Mon, Sep 30, 2013 11:14 pm
Extreme Volume Pop Halloween
One of the places I searched for music to play from our porch for
trick-or-treaters was the
Internet Archive
site at
archive.org. The site provides
permanent storage for collections of digitized materials, including websites,
music, moving images, and nearly three million public-domain books, all of which
are freely available to the public. If you ever attempt to follow a link on
a webpage only to find it is no longer working, you may be able to find an
archived version of the page through the Internet Archive's
Wayback Machine;
simply put the URL into the search field for the Wayback Machine, which will
show you all of the times the page was archived in the past.
You can search the Internet Archive site for "Halloween" and get lots of
results, if you are looking for free public domain music that you could use
for Halloween. I found
Extreme Volume Pop Halloween, which is 46 minutes and 7 seconds of
instrumental music described by its creator
Tom Baker as:
An album of eclectic , haunting music, inspired by the greatest holiday in the
history of the world. Dark ambient passages, beautiful keyboard compositions,
and occult music to give you many nights of uneasy dreams are what this free
recording are all about! For fans of dark music, gothic orchestrations, horror
movie soundtracks.
The titles for the songs it includes are as follows:
- The Inner Sanctum
- Lurking Fear
- Halloween Overture 2008
- Mind of a Killer
- Gypsy Caravan
- The Stalker
- Witchcraft Through the Ages
- Midnight Shadows
- Vlad the Impaler
- Galactic Carnivore
- Here There Be Ghosts
- Sabbat
You can download a zip file,
Halloween_928, which contains one MP3 file of all the songs or you can
listen to the music online.
At his website,
Tom Baker describes himself thusly:
an experimental musician dabbling in forms as diverse as metal, punk, noise,
ambient, drone, industrial, and aleatoric. He has been featured on a number of
different internet radio programs, including The Black Cat Lounge, Stirring the
Cauldron with Marla Brooks, and Seps Paranormal Radio. He has written a number
of novels, and covered nonfiction topics as diverse as true crime, UFOs, urban
legends, ghosts and hauntings, and other paranormal events.
A list of books he has written is available
here.
Scary Urban Legends (illustrated by John C. Eng),
Haunted Indianapolis and Other Indiana Ghost Stories
(with Jonathan Titchenal), and
Indiana Ghost Folklore might also be interesting Halloween reading.
[/music]
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Sun, Sep 29, 2013 8:58 pm
Halloween Music Stations at Live365
Like Pandora,
Live365 also provides
Halloween radio stations.
Live365 is an Internet radio broadcasting and listening network where
people can create their own online radio stations or listen
to thousands of stations created by other people from around the world.
You
can listen to over 7,000 stations across 265 genres of music.
For a list of the Halloween stations provided by Live365, you can go to Listen to Free Halloween
Music Online - Live365 Internet Radio.
One of the stations is
Musique Macabre,
which is "Horror & Halloween Radio." The station plays oldies,
novelty, horror movie soundtracks, horror punk, surf, psychobilly,
deathrock, gothic, space, library, symphonic, progressive rock,
electronic, soundscapes, rare and weird" music. The website for the station
is at Musique Macabre Horror &
Halloween Radio.
Other stations include the following:
- Holidaze Halloween
- The Haunted Mansion!
- Halloween Radio: KDOA!!
- Horror Old Time Radio
- The Grimly Show
- Bindlegrim Halloween
- Drive In of the Damned
- Boogeyman Radio
- WGTR Hallotober
- Halloween Party Music
- Monster Kid Radio
- Welcome To Weirdsville
- All the World's a Stage
- Kiddfellas Radio
[/music]
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Sun, Sep 29, 2013 5:28 pm
Halloween Music from Pandora
My wife and I decorate the house for Halloween, both inside and out,
so I thought I'd also put up some Halloween decorations here, also. For others
who may also like to listen to music that fits with Halloween,
Pandora Internet
Radio, aka "Pandora Radio" or just "Pandora",
offers several Halloween-themed stations at this time of the year.
Pandora is the "custodian" for the
Music Genome Project, which associates a list of attributes with songs as one might associate
genes with
phenotypical
traits of an organism.
Halloween
Party Radio plays songs such as
Monster Mash by John Zacherle,
while the
Spooky Symphonies station plays music from films, such as
The Nightmare Before Christmas, and
Family
Halloween Radio provides Halloween music for children of all ages,
which one could use for a children's Halloween party or can play from
the porch as we do for trick-or-treaters. The station plays songs such as
The Purple People Eater by Shep Wooley.
