Digital Ramblings

0612 Is Still Alive

2010-01-22T16:46:00.004+08:00

OMG, 0612 is still alive!?

Well yes, I am still alive and kicking, though unfortunately the same cannot be said of this blog.

You will be pleased to know that I am still (somewhat) active in doing what I love - That is, by sharing knowledge and passing on whatever little nuggets of information I may have. The only difference being that I've now turned to a different host and a different medium - My work now takes the form of YouTube videos.

Please visit my channel here: http://www.youtube.com/lcc0612

Quite a few educational videos have already been put up since my last post here, in addition to some of my artwork.

From this point on, this blog will probably not be updated much (well, it's been this way for the past two years anyway), but I will definitely keep all the content right here (unless of course, my blog host somehow decides to pull my content down).

In addition, this blog won't be completely quiet - I may post links to my videos as they come up.

To those who consistently read this blog (all five of you), I thank you for your continued support, and I hope you will extend the same towards my youtube channel and my videos!

***

Personal plug: During this time I have also picked up a DeviantArt account right here: http://lcc0612.deviantart.com/ Do drop by if you have time

Did You Know? #51

2009-07-26T22:39:00.002+08:00

Did You Know...

That the "Fn" key on some laptop keyboards is a pretty unique key?

For one, your computer generally doesn't even know it exists - Pressing the Fn button does not send a message to your operating system at all. If you have a laptop or Ultra Mobile PC, you can try it, let your screensaver run. Technically any button press would stop the screensaver, but you can press the Fn key as many times as you like, and there would be no effect.

Of course we know what the Fn key does, it changes the function of certain keys on your keyboard - This allows normal buttons such as the arrow keys to do other functions like change the volume or brightness in the case of laptops.

Knowing this, and that the works of the Fn key is transparent to the operating system, this means another thing: Your operating system isn't the one changing the functions of the keys when you press Fn - Instead, the keyboard does all the work: When you hold down the Fn key and change the volume, for isntance, your operating system thinks your keyboard has a special volume button (like many keyboards do), and thinks you're just pressing that button.

Here's a little more trivia, if you're interested: Some laptops or Ultra Mobile PCs especially allow the user to choose to boot into a little "Quick Boot Operating System". This means we're not running Windows at all. If it is a software program that changes the functions of keys when "Fn" is pressed, then you may find that the special keys don't work because the quick boot operating system likely does not support the special driver software - But this is not the case.

There you have it, that's two did you knows rolled into one post!

Hitting the Right Gold

2009-07-06T19:55:00.004+08:00

Have a quick look at this:

For 3D artists, one of the type of objects you'll probably be faced with making once in a while is Gold - The precious metal isn't so easy to reproduce in 3D programs, and, if not done properly, the material either looks dull yellow or dull orange. So here's the trick to creating a gold material in any 3D software that will pass off as pretty convincing.

In this post I will refer to a number of technical terms with regard to materials in 3D programs, and, in case you don't understand any of them, I will make a short explanation, but if you need more details you can refer to one of my older posts, Coloring in 3D.

As mentioned, I have tried my best to write this tutorial in a way that is not program-specific. However, to aid the discussion, I will use screenshots from my favorite 3D program Blender.

So let's dive right in!

So that you have an idea of what the screenshots will look like, here's a screenshot of the original, unedited material provided by my software. Your software need not have the same default settings, but through experience, it should not differ much.

For any material, you usually can define a number of different colors. The first is of course the actual surface colour of the material. So first we'll go ahead and give the surface a nice yellowish colour, like so:

The color I picked is #FFC83D - A colour that emphasizes red and green, but gives a little blue to. Depending on what program you use, I'd recommend that you do not set any colour to 0. Even if you completely do not want a particular colour, give it a small value greater than zero, for more natural effects.

Next, we move on to the specular highlight. Very quickly, that refers to the glow a material experiences when light hits it:

Most non-metallic materials have white specular colours - As long as white light hits it, the glow is white. For gold, however (and other coloured metals), this wouldn't do - The specular highlight should be a colour similar to the actual surface colour. I have chosen a deep orange for the highlight. However, since none of the component colours (red, green and blue), have been set to zero, the glow is white at its brightest spot, like so:

The specular colour I've chosen is FF6D33, which , compared to the surface colour has less green, thus creating a deeper shade of orange. As you can see, this change hasn't done much - It has only made the specular spot less distinct.

In actual fact, gold is far more shiny than this - We need to give the surface a greater specular value. Note that this is different from what we set just now, which is the colour of the specular hightlight. Now we will change the amount of specular highlight.

I had to increase the existing specular value more than threefold to get the desired effect. Experiment and see!

If your 3D package allows it, you can also try to experiment with the spot size of the specular highlight (this setting is known as Hardness in Blender). I personally prefer a slightly larger spot, thus reducing the hardness parameter, giving this result

Now we've come to the most crucial part of the material - Reflections. Gold is shiny, and while it's not mirror-like, it still is reflective, and some mirroring of the surroundings will give your gold a better look.

If your modelling program does not support raytracing (the ability to simulate the behaviour of light in real life), then life will be more difficult - The tutorial becomes irrelevant from this point on, but not all hope is lost since it is still possible to acheive the same effect using reflection maps. However, that is beyond the scope of this tutorial.

Without preamble I'm going to go ahead and make the material about 60% reflective, producing this result:

No - not very convincing. In fact, it looks bad! Completely washed out! The reason for this is that the surface reflects all colours, and we know that's wrong - Gold should reflect yellows only, and less of blue. Thus, search for a mirror colour option, and set that colour to an orangey-yellowish hue, which produces this result for me:

And yes, that is pretty much it!

While you can have the best material, the setup of your scene is also important. Know how to set up your lighting (use high powered omni-lamps to really bring out that specular spot), and make sure the scene is well lit. Don't be afraid to tweak the material too.

Since we're dealing with reflections, there also needs to be an environment to actually reflect. For example, the default scene in Blender isn't going to make the reflective material very useful since it is a solid colour!

Instead, add a background or walls and floor, to take full advantage of the gold's reflectivity!

And there you have it - Some nice convincing gold!

Did you Know? #50

2009-06-27T11:07:00.005+08:00

Did you know...

That you can extend the contents of the right-click Context Menu? This has been proven to work on Windows Vista, but I am not sure if it works on Windows XP or earlier.

Instead of right-clicking, hold down Shift, then right-click.

Additional options will appear in the context menu, depending on what you've right clicked. There are two options which I find particularly useful.

First is the "Open Command Window Here" option. While it is usually easy enough to start an MS-DOS session, you can do so by going to Run and typing "CMD", it usually starts in a certain default folder - Which is probably not where you have stored the files you want to access.

As you can see, it starts in my default folder. If I want it to start in, say my desktop, all I need to do is to hold down shift, right click on my desktop, and choose "open command window here", which puts it in the correct folder:

Tada!

Another right click feature I like is the "Copy as path" function, which lets you copy the direct path to the file. If I do the following:

This is what I get on my clipboard:
"C:\Users\0612\Pictures\roflmao.gif"

Depending on what icon you're right-clicking, other features may also appear. Explore and have fun!

Digital Ramblings - Now with a Tiny URL!

2009-06-25T14:14:00.002+08:00

TinyURL is a web service that takes a URL of any length, and gives a new URL that points to the same location.

This is particularly useful for long URLs, or URLs containing messy hash code (such as the code for YouTube videos). TinyURL makes accessing these sites by memory much easier, since you only need to remember a shortened URL, which can have any name you choose.

Digital Ramblings' URL is unfortunately not very easy to remember either (especially the 0612 at the end, standing for my pen name), so we now have our very own TinyURL:

http://tinyurl.com/digital-ramblings

So, go ahead and give this link to your friends! No reason to forget it now!

Just to be clear, the original URL still works. This is true for any site that tinyURL is used on, because tinyURL doesn't actually do anything to the original site - It only adds an entry in its own database, such that accessing the entry redirects the user's browser to the original web page.

So there you have it - Many thanks to tinyURL for making this possible. And if you ever need your own tinyURL, just visit their web page (the link is the first word of this post!) - Making tinyURLs is a completely free process!

CSS - A preface

2009-06-21T12:47:00.006+08:00

Before we begin I must mention that I am no expert at CSS - Quite the contrary, in fact, as I have no formal training, and I've never even read a book on the subject before. The purpose of this preface is to let you have a "bare-minimum" look at CSS - Enough for you to solve simple problems, and also to guide you on how to search online for solutions to those tougher problems.

First of all, what is CSS? The name stands for Cascading Style Sheets. We usually refer to these simply as CSS, or occasionally as "Style Sheets". As the name implies, CSS defines the style of a web page - How data is presented and formatted in a web page.

Why is there a need for CSS? Consider this situation: In a web page, you have a number of tables, all of which are meant to have the same background color, as well as font face (ie type of font, eg Arial, Tahoma), font size, and color. If you wanted to change the background color, you'd have to do so for each table individually.

Now take a look at it from a even wider perspective: Your web site has 20 of such pages, and you want to make the change across the board - The amount of effort involved would be simply intolerable.

That's the simplest reason for CSS - To unify the formatting definitions from any number of sites into one single style sheet, which can be used across the board: One change in the style sheet updates all the pages accordingly.

We will pause for a bit here to take a look at the core of web pages: HTML, short for Hyper Text Markup Language.

HTML basically consists of the actual content you see on the web page. All the text, in addition to a number of tags, which specify how the content is formatted, and is also used to add additional features such as tables or images.

We will not go in-depth with HTML, but suffice to know that HTML alone is capable of formatting.

However, we can also choose to not have our formatting in HTML, and instead let CSS handle it. A small coding change to the HTML, along with the style parameter, will allow us to do this. Let's take a look at a little bit of example HTML:


<table border=1 bgcolor=#FFDDAA width=50% align=center>
<tr><td>Cell 1</td><td>Cell 2</td><td>Cell 3</td></tr>
<tr><td>Cell 4</td><td>Cell 5</td><td>Cell 6</td></tr>
</table>

The above code generates a table that looks like this:

Cell 1	Cell 2	Cell 3
Cell 4	Cell 5	Cell 6

What you should take note of in the above code are the lines "bgcolor=#FFDDAA", "width=50%" and "align=center". All these define the formatting of the table.

The first "bgcolor" defines the background color of the table (a pale orange).

"Width" sets the table width to 50% - In other words the entire width of the table will fill up half the horizontal space allowed for this post.

"Align=center" simply centers the table in the viewing area.

Actually, "border=1" also defines the format of the table - Setting its border to have a thickness of 1. However, its CSS counterpart is slightly more complicated that I'd have liked it to be, so for the purposes of this explanation I will leave it as it is.

We will now attempt to create a CSS style definition to replace the formatting of the table. Before we do that, however, take note of the correct way to set CSS definitions.

A HTML page structure basically looks like this:


<html>
<head>
...
</head>

<body>
...
</body>

</html>

What you need to do is that you have to add style tags into the head portion itself, like so:


<html>
<head>

<style type="text/css">
CSS Stuff Goes Here
</style>

</head>

<body>
...
</body>

</html>

Now that we're settled with that, let's plunge straight into CSS!

What we're going to do now is to define a style for our table - It will contain the exact same defintions as in our HTML, meaning that we will define the background color, width, and alignment. The CSS code looks something like this:


.tblstyle { background-color:#FFDDAA;
    width:50%;
    table-align:center; }

The three format settings, "background-color", "width", and "table-align" basically work like their HTML counterparts. ".tblstyle" is just the name of this formatting - We will see how this is used by considering the HTML portion of the table itself:


<table class="tblstyle" border=1>
<tr><td>Cell 1</td><td>Cell 2</td><td>Cell 3</td></tr>
<tr><td>Cell 4</td><td>Cell 5</td><td>Cell 6</td></tr>
</table>

Notice that I have removed all the "bgcolor" and "width" and so on - Since we're defining it with CSS, we do not need to define it at the <table> tag. "border=1" still remains there for reasons we have discussed - Swapping it out is a little too tedious for this tutorial.

Do you see how "tblstyle" works? The definitions we had in the CSS were named "tblstyle" (this can be any arbitrary name). As long as the value under "class =" matches the name of the definitions, the styles would apply.

Basically that's CSS in a nutshell! There are much, much more variations than those covered in this post, but the concept remains along these lines - Styles are defined under <style> in the head, and the various HTML tags refer to these styles, and is formatted accordingly!

Earlier on I mentioned that if you had lots of tables supposed to follow the same style, CSS will speed up the change - Do you see how that is now? If in the example above, I had a hundred tables all using tblstyle, I could simply change the CSS, and the changes would be reflected in all the tables using "class=tblstyle" - Simple!

So, it's time for you to step out into the world of CSS. There are lots of things we haven't covered today, but you'll be surprised at how much you can do with this knowledge.

Want to change something? Just look at the HTML code, and see which class it is using, and modify the class accordingly. If you don't know what to type in under the CSS, you can first try logical names such as image, or color (if you're mentioning "color", remember to use the American spelling, ie not "Colour" but "Color").

If you can't hit on the right name, just Google! Things such as "CSS Background Image" or "CSS Table Alignment" are all simple yet effective google search keywords that you can try.

Have fun with CSS!

More Youtube Tricks

2009-06-15T13:51:00.004+08:00

In an earlier post, I described the Fmt Hack, where a little change in the URL of a Youtube window would allow you to view the content in different quality levels.

In today's post, we're going to look at two interesting tricks of a similar nature that you can now do to youtube.

The first is a continuation of the traditional fmt hack. As of February 2009, there are a new set of fmt values that you can add to the end of the URL, but before I plunge into that, also take note that YouTube's idea of a "Standard Quality" and "High Quality" video has also changed:

fmt=0
This is the old "Standard Quality" setting - If standard quality videos now load slowly for you, add that to the end of the URL bar and get back the old standard quality videos.

fmt=6
This is the old "High Quality" setting

fmt=18
This is the old "hidden" high quality setting

fmt=22
HD setting - Hasn't changed and is still in use.

fmt=34
This is the new "Standard Quality" setting. Depending on what preferences you've set, most newer videos appear in this quality by default.

fmt=35
This is the new "High Quality" setting, which delivers DVD-like quality.

The next thing we're gonna look at today is some settings for video uploaders. When you upload a video, you're allowed to add tags which help your video get found. Now, you can add a special tag that affects the quality and ize of your video. The best part about this is you can change the setting anytime since you're free to edit the tags of the video as much as you like.

All you have to do is to enter a short code into your list of tags, and it will take effect directly. The codes are:

yt:crop=16:9
All this does is that it removes the top and bottom of a standard size (non-widescreen) video, and enlarges the rest of the video to fill up an area that a widescreen video would normally occupy. The main reason for having this function is this:

Before youtube provided widescreen support, videos uploaded in a 16:9 aspect ratio (More info on Widescreen here) were stretched vertically to fill up the 4:3 viewing window (which was used back then). The effect created by this is ugly, and so many video uploaders converted their widescreen video to fill a standard frame size by adding black bars at the top and bottom of their video (an effect called letterboxing).

This circumvented the problem, but now that the youtube viewing window is in widescreen, another problem is created. Youtube can't tell that those videos were widescreen with black bars - It only knew the video was a standard size. The result is that the video image now has both black bars at the top and bottom, and also at the sides of the video. This phenomenon, called windowboxing, is really quite ugly.

That's why the yt:crop=16:9 function is so useful, it gets rid of the black bars the user has added and enlarges the video to fit the entire widescreen viewer.

yt:stretch=16:9
Usually, a standard-size video will not be stretched horizontally to fill up the widescreen viewer. However, there are some circumstances where doing so is necessary, and can be achieved by the yt:stretch code.

The only situation where you'd really need this (other than to create a groovy effect) is when anamorphic content is uploaded. This refers to a widescreen video that is squashed horizontally so it fits into the dimensions of a standard screen video. The code then functions by stretching out this compressed image, thus restoring the entire widescreen view.

yt:stretch=4:3
This basically functions like the previous setting, but this one stretches a widescreen video vertically so that it now fills the dimensions of a standard size video.

I don't know when you'd ever need this - Probably only when you've accidentally created a widescreen video out of a standard video by squashing it!

yt:quality=high
And back to quality. All this tag does is that it makes the high quality version the default (provided one is available), so that when a user loads your video, the high quality one is shown immediately.

And that's it for a couple of useful youtube hacks! Happy youtubing =)

Quick Definition #36

2009-06-07T16:11:00.003+08:00

In computing terms, parallelization refers to one process that can be split into multiple processes and carried out simultaneously. For example, any program that supports multiple-core processors is capable of parallelization since it is able to split up its processes, which will be processed by each of the cores seperately.

LMMS - Turning the Knobs! (part 1)

2009-05-02T16:58:00.007+08:00

This post assumes you've read my first tutorial on LMMS, Getting Your Head Around LMMS, as this post uses some of the terminology explained there.

So, you've created your killer song, but there is a problem - You want something to change, perhaps the speed of the song at a particular point, or a volume of a certain track. Well, that's where you need controllers and/or automation!

Basically what these do for you is that they change the value of a knob/slider (including the BPM control), for you, though each approach takes on a different method. In this post, we will cover the latter method, automation.

Automation gives you full control over any control, at any time. It is versatile and easy to use. Here's how you'd use it:

1. Create an automation track by clicking on the "new automation track" button:

2. You can now click on any point of the newly added automation track to control whatever you choose at the point of time.

To make this clearer, look at the screenshot below. The Bassline track kicks in at the time labelled "21". When this happens, I want the "E-Organ" track to become softer. Hence, I've added an automation track in order to make this change. I have already clicked once at the point where I want the change to take effect:

(In the picture, the automation track is circled)

3. You now have to choose which knob you want to control. Hold down control, and drag the knob you want onto the track.

In my example, I want to control the volume of the "E-Organ" track, so I would hold down control and drag the volume of the "E-Organ" track to the automation track:

(click on image for animation!)

