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Midi and Karaoke: how to remove melody track

Read this in Italiano
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

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?

(more…)

Virtual Duet Procedure

Read this in Italiano
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

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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Gengo language switch

Read this in Italiano
Friday, December 14th, 2007

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.

How to play Sudoku

Read this in Italiano
Friday, October 19th, 2007

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.

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