There's also
Ghostly
Grooves, which plays songs such as
When I'm Small by Phantogram.
You can point your browser to any of the stations and listen
for free to songs appropriate for the holiday.
Note: Pandora's Terms of Use
states "Pandora can only be used in the United States, New Zealand,
Australia and those countries' respective territories."
[/music]
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Sat, Sep 28, 2013 9:59 pm
Viewing Cached Google Pages from DuckDuckGo
I've often found Google's cached copies of webpages useful when a website
isn't currently accessible or when I would like to see a previous version
of a page that has recently changed. Unfortunately, Google doesn't make it
as easy as it once did to view such pages. Though
DuckDuckGo doesn't provide cached
copies of pages, it does provide a very easy method to access Google
cached pages from the DuckDuckGo search field as explained at
Cache. You simply
put
!cache
in front of a URL in the
DuckDuckGo search field. E.g.,
!cache http://example.com
.
DuckDuckGo states that "We would like to provide cached results
ourselves, but unfortunately it is non-trivial to do so as it requires
a lot of storage."
[/network/web/search]
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Fri, Sep 27, 2013 11:04 pm
Google's 15th Birthday
Google celebrated its 15th birthday today. Though the company was
incorporated a few weeks earlier, the company celebrates its birthday
on September 27. It announced on its birthday that it is updating its
search algorithm as part of an update it has named "Hummingbird". Three
years ago it had an update it called Caffeine. Amit Singhal, a senior
vice-president for Google estimates that the redesign will affect how
Google analyzes about 90% of the search requests it receives. Singhal
said that Hummingbird is primarily aimed at giving Google's search engine
a better grasp at understanding concepts instead of mere words. The
increasing use of Google's voice-recognition technology for spoken
search requests through smartphones was a factor in the development of
changes for Hummingbird.
Google's ad revenue related to web content is expected to
approach $60 billion U.S. dollars this year.
References:
-
A Google Google doodle? Search giant celebrates 15 years and a new algorithm
[/network/web/services/google]
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Sat, Sep 21, 2013 12:03 pm
Testing a value to prevent a divide by zero error in Excel
Excel's
IF function can be used to prevent divide by zero errors,
which show up as
#DIV/0! values in cells, in calculations. The
format for the
IF function is:
IF(logical_test, [value_if_true], [value_if_false])
E.g., suppose column B holds values for items ordered on
particular days and column C holds values for items shipped on
those days, as shown below:
| A | B | C | D |
1 |
Date | Items Ordered | Items Shipped |
% Shipped |
2 |
9/1/13 | 0 | 0 |
|
3 |
9/2/13 | 2 | 1 |
|
4 |
9/3/13 | 0 | 1 |
|
5 |
9/4/13 | 3 | 0 |
|
If column C is simply divided by column B, e.g.
=C2/B2, to get the percentage of orders shipped, the results would be
as follows:
| A | B | C | D |
1 |
Date | Items Ordered | Items Shipped |
% Shipped |
2 |
9/1/13 | 0 | 0 |
#DIV/0! |
3 |
9/2/13 | 2 | 1 |
50.00% |
4 |
9/3/13 | 0 | 1 |
0.00% |
5 |
9/4/13 | 3 | 0 |
#DIV/0! |
A simple IF test can be used so that if a cell in column B is
zero, then a zero value is put in the "% shipped column".
=IF(B2>0, C2/B2, 0)
| A | B | C | D |
1 |
Date | Items Ordered | Items Shipped |
% Shipped |
2 |
9/1/13 | 0 | 0 |
0.00% |
3 |
9/2/13 | 2 | 1 |
50.00% |
4 |
9/3/13 | 0 | 1 |
0.00% |
5 |
9/4/13 | 3 | 0 |
0.00% |
Or if no items were ordered on a particular day, "N/A", for "Not Applicable" could be used instead of zero, if preferred.