4. To make changes to the value, simply double click on the track you made, and use your mouse to change the value, with the vertical position representing value, and horizontal representing time.

Click here to see how the shape you draw in the automation graph affects the knob you've set.

5. If you want to extend the time in which the automation appears, you can click on its edge and drag:

And there you have it! You can technically control as many knobs as you want on a single automation track, but I wouldn't recommend it since it may become confusing (even though LMMS has very kindly labelled every track).

So now, you can get the knobs to turn themselves, go on and make your killer track!

Adobe Photoshop - Start Undoing Properly!

2009-04-19T15:27:00.003+08:00

Adobe Photoshop - The program often hailed to be the industry standard for graphics design. Well, while that may be true, some of the functions certainly aren't very standard.

How about Ctrl-Z, the hotkey that we've been so used to using for Undoing? While the feature in Photoshop that is mapped to Ctrl-Z goes under the same name, it only allows one step of undo. Pressing Ctrl-Z the second time redoes instead.

Thankfully, Photoshop does have Undo and Redo as we know them, but they've been renamed to Step Forward and Step Backward:

So, how do we get back the standard Ctrl-Z behaviour? Easy:

1. Go to Edit -> Keyboard Shortcuts
2. In the window that appears, click on the arrow left of the word "Edit":

3. First click on the shortcut assigned to Undo/Redo (which is Ctrl-Z by default). Once the shortcut is highlighted you can change it. I removed the shortcut altogether by pressing Backspace.
4. Click on the shortcut that was already assigned to the Step Forward function, and press Ctrl-Y on your keyboard.
5. Now click on the shortcut that was already assigned to the Step Backward function, and press Ctrl-Z on your keyboard. By now, the screen should look like this:

6. Click "OK", and you're done!

Hold The Flip!

2009-04-14T22:51:00.002+08:00

In Windows, you are offered with two ways of switching between programs, the Alt-Tab and Windows-Tab. In Windows XP and before (as well as Windows Vista, if not running Aero), doing the two keystrokes merely evoke simple program changing options.

If you're on Vista and running Aero, however, Alt-Tab opens up a little screen with previews of every window open (plus the desktop), and you can select one by pressing Tab, or clicking on the icon. The window looks like this:

If you press Windows-Tab, you get a cool effect where all the open windows "fan" out on the screen like so:

(For more information you can read the following Digital Ramblings post: Flipping Vista)

Now, both these screens look great, but have one little problem. The moment you release Alt (if you're using Alt-Tab), or the Windows key (if you're using Windows-Tab), the screen disappears. Isn't there a way to keep the display there, just for kicks?

Well, the answer is, of course, YES! Here's what you have to do.

If you want Aero Flip 3D (what you get with Windows-Tab) to stay active, instead of invoking it with Windows-Tab, use Ctrl-Windows-Tab instead.

Similarly, for the normal Alt-Tab screen, use Ctrl-Alt-Tab instead.

And there you have it! By just adding a Ctrl before entering the keystroke, the display now stays open for your admiration!

Getting Your Head Around LMMS

2009-04-07T20:50:00.008+08:00

So, you've always wanted to live your dream as a rockstar. Being a loyal reader of Digital Ramblings (like you should!), you have gone and downloaded LMMS, ready to compose your killer tune - Before you realise you don't really know what's going on.

Well, hopefully this post will give you a poke in the right direction! Instead of structuring this post like a complete manual, we're instead going to walk through the entire process of creating a short track. Hopefully this presentation method would serve as a better guide to quick-start your composing stint!

There are many different approaches to coming up with a track. My personal favorite is the following order, which we will follow in this post:
1) Main Melody
2) Drum Beats
3) Backing Tracks
4) Exporting the Complete Product

(Bearing in mind that I have left out some steps that I ocassionally use, but I think isn't absoulutely necessary for all works. We will cover those at a later time)

*

The Main Melody

The most important thing you need for any sound track is the melody. Before you create the melody, you need to choose an instrument. To do that, move your mouse to the left side of the screen and click on the "" symbol.

This would bring up the following list of names:

What you see are names of the "instrument programs" - which are little programs that take charge of creating different kinds of sounds. Each instrument program has many settings that can create a whole range of different sounds, and different programs have different settings, from which you can create a really diverse range of different instruments.

For the sake of simplicity, this tutorial will not cover the creation of your own instrument. Instead, we will merely and use the pre-made ones from the list. The most commonly used program in the list would be the "TripleOscillator", so go ahead and click the "+" sign next to "TripleOscillator" in the list. This gives you a long list of pre-made instruments which were created with TripleOscillator.

If you click on any of the instrument names and hold down your mouse button, what you hear is a preview of the instrument. Go ahead and preview a number of instruments. Pick one you like, and drag the instrument to an empty space in the Song Editor, as follows:

You have just made use of the Song Editor - Arguably the most important panel in the entire program, which would eventually act as the single point of collation for all your drum beats and instruments.

Now that we're done choosing an instrument, we can start composing the actual track. Double click on , which opens the Piano Roll - arguably the second most important dialog in the program:

This is where you would arrange and configure the notes for that particular instrument. The left side of the screen displays a virtual keyboard of immense length. The lower the key (displayed on the screen), the lower the pitch of the sound produced. The numbers displayed on the keys also give a hint as to which octave it is, the higher the number, the higher the pitch:

You can start composing tracks by placing notes across the piano roll. You do so by clicking on the piano roll screen, with horizontal position denoting time, and vertical position denoting pitch. You can change the duration of the note by dragging the right corner of the note.

Further note settings can be accessed at the bottom of the window. Look at the bottom left corner of the window to choose between Volume and Panning (left/right) settings. In Volume mode, lowering the slider lowers volume, while in Panning mode, lowering the slider pans to the left, while bringing it up pans to the right.

The note changes its brightness to reflect its volume setting, and the panning is reflected by the notes being shaded smoothly from one side to the other, the brighter side reflecting the side the note is panned to, as shown below:

At any time, if you want to listen to what you've created, you can press the spacebar, or click the play button at the top left corner of the piano roll. There are a number of more advanced features you can use, but what we have covered would suffice for now.

When you're done, simply close the piano roll. Notice how the notes you've entered are now reflected on the song editor:

And that's all you need for the melody!

At this point, you may see a need to copy a track exactly, or remove a track altogether. You can do so by clicking on the "Actions on this track" button:

If you chose an instrument and created a track, then decided to replace the instrument, you can do so by dragging the new instrument, and dropping it onto the instrument name of the track:

In addition, if there is any track (song editor) or note (piano roll) you want to shift in time (ie make it happen earlier or later), simply click it and drag it left or right. For the song editor, different items on the same row cannot overlap, while that is possible in the piano roll.

*

Adding a Drum Beat

Before you start with the beat, you will need a beat/bassline track in the Song Editor. If you did not delete any tracks from the default file that appears on startup, you should already have a track called "Beat/Bassline 0". If not, you can add one by clicking on the "Add Beat/Bassline" button:

Similarly to creating a melody, the first step in creating a drum beat is to choose your drum samples. But before that, let's take a look at the beat editor, which is what we will use to create drum beats:

Right now, all you see is a single "Default Preset" and a row of little boxes. Similarly to the "Default Preset" you saw in the Song Editor, this just means a particular instrument. For drums, instrument programs aren't the best idea: Instead, all we need are recordings of real drum sounds. Short recordings like these are called Samples, and that's exactly what we're going to use.

To get at your samples, go to the left side of the screen again, but this time click on the samples icon instead:

You can get a good lot of drum samples under "Drums". Similarly to choosing instruments earlier, you can preview a drum sound by clicking and holding onto the sample. If you like it, click and drag it into the beat editor (NOT the song editor!).

Since we're drumming now, one sound wouldn't be enough. Pick two to three sounds so you can have a varying pattern. If you don't know what to choose, you can start by choosing a bassdrum sound, a snare sound, and a hihat closed sound.

You can now choose when you want each beat to sound by clicking on the boxes. If a box lights up, that means the beat would play at that particular time. You can click the play button at the top of the beat editor window to hear your beat. (You can actually play and edit the beat in real-time).

You can vary the volume of the beat by hovering your mouse cursor over a particular square and rolling the scroll wheel. The brightness of the box will tell you how loud the sound will be, as shown below:

When you've gotten a drum beat you like, you can now integrate that with your song!

Return to the Song Editor, and you can now choose when you want to hear your beat, by clicking on the appropriate boxes in the song editor. When activated (ie you can hear the beat), the box turns blue, like so:

While having the same beat for an entire song isn't wrong in any way, you could provide greater variation by occasionally changing the beat. To do so, add another beat/bassline track, and edit that in the Beat/Bassline editor (make sure you're editing the correct beat by checking the top of the Beat/Bassline editor, and checking to see if the name corresponds with the track you're intending to edit). With different beats, you can then activate different beats at different times.

Unfortunately all beats have to use the same instruments, but this really isn't a very big problem since you'd more or less do things this way anyway. If you need to use a new instrument for a new beat, just drag the new instrument into the Beat Editor. Nothing from the new instrument would be heard in older tracks unless you set it manually.

*

A Backing Track

We're actually done with the main bulk of this tutorial. This part would be particularly short, since there really isn't anything new from the first part - The melody. The whole idea of this track is just to play in conjunction with the main melody, to provide some extra feel in the music.

There are two approaches you can take to adding a backing track. You could start from scratch, in which case all you have to do would be to drag a new instrument to the song editor, and approach it the same way as you would for the main melody.

Alternatively, you could start by cloning your melody track, if you want a backing track that is very similar to the actual melody. You could then replace its instrument by dragging a new instrument onto its slot, and then modifying it slightly by double-clicking on the track to open the piano roll.

*

Exporting the Completed Product

Once you've finished off, and given the song a final listen through, you're ready to produce an audio file that everyone can open!

Go to Project (in the menu bar) -> Export. You then get to choose a file name as well as a file format. You can choose between a WAV file, or an OGG file. Your best bet would be a WAV file first. But you'll have to download some converter so as to convert the file to an MP3.

Once you've chosen a file name and type you like, click "Save", and you'll get a screen of more settings.

You more or less do not need to meddle with the settings on the left panel (labelled "Output"). On the right panel ("Quality Settings"), you get to set Interpolation and Oversampling options. Generally, if you're willing to wait, you can set these to the highest options ("Sinc Best" and "8x" respectively). If not, "Sinc Medium" and "2x" would do fine.

Once you're done with this step, it's finished! You now have a wave file. You can do further editing with an editing program such as Audacity, and you could convert it will the all-powerful WinFF. Once you're done, you could distribute your track with box.net, an online file-sharing website.

And that's it! Every time you do a piece of work, think about your previous experience, and ask yourself how you can improve on that. With that, your works can only get better and better! Now go, and give LMMS a try!

This post is actually by no means complete - There are quite a few functions of the program that I have not covered, including some tips that could increase your productivity. Since this page is meant to give you a general idea from the perspective of creating a short track from start to finish, we had no opportunity to go into too much detail. Watch this space, more LMMS tutorials would be coming up!

Get straight to the Task Manager!

2009-04-06T22:14:00.003+08:00

Back in the days, (like, almost ten years ago), Ctrl-Alt-Del brought up the task manager, from which you could end tasks and perform other fun actions.

Actually, further back, in the MS-DOS days, hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del restarted your system straightaway, regardless of what you're doing, or whether you've saved. But we won't go that far.

In the age of Windows XP and Windows Vista, hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn't bring you straight to the task manager. Instead, it brings up a menu with a number of choices, with one of them being the task manager. You then have to click on that choice before arriving at the task manager.

90% of the time, when you need the task manager, it's when something has crashed, or is slowing the system down. That's the situation where you want to shut down the misbehaving program as soon as possible. That extra click could mean another five minutes of waiting!

So here's a new key combination to get to Task Manager directly! Instead of Ctrl-Alt-Del, press Ctrl-Shift-Esc. This gets you to the task manager immediately! Try it yourself!

Note: It seems that, on some Windows XP systems, Ctrl-Alt-Del brings up the task manager directly. In that case, you don't need Ctrl-Shift-Esc, which does exactly the same thing. This is apparently caused by the enabling of the Welcome screen. If the screen is disabled, Ctrl-Alt-Del will bring up the menu instead. That's where you need Ctrl-Shift-Esc. This does not apply to Vista users, all of whom would find this key combination useful.

Nyquist Frequency

2009-04-03T16:35:00.009+08:00

Don't we just love funny titles?

This post will describe to you the concept of Nyquist Frequency, and how it applies to you in your music listening experience. Along the way, we will look at a couple of other concepts, which would hopefully extend your knowledge regarding sound by a fair bit!

Since we delve into everything related to quite a detailed extent, this post is terribly long. You don't have to take in everything at one go! Read slowly, and take breaks, because reading continuously might kill you! =P

And let's jump right in! First, we will take a look at the concept of sampling, and the sampling frequency of your music.

You see that this track I chose has a sampling frequency of 44100 Hz. But what does that mean?

As you should know, sounds can be represented by sound waves. We can store the shape of this wave for us to reproduce the original sound, by moving the diaphragm of a speaker according to the motion described by the sound wave. If you're interested to know more, you can read my earlier post "Those Squiggly Lines".

The problem is, it is difficult to store the shape of a wave in a file - How can a whole load of bytes (representing numbers), represent the shape of a wave?

The simplest way to do this is to sample the wave. This is done by looking at a sound wave, and approximating the shape by measuring the shape at fixed intervals. Consider the diagram below:

The bolded points in the sound wave indicated where the samples have been taken - The wave can then be represented as a series of numbers indicating the position of fixed points on the wave.

So, we now understand how sampling works - But how often are samples taken? How does this affect sound quality? To answer this, we move a step closer to the goal of this post - To understand Nyquist Frequency.

As you have seen in the first picture, the number of samples taken is displayed as "44100 Hz". What this simply means is that 44100 samples are taken every second. Why? Simply because the unit "Hz" (pronounced "Hertz") translates directly to "per second". Hence putting it behind "44100" shows that 44100 samples are taken.

In taking samples, we obviously lose quality, since waveform data that are not sampled directly are lost. Why? Because we only really know the shape of a waveform when we take a sample at a particular point of time - Any details going on when a sample wasn't taken would be lost. This phenomena is called aliasing.

This means that, if we had samples at point A and point B, as shown in the following diagram, we could only guess what happened in between:

So, how do we measure how often we take samples, and how do we know we have taken enough samples to produce decent-quality sound? To understand this, we look at Frequency. Simply put, the higher the frequency, the higher the pitch. In any song, the frequency changes constantly to represent the sound.

Frequency is measured by the number of oscillations made by the speaker diaphragm per second - The quicker the diaphragm moves (ie the more movements per unit time), the higher pitched the sound. We measure frequency with a unit we've already seen - the Hertz. Remember that "Hz" simply means "per second", and in this case, the frequency measured refers to the "number of complete oscillations (of the speaker diaphragm) per second".

So now, the idea is this - The sampling frequency limits the maximum frequency of the track. Which is a logical conclusion since if I sample at a particular rate, but the frequency of the sound is greater than my sampling rate, then the sampled shape would not correctly represent the actual shape. In particular, extra oscillations not sampled would be lost, and thus, the frequency is limited.

But, numerically, to what extent does the sampling frequency affect the track's maximum frequency? To explain this, we turn to our mystery of the day - Nyquist Frequency.

The idea of Nyquist Frequency is as such: In order to sample in such a way that aliasing does not occur, we must sample at double the maximum frequency we want. This means that, if I want a highest frequency of 22kHz, such that it does not alias, we must sample at the rate of 44kHz.

Well, that's how the theory is stated. But why is this so? Let's read on.

Let's say I have a simple waveform that oscillates at 22kHz. I would now take samples with a sampling rate of 22kHz. See what happens in the following diagram. A red cross indicates where a sample was taken:

Do you see the flaw yet? Perhaps not. Let's now ignore our original waveform, and let us create a new sound based on the samples we took. The simplest approach to doing this would be to join up the points to create a new waveform. This is what most programs do to produce sound. The new waveform, however, doesn't quite look like the original waveform:

In fact, we get a straight line! This example shows aliasing at its worst - A sound wave is completely destroyed since the sampling frequency is exactly equal to the sound frequency.

In real situations, chances are the two frequencies wouldn't be exactly the same. The result of this, however, is still mis-represented sound. The sound would probably become a sound of a lower frequency, thus, ruining the sound altogether.

Here's a direct comparison of the effect. I have here a 30kHz sound, sampled firstly at 96kHz, and then at 44.1kHz. The concept of nyquist frequency says that there will be no aliasing for the first case, since the maximum frequency that can be represented by sampling at 96kHz is 48kHz (exactly half).

For the second case, on the other hand, the maximum frequency is only about 22kHz. This means that our 30kHz sound would be aliased. Here's what happens:

While neither sampling rate is capable of smoothly representing the sine waves, the 96kHz sample was able to represent a sound of 30kHz. Even though it wouldn't sound entirely like a sine wave as it was supposed to, it nonetheless is able to produce a 30kHz sound.

The 44.1kHz sample is unable to completely represent the oscillations. The sound heard would not be 30kHz, but instead less.

This post has been jammed-packed with loads of information. If you managed to read all the way to this point without stopping, I commend you. We have just one more question to go - So, what sampling rates are considered "good"?

First, we know of one fact - The highest sound detectable by the most sensetive human ear is approximately 20000Hz, or 20kHz. There is thus little point in representing sound above 20kHz, since your ears can't pick them up anyway. Also remember that every sample takes space to store. It simply makes no sense to waste space to store information your ears can't hear anyway.

A very common sampling frequency seen today is 44100Hz, which makes sense since 20kHz is the limit of human hearing, and so, according to the concept of nyquist frequency, we should sample at approximately 40kHz.

And there we have it! That's all the information on Nyquist Frequency, and also on related concepts.

