5 New Articles on MakeUseOf |  |
- Cool Websites and Tools [April 14th 2013]
- Stream Music From Your Menu Bar With CloudPlay [Mac]
- Off The Mainstream: Free Pop Rock Electronic Music Mix [Sound Sunday]
- 5 Tips & Tools To Help You Learn Japanese
- Would You Consider Shutting Off Your Cell Phone For A Whole Day? [MakeUseOf Poll]
| Cool Websites and Tools [April 14th 2013] Posted: 14 Apr 2013 09:31 PM PDT
These are just half of the websites that we discovered in the last couple of days. If you want us to send you daily round-ups of all cool websites we come across, leave your email here. Or follow us via RSS feed. The post Cool Websites and Tools [April 14th 2013] appeared first on MakeUseOf. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Stream Music From Your Menu Bar With CloudPlay [Mac] Posted: 14 Apr 2013 06:01 PM PDT
The obvious alternative would be Spotify. However, I don’t very often go on a journey of musical discovery from within Spotify and it feels strange to pay a monthly fee to play what is essentially the same music library over and over again. CloudPlay ($ 4.99)CloudPlay is a nifty little application that resides in your Mac OS X menu bar. To use it, just click on the little cloud icon in your menu bar and start searching for music that fits your mood. CloudPlay solves the problems mentioned earlier by pulling its music from the cloud. However, unlike other popular Cloud players like Spotify and Grooveshark CloudPlay doesn’t let you tune in to its own super sized music database. Instead, CloudPlay looks for the tracks using other third-party services, like YouTube and SoundCloud.
This both has its advantages and its disadvantages. Unlike Spotify and Grooveshark, CloudPlay won’t ask for a monthly fee. After a single payment of $4.99 the application is yours and you won’t be charged again. However, some of CloudPlay’s procurement of music may be in a grey zone. If a music video is deleted from YouTube due to a DMCA complaint, it will also disappear from SoundCloud. Perhaps the biggest single drawback to SoundCloud is its fragmented search. With Spotify, you search for a song or artist and receive a simple response to your query. With CloudPlay, a lot of different users may have uploaded the same music video, crowding your search results. But all in all, this is a small price to pay for free access to a ridiculous amount of music. Media SourcesCloudPlay tunes in to multiple services to provide you with music. First and foremost, CloudPlay looks at your iTunes library. Any song you already have on your computer will also show up in CloudPlay’s search result. This ensures you’ll get your music with the best audio quality possible. This is especially great news if you’ve spent a lot of time painstakingly organising your iTunes music library.
If CloudPlay can’t find the track in your iTunes library, it’ll start looking online. Online sources include YouTube, SoundCloud, Exfm, UndergroundMusic, Jamendo and Official.fm. If you aren’t able to find the song you’re looking for through YouTube, CloudPlay’s combination of professional, indie and all-round music services provide a great fallback. You can toggle any of these sources on or off in SoundCloud’s preference to get a more fine grained control of your search results. PlaylistsJust like most other music players, CloudPlay gives you the ability to create a playlist of your favourite songs. To add a song to a playlist, right-click it in CloudPlay and select or create a new playlist. These playlists are visible in CloudPlay by pressing the drop-down menu in the main application screen. This is especially useful because you can add tracks from across different music sources to a single playlist.
