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 is free and of open-source development.
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
The SMF forum testing SPAM is now up and running.
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
For up-to-date statics, see this page:
https://zylblog.com/smf/index.php?action=stats
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 in system tray
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
might not work with Synaptic’s palm check. Continue reading
The DirectX just asked to install the Bing toolbar…
We are now spam testing on Questions2Answers Q&A Platform.
As usual, it started out with a few legitimate questions to build search engine ranking and to get noticed.
The platform can be seen here:
https://zylblog.com/answers/
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.
The Minors: Lowered Scale Degrees
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)
Hear it:Download:The Minors MP3
Still not getting it?
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.
Where are the half-steps? Take a look:
Copyright info for these charts and audio:
7th Chord Chart by Jesse Zylstra is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Click “read more” for word-processor friendly version
Continue reading
Free use for non-commercial purposes, share alike, attribute.
Lead-sheet symbols are a tricky thing to remember. Even I, if I go too long without reminding myself about my sevenths, get them messed up.
On the chart above, you can see the 5 types of 7th chords and the 4 types of triads.
Let’s talk about the types of sevenths:
A major 7th has what would be the root of the chord and the 7th being a half-step apart (i.e., C — B)
A minor 7th has what would be the root and the 7th a whole step apart (two half steps. i.e., C — Bb)
A half-diminished 7th is also one whole step (two half steps)
A fully diminished 7th is three half steps ( i.e., C — A)
These are just the 7ths. The triad is equally important in determining the type of the 7th chord.
Here is an abstracted version of the above chart:
Major Triad + Major 7th = Major 7th Chord (M7)
Major Triad + Minor 7th = Dominant 7th Chord (Mm7 / dom7)
Minor Triad + Minor 7th = Minor 7th Chord (m7)
Diminished Triad + Minor 7th = Half-Diminished 7th Chord (⦰7th)
Diminished Triad Diminished 7th = Fully Diminished 7th Chord (o7) (Note that “o” is a radial sign)
“Why the white-notes?”
If you spell your sevenths without qualities, the “white-note” chords are their default position. C E G B is a M7, F A C E is also an M7. G B D F is the only white-note dominant chord, etc etc. They are useful as a memory tool.
What does it look like in two different keys?
7th Chord Qualitiues in C and Bb
Hear it:
Download: 7th Chord Qualities MP3
Notice how the minor 7th (m7) almost sounds major. This is because of the major chord that exists in the chord when the bass note is removed. C Eb G Bb, remove the C and you have a Eb major triad.
Copyright info for these charts:
7th Chord Chart by Jesse Zylstra is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Click “read more” for word-processor friendly version
Continue reading