Since this post has covered a really wide scope, let's have a quick summary of the points we discussed:

1) Sampling Frequency
This refers to the number of samples taken per second. These samples are used to approximate the shape of the original sound.

2) Aliasing
If sound was sampled at a frequency too low as compared to the actual sound itself, some details are lost, and the frequency recorded would be incorrect, producing a distorted sound.

3) Frequency
The higher the frequency, the higher the pitch. It also takes more samples to accurately represent a sound of higher frequency.

4) Nyquist Frequency
In order to represent a sound of a particular frequency without aliasing, samples must be taken at double the frequency.

5) Optimal Sampling Rate
A good, space-saving, yet low-distortion sampling rate would be 44100Hz, since the highest frequency humans can hear is about 20kHz, and the sampling rate to represent this without aliasing would be about 40kHz.

LMMS - All in one program for music-making!

2009-03-17T11:49:00.010+08:00

While I was looking for good programs to create music, I came across LMMS - the Linux MultiMedia System. But don't worry, it runs on Windows too, despite the name =D

LMMS is of course open-source, and I love it because it features a fully-fledged piano roll, for you to create your melody in, drum beat sequencer, and support for external audio. There are also hundreds of different samples built in, and lots of cool effects to choose from.

There are also a multitude of options for you to create your own instruments, or use the own sounds you've recorded. The possibilities are endless! When you're done tinkering, you can output your work as a .wav file or .ogg file.

Here's the link to the LMMS homepage: http://lmms.sourceforge.net/

In the above link you will find download links for LMMS, as well as the documentation. The program may be daunting at first, but it's worth learning.

Still not convinced on downloading? Listen to my first piece of work on LMMS:
http://www.box.net/shared/rrlnz4tv7i

Yenka - A Virtual Science Lab at Home!

2009-03-09T22:52:00.002+08:00

Have you ever thought of taking the science lab experience out of your school, and to bring it home? Or perhaps you know what happens to Potassium when you dump it into water, but never dared to try it in the lab? Here's your chance!

Well, now you can, with the software Yenka! Yenka comes from the guys who brought us Crocodile Clips series of software, which also serve about the same purpose - Allowing us to model and carry out science experiements on the desktop.

This time, Yenka is free - At least, free for home use up till the end of 2009, if you apply for a free home license (it takes practically two steps to do so). Please bear in mind that this license restricts you to home use, and public display of the program, or commercial use, is prohibited.

http://www.yenka.com/en/Downloads/
So here is the link to Yenka's download page - Download, and have fun!

See it Wide!

2009-02-27T20:03:00.002+08:00

This tutorial only works for Media Player Classic. For download instructions, as well as a summary of features, do check out my earlier post on ffdshow.

Now, here's a real problem - Let's say you have a widescreen monitor, and you want to play a widescreen video in full screen. The problem is, the creator of the video has put black bars at the top and bottom of the video, so that it fits a 4:3 aspect ratio instead. The end result? When you play the video in fullscreen, there are black bars at the top and bottom (as set by the video creator), and there are also black bars at the left and right since the vid couldn't fill the screen! This is a phenomenon called Windowboxing, and is more or less undesirable.

So how do you remedy this? Media Player Classic can do this for you!

Exit from fullscreen mode if you have it activated. Then, right-click on the video, point to Pan&Scan, and then click Zoom to Widescreen. What media player classic does it that it zooms in the video, effectively cropping out the bars at the top and bottom.

You can now watch the video in one of two ways - In fullscreen, or in windowed mode. If you want to use the windowed mode, you'll need to stretch the window horizontally until all of the video appears in the window.

Did you know? #49

2009-02-21T14:10:00.002+08:00

Did you know...

That computer mice were not made equal?

Sure almost all the mice we see today have a scroll wheel, but if you move from one mouse to another, you may find that the scroll wheels seem to behave somewhat differently.

The reason lies in the fact that some mice have many "steps" in one rotation, so by pulling the scroll wheel a certain amount, you send the computer large number of scrolling signals. Other mice may have less "steps", so the same amount of rotation may produce less signals.

Your computer scrolls the page upwards or downwards by a certain amount everytime it receives a signal saying that you've moved the scroll wheel. Since different mice generate differing amounts of clicks for the same motion, you may find that you are scrolling through pages at different speeds with different mice.

How do we fix this? Simply go to control panel, and open the "Mouse" settings. Go to the "Wheel" tab, and you'd find a setting called "The following number of lines at a time". For a mouse with few steps, the value should be higher, and for a mouse with many steps, the value can be lowered.

PowerDefrag - Add Power to your Defragmentation!!

2009-02-15T12:30:00.002+08:00

Sorry, couldn't resist the title =P

We've covered defragmentation before (here) - It is the act of putting files that were broken up back together.

Fragmentation happens because of the way hard drives work - New files are added at the end of what can be described as a very long queue. If changes are made to a file earlier up in the queue, these changes can only be added at the very end of the queue. This results in a file being broken up into a number of fragments, which increases file reading times. This can be fixed with the process of Defragmentation.

The above paragraph is a quick summary of why fragmentation happens, and why it is a bad thing, but the main purpose of this post is to introduce you to a tool that can make your defragmentation process a lot easier.

The question here is how the defragmentation is done - Sure you could run the defragmenter that is built into your Operating System, but did you know that doing so takes much longer than necessary?

Allow me to introduce Power Defragmenter! This is a program that, not only defragments much quicker than your built-in defragmenter, but also has many additional options, such as defragmenting particular files or folders, or multiple drives at once! This program is free, and is based off the free Contig defragmentation program. While defragmenting, a console window will be open to show you the detailed status of the defragmentation.

Here is the download link:
http://cid-94a12102e5094675.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/eXcessive%20Software/PowerDefragmenter.zip

Quick Definition #35

2009-02-07T18:41:00.002+08:00

The computing term Chording in computing refers to the pressing of multiple keys to invoke a particular function.

Examples of this include Alt-Tab to switch between windows, or Ctrl-S to save.

This term is likely to be derived from the musical term "Chord", which refers to playing a number of notes simulataneously to produce a combination of tones.

Did you know? #48

2009-02-03T20:12:00.002+08:00

Did you know...

That using the fmt hack on a YouTube HD Video will automatically open the HD window anyway?

Now, if you don't know what I'm talking about when I say "fmt hack", you can read this post: "YouTube Formats - 2. The fmt Hack".

As you know, youtube lets videos in HD quality display in a large viewer, which fills up most of the screen.

If you were to use, say "fmt=18" on a HD video, it would open up the large window anyway. Note that in such a state, you are not loading up the HD video. You are simply watching the fmt=18 version of the video in a larger window.

Compression Magic & PeaZip

2009-01-24T10:20:00.004+08:00

Sure, we've discussed this before - In an old post of mine (Nov 07) "File Compression", we covered the fundamentals of file compression - Its rationale and implementation.

Today, we're going to go one step further in its implementation, and look deeper into some more compression methods in use today.

As mentioned before, the ZIP file format is a very common method of compression, and is used for many downloads - If you run the Windows Operating System, chances are, the ability to read and extract files of this format is already built in. Right-click on the ZIP archive, and click "Extract" to decompress the files to a new folder.

That's well known enough, but do you know there are a series of other compression methods?

One example is the TAR format, which is commonly used in open-source communities to compress source code. TAR file formats have a number of extensions, including ".TAR" and ".GZ"

Another example would be the RAR format, also quite commonly used due to good compression rate.

The good thing about many compression techniques these days is that they allow for security. File formats like ZIP allow for strong file encryption and seting passwords, to protect the contents.

So alright, there are lots of file formats out there, with lots of cool functions. But I want to work with them, and I don't want to install multiple decompressors for different file types. Is there one decompressor program to rule em' all?

Well, the answer is yes. Personally, I have had pretty good success with the open-source program PeaZip, which you can find here: http://peazip.sourceforge.net/index.html

Happy decompressing =)

Double your music output!

2009-01-15T14:22:00.003+08:00

Does your computer have multiple headphone ports? Have you ever wanted to make the ports do separate things? Well, you probably can.

First, why is there a need for this? Well, there probably isn't much of a need, but one use I can think of is for DJing software. Two outputs are used - A main audio output which will be amplified and played to the room, in addition to a "cue" output. Only the DJ can hear this output through his headphones, on which he gets the next track ready for mixing into the main mix.

Now, why did I say you probably can? That's because there are so many makes of sound cards and drivers that there's no way I can cater to all the possible settings out there. So all I can do is show you how I did it - How you do it, and whether you can, really depends on your computer.

And this is how I did it:

1. Open Control Panel
2. Open your sound card's control panel.

For me, my sound card's control panel is the "RealTek HD Audio Manager". If you do not see the same thing, look around for any control panel with your soundcard manufacturer's name on it. In my case, the icon and label looks like this:

But please take note. The control panel I'm referring to is NOT the following:

This sound control panel is built into windows, and not the one we're looking for.

If you're running a different soundcard, the control panel is likely to look completely different. But hopefully the settings tally somehow!

3. For me, I clicked "Device Advanced Settings" on the control panel.

4. This pops up the following window:

Now click on "Make front and rear output devices playback two different audio streams simultaneously".

5. Click OK, and close the control panel.
6. If you're running Windows Vista, open your system mixer, and notice now you'll have one more device under "Devices":

You can now change settings for each output device separately. Select either device to make settings for it.

So there you have it! Get an extra output for your system!

Did you Know? #47

2009-01-10T10:26:00.002+08:00

Did you know...

That, in Mozilla Firefox, the middle-click has many uses?

Any link (and even some buttons within the Firefox interface, such as the "Home" and "Search" buttons), when middle-clicked, opens in a new tab.

You can also close a tab in a single click by middle-clicking the tab under the URL bar.

Did you Know? #46

2009-01-06T18:31:00.002+08:00

Did you know...

That there are free versions of Microsoft Office (legally released by Microsoft) that you can use to view microsoft office files?

You can download Microsoft Word Viewer, Excel Viewer and Powerpoint Viewer to open and read even the latest files saved from these programs.

But here's the catch: You can only view, and not edit the files. If you are okay with that (or in a position where you don't need to edit files), then go ahead and download the free viewers.

These versions are current as of the creation of this post, but as Microsoft updates their product, the downloads these links point to may not be current anymore. If you're unsure, search Microsoft's web page before downloading.

Here are the links:
Word Viewer
Excel Viewer
Powerpoint Viewer

Microsoft Excel - The Data Filter

2009-01-05T17:08:00.010+08:00

So, you've put your data into Excel. Now it's time to properly look at your data. Ideally, we want to be able to maybe sort the data, or perhaps look through only certain types of data. Is it possible to quickly and easily do that in Excel?

Of course it is! And not just that, invoking this feature requires a whooping one step. (That, of course, excludes the data input. =D )

I have here a little mock data (yes, I always use students and results, because my creativity stops there xD):

So basically we have a group of six kids, each of whom sat for three examinations. This spreadsheet contains their names (what original names! xD), gender, score for each examination, and an overall score - which is the summation of the scores for all three tests.

So we want to work on the data now. We can quickly and easily sort and filter the data using the AutoFilter function.

To invoke the function, select your data, then go to "Data -> Filter -> Autofilter".

And... That's it? Yep. That's all you need to do. The function has been switched on, and you can use it for the range of cells that you have selected before.

But how to use it? Notice that all the heading cells now have a little drop-down icon at the right side. Let's go ahead and click on it, and see...

Notice that the first two options are "Sort Ascending" and "Sort Descending". As the name clearly implies, "Sort Ascending" will sort numerical data from the smallest to the largest value, and text data alphabetically, from A to Z. Sort descending reverses the order.

A line separates these two choices from the next group. The reason is, the first two options deal with sorting (ie. Reordering data), while the rest of the options actually involve filtering (ie. Selectively removing data).

Just a quick word on filtering: It is useful when you're working on large amounts of data, and only want to focus whatever you're looking for.

This is not so clear when we're working in the "Name" column, so let's go one column to the right, and look at "Gender" instead:

At the bottom, I only have two choices "M" and "F". If I click on either, only students of the chosen gender are displayed. See what happens if I choose "F":

Notice how the boys' names and records have been removed. Note that when the autofilter function is in effect, the numbers at the left are colored blue.

Also note the difference between filtering and sorting: If I uncheck the "AutoFilter" function (through "Data -> Filter -> AutoFilter") after I sort, the new order is preserved. However, if I uncheck "AutoFilter" after performing a filter function, the data will revert to the same stage as it was before filtering.

So there you have it - The really simple autofilter function.

Quick Poll: There is an animation in this post which showed in video form how to get at the autofilter function. Please post in a comment and tell me what you think about such animations. Are they helpful? Do you want to see more of these in the future? Let me know! Thanks!

ffdshow - One codec to play them all!

2009-01-04T10:01:00.004+08:00

Before I begin, I wish everyone a happy and fruitful 2009! (Boy am I late xD)

Anyways, as the title of this post says, let's start off the new year with some download recommendations!

As we know, videos can be encoded with any one of the numerous codecs out there (these codecs define the structure and compression of audio and video). However, opening these can be quite a pain when you don't have the correct codec installed. Do you work with a large amount of file formats? Do you often wish you could forget these problems, and just open any video file?

Well, now you can. Many (but not all) media players on Windows attempt to decode videos using DirectShow technology, which, simply put, provides a means for installing a codec once, and using it across different programs.

There is one particular DirectShow Codec (or to use the proper name, filter) that runs based on libavcodec, a powerful open-source codec used for encoding and decoding of many audio and video codecs. This filter is called ffdshow and can be found here: http://ffdshow-tryout.sourceforge.net/

Once you've installed it (just follow the instructions and go along), ffdshow will work with the copy of windows media player on your computer.

So that's it then? Or is it?

Nope. One more goodie to go!

So now you have ffdshow. Sure, you could use it with windows media player, but is that interface too slow and clunky for you? Well, no problem, there's an open-source alternative called Media Player Classic.

Depending on which version of windows you own, you may already have media player classic on your computer. Do a system search and see if you can find it. If you can, then you're all set to go!

I own Windows Vista Home Premium, and Media Player Classic was not pre-installed (either that, or my searching skills need honing), so to get it, I had to download it instead.

The download page for Media Player Classic is here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=82303&package_id=84358

Are you confused by the page? Well, don't worry, I'll try to guide you around.

Entering the page alone should show up four possible files you can download (there are a lot more that are hidden, but you probably won't need them since they're older versions).

The titles of these files should look something like: "mpc2kxp6490.zip"

What does that mean? The first three letters "mpc", tell you that the package contains media player classic.

The next four characters would either be "2kxp" or "98me". If you're running windows 2000 and above, go for the "2kxp" options. Anything earlier, go for "98me".

The next group of numbers tell you the version you're downloading.

And finally, the letters beyond the point at the end tell you the method in which the program file was compressed. Generally, you should go for the ".zip" file since ZIP decompressors are likely to have already been installed on your system.

So download the package and unzip it, and in it you'll find just one program file. That's it! That's media player classic. You can start using it without any installation. Just open files by dragging and dropping them into the player window, or opening files by going to "file -> open".

YouTube Formats - 3. Frame Sizes

2008-12-28T18:56:00.005+08:00

As promised, here's the third instalment of the YouTube Formats series, and in this one, we'll discuss the actual frame sizes. Here, we'll take an insight into YouTube's video encoding options - This is useful for both knowing what you're watching, and hopefully also serve as a guide if you're uploading stuff.

In this post I will make multiple references to the quality options you have. To have a full understanding of what I mean when I do so, I recommend you read my previous post, YouTube Formats - 2. The fmt Hack, which covers all the quality options that YouTube has to offer.

Also, I have written about widescreen videos here, and that post would serve as a background for some of the things mentioned here.

As mentioned, YouTube now offers videos in Widescreen and also non-widescreen. Since the videos are of different aspect ratios, their dimensions must definitely be different. The usual practise would be that widescreen videos have a higher resolution - Which makes sense because widescreen videos were supposed to show you more stuff.

Interestingly, YouTube takes a different approach. As you will find out later, the resolution for widescreen videos are actually lower instead.

First, let's look at the standard quality. Standard quality video should be at least 320x240 for standard size, and 320x180 for widescreen. See? Widescreen videos are actually lower quality.

For high quality (both fmt=6 or fmt=18), the video sizes are 480x360 for standard size, and 480x270 for widescreen. Now here's an interesting point. If you intend to upload a video that makes it for the high-quality option in widescreen, uploading a 480x270 will not work (this is said through experience) - An upload of 640x360 works though, but it gets scaled down to 480x270.

High Definition video is trickier. HD is offered in a large variety of sizes, ranging from 800x450 (is that even HD?), including 1280x544 (this is a theatrical aspect ratio that has a width more than twice the length of the height), and of course including the most correct 1280x720. What's really tricky about HD is that the "Watch in HD" option can take up to days to appear. This makes it harder to find out if you've correctly uploaded a HD video.

I have personally tried to upload HD video by uploading a 1440x810 video file (slightly larger than 720p, which should theoretically be accepted as HD without much problem). As of writing (Dec 28), the file has been uploaded for a day, but no HD option yet. I will edit this post if any changes take place.

Personally, one word of advice for uploading would be to upload in a size slightly larger than what you intend to see. That way, the video will be shrunken slightly, which will not harm the video quality too much.

It is also interesting to note at this point that the YouTube window actually increases the size of every video slightly, to the extent where distortion is minimal but the video size is increased by a visible amount - An interesting and feasible trick.

So that's it for the YouTube formats series of posts!

YouTube Formats - 2. The fmt Hack

2008-12-22T16:55:00.007+08:00

(Note: Even though I used the term "hack" here, this is different from the illegal "hacking" of computers. I use the term "hack" to mean something along the lines of "disclose functionality not readily available", and NOT as in "to access data that I have no right to seeing".)

