Part One: Pass!

 Education, Japanese Language, Technology  Comments Off on A+ Part One: Pass!
Oct 112013
 

So far, so good. I passed the first A+ test. It was harder than I thought it would be. I’m glad I had 3 different prep books to drill questions out of. I must have taken about 10 or so practice tests. I nailed this one.

Now my sister and nephew are coming tonight for the weekend, so I need to get the house ready. And I’ll be taking part two of the A+ on the 21st.

And of course there’s still the N1 looming over me. I’m not sure what to do about that. Panic? Nah. I don’t have time for that.

Glass in Durham

 Education, Music, Photography, Technology  Comments Off on Glass in Durham
Oct 052013
 

Google brought its Glass wearable device to Durham today, and it was a madhouse. A controlled madhouse, but the lines were huuuuge.

Kudos to the Google staff, who managed the hordes of people who showed up. I only had to wait in line for about 30 minutes, and I came a little late. (Like at 11 am.)

Everyone was excited. We got little booklets that explained how to use Glass before we even went in. And they had waiters bringing us water so nobody got dehydrated.

Once I got in, I had to sign a release, then we went off into our little orientation groups. Then we got to try it on for about 10 minutes.

It’s a really neat device. My unit didn’t connect to WiFi, though, so it didn’t do much. But I can see how having it could be really useful for anyone who shoots video. I’m not as sold on the serious photography aspect, but I’m a camera snob. If the lens is too small, I have problems taking it seriously.

But I bet you could make some really interesting videos with this.

The heads-up display isn’t really a HUD. It’s more like a little TV that hovers just off and to the right. It’s not quite as earth-shattering as I was hoping for.

In my vision of a vision enhancing technology, it would be a real HUD that would give you an overlay layer on reality, like drawing big fat arrows on the pavement as you’re driving along to tell you where to turn, instead of making you look at a little monitor and look away from the road. It would kind of be like a world where your computer is a really good, really fast graffiti artist.

But I think that kind of tech is about 4-5 years away at least.

After we played with it, we could go upstairs and get food and beverages for free, and a poster. I skipped the food, grabbed a poster, and left. I had music composition later on, and I needed to get ready for it.

That’s been a fun class so far. Lots to learn, but a nice environment. I’ve already written one piece, too. It’s not great, but it’s a start.

I’m also cramming A+ material into my brain as fast as I can. I have my first A+ test on the 11th. Gotta study.

Anki Assault / Piano Practice

 Education, Japanese Language, Music, Technology  Comments Off on Anki Assault / Piano Practice
Sep 102013
 

In order to get ready for both the N1 and the A+ exams, I’m going all out on Anki for the next few weeks. I’ve just finished setting up a bunch of workbook practice sheets for Anki, thanks to e.Typist. It lets me OCR stuff and get it into Anki relatively painlessly.

For A+ material, if the book I bought is in PDF format, it’s easy to just copy/paste the text into Anki. But if it’s a Kindle book, then I have to use something like Greenshot, which take a photo of the page, OCRs it, and adds it to the clipboard. Then I just have to paste it into Anki.

Really, it would be a lot easier if these publishers just gave us text files. I paid for the book. It’s not like I’m going to give away the contents. I just want to turn it into flashcards I can use.

Also, I finally upgraded to Anki 2.0. I’ve been putting that off forever, but it’s finally time to bite the bullet. The transition took a couple of days to get ironed out completely, but now I don’t even notice the differences. The differences are there, and the workflow is pretty different, but things I used to complain about don’t seem like such a big deal to me anymore. As long as it’s fast, that’s all I care about.

Oh, Piano Class started tonight. That was a lot of fun. The Piano Lit class afterwards was interesting, too. I’m pretty ignorant when it comes to piano music. My background is in marching bands, concert bands, and jazz bands. So I don’t know much about classical piano music. But it’s interesting.

Music School

 Education, Music, Technology, Travel  Comments Off on Music School
Sep 032013
 

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is starting something new this fall, a Community Music School for people like me who live nearby and want to polish our musical skills in a relaxed setting. It sounds really interesting to me, because as I’ve said before, I need to work on my music composition skills. I also need to work on my piano/keyboarding skills, because that’s the fastest way to enter music into my DAW of choice, Reason.

I spoke with the teachers at an event on Sunday, August 25th, and they both seemed like really nice people who were not only passionate about what they do, but highly experienced. So signing up was a no-brainer for me.

Composition starts this Saturday, Group Piano starts next Tuesday. I’m looking forward to it.

Also, I’m starting to go into full gear mode for the N1, which is coming up in less than three months. (OMG!) I’m also looking at getting my A+ certification, because it’s an easy way to show people I know what I’m doing when it comes to computers. I may get Network+ and Security+ later on, but for now A+ will be plenty.

The only thing I’m worried about is cramming for A+ will mess up my N1 prep. But I want to have the A+ certification before I go to Boston again. (Yeah, I’m going again.)

This fall is going to be crazy.

Fahrenheit 451 or What Do I Do With These Things You Call “Books?”

 Education, Technology  Comments Off on Fahrenheit 451 or What Do I Do With These Things You Call “Books?”
Jul 312013
 

Lately I have been getting rid of books I don’t need. So far, I have donated about 8 boxes full to the local thrift shop. I set aside 2 boxes more for my friend’s son, who likes science fiction books.

My main targets for removal are old law books, old computer books, and out-of-copyright literary works. The law/computer books just aren’t current anymore, so other than as decorations or ballast, they don’t have much value. I’m hoping maybe decorators can use the law books, or someone might want the computer books for ballast.

The literary works I’m trying to give to people who can use them, but even that is difficult. With Project Gutenberg, I can download Mark Twain’s books whenever I feel like it, so having a paper copy doesn’t make any sense. But I know someone out there might want one. Someone like my mom, who looks at computers the same way you or I might look at a live snake.

