Critical Metrics – A collective of music reviews for finding new music (and listening to it for free)

Searching for new music is still a tricky business. In Discover New Music That’s Perfect for You, I once presented a few recommendation systems which adopted to the personal taste of the user. Critical Metrics walks a different path. It systematically spiders through music reviews in various media. The collected recommendations are then presented at […]

Volume: Bright, audiovisual and interactive installation

The audiovisual and interactive installation Volume consists of numerous shining columns, which are installed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The columns change their optical textures when visitors walk between them. Probably, the sound of the installation changes as well – but that is not described anywhere. Volume is a cooperation between United […]

Iran does not want to wipe Israel off the map

“Israel must be wiped off the map” This is a famous quote of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad that is used over and over to show how dangerous Iran allegedly is. Considering the publicity of this quote, it is quite surprising that almost noone knows that this is a mistranslation and crudely taken out of context. In […]

Automatic Scaling in Ren’Py

Ren’Py is an authoring system for visual novels. Last semester, I was involved in the creation of such a novel („Felix, Gaijin“ – German only, sorry) together with several fellow students. We stumbled upon a „little problem“: Out of the box, images in Ren’Py can only be of one size, but we wanted to use […]

Fighting Procrastination with Firewalls

The Internet is the perfect tool for procrastination. It is way too easy to get lost in the endless flow of information. Time management becomes a challenge. You can virtually surf the net forever and you will always find some interesting new thing. Abstaining from the net is hard, but many of us already have […]

DivX Pro for free

DivX, a video codec, is usually available in a free basic version and a pro version for 19,99€. At the moment, the pro version is also available for free. The DivX website doesn’t tell for how long the offer will be available. It only says “for a limited time”. The catch is that one has […]

Earmaster Pro 5: E-Learning Software for Ear Training

Earmaster Pro is an e-learning program for musical ear training. It is supposed to help you perceive intervals, accords and rhythms more accurately.

Space Night – Alpha Centauri

There once was a time when I would stay up deep into the night just to watch “Space Night”, a show featuring endless video footage of the earth recorded by astronauts during their flights. While this alone – despite being interesting – wouldn’t be enough to keep me up for so long regularly, there was […]

Jamming on the Internet: eJamming AUDiiO

The Internet opened many new beautiful ways of communication, many of them even in real time. Unfortunately, Internet connections have always had a latency that has been too high to allow musicians to play across the globe. The small delays which appear on every net connection are a massive problem for musical applications. Now, another […]

Ego Shooters with Real Pain: Trakonya Mutator

While politicians ins Germany are still arguing whether they should ban ego shooters all together, smart tinkerers created a painful gadget for Unreal: The Trakonya Mutator. It delivers an electric shock to the player when he takes damage in the game.