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Category Archives: Tutorials

Tutorials, howtos and more.

Home Studio Acoustics: The Basics

Home studio.

There are two extremes to studio building: The situation were you are stuck with a room and have to do the best of the situation, and the situation were you have total control and can do the best you can afford. In here I try to examen the first and most common situation and how you deal with it in three easy steps. While I’m going to approach a room that isn’t necessarily allocated as studio all the basics will still be the same when you slide across the scale to the other extreme.

Just let us clear up one thing right away: Acoustic treatment and sound isolation are two completely different concepts. When you design a studio from scratch you will take both into account from the start of the design process. But with that said it’s worth to know that an acoustically pleasing space will let you play back sound at lower volume with better definition and do not exaggerate lower frequencies and make the room sound less loud. So even without any special sound isolation just treating it acoustically will probably make your neighbors happy.

So let’s get cracking!

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Introduction to K-3D

This past summers participation in Googles Summer of Code has really revitalized the K-3D project to some degree. Especially with the realization that we1 need both more regular users as well as developers, to keep interest in the project alive and as a reason to continue development.

One of the suggestions was to create demos of K-3D as screeencasts. In my own experience a screencast tell me more about an application and the work flow than a screenshot or tutorial ever will. Over the previous week-end Joe Crawford2 really applied himself to the task and spent ten hours making this quite impressive introduction to K-3D.

My apologies for the poor quality. Google Video resized and transcoded the hell out of it while Joe’s original TechSmith video is razor sharp.


1 I haven’t contributed to the projects for years, but will again once I get my new workstation.

2 Joe Crawford teaches 3D at VanArts in addition to running his own studio and serves as “superuser”-consult to the project.

Jazz Notes

I’m no expert in music or jazz, just a happy amateur trying to learn new stuff and make sense of what I already know. So the following is simply an introduction on how I think about the topic. My personal mental map, if you will.

For this reason it’s helpful for you to read thought everything from beginning to end, even if you already know the difference between major and minor scales and chords, or how to play Cmaj13 “jazz style”. I’ve tried to explore the subject in logical steps, so that we can expand upon what we already know and start to see all the different relationships present in the music.

However, the following text assume that you already know how to read notation, at least on a very basic level, and how to play it on a keyboard. If you don’t already know that, please take time to learn it before continuing.

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Redesign Chronicles: Layout Behavior

I will kick off this recurring series with an overview of the basic layout options we have at our disposal. It’s nothing especially earth-shattering, but it’s an important issue to think through properly and just because it seem so basic few do. You might already have heard it a thousand times, that “the web isn’t print”, until your ears fell off. But it’s so true when it comes to layout. In print you can easily sketch up a few layout solution to pick from, based on the page size, proportion and content, and call it a day. The web is something completely different as a medium: the user has complete control over the browser viewport size and font size.

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Table of Contents

This is the full table of contents for an unfinished of a book I wrote back in 1999 on the topic of motion control.

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Part IV: Visualization and Motion Control

This is an unfinished draft for a book I wrote back in 1999 on the topic of motion control. This is the final and minimal part, just as it was written and with… well, “gaps” some might call it (I told you it was unfinished).

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Part III: Nuts & Bolts

This is an unfinished draft for a book I wrote back in 1999 on the topic of motion control. Tomorrow I will publish the final part, just as it was written and with lots of gaps in the text (I told you it was unfinished).

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Creeper