The new issue of Make magazine features a tutorial I wrote on embedding a MIDI data detector in a tiny Japanese monster toy. I took a bunch of photos for the article, along with two videos. You can see one video on the Make site, so I thought I'd share the other here....

Gearing up for Photoshop World in Las Vegas next week. It's always interesting to watch thousands of photographers, graphic artists, designers, and other creative types come together all for the love of (or at least the preoccupation with) a single computer program. In my experience, it's a fun but frenzied week chock-full of informative classes, industry gossip, and catching up...

Another one of my long-time colleagues (and active collaborators) is Gerd Leonhard, a well-known visionary in digital music and media, media futurist, and author of the bestseller "The Future of Music" (Berklee Press). Back in the dotcom heyday when I first met him, Gerd was the CEO of LicenseMusic.com -- a company focused on making cleared music available to music...

If you've been following the Adobe Lightroom Adventure to Iceland, you know that we've published a dozen galleries from members of the team. Viewing them, you might realize that some of them are using the current template available in Beta 3 for the Mac, and then others are, well, using something different. The story behind the difference is a good...

To me, CDs are still a better value than compressed audio files. And as the wonderful CD Baby online store demonstrates, there's still a lot of room for innovation in how they're sold. A while back, I wrote about a song I really liked, Gary Jules's cover of Tears for Fears' "Mad World." Unfortunately, the album containing the song was...

The first rule of good cable buying is simple. Don't go cheap. Good cables cost money. Spend it. You don't always have to buy the most expensive cable at the music store, but never buy the cheapest either.

If you've been following my blog, you've been aware of the One Laptop Per Child milestones. Last week, The One Laptop Per Child initiative put a name on their first laptop device. The new name is "Children's Machine" or CM1, apparently taken from the title of Seymour Papert's book of the same name (published in the early 90s.) There...

Audio podcasts are the perfect accompaniment to my long, once-a-week commute to O'Reilly HQ. If I can find shows that are relevant to work, even better, because I feel like I'm gearing my brain up for the workday rather than stressing about the traffic that's keeping me from the things I have to do when I get there. (And did...

I've had an ongoing argument with whoever will listen that computer software controls and widgits are lame, and that the infinite potential in the graphic desktop has gone virtually untapped. We see the same old boring icons, files, folders, knobs and sliders year after year. Sure these widgits and metaphors are easy to learn, but so is the use of...

During the last few months, I've had the opportunity to record two titles for the folks at Lynda.com. It was a great experience for me, and it opened my eyes to a world I had known little about. I knew Lynda, of course, from the heyday of web graphics. She was, and still is, the expert when it comes to publishing rich media on the web. But I had no idea about the depth and breath of her online training business.