This week’s faves include free online courses, some Kickstarter projects, and a kitten in need:
You can take online courses from some major colleges and universities for free at Coursera. I just found that they are offering four courses this spring from Berklee College of Music:
– Starting March 1st: Songwriting and Intro to Music Production
– Starting April 22: Intro to Guitar and Intro to Improvisation
Maybe I’ll ‘see’ you in the Improv course :-)
I’ve shown you how to share files with individuals via YouSendIt. I’ve also talked about using Dropbox and Carbonite to share files among your own devices. But suppose you want to share (legal original) music or sound files to a group of people, e.g., your band, or with the general public?
If you have your own website you can stream MP3s from there – but that could quickly use up your monthly data transfer allotment if the tracks are popular or large. If you are selling the tracks you could set up a Bandcamp account and post them there.
But if these are files like band practice recordings, rough drafts, non-music audio samples, etc. you may prefer to use SoundCloud.
Happy New Year! Here are a few new fundraisers worthy of your attention – but first, a bit of self-promotion:
As you may recall, following on some compliments about my non-fiction writing (especially from a successful fiction writer) I decided to attempt NaNoWriMo in November. I did “win” by completing 50,000 words of a novel – my first long form writing of any sort.
Enough people have asked to read it that I’ve decided to serialize as I complete editing chapters. I’ve set up a separate blog for my literary endeavors, WhatBettyWrites.com – the first two chapters of Want It Back are posted now. You can subscribe to get notifications of new postings, or follow along via the Twitter acct @WhatBettyWrites and/or Facebook Page WhatBettyWrites. Feel free to leave feedback on that blog – most helpful to me would be things like “This chapter was interesting/boring/confusing because of ….”
And now on to other interesting links:
If you are in a part of the world now undergoing a snow/slush/rain season you probably have some waterproof boots made of rubber/plastic/Gortex/etc. But since you don’t always want to look like you are going on a backwoods expedition you probably also have some nice leather footwear (I’m partial to Fluevogs, though recently got some Durango boots as well). Here are some tips for protecting your leather from the elements: