I encourage y’all to forget what this federal holiday is all about. Instead, celebrate by drinking and lighting explosives. Violate town ordinances forbidding fireworks, make the EPA stand on its toes. Now go catch something on fire!
Remember, in Washington State, DUI’s require a .08 blood alcohol content and reckless driving for speeding must be 20MPH over the limit. GO BIG OR GO HOME.
7-Zip is an archive program that supports reading and writing: 7z, XZ, BZIP2, GZIP, TAR,
ZIP and WIM
and reading of: ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, CramFS, DEB, DMG, FAT, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MBR, MSI, NSIS, NTFS, RAR, RPM, SquashFS, UDF, VHD, WIM, XAR and Z.
7-Zip uses about 4mb of memory and the program itself is 1mb. This is perfect for a type of program that should open quickly. 7-Zip is GNU LGPL licensed with some mixed licensing for proprietary formats.
For a very long time, I recommended a program called IZarc for archives of all sorts. Unfortunately, they have made some interesting choices to fund their developments by including adware bundled with their software. You can opt out of these during the installer, but the amount of trickery in doing so exceeds the benefits of the program.
RIOT (Radical Image Optimization Tool) is a free program which allows for easy resizing, compression, conversion, and adjustment for images. RIOT uses JPEG, GIF, and PNG formats.
This tool is a simple way to scale down an image in resolution, or to make an image smaller by adjusting quality for the web or email. It is the program that is used to scale down the images in this website.
RIOT is about 1.7mb in size and uses about 9.8mb of memory when open, making it quite fast to open and quickly use. Continue reading →
It can be seen here: zylblog.com/smf/ To stay on the site without getting redirected, hold down the escape button while on a page.
It “opened” on July 14th and has made some progress.
Interesting stats:
Total Members:299 (take a look at the member list to see how naming happens) Total Posts:197
Total Topics:197
Average registrations per day:24.92
Average posts per day:16.50
Average topics per day:16.50 Male to Female Ratio:1:0
Average page views per day:878.92
Statistics at the moment are fairly uninteresting. No one registered bot has spent unusual amounts of time on the site, no one bot has made an unusual amount of posts (5 at the most, so far), very few or no bots have made posts as guests.
Bots do seem, in many cases, to use usernames that almost look real.
TouchFreeze is a simple (and very small) program that helps you to avoid hitting the mouse while typing on a laptop. This is a feature similar to “PalmCheck” which is found on Synaptic trackpads. This program seems to work better in gaming environments that
Current settings require a CAPTCHA (using ReCaptcha) OR email verification. All the rest of the spam limit settings are the defaults of the platform.
We will also introduce SMF spam testing again on two new addresses (although this could get a little messy on resources, we’ll see what we can do…)
One will be at the old address, with no mechanisms to stop spam. (zylblog.com/smf … not yet set up at this time)
One will be at a random address with no spam prevention mechanisms (to see how long it takes for the address to be discovered). Our robots.txt will block the address from search engine results, but there will be a link to the address on this blog to see if spambots do much of their own indexing or not.
A quick reminder: We tend to remember most scales by thinking about how they deviate from the major (ionian) scale. i.e., we tend to say that the natural minor scale is like the major scale, but the 3rd, 6th, and 7th scale degrees are lowered. This is not to say that major is in any way better than any other mode/scale.
In the above chart, the deviations from major for each of the three minors is listed.
How does this work?
Let’s think about the key of C-Major, and turn it into the minors.
If I take my major scale, and lower the 3rd degree (the “third note”), I get a Melodic Minor
If I lower the 6th in addition to the 3rd, I get the Harmonic Minor
and if I lower the 7th in addition to the 3rd and 6th, I get the Natural Minor.
C D E F G A B < My Major Scale
C D Eb F G A B < Melodic Minor (3 lowered)
C D Eb F G Ab B < Harmonic Minor (3, 6 lowered)
C D Eb F G Ab Bb < Natural Minor (3, 6, 7 lowered)
What does it look like on the staff?
(Red represents newly lowered notes. Both pink and red represent deviations from the major)
Have you sung them yet?
Let’s look at the solfege:
Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti < Major
Do Re Me Fa Sol La Ti < Melodic Minor
Do Re Me Fa Sol Le Ti < Harmonic Minor
Do Re Me Fa Sol Le Te < Natural Minor
What actually changes between these different types?
The location of the half steps, of course!
Harmonic Minor is an interesting exception. It has three half-step locations, unlike any other commonly used scale/mode.
Make GIMP easier to use.