This is a continuation of my earlier post on YouTube's formats History. In this post, I will explain the format hack described in the first post, and hopefully you can use that to get the quality level you want.

Firstly, let us look at how this hack works. You first need to access a YouTube video page. Now, look at the URL bar, and you should see something like this:

What we have to do now, is to add a short piece of code to the end of the URL. This tells the player page what quality setting we want.

To do this, first enter "&fmt=" and then a number which represents your setting. The possible values of this number will be described and explained in this post.

After entering that, your URL bar should look something like this:

Once you've typed that in, go ahead and hit "Enter" on your keyboard. This loads up the same page, but displays a higher-quality video.

Alright, now let's look at what the fmt value represents. This section mentions stereo and mono, which are audio-related terms. These generally mean whether your left and right speakers are playing the same audio. For more details, refer to my earlier post One Ear or Two?

As mentioned before, there are four quality settings. These are:

1. Normal Quality
This is the lowest quality setting. It is the earliest setting available. You will get low-resolution video, and highly-compressed mono audio. To get at this quality setting, most users can simply not use this hack (ie Not add "&fmt=" in the URL bar). However, if you have set to always display high quality video, you could either click on "Watch in Normal Quality" under the video, or add "&fmt=0" in the URL bar (the last character being the number zero).

2. Semi-High Quality
This is the quality setting delivers higer-resolution video, but with the same sound quality as the Normal Quality version. To access this, you can either click on "Watch in High Quality" under the video, or enter "&fmt=6" in the URL bar. It is interesting to note, at this point, that not all videos that benefit from this quality setting will display "Watch in High Quality" under the video window.

3. High Quality
This quality setting gives you the same video as the "fmt=6" version, but gives enhanced sound. There is slightly less compression, and you'd get stereo sound. There is no "official" way to access this, so the only way to get this quality option is by adding "&fmt=18" to the end of the URL.

4. HD Version
This quality setting gives you HD video, in extremely high resolution (for more details, please read my post High Definition Video). Also, sound quality is greatly improved. To get this mode, you can click on "Watch in HD" under the video window, or add "&fmt=22" to the end of the URL bar.

So there you have it, the YouTube quality hack. As you can see, this isn't always useful or necessary because YouTube also provides links underneath videos for you to make the choice. However, there are times where YouTube does not detect that a video is available in a Higher Quality, or the video does not meet the required resolution to be considered "High Quality". In these cases, a version with higher quality exists, and can only be accessed through the hack.

YouTube Formats - 1. A History

2008-12-22T16:54:00.004+08:00

(This is a three-part post. This post serves as the first and main post. As the other parts are posted, this post will be edited to reflect links to the other parts. Stay tuned!)

Before we begin, I must inform the reader that in this post, there will be multiple references to widescreen terminology. In order for you to completely understand this post, you need to have read my earlier post explaining widescreen terminology: All about Widescreen.

A bit of history to start this off: When youtube started, it only had one option for video quality, and that is the most common format still in use today.

Some time ago, YouTube added support for multiple quality levels. At that point of time, the higer quality level videos could be accessed by clicking "Watch in High Quality" under some videos. Unknown to most users, a hack had also been implemented at that time for users to access the high-quality version of videos. In addition, there was another quality setting only accessible through this hack, which provided higher quality audio as well.

At the same time, YouTube has also improved its support for Widescreen video. Quite some time ago, videos were not allowed to have customized aspect ratios. This means that widescreen videos were stretched to fit the YouTube window. Some time after, YouTube automatically showed widescreen videos in the letterbox format, in other words allowing widescreen video uploads.

But recently, changes have been made to the YouTube window such that all videos were displayed in the widescreen format.

Soon after that, yet another quality setting has emerged - YouTube now offers videos in High Definition, or HD for short. High Definition videos are represented by a large number of pixels, making them appear sharp and clear even when displayed on large screens.

So, what is this post for? Basically, I want to discuss two things about YouTube uploads, as well as to familiarize the reader with a little YouTube history.

This post has acheived the latter objective. As mentioned at the start, there are two more parts to this post, which will be covered in later posts.

Link to further parts:
Part 2 - The fmt Hack
Part 3 - Frame Sizes

High Definition Video

2008-12-21T16:30:00.006+08:00

High Definition Video - The wave of the future, which is, incidentally, becoming more and more of the present.

So what exactly is it?

It all has to do with the quality of the video, which in turn is affected by the resolution of the video. This refers to the number of pixels (colored dots on your screen) that represent the individual images that make up the video (called "frames").

Of course, the more pixels, the more information can be represented. This means that, with more pixels, finer details can be seen. This thus means crisper and sharper images.

As technology advances, displays are capable of handling much higher resolutions - This means that they are able to display more pixels than before.

This means that there is now a demand for videos of a higher resolution. Why? To answer that, we need to look at how lower-resolution videos work.

Similarly to its higher-quality counterpart, low-resolution videos are also represented by pixels. The difference lies in how many pixels there are. Low-resolution videos are represented by very few pixels.

Now, powerful monitors pack lots of pixels in them, while not increasing the physical size of the display much. In order to fit a larger amount of pixels in more or less the same physical size, individual pixels must be shrunken.

What this means is that a low-resolution video would look really small on a monitor if every pixel of the video was to be assigned to one pixel on the monitor. Well, we could enlarge the video such that it becomes of a comfortable size, but then when we do that, every pixel becomes large, and appears blurred.

This means that a low-resolution video will never look good, especially on a high-resolution monitor.

Hence the demand for high-resolution video. HD Videos are an example of extremely high-resolution video.

Speaking in terms of resolution only, there are generally two standard sizes for HD video. This is either 1920 pixels horizontally by 1080 pixels vertically (this is represented in the form "1920x1080"), or 1280 horizontal by 720 vertical (ie 1280x720).

Please bear in mind that what we have covered so far pertains to only to HD Videos on a computer screen. When speaking of HD Videos in broadcast, there are other factors to be considered. In order to completely understand the terminology, we would have to cover one broadcast-specific factor.

Have you ever seen the terms "1080p", "1080i", "720p" and "720i"?

We already know what the numbers represent - They represent the picture resolution. However, what does the letter at the end represent? They tell of how a television displays the image. (Note, once again, that this does not apply to computer monitors.)

"P" stands for progressive. It means that images will be displayed line by line (horizontally). This means that the screen will draw the first horizontal line of the video, then return to the left, move down, and continue drawing the second line.

"I" stands for interlaced. This differs from the progressive method because it draws every other line. When the drawing process gets to the bottom, it goes back up and draws in the lines that were missed out.

What this means is that, in the interlaced method, less data is being represented. However, the screen can be redrawn at a faster rate. Generally, the progressive method is preferred.

Flipping Vista

2008-12-18T10:01:00.003+08:00

Windows Vista's most famous eye candy is probably the Windows Flip Feature (this is excluded in Vista Home Basic, though. You can find it in all other editions.), which looks somewhat like this:

What this allows you to do is to flip through currently open windows in a 3-Dimensional perspective. It can help you find a window faster.

How do you do it? Hold down the Windows button on your keyboard and press Tab. Each time you press Tab, the front-most window goes to the back and the next window pushes forwards. Once you find the window you want to go to, release the windows button.

Another way to navigate through this is to press Windows-Tab once, and release just the Tab button. You can now scroll through the open windows with your mouse's scroll wheel. As usual, when you're at the window you want, release the Windows key.

This is somewhat like a flashier version of Alt-Tab that is present in other Windows systems. At the same time, Alt-Tab is still present here, but is also revamped. Now, when you hold Alt and press Tab, window contents are shown to you, like so:

In addition, you can now use your mouse to click on the windows instead. Press Alt-Tab and release Tab. Clicking on any window opens it.

Finally, you'd notice that you can use Alt-Tab and Windows-Tab to go straight to your desktop. This is another way of minimizing all windows, other than Windows-M.

The IF function in Microsoft Excel

2008-12-17T19:31:00.011+08:00

We finally move on to making comparisons in Excel spreadsheets. There are many methods to do this, among them is the "IF" function. The "IF" function is likely to be the simplest and most intuitive method of comparison, but you'd find that this is not complete without other comparison functions such as "AND", "OR", and "NOT". But we'll come back to those later. Right now, let's look at the "IF" function.

To start using the IF function, click on an empty cell, and select fx on the edit bar. You can find the IF function under the "Logical" category. Once you have done that you will see three boxes for input. Let's now take a look at what to put in there.

The IF function takes three inputs. The first is a condition. The second is the text that would be shown if the condition is true, and the third is the text that shows if the condition is false.

The first input is the essence behind this entire function. The condition is made up of any function that returns TRUE or FALSE. Depending on the value, the function will then output either input two or input three. The greater part of this post will describe how you would phrase the condition input.

Similarly to your conditional formatting, most of the time, you would use the condition input to specify a comparison between one cell and a fixed value, or between two cells. However, this is different from conditional formatting in the sense that you are not given drop-down menus letting you choose what kind of condition to use. You have to specify it yourself in text. How? I'll show you here.

In the following examples, I will assume that the comparison being made is between the cells A1 and B1. Since you'd probably not be doing just that, substitute it accordingly.

If you're checking to see if A1 and B1 are equal, you would type "A1 = B1".

Note that this is not algebra. It does not mean that you're equating the two cell values. Instead, it simply asks the program "Is A1 equal to B1?".

So, what would you do if you want to make other comparisons? The following is a table of the syntax you could use:

Syntax	This means...
A1 < B1	Is A1 less than B1?
A1 > B1	Is A1 greater than B1?
A1 <= B1	Is A1 less than or equal to B1?
A1 >= B1	Is A1 greater than or equal B1?

Programmers take note: This may appear like how comparisons usually do in programming. However, take note that when you are checking if two numbers are equal, you do not use "==" like you do in programming. One equals sign is enough. In addition, you can't check if values are NOT equal by simply using "!=" or "~=". In Excel, this is not recognised. You'll need to use the NOT function instead (which we will cover in a later post).

The remaining two inputs are simple. Exactly as mentioned, Input 2 will be shown if the condition specified in Input 1 is true. Otherwise Input 3 will be shown.

Alright, done with the details. Now let's look at some examples.

Firstly, a simple one. Basically, this setup will look at the value of the cells in the A-column, and output "Larger" or "Smaller" in the B-column depending on whether the value in the A-column is larger than or smaller than 10.

This is how I set up the IF function:

And this yields the following results:

If you don't know how I got the results to appear over a range of cells instead of just one cell, please read my earlier post "Microsoft Excel - Dragging the Edge".

Let us now take it one step further. Let's compare two inputs now. This time, if the left input is smaller than the right input, the output "Smaller" will be produced. Otherwise, "Not Smaller" would be output instead. So this time, the A- and B-columns serve as input while the C-column is output. This is how I set up the function:

Which produces the following results:

Alright, now let's add the ultimate complexity. Let's have output that changes according to input data too. This means we have to make references to the cells A1 and B1. This new setup will output the smaller of the two integers:

Yielding the following result:

Now, this setup is not technically correct. Notice that if the cell A value is equal to the cell B value, the condition is actually false, and it displays the cell B value. This is not the same as the comparison we intended to make, but it is acceptable since the perceived result remains correct.

So, that's it for the IF function! Or is that it? Actually, no, it's not! It is possible to put one IF function inside another (doing so is called nesting), and have them process different data one after another! However, this post has run long enough. Maybe in the future, we will take a closer look at nested IF functions. So for now, that's all!

Word Count in Microsoft Word

2008-12-12T13:12:00.007+08:00

We've all used it. Especially if you're a student, you need this feature - The word count in Microsoft Word. But is there is a quicker way to access this feature than Tools -> Word Count from the menu bar?

The answer is yes. Microsoft Word has the Word Count Toolbar, which, exactly as the name implies, is a simple toolbar displaying the word count, with a button to let you re-count whenever you've selected some new text you want to count.

This is how to open the toolbar. Right-click the menu bar, and check the "Word Count" option:

And the word count toolbar should now appear:

Now all you have to do is to select some text, click "Re-Count", and a word count will appear on the fly, like so:

And there you have it! The word count pops right up in the box beside the "re-count" button.

Wet and Dry?

2008-12-05T12:50:00.003+08:00

Usually when working with audio equipment, especially effects units, you may have a "Wet/Dry" setting. What does that mean?

A sound that is completely modified by an effect is considered "Wet", while completely untouched sound is considered "Dry".

If you have a slider on equipment that says "Wet" at one end and "Dry" at the other, moving the slider to the "Wet" end will give you only the sound produced through the effect. Moving the slider to the "Dry" end will cut out all the effected sound, leaving you with the original sound.

Usually, in such situations, the slider is kept somewhere in the centre. The reason is simply that some effects change the original sound to the extent that it sounds really different. In order to make the original sound recognizable, the dry signal must be mixed in a little.

One example of such a situation is the reverb effect. The wet signal would sound all echoey and far-away. However, if you are using the reverb effect to simulate a room such as a concert hall, you need to mix some of the dry signal back in, or all you'd hear are the echoes.

Indentation in Powerpoint

2008-12-04T12:05:00.002+08:00

Microsoft PowerPoint automatically bullets everything. When what you type wraps over to the next line, the second line lines up with the bullet, like so:

I have put in a red line so that you can see the effect clearer. Do you see that all the words start at the red line? This effect is good when you're working with the bullets, but what if you decide to turn off the bullets? Let's go back to the slide and see what happens.

See? Although the first line moves to the left, everything else stays, creating an unsightly extra margin. How do you get rid of that?

First, you need to display the page rulers. You can do so by going to "View -> Ruler". The 'rulers' should now appear around your slide. To get rid of the margin, this is what you do:

1. Select the affected text.
2. Go up to the ruler. It should look something like this:

3. Find the lower control, and drag its upper arrow all the way to the left:

4. The end result should look like this:

And now the unsightly margin in the text box should be gone.

Audacity Plugin - Controlling Volume

2008-12-02T15:00:00.003+08:00

Have you ever had the desire to control volume changes more smoothly in Audacity? Sure, fading in and out is no problem - the functionality is built right into Audacity (you can access these under Effects -> Fade In or Effects -> Fade Out). But what if you don't want the sound to be cut off altogether? Perhaps you want the sound to smoothly reduce to 50% of its original volume and continue playing? How would you do that?

You can do that with a nyquist plugin written by me!

First of all, get the plugin installed. You can download it by clicking on this link (file hosted by box.net). Once you get the file, find the folder where you have installed Audacity, and look for the "Plug-Ins" folder. Move the "VariScaler.ny" file into that folder. If you have a copy of audacity open, close it and reopen it, and you should be able to find the plugin under the effects menubar.

This is how to use the plugin:

First, select the region of the sound where you want the volume changes to occur. Then, go to the menubar, and select "Effects -> Scale Sweep...". A little dialog box should pop up, letting you set the "Start Amplitude" and the "End Amplitude".

This basically means the volume at the start and end of your selection. If you specify a smaller value for "End Amplitude" than for "Start Amplitude", the sound will get quieter as you play it. The converse is true: If "Start" is smaller than "End", then the sound will get louder.

IMPORTANT: But what do the numbers mean? This one is important. Typing in incorrect values could distort your audio, and/or blow your eardrums, so take note. For any one of the two boxes, saying "1.00" means that no changes would be done to the sound at that region. "2.00" means the sound will be doubled in amplitude (generally not a good idea to do unless you have a very soft sound), and "0.50" means the sound will be halved in amplitude.

So let's say I have a sound, and I select a region. Then I apply the plugin, and set its "Start Amplitude" as "0.50" and "End Amplitude" as "1.00". What will happen is that the sound in the selected region will start off at half its volume, then get louder gradually. At the end of the selected region, the sound is as loud as it originally is.

Graphically, this is what would happen:

Very Useful File Host!

2008-12-02T14:36:00.002+08:00

Have you ever seen a need to upload some files to the web, for example, let's say you're running an educational blog, and want to share your goodies with other people?

Yes, this post is both an advertisement of sorts, and also an important announcement from me.

I have created an account at http://www.box.net/. This site offers free file hosting. You are given 1GB of storage space (for a free user, that is. If you pay, you can get up to 15GB!), and you can upload any kind of file and link to them from your blog or webpage. You can also create public folders for people to browse.

Hopefully, with my new box.net account, your experience at Digital Ramblings would be more value-added than ever!

Aprostophes

2008-11-27T21:00:00.007+08:00

In most programs, when you enter an aprostophe character (be it 'single quotes' or "double quotes"), the program draws one or two short, straight lines to represent the symbol. In Microsoft Word and Powerpoint, when you enter an aprostophe, it looks at what you've typed, and guesses which way the aprostophe should curve. It then replaces the straight-version with the curved ones: ‘’ and “”

This post is all about this function. How to turn it off, and how you can use it to the fullest.

First of all, this option is known as "smart quotes". In Microsoft word, you can access this option by going to Tools -> AutoCorrect, and selecting the AutoFormat tab. Here, you should see the option that says "Replace straight quotes with smart quotes". Exactly like what it says, if the checkbox is ticked, the replacement will happen automatically. If unchecked, it won't happen. This is what the dialog box looks like:

In PowerPoint, the same option can be found at Tools -> Options, "Replace straight quotes with smart quotes".

So, how does Word and PowerPoint guess the aprostophe direction? Simply this: It looks at the characters before and after the aprostophe itself.

If either (but only one) of these characters are white space (or punctuation), it would angle away from the white space. This means:

The rationale behind this is that aprostophes may be used for quotation. When used in this manner, the quotation marks are, of course, at the two ends of the quotation. The sentence would of course, start with blank space and end with blank space, like so:

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth" ~ Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of the Four

So that's one case. Another case is where both the characters around the aprostophe are not white space. In such cases, the aprostophe always angles to the left:

The reason for doing so is because of contractions such as "don't", "you're", or "let's". Since the most common reason for putting charcters on both sides of an aprostophe is contraction, Word and Powerpoint assumes that you're doing it for the contraction, thus angling the mark to the left.

