Songbird is a new Open Source media player. It looks and feels a lot like iTunes but, It has features that make it much better. For example you can right click on your songs and edit the names (id3 tags). That is one feature iTunes should have had a long time ago. Songbird is also designed to be added onto so hopefully it will just keep getting better and follow in the foot steps of Firefox. Go to http://getsongbird.com to download it for yourself and enjoy more freedom while listening to your music.

Last week I found a remake of the new Google Chrome web browser, it’s called Iron. A company in Germany decided to take the new Google browser and strip all of the code out that reports data back to Google. You can download it at www.SRWare.net (that link takes you to the download page). Their website is in German but there is a button there so you can read it in English. I downloaded the portable version so I can take it with me on my jump-drive. Have fun

I few months ago I found a great program for creating techno. It’s called Renoise and you can download it for free for Window, Mac, and Linux. I haven’t had much time use the software but, what I have seen looks amazing. I was able to load in sounds and beats from other software that I own and transform the sounds using filters and other tools available in Renoise. This is a nice program and I am happy to see that it is available on Linux too. It dosen’t look like this program is opensource but, it appears to have a community that contributes to the program.

Check out the site at http://www.renoise.com

Learn how to use Renoise here: http://tutorials.renoise.com/

Here is a video I found on Youtube about making trance in Renoise.

There is also a filter that would be great for making 8bit techno.

I like to draw. Last week I bought a few pens from Dick Blick and I found one in particular that I like a lot. The Pilot Fineliner is like a marker but the tip is super fine and it doesn’t bleed. The price of the fineliner is about $1.50 so I ended up going back and buying more. I also picked up some Faber-Castell pens. They are really nice drawing pens too, but there not so cheap. If you like to draw you should try the Pilot Fineliner. I started using them for everything even taking notes in my FORTRAN class.