Creative Engineering

Okay, this is hardly a new topic on the internet… but it’s yet another new topic on my blog (the strategy is to have as little focus as possible and thus make it completely impossible to “monetize” the blog). The topic, formulated as a question, is: how do you improve your singing? And your speaking, I guess. The problem with that topic is that there’s a lot of information about it on the internet, much of it either wrong, misleading or irrelevant. So I thought I’d add some more noise, and I’ll try to give you a few explanations of why I think certain parts might be more or less useful.

So, here’s an introduction to all the stuff you’ll find on the internet, and which parts of it really matter (if you ask me). (Note: I made substantial changes to this article shortly after first publishing it.) Read the full post »

The submission timeframe for the current Song Fight, “Paper Thin”, ended four days ago and the submissions were just published. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to submit my song in time (I recorded most of it in the last few hours) but you can listen to it anyway. Read the full post »

Good news! A couple of weeks ago I found the Song Fight website. Song Fight works like this: a song title is posted. You write a song for that title within a week and submit it to the fightmaster. When the week is up, the fightmaster will publish the list of all entries on the website. Visitors can now vote for songs until the songs of the next fight are published. The winner of a fight gets to brag… and not really anything else. Apart from a serious boost in creativity and musical skills when you make it a habit to participate, that is.

Yesterday (going by the local timezone) I submitted my first Song Fight entry for the title “Interesting Times”. It will be up on the Song Fight website shortly, and it’s now available here. Read the full post »

Tom7, also known as Tom Murphy VII, has been challenging musicians to create an entire album in 24 hours. Consecutive hours, that is. In other words, this challenge is an excellent source of sleep deprivation and a great way to avoid doing things I ought to be doing instead. So I thought to myself: one day I simply must give this a try. That day was today (and yesterday). I proudly present my first Album-A-Day: You Vs. The Others. Read the full post »

I am always happy to find alternative applications of creativity. Today’s focus is on Acer or, more specifically, on Acer’s so-called Linux notebooks. Shipped exlusively in Europe (as far as I can tell), they attract interest by being cheaper than the version shipped with some version of Windows. Currently, the difference in price weighs in at 47.01 € at Amazon Germany (that’s, very roughly, 10% of the full price).

And, of course, they come with Linux pre-installed. So that’s fine for basic usage, even if it takes a little getting used to for the more Windows- savvy people. Right?

Let’s take a closer look. Acer’s Linux distribution of choice appears to be Linpus Linux (a Fedora fork developed by Linpus Technologies of Taiwan). Their website is down right now (I wonder…), but from what I gather from the rest of the web, Linpus comes in several flavors, among them a desktop edition and a server edition. The desktop edition is based on KDE 3.4 et cetera et cetera, so nothing really surprising there. Even if Linpus is rather unusual, it’s probably decent enough. Right? Right? Well… Guess again. Read the full post »