Cheap stuff, free stuff, silly stuff

Adobe has transitioned from innovation to rent-seeking. Fortunately, there is are practical alternatives to Photoshop and InDesign: Affinity’s Photo and Publisher. You can buy them, and actually own them, and for excellent prices, too. Currently they are $25 each. There’s also Affinity Designer, a counterpart to Illustrator, for the same price. I haven’t had time to give them thorough workouts, but I have verified that most of the Topaz plugins I use work in Affinity Photo. The Affinity site is here.

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Cherry Audio has made their Voltage Modular Nucleus free for the downloading for a while. I already have VCV Rack and Reaktor Blocks, so I’ll probably give it a pass, but if you have a yen to experiment with modular sound synthesis, it might be worth checking out.

If you have a digital audio workstation such as Logic or Cubase, here are some freebies you might find useful.

• Native Instruments’ Analog Dreams is an “instrument” emulating old-fashioned subtractive synthesizers. It’s in my armory, and it sounds convincing. I haven’t used it much, but that’s because I have more virtual noisemakers than I will ever use.

Standard Guitar is an extended-range electric guitar that works well with pedal and amp emulations. (The site is in Japanese, but it’s not hard to figure out where to click.)

Shiny Guitar is an arch-top guitar, suitable for jazz, of course, and quite a bit else.

Both the above guitars run in Plogue’s sampler Sforzando, which is also free.

If you have NI’s Kontakt, there are several other free guitars to consider here.

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I wonder sometimes just how authoritative AllMusic is. The above is from the entry on Canned Heat’s second album. Strange — I don’t recall hearing the City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus on “Amphetamine Annie.”

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I recently received the above invitation. Um, yeah. Right. Just wondering: how many of these “women of excellence” need to shave?

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California, December 2018

I made a trip out to California the week before Christmas, where I spent a couple of days in Disneyland. It was difficult to get good pictures of the attractions — 10,000 oblivious people staring at their cellphones got in the way — but I was more interested in the plants there, anyway. Many that … Continue reading “California, December 2018”

A novelty in Kansas, omnipresent in Anaheim

I made a trip out to California the week before Christmas, where I spent a couple of days in Disneyland. It was difficult to get good pictures of the attractions — 10,000 oblivious people staring at their cellphones got in the way — but I was more interested in the plants there, anyway. Many that are greenhouse exotics in Kansas were growing outdoors everywhere in Anaheim. This batch of pictures reflects that.

A few token pictures of the park:

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Old books

A major chunk of my science fiction and fantasy library. I need to discard at least two-thirds of them, which will not be easy. Right-click and open in a new window to see the details.

A major chunk of my science fiction and fantasy library. I need to discard at least two-thirds of them, which will not be easy. Right-click and open in a new window to see the details.

Continue reading “Old books”

Nanodotty

125 shiny little magnets. Click to embiggen, as usual. Cross your eyes until you see three images, then focus on the middle image.

125 shiny little magnets. Click to embiggen, as usual.

Cross your eyes until you see three images, then focus on the middle image.

Maple

On the way to work this morning. Click to see larger images with more vivid color.

On the way to work this morning. Click to see larger images with more vivid color.