Ever wanted to draw on somebody's web site? Do a little virtual graffiti? Tag a page with your logo? Now you can! Drawhere.com has created a cool, dead simple tool that allows you to draw on any page. Is it Photoshop drawing? No. Windows Paint? More like it. But still, draw on any page?

You can view other people's drawings and who's got the top draw. I have no idea how they calculate that ranking, but who cares! Check out my drawing ... I tagged my last blog post, oooooh living on the edge! (I did not have my Wacom Tablet hooked up)

For some reason, though, I can't save my drawings. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently took a trip into the Humboldt county redwoods park. Avenue of the Giants! Absolutely incredible visuals. To think, some of these trees were alive while Christ was on earth and while the pyramids were being built. Wow! Naturally, I brought my photo gear for some ancient forest photography.

I made a huge mistake in the beginning ... I forgot my tripod! I couldn't believe it! I had to work with limited options. For landspace shots, you want a small aperture to maximize your depth of field. Anywhere from f8 to f16 would be great for super wide to standard telephoto lenses. Unfortunately, I could barely get above f4.5 (and that's with ISO800 and 1/60sec shutter speed!)

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It's the weekend, so I figured an off-topic post would be cool. This has got to be one of the best forum threads I've followed in a long time! It's start off with some rules:

Rules: cut the subject out and put him in another situation.

Sounds fair ... 28 pages of photoshop'ed images!!! This passed out guy has been "immortalized"! The funniest page for me is #4. The guy is put into SO MANY situations, it's incredible! From the Pope, to riding with Bush, to hanging with the Beatles ... it's great!

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Last.FM has created a very cool social network around music. You discover new artists around other poeple's music compatibility. If you listen to a lot of Daft Punk, then it will recommend what others have listened to after Daft Punk. How cool is that!? Then, they compile a chart based on the number of listens for the week. Is this the future of radio charts?

One problem ... Last.FM was acquired by the media giant CBS!!! NO!!! Last.FM didn't observe the day of silence to revolt against the rate charges for online radio performances. The internet was suppose to be the frontier to free us from radio consolidation!

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Why do we have to have an endless number of audio plugin formats? I can't imagine being an audio developer today and having to support so many different formats and operating systems. You've got Windows, Mac, and now Linux for the OS's, but the plugins are ridiculous. When Apple bought Logic, they dropped support for Windows (which was the reason I switched to Apple!) but they also dropped VST support! Crazy ... A lot of developers only support VST.

VST, AudioUnit, MAS, 32bit, 64bit, PowerPC, MacTel, ohh my god! Look at a KVRAudio post by Zebra developer URS:

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A lot of people ask me when they first get started in building a home studio "what do you recommend I buy?" It's such a broad question! So many choices, options, and paths to walk down. Do you dance with Digidesign and the ProTools money pit? Or do you amalgamate a digital audio workstation from Logic and Motu gear? Or do you go analog and mix everything through a mackie board? Or a combo of both? Ahhh! Options!!!

A common mistake is when somebody drops $3,000 - $4,000 on a microphone and only spends $400 on a sound card (audio converters). Big mistake! Lots of records have been cut with cheap microphones, but the difference is they were cut using analog tape. With digital recording, you inherently lose definition because the sound waves become steps (16bit has about 65,000 steps. 24bit has a few million). Analog tape is not restricted by steps (or bit depth).

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Ohhhh baby ... this fall is gonna be good, at least I hope it's gonna be good. If you do a search on "22mp canon", everybody is rumoring up a storm about the 1Ds MK3 potential release and what could be in store for it's feature set (1D Mark3's big brother). First off, a lot of people are saying "a new lens mount" is in the works. Ummmm, why? A 35mm film camera slide can produce a 22mp scan, and that's using Canon's L lenses. So why would we need a new set of lenses?? It's already got the resolution!

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I've read a lot of magazines talking about lighting up landscapes at night for some dramatic shots. Same goes for macro photography! The key is to take many shots with different lighting angles, because you never know which shot is the winner until you pull it up on the computer screen. A few obvious things have to be observed when shooting nighttime macros:

• Manually focus your shots
• Use long exposures (tripod is an obvious requirement!)
• Observe the wind conditions carefully
• Flashlight is required

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I remember when I first started out in music production not having a single clue how samples and loops were constructed. I was like "how do people produce these sounds?!" One the goals for this blog is to help people learn production techniques and to give away production material (loops, samples, kits, etc). My first post on audio loops was under producing "electro loops". I decided to go a more generic route and produce basic, backbone type loops for this post.

The great thing about creating loops for the purpose of loop production, is you can start from ANYWHERE! I had produced a set of loops about 3 years ago that were alright, but not spectacular. I decided to load up a loop from that collection into Native Instruments Kontakt 2 and slice the loop for individual hits. Kontakt makes this relatively simple. I always start by sequencing a click track with the hihat-like sound. Then I play the beats with M-Audio's Trigger Finger. Here's the result:

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Last weekend Mimi and I took a saturday over to the bay area. Fishermans warf ... glorious fresh fish! About three weeks ago I had seen a local news cast talking about a coffee roasting company that was selling coffee out of a garage, and people have driven all the way across the bay area to get a cup of coffee! Whoa! This better be good coffee.

I dialed in the address to the Blue Bottle Coffee Kiosk into my navigation system and off we went (full of fish and chips). Sure enough, the coffee kiosk was hidden in a one way alley in San Fransisco. AND, there was a line! A line for a sweet fresh cup of joe. And it kept growing ... not a two or three person line, but a strong 10 person average of a line!

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