I’m one of the >85,000 subscribers worldwide for the Artificial Intelligence Class taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig.

Great, but not special, since at least 84,999 other people did that too. I’ll only be proud when I finished the course, because it troubles me if my math skills are still up-to-date – I left school more that 30 years ago!
At Aiqus, the Q&A community for students taking Stanford’s globally available course, some guy had the same question and in one of the many answers the Khanacademy and especially the videos on probability and videos on Linear Algebra were mentioned.
This was just what I was looking for! Even better: Khanacademy also has a complete education on their library of videos, and I started to follow their program of regular brain building.

They have a great interface for tracking your own progress, which is imo better, or at least more stimulating (or, at least, more stimulating to me ) than that of Lumosity.

So, don’t expect too much updates on this blog for the next few weeks, I’ll be spending a lot of time at Khanacademy.:-)

©2011 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.

Today in the Image-Line Newsletter the new Harmor synthesizer,
Harmor is driven by a powerful additive synthesis engine. Its modules will look familiar to subtractive synthesizer enthusiasts including: oscillators, filters & phasers, these are featured in Harmor but, because they are performed through additive synthesis, offer more freedom.

After watching the introductory video I browsed some other videos, and what made me most happy was the tutorial about making tempo changes in a project (and how to sync Fruity Granulizer to the project tempo, to keep your loops in time with the changes) – I didn’t know this was possible.

Another video tutorial I’d like to watch (if time permits: it lasts 44′ !) is the Dubstep tutorial. Unfortunately the audio is very bad and because of the unintelligible mumbling of Mr SekoIdiootti you can’t make much sense of the lesson he is teaching, but if you let the video speak for itself, there will hopefuly be some tips and tricks to learn.

While writing the above, I’m still thinking about the Harmor: shall I buy it? It costs only $ 99 now, as an introductory price, but this will be $ 149 on October 1. So I feel a bit strained about the offer. Besides: Image Line is also developing a Groove Machine, currently beta-tested; a horrible attack of greediness is coming up in me

The guys at Image-Line keep expanding FLStudio – there is now even a mobile version (not for Android yet) – and although I have been making some music with other DAWs (Ableton, Renoise, EnergyXT), FLStudio is still my favourite workhorse.

So, where is my credit card?

©2011 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.

The eighth edition of the GOGBOT Festival takes place from the 8th to 11th of September 2011 in the centre of Enschede. This annual festival for music, art and technology is organised by Planetart.

The program looks very interesting with again a lot of transhumanistic influences, although maybe not as much as last year, when the theme was “The Singularity is Near – Resistance is Futile”.
This year’s festival theme is ‘Data-Panic, YouTube-poop, Japanoiiid!’.

From the program:

• Music: eclectic, grime, electronics, electro, minimal, 8-bit rave, glitch, dubstep, beats, noise, bleebs, breakcore, speedcore, terror, disco, drones, psychedelic, metal, drumnbass, circuitbending, experimental, performance.
• Technology: googlization of everything, we are anonymous, information overload / abundance, cyberwars / cyberattacks, info panic, japanoiiiid, filtered failure, militant modernism, digital folklore, post-internet, singularity 2.0 

©2011 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.

I had to wait some time before I got my invitation; but now I’m on Google+. I’m not sure yet if it will be an improvement over Facebook, but some people claim it will change the Web as we know it. They’re definitely right: the Web is changing constantly. From what I’ve seen I can only say: it is an improvement to organize your friends in circles, because now I don’t have to annoy my transhumanist friends with holiday pics of my children – and I don’t have to annoy my kids with my latest tweets about MindUploading – if they bother to read what I’m writing anyway
SocialWeb-Website Mashable published a Google+ guide, with a very useful cheat-sheet:

Having tried Google+ only briefly: two things are on my wishlist for now. One: how can I sync Google+ with all my other social networks? Until now I shared everything I wanted to share with Diigo – a small booklet in my browser (or the small app on my android) takes care of the job with only one click: saving to Diigo, bookmarking to Delicious, microblogging to Twitter, and from there it is automatically published in Friendfeed, Facebook and Hyves (the now almost obsolete Dutch Social Network). That’s where computers are invented for: to be a willing slave – a workhorse that allows me to be creative and to live my life without bothering about the tedious handwork. Emlyn O’Regan built a synchroniser that supports Facebook and Google’s Buzz, with read-only Google+ (and experimental WordPress support), so that’s a start.
My second wish – more a complaint – is about the Google+ app. It is rather heavy: currently a > 8 MB (initially > 11 MB!) and no option to move it to your SD card, so it eats a lot of the storage space on my Android. That could and should be done better.
BTW: if you still need an invite (a very boring strategy to give the appearance of exclusivity): contact me.

©2011 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.

Scrivener is a powerful tool for writers that allows you to write a novel, a research paper, a film-script or any long-form text.

Until now Scrivener has only be available for the Mac, but that’s going to change, since Literature and Latte, the makers of Scrivener, are working on a version for windows.
Of course there are also other writer tools out there, like CeltX. CeltX is free and even portable – which is a good thing! And it has some interesting features. But, CeltX is not entirely free, trying to make money by selling “add-ons” and their Studio.
CeltX is only for creative writing, like writing a novel, a film script or even a comic book – and they claim to be the “#1 choice for media pre-production”. Scrivener can also help you organizing your research and writing your paper.
Scrivener lets you create a series of “index cards” – which is still a good way to organize your data – with a title and a short synopsis. You can view and edit these cards on a “cork board” (rather ugly IMHO) but you can also edit these cards in the outline view. Each card is associated with a section of the paper or book you’re writing.
When Scrivener for Windows goes on sale it will cost $40 for a regular licence. I’m working now with the beta, and I can’t wait until it will be released.

©2011 Kuehleborn's World. All Rights Reserved.