Category Archives: Technology

Friday Faves 02-08-13

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With a major winter storm poised to bury my area in a couple feet of snow, let’s think of warmer days – check out this Kickstarter to build an urban farm on the roof of a building in downtown Boston:

 

This is kind of neat – a phone charging device that produces charge based on applying your hot or cold drink to it:

 

Local tip: if you are a resident of Cambridge MA with less-than-adequate or no health insurance (or even if you have some – there is no qualification other than residency) you can get a free card for discounts on prescription medicine at certain pharmacies. See all the information here.

Create Your Own GarageBand Loops

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Today’s post is rather geeky! Since for this year’s RPM Challenge I am working with a musical partner for the first time we decided to do our recording projects using Apple’s GarageBand. GB is fairly easy to use and at this point has been improved and cross-pollinated from Apple’s pro Logic app sufficiently to get decent results.

One of the functions that makes GB easy is Apple Loops. GB comes with a large collection of pre-recorded/programmed live and electronic (MIDI) snippets that can be dropped into your song project and then “dragged” with your mouse to duplicate as many times as you wish.In the screen shot below (click to enlarge) I have dragged the loop “club beat 001” from the list of loops at the bottom right into the track area in the middle, and when this was captured I was using my mouse to drag from left to right on the loop to cause it to start copying itself:

Gb loop

 

But suppose you want to create your own loops? First, a legal caveat: do NOT use music you did not create yourself unless you have obtained the rights to sample it! (Apple’s built-in loops are royalty-free for commercial use).

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Claim Your Facebook Page Username

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I started to write another post, but when I went to link a Facebook page to it I realized the page owner had not claimed a username for her page.

What does this mean? If you want people to be able to find you easily on the Web, it’s helpful to have an easily-remembered web address (URL). For your own website domain this means you want buy a domain name that makes sense and is easily remembered. E.g., I could have bought the domain name “StuffThatBettyWiderskiKnowsAndWantsToShareWithYou .com”                                     but “WhatBettyKnows.com” is more memorable and tidy.

You don’t have as much control over your Facebook business/band/etc Page address, but you can choose to make it less of a string of random numbers.

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Friday Faves 01-11-13

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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 :-)

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