=IF(B2>0, C2/B2, "N/A")
[/os/windows/office/excel]
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Tue, Sep 10, 2013 9:37 pm
Changing the background color for a cell in Excel for Unequal Values
To compare whether two cells contain equal values, whether numbers or text,
in Excel you can use
<>
. E.g., to take some action,
such as changing the background color of a cell,
C3
, if it
does contain the same data as another cell,
B3
, I could
use a formula of
=B3<>C3
. E.g., Suppose I have two
columns,
B
and
C
, containing values I wish
to compare and wish to change the background color of a cell in column
C to pink whenever it does not match the value in the adjacent B cell,
so that I can easily scan the spreadsheet to find all instances where
the values differ. The first row is a heading row and the second row is
blank with the data starting in the third row as shown below:
A |
B |
C |
D |
E |
1 |
Sensor | 1st Reading | 2nd Reading | Checked |
2 |
| | | |
3 |
Alpha | 32 | 32 | 9/3/13 |
4 |
Beta | 35 |
37 | 9/3/13 |
5 |
Delta |
36 |
33 | 9/3/13 |
6 |
Epsilon |
38 |
34 | 9/3/13 |
7 |
Gamma | 38 | 38 | 9/3/13 |
In Microsoft Excel 2008 for Mac,
to have the background color of cells in column C change to pink whenever
the value does not match the adjacent value in column B, I can click on
cell C3
, the first cell in column C to contain data, then
click on Format then select Conditional Formatting.
I can then for Condition 1, change "Cell Value Is" to "Forumula Is"
and use =B3<>C3
for the formula. I can then click on the
Format button, select Patterns, and pick the color I want
for the cell background and click on OK.
If I click on OK again, the conditional formatting is set for
cell C3. To copy it to all the cells below in the column, I can hit
Command-C on a Mac (the equivalent to Control-C on a
Microsoft Windows system) to copy the cell. I can then click on the
cell immediately below and drag downwards until all of the cell from
C4
to the bottom of the column are highlighted. I can then click on
Edit and select Paste Special. If I then select
Formats from the Paste section and click on OK,
the conditional formatting will be applied to all cells with data in column
C so that any that don't match their adjacent neighbor in column B will have
a pink background.
[/os/windows/office/excel]
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Fri, Sep 06, 2013 7:57 pm
Creating a Service for a Windows System
You can create a new service on a Windows system, including Windows 8, using
the
sc
command. To create a new service named "ExampleService",
the command below could be issued from a
Command Prompt:
Microsoft Windows [Version 6.2.9200]
(c) 2012 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
C:\Windows\system32&sc create ExampleService binpath="C:\Program Files (x86)\ExampleApp\Example.exe"
[SC] CreateService SUCCESS
C:\Windows\system32&
To delete the service you created, e.g., ExampleService
,
you can use the command sc delete servicename
, e.g.:
C:\Windows\system32>sc delete ExampleService
[SC] DeleteService SUCCESS
Once you have created a service, you can modify it, e.g., to have it start
automatically by using services.msc
to bring up the
Windows
Services list.
Or you can get to the services list through the Control Panel,
which you can do on a Windows 8 system by selecting System and Security
from the Control Panel, then select Administrative
Tools, then Services. Double-click on the service you wish to
modify and make any changes you wish, for instance changing the startup type to
Automatic so that the service starts whenever the system boots.
References:
-
Create Windows service from executable
Date: August 27, 2010
stackoverflow
-
How To Create a
User-Defined Service
Microsoft Support
[/os/windows/commands]
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Tue, Sep 03, 2013 8:51 pm
Starting RunUO automatically with FireDaemon Pro
If you would like to have
RunUO start automatically when you boot the system on which it is
installed, you can do so by creating a Windows service for it using
FireDaemon Pro.
[ More Info ]
[/gaming/runuo/firedaemon]
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Mon, Sep 02, 2013 2:16 pm
freeSSHd on Windows 8
If you want to set up a Windows 8 system as a
Secure Shell (SSH)
server, you can use
freeSSHd, which
as the name implies is free, to do so. I had problems getting it to run
as a service on a Windows 8 system, though.
[ More Info ]
[/os/windows/network/ssh]
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Mon, Sep 02, 2013 1:17 pm
Counting the number of specific characters in a file
On a Linux/Unix system, you can count the occurences of a specific character
in a file by using the
fgrep
and
wc
commands. E.g.,
suppose you wish to count the number of times the letter "A" occurs in a file
named temp.txt.
fgrep -o A temp.txt | wc -l
The "-o PATTERN" option for fgrep tells it to show only the part of a
matching line that matches PATTERN where PATTERN is what you are searching
for, in this case the letter "A". Piping the output to wc -l
will count the number of times the PATTERN appears in the file.
[/os/unix/commands]
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