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Justin King - Knock On Wood

I'm always fascinated by musicians with a unique musical style, and Justin King certainly comes into this category, although his playing is reminiscent of the late Michael Hedges. This track, Knock On Wood, is really cool.

Google Guide

Nancy Blanchman developed Google Guide because she wanted more information about Google's capabilties, features, and services than she found on Google's website. And she made a very good job of it! The website provides an interactive tutorial and comprehensive downloadable reference guides and quick reference cards in PDF and HTML formats.

FilesFly also has a very nice cheat sheet for all things Google.

Warholizer

My latest logo was created using Warholizer, a tribute to Andy Warhol's famous paintings of Marilyn Monroe. Upload or link to your own photo and the tool instantly creates your own image.

Free language courses

FSI-language-courses.com is a website hosting language courses developed by the United States government's Foreign Service Institute. The website itself is not affiliated in any way with the government; it is an independent effort to foster the learning of worldwide languages.

Arabic, Cambodian, Cantonese, Chinese (Standard), Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Vietnamese are currently available.

These courses are freely available in an electronic format, and are in the public domain. They are made available through the private efforts of individuals who are donating their time and resources to help others.

Pierre Thomson provides an excellent email course for learning Norwegian, called NorWord. The NorWord learning program was written by Nancy Aarsvold and Louis Janus at the University of Minnesota. The lessons arrive daily, in all 160 lessons in about 6 months, after which you should be able to hold simple conversations in Norwegian. The Norskklassen list is an informal online class for people learning Norwegian. You'll find information on how to join the list and lots of resources for learning Norwegian on the Norskklassen website. All for free.

Here's a listing of some free Dutch language courses which I'm currently studying: dutchgrammer.com, Taalthuis online Dutch and NT2 examen.nl

Are you wondering how to pronounce a word? Fonetiks.org provides free online pronunciation guides to 9 varieties of the English language and 9 other languages: French, French Canadian, German, Swiss German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, Mandarin, Thai. The site also provides links to several other resources for learning languages.

PBS Nova - The Elegant Universe

"Eleven dimensions, parallel universes and a world made out of strings. It's not science fiction, it's string theory." PBS have many of their excellent educational television programmes available for online viewing. The Elegant Universe is a three hour series with supporting articles and interviews, providing a good introduction to the controversial string theory - an attempt at providing a theory of everything.

LibriVox - public domain audio books

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files on their website. Their goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books and their catalogue includes complete books, short works, collections and poetry. The completed works are available for download in mp3 and Ogg Vorbis formats.

You may, of course, prefer to read your books. Project Gutenberg has about 20,000 free ebooks available in the public domain and, thankfully, a searchable database.

Musopen - an online classical music repository

Here's a site that focuses on the baroque, classical, romantic and 20th century periods of classical music. Musopen takes music that is in the public domain, has it recorded by individuals and college/community orchestras throughout the United States, then allows it to be accessed for free. Musopen provides search, random play, streaming radio, mp3 downloads and browsing by performer, composer, instrument, form or period of its musical archives. There's even short introductions to music history, composers and their featured pieces of work. Musopen's lawyers assure that everything on the site is legal for download.

Scrybe

I've just watched a video preview of Scrybe, a new Ajax-based online calendar/organiser application that is currently undergoing limited beta-testing.

This looks very promising! I've signed myself up for an account...

Using Google Docs as a blog posting tool

I've just found out that I can use Google Docs to make drafts of documents before publishing directly to my blog.

Of course, the Blogger posting tool also allows saving of drafts, but Google Docs is a convenient online clipboard and a tool that I'll be using more of in the future. Unfortunately, the title and label I entered for this test posting didn't get transferred from the Google Doc, so the integration isn't yet as complete as it could be.

Musicovery

Yet another site providing streamed music based on your personal preferences. Musicovery has an excellent interactive interface that let's you select the musical genre, mood and timeline that you want to hear.

Jay Wasco

Jay Wasco has, is his own words, "the strange ability to play the bass guitar and keyboards at the same time." Not only that, he invents and plays some very strange instruments, such as the Egotar and Swiss Army Bass.

Since his homepage is, again in his own words, "Not so slick ........or eazy to navigate", here's a link to some videos of this remarkable musician.

John Martyn - Small Hours

This takes me back! Here's a link to a YouTube video showing John Martyn playing Small Hours live at Reading University in 1978. This song, originally from the One World album, has always been one of my favourite chill-out tracks.

Julian Beever's pavement drawings

Have a look at Julian Beever's pavement drawings. His anamorphic illusions are drawn in a special distortion in order to create an impression of 3-D when seen from one particular viewpoint.

popurls

As it announces in its logo, popurls provides popular URLs to the latest web buzz. It's a nicely designed aggregator page showing listings of latest feeds from a number of sites, including digg.com, del.icio.us, flickr.com, youtube.com, +++

This site is a great timesaver and a pleasure to browse.

SearchMash

Google is experimenting with a new search engine interface called SearchMash. It has a clean looking interface and currently provides sidebar tabs for showing results sorted by web pages, images, blogs and Wikipedia.

"SearchMash lets you search the internet in new ways. It is constantly evolving as we come up with ideas and figure out what works and what doesn't. Check back here from time to time to see what has changed, and also to tell us which ones are useful to you."

Thanks to The Red Ferret Journal for this link.

GB-PVR personal video recorder

I thought it would be a nice idea to install a reasonably priced TV tuner card in my PC. On the advice of a colleague at work, I bought a Hauppauge PVR-150 card, then downloaded and installed GB-PVR.

