Author Archives: Administrator

Hydrogen Advanced Drum Machine

If you have used Linux before you may notice a few things missing when migrating from major systems. Audio, Video and Games. There are some programs for those tasks but many times they are not as feature rich, user friendly, or some other issue for the novice.

But Hydrogen Advanced Drum Machine will give you good results, is easy to learn how to use, looks good, and most importantly, sounds good! The problem with a drum machine usually is with the natural sound. There is usually a ‘swing’ function, which is not to bad, but not anything more advanced. With Hydrogen you get some pro features here. It has a knob to make it more random in it’s hit strength (that is right, it has layered sounds for more realism to!) so you get variation that is as sloppy or tight as you want. Add to the realism functions, volume and pan on each track, layer adjustments for each velocity layer in the kit and some decent free drum kits and all you need is the motivation to use the very simple interface to make a good track. You need to only have listened to music intently to make a beat. Very easy interface with no notation or notes and is very visual. The drum kits are all made by different people and on the forums you can find out more about making some with sounds not allowed to be redistributed, though they are free. So keep in mind some do not have a lot of layers, if any at all, so the realism will vary kit by kit. They have techno, dance, rock, jazz, latin, and a few old school things (like Disco) in the free kit downloads. On Linux it works great and makes good enough tracks for decent recordings and it’s free.

VYM Mind Mapping Tool

VYM is a great mind mapping tool for Linux and Mac-OS Mind mapping is a powerful way to organize your mind.

Putting a keyword in the middle of a blank page, you then draw branches from that keyword and label them, creating a tree-like structure of information that resembles the way your brain organizes data. Personally, I use mind mapping to easily memorize facts I have to learn for the university, but there are several other applications for this method. Tired of forgetting things you have to pack when going on a voyage or camping? Use a mind map. Start out with branches like “clothes”, “books” or “stuff for work”. You won’t forget a single thing. Mind maps are also a great way to structure ideas you gathered in a brainstorming session or to plan a presentation on any topic. The possibilities of the mind mapping technique are great and it’s no wonder that there is a lot of software on the market to support you in your mind mapping. If you use Linux or Mac, I have found a great piece of free software for you. VYM or “View Your Mind” lets you create mind maps in the blink of an eye, print them and export them into several formats, including websites. Have a look at the VYM-website, it’s a great example.

WordWeb Dictionary

The WordWeb Dictionary is the most widely used dictionary software on the PCs.

It not only brings the user the meaning of the entered word and its audio pronunciation but also it shows nearest words, synonyms, type of, and part of words associated with the word entered by the user. This handy application software termed as Dictionary + Thesaurus + Word Finder and its database has been developed in association with Princeton University. The latest version available on its official site at present is WordWeb v5. It comes in two differnt versions: Freeware and WordWeb Pro. It is for the Windows Platform compatible with Windows 98/2000/Me/XP/Vista. The software has a full dictionary and thesaurus for American, British, Canadian, Australian, Indian, and global English. The Pro version costs around USD 30 where as the free version can be downloaded anytime from their official site which offers Definitions and synonyms, Proper nouns, Related words, Pronunciations, 150,000 root words, 120,000 synonym sets, and fixed web reference tabs.

Sudoku For iPhone

If you are a Sudoku fanatic and have an iPhone, there is a website just for you: http://www.enjoysudoku.com.

This site offers the most intuitive interface for Sudoku since the pencil. There are new puzzles every day and they are offered at seven levels of difficulty ranging from Beginner to Fiendish. Even the ‘Moderate’ setting offers a challenging puzzle and they go up from there. One nice feature is that once you select a number to work on, the game highlights all of those already on the board. If you make a mistake by placing a number on a line already occupied it displays the number in red, so you don’t fat-finger your way into a wrecked puzzle. When you finish a puzzle the system tells you what percentage your time ranks among all the others who have played!

How to Defragment your Hard Drive

It is important to defragment your hard drive from time to time.

It is particularly useful to do this when you have uninstalled and installed hardware or copied many files. Over time, your hard drive becomes fragmented as files are put on or taken off your hard drive. Fragmentation happens because the operating system will place files wherever there is space but will not necessarily keep the files together. Think of it this way — your hard drive is a wall unit with a bunch of cubby holes for pieces of paper. As you get papers, you stick the papers where there is space available. You start at the beginning and move over and down putting papers wherever they fit, but as you take out papers, you make cubby holes available for new papers. After some time of adding and taking away papers, you have some cubby holes full, some half full, and some entirely empty. This is very much like what happens on your hard drive and is called fragmentation. Fragmentation slows down access to your hard drive. For instance, using the cubby hole example, let us say that when placing papers, you placed a book among five different cubby holes because that is where there was space. Well to get the book out, you have to go to five different cubby holes to access the book. This takes time and slows you down every time you want to view that book!

Defragmenting is the answer. You can do this on any Microsoft Windows computer. I will list the instructions for Windows XP below. The instructions will vary slightly for different versions of Windows.
1. Go to your desktop and locate the My Computer icon.
2. Double click the My Computer icon and locate the drive you would like to defragment (you cannot defragment CD’s).
3. Right-click on the drive and select Properties.
4. Click the Tools tab in the Disk Properties dialog box.
5. Click the Defragment Now… button.
6. Follow the instructions on Disk Defragmenter application to defragment your drive.

Thin Clients – How to assemble a cheap computer!

I have a pentium pro 333mhz and a pIII 933mhz setup as thin clients.

This kind of junk can be found easily and most of the times without any cost 🙂 The idea here is to have a typical client-server setup. I use SoThin for this and it does miracles for my kids! The server software is running on my home server (a mix of file server and media center right now). If you’re interested in this I recommend browsing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_client Another tip for cheap computer parts. The HDs! I bougth 4 250gb HDs, IDE, one samsung and the rest Western Digital, on eBay. After formating them I mounted a dynamic partition in a RAID like partition. 3 HDs as a single data unit with about 700gb and one for recovery if something happens. The price? A 3+1 RAID solution for 65 dollars? 🙂 Try to find one in the market!