Serendipity

Freebies galore: iTunes & NPR

I was doing my weekly review of the iTunes Store as well as NPR & found a few things worth checking out, and checking back on:

1.  iTunes has several free downloads each week, of all kinds.  I frequently download all the music and then, if I hate it I can delete it easily or decide to move ahead perhaps to buy the person's next song.

2.  iTunes Podcasts:  The greatest thing since sliced bread, other than iTunes U.

All sorts of material, music, spoken and video, humor, poetry, I could go on [including one of my favorites, This American Life].  I wish I commuted so I could listen to more.

3.  iTunes U:  The second slice of bread, so to speak.  History, philosophy, math, language lessons, marketing, Public Radio shows.  Universities have increasingly been putting material on iTunes U [Stanford, U. Penn, Cambridge University, etc.]

4.  Fourth but not least, NPR.  Again, I was meandering around its site.  I decided to check on the Music area and there are two collections/samplers of music available for free:  Folk at Newport and Jazz at Newport.  

Using Faces in iPhoto

I have blogged on this before here, or on another blog of mine, but was using iPhoto today and thought I'd try to assign a 'Face' to the various family images there.  Since I had a whole set of photos of Ryan already identified as such, I decided to go through them using Faces to Confirm that they are, in fact, of him.  The program then uses the information and some sort of algorithm to identify similar facial features on other faces in the entire library and asks me then to Confirm them as the person or not.

Doing this, of course I had alot of Ryan right away and confirmed those.  But then I kept going and pretty soon up popped:  his sister, Kate, and nephews/nieces [children of his older sister and brothers who are under 10 yrs].  It's a great feature of iPhoto and it also confirms that often there are subtle family commonalities even though everyone in a family might seem distinctly different.

Go to the website and play this NOW!!!

Soy Tu Aire    It is a song ["I'm Your Air"] by Labuat, a female vocalist who sings in Spanish [her website is www.labuat.com] - but this is not only a song but an interactive experience.  As summarized on VSL, where I found it:

As the song — “Soy Tu Aire” (“I’m Your Air”) — kicks off, a line of black ink moves across the screen: You can send it up, down, back, and forth, or swirl it into circles. The line grows thicker along the way and splatters into several shapes: butterflies, red lips, birds. The immersive experience will make you feel like a maestro.

Wait for it to download and then move your cursor around and around and you'll get the idea.