Let me introduce you to this English guy who is a really great guitar teacher.
The monotone color hue on his videos is as unique as his hairstyle, but let me tell you that this guy really knows how to teach guitar!
He has around 12 free videos which are all great. Just search You Tube for "vGuitar" and you should easily find them.
To show you just how good they are, here are some of them here for your learning pleasure.
Let's start off with an introductory lesson on Bar Chords:
Here is a lesson all about "Johnny B Goode" bluesy rock style rythms:
Finally let's finish off with how to play a classic sounding rock song.
There is a full blown website for vGuitar at: http://www.vguitarlessons.com/ where additional lessons can be purchased, as well as great lessons on how to play every part of particular famous rock songs like:
Seven Nation Army - White Stripes
Under The Bridge - Red Hot Chilli Peppers
Basket Case - Green Day
Back In Black - AC/DC
and many others.
So get yourself flying into some vGuitar lessons, and I am sure you will find it most invigorating.
Blippr is an interesting website involving a community of people writing 160 character "blips", which are micro reviews of Books, Movies, Games, Music and Apps.(Link to Blippr site in new window here: http://www.blippr.com/ ).
From their site: "Blippr is a really easy way to discover, talk about, and organize great apps, books, games, movies, and music. We figure why not make it easy to talk about and then find even more great stuff to talk about? Blippr is all about making all things media in your life better."
You can search Blippr and find what their members claim are the best books, movies, and so on, and then read the member blip reviews about them.
I tried this out for a book I had heard about, but have not read yet, called "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson.
Blippr soon found and displayed plenty of micro reviews on the book:
The other really interesting thing is that the Blippr site also supplies recommendations of similar books which you might be interested in.
These are the science type books shown here:
We assume that is from the tags assigned to items by the reviewers that Blippr works out these related items ? (or is a silent third party database involved)?
Blippr is also handy for getting basic information about computer applications. Eg. When we type in "Wolfram" we receive the following:
Blippr does not know about "Wolfram Mathematica", "Wordle", "Wall Wisher", and several other application names that we entered. Perhaps I should join up sometime, and add these to the community knowledge base.
So if you are looking for an interesting Book or Movie to check out, then why not get the cyber bods at Blippr to make some suggestions: it's very easy and gets you right to the decision point that you need to reach.
Instead of guessing what friends and family want for the birthdays, weddings, and Christmas, we can share "wish lists" online and see what they really want. It's private by invite only, and best of all, its free.
The sign up process is the usual thing: Supply an email address, User ID, and Password, and from there the main steps are as follows.
When we type in and add an item, Giftie uses Amazon to find weblinks to the item for our invited friends and family to be able to buy it for us online if they want to.
For example, I entered in a Boss Chorus Pedal for guitar onto my list:
and when I clicked the "Add this Gift" button, Amazon.com set up web links to various types of Boss Chorus pedals: (if I click the actual "boss chorus pedal" link, I can see about twenty different items).
(I don't have a Chorus pedal because the Native Instruments emulator on my PC has Chorus, and my Marshall Guitar amp also has inbuilt chorus, but a Boss pedal would be nice to have as well).
Amongst the items we add onto our list, we can flag certain items as "Most Wanted". A Chevrolet Corvette is my most wanted item..... because we can dream to the max on Giftie !
The second step after creating a wish list is Create or Join a Group if we are planning to have our whole family put up Christmas Wish Lists together:
The third step is to view other people's lists and to "reserve" an item on their list if you are planning to buy it for them. Once an item is reserved, its gift tag turns red so that other people know that the item is already taken care of by somebody else. But the recipient does not know that the item has been reserved.
The nice thing here is that we can reserve an item without being required to purchase it online through any of the links that Giftie has provided. So the service is really free with no strings attached.
Giftie also provides some interesting stats on what the most popular gifts on its lists are:
In these stats, we can pick a category and then "drill down" to what interests us.
For example we can find out what are the most popular video games for the Nintendo Wii :
So for this Christmas, why not give "Giftie Giftie" a go: it's free, and it's fun. And it just goes to show there is a free web application for nearly everything !
Every year around Christmas time, people email around these great flashing lights animated Christmas Cards.
So this year I decided I would have a go at making one myself as an animated GIF file. The resulting output from this project is shown above.
Next Christmas I will aim a bit higher and make a Flash animation, that has Christmas Carol music with it as well as moving images.
The following instructions and resources files are specifically for making the above Christmas Card in Adobe CS3 Fireworks, but could easily be used to make the same type of animation in Photoshop, or various other photo imaging software.
