Review of the CASIO WK-110

Introduction

Hi there! It's me again :-) I have not written posts for some time, because of our "great" Czech Language teacher and other things like that. But this time, I will tell you something about my new keyboard CASIO WK-110. I have this device for about 2 months. I know, it is not so long, but I can share some experiences and opinions I got so far. So do not waste of words to write introduction and let's look at this puppy :-)

Unpacking

Once, you order this keyboard, you will get a huge package, which contains:

• Keyboard itself
• Sheet (score) stage
• Songbook and as usual some papers for making fire and CD with drivers for connecting to PC

Are you missing something? Yeah, you are right, you need another piece of puzzle. Please be aware of the thing, that there is no AC/DC adaptor included in the box! You have to buy this separately.

Another thing you will probably need, but is not necessary to start playing like at least like a kitty is a piano stage and comfortable chair. If you are not beginner, you may want to buy a pedal, which can be connected via standard “big jack”.

It wasn't all so expensive, but not so cheap as well :-) There are the prizes:

• keyboard + AC/DC adaptor - $370 /  250€
• “doubled-X” Bespeco CROCODILED piano stage (Bespeco stages are really one of the best) - $68 / 46€

I had some chair and pedal at home, so no need of buying it for me there :-)

Let's roll!

After unpacking, putting keyboard on a stage, connecting AC/DC adaptor and pressing the “Power” button, you can finally play. There are some highlights for this piece of hardware:

• 76 piano-look-and-size keys
• 515 sounds and 120 accompaniments
• 32 tone polyphony (16 with stereo sound)
• other ordinary things like Split, Layer, Transposition, Tuning, Recording memory, Touch Response, …
  

If you like piano best, you may be glad to see the number of keys. Sixty-one, which is on ordinary keyboards is not enough for many of players. This one has 76 keys, which is an octave lower than grand piano and for me is enough :-) There is no hammer keyboard, so the feeling is not so good like a grand piano, but according to the price, there is no way to have it. There are also many sound registers, but I guess you will use “001 – St.GrPno” for the most of the time like I do :-)

In the keyboard, there is one hundred of songs, which can be learned by integrated educational system. In my opinion, this system is not so good. The Yamaha's light-keys are better, but sucks anyway :-) For this case, there is a paper songbook - incluedes all of the 100 songs (except the first two – some copyright things – idiots).

Pluses

• 76 keys, which is the best thing in the world, if you really wanna play
• great sound
• price

Minuses

• The LCD display is nice, but if you wanna read from it, you have to incline yourself. There is no way of reading it while playing and using educational system is not good as well. This is actually thing I do not care about much, because I just set it once and play without need of setting something again. And, I can read sheets, so no educational system needed too :-)
• Keys click when pressed more loudly than on other keyboards. This is bad if you play in night like I sometimes do :-) For normal ordinary playing in the day, it is OK.
• The switching button (normal and types of accompaniment) sucks. It seems to be done in fifteen seconds by a monkey, because even fly can move with it and sometimes, the keyboard just switches the mode itself, which sucks, because you just finish one song, want to start another, but pressing keys on the left side does not have an effect. I will probably send it to service centre, if problem still occurs in next weeks.

Connecting to PC

• There is also possibility of connecting it with PC. You can just use this keyboard like a MIDI player and record your music as well as do some sheets :-)
• If you ask, how it works in Linux, the answer is: Perfectly! ALSA detects it automatically, so there is no driver installation needed. If you have some application installed (for example Rosegarden), you can just plug & play :-)
• If you ask, how it works in Windows, I have no idea :-)

Conclusion

If there would not be the problem with switching button, it would be really good keyboard. I will see, what will happen, if they will fix it or not. I hope yes. The first and the second issues described are not so important to me. To end this all up, I can say, I am really satisfied with my new instrument :-)

P.S: Expect some videos of me playing my Casio as soon as I will get a camcorder :-)

How I Started To Play Piano

Some time ago (one and half of a year, before Christmas I guess) I was watching some Fazil Say's videos (there are articles coming about him and two other piano players / composers) and asked myself: “Why I am not playing some instrument?”. I was thinking about it for a while and then, to find the answer, I asked my parents. They were surprised a little bit and said something like “You have never showed anything about your interest in music”. I said like “OK” and was quite sad. After some days, I just came home and told my mum “I wanna play piano”. She said like “Fine. You can go to the music school”. But I was little scared, because starting playing an instrument in fifteen seemed too late for me. And, by the way I was scared of little children playing Mozart and laughing and pointing at me :-)

But later I came to our ZUŠ (in English it is something like Primary School of Arts) with my mum, because she knows the boss :-) After that, I felt calm and OK, because, teacher was really nice and they've said, that even older starts with playing :-)

For a half of a year, I've been going there and learning by my teacher (his surname is Kadeřávek) and playing at home on my really old Yamaha PSR-400 (it was produced in 1991 I think :-P). It was a short period of playing some classical piano etudes and then it ended with final exams. (of course, it was terrible, my first time, I haven't played everything well as you can guess).

Next year, I started a new period, for this time a longer one :-) ZUŠ has bought new keyboard (Yamaha S-550 I think, I can't remember the number). My teacher left the school and another one was associated to me. His name is Aleš Parkan, he teaches keyboard and accordion. I have successfully finished one full year with exams which were fine (there I was playing Život je jen náhoda by Jaroslav Ježek – really nice and some other things). I have also been on one concert which was totally terrible, I have screwed it all up – and it was really simple thing :-(

On holidays, I really started to play, not just like going to the ZUŠ every second week like I was the first half of a year. I have learned many new things and now, there are some pieces to show the others, when they will ask me “Can you play something for me, please?”. There are some articles coming about it, especially videos. Actually I have bought a new keyboard – CASIO WK-110 (it has 76 keys – great thing! Expect a review soon).

