Sometimes the best way to overcome annoyances is to embrace them and make them your own. To protest the way rampant commercialism has corrupted Christmas carols, O'Reilly author Michael W. Dean recorded "God Rest Ye Merry Bonzo." This "perverted Xmas music" mates a drum loop from Led Zep's "Bonzo" Bonham with vocals, bass, sleigh bells (!), and an e-mailed guitar...

As dusk darkened to night, my exposures got longer and longer until the swirl trails of the stars echoed the swirls in the rock of the Wave. View this image larger. To take this photo, I needed to wait until darkness out in the desert with the ordeal that was to come. But, I say, since all's well that ends...

I feel a little like Bob Moog today — or maybe Adolphe Sax. While Googling for one of my articles, I discovered a musical instrument called the Battino: You play it by whacking a wooden ball with a hammer, causing the ball to tumble across some pegs and strike a bell. "The balls make a pleasing clickety-clack sound as they...

I just downloaded the new Miro player (formally Democracy Player). It's very nice, seems to organize videos reasonably well, is free, multi-platform, open source and includes features I believe all video players should provide. But, when I got to checking it out, I was disappointed with the audio quality on many of the videos featured on Miro's Getting Started page....

Name a wildly popular entertainment technology that suddenly perished because its stewards didn't innovate. Here are your clues: It was introduced in the '70s. It became more popular in the '80s and hugely popular in the '90s. By the turn of the century there were 9,000 titles available.

With 486 comments at last count, our discussion on the Zoom H2 handheld surround recorder is teeming with questions and tips. One of the latest struck me, because I'd been wondering about this myself. Reader Lee Wong wrote: Help! Does anyone have a schematic they can share for making a really small, portable preamp so I can stick my Soundman...

I see Visual VST/i Programming: Synthedit is out now. I haven't sighted it yet, but it includes some of my custom SynthEdit modules, so it is quite fun for me. SynthEdit is a shareware application for PC that is a kind of modular synthesizer; it gained a lot of traction early because it had one killer feature in particular: you...

After 8 years, several hard drive upgrades, and a great lifetime of service, my daughter made our Series 1 TiVo go boom the other day. She knocked over the TV, the TiVo, and our DVD player/recorder. In the end, daughter was fine (albeit in big trouble), the HDTV also survived without a problem. The antennas on both the TiVo and...

I'm just back from my 14^th trip to Texas to participate in one of the Fat Man's amazing digital media conferences. This one was called Project Horseshoe, and dedicated to "solving game design's toughest problems." If history holds, this improbable but beloved conference will have far-reaching results.

The sun in the photo below apparently frames the northern tower of the Golden Gate Bridge in a perfect circle. In fact, there are apparently three "suns" in the photo. One sun is real, two of them are optical artifacts. The fake suns, including the perfect one framing the Golden Gate tower are caused by an optical phenomenon called double...