The resource files supply the Background, Christmas tree, and Merry Christmas text, and it is just a matter of progressively coloring in the lights for each letter, and building this into a standard frame by frame animation. So this card could be easily built in Flash as well.
Once we are finished making our animated card, we can insert the GIF file into an email to send it to all of our friends. (This works fine in MS Outlook mail, but does not seem to work in Hotmail unfortunately).
To get around the Hotmail problem, we can save our card from Fireworks, as a Flash SWF file. We can then attach and send the SWF to our friends, and tell them to open it to play on their PC. (We did find however that the Flash SWF does seemed to play slightly faster than our GIF for some reason).
Here is a 1.48 Mb PDF file of detailed step by step instructions to make an animated GIF card like the one shown on this Blog post:
If you would like to have your own full size copy of this PDF, then simply click the save disk icon button on the PDF viewer, and you should be able to save it to your own hard disk. Alternatively, you can view or save the full size PDF by clicking the link below:
So if you need a little electronic DIY pre-Christmas Project, then why not make an animated GIF card and email it to all of your friends.
In addition, Christmas animations can be made in PowerPoint by using GIFs obtained from Google Images.
Here is a Jing video capture of a Christmas PowerPoint that my students made. They obtained animated GIFs from Google Images and each made a slide, We then combined the slides into a single PowerPoint with a music backing track.
First of all it is not a psychadelic jellyfish, and it isn't a group of swarming sentinels from "The Matrix" movie either.
It's actually some computer mapping imagery of the human brain.
The reason I chose this picture, was to get you in the mood for this interesting "Brain Test" that a student administered to me recently.
The test is to see how well you can read and decipher the following passage of text: (Read on......)
fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid lkie mnie.
Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!
So if you are not one of the 55% of people who could easily understand the above "mumbo-jumbo", then maybe consider some lifestyle changes, to preserve and conserve a few more of these:
Source: http://pkab.files.wordpress.com
Yes we need a lots of these brain cells functioning in a healthy manner on a daily basis. (Again a marvelous computer image of our human biology).
So get those synapses a snapping, brain cells a buzzing, chess moves mastered, and Sudoku skills sharpened, because we all need to build up some extra brain power.
Some people will find the video below really funny, others might find it really annoying. Go ahead and be adventurous, push the play button, and give it a go.
If you liked "Charlie the Unicorn 1", then you will definitely like Part 2 below, (along with the almost 20 million other people who have also viewed it).
Okay, I know you are craving it, so here is Part 3 of Charlie's Adventures:
There are also a few other Charlie clips out there on You Tube that are well worth checking out some time.
I really like Charlie, he is a bit older, a bit cynical, slightly jaded, and very world-wise. His two "friends" take him on an adventure, and his gut feeling is that he should not be following along with them. However, he is a fearless alpha male, and cannot pass up on the opportunity to see all things new and interesting.
In the end, he should have perhaps listened to the little doubting voice inside himself, as he finds he has been conned by the others, and it has cost him a kidney!
So the dilemma of it all is: What should we do?
Stay in front of the TV, or seek out adventure, (with the risk of losing a kidney).
I guess in the end we just have to be guided by our feelings and do what feels right at the time......and later on simply have no regrets.
The other thing about the "Charlie the Unicorn" series of animations is that the actual animation techniques are fairly standard, and are not a major Disney-Pixar production.
This demonstrates a really vital concept for multimedia: it is far more important to have a fresh new idea, and an interesting story to tell, than all the world's best production techniques and movie making software.
The opening of the Sydney "Rocks Aroma Festival" saw a very large image of the Mona Lisa produced.
See if you can guess what she is made of:
Answer: Several thousand cups of coffee of varing shades, but all of the same size. These were made into a giant Mona Lisa in Sydney, Australia, in July 2009.
The 3,604 cups of coffee were each filled with different amounts of milk to create five different shades of coffee circles!
The 12th annual Aroma Festival in Sydney happened earlier this year on July 19th. The Mona Lisa coffee creation was made at "The Rocks" in Sydney, and used to launch the festival.
Australians consume a whopping 1.2 billion cups of coffee each year. While Italian blends are usually the best sellers, there’s an increasing interest in Turkish, Spanish, French and Japanese coffee.
But what about Java Coffee Beans ?
I'm not much of a Coffee drinker myself, but I do like the smell of feshly ground beans, and enjoy the odd frothy capuccino or a cool iced coffee in the summertime.
Here is a 2 minute stop motion video of the Coffee Mona Lisa being made:
This art work is a great example of pixelation. Eg. Having lots of different coloured dots actually forming an image, the same way as is happening on the computer screen you are looking at right now !