CloudPlay can also tune in to other playlists. Any playlists you have in your iTunes library are also accessible through CloudPlay’s drop-down menu. Better yet, you can access your favourites and playlists that you previously created on your YouTube account, or browse preexisting playlists on Console.fm and Jamendo. However, if you want to access the music from your YouTube playlists offline, you’ll have to use other tools to download your YouTube playlists. Online RadioA third and final source of music for CloudPlay is in Online Radio. There is a rich offering of online radio stations; thousands upon thousands of them. Angela Alcorn even wrote about how to create your own online radio station. CloudPlay searches these radio stations to give you additional search results, besides the aforementioned sources. Similar to tracks that are found using other music services, you can save radio stations that you like to your playlists, adding dynamic content to your song collections. What application or service do you use to listen to music on your computer. Do you still keep all your albums locally, or have you perhaps subscribed to a cloud music service. Let us know in the comments section below the article! The post Stream Music From Your Menu Bar With CloudPlay [Mac] appeared first on MakeUseOf. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Off The Mainstream: Free Pop Rock Electronic Music Mix [Sound Sunday] Posted: 14 Apr 2013 01:30 PM PDT
Note that name your price albums can be downloaded for free by entering 0 in the price field. That said, we strongly recommend you to donate a few dollars for music you enjoy! You are welcome to submit your music, send suggestions with free albums you have discovered, or request genres I haven't covered in a while. For all Sound Sunday related inquiries, please contact Tina [tina at makeuseof dot com]. Single: Flying Colours – The TakeoffGenre: pop Flying Colours are Jay Griffith, Rob Griffith, and Taylor Hare with lots of different friends. The Takeoff is a single off their new album All The Answers, released in February. The Takeoff is a name your price download from Bandcamp. TA Walker – LifecoursesGenre: acoustic, instrumental, progressive rock, electronica, folk TA Walker is a “guitarist/multi-instrumentalist and composer, who was influenced by many great musicians, but will listen to anyone who can play decent guitar. From the album page: A collection of largely acoustic guitar-based instrumentals with progressive rock, ambient and folk influences, recorded during 2009-2011. Lifecourses is a name your price download from Bandcamp. EP: Tim Coons – Frailty After-Party EPGenre: indie, alternative, folk, gospel From the album page: I don't think I've ever really been to an after-party. In my head, it looks like heading from the Oscars at 3 a.m. to sip champagne with P-Diddy. Perhaps listening to this 3 song extended-play will give you that experience… Frailty After-Party EP is a free download from Bandcamp. Arch Woodmann – Mighty ScotlandGenre: pop, arch, folk, minimalist, post rock From his Bandcamp profile: Young, French and acoustic, Arch Woodmann is the solo project of a former post-punk/post-rocker who chose to leave – for a while – electricity behind him. After having fallen in love with folk music, he started to focuse on his own production, which mixes the melancholy of Sun Kill Monn to the experimental jazz touch of Do Make Say Think, with a few Broken Social Scene-like poppy choruses. Mighty Scotland is a free download from Bandcamp. Schroedinger’s Cathouse – The John Deere LettersGenre: alternative, folk, americana, roots, country, pop, rock From their ReverbNation profile: Schroedinger’s Cathouse is a two man studio band, featuring Joseph Scott and J. Ross Goforth. Both artists write, play, and sing. They record using N-Track Virtual Studio. The John Deere Letters is a free download from Bandcamp. Obsidian Kingdom – MantiisGenre: alternative, crossover, experimental, metal, post black metal, progressive rock, art rock, dark metal, rock opera From the album page: The most ambitious project of the band until the present date; Obsidian Kingdom's debut fully displays its components' maturity in music writing and performing, meaning a bizarre step outside the boundaries of extreme music. Mantiis is a free download from Bandcamp. EP: backpackparty – Kind Of ClassyGenre: indie, electronic, pop, synthpop From the album page: Kind Of Classy is not just an album. It’s an event. An event where the minds of Zach Katz, Christian Novelli, and Jon Duckworth join from thousands of miles away. An event filled with eerie synths, melodic vocals, cool bowties, and maybe even backpacks. Pretty classy huh? Well, kind of. Kind Of Classy is a name your price download from Bandcamp. Jess Marquis – Mashup Album VGenre: electronic, progressive house, mashup, remix From his Bandcamp profile: The curious and witty Jess Marquis doesn't just bring the party: he seduces it, bombards it with vodka shots, spins it around the dance floor, and wakes up with it the next morning in a strange apartment. Voted “Best DJ” in New York three times, you can catch him every Friday and Saturday night at Webster Hall in NYC. Mashup Album V is a free download from Bandcamp. Wojciech Wszelaki i Przyjaciele – Unless you have a man in a manGenre: electronic, rock, piano Wojciech Wszelaki is an electronic music composer who says about himself that isn’t limited or locked into a specific category, but tries to create his own unique style of electronic music. Some songs are clearly influenced