Finally, what if it's empty on both sides? This one is a little hard to say (since there is practically nothing for the program to draw a deduction from!), but angling it to the right is the best option, because, usually when users type a quotation mark after a space (with nothing to the right of the mark as yet), they are more likely to enter a quote or speech.

So now you know which way the quotation marks automatically angle, let's say you want to insert a particular quotation mark, independant of other text. How would you do it? Simply enter a dummy character, and insert a quotation mark either to the left or right of it (to let the mark angle to the right or left, respectively). Once you've gotten the mark you want, get rid of the dummy character, and there you have it!

Memory

2008-11-23T16:24:00.003+08:00

We're all very used to electronic devices around us having memory. Computers, mobile phones, PDAs... Even devices like clocks and your TV have a small amount of memory, to hold the time, and the channel presets respectively.

In this post, we'll look at some terminology associated with different memory types, and a little bit of history.

Memory is split into two large categories: Volatile, and Non-Volatile. Simply put, volatile memory requires a constant supply of power to retain the memory. Once the power is cut off, the data is lost. Non-Volatile memory, on the other hand, can retain information even in the absence of power supply.

Let's first look at examples of Non-Volatile memory.

The most classic, and very widely used form of memory, would be Read-Only Memory, often shortened to ROM. It is the simplest form of memory out there simply because it can only be written once. Once written, it can only be read from. It remains in common use today because it is practical. For example, in a watch, you wouldn't expect the user to re-write the program inside. Hence, using ROM will suffice.

Usually, in ROMs, the data is hardwired into the chip. If you don't understand this, read on and compare with other kinds of memory.

When engineers work on chips, they sometimes need to write the chip themselves for testing. It is not practical to create a ROM for that purpose since it cannot be quickly and easily done in a lab environment. Thus, PROMs were created. This stood for "Programmable Read-Only Memory".

Instead of having data hard-wired into the chip, the chip consisted a series of fuses. Such chips can be programmed in the lab by applying large currents to the chip, which would selectively blow certain fuses. The pattern created by the remaining fuses represent data.

This is quite a permanent way of storing information, provided the chip is not exposed to further power surges, because this could lead to certain fuses blowing, thus corrupting the data.

Of course, the next evolution would of course be making the memory erasable, right? This lead to the creation of EPROM, or "Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory", whose method of erasure is actually pretty interesting.

EPROMs have a little glass window at the top. To erase the data on the chip, strong ultraviolet light has to be shone through the glass window for a period of about fifteen minutes. This erases the chip, allowing it to be written again.

As you can see, such erasure methods are time-consuming, and not very practical.

Thus came the EEPROM, or "Electronically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory", which, exactly as the name implies, can be erased through electrical means, eliminating the use of ultraviolet light.

EEPROM is in wide use today. In fact, Flash Memory, which is the technology used in storage devices such as USB Thumbdrives or expansion cards, is also a form of EEPROM - It is non-volatile, and can be written to and erased electronically.

Volatile memory, on the other hand, takes the form of RAM, also known as Random Access Memory. Some devices use RAM as the main source of memory, while others, like computers, use RAM as a complement to main storage, to speed up data access.

Microsoft Excel - Conditional Formatting

2008-11-21T09:22:00.005+08:00

We continue our earlier post on Microsoft Excel formulas. This post will cover a feature in Excel called Conditional Formatting. While not strictly part of the formula system, conditional formatting is an extremely powerful tool, especially when used in conjuction with the formula system, so I couldn't miss it.

Firstly, an introduction: What is conditional formatting? Exactly as the name implies, this feature will apply certain formats to a particular cell if certain conditions are met. These conditions usually consider the value of the cell itself, but it is also possible to reference other cells through the use of a formula (not very efficient, though).

So, let's start by finding the conditional formatting option. First select the cell in which you want to apply the conditional formatting, then invoke the function by going to the menu bar -> Format -> Conditional Formatting.

Out pops the conditional formatting dialog box, which should look like this:

The first dropdown, labelled "Cell value is", allows you to switch between checking the value of the cell, or using a formula. Since using a formula makes the condition pretty complicated, and since we haven't covered many formulas anyway, we will ignore the option, and leave the dropdown as it is.

The dropdown that interests us more is the second one, shown in the screenshot above as "between". This is the first, and arguably most important part of our condition, because it sets the limits. Click on the dropdown to see the list of options that you have:

Most of the choices here are self-explanatory.

"Between" and "Not between" gives you two fields, where you enter both an upper limit and a lower limit. It doesn't matter what order you put in those numbers (ie. both "3 and -2" and "-2 and 3" are fine).

Another thing to note when working with "between" and "not between" is that the values you type are inclusive. This means when you say "between -2 and 3", a cell with the value 3 is considered to fit the condition.

For the rest of the comparisons, you can only enter one value.

"Equal To" and "Not equal to" works exactly as you would expect. The value in the cell must be exactly the same to be true or false respectively.

For the rest of the options, Excel will compare the cell value with your input value.

"Less than" and "greater than" works exactly as you would expect, but take note that if I say "less than 3", 3 is not counted as 3 is not less than 3! If you want the number 3 to count, then you have to use the next two options:

"Less than or equal to" and "Greater than or equal to" then allows a "Less than" or "greater than" comparison to also include the provided limit.

Once we've set up a condition, we then choose how cells that fit the condition should change. Click the "format" button, which would pop up a formatting dialog box which allows you to set the new formats.

So, what if you want to make multiple comparisons? You can. By clicking the button labelled "Add" at the bottom of the dialog box, you can specify up to three conditions. You can remove conditions by using the "Delete" button beside it.

However, note that, for any cell, only one condition can be shown at a time. This means if a cell value fulfills more than one condition, only the formatting for the top-most condition will show.

If you want to apply conditional formatting to multiple cells, you could select them manually and then open the conditional formatting dialog box, or you can also fill by dragging the edge as shown in the post Microsoft Excel: Dragging the edge.

So, how can this be applied in real-life situations? Let's walk through one perfect example. Let's say you're a teacher, with a marks list:

The first (and most classic thing to do) is to differentiate between passes and failures by marking the failures red. This can be done with the following conditional format setting:

This yields the following results:

Let's say we wanted to take this one step further. Let's say this teacher was really caring and wanted to give extra help to the students who scored worst - Scoring below 30. So we highlight these scores by specifying the following condition:

But wait. It didn't work. Do you know why? Remember that, if multiple conditions are true, only the topmost true formatting will apply? Since anything less than 30 is definitely less than 50, the condition to make the text red has already been applied, so the new condition will not apply.

Since we want the new condition to apply over the old one where appropriate, we must shift the condition to the top. Sadly, it seems that it can only be done manually. So, the dialog should look like this when we're done:

So now we can see the orange highlighting:

You should have no difficulty setting another condition now. Let's say our caring teacher wants to reward the top scorers (who scored 70 and above). We could easily add another condition like so:

Thus yielding these results:

Microsoft Excel - Dragging the edge

2008-11-17T09:48:00.002+08:00

Got to love the title =P Anyway, this post is the continuation of the previous post, Microsoft Excel Formulas. Even though this post isn't directly related to the formula system, what I will share with you here will be extremely useful especially when you are working with large lists of formulas.

Here's the simplest example. Let's say I wanted a column with digits 1 all the way through to 100. Well, I could type the numbers one through to a hundred manually, but you wouldn't want to do that, would you? Don't worry, Excel can do it for you!

Excel has a fill cell feature that would generate more numbers based on what was typed originally. So, to generate our numbers from 1 to 100, type the first two numbers like so:

The reason I asked you to type two numbers instead of just one is because Excel needs to know how the series of numbers progresses. If you wrote just "1", it could be "1,3,5,7...", or maybe "1,6,11,16...". Excel doesn't know for sure you're referring to "1,2,3...". So we tell it that our series starts from "1,2" so that Excel knows what you're referring to.

Alright, we've determined the start of our series, now all we need to do is to fill it down! Click the little black box at the bottom right corner of the selection, and drag it in the direction you want the series to go, like so:

As you drag, a tooltip should appear at the right side of your cursor, which tells you which number will be filled into the cell as you drag. When you release your mouse button, the selected region will be filled.

This function isn't only useful for filling numbers. When working with formulas, cell reference values can also be filled in a similar way.

You can also use the same method to fill a series of cells with the same value. Instead of specifying two values to start off with, just specify one. The same value will be filled all the way.

Microsoft Excel Formulas

2008-11-14T08:43:00.010+08:00

So, we all know what Microsoft Excel is - It's a program for you to draw tables, fill cells, and do calculations. But how?

This post marks the start of a series of Microsoft Excel-related posts. We'll cover the formula system first. This post will cover the basics of the forumla system, while later posts will cover certain more complex formulas in greater depth.

So let's start with an introduction to the formula system. At its simplest, you perform calculations within the same cell, using any of the basic operators (addition, subtraction, multiplication or division), or any of the other formulas.

You could then take this a step further by writing formulas that make reference to values in other cells. This then allows for another user to input some data, and your formula will automatically perform the calculations.

So how do you define a formula? Select the cell you want to put your formula in, click the formula bar near the top of the screen, and start off with an "equals" sign:

This equals sign tells the program that you intend to enter a formula in the cell, and thus, Excel will evaluate all cells starting with "=".

As a side note: What if you create a cell that starts with "=", but you did not intend to have a formula in there? All you have to do is to insert a single quotation mark ( ' ) all the way at the start. This tells Excel to display the cell contents exactly as it is, and not try to evaluate it even if there is a working formula in there. Here is an example:

If I put my favorite smiley into an excel cell, it would show up like this. (Notice the 'correct' value in the formula bar):

So, I shall insert an aprostophe at the beginning. Note the differences both in the formula bar, and the cell itself:

There you go, problem solved.

So, back to entering formulas. Let's start by working within one cell first. Let's say I wanted to add 15 and 12. I could then go to the cell I want to work on, and then enter the formula " =15+12 ", and press enter:

See what happens? The formula bar continues showing the formula, but the actual cell reflects the evaluated answer. What this means is that you can come back at any time to the original formula to edit it - Extremely convenient.

We could do the same for subtraction (using the " - " symbol), multiplication (using the " * " symbol), and division (using the "/" symbol). Side note: If you're confused as to which slash to use, it is the one you find on the numeric section of your keyboard.

So here's subtraction, multiplication, and division, all in one graphic:

Alright! Let's take our knowledge one step further now. Let's try to reference another cell in our formula.

Firstly, the very basic. All we're gonna do to start off with, is to simply copy the exact value of another cell. Since we're using multiple cells now, I will label it as in the following diagram. The green cell is the input. This is where the user can modify the value. The yellow cell is the output. This is the cell where we will enter the formula. The value of the output cell will change according to the user's input value, and should not be changed by the user:

Every cell has a unique reference ID. This value is a combination of the column and row values. The reference value of any cell can be seen by selecting it, and looking to the far left of the formula bar:

When we want to make reference to other cells in a formula, this is how we identify the cell in question.

So let us now copy the value in the cell. This is easy. Simply go to the output cell, and enter "=C3". Alternatively, you can also simply click on the cell you want to refer to, and its reference value will be input for you (make sure you've entered the "=" at the start of the formula bar first). This means exactly what you'd expect: "The value of this cell is equal to the value of cell C3":

We see now that the output is zero. Though not strictly correct, the formula works with numerical values (except otherwise stated). So since the input cell is empty, the output cell treats it as a zero. Let's now go ahead and modify the input cell and see what happens:

See? The first example should be self-explanatory. You enter "3" under input, and the output field says "3". No surprises here.

We stretch the formula a little by using a string of letters in the second example. And it works. The "hello" in the input cell is copied exactly as it is, to the output cell.

A small amount of complexity creeps into our third example. The value of our input cell is now a formula instead. However, Excel handles it just fine. It picks up the final, evaluated answer, and copies that to the output cell.

Alright! We're almost done here. Here's a little fun activity for you to try yourself: Make an addition formula. Ask the user for two pieces of numeric data, and add them together. The end result could look a little like this:

And with values,

There you have it! More to come on this topic!

Update
This post is meant to be the start of a series of posts. These related posts will be listed below:
Microsoft Excel - Dragging the edge: A tutorial on filling cells
Microsoft Excel - Conditional Formatting: How to automatically format cells based on its value
The IF function in Microsoft Excel: Making comparisons using the IF function
Microsoft Excel - The Data Filter: Describes the autofilter function which allows you to sort and filter pages

Equalizers (Take 2)

2008-11-10T16:47:00.010+08:00

Exactly a year ago, I once wrote a short post about Graphic Equalizers, with some instructions about how to set them, but it wasn't very clear. So here is an in-depth post about equalizers! This post will first try to take you through the basic concepts, after which we will conisder various settings and see their effects.

First of all, what the hell am I on about?

When I speak of equalizers, I am referring to a device that modifies sound that passes through it. How this modification takes place, and to what extent, can be set by the user.

An equalizer can take the form of a set of sliders, which usually look like this:

Sorry for the badly blurred photo! In this post, I will represent these sort of equalizers with a diagram like this one:

The blue rectangles will represent the slider position, while the horizontal grey line will represent the 'zero' position, which is right in the middle.

Now, equalizers could also take on a knob form:

(I've relabeled the knobs so the words are clearer)

Alright, so what exactly do equalizers do? Basically, an equalizer splits sound into a number of frequency bands. (Before we continue, recall that sound is produced by air molecules moving back and forth. The frequency is a measure of how many times a particle moves back and forth in a second).

A low frequency of vibration creates a low-pitched sound. Conversely, a high frequency creates a high-pitched sound. Thus, what an equalizer does is that it splits incoming signal into small bands, so that you can control the volume of different frequencies individually, without affecting the others.

So, how is this useful? For a consumer, this may mean a number of things. Usually, it's just to enhance your music-listening experience. What does this mean? Perhaps you love the bass kicks, so you bring up the bass. Or perhaps you want to hear your favorite singer's voice a little clearer, so you bring up the mid-range.

There may be other reasons, of course. Perhaps you're using a pair of bad speakers, through which you could hardly hear any of the higher sounds. You could then increase the high frequency bands.

In a professional context, this may mean even more things. Perhaps, during a radio broadcast, the operater finds that a particular person's enunciation isn't very good, and he isn't saying all that "s" sounds (which are high-pitched) very clearly. So the operator could boost the high frequency range for the particular person's microphone.

Or perhaps a DJ, in the mix, finds that two songs are mixed perfectly together, but maybe the bass drums from each song don't work well together. He could thus turn down the bass on one of the two tracks (DJ Mixers are more powerful in the sense that a frequency band can be completely removed - Something you don't expect your home stereo to do!), so that only the bass drums from one track can be heard.

Very quickly, how does an equalizer work? To put it simply, the main thing behind equalizers are band-pass filters. These are, in turn, made of pairs of low-pass filters and high-pass filters. Low pass filters only allow sound below a certain frequency to be heard. High pass filters only allow sound above a certain frequency to be heard.

When used in conjunction, the frequency cutoff for the high-pass filter forms the lower limit of the band, while the cutoff for the low-pass filter creates the upper limit. This means:

Alright, on to setting equalizers. Please remember that how it is done varies from track to track, but here are some general ideas you could use.

First, here are some things you should not do.

Increasing everything to the max is simply not the right thing to do. Since the different bands are not amplfied differently, there will be no difference in tone overall. What this does is simply give the track a volume boost. Now, this may not sound like it's bad, but in truth it is, because it is likely to lead to distortion! This may mean damage to your equipment, but at the very least, the sound is not going to come out good.

I'm not saying that this is a complete no-no, but it's not going to be very helpful - A particular band is boosted, but its immediate counterparts are surpressed. As a result, the effect is not prominent at all.

So, here is what I think is the correct way:

Let's say I wanted to boost just bass. This would be how I do it.

Let's take a look at some of the things I've done here:

1) Smooth Curve
To get the maximum increase in bass, it would be good to boost all bass-related regions. However, we do not want to boost too many frequencies. Thus, I would get the best results by boosting all bass-related regions, but to a lesser and lesser degree as I move away from the bass-related regions.

2) Max It
Don't be afraid of moving a slider too far, but that's provided you follow the thrid tip...

3) Balance Up
See, even though I only wanted a bass boost, I didn't only boost the bass: I also reduced the treble. Remember that, if we make a significant overall increase, distortion will occur. Thus, when we increase something, we must also decrease something to counter-balance the effect of the increase.

So that's the general idea.

Here are one common setting that you could consider.

This is a pretty generic (and almost always useful!) setting. Why? Well, we all love bass. At least, most people do. Hence, we boost it. Now, most speakers are more capable of handling mid-range than the extreme ends. So, it's okay to bring it down a little. As mentioned, most speakers aren't as good reproducing frequencies at the extreme ends. Thus, we would bring up the treble a little.

So, there you have it - The end of an extremely long post. I sincerely hope you've learnt something. Any comments or questions, feel free to add a comment!

Did you know? #45

2008-11-09T15:08:00.002+08:00

Did you know...

That it is almost always impossible to copy content out of a password field? This is an obvious security measure. Meaning that if you type your password in a password field and leave your computer, somebody coming along couldn't copy and paste your password to look at it.

Try it yourself. Underneath this line is a password field. Try to type something in there, and try to copy and paste that into notepad. It won't work:

Did you Know? #44

2008-11-08T19:59:00.002+08:00

Did you know...

About the "invert selection" feature?

Let's say you are in a folder, and you want to select most (but not all) files in there. There are three ways you can do that:

1) Select every file you want individually (extremely time-consuming)
2) Select all, then deselect the file you don't want (fast)

Another way, equally fast as (2), is:

3) Select the files you don't want, and invert the selection.

This is how you can do it in Windows Explorer. First, select the files you eventually want to be deselected. Then, go to the menu bar, click "Edit -> Invert Selection". What this does is, files that were selected become deselected, and vice versa.

