Very often you’ll listen to karaoke recordings where the voice of the singer is bothered by a background irritating sound, following the melody line: it’s an instrument like flute, piano, pan flute, celesta, oboe (usually for high pitch female voices) or other.

If you’re lucky its volume is quite discreet but often it is also set to a very annoying loudness.

It is recommended to remove or set to mute this melody track… but how to do it?

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Introduction:

If you like karaoke singing and you already shared your passion with your on-line friends of a community, one fine day you would be interested in the idea to have fun singing a duet with one of your friends.

A duet is easy when you sing with your friends, sister or brother at home, in the same room, same PC… but what if you on-line friend is in Japan and you’re in California?

In this case you should be able to setup a…
Virtual Duet!

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You’ve probably already read about the “mystery figure” spotted on one of the panoramic snapshots by NASA’s Spirit Mars Rover.

Here, on the right, you can see the original shot. It looks like the statue of a woman, sit on a rock and it seems to me very similar to the Copenhagen Little Mermaid statue at Langelinie Pier.

In my opinion:

if the Rover would have stopped a few meters further, that in the direction (on the left of the panoramic) of the mystery-shaped rock it means a little bit sidewards, we should see now at something like this:

do you see anything mysterious here?

It’s a shame my limited knowledge of the English language prevents me to fully detail the explanation. By the way I guess the image itself explains what it should be: simply a sharp piece of stratified slab of rock lies down the slope (notice the same colour of the horizontal ones where it has been detached) then simply a shaded rock and a shadow in the background (notice the brown colour of both different from the other stratified rocks).

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First of all I wish you had a pleasant Christmas.

And what about playing a nice Xmas-themed FlashGame during the holidays?

I found this one, Santa’s Tower (Red Beard Attack) very funny and fresh since it seems to be just released.

by GameZhero.com

You have to help Santa Claus to protect the presents from Red Beard and his gang.
Santa is on the top of his tower, the enemies come from the bottom, climbing the tower wall, or coming down from the sky.

Each enemy carries a symbol: while keeping the left mouse button pressed you have to trace the symbols in order to fight them. The control is interesting, it is called “gesture recognition system” (one of the first implementation was on Peter Molyneux’s “Black & White“) basically you have to employ your mouse-drawing skills for good playing since each failed sign costs you points!

You have to face several waves (nine if I’m not wrong): from bottom only, from the sky, both directions and back again like this but with harder symbols, growing difficulty in shapes and number, you’ll have to reproduce multiple signs to beat the bad guys. At the end of the last wave you’ll notice a bigger symbol box (in purple) coming from the bottom: it’s the final boss -the crucial phase of the game- the huge teddy bear with Red Beard on his shoulder.

Tips and Tricks:
Once you’ve learned how to draw the symbols without too many mistakes, try to concentrate on the Combos, tracing sings occurring more than once in the screen at the same time.

My best score: 76,335

About the score, well this is how much I managed to do honestly, yes because the game is affected by a huge bug: when the bug is running, even if it’s impossible to complete and reach the final boss, you could double up scores, potentially scoring incredible ones. Doing so I submitted the highest one, 1st place in the Top 100 board, using the nickname “Please FIX this BUG!” sending an e-mail about how to fix it. Let’s see.

I see a few Google searches for “code for language switch in gengo” and, since I’m actually using it in my theme, it’s a shame that people land here without finding what they’re looking for.

So here’s the code you should add to your WordPress theme to show the language switch.
I’m currently using this code:
<div class="post_translations" style="float:right">
<?php if (function_exists('the_translations')) the_translations('pre= &post= &title_exists=Read this in ') ?>
</div>

First of all, the “if function_exists” part gives you the ability to switch off the Gengo Plugin avoiding any error. It says, if PHP finds a function named “the_translations” is declared and available, it is safe to proceed using it otherwise the following code is ignored.

The function “the_translations” returns a string representing the HTML code to display a list of translations for the current post. It must be used in “The Loop”.

I use a single string as parameter, providing more parameters in one “querystring” (param1=value1&param2=value2 …).