by Robert Miles, while others almost carry the sound of electronic folk songs. A unique mix of styles indeed. Unless you have a man in a man is a free download from Bandcamp. HEXSYSTEM – Black Cake 2Genre: experimental, electronic, edm, dark, ambient, downtempo Montréal is a city of extremes and home to many fantastic musicians. Dark cold winters and a vibrant club culture breed creativity. Three years after the first edition, HEXSYSTEM have released Black Cake 2 this March. Industrial sounds convey a dark and heavy atmosphere. Black Cake 2 is a name your price download from Bandcamp. ME – HAMDENGenre: alternative, indie, ambient, folk, avantgarde From his Bandcamp profile: ME is Minco Eggersman solo—where 'solo' is relative, considering the journey ME made over the years, and which has landed him in a filmic niche of his own. The Wagon Fair sounded most like his band at the close of every day, but his later work (like filmsoundtracks, Ooit, WIN/WIN and Drone) reminds us most of David Sylvian's later work. HAMDEN and RESERVOIRS reflect that new direction. HAMDEN is a name your price download from Bandcamp. And More…Enjoyed one of these albums? Pay it back and share this article or the albums you liked. If you really appreciated a particular album, please donate to the respective artist, so they can continue releasing great music. New to Sound Sunday? Past editions of Sound Sunday are available here. Are you using ifttt? Check out these recipes for receiving notifications of new Sound Sunday releases to GTalk and Pushover for mobile devices. Thank you @Vampie! Feel free to get in touch with me [tina at makeuseof dot com] to share free material, suggestions, and feedback or simply add your comments below. The post Off The Mainstream: Free Pop Rock Electronic Music Mix [Sound Sunday] appeared first on MakeUseOf. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 5 Tips & Tools To Help You Learn Japanese Posted: 14 Apr 2013 11:31 AM PDT
If you’re not particularly into Japanese, then check out all our other language learning articles too. The Alphabet. Both Of ThemJapanese actually has 3 character sets – a huge number of pictographical Kanji of which you only really need about 2,000 – and the two phonetic alphabets used for pronunciation, grammatical structure and foreign words. Thankfully both the alphabets have exactly the same sounds – they’re just written differently. Hiragana is the traditional Japanese script, the equivalent of our basic alphabet. It’s used for grammar – verb inflexions, sentence structure and such – as well as writing the pronunciation of Kanji. Pictured below are some traditional street signs in a mixture of Hiragana and Kanji.
Katakana is all the same sounds, but written differently – it looks more “modern”, with sharp, straight lines. You might think of it as capitalised version of our alphabet. It’s used almost exclusively for foreign words. Pictured below, a cafe menu written completely in Katakana.
If you’re travelling to Japan for less than a few months, I’d strongly recommend – if nothing else – that you master Katakana. A lot of menus you encounter will be written in Katakana-ized English, by which I mean rather than “burger”, you will read “ba-ga-”. Deciphering these bastardized English words is entire topic on it’s own, but suffice to say you will need Katakana to even attempt to read them! To learn both, I found Declan’s ReadWrite series ($25 bundle for both apps) to be great – it includes training on the pronunciation and writing (great if you have a tablet PC), as well as comprehensive testing. Basically, it works. There’s a free trial with later lessons locked for you to check it out.
Dump The Textbooks, Study OnlineNearly all the beginner level Japanese textbooks I’ve come across only present a rather dry form of polite Japanese. While this certainly has it’s use in formal situations and the upper echelons of society and business, it’s thoroughly useless in daily life and you’ll stick out like a sore thumb if you speak it. It’s the kind of Japanese that Japanese people think a foreigner ought to learn, but I’m here to tell you that my “aha!” moment happened once I dumped the textbooks and randomly searched for verb conjugation. This chart (a small part of which is shown below), by Aeron Buchanan summarises everything nicely, and you can download a PDF directly from Wikimedia here.
Once you understand how to turn the dictionary form a verb into all these other forms along with some basic structures, finding a single new verb gives you access to hundreds of new phrases. Here’s ten off the top of my head, all made from the base verb taberu, meaning “to eat”:
If you’re too lazy to work these out yourself, here’s a basic to tool to work them out for you. Type in the dictionary form, hit enter. Presto. Read as much as you can about verb conjugations and I guarantee your level of Japanese will skyrocket overnight – if you’re living in Japan, the world will start to make sense again! Lang-8Not for just Japanese, Lang-8 is a free web app (the 8 is supposed to represent the sign for infinity) for written language exchange. In return for correcting other’s English, people will correct your Japanese. I’ve used it with students writing an English blog before, and it’s simple to use and free. Rikai-chanRikai-chan is an essential Firefox plugin (and it’s Chrome port, Rikai-kun) for anyone hoping to read Japanese language websites. Hover over any word, and Rikai-chan will popup with a helpful dictionary entry, including meaning and pronunciation. You need this. Get it.