Soft Focus

2008-11-06T20:10:00.003+08:00

In photography, soft focus is a special effect used to 'soften' the edges of objects in a photograph. Through post-processing, you can achieve similar effects.

Here is an original photo. We will work towards adding a soft focus to it:

The first thing you need, is a photo editing program that allows the use of multiple layers, whereby each layer has its own transparency control. This shouldn't be a problem as it is a rather common feature.

Now, make two duplicate layers with the same photo. Do not shift the layers - Make sure they superimpose exactly.

Pick the uppermost layer, and apply a blur to it. For this, I recommend Gaussian Blur. The result would look something like this:

Now pick the blurred layer, and set its opacity to approximately 50%. What should happen now is, the sharp image and the blurred one are blended together, creating the soft focus effect!

Image Editing - Make a sunrise/sunset stand out

2008-11-06T19:36:00.003+08:00

So you've taken a photo of that beautiful sunset, brought it home, and loaded it on your computer, only to find that it looks nothing like what you've seen, and the sun has long gone down. What do you do?

Well, as a last resort, you could always break out the image editing program. In this post, I'll show you what you can do.

Here's a picture I snapped out of a window of the sunset (5-Nov-08) with my camera phone. No editing has been done to it:

Well, that's not too bad, is it? But we can make it better. First, use the old trick that I've shared with you here before. Remember what it is? If you've forgotten, it's "Brightness down, Contrast up". Let's pop the photo into and image editing program and see how that helps:

Ooh, the clouds are jumping right out! Even though "Brightness down, contrast up" is a powerful technique, it could be overdone. Here is what would happen if you increased the contrast too far:

Well, it's not bad, actually. It'll make a good special effects shot. But let's say we don't want it to look like an explosion just happened, so let's undo it.

The actual sky that day had a richer tone of color. There are two ways in which we could create a similar kind of "epic sunset" scene.

First, we could increase the saturation of the image. This basically means that all color tones are being increased in intensity. Increasing the saturation on our sunset has this effect:

Alternatively, we could instead increase the contrast of just the red channel (I picked red because that's the color that would enhance a sunset).

The best solution, however, is to get a balance between the two effects mentioned above. The next picture makes use of both the effects:

Hmm... Does the picture look a little strange? In fact, the two color-enhancing methods outlined above also have the nasty side-effect of highlighting the blue in the picture! Let's tone down the blue a little by reducing the brightness of the blue channel:

Hmm... The sky looks green! We could remove the green by increasing the contrast for the green channel. This is done instead of bringing down the green brightness, because doing so would just cause the image to turn reddish (we've turned down the blue and the green, what remains? red of course!)

So there it is. It's a much more epic-looking sunset than what you've gotten off your camera.

Page Breaks

2008-10-28T18:48:00.003+08:00

Let's say you're editing a document with Microsoft Word. Let's say now that you've written halfway through the page, and you want to continue writing on the next page, leaving empty space in between. Meaning...

The obvious solution would be to press the enter button repeatedly, creating many new lines until you overflow to the next page. This, however creates another problem.

See? When new lines are added at the top, the bottom line gets pushed down. You could, of course, delete the extra space, but that's never as good as using the proper solution, right?

Microsoft Word has a feature called Page Break. This basically does what is described above: You jump to the next page immediately, except that you do not create many lines in between. You jump straight there, leaving flexible space that can be filled later, while not affecting text on the next page (unless your first page overflows, of course).

So, how do you do it? To insert a page break, press Ctrl-Enter. You will jump immediately to the next page. If you go back to edit the gap, it will not affect the next page.

It's the simple things that matter, hunh? =D

(Edited on 3-Dec-08: The graphics were swapped! Silly me.)

DVD Region

2008-10-25T15:14:00.023+08:00

Ever imported a DVD from overseas, put it in your DVD player, and find that it doesn't play? Or maybe you're even getting some error message that says you're in the wrong region. What does that mean?

DVD video discs can actually be locked by a region code. This then limits the disc to being playable only in certain DVD players.

For example, DVDs bought in the United States are encoded Region 1. At the same time, DVD players sold in the United States are designed to play only Region 1 DVDs, while rejecting DVDs from other regions. Thus, with this, DVDs bought in the United States will only play in the United States.

Here is the list of Region Codes and their respective locations, taken off Wikipedia:

Region Code	Actual Region
0	Informal, meaning 'Worldwide' - Region Zero discs play in all players
1	Canada, United States; U.S. territories; Bermuda
2	Western and Central Europe; Western Asia; Egypt, Japan, South Africa, Swaziland; British overseas territories, French overseas territories
3	Southeast Asia; South Korea; Non-mainland China (Hong Kong)
4	Oceania; Central and South America; Caribbean; Mexico
5	Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Africa, Central and South Asia, Mongolia, North Korea.
6	Mainland China, Hong Kong
7	Reserved
8	International venues such as aircraft, cruise ships, etc.
ALL	Region ALL discs are playable in all DVD Players

If you're importing a DVD, and want to have minimal hassle with your DVD player, make sure you know that DVD Region Code of your DVD player. You can find that on the unit itself, and usually also in the manual and the box.

If you're buying a DVD locally, 99.9% of the time, the region code will match. (That is provided you're not buying it second hand - Who knows where the previous owner got it from? But DVDs will be labelled, so keep your eyes open.)

If you really want to bypass that limitation, you actually can. Pop it into your computer - Most video players actually ignore the region code, and go straight to playing the video.

Thumbs it down... Further!

2008-10-24T17:27:00.002+08:00

YouTube has a comments voting feature - You can give comments a thumbs up or a thumbs down depending on whether the comment is good or bad (this feature is only open to registered users). Every comment has a "rating", and this number increases when a thumbsup is clicked, and decreases with every thumbsdown.

When a comment has been thumbed down enough (this value depends on your settings, but is usually -5), the comment doesn't show up anymore. It gets hidden. However, you can still unhide it to read it.

What if you come across a really bad comment that you have unhidden, and want to thumbs it down further? You will find that, at this stage, you cannot do that anymore. How do you get around this? The solution is pretty simple.

Under the video window, you should see a dropdown that looks like the following. Click it and make the change as shown in the picture:

And voila. None of the comments will be hidden anymore, allowing you to further thumbs it down!

Inkjet vs Laser

2008-10-20T18:54:00.002+08:00

There are two kinds of printers in common use today: Inkjet printers, commonly found in homes (chances are, if you have one, it's probably inkjet), and laser printers, usually found in offices and schools.

What's the difference? Inkjet printers basically work exactly as their name implies. Print catridges 'fire' jets of ink (this can be done either through electrical, or thermal means), coloring the paper as it comes along.

Laser printers, on the other hand, are slightly more complex. First, a print drum is electrically charged. If this drum passes over particles of toner (powdery bits of ink - yes, solid, not liquid), the charged portions will pick up the toner.

But we don't want to pick up all the toner, because all you'd get is a completely black image. That's where the laser comes in. The laser will shine at parts of the drum where color is not required. Photoconductivity (a process whereby light causes some matter to become more conductive) will then occur, causing those places to lose their charge. Thus, they are not able to pick up toner particles. This creates the variations in color that eventually form the final image.

The little bits of toner are deposited onto the paper, and are 'stuck' to the paper by heat - A process called fusion. The toner particles 'melt onto' the paper, thus creating the image.

So now you know the difference between how each printer works on the inside, but then, what is the difference with regard to performance?

Simply this: Because of the way laser printers work, they print very quickly. In an inkjet printer, the print head needs to move around, alternately pouring ink onto the paper. A laser printer, on the other hand simply shines light (practically no moving parts, except a mirror which deflects the laser across the drum).

In addition to that, because of the way laser printers operate, they usually print in black and white - Not that color laser printers are not available: They do, in fact, exist. However, because of the way they work, color laser printers have to print in multiple passes - Meaning that the colors have to be printed separately. There is no such problem in inkjet printers - All the colors can be deposited at the same time.

Another difference is, surprisingly, pollution. As you now know, toner is actually little particles of ink, resembling powder. In the printing process, some of it is likely to fly out and float around. However, there is some evidence to show that inkjet printers are not exempt from this.

Finally, a rather significant difference to most of us - Is the price. The intricate structure of the laser printer, plus its obvious advantages of speed, render it more expensive than its inkjet counterpart.

Bad Fonts

2008-10-18T19:25:00.001+08:00

Ever prepared a presentation at home, and then brought it to work or school, only to find that something has gone wrong, and now everything has gone awry?

It's a major problem. Things go out of alignment, text that fit in a text box now overflows and wraps to the next line. In short, everything simply turns ugly.

The answer is simple. You used a font at home that isn't installed on the computer at work or school. The computer obviously cannot display in the font that is not available, and thus, it would simply use another font as a replacement. This font may not have similar properties to the font you had originally used, thus causing problems in alignments.

The solution? Use common fonts. You can expect stuff like Arial, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Tahoma, Times New Roman and Verdana to be present on any Windows computer.

And if you really love that fanciful font? It is actually possible to copy the font out of your home computer, and into the computer at your school or workplace. Please bear in mind that doing so is not always legal since some fonts have to be paid for! (Even if you didn't pay for them since they were bundled with your PC, it doesn't mean they are not paid fonts!)

How do you copy out a font? That's simple.

1. Open control panel
2. Go to the 'fonts' page
3. Look for the font you want to copy, and copy it.
4. Paste it onto a folder in a flash drive.
5. Bring your folder to your school or workplace computer
6. Copy the font from your flash drive to the 'fonts' folder of the computer.

And that's it.

Trick your camera #2!

2008-10-12T15:26:00.004+08:00

Yeah, it's the second part of trick your camera!

In the previous "trick your camera", I showed you how you could make your phone camera take pictures brighter by blocking the lens with your finger, either partially or completely. I also showed you how you could acheive a different effect by varying the time between lifting your finger and taking the photo.

This post goes along the same lines - I will show you a 'physical' method to vary the White Balance of your phone camera.

Firstly, what is white balance? I have covered this in detail before in an earlier post, appropriately titled White Balance, posted in December 2007. But, in breif, white balance refers to what color your camera sees to be white.

Such a feature needs to be present because of color cast, which is what happens when light gets colored by the objects around your subject, thus coloring the subject when this light hits it.

In the aforementioned post, I quoted a white horse under a tree as an example. Light hits the leaves, gets colored green, and then bounces off and hits the horse, thus causing the horse to turn green as well.

This is the problem in which the white balance feature tries to correct. It does so by first trying to identify which color is supposed to be white, and then reducing a particular color so that the incorrectly colored section turns white.

This post will show you how you can change the color of the photo by exploiting this feature. Basically, the idea is to trick the camera into thinking that a particular color is white, thus making it change the color of the picture. At this state, we take a photo, creating an effect shot.

To do this, you will need some evenly colored medium. Many things fit this category - Colored papers, plain walls, even rubik's cubes.

Now, point the camera at the surface and give it some time to make appropriate corrections. When is that? Basically, the color would start off looking quite vivid, like so:

Let your camera stare at it for a while, and it should attempt to tone down the color. In this case, the camera would acheive the affect by reducing blue. The result should look like this:

Ignoring the differences in brightness, can you see that the latter picture has much less blue in it as compared to the previous one? The camera has toned down the 'blue-ness' of the image.

You should be able to experience the same effect with any color. In the next set of images, I used green instead of blue. (I've got lots of blue and green paper lying around, since I was playing with chroma keying a few weeks ago).

Before white balance correction:

After white balance correction:

Anyway, after the color correction has taken place, you can now point your camera at the subject, and take a photo. Similarly to the previous "Trick your camera" post, you can vary the amount of time between removing your camera from the colored surface and taking the photo. Read on for an example.

Here's my homework, taken firstly without any tricks whatsoever.

Since I'm putting a piece of paper in front of the lens, I will also get changes in exposure, as described in the earlier "Trick your camera" post. Here is a shot with only an exposure change.

And now, here's what the white balance trick will do. A piece of blue paper was used, and a reasonable delay was given, thus, the effect is just right:

If you overdo the effect, the color difference may appear a little too pronounced:

Alternatively, if you give it too much delay, the color change will be very subtle. It's not a bad effect, though - It won't ruin the shot, at least not as badly as overdoing it.

You can try varying the effect further by using a slightly different shade of color, or by covering the lens partially. This one is acheived by covering the lens about three-quarters of the way.

Different colored media will shade the photograph differently. At the same time, colored shades with similar colors will not exhibit much difference. For the following shots, I picked up a rubik's cube (the only colorful thing in reach!) for the job.

Notice that the following images are all shaded blue:

The first image used the red side of the cube. The second used yellow, and the third used orange. All three images turned blue because the three colors were all highest in red, and lowest in blue. Thus, red was reduced, and little changes were made to blue.

For the top image, which used pure red, most of the green remained, causing the image to turn a shade of cyan (a mixture of blue and green). On the other hand, there is a lot of green in yellow, and thus, for the second image, much of green has been reduced, leaving only pure blue behind. The last image then, is an intermediate stage between the first two.

Then, I turned to the green face and used that. Of course, if you've been following so far, you wouldn't have problems guessing what color the image would come out in:

Since green is reduced, purple (a mix of red and blue) remains.

So there you have it!

Did you know? #43

2008-10-11T16:28:00.003+08:00

Did you know...

That, if you use a USB mouse or keyboard, your system will be theoretically slower than if you used a PS/2 mouse or keyboard?

Why is this so? The reason, simply put, is how each input method is implemented. With all USB input devices, the input data needs to be processed by the processor. This means that you are using up a small proportion of your processing power (which is normally spent on running programs) to decode input from your mouse and keyboard.

There is no such problem when using PS/2 devices because all input data is processed by hardware - No need to bother your processor.

Notice my emphasis on the word "theoretically" - practically, you should experience no difference, because how much processing power can a mouse or keyboard spend?

Beep beep beep!

2008-10-09T17:03:00.002+08:00

Your system slows down, or gets completely unresponsive, and you decide to be impatient, so you hammer away at the keys on your keyboard, or drag the mouse about like a madman. The next thing you know, your computer is issuing a series of beeps or clicks, but remains as unresponsive as it was. What is going on?

Well, simply put, it is a matter with the input buffer.

In computing, the term buffer refers to some temporary memory. For input from mouses and keyboards, the input information first enters the input buffer. The data only gets processed when your processor is ready. How does the buffer know the processor is ready? Why, the processor tells it, of course!

Now, let's say a program has crashed somewhere, and is sucking up all of your processor's processing power. Let's say, now, at this point of time, you are mashing on your keyboard. The input data goes to the buffer. But because your processor is tied up, it can't tell the buffer that it's ready to process the data. Thus, the data stays in the buffer.

The buffer is memory, and is definitely limited. If you continue smashing away on your keyboard, more data enters the buffer, and none goes out. Obviously, your buffer eventually gets full.

When the buffer is full, the little beep or click will be produced by the motherboard, as a warning that the buffer is full, and whatever input you're providing is no longer being accepted by the system.

Quick Definition #34

2008-10-08T20:56:00.003+08:00

The term sticky is most commonly seen on forums and folders in your E-Mail (eg Inbox). In these lists, newest items will appear at the top of the list, while older items get 'pushed' towards the bottom of the page.

This behavior can be changed. If you prefer a particular message or thread to remain at the top, you can use the sticky function to 'stick' it to the top of the list.

Cancelling and Speed

2008-10-04T10:09:00.002+08:00

Yes, I'm still using confusing post titles =D

The issue here is this: Let's say we're deleting a bunch of files, and halfway through the processing, we decide to cancel the process, so we click on the "Cancel" button. However, the processing doesn't stop immediately. It takes a short while before the dialog box closes. Why is this so?

The answer is actually very simple. Your computer must finish what it is doing to the file it is working on, before it can close the dialog. That means, if your computer was deleting a file halfway, it couldn't just leave a half-deleted file there, could it? It must continue to spend some time to completely delete the file before stopping.

New Sidebar Widget Implemented

2008-09-30T22:20:00.003+08:00

It's about time I looked into the blog's navigation. Ha!

In the past, navigation was pretty limited - You could use the archives sidebar at the side to look through posts sorted by time. Alternatively, you could search for whatever you're interested in by using the search box at the top left corner of the screen.

These two features of course, remain where they are.

However, a new feature has been added. You can now view various categories of posts. If you were observant, you would notice that every post has been classified into various categories (you will see them at the end of every post) - You can now only view posts from a category you are interested in by clicking the category name in the sidebar on the left of the screen.

Hopefully this new feature would make navigation a little quicker and friendlier.

But I need readers' input on something: Right now, the categories section is placed above the original navigation section. I reasoned that this arrangement would be more practical, especially to the new reader. What do you think? Tell me in the comments.

Thanks for reading, and hopefully, responding.

Update (1 Oct 08): I have found a little error with the "Did You Know? Series" link, which has been fixed. In addition, clicking on any of the links now open only five of the latest posts, and not twenty as before.

Trick your camera!

2008-09-27T10:23:00.007+08:00

This trick works best for cell phone cameras that don't have exposure value settings. It's not the best thing in the world to do, but it can allow you to get the exposure right, and even do some cool tricks with it.

Before I begin, I'd like to acknowledge the web site where I first found out about this: http://www.everythingtreo.com/forum/treo-650/camera-exposure-control-on-the-treo-650-a-6971.html (July, 2006)

The web page above only deals with the Palm Treo 650, but this is such a generic trick that it can apply to almost any cell phone camera.

The idea is this: Let's say, in the photo you want to take, there is an extremely bright spot in a corner, such that your camera automatically compensates by darkening the entire picture. The problem - The rest of the picture becomes extremely dark, like so:

See? Because of my table lamp, the camera must darken the entire picture to prevent overexposure at the top-right corner. However, as a result, the "0612" on the wall (which, incidentally, are little wooden numbers usually used to number doors), gets underexposed.

