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I was thrilled to win a copy of The Book of Audacity on the excellent website AudioTuts+ recently. It was a great excuse to become more efficient with this amazing free software program.

My audio editing tasks are usually done using Ardour, a more feature-rich open source program dedicated to multitrack recording and production, but sometimes, if all you need is to do is make a few quick edits, Audacity is an easy choice.

A certain amount of technical knowledge about Audacity is also a wise choice for any audio geek. It’s free, open source, works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and if you are the musician in your group of friends, there is a high chance that someone will come asking you for help using it one day.

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Tags: free audio editor, Review, The Book of Audacity

All of my previous projects have come to a dramatic halt these days while I spend more time educating myself with some real programming skills.

Not having a lot to show for the past couple months, I thought I’d simply share my opinions on some of what I believe are the best book/tutorials available for those looking to dive headfirst into computer programming, creative code, and/or interactive media installations.

First off, the book that is essentially responsible for allowing me to think that I have any business whatsoever writing any kind of code:

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Tags: Interactivity, iphone, jitter, Max/Msp, oF, Open Frameworks, Processing, processing.org, Pure Data, SuperCollider, tutorials

I recently started reading this book after watching Ron Eglash’s lecture on Ted.com. While watching the video I realized that I had no idea what fractals are, or that this particular system of geometry played such a vital role in African culture. Ron Eglash does a great job during this talk on Ted.com of quickly explaining the basics to the uninformed listener, but once I started looking through books (other than his) about fractals in general, I was greeted with page after page of mathematical formulas that I had no idea how to interpret.

The one big plus about Ron Eglash’s book, African Fracals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design, is that it starts with the assumption that the reader knows little or nothing about fractals in general. After a thoroughly informative crash course on fractal geometry, the book goes on to systematically examine the importance of this geometric system in all facets of African culture.

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Tags: African, African fractals, anthropology, binary, computer science, eglash, ethnomathematics, fractals, geometry, indigenous design, mathematics

When I saw this book on the rack at Kinokuniya I just had to buy it. Japanese culture insists upon it’s homogeneity and the importance of everyone being the same, however once you look slightly below the surface you find this isn’t always the reality. It’s no secret that people even go as far as changing family records at their local town hall, and private investigators are often hired by large companies to check the validity of potential employees lineages. For some reason this dynamic absolutely intrigues me.

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Tags: Ainu, Brazilian Japanese, Burakumin, culture, homogeneity, Japan, Minorities, Zainichi