If you prefer to use Anki to learn vocabulary, you can even save words from Rikai-chan straight to Anki. Here’s how: Don’t Learn From (Some) AnimeA lot of Japanese learners get quite shockingly embarrassed when they find out that the line they just repeated from Dragonball Z in the middle of the civilised dinner is the equivalent of shouting out “you motherf*****”. Some popular anime (popular in America at least, and mostly reserved for little boys in Japan) uses the kind of language which is in the real world almost exclusively reserved for Yakuza. Using that in polite company will make you look like a big foreign jerk. If you really want to know the kind of language I’m talking about – here’s a silly little compilation. Do not repeat. That said, there’s a lot of anime that does use realistic Japanese, and short of moving to Japan it’s the best you’re going to get in the way of real listening practice – any of the Ghibli movies is a good start. If you are preparing for life in Japan, don’t forget to check out my pick of YouTube for learning about real Japanese culture. Despite no longer living in Japan, my (Chinese) wife and I continue to communicate daily in predominantly Japanese. I’d say it took me about 2 years of actually living there until I was confident in conversational Japanese, but then I did waste a year studying from textbooks. Learn from my mistakes, use these tips, and good luck! Do you have any other tips and tools you think should be here? Tell us in the comments and if there’s enough, we can do a follow up post. If these tips were useful to you, then please share and tell your friends about it! Image credits: anime teacher from ShutterStock, legassie44 via Compfight cc, Scout Seventeen via Compfight cc The post 5 Tips & Tools To Help You Learn Japanese appeared first on MakeUseOf. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Would You Consider Shutting Off Your Cell Phone For A Whole Day? [MakeUseOf Poll] Posted: 14 Apr 2013 10:30 AM PDT
Out of 399 votes in total, 6% of the readers haven’t decided what they think about touchscreens yet, another 6% already own a laptop with a touchscreen, 14.5% think a touchscreen would be kind of unnecessary in a laptop, 21% don’t mind it but refuse to pay more for it, 21.5% simply don’t want it, and 31% of the readers who voted say they hope to have a touchscreen on their next laptop. Full results and this week’s poll after the jump. Don’t forget to check out last week’s comments, which have very interesting points both for and against touchscreens on laptops, and especially the poll’s best comment by Victor Ong who won 150 reward points for his input!
This week’s poll question is: Would You Consider Shutting Off Your Cell Phone For A Whole Day? Want to make some extra MakeUseOf reward points? The most useful comment on the poll will be awarded 150 points! For sure, this is a tough one. Unlike 5 years ago, today’s cell phones are much more than mere phones. For those who own a smartphone, the cellphone has become a small-scale computer, which is used for surfing, social networks and messaging way more than it’s used for actual calling. The advent of cell phones and smartphones made us all very used to being able to call, send messages and emails from everywhere, and being available no matter where we are. This is undoubtedly useful, but it can also be overwhelming at times. Would you consider shutting off your phone for an entire day, or would that be too much to bear? Mind that the question doesn’t refer to a case of emergency, or a time when you must switch off your phone for some reason. We’re dealing with an ordinary day in your life, in which you’d simply give up your cell phone. Could you do it? Don’t forget to explain your answers in the comments, and tell us what you think about the cell phone situation as it is today. The post Would You Consider Shutting Off Your Cell Phone For A Whole Day? [MakeUseOf Poll] appeared first on MakeUseOf. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. Most of the listed websites are FREE or come with a decent free account option. If you want to have similar cool website round-ups delivered to your daily email, subscribe 
A more portable laptop (in my case, an ultrabook) comes with all kinds of problems for the music enthusiast. The sound quality of Apple’s built-in speakers is better than most, and I love iTunes’ capabilities for organising my media library. However, anything resembling a decent music collection takes up most – if not all – of the available hard drive space. Without a gigantic hard drive, keeping a local music library simply isn’t feasible.
Few editions of 
Japanese is an incredibly difficult language to learn, and I should know having lived in Kyoto for 8 years. While nothing beats learning a language by being thrown straight in at the deep end, there’s certainly some great tips and tools I can pass on that should benefit anyone just getting started with Japanese.
Last week we asked you if 
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