Providing values for “pre”, “post” and “inner” you could specify which HTML tags should respectively be opened, closed and be in between of the resulting list of links to other language versions of the article.
Well, since this blog is bilingual (English/Italian) I’m only using two languages, this means I don’t need a “list” of translation but just a link to the “other” language. This is why I provide a space (or blank) value for pre and post. So a single link to the opposite language will appear in my theme, no need of useless tags.

The “title_exists” parameter specifies the text or label to show before the link/s, only if other languages are found for this post. If no other parameters are provided (as in this case) if a post is written in a single language, no other versions, nothing appears and this is what I wanted.
Otherwise you should add the “title_none” parameter telling what to write in case no other language is available.
For both parameters, you could write your own string -in a specific language, as I did in English- otherwise you could use for both, as value, the keyword “GENGO_DEFAULT”: this will result respectively in strings like “Other languages” or “No translations”.

In my case the result is wrapped in a DIV, which is right floated as directly specified by the inline style and the rest of its appearance is decided in my style sheet .css file under a class named “post_translations” but this is another story.

The results of my code of course is visible simply browsing my posts, reading a single article (click on its title) since in a list of posts the switch is not visible in my theme.

In discussions about different audio formats, wave, mp3, etc… quite often I read the question “can I convert mp3 to midi?”. Yes, it would be good, since evidently .mid files are so lightweight, usually less than 100KB while an mp3 file is usually more than 3MB. Why such difference?

MIDI:
A .mid file is to be considered as a piece of sheet music, the score on which you can read which instruments, which notes, at which tempo (and other musical data) have to be played. To excecute such information (i.e. to read the score) is up to the MIDI device, which will do the job of the “orchestra”.

MP3:
Fundamentally, the mp3 file contains a whole recording of real music or sounds, so every single digital info to determine a waveform: a lot of data, lot of bytes, the more the quality the bigger the file.

Again, following the score-orchestra example, I’m tempted to say that the mp3 is the orchestra itself because it well renders the idea of weight difference: a score is always much lighter than the orchestra that is performing it.

But, honestly, it wouldn’t be true: in this case the mp3 is a detailed recording of an orchestra playing, so it should be compared to a long-playing record. In the example a vynil record could weighs a little bit more than the pages of a score… but -digitally speaking- the difference is huge.
To be clear, we discussed about “mp3″ because nowadays it’s the common term for a digital music format; by the way in this article we could mean the WAVE format in general as well. Mp3 allows to obtain a high-fidelity sound similar to the Wave but it’s compressed into a few megabytes (from 4 to 5 as average size); the advantage is having just like a very long text file (.txt) and compressing it into a .zip file, ten to twenty times smaller. A dramatic difference would be to compare the lightness of a MIDI to a high-quality stereo WAVE; something like “a thousand times heavier” (a midi 100KB, a wave 100MB).

Again, with regard to the initial argument about “mp3 to midi”, personally, since I sequenced some MIDI files and I have well clear the idea and the difference with wave/mp3, I don’t think it’s possible to obtain something decent. I hope someone will prove I’m wrong… maybe before long.

Q:
I read: “Ho dato qualcosa allo zio”, “Ho dato qualcosa alla mamma”, “Ho dato qualcosa a Paolo”. Why “allo zio” and “alla mamma” instead of “a zio” and “a mamma”?
Where and when do I use this allo or alla?

A:
In case of parents and some relatives in italian (e.g., mamma, papà, zio, nonno/a) you can use both the simple and compound preposition: “a” and “a”+<article>, so mamma, nonna, zia (female) both “a” and “alla”, for male parents both “a” and “allo/al”.
So this works in these cases of parents and relatives:
“dai a/alla mamma/zia/nonna il regalo”
“dai a/al papà(/babbo)/nonno il regalo”
“dai a/allo zio il regalo” (”a zio” without his name is a bit strange in formal italian, but quite common specially when addressing to kids)

By the way this works only with such family roles, for instance you can’t say:
“dai a fratello” or “dai a sorella”.
You can say “dai al fratello” or “dai alla sorella” but you must indicate “di chi?”, “whom brother/sister?” e.g. “dai al fratello di Gino il regalo”.
Same for “nipote” and other relationships (genero, cognato, etc..)

