“This is my tree. It makes music.” It took “actual 12-year-old girl” (as Microsoft described her) Sparrow to rescue Microsoft’s drab CES keynote (and drab tech news week) and get us back into the Future again. That future is one in which the dazzling interactive 3D world of games becomes a playground you can shape. […]

It’s looking like 2009 is set to be a great year for open source and hardware hacking. Likely lost in a lot of the CES news, BUG Labs, makers of open source, Linux-based hardware you can snap together like Lego bricks, now has a range of new modules. Most interesting to readers here: there’s an […]

It’s official: Music Thing, the benchmark music tech blog, is no more – at least for now. Post volume had dropped off of late, so it’s not a complete surprise. And Music Thing’s voice, Tom Whitwell, has gone on to shake up the online world in other ways: running the online output of The Times […]

Previous modules include GPS, screen, camera, proximity/accelerometer, and some powerful features on the core hardware unit. But a projector? Now we’re really interested. I just recently got my BUG developer hardware from Bug Labs and have begun to work with it. The idea: a Linux-powered, open source mini computer with little modules you snap on […]

Grant Michaels points to a lovely post on getting started with augmented reality using Flash. FlarToolkit/Flash Augmented Reality [Mikko Haapoja] It’s all free for FlarToolkit, and with free tools for Flex out there, you could build a whole free toolchain. Of course, we tend to like Java and Processing round these parts, so I can […]

Need some New Year inspiration on several levels? dickypan points to this brilliant New Year’s video. It’ll make you feel good about all dimensions of 2009. Motion graphics fly out of augmented reality, triggered by small objects on the screen. The work is based on an open source framework. Here it’s running in Flash, as: […]

Here’s a novel concept: Provide video tutorials that teach you how to play an instrument and walk you specifically through the technique of a song Make them available as downloads Charge US$4.99 each Get the artists (and producers) involved in the original song Let people hear the original track Break down the song piece by […]

Apple has posted the details of GarageBand ‘09. Most of the new improvements are in the form of the new Lessons feature, both built-in “Basic Lessons” and a la carte, $5 “Artist Lessons.” The basic specs: Basic lessons: Included with the program, these teach you the fundamentals of piano and guitar, with side-by-side notation, frets, […]

Photo: transcribed solos by Jamie Aebersold. Not high-tech, but invaluable. Now, let’s hope Apple’s latest is just the tip of the offering for tools to help make us better musicians. Photo here, below (CC) naturalkinds. What’s the biggest obstacle in music making? For most people, it’s basic musicianship. I’m not at the Macworld keynote, but […]

It’s port talk time again. As I suspected, Apple’s 17” MacBook Pro does get one additional port. You get 3 USB ports and one FireWire 800 port – though this means that, even though there’s almost no hardware that supports FW800, you’ll need an adapter for FW400 devices like HDV/DV cameras. At least unlike the […]