TED Talks

"TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader."

So, a while back, I introduced Miro (formerly Democracy player), which allows you to watch video podcasts as channels. When you first install Miro, it comes with a few subscriptions loaded by default. One of these is "TED talks", which is videos of various talks/performances given at the annual TED conference. They involve all kinds of things ranging from technology to language to music to psychology to pretty much anything you can think of that's on the cutting edge of creative and innovative thinking.

I highly recommend checking it out as there's some extremely interesting stuff on there. Even if none of the things cover your field of interest, I'm sure you'll find the talks interesting and some might even spark your interest about things you've never even thought about before (I do nothing to do with neuroscience but Vilayanur Ramachandran's talk was extremely interesting).

So, you can either get Miro or head to the TED talks site, here.

Cheap Ubuntu PCs are now available in the UK!

And they're from Tesco!

eSys Intel Celeron PC Base Unit (£139.93)

eSys AMD 3600 PC Base Unit (189.93)


So, they're not the best systems out there and for some reason they're running 6.06, but they'll probably do just fine for surfing the net and writing documents, which is probably what someone buying a computer at this price would want to do (especially someone who'd buy a computer from Tesco).

Whether this is a good or bad thing remains to be seen (Pro: This is a step towards the mainstream for Linux/Ubuntu, Con: These could be terrible computers, which would reflect badly on Ubuntu). Either way, that's a hell of a lot of clubcard points! :D

The next step is to get Dell to release Ubuntu PCs over here. Hopefully they'll do so by the time it becomes time for me to replace my current laptop... (or at least get myself a desktop to go with it)

The times they are a-changin'

So, there's been some changes afoot and I figured it's time to tell you about them.

I no longer do music tech. I graduated in July with a 2:1. I have now started a Master's course in Creative Technologies. I'm still at DMU, but now I'm working in the Institute Of Creative Technologies. You can find some links to various IOCT-related things over on the right.

What this means, is that this blog is now going to broaden its scope to cover all kinds of creative technology, rather than just those that are music related. I'm not changing the name though, as that's too much hassle.

Also, for those that don't know, Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) is being released in a few days. I plan to once again do a complete reinstall, as that should fix various things I've broken in the course of using Feisty for the past six months. I shall obviously give a full report on that endeavour when it's all over.