Thursday, April 29, 2010
OpenOffice.org Draw
Why are OpenOffice.org Draw diagram toolbar icons so much better looking than the actual diagrams themselves?
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Home File Server
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Why, Dad?
My daughter started asking "why?" today, suddenly. She's starting with the hard questions.
1. "Why [aren't the white shoes good park shoes]?" Dumbfounded, the best I could come up with was "because there are holes in them". (They are sort of like sandal-shoes.) My answer was so unsatisfying (to both of us), I put on the white shoes.
2. I was washing my hands tonight, and she walks up to the bathroom and asks, "Why [are your] hands dirty?" I still don't know how to answer that question.
1. "Why [aren't the white shoes good park shoes]?" Dumbfounded, the best I could come up with was "because there are holes in them". (They are sort of like sandal-shoes.) My answer was so unsatisfying (to both of us), I put on the white shoes.
2. I was washing my hands tonight, and she walks up to the bathroom and asks, "Why [are your] hands dirty?" I still don't know how to answer that question.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Music From Japan
It's been one year (today) since the beginning of our 6-month tour of Japan. I realized recently that some of our most vivid memories take the form of music. I still can recall some of the jingles that played in the stores in our neighborhood. TV and radio was full of songs we heard routinely, and they bring us right back when we hear them again now. (e.g. I heard these on a children's program practically every day before going to work.)
Some songs we had the foresight to take back with us. (Others - it turns out - get deleted when you synchronize your iphone to the wrong computer upon returning. grrr!) I wanted to learn to play some of them myself (e.g. on a piano). We have a toy camera (which makes flash and camera noises, but doesn't take pictures) that plays the Anpanman theme song in NES-style beeps [original]. I converted the music from the camera into sheet music via an open source program called "Lilypond". It works by hand-writing a text file with musical markup that Lilypond knows how to read. It's a rather painstaking process, but the program will automatically create a PDF of sheet music from your source text file, and even a MIDI file.
I haven't learned to play it very well yet (like this guy), but now I can relearn it when I forget it. Here's the PDF of the sheet music, and the ho-hum MIDI file (sounds like a piano played by a robot). For those curious, here's the source that generated them.
Some songs we had the foresight to take back with us. (Others - it turns out - get deleted when you synchronize your iphone to the wrong computer upon returning. grrr!) I wanted to learn to play some of them myself (e.g. on a piano). We have a toy camera (which makes flash and camera noises, but doesn't take pictures) that plays the Anpanman theme song in NES-style beeps [original]. I converted the music from the camera into sheet music via an open source program called "Lilypond". It works by hand-writing a text file with musical markup that Lilypond knows how to read. It's a rather painstaking process, but the program will automatically create a PDF of sheet music from your source text file, and even a MIDI file.
I haven't learned to play it very well yet (like this guy), but now I can relearn it when I forget it. Here's the PDF of the sheet music, and the ho-hum MIDI file (sounds like a piano played by a robot). For those curious, here's the source that generated them.
Sunday, March 07, 2010
FileZilla icon set ("theme")
A new version of FileZilla (cross-platform FTP client) just came out, which includes my latest theme. (It's not the default, but it's selectable under Settings > Interface > Themes.)
Here's a presentation, of sorts, I made on the theme.
http://plurib.us/1shot/2010/filezilla-icons2.0/demo2.html
Here's a presentation, of sorts, I made on the theme.
http://plurib.us/1shot/2010/filezilla-icons2.0/demo2.html
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