Gnaural vs. NNS

I like Neural Noise Synthesizer but but it's $35 price tag is a bit hefty for a simple noise/tone generator, so I'm feeling like contributing to Gnaural and making it as powerful as NNS. What a perfect way to contribute to the open source community as well as expand my brain wave entrainment experiments! Okay, now someone tell me how to program in GTK.

LyX for Math

I just discovered LyX and its math editor, and I'm in love. I was looking for a math editor to do my physics homework. A teacher recommended MathType. It costs $100. Heck no! So I searched for a GNU alternative, and wham, I saw a picture of AbiWord with a LaTeX popup editing a math formula! Beautiful.

Unfortunately, I'm not too familiar with LaTeX or plugins/customizing AbiWord. I decided to just use LaTeX, which is when I discovered a frontend for it called LyX.

Wow, keyboard shortcuts for every symbol (e.g. \infty for infinity symbol)! Wow, subscripts (^) and superscripts (_)! Why math with pencil and paper sucks:

• Writing tiny sub- and superscript numbers can get messy.
  
• Big matrices are a huge waste of paper.
  
• Make a mistake near the top, eat a fraction of an eraser.
• No copy & paste means more tedium and more errors.

I think I'm going to like math again.