Having finally recuperated from last month's visit to Musikmesse, I have created a Flickr set with more photos from the event, complementing the impressions from our Messe Report. Searching Flickr for the "Musikmesse 2007" tag will find many more photos from Frankfurt, providing you with quite a much broader view than my admittedly keyboard-centric perspective. Enjoy!...

O'Reilly recently snuck a wacky speech synthesizer into our blogs: Clicking the "listen" link above will play back these words with a robotic voice. As a speech synth enthusiast, I immediately started looking for phrases that would produce funny rhythms. I found the first in Peter Drescher's recent blog about the Game Developers Conference: I love the Game Developer's Conference!...

Last week, I talked about how long I'd been waiting the arrival of Smart Filters. In this installment of dekeBytes, I'll give you a sense for how this new feature in Photoshop CS3 works by applying some detail sharpening and high-key softening to an image. Along the way, you'll learn the basics, including how to apply a Smart Filter,...

In the intro to my last podcast, I listed six popular songs that use the notorious E-mu Emulator II shakuhachi sound. For fun, here are two I couldn't fit into the show itself. Tangerine Dream: Yellowstone Park (540KB MP3) Sade: Stronger Than Pride (432KB MP3) Coincidentally, I came across a bucket of real shakuhachis last week at a camping lodge....

In 2002, I wrote a preview of Adobe Photoshop 7 for a popular computer magazine. Although I praised the program for its file browser, expanded Brushes palette, and healing tools, I lamented its lack of ambition in the parametric department. After four back-to-back upgrades in which Photoshop blazed new trails in non-destructive image editing, Version 7 abruptly dropped the ball...

Even though we can all "rip" our own personally purchased CDs legally and put them on our digital media players for personal use, this has not not necessarily been the case for DVDs. A high end "DVD Jukebox" product, Kaleidescape, has existed in the market since 2002, and has been in contest with the DVD Copy Control Association since...

Carol Cali--a photography teacher at The Meadows School in Las Vegas, a private college preparatory school--snapped this photo of her students. We donated the photography books to her school at the end of PMA 07 International Convention and Trade Show in March. "I teach B&W Photography with a wet lab, digital photography using Photoshop on PC computers, and yearbook photography...

UPDATE, 2007-09-14: Our massive H2 review is now online, and it's packed with answers to the questions you asked here. Thanks again for making this such a collaborative process. We also have a new discussion area at the end of the review, so please feel free to continue this conversation over there. Zoom finally started production of its latest handheld...

In today's O'Reilly Digital Media feature, Jochen Wolters talks about a transformative music technology experience—watching singer Don Lewis play a Roland VP-550 vocoder keyboard. "It was the most uplifting start into a trade show day I ever had," Jochen told me. Jochen put a link to a YouTube video of Lewis in the article, but I've embedded it here for...

Jessica Dolcourt posted a great article on the One Laptop Per Child initiative in Nigeria on CNET news. We are finally seeing the beginning of the first deployments of the laptop. I think we're going to be impressed with what these young children do with this technology. Photos and Video of the 3-day event also available. Nice overview of the...