Posts Tagged computer
Pandora
Music lovers, take note! Pandora (pandora.com) is a great music-listening website with minimal commercial interruption. Here’s how it works.
After creating your user profile (not necessary for previewing the site), you name a genre, song, or artist that you particularly enjoy. Pandora then creates a radio station with that genre, song, or songs by that artist and similar songs. You have a list of radio stations that are kept separate, and you can create a quickmix station that plays music from the chosen stations on your list. For each song that plays, you can give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, bookmark the song or the artist, buy the song, and get tons of info about the song or artist (lyrics, bio, similar artists, and more). There are a bunch more features, but you’ll just have to check out the site to see them.
Pandora is part of the Music Genome Project, a music analysis endeavor described by its founder like this -
Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song – everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records – it’s about what each individual song sounds like.
Since we started back in 2000, we’ve carefully listened to the songs of tens of thousands of different artists – ranging from popular to obscure – and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world.
The result? You really hear music you like! For example, I created a quickmix station from four stations: Pat Benetar, Johnny Cash, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Brandi Carlile (four artists who would never have their songs played on the same radio station!). I listened to great music for hours, heard much more than is in my personal collection, and discovered some new songs and artists that I happen to really enjoy.
And for the technophiles out there, note that Pandora works not only on the computer, but also on an iPod Touch, an iPhone, and a Blackberry. For all-around town, non-stop grooving.
2 comments July 1, 2009
Typing Tuorials
Being able to quickly and efficiently type on a keyboard has a become a necessary skill set for many job and educational opportunities. Here are a few free online typing tutorials, and hand placement guides which can be used to help improve your typing skills. Also, don’t forget, you can practice 7 days a week at the Computer Center.
Hand Placement and Posture Guide
Free Typing Tutorials
Add comment February 9, 2009
Getting the most out of your old computer
So my mom has this old computer. It’s pushing archaic – all of 7 years old. She and I dream of getting rid of the thing and replacing it with a sweet little suped-up laptop. In this fantasy of ours, she need not upgrade from her rotten, rural dial-up Internet; she can cart her Wi-Fi capable machine over to her friend’s house and they can go crazy with photo sharing, social networking, recipe searching, yoga-ing, and whatever else they might think up. This is a nice little plan we have going, but in reality, the washing machine (which my mother has taken apart and fixed herself twice in the last year) will be replaced before the computer.
So in the meantime, we are stuck brainstorming ways to make the old machine work for her. It’s a good computer, so we have a good starting point, but it’s memory is overstuffed so it just putts along, it’s software is outdated so photo management and editing is a nightmare. Here’s what we’re thinking of doing.
1. Invest in an external hard drive. Many older computers run poorly because they were not equipped to handle the large files that are used today. Photos, music, and downloaded files with images in them can fill an older computer’s memory in a big hurry. A simple (and somewhat affordable) fix is to move those files onto an external hard drive. This nifty device connects to your computer via USB port (that flat-looking hole about the width of your finger) and can hold thousands of digital photos. An average external hard drive can cost between $80-$150 and can give your machine the speed of its youth.
2. Invest in a USB flash drive. About the size of your thumb, this little stick is the new-age floppy disk. It plugs into the USB port on a computer (described above), and transferring files can be as easy as click-and-drag. A 4 GB flash drive, which can cost between 10 and 20 dollars, can hold hundreds of digital photos. The flash drive has some cool uses. You can save photos from a home computer onto it, bring it to a photo center (like Meijer or Walgreen’s) and plug it into the photo center computer to order prints. You can also download files from the internet while on a public computer (say, at your library), save them to the flash drive, and transfer the files from it to your home computer. If your library has excellent software (like CADL has), you can put a few photos onto your flash drive, slip that thing into your pocket, and head on over to the library to use the photo-editing software on those computers.
3. Get yourself out of the house and take advantage of outside resources!Libraries are a great place to get to know. The people working are competent, happy to help, and accustomed to questions; the Internet is generally fast; and the software is up-to-date. In my mom’s case, her library isn’t so sweet, but she does have a friend (with a bells-and-whistles computer and lightening-fast Internet) who loves to have visitors. Either way, getting out does a person good. And didn’t we learn in kindergarten that sharing makes us better people? Getting the most out of your old computer might just become a way to get re-connected to friends and community.
Add comment February 3, 2009