Now watch - I am going to put my finger over the camera lens, such that I cover off the table lamp:

See? The remainder of the image has brightened up, because the camera no longer 'sees' a bright spot in the top-right corner. If I were to remove my finger quickly and take a shot, you'd find that you capture a brighter picture, because the exposure hasn't had time to change.

There you have it, basically. You can attempt special effects photos by changing the amount of time between removing your finger and taking the photo. You can also see some difference if you cover the entire lens, or just cover it partially.

This one is completely washed out. I took the shot almost immediately after removing my finger:

The next one is still extrememly over-exposed, but I did wait a little longer than the previous shot:

The next one could make an interesting special effects shot! I gave this one just a little bit more time:

Well, there you have it! Here are some more pictures with fun exposure tweaks.

Coming up, yet another photo of my table lamp, from a slightly different angle:

The next four pictures were taken in school, with and without exposure tweaks:

Extend a sound infinitely with Audacity

2008-09-26T20:08:00.003+08:00

This tutorial will show you how you can infinitely prolong a particular tone with the open-source audio editing software Audacity. This effect can be particularly amusing when used on human voice.

First, fire up the trusty ol' Audacity, and load up the sound file you want to edit. Now, go near the region where you want to extend, and zoom right in. You should now see something like this:

Now here's the trick: What you need to do is to identify one complete oscillation of the sound wave. Of course, unless we're dealing with a perfect machine-generated tone, don't expect the oscillations to be anywhere near perfect.

But look at this. Don't the four parts highlighted in different colors (labelled A to D), look very much alike?

Though not scientifically correct, they can be considered four oscillations of the same sound wave. So fire up the Selection Tool () and select one complete cycle of the 'wave'. If you have problems doing this, you can adopt the following method:

"Start from the lowest point, and end at the lowest point":

Now, you need to play this sound in a seamless loop first, to see if it sounds okay. Hold down the shift button, and you should notice that the play sign changes to the loop symbol:

Click on the loop button. You should now hear a single tone, being looped indefinitely! Fine-tune the boundaries if there is a need, and then you're ready to actually integrate that into your project.

We will be using the repeat effect to do this. First, you need to determine how long you want the sound to be. There is a mathematical way, and also a trial-and-error way. The latter would probably be faster, though a little less accurate.

The mathematical way works like this. The repeat effect merely creates copies of your selection, as many times as you ask for. This means that there is a simple formula relating the three variables:

final length = selection length x number of repeats

Do you know the final length? Well, definitely, because you'll have to decide on that. Then, do you know the selection length? Yes, too. After you've selected your single oscillation, refer to the bottom of the screen, which should look like this:

And the number of repeats? That's what you want to find out, to enter into the repeat dialog box, right? So rearrange the equation, and substitute the values to get the number of repeats:

number of repeats = final length ÷ selection length

But that's quite a hassle. Instead, you could also use trial-and-error. First, fire up the repeat effect:

This will open the repeat dialog box as shown below. Notice that the dialog will ask you for the number of repeats. Assuming you didn't calculate the exact amount, you can then vary the number of repeats, and the line "New Selection Length" will tell you the final length:

There you have it! It's a real cool effect, really worth trying.

Blurring and Sharpening

2008-09-25T21:23:00.002+08:00

In photography, images usually need to be sharp - Blurring is used as an effect. We know that, but what exactly does sharp and blur refer to? How can computer programs help in doing both?

First of all, let's look at the definition of each word. Here is a sharp picture of a sphere.

Now, here's the exact same sphere, except now it's blurred.

Let's compare the two pictures, and see if we can accurately define the definitions of the two words.

Blurring, in simple terms, refers to a situation where an image is not clearly defined - Especially edges. A sharp image must have reasonably distinct edges.

And that's exactly what your photo editing software tries to do with the sharpen function (more correctly known as Unsharp Masking, sometimes shortened to Unsharp Mask - We will come to the technical details regarding this method later). The sharpen function will seek out the edges, and increase the contrast at the edges so as to make the edge more distinct.

Blurring is easier to implement. At its simplest, the blur function would simply recolor every pixel with the average color of its neighboring pixels. This works because then the color surrounding the pixel will 'blend' with it.

So, how exactly does the Unsharp Mask feature work? The image you are working on is first duplicated. One of the two copies are blurred. Every pixel between the two images are then compared. If the difference is reasonably large (this value can usually be set), the difference between the images are taken at that pixel. This makes the image look sharper.

Quick Definition #33

2008-09-25T18:01:00.002+08:00

Ha, this post is pretty difficult to start. So, let's have it go like this: Have you ever heard of a fat application?

No. It has nothing to do with weight.

This term is actually programming-related, and yet, if you're a programmer, and not familiar with this term, it's not your fault since not too many programming languages actually give the programmers this option.

As you know, programs consist of program code. When this code is compiled, it can be run by a device, be it a computer, handheld, or mobile phone.

However, certain programming languages do not compile directly to an executable file. Instead, it is merely compiled to an intermediate stage, that cannot be run on its own, but still needs to be processed by an application that understands the programming language. This application is called a runtime library, which can be shortened to runtime.

So what happens if the programmer wants to distribute his code? He could do it in two ways. First, he could distribute his compiled program along with the runtime. This means that the user would have to install the two items to run the program.

The alternative way, would be to compile a Fat Application. This simply means that the runtime is compiled into the application itself. In other words, the runtime library and the application reside in the same file. This way, the user only deals with one program instead of two.

Each is useful in its own way. The latter provides the convinience of not having to install so many files, while the former helps if you have a lot of files needing the same runtime. By updating the runtime just once, all the programs get to use the updated libraries. This cannot be acheived if fat apps are used.

Looking at the Third Dimension

2008-09-22T20:58:00.005+08:00

(This post contains a number of graphics. Remember that all graphics can be enlarged by clicking on them)

In a 3D modelling/animation package, there are many ways you can look at your 3D scene.

Firstly, you can, of course, take a two-dimensional view. That means looking at your object from top-down, or from the side.

Then you can rotate the object at an angle, and see more than two dimensions at once. But there are actually two ways to display this view: An orthographic view, or a perspective view.

To let you understand each term, we'll need to compare how different each view appears to be.

First, the perspective view: It displays the object in a manner that is more realistic - More like how the object would look like in real life. Consider a cube. One look at the following picture, and you wouldn't doubt you're looking at a cube:

Now, consider the following. It is the exact same view, but this time in orthographic projection.

What? That's not a cube! It's a square! Perhaps this angle isn't clear enough. Let's rotate the cube a little, and see the effect in each projection.

Firstly, in perspective mode:

And now, the exact same view in orthographic projection:

Perhaps now, you'll see the difference.

The formal definition is such: With orthographic projection, parallel lines remain parallel. With perspective projection, all lines appear to tend towards a centre the further they get from the viewer.

Let's consider the orthographic view again. We know, of course, that in a cube, the lines marked in green in the following diagram are parallel:

Notice that in the orthographic projection, the lines remain parallel, exactly as the definition defines. Now let's look at the same lines in the perspective view. The two lines that were marked green in the previous picture have also been marked here.

See, the lines are no longer parallel. But that's not the only difference. Notice that the lines go closer to the centre of the image as they get further from the viewer. This is characteristic of the perspective projection. Notice that the same applies to every line.

The horizontal lines don't exhibit the same effect because, as you run through its length, the line doesn't go very much further away from the viewer, and thus the effect is less pronounced.

So why is there a need for two different types of views? Simply because the orthographic view is more correct in showing proportions and angles. If the 3D designer wanted to be precise, he had to use the orthographic view to make sure he was correct.

The perspective view exists simply because of realism. The orthographic view, though appearing more correct, looks nothing like real-world items. If a 3D designer wanted to render a work of art, he would choose the perspective view for more realism.

So there you have it. You are now able to look at three-dimensional objects in two different ways!

All about Widescreen

2008-09-17T10:56:00.004+08:00

Having caught a movie a week ago (for the first time in years!), I noticed that there is quite a bit of complicated terminology and complicated stuff associated with widescreen video. So, in this post, we'd take an overall view at widescreen technology.

First of all, the most fundamental - The difference between wide screens, and normal screens, is, of course, that the wide screen can display more information horizontally because it is wider. But how much wider?

To know that, we have to understand what is aspect ratio, and what it means.

Aspect ratio refers to the ratio of the screen's dimensions, the first set of digits being the breadth (horizontal length), and the second set referring to the height. Meaning that a screen as shown in the below diagram would have the aspect ratio of x:y.

(remember that you can enlarge any graphic by clicking on it)

In film and TV, there are two common aspect ratios - One for widescreen video, and the other for standard video. The aspect ratio for widescreen video is 16:9, whilst the aspect ratio for standard video is 4:3. Comparing graphically, the two aspect ratios would look somewhat like this:

This is, of course, the most logical way to implement widescreen, but I have heard of some complaints with certain games whereby the widescreen version actually showed less than the normal version.

How does that work out? The idea can thought of very simply as this. In the previous graphic, we 'cropped' a 4:3 screen out of a 16:9 screen. The alternative (and less logical way), was to actually 'crop' a small 16:9 screen out of a 4:3 screen, like so:

If we did that to a movie, graphic resolution would be lost, but the case in question was referring to a computer game. Since the graphics are rendered in real-time, all that is changed is the definition of the image size. Thus, only viewing range is lost, and not resolution.

Still, it's a bad idea - A widescreen image is supposed to show more than a normal display.

Alright, next up - How do widescreen images show on a screen with 4:3 aspect ratio?

The simplest and most common way to do this is to shrink the 16:9 image, and insert black bars at the top and bottom. This method is called letterboxing. It's probably the best method available, since it's not difficult to implement, and the entire widescreen image is preserved. The final image looks something like this:

Another method, which is slightly more complicated, ensures that the viewer using the 4:3 screen does not see black bars - Meaning that every pixel of his display is properly used.

This method is called Pan and Scan, and is rather difficult to implement. It works like this: An operator must go through the movie, and, at all points in the movie, define a 4:3-shaped region in the picture. The operator's job is to shift this region around all the time such that it captures the area onscreen with the most action.

Well, that's about all, but there's one term intimately associated with widescreen that I must cover. The term is "anamorphic widescreen".

On material that needs to present widescreen data, but cannot actually provide the necessary resolution, it is possible to 'squash' a widescreen image to fit into the 4:3 aspect ratio. During playback, this 4:3 image must be stretched back to its 16:9 state. Consider the following diagram:

The term "anamorphic" came from an early filming technique, which uses an anamorphic lens to optically squash the image. These two methods, though similar in result, are completely unrelated.

More RAM or better processor?

2008-09-16T17:27:00.002+08:00

We've heard that increasing RAM would increase system speed, while at the same time we know that system speed is directly affected by the speed of your processor. So the question is - Which one to upgrade when things get slow?

To answer that question better, let us consider the two things separately first.

RAM, or Random Access Memory, is basically free memory used by running programs. Every program requires a little memory to run. If the program works with files on your computer, it'll need even more memory. But don't mix this up with hard disk memory. While they are indeed both called memory, RAM space is temporary storage. When you switch your computer off, RAM is wiped out.

So why does RAM speed up access? Simply because files on your hard disk take a longer time to read than files on RAM. Why? Because the hard disk is mechanical, and to get to a file it needs to first spin around to the correct position, and then let the arm pass over the data to pick it up. On RAM, both storage and access is electrical.

So, programs that need to work fast will first need to load the file you're working with onto the RAM. It can then quickly access any part of the file that you may ask for.

The processor does exactly what it's supposed to do - Process stuff and make calculations. How fast your processor performs these actions is dependant on the clock speed of the motherboard. Every basic instruction is executed in one clock cycle (which takes nanoseconds) from start to finish. Obviously, the faster the clock speed, the quicker your processor can process data.

So the question is, which to upgrade? But wait, before we get there, we must also consider what causes slowness.

First, a possible lack of RAM - It is possible that, when a program wants to load information to RAM, it finds that there isn't enough RAM to load up the file you're running. As a result, it uses hard disk space to hold that data. Of course, it takes longer to read off the hard drive, and as a result, slowness is expected.

So alright, in such cases, it is indeed a good solution to increase the amount of RAM available to the system.

But let's say we increased RAM to the extent that it is no longer a direct factor leading to slowness. So what's the remaining limiting factor? - The processor, isn't it? (Of course, we're ignoring some other factors such as hard disk capacity so that we can focus on the two major factors relevant to this post - RAM and processor).

You see, the slower of the two is now the processor, not the RAM. Even if you have all the RAM in the world, your processor cannot handle such a large volume of data - Meaning that, at this stage, no matter how much you increased your RAM, it's not going to have any effect on your computer's speed.

Depending on what kind of user you are, you may have already reached such a state. Let's say you're the typical office worker, who doesn't do anything other than word processing and E-Mail, why would you need two gigabytes of RAM? You probably wouldn't be dealing with a file anywhere as large.

On the other hand, if you're a serious gamer, or a graphics artist, make sure you have enough RAM.

At the end of the day, it's how much you use that matters. Make sure you're aware of your usage habits, and, if you need an upgrade, you know what to do.

Chroma Key

2008-09-15T18:40:00.002+08:00

About half a year ago or so, I wrote Mattes and Keys, a post describing some different post-production options. Today, I have put Chroma Keys to practical use, and come up with a video. It's not the best video in the world, but it was fun putting it together.

Basically, the method I used was the Chroma Key, which removes all of a particular color from an image. The color I chose in this scene was blue. Notice how most of the bluish parts in the scene were also affected by artifacts.

This video wasn't very nice mainly because of the low resolution of my camera (I used a cell phone camera). The automatic exposure compensation (which apparently cannot be adjusted) also posed a problem, since the same shade of color would appear at different brightnesses at different times.

Like I said, it was fun - Far from perfect, but really nice to try.

Post #200!

2008-09-15T14:13:00.004+08:00

Brett Winn from the educational video channel "WhatYouOughtToKnow" on YouTube once said that "Every podcast just about has a hundred shows. But two hundred - That's something."

And it is! We've just celebrated the 1st anniversary about a month ago, so I won't bore you with another teary speech =P

Anyways, I just wanna thank readers for their consistency. Thanks to everyone who's left comments (even the spam comments - At least my blog is noticeable enough for spammers to turn up).

Still the same as in the past, please continue reading, and if you like this place, please advertise for me! If you are a member of any forums, etc, you can paste the following code into your signature box. This will produce the Digital Ramblings header graphic, linked such that the user can click on the image to get here:

[url=http://digitalramblings-0612.blogspot.com/][IMG]http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h89/lcc0612/DRLogo.jpg[/IMG][/url]

Please help me advertise. Hopefully this place will get more readers, so that I'd get more feedback, and then I can work towards readers' needs.

Did you know? #42

2008-09-15T14:10:00.002+08:00

Did you know...

That your computer continues to consume electricity even when it's switched off?

You may have shut down your computer, and the screen appears blank, the power light is off, and the hard disk isn't working. However, electricity still enters the Power Unit as long as you didn't switch it off at the mains.

This means that a small amount of energy is wasted all the time, powering up nothing. Plus, since usage equates to wear and tear, leaving the power on could also mean shortening the life of the power unit.

So whenever you're not using your computer, shut it down safely, and switch off the mains plug.

Making Instrumentals from Songs

2008-09-14T16:28:00.004+08:00

In this post, we're going to cover a simple trick that, on some occasions, can be used to create an instrumental track out of a normal song. (Remember that you can click on any image to enlarge it!)

Firstly, an instrumental is basically a song without vocals. This means that the percussion, melody, etc remains intact, and only the singing voice is removed. With this method, background vocals may be retained.

Now let's cover how to do this using Audacity. I will explain how and why it works, as well as how and why it won't work in other situations.

0. Choose the track, making sure it is a stereo track. If it's not stereo, this method won't work. If it is, this method may work. Your screen should now look something like this:

1. Split up the stereo track:

2. When you've done that, convert each track to a mono track.

3. Pick one of the tracks and invert it.

4. Now play it back. If you hear a rough instrumental version of the track, all is well. If you don't, there's one of two possibilities: 1) You followed the instructions wrongly (not very likely!), or 2) The track isn't good for this kind of editing.

Alright, so how does this work?

First, you need a stereo track. At the same time, the track must have vocals panned to the centre (meaning it's equally loud on both the left and right channels - A sensible thing to do anyway), and instruments generally panned to the left and right.

The next thing we need to do, is to let the vocals cancel each other out. Cancellation happens when a sound wave and its exact inverse are summed together, like so:

It's almost like adding a number to its negative counterpart, eg 5 + (-5), thus creating zero. This means that any sound wave summed with its inverse will produce absolute silence.

Let's get back to making instrumentals. Remember that the vocals must be panned to the centre? This means that they are equally loud on both sides. This means that when I take the inverse of one of the channels, and then sum the two, anything panned to the centre will be completely removed.

The good news is, vocals would be removed. The bad news is, anything else panned to the centre will also be gone. This means stuff like percussion is likely to be removed.

When does this not work? A number of situations:

1. A mono track
Since in a mono track, the left and the right channels are EXACTLY the same, they'd cancel each other out fully, so you'll get silence.

2. Tracks with too much stuff panned to the centre
Some stereo tracks have most instruments panned to the centre. This means that when you're done with this, you're gonna hear very little - Not very useful.

3. Tracks with vocals not panned to the centre
Does this happen very often? I don't think so. Either way, anything that's not panned to the centre will remain. The further away something is panned from the centre, the louder it would be, meaning that you won't get an instrumental.

Well, that's it! This method is definitely not foolproof, and the quality you get out of it isn't gonna be very good either - Which means this method is hardly helpful, but it's fun.

Clipping in Audio

2008-09-14T11:28:00.003+08:00

We've occasionally heard of the term "Clipping" when used with regard to audio. What exactly does that mean?

