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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 If you ever attempt to follow a link on a webpage only to find it is no longer working, you may be able to find an archived version of the page through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine; simply put the URL into the search field for the Wayback Machine, which will show you all of the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.
Extreme Volumpe Pop Halloween cover

The titles for the songs it includes are as follows:

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] permanent link

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. 1px x 1px

For a list of the Halloween stations provided by Live365, you can go to Listen to Free Halloween Music Online - Live365 Internet Radio.

Musique Macabre

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.

Skeleton music poster

Other stations include the following:

[/music] permanent link

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] permanent link

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] permanent link

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:

  1. A Google Google doodle? Search giant celebrates 15 years and a new algorithm

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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:

 ABCD
1 DateItems OrderedItems Shipped % Shipped
2 9/1/1300  
3 9/2/1321  
4 9/3/1301  
5 9/4/1330  

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:

 ABCD
1 DateItems OrderedItems Shipped % Shipped
2 9/1/1300 #DIV/0!
3 9/2/1321 50.00%
4 9/3/1301 0.00%
5 9/4/1330 #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)

 ABCD
1 DateItems OrderedItems Shipped % Shipped
2 9/1/1300 0.00%
3 9/2/1321 50.00%
4 9/3/1301 0.00%
5 9/4/1330 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] permanent link

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 Sensor1st Reading2nd ReadingChecked
2     
3 Alpha32329/3/13
4 Beta35 379/3/13
5 Delta 36 339/3/13
6 Epsilon 38 349/3/13
7 Gamma38389/3/13

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.

Excel - pink conditional formatting

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.

Excel - Paste Special Format

[/os/windows/office/excel] permanent link

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.

C:\>services.msc

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:
  1. Create Windows service from executable
    Date: August 27, 2010
    stackoverflow
  2. How To Create a User-Defined Service
    Microsoft Support

[/os/windows/commands] permanent link

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] permanent link

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] permanent link

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] permanent link

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