GB-PVR is free software, but never-the-less a fully featured Personal Video Recorder (PVR), allowing you to schedule recordings and view/pause live TV. It's also a media centre supporting FM radio, DVDs, video files, photos, streaming radio stations, CDs, MP3s, etc.

I was pleasantly surprised when everything worked without a hitch after completing a straight-forward setup, including using xmltv as the TV listings "grabber" for the Electronic Programming Guide (EPG).

GB-PVR is very well supported via a comprehensive wiki. This is an amazing hardware/software combination, which I can definitely recommend if you're considering building your own PVR.

Doodle

Here's a web-based tool which can help a group of people find a suitable date for a meeting.

The initiator follows simple instuctions to set up the optional dates & times, then emails the link provided by Doodle to the rest of the group.

The results of the poll are shown in a table. Very simple, useful and free.

Feeds That Matter

This is a great website for finding RSS feeds for a given topic. It analyses the feeds organised by publicly listed users of Bloglines to produce a taxonomy of popular topics and lists feeds that are most relevant to that topic.

By the way, I can highly recommend Bloglines, which is currently my favourite feed reader. It's a web-based application and very easy to use.

The Monty Hall problem

I found a rather interesting article, called the Monty Hall problem on Wikipedia.

A thoroughly honest game-show host has placed a car behind one of three doors. There is a goat behind each of the other doors. You have no prior knowledge that allows you to distinguish among the doors. "First you point toward a door," he says. "Then I'll open one of the other doors to reveal a goat. After I've shown you the goat, you make your final choice whether to stick with your initial choice of doors, or to switch to the remaining door. You win whatever is behind the door."

You begin by pointing to door number 1. The host shows you that door number 3 has a goat.

Now, do your odds of getting the car increase by switching to door number 2?

As it happens, the answer is "yes", since switching gives you a 2 in 3 chance of winning instead of the intuitively assumed 1 in 2 chance.

Wikipedia describes the full details about the paradox and the Mozy Blog provides a nice, interactive demonstration based on playing cards (ace and jokers) instead of car and goats.

Finetune

Finetune is a streaming music service similar to Pandora, but also allows you to build and edit your own playlists from individual tracks. I still prefer Pandora, but Finetune certainly has its merits.

Mother Tongue

Here's Michaela & Dorise, two-thirds of Mother Tongue, performing in front of the Cafe du Monde in New Orleans. These ladies are awesome musicians. Cool, eclectic repetoire and genuine passion.

Details about this musical sisterhood can be found on their website and MySpace.

Placing Your Order With the Universe

Steve Pavlina and his wife Erin have their own take on personal development. Steve's blog and website are useful sources of thought-provoking material.

I enjoyed a recent podcast Placing Your Order With the Universe, where Erin offers a parable that helped her understand the Law of Attraction and the intention-manifestation model of reality.

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

A brilliant video of George Bush performing U2’s Sunday, Bloody Sunday on Google Video.

While we're at it, here's Bush and Blair declaring their Endless Love.

The Whitney Music Box

Check out the hypnotic, spooky music based on harmonic relationships generated by the Whitney Music Box.

Jim Bumgardner has created a musical realization of one of experimental film pioneer John Whitney's ideas on harmonic resonance, as described in his book Digital Harmony. You'll find the technical details on Jim's blog KrazyDad.

I picked this up from The J-Walk Blog and see that it is also featured on digg.

Cool relaxation tool

I found a reference to this cool relaxation tool on Lifehacker. The web site Sound Sleeping provides a Flash application which lets you mix a looping soundtrack including drums, rain, thunder, ocean, chimes, songbirds and gulls. Very relaxing, but perhaps a bit boring after a while? They've got a second sleep-aid which replaces the drums with a vibrophone.

Mind mapping

I'm a great fan of mind mapping and have used the technique both privately and at work for many years. It's a great way of brainstorming, then organising and documenting random ideas and minutes of meetings. At work, I've also successfully used mind mapping tools such as Mindjet MindManager to assist in documenting detailed requirement specifications for technical systems and process development.

Freemind is free mind mapping software that I use at home and can highly recommend.

Scott Adams' Good News Day

It's nice to hear a piece of good news for a change. Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams has regained his voice (diagnosed permanently lost due to a condition known as Spasmodic Dysphonia) after repeatedly speaking in rhyme!

"The day before yesterday, while helping on a homework assignment, I noticed I could speak perfectly in rhyme. Rhyme was a context I hadn’t considered. A poem isn’t singing and it isn’t regular talking. But for some reason the context is just different enough from normal speech that my brain handled it fine.

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.
Jack jumped over the candlestick.

I repeated it dozens of times, partly because I could. It was effortless, even though it was similar to regular speech. I enjoyed repeating it, hearing the sound of my own voice working almost flawlessly. I longed for that sound, and the memory of normal speech. Perhaps the rhyme took me back to my own childhood too. Or maybe it’s just plain catchy. I enjoyed repeating it more than I should have. Then something happened.

My brain remapped.
My speech returned."

Wonderful news, in more ways than one!

Grandpa Elliott - Bluesman and street musician

Grandpa Elliott is one of the most talented bluesmen and street musicians in New Orleans. His voice and harmonica playing is extraordinary. You'll see him playing alone or, more often than not, together with other musicians in the French Quarter. Sunday afternoon in front of the Cafe du Monde is the place for a guaranteed great gig, often lasting several hours. Don't forget to tip the musicians generously.

Here's a video clip I found on YouTube, featuring Grandpa jamming with Mother Tongue.