I like books. They’re comforting. But I have too many, so the ones that don’t make the cut are going out the door.

O’Reilly has a good program going on. Register your O’Reilly books with the site, and you can get DRM-free e-book versions for $5 each. I spent a good two hours registering books, and I’ll probably start buying the e-book versions soon. I’ll probably get rid of some of the older paper copies either way. They just take up too much space.

Grabbing the N1 Bull by the Horns

 Education, Japanese Language, Technology  Comments Off on Grabbing the N1 Bull by the Horns
May 072013
 

Well, it’s May, and that means it’s time to start getting ready for the N1 again. This time, I’m going to get more serious about it than last time, because I have some pockets of free time here and there to work on it.

My calligraphy class, which was taught in Japanese, is now over for good, so I have one less way to speak/learn. I had a lot of fun there, even though it was a one-hour drive each way for a one-hour class (well, it usually ran a bit over, but I really enjoyed it!)

That class, plus my twice-weekly business Japanese sessions have helped me keep my conversational skills going, but it’s hard for me to keep my grammar and vocabulary knowledge highly polished without doing some sort of language classes that focus on it.

Going over some of my notes from Yamasa really shows how much rust can build up in unseen areas. I notice that there are some grammar phrases I should be using, but I just never use in daily conversation, so I need to focus on those a bit more.

So this week, I’m going to try out the Japanese Online Institute. It’s an online speech + chat + whiteboard-based way to learn Japanese in either small groups or privately. The first 3 lessons are only $9, so I’m game to try. After that, group lessons range in price from 500 yen (if you buy 180 lessons) to 900 yen (if you buy 5). The dollar/yen pricing is a bit off, probably due to the plummeting yen.

If I like the classes, then I’ll probably pony up a decent chunk of cash to get some lessons at a discount. I want pummel the N1 this year, so I don’t have to mess with it anymore.

They have a nice variety of classes, so it looks promising.

Done with Intro to Music Production

 Education, Music, Technology  Comments Off on Done with Intro to Music Production
Apr 272013
 

That was fun.

I just finished up the Berklee Intro to Music Production class on Coursera. I learned a lot, and had a lot of fun doing it. I would love to be able to point you to my insanely popular tracks that are burning up all of the interwebs, but I’m still a scrub in that respect. The only way to get good at most things in life is to practice.

My only problem is that I keep coming across new and interesting things to do. Ahh! I need another 10 hours in the day. Someone get on that for me.

Coursera-sera // Nektar Panorama P4

 Education, Music, Technology  Comments Off on Coursera-sera // Nektar Panorama P4
Feb 092013
 

I signed up for Coursera today, mainly because I was interested in an Intro to Sound Design class taught by Steve Everett of Emory University. I’m coming in a little late, but I’ll still have time to finish it and get my certificate, if that’s what I want. What I really want is to learn how to do sound design.

I’ve been trying to get more and more into music production, but it’s always a question of time. I don’t seem to have enough of it to figure this all out on my own, so I’m hoping I can pick up some knowledge here and skip ahead a few steps.

I like the offerings in Coursera, but I wish they had more of a Udacity model that lets me pick up and finish a class whenever I feel like it, kind of like Khan Academy, only with certificates if I want one.

All three sites are pretty amazing in their own way, but it’s still a matter of making the time to get the work done.

Nektar Panorama P4

I keep forgetting to mention this. A few weeks ago my patched-together Edirol MIDI controller was dying again, and this time, no amount of pencil work could bring the dead keys back.

So I started looking at new MIDI controllers. I first went to the local Large Music Supply chain store, and tried a bunch of keyboards out, and just wasn’t impressed with any of them. Some were too mushy, some were too hard, none were what I was looking for.

I could have spent $300 now, and wound up buying another new keyboard in six months when I got sick of it.

So I kept looking, this time online. I decided to give the Nektar Panorama P4 a try. Amazon is good about taking returns, so why not?

The P4 has really tight integration with Reason, and the keys feel great. There’s some weight, but not full weight. The display and rotary knobs/sliders mean that I don’t have to fiddle with the computer as much.

Nektar also says that they’ll be doing frequent updates to keep up with the growing number of Rack Extensions in Reason. If a RE isn’t mapped, you can’t do anything with it from the P4. That’s kind of annoying, but it only affects the latest REs.

I like this growing trend of creating instruments that feel like instruments, and pull me away from the monitor.

Working on My Japanese

 Education, Japanese Language  Comments Off on Working on My Japanese
May 012012
 

I met up with my first Japanese teacher from when I was a grad student about ten years ago. A-sensei is a great person who will always help a former student out, and I really appreciate it. We had a nice chat and she’s going to connect me with some local folks to talk to.

I’m also waiting to hear back from some other folks in Japan about getting a tutor for the business Japanese.

Language is a muscle. If you don’t use it, it atrophies. Fast. So the more people I can talk to in Japanese, the better.

CLE

 Education  Comments Off on CLE
Feb 102012
 

In North Carolina, it’s every lawyer’s obligation to do 12 hours per year of Continuing Legal Education (CLE). What is it? It’s sitting in a room full of lawyers, listening to lectures about current issues in the law. There are also ethics and substance abuse classes we have to sit in on, too.

I usually go to the UNC School of Law Festival of Legal Learning, because it has some really interesting seminars to sit in on. I’ve used information from some of them to get leads for articles I later wrote for local papers. It’s a good way to get current on the trendy stuff in law, and the not-so-trendy stuff.

I really enjoy the environmental law seminars, but the science we hear about the future is a bit depressing.

There was a lot of talk about fracking this year. That looks like it’s going to be a mess.

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