Now, I am in the third class and I really like it and I am glad I started before, because if I would start now, I would not have so much time.

MSI EX600-074CZ and Linux after 2 years

For almost two years I am owner of MSI laptop (EX600-74CZ is the exact model number). I guess, after this long time I can tell you, what is worth buying this laptop and of course, what is totally terrible.

First, some specifications:

• 15.4'' “mirror-like” screen with standard resolution (1280x800 pixels)
• 1.5 GHz 64-bit dual-core CPU Intel Centrino Duo
• 2 gigabytes of RAM
• 160 GB hard drive and some DVD-RW optical drive
• Nvidia 8400M G graphic card 
• integrated Wi-Fi (Intel 4965 a/g/n), Bluetooth, 3in1 card reader and 1.3 Mpx webcam
• slots and ports: 4x USB, FireWire (IEEE1394), PCMCIA, VGA out, S-Video out, network card and modem
• full-size keyboard (including the part with numbers) and touchpad
  

The laptop was for 19 000,- Kč (now it is something about $1100 / 750€). For this price, it was relatively good machine for office work as well as for gaming, because of the great NVidia graphic card.

Now, after two years, I can say the following:

• Optical drive is dead and there is little crack on the back of the screen – it is most likely because of moving the laptop in normal rucksack and putting it on the floor all the time. ATTENTION: Always use rucksack with reinforced layer – the bigger = the better. It does not matter, how much you try and care, if you will use normal rucksack, there will be a crack after some time and maybe some broken components.

• I was moving my open laptop when it was raining for some time and there is still some water in the screen … Does anyone know, how to disassemble it? :-)

• I wanted to try Nvidia's VDPAU to watch Full HD movies accelerated over my GPU, but unfortunately, my GPU seems to be broken according to this forum topic and more unfortunately, I have already disassembled my laptop, so there is no warranty anymore, I guess :-)

• Everything except those things written above works absolutely fine. Video and things like that are really okay, just Nvidia :-) Full-size keyboard is really great thing, not just some nice looking thing in advertisement.

And finally, the software thing: I am using Linux, so, “What is the support?”, you may ask. Works everything?

• There is a simple answer to that question: In Linux, everything works out-of-the-box except … wait for it … ACPI. Yeah, this is right, unexpected, huh? Wi-Fi, BT, sound, video, card reader, … everything is perfect, there's no need of  finding drivers, you just put in CD, install it with pressing Enter key a few times and everything is working! If you want 3D acceleration, it is so simple, because Ubuntu will automatically notice you, that you are using a free driver, which does not have 3D, so you will just confirm it and in 2 clicks, Ubuntu will install official Nvidia driver, nice, isn't it? :-)

• Except ACPI (suspend), there is another little thing, which is actually for me an advantage: If you will plug in headphones, sound from speakers will be still coming out, so you have to check / uncheck some little beast in sound preferences and if you unplug headphones, there will be no sound coming from speakers, so you will have to check / uncheck the little beast again. You are maybe thinking, it is just boring thing, which takes time. What can be the advantage? I will tell you … Imagine, you are at the school and there's some boring lesson … What will you do? Do your work and listen to music? That is right. And can you imagine what will happen, if you will move and do not realize, your headphones have short cable or you will have to go away fast? Yeah, you got it … With this little “bug / feature” , you can just unplug it and nothing happens – no sound, no loud screaming of Nightwish or soundtrack of Phantom of the Opera :-)
  Actually, out-of-the-box, even this checkable thing will not appear, you have to add these lines to /etc/modprobe.conf:
  
  alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
  alias sound-slot-0 snd-hda-intel
  options snd-hda-intel model=3stack-6ch-dig
  Simple, right?
  
  Back to the ACPI: Suspend does not work at all. Laptop seems to go to sleep successfully, but it will not wake up. Showing the state of battery and some other things sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. CPU frequency scaling works fine.
  

So in the end, there is the conclusion: The HW is really good and if I would not destroy it by myself and do not disassemble it (for changing graphic card in the terms of warranty), everything will be probably working and OK :-) Linux is really running nice on this device, but non-working ACPI sucks, especially on laptop, but is thing, I can live without.

Welcome!

Welcome here!

My name is René Kliment and I live in Vimperk, little town in Czech Republic. Just about three hours ago, I decided to have a blog, so this is the result :-)

I am not native English speaker, so if you are, or you know English better than a primary school student, you may be saying right know something like "Uh, that is terrible, little child can do that better". That is true, I do not know English so well, but you know what they say, practicing makes better, I hope I will get better and you will like it more :-)

Anyway, except the practicing thing, it makes possible to read this blog for much more people than just in Czech Republic :-) For people from Czech Republic, I hope it is not a problem to read my posts in English, because, you know, is it kind of international language and I really think, that English is necessary to live nowadays.

To the topic of the blog - it will be about things I am interested in at most: IT and music. In IT, there are things about Linux and PHP I like the best and some blogposts are going to be about. Regarding to the music, I started to play piano, like year and half ago. Now, I see there's much more, not just listening to some new popular rock songs, which actually I do not know what they are about and maybe, even artists don't know it either.

There are many of them, mostly those "Disney" guys like High School Musical crew, Miley Cyrus and so on. I am not saying, they are not good, I think, they are, but mostly they are just icons for earning money and making 13-year girls mad. They're just like Barbie and pink color. Huh, this paragraph is getting longer, but this is supposed to be a "Welcome post", so, let's end it up and maybe write about this in some future post :-)

It is an hour and half after midnight, so it is really time to go sleep, to the end: I hope you will like it here guys. Soon, expect something about my PHP projects, laptop and Linux and of course, my piano review, pieces I am learning and many, many things. Good night guys.