The writing habit I’ve had some thoughts on writing recently. As you may or may not know, as a founder of Ubernote , writing notes is a habit that I am very serious about, and is near and dear to my heart. However as critical as notes are, I think that writing clear and finished pieces of work is also…

Closing learning loops, or bridges over new knowledge I have been thinking about writing a few posts about learning techniques and methods. I don’t want to turn my blog into a productivity or life hacking blog, but there are a few thoughts about the way that I approach learning that I wanted to write down somewhere and get out. When…

Subtractor: A subtractive synth for Reaktor Here is probably the first full synthesizer patch that I ever made. I was impressed with the Subtractor synth that was included with Propellerheads’ Reason suite, and I wanted to have a standalone instrument version of it. I had the idea of making my own version of it using some sampled single-cycle waveforms from…

Peeq: A MIDI sequencer in PD I was digging through old music production stuff, and I found some patches that I did using Pure Data . Pure Data is a graphical programming language for music performance and sound data manipulation. At the time that I wrote this, I really needed a live performance sequencer that had extensive keyboard shortcut coverage,…

Using old tablet pc as input device I have an old tablet PC lying around that I sometimes do UI sketches on. It is pretty underpowered though, and the only app that I really use on it is Windows Journal. Windows Journal is a very lightweight pen-enabled bit of software that allows you to do quick sketches and note taking…

Initial impression of Google Wave Just last night I received an invite to the Google Wave Developer Sandbox. Since Wave’s initial announcement at the Google IO developer conference, I had been reading up on the protocol and the API specifications, but this is the first opportunity that I’ve had to actually play with the front-end application. My thoughts here will…

10 Reactions to DEMO 09 presentations LaunchBox demo days are coming up, and to get into the demo spirit, what better way to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t than to watch other demos? I took some time to watch some of the demos given at the DEMO 2009 conference. I came up with a list of…

What’s your Twitter influencer rating? I was fortunate enough to have attended a panel discussion recently where Hooman Radfar, CEO of Clearspring , sat on the panel. During the discussion, he mentioned an experiment that he did to see how many of his Twitter followers clicked on links that he posted in his updates. I repeated this experiment by tracking…

Achieving flow in unlikely situations I was thinking recently about how to more reliably get into a productive flow when working on my programming tasks. Typically, I think that when I really need to get deep into things, it is best to go sit at my desk with the big monitor and ergonomic keyboard and get to it. However, it…

Inverse Proportionality Between Reading Too Much Hacker News and Having Original Thoughts I seem to have reached a point where I feel like I’m reading so many blog posts, RSS feeds and yes, hacker news postings, that I actually feel less inclined to think. I know that this is not a new meme, but I think that putting this out…