Android Comics

It is strange of course, but people have a habit to give knowledge about the World through toys and pictures... Instead of to show you a serious science movie on the "Discovery" or at least a plausible photo, you slip a picture with handwritten image of some cheerful bear and say, "Look, this is a Teddy bear!". Your children's little eyes look at this picture and you draw a clear analogy with disheveled teddy bear lying around in the corner. And you do not realize that behind this image hides one of the most aggressive animals whose clutches killed more than one hapless hunter.

Finally it comes out that in your life you have to face with some things or cases which you have seen before only on children's pictures or in cartoons. And you have to re-experience them in real life by yourself. Although of course it is more logical to gain "adult" knowledge initially, because it is always harder to learn again. Definitely all those dead hunters lost their lives by reason of some ridiculous confusion happened with them when they met with a real bear. Probably some of them were confused by bright childhood memories even cried out: "Look! This is just a Teddy bear!" and tried to touch bear's wet button-nose. But "adult" fate was inevitable and took away childhood dreams together with life.

Anyway, love for drawn and puppet heroes sits in us for the rest of our lives. Only this can explain enormous popularity of all those "shreks," "kung-fu pandas", etc. As well as it explains for me constant interest in comic books and artworks of that kind. I do not collect them by thousands but I can't pass through them neither in book stores nor in internet...

Space Invaders

I'm not a gamer... But sometimes, of course, I play "Solitaire" in the office, until there is no bosses, or I can play "SweepMiner". But it is not systematic.

But only when I see those games that I played 20 years ago on console "Dendy", my soul overflows with children's delight! So when I was presented with tablet based on "Android" and visited the "Android Market", I saw a huge number of games written for this platform, I decided to try my luck and typed in the search engine: "8-bit games"...

FLOSS Manuals

Most of my hobbies are somehow related to the computer, so I'm constantly in the search stage of software to meet my needs. But the more professional is software, the more the price of all these developments. But I'm not a professional! So why should I spend big money on the purchase of certain products, if I did not earn a penny from them in the long term?

Use of limited "home" versions or "light" packages is also not an option, because they usually cut a very interesting and useful functions... So I concentrated on testing the "open source" analogues of the various programs, fortunately enthusiasts willing to share their experience are enough in the world (for what they have honor, praise and respect). But here there is one problem: the developers of professional products are focused on "loyalty" of its user, so running in parallel with the development of the product they supply it usually with serious and informative guides. But in the case of "open source" it is not always possible. It could be argued that the "good" software is clear and intuitive for the user at any level, but personal experience suggests that to read manuals is still very, very useful exercise. Because every program has its own quirks, to understand that empirically is not so simple. And manuals speed up the process at times (unless of course, they are not stretched more than a 500 pages, but in any case there is a glossary or table of contents))).

So, in search of regular manuals to music program I dug up a project called FLOSS Manuals. List of manuals decently surprised me: besides the well expected VLC-player or a sound editor Audacity, I found a manuals for such interesting projects as Csound (audio programming) and Ardour (digital audio workstation (DAW)). Well, a manual for Pure Data (a program for creating interactive audio-visual applications) I think one of the most convenient, complete and easy to understand for a standard user!

My pd-patch © :)