So a general rule could be:
always use only the simple preposition for personal names
“ricetta a Paolo”
and compound preposition for other nouns:
“ricetta al dottore”, “ricetta alla dottoressa”
papà, mamma, etc.. are simply an exception, just as if they were personal names and in fact they replace the first name of the parent.

The classic Sudoku is played over a 9×9 grid divided into smaller 3×3 grids called “regions”. As you can see some grid cells already show a number (or generically a value or symbol).
Other versions feature different grid size and different values to fill the grid cells but, to avoid complicated explanations of the rules let’s just focus on the classic Sudoku sized 9×9 with numbers 1 to 9.

The objective of Sudoku is to fill the whole grid with numbers respecting this main rule

you can only use the same number once in each row, each column and in each of the 3×3 regions.

The Heracleum Sudoku Game Interface

On the top you can read how many given cells are already displayed on the starting grid.

Left-clicking on each cell of the grid will show all the values (numbers or letters in larger grids) in a popup menu: this will confirm the chosen value in the cell.

Right-clicking on each cell of the grid will show all the values in a popup menu: each selected value (with a tick on the left) will then appear as a small temporary value of the current cell. This comes in handy if you want to remember that a cell could contain only some values. Beginners could make a large use of this function while experienced players would use it only in tricky situations, to solve a blocking situation.

On the right (or bottom if the game area is vertical-wise) you can find three buttons: Timer, Options and Solution.

Timer:

it usually displays the elapsed time since you started playing the game but it’s also a “Pause” button; click it to pause the game and the grid will disappear revealing the background.

Options:

clicking this button, the same right-clicking the empty background, will popup a small menu with definitely self-explaining commands:

• Rendering quality: decrease graphics precision and details if your computer is running the applet too slow;
• Hide Background: in case you find the background distracting;
• Allow Controls: activating the backspace key will work as if you’re deleting backwards usual text (clears the cell values) or use the Mouse Wheel to roll the values up/down.

Solution:

The correct numbers -in a transparent red colour- are overlapped on the game grid. Since the solution is semi-opaque you can easily tell if one of the number you placed is wrong, showing two different numbers one over the other.

All this buttons and sub-options can be toggled, activated and de-activated on every click.

Since this site and its journal is bilingual, or at least most of the posts are often in both Italian and English, I added this new category to post about English-Italian oddities, idioms, false friends and everything else.

Even though I love English language and I’m studying it since a long time, unfortunately it is still quite ugly, that’s why I decided to translate almost each post of this bilingual journal, to force me in practicing a bit more.
The main source of my improving intent is the WordReference English-Italian Forum: natives of both language open topics to ask about tricky or colloquial sentences hard to translate using a dictionary. I rarely open threads but even discussing a topic reveals to be a powerful way to improve the language knowledge.

In my Language category I’ll try to post in both languages:
in the italian version I’ll show how an english sentence would sound in italian and the same vice-versa in the english one. So obviously in this case it wouldn’t be a literal translation as I’m used to do in usual posts.

Of course comments are definitely welcome!

Enjoy

Inventing personal spiritual concepts.

Tastes differ: some prefer to adopt a Religion, solid and well promising, a few others choose to follow personal spiritual paths, more demanding but it will probably lead to something that really fits your mind.
This is usually given a negative connotation: do-it-yourself religion.
Following a predefined scheme of what you must believe seems to be far better than trying to imagine Life and what’s beyond by yourself, with concepts you can actually understand. Is it really that better?

If each exsisting Religion would be “open-source”, completely understandable, one could modify the grey parts, dogmas, etc… but in the end, would it be worth it?
So what about starting from scratch a new one? Hmm too hard. Let’s “simply” build up some basic principles of how the Cosmos could work, what/who the Infinite/God is, who is You and what is around you.

The trick to go on is thinking about very simple basic principles: if you’re thinking about something, try to think about its root. Root concepts will keep you from getting lost into thousands of useless frills.

This kind of religion obviously will not like to those who pray their gods to obtain benefits or who wants his/her wishes to be fulfilled. In such cases I’d rather prefer atheists.