Magpie and Magpie Pro are very specialist software. What they do is allow animators to figure out what mouth shapes to animate when adding visuals to avoice. It’s called lip sync. Actors record voices, and animators hear those words and draw or fashion from clay,the expressions and mouth shapes of the characters. Sounds simple, but it’s really not.

Magpie and it’s big brother Magpie Pro make this easy by loading the sound file up and breaking it down into frame sized pieces. Then you can assign a mouth shape to the syllables you hear, frame by frame. Then you can play the sound and watch the mouth. If it matches and looks good, you’re done, if not it’s back to the old drawing board. Magpie makes it simple.

Find all the details and demo download at Third Wish Software.

Ever get the urge to go back in time, a simpler when everything, including interpersonal communication was more elegant, had a little more style? Why not? They haven’t stopped doing telegrams yet, but it’s only a matter of time. There’s something about a telegram, a certain old world class, which emails still can’t equal with all their sassy speed and efficiency.

Retrograms aims to stop all that. Choose from a range of excellent retro looking telegrams and have them shipped to your friends either as e-cards over the Internet, or as real live telegrams delivered through the mail. Okay, so they don’t travel as fast as real telegrams but boy oh boy do they ever look the part.

For all the retro telegram sending fun you can handle, go to Retro Gram.

It’s easy to see what side of the bread the code monkeys at Google have buttered, politically speaking. Type “failure” into Google and click “I’m feeling lucky.” Well yeah that just about says it.

I’m really curious as to how this was done. Usually search engine stuff is all drawn from the target page, spiderbots read all the text on the page (and more importantly IN the page) and catalogue this in the database. I’ve viewed the source of that page on the Whitehouse site and there’s nothing like that in the code. Obviously, putting comments like that in the Whitehouse code is a short way to get yourself fired…

So the only explanation is that someone put it directly into the Google database. Man, the power. It’s overwhelming, isn’t it?

This software has apparently been in use in computer music for over fifteen years, and used by performers, composers, artists, teachers, and students all over the world. As they put it on the web site “Max/MSP is the way to make your computer do things that reflect your individual ideas and dreams”, which is a bit grandiose for my taste.

More simply put, Max/MSP is a “graphical programming environment”, which means you can develop your own music generation and treatment software using a visual representation of the tools, connecting them together with patch cords on screen to make them talk to each other. This is really cool by the way! Not to mention very powerful.

The basic environment includes all the basic MIDI, control, user interface, and timing tools. That is the Max part of the suite. On top of Max you can build hundreds of other objects, including the two powerful collections of objects you can buy with Max, first of which is MSP, a collection of audio objects that facilitate everything from interactive filter design to direct to hard disk recording. The other set of objects is Jitter, a set of objects optimized for manipulating video and 3D graphics.

Yes it’s very geeky and techie, BUT it is VERY powerful. Computer driven music doesn’t get more leading edge than this.

Click here to join the magic.

In design stock photography is something you usually pay through the nose for. A good source of free stock photography is a boon for designers, graphic artists and web creators alike. Which is why it’s so very nice to see so many good quality free stock photo resources on the web.

My favourite of all time has to be Stock Exchange, the first and best. The quality of the photos is great and you can contribute too. It’s like Flickr but with higher resolution to the graphics you create using these resources can be printable in magazines.

There are other resources too, all you have to do is search for “free stock photo -royalty”. The last bit is to stop searching for “royalty free” which is not free but something you pay for.

See Stock Exchange, but also these fine resources:

http://www.creatingonline.com/stock_photos/
http://www.free-stockphotos.com/

First we had the podsafe music network, Podshow now we have this. Music which is from unsigned bands which is licensed especially for podcasting. But the trend is growing. Most music producers are happy with the idea that in order to sell music you have to give lots away. It seems that the days of bloated greedy record companies are numbered. And not very big numbers either…

File sharing and MP3 network MP34U is trying hard to be an alternative to the traditional music business and succeeding to a certain extent. You’ve got signed and unsigned bands side by side, ratings and chart positions, well known and less well known artists. The “sources” look for and find the best free and legal MP3s out there on the Net. These countless billions (well lots anyway) are then voted on, and you get the results. So you know that the stuff which rises to the top is popular. It might even be good, the odds are with you on that one.

Visit the asylum here.

I found a really cool resource on the web, which if you are a fan of old blues masters is actually something of a gold mine. Lots of the recordings of the old blues musicians have fallen into the public domain, being really old and all that. The problem with media that has fallen into the public domain is that it is pretty hard to find.

Luckily there is a new kind of movement on the Net where clever and resourceful people find out stuff which is public domain now and collect it together. This is one such resource.

Here you can find such brilliant old stuff as Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”, Blind Willie Johnson singing “Praise God I’m Satisfied”, and Lottie Kimbough with “Wayward Girl Blues”. Oh yeah and I really love Memphis Minnie’s “Where is My Good Man At?”. Very cool.

Join the fun at PublicDomain4U.

You know what’s really weird about the concept of backing up the entire Internet? Where on earth would you put it all?

I don’t know how it works, but over at www.archive.org they have a thing called the Internet Wayback Machine. You can put in a URL and it will take you back to what that page looked like in 1996. It must be vestigial logs from the hosting sites or something, I don’t see how it can work, but it does. I can verify I went back to a lot of my old websites that are LONG gone and there they were, graphics and all.

That’s not even possible, is it?

Mind boggling. Go boggle your own mind at The Internet Wayback Machine.

I tell you what I really could use right about now… a random dictionary. I’ve searched all over the web and I can’t find a piece of software or a web site that will plunder an extensive dictionary for a random word and definition. Why would I want to reverse engineer a dictionary? Surely the point of dictionaries is that you know a word but you don’t know what it means. You look it up.You find it out.

But that’s not what I want. I have a perfectly good dictionary in Dictionary.com which is the best free online dictionary going. What I need is a means to find random words drawn from a very large word list. Why? Because that is the way I come up with story and article ideas. Choose three random words out of the dictionary like so:

evangelical
numbers
photoluminescence

and you have a trio of concepts which you can work from to make a story. Say from this set we get a thought about a crusade, a group of knights either from the past or future, who follow a religion based on numbers. And guess what? – they glow in the dark! A silly example, but already we have a basis for a story. Snatching these words out of a dictionary is physically difficult. You cannot be truly random, and a big enough dictionary that has enough words in it is often heavy and unwieldy.

If you know of any such resources on the Internet, please let me know, I’ll be happy to check them out.

Lulu.com is the place to go if you have a book you want published. It’s free to upload and design your publications, not unlike Cafepress.com, and you can host the finished books in its online store. If you have a technical book you always wanted to write but the market for it is minimal, for no setup cost you can be selling it online and shipping it worldwide.

It’s not just vanity publishing, this is personal publishing. You are the boss. But using Lulu’s connections to worldwide book sales databases, for a reasonable fee you can be on the lists at Barnes and Noble or Amazon. But for free you can sell via your own storefront on lulu.com. I’ve republished some fine out of print and public domain texts, plus my own novel. You could publish that textbook about programming you always wanted to write. Or that guide to all the best curry restaurants in Northern England. If you “have a book in you”, go to www.lulu.com to get it out.