I was over at geek.com and the website was carrying a story about a cool little gizmo called Neocube. Apparently it’s a “puzzle with a billion solutions”. Something to keep your mind occupied when you are bored or feeling a bit “gray”. What I like is the way you could manipulate all those little spheres into something cool, and so quickly. Looks like an amazing gadget to let your creativity do the talking. OK I need this one!
Category Archives: Fun
FL Studio Rocks!
All of this blog has been tech stuff and more tech stuff. People must be wondering what is it I otherwise do. Actually as the story goes, earlier when I was working (, not on gaming but on my other programming job), my hobby used to be working on graphics stuff and modding other games and engines. Funny, my hobby became my job now that I am working on this game, so it was time to take up another one (, hobby that is). What’s the next best thing? Creating music, of course! 😀 It so happens I ran across this software called FL Studio 6 months or so back and started fiddling with it and was soon hooked.
I was using the demo for quite a while and I was really impressed by the whole product. I guess impressed enough to go get the full producer version of the software. For the clueless, FL Studio is a digital audio workstation (DAW), meaning you can produce music with it. OK, I am still a noob at the whole thing, but even then the software allowed me to create some really good tunes pretty easily. The work flow is not trivial, but you can figure your way around after reading tutorials and following online video-tutorials. I am not a good music composer, not by any stretch of the imagination, yet the software allowed me to create pretty decent tracks far too quickly than what I had ever thought possible.
The program has near infinite options for authoring audio, most of which I am completely clueless about. Unfortunately I haven’t got too much time right now to look at each and every one, but I hope I can get around to understanding them eventually. To someone who has never seen FL Studio, the interface might look intimidating. The amount of nuts and bolts on the UI makes one think that it would be rather difficult to get things working, however looks can be very deceiving. While not a walk in the park, a few searches on the internet will have even a total noob creating great audio loops in no time. All you really need to do is visit Youtube and there are more than enough tutorials for even advanced stuff. The FL Studio site itself has more than enough vids to get you started.
I kinda liked the software right from the word ‘Go’ and, yes, I am a sucker for music. Unfortunately all my earlier attempts to produce anything audible, with any other software (, or for that matter hardware) could only be categorized as ‘noise’. FL Studio just seemed so intuitive. True there are other, more powerful products in the market, but I think very few can stand up to FL Studio given the price point, not to mention the lifetime free upgrades the product offers. Cool!
BOO! It’s Friday the 13th!
“Hee haw haw ha! Be careful, its Friday the thirteenth!”
So what is the old superstition surrounding this morbid date in the calender? Well I decided to do some quick googling around to find out. It seems that Friday the 13th is among the oldest superstitions around. Or at least in the western world it is. “A Friday occurring on the 13th day of any month is considered to be a day of bad luck in English, German, Polish and Portuguese-speaking cultures around the globe. ” — Wikipedia. So much so they have a scientific name for it. It’s called, ok get ready for tongue twisters, paraskevidekatriaphobia or friggatriskaidekaphobia. Shush! Don’t say the words out loud, according to an urban legend, if you do so on this very date, something bad might happen to you
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Apart from this superstitious belief, there is no explanation either rational or irrational that anything bad happens on this date. People have given all sorts of wired explanations why 13th and in fact Friday the 13th is bad. Everything from prehistoric man only being able to count till 12 to a boy being drowned and then reincarnated to do unspeakable evil, which apparently forms the plot of the Friday the 13th movie series.
As far as I am concerned I have never observed anything, or nothing has ever happened to me that would suggest that Friday the 13th was bad. In fact I remember one incident a few years back when I was doing engineering and I had a lucky break on a difficult math exam on this date. I managed to pass the exam because of that. So in fact Friday the 13th has been lucky for me once. I am kinda weired, 13 has always been lucky for me, go figure! But then that’s just me. Remember,
“Even spooks don’t go out on Friday the thirteenth!”