Laptop

So I decided to install Ubuntu on my daughter’s new laptop, more specifically an HP Pavilion. The choice of this particular laptop was because it looked nice, and had good specs for the money. It was first after the purchase I read all the complaints people have about the weird UEFI implementation on HP laptops. So I started the install process with some worries. Reading on various forums, people seemed to have been doing all sorts of strange things to be able to install Ubuntu on HP laptops, including modifying the UEFI setup, changing the BIOS, and so on. I recall that on my Lenovo laptop I had to work quite a bit to turn off all the fancy auto-Windows-stuff. ...

My 9-year old daughter is getting her first laptop. But which OS should she get started with? I have been using various versions of Ubuntu as my main OS for around 5 years now, currently using Ubuntu Studio on my main laptop. This distro is based on XFCE, a very lightweight yet versatile OS. The reason for choosing Ubuntu Studio over the regular XUbuntu was to get a bunch of music apps by default. I haven’t been able to explore these as much as I wanted to, unfortunately, primarily due to everything happening at our new centre (RITMO) and master’s programme (MCT). ...

Yesterday I was teaching a workshop on laptop orchestra performance for the students in Live electronics at the Norwegian Academy of Music. I usually start such workshops by playing the piece Clix by Ge Wang (see e.g. here for a performance of it). It is a fun piece to play, and it is nice to show the students something else than Max patches. Unfortunately, while setting up for the workshop I had problems getting Chuck to work on my new laptop. I haven’t had time to figure out what the problem actually is, but I think it may be an issue with OS X Lion. Anyways, since I was short on time I decided that the quickest solution was just to make something similar to Clix in Max. The result is Click-It, and the GUI looks like this: ...