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raindropper

“pouring…”

Category Archives: Pop

July 4, 2018 Kara Controller – Altering Sound with Motion

 

By touching a motion trigger and turning the Kara controller, sound gradually changes between flute and clarinet, between quiet and loud.

May 24, 2018 Introducing Kara Music Controller

 

 

Now, I can finally present You something I’ve worked on for the past four years: Kara MIDI controller/musical instrument! 🙂

March 24, 2014 Let It Grow (Love) – Full Song

LET IT GROW (LOVE)

there are lies in you
there are lies in me
there are lies in everything we do

it’s starting again it’s starting again
starting again

let it fall through you
let it fall to the ground

there is love in you
there is love in everything we do

it’s starting again starting again

let it grow let it grow let it grow let it grow let it grow
let it grow let it grow let it grow let it grow let it grow

September 17, 2011 Ambient and Angle

After I decided to start publishing my music, I thought about how would I tie all the pieces of music together visually. Would I use the same set of fonts all the time, one specific color, would I create a Raindropper logo and plaster it on all the record covers?

Those all seemed too constraining, thus I opted for a more subtle idea: angle. So, let’s sneak one specific angle in all the images from now on.

The angle ended up being 53 degrees. To my eye, it just seemed the most pleasing one. The bonding angle of hydrogen atoms on a water molecule is roughly twice that (circa 104,45) so my eye missed the target with a degree or so.

Oops, here’s Void Saturday with a slightly skewed angle…

May 16, 2009 Wolfram|Alpha Test Drive

Ok, Wolfram|Alpha – the computational knowledge engine – is up and running. Granted, I’ve seen three different versions of “site is currently under heavy load”. Do remember that there’s a large amount of on the fly computation and algorithm crunching behind each result. 

These are the queries I tested it with:

Where are you? gives a good result.

Where am I? gives the correct answer.

Who am I? gives the same answer.

sin(n/10) * 100 draws a nice chart.

What are you doing? is the first computed tweet. 🙂

What time is it? surprisingly gives nothing.

green, red – minimum result.

BMW presents stock information.

Weather in Lahti Wow!

Weather in Lahti June 2003 Double-Wow!

Neuron is not that interesting for Wolfram to have knowledge about.

Are you OK? opens a “Human Discourse” functionality which is under development. What will it be?

All in all, Wolfram|Alpha provides an interesting approach and implementation. It’s certainly one to follow and use.

However, I do get “everything is a number or a taxonomy” feel from the data it contains. It mostly answers with numbers; even Madonna boils down to a straight line between two dates.

So, Wolfram|Alpha is the engine Douglas Adams wrote about. 

Google left, Wolfram|Alpha right.

Google left, Wolfram|Alpha right.

I do not know why, but the system creates an impression of an autistic Rain Man recalling phone book numbers and curated minutia with precision. Whereas Google is the outgoing guy with all the fun; its bots gathering data from the web carelessly, and giving noisy, vague answers at times.

December 28, 2007 I Am Legend – And I’m Driving a Ford

Just came back from watching “I Am Legend” movie with my wife. If you liked Spielberg’s “War of The Worlds”, you’ll probably like this movie also. They both decipit a ruthless, dismal and dark world with people turned to violent animals.

Will Smith does a marvellous job in portraying a man in the brink of insanity.

My wife’s reaction? Well, she almost puked. Too much exploding low frequencies and too little steadicam. Don’t go to this movie with your girlfriend. It takes all the fun out of your evening.

Product placement thanks go to Apple and Ford.

March 11, 2007 Where are The Pages of The Wired Magazine?

I’m browsing December 1996 issue of Wired Magazine. Paper version, that is, you remember what paper is, don’t you? And I’m browsing it with my hands, not with a browser. 😉

It’s got 312 pages.

February 2007 issue has 160 pages. Where are the rest? 

January 18, 2007 Scott Adams Q & A – Snippets about Blogging

For around 8 months, Scott Adams’ blog has been one of my favourites.

Besides writing and drawing Dilbert, he still has creative juices left to blog about religion, politics, his everyday philosophy, … 

He is very direct, very provocative and very often very funny. And very serious in his search of solutions for global, difficult problems. 

He plays with words, tricks your mind – one can never be certain how a sentence ends. Here’s an example of that, in the context of someone hacking electronic voting machines:

“…the choice of the next American president will be taken out of the hands of deep-pocket, autofellating, corporate shitbags and put it into the hands of some teenager in Finland. How is that not an improvement?”

The teenagers here in Finland take this as a compliment. 😉

His views on blogging can be found from this recent Questions & Answers post. Some snippets:

I think one of your major fantasy is to have the prime idea that will change the world, reboot the world. Is it what you try to accomplish with this blog?

It’s not the main reason for the blog, but I prefer activities that have some potential, no matter how unlikely, of changing the world in a good way.

How do you decide about what you want to write in your blog every morning?

It’s whatever interests me that day. I have to be personally interested or it won’t come.

Why do you do this blog day after day? Not that WE don’t enjoy it, I just can’t see what YOU are getting out of it… day after day, smarmy retort after smarmy retort, the endless whining and moaning…etc. etc.

I enjoy it creatively. It’s nice to have no editor between me and you. And I’m not much affected by critics who are irrational or humorless.

I often wonder if the cynical views that you express through your work or your blog ever cause marital trouble.

No.

Your life has become more public since you started this blog. I’d be interested to know how your family and friends feel about that. Has privacy been an issue? Has anyone done or said something followed by “don’t you dare use this!”? Did you have to adjust your day to accommodate blogging or are you usually on the computer a lot anyway?

Blogging takes a lot of time. So that’s an issue. Privacy has been an issue too, but for reasons of privacy I can’t explain how.