First, let's just look at the word "Clipping" alone. It sounds as though something is getting cut off. And that is exactly the case.

Remember that sounds can be represented by waveforms. Your computer cannot simply 'store a waveform'. Instead, it takes samples, or little points of the original waveform, and stores those points as numerical values. During playback, these points are joined together to recreate a waveform, which is played through to your speakers. (For details on this, refer to my older post Those squiggly lines (Sound Waves))

Because computer memory is pretty fixed, every value stored is limited in value. In true computing terms, this means that, if a value were to be stored as an unsigned byte, it must be within the range 0 to 255 (more on this in a later post), but let's not complicate life with these details right now. Let us instead think of the range as -1 to 1 like so (look at the numbers on the left):

Now what happens if I were to amplify the sound? To put it simply, amplification refers to a vertical stretch (more on that in the post How loud is your music?). So what happens when sound is amplified beyond the range of -1 to +1? Since there is no way to save a number beyond the range, it must be cut to the largest possible number in the range - In other words, clipped.

So let's try to amplify the wave we've seen earlier, and watch the effect.

Can you see how most of the wave has hit the 'ceiling'? Let's now zoom in on a small region of the wave and take a look.

See? Many parts of the wave have been 'flattened' against the 'floor' and the 'ceiling', when it was supposed to be curved. This phenomena is called clipping, also known as distortion.

This is the interesting part. We can actually 'see' the clipping happening because we're working with the digital representation, and the program simply cannot save numbers that are out of range. Thus, the program is 'forced' to clip the audio.

If we're dealing with analog signals, coming from an audio source that does not automatically clip signals, it is indeed possible to put too much signal into the audio cable. This could possibly cause damage to other devices plugged to the audio signal, because too much power is being put into the circuitry.

That's why, even though clipping results in distortion, it is actually a better idea than putting an unclipped signal through your speaker or other devices.

Jumpers

2008-09-14T10:59:00.002+08:00

Once again, we touch on a little bit of Computing history.

In the past, certain settings in Computers and other electronics devices such as VCRs were not set through menus, but were instead set manually on the circuit board themselves.

Basically the idea is such: There are two rows of exposed pins which are not in electrical contact. A jumper is simply a little block of plastic that slides over two of the pins to short them together. The circuit board then determines what setting you've chosen by checking which pins are shorted.

Sadly, I do not have any photographs to demonstrate this, so you'll have to do with 3D renders.

As you can see, the exposed contacts stick out of the circuit board. The jumper block just sits on the jumpers like this:

The jumper block simply contains metallic contacts inside, providing electrical conductivity between the two pins.

So why are jumpers history? The answer is simple - They simply weren't user-friendly. Imagine having to open up your computer just to change a setting!

That's not to say jumpers aren't used today at all. Some places, where settings aren't frequently changed, or need not be changed by a user, jumpers may still be used.

Jumpers, being a physical setting, has the advantage of permanance. Settings changed on your computer are saved in memory, meaning that if this memory was lost for some reason or another, the setting would be lost too. There is no such risk with a jumper.

So there you have it! Sorry for the bad graphics (they aren't very accurate representations).

Lighting Quick-fix for Blender

2008-09-11T17:02:00.004+08:00

This post will describe a quick fix used for lighting in Blender. Please bear in mind that this little trick is used by lazy people like me. It's not an elegant solution, and creates a set of problems of its own. But if you really don't care, and just want a quick fix, this is for you.

I'm not sure when exactly you'll need this. I used it once when I tried to create lighting patterns coming through a papered door. Light must still pass through the papered door, but to an extent less than that of where there was no obstruction. This is the final result:

See? The light is somewhat filtered by the translucent paper. Where there is no obstruction (the opening at the centre), light shines in brightly.

First, understand that Blender creates shadows using two different methods - Shadow Buffers, and Ray Tracing. For any material, you can turn the options on or off separately.

So the idea is simply this. On the other side of the doors, there are two lights. Each light casts a different type of shadow - One with shadow buffers, and the other one with raytraced shadows.

The materials were set up as such: The wooden grille of the door responds to both kind of shadows. This means that it would cast shadows for both the lights. There is nothing new in this setting - It is the default setting.

For the translucent paper, it was set up to respond only to Raytraced shadows, and not shadow buffers. This means that the light casting shadows using shadow buffers will think that there is no material there - In other words casting no shadow at all.

The raytraced light, on the other hand will cast a shadow. As a result, a shadow is casted, but the shadow is not as strong as the shadow cast by the grille since some light still goes through.

So how did I turn off shadow buffers? Here it is, under "Links and Pipeline" in the "Materials" panel:

The "Traceable" button, as circled, controls whether the raytracer will detect the material. But take note - If it is turned off, not only shadows will be affected. Reflections and refractions would also be affected, because this option affects the raytracer as a whole, and not just the shadows.

The "Shadbuf" button controls whether shadows will be cast with the shadow buffer.

So there you have it - A quick and dirty fix.

Did you know? #41

2008-09-07T18:51:00.002+08:00

Did you know...

That, for telephone services, Caller ID information is sent to the ringing phone during the silence between the first and the second ring?

That's why when you pick up the phone too quickly, your Caller ID would give an error message similar to that of "No Data Sent".

Safe Mode

2008-09-07T12:41:00.003+08:00

I've touched on this topic before in my post Quick Definition #24, but that post had little elaboration, so I'm going to start off this subject from scratch.

I'm sure we've all encountered this before: Sometimes a bad error happens to a Windows computer, and it fails to start up normally, instead starting up into 'Safe Mode'.

So, what is safe mode, and how can we get out of it?

We all know a computer is really complex. There are lots of drivers and programs that your computer must load when it starts up, so that all the features are available to you. If any one of these drivers or programs have an error in them, this will cause the normal booting up to crash.

And that's the problem that Safe Mode attempts to address. Safe Mode doesn't load up all the drivers and programs. It just loads up the bare minimum - Enough for Windows to run, and nothing more. That's why when your computer boots in safe mode, your monitor resolution is at its worst, and features like internet and printing are not available. That's because Windows doesn't load the drivers or programs required for these features to run.

When it's impossible to boot up normally, booting into safe mode allows you to diagnose problems, perhaps manually re-activiating the drivers and programs one by one, to see which one is causing the problem.

But for the rest of us, who just want to get out of safe mode, here's how to do it. Please bear in mind that this doesn't work all the time, but only when you got into safe mode through some random error that goes away by itself:

When you're in safe mode, shut down your computer properly. When it's off, wait for about 30 seconds, and then boot up your computer. If all goes well, you'll be out of safe mode.

But you can see why this doesn't always work - If there's a real problem, for example there's an error on your graphics card, doing so won't clear the problem until you actually solve the problem with your graphics card.

Korg Kaossilator - Slow down the gate Arp

2008-09-04T12:04:00.002+08:00

In an earlier post Kaossilator Trick - Slowing Down the Arpeggiator, I explained in words how you could slow down the Arpeggiator function of the Kaossilator.

Albeit my inability to pronounce the word Arpeggiator, I have come up with a video on the subject:

Practise and N-Joy!

Microsoft Word - Paste Special

2008-09-03T19:10:00.002+08:00

How often have we copied stuff and pasted them into Microsoft Word, only to find that the formatting is completely off?

Well, don't worry - There is a solution.

There is a feature in Microsoft Word called Paste Special which modifies the clipboard contents before pasting them, instead of pasting everything wholesale. You can access this window by going to the Menu Bar, selecting Edit -> Paste Special.

I have copied a random string of text off the Digital Ramblings page, entered Microsoft Word, and invoked the Paste Special dialog box, show below.

Most options are self-explanatory, so I won't go into detail. "HTML Format" will preserve everything - Formatting, and even web-specific stuff such as links. As the name implies, "Unformatted" modes will remove formatting. The difference between the option with "Unicode" and the one without is that Unicode encoding will preserve special characters like those in other languages, while the one without will display them as strange characters.

Well, there you have it. The main difference here is the one between formatted and unformatted.

Global Positioning System

2008-08-29T21:25:00.007+08:00

We all have an idea of how Global Positioning System (GPS) works on the surface. You install a little unit in your car, and it tells you where on Earth you are.

But how does GPS actually work?

Your GPS unit actually needs to access a number of satellites. About 30 of such satellites orbit the Earth all the time. These satellites do nothing except repeatedly report the time very accurately.

Your GPS unit will then need to read the signal coming from those satellites. When it receives a time signal, it compares the received time with its own time. From there, it can then calculate the distance between the satellite and the unit, in the exact same way your camera does.

The calculation is simple. We've all learnt in school that famous formula for average speed:

speed = distance / time

How is it used? Simply that we can determine the distance between the satellite and the unit if we know the speed and time by rearranging the equation like so:

distance = speed x time

Do we know the time? Yes we do! In this case, the time refers specifically to the time taken for the signal to travel from the satellite to your receiver. This time can be obtained by considering the difference between the time received and the internal time.

Don't understand? Let's say the satellite sends out the time 17:12:35. This signal saying "17:12:35" must travel from the satellite all the way onto Earth. Of course this travelling takes time. Let's say the signal reaches your receiver at 17:12:40.

Your receiver will then know that the message sent at 17:12:35 reached Earth at 17:12:40. In other words, the travelling time is 5 seconds. See, not that complicated, is it?

Then, do we know the speed? The answer is also yes. The signal sent is actually an electromagnetic wave, and Physics says that electromagnetic waves travel at the speed of light (represented by the letter c, it has the approximate value of 3 x 10^8, or 3 hundred million metres per second) in vacuum, and slightly slower in air.

So the distance can be found by simply multiplying the two values.

Now this is the tricky part. Finding the distance isn't enough to determine where you are on Earth. It just narrows down the possiblities.

Let's say you know you're 10 kilometres away from the satellite. This reduces the number of possible locations to a sphere:

First, consider the relative position between your receiver and the satellite as shown in the diagram.

Now, we know for sure that we're 10 km away from the satellite. This means that you can be anywhere on the surface of the green sphere as shown in the second diagram:

Not clear enough? Let's zoom out a little, and see this from another angle.

You are now looking at the scene from an almost perfect side view. The surface of the green sphere indicates any position 10km from the satellite. This means that, from the only piece of data we have, you could be anywhere on the surface of the green sphere.

So how do we go one step further? Simple. We look at another satellite, and perform the same calculation. Let's say we're 2km from the second satellite. So now, the scene looks like this:

For simplicity, let's name the satellites "A" and "B".

Let's now plot the spheres for both satellites. The 10km sphere remains the way it is, while we add a new 2km sphere for the second satellite.

Now this looks complicated, hunh? But let's think about it logically. We must be 10km away from satellite A. We also must be 2km away from satellite B. Instead of adding more possible positions, we've actually narrowed down the possibilities considerably! In truth, our possible positions are now reduced to the points where the two spheres intersect. In other words, a circle as indicated in the diagram by the bright white line:

Let's now remove the two spheres to simplify our lives. At the same time, let's shift our perspective a little so that we can see the circle clearly.

Notice that the red dot, signifying your unit, is lying on the white circle. Now, let's further narrow down the possibilities by introducing a third satellite, satellite "C", and adding its sphere. Just in case you can't see it clearly, I have magnified the size of the sphere representing satellite C such that it's bigger than the rest.

Once again, we've reduced the number of possibilities to the intersections - In this case of the sphere and the circle. I have thus removed both sphere and circle, and indicate the intersections with bright white halos.

Yes! We've narrowed the possibilities down to two points (and you'll notice that one of them is correct because it lies on the same spot as the red sphere used to represent "You").

In theory, we'd need to use one more satellite to determine which one of the two points are correct. Practically, though, we can effectively guess which point is correct because the correct one is reasonably near to the ground, while the incorrect one is either extremely high in the air, or completely outside the Earth. Since it isn't very probable that you're driving outside our atmosphere, we can eliminate that point.

However, all this is theory. In truth, electronic equipment have their limitations, and so calculation time and the possibility of error must be taken into account. With all these, a fourth satellite is usually used. This considerably reduces the margin of error.

So now you know how GPS works. Using four satellites, your position is pinpointed - Well at least, narrowed down to an area of about 10 metres, your GPS receiver can then represent the value either in terms of longtitude and latitude, or graphically on a map.

It's been a year!

2008-08-28T18:58:00.003+08:00

It's been a year!

Yes it has. Digital Ramblings has been rendering its humble service to the Internet for one whole year now.

Quick look at the statistics. Through the past year, we've covered 189 posts. My Google rating (pages crawled by Google) has gone up and down (consistent with my posting rate =P) - But the general trend is rising. The blog has 28 comments (ha! it's a little sad =P) and we've covered a nice wide variety of topics, ranging from 3D Graphics to audio.

The "Did you Know?" series has spawned 40 separate posts, while the "Quick Definition" series has 32 posts to its name.

Well, we've come pretty far, haven't we? Looking back, flipping through the pages, there's really a lot of content buried in here. It's really rather surprising that I wrote it all.

It's been fun. Really fun. Nothing is as satisfying as the sharing of knowledge, hoping to be able to reach out to the world and help.

But I know I have my limitations. It is idle to deny that there were long periods of inactivity, and that I run out of writing ideas quite often. As I get busier and busier with my studies, I don't expect that problem to improve.

And that's where YOU can help out. If you have any questions, anything you want to know, or anything you'd like to request - Just drop me a line, and I'd be more than happy to help out, or create a new post whenever I can.

Hopefully there'll be more years up ahead, and hopefully this blog will really pick up.

Remember, all readers out there. If you have some knowledge, share it.

Password Strength

2008-08-23T22:26:00.002+08:00

We all know what passwords are for - They are a means to prove our identity when logging into various web services such as Intranets, E-Mail, Forums, Blogs or almost everything else.

And that's what makes them very valuable for theives - They want to take on your identity to access your stuff - usually money, though slightly trivial things like game bank accounts cannot be ignored. This is why we need a strong password to make cracking difficult.

Here are some tips you could use to get a real strong password:

1) Lengthen it
A shorter password is easier to crack, because the number of possible combinations is drastically lower as compared to a long password. I personally aim for passwords that are at least 14 characters long.

2) Mix alphabets, numbers and punctuation
The goal of doing so is to further increase the number of possible combinations. If your password consists of only letters, a cracking program optimised for finding out letters would be able to get at your password quickly.

3) Don't use whole English words
Some cracking programs are smart enough to search for whole words in your password. If they find a word, it'll really speed up the cracking process.

Each of the above tips are significant, but considering them collectively, here is my method for coming up with the ultimate password:

The bulk of your password should be a seemingly random list of characters that don't appear to mean anything except to you. Throw in a couple of numbers, an exclamation mark, or an underscore, and you have a pretty strong password.

Here are some sample passwords, along with the rationale behind their choice. Just to disclaim: I have never used the below passwords, and you shouldn't either, now that they've been published:

!12yamtssfa34!
My god, that was random. Anyway, the letters come from one line of the extremely famous song "Yesterday" by the Beatles, which runs "Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away". Bet you couldn't guess that, could you?

_?srmkkrocr1991_
This one required some thinking. The random string of text came from a Japanese proverb, which runs thus: "Saru mo ki kara ochiru". Literally meaning that "even monkeys fall from trees" (lolz!), which implies that everybody makes mistakes. (Reference: Wikiquote) The 1991 is pretty arbitrary, but I used it since it's my birth year. Adapt accordingly.

Well, you get the idea, don't you? Hopefully you'd come up with stronger passwords after reading this!

Disclaimer: I DO NOT guarantee that the method taught here will be 100% safe. Please use the methods at your own discretion, and you agree, by using them, to not hold me responsible if they fail.

Framerate - What it does and why it matters

2008-08-22T17:19:00.003+08:00

A reader asks - Why is it that in Olympic telecasts, slow motion video is still perfectly smooth? Why is it that the effect cannot be acheived with video taken from still cameras?

The answer is in the frame rate, but before I explain that, let's first consider the idea behind videos.

A video is simply a series of photographs, captured very quickly by your camera, and played back at the same fast speed, so that the differences in the pictures appear like motion to the viewer. Every photograph taken is called a frame.

At the word rate implies, we are concerned with the speed of the frames. This is exactly what frame rate means: The speed in which the frames change.

This can be explained better with an example. Let's imagine a 'movie' of a blue circle, moving from the bottom left of the frame, to the top right of the frame, like so:

Let's say that I use only five frames to represent this motion, at the same speed. The effect is a very jerky animation.

See? Comparing the previous two pictures, you can see that the motion described is exactly the same. They start and end at the same places, and they take exactly the same time (note that the speed may appear to change because of your browser) to move from the start position to the end position (one second). However, the latter has a lower frame rate, resulting in the jerky effect.

Let's bring the frame rate up to ten, and see if things look better.

Well, it's less jerky now. Let's bring it up to twenty now.

See? The motion appears fluid now.

I haven't exactly described how we actually calculate frame rate. All I have stated is that the above animations are described with a differing number of frames. You'd see that this system is impractical - A real movie is really long, and you'd easily end up with millions of frames.

Since we are talking about speed here, we can actually introduce the concept of time. In fact, frame rate is actually measured in frames per second. This number indicates how many frames are shown on the screen every second. Obviously, the greater the number, the better.

Now, let's consider the effect on frame rate when video is sped up or slowed down.

Let's say a camera captures at 30 frames per second. This can be intepreted to mean that every second of video is described with 30 frames.

So what would happen now if I displayed this video at 15 frames per second? Won't this mean that what was originally one second of footage now requires two seconds to display?

There you have it! That's how you speed up or slow down video: By changing the playback frame rate.

So, why is it that Olympic slow-motion video looks so smooth? By now, the answer should be self-evident. The cameras used are extremely powerful, and they capture video at an extremely high frame rate.

When slowed down, frame rate is reduced, but because the frame rate when capturing is so high, the frame rate after reduction is still rather large, and thus the final video remains smooth.

That's all for this topic. Here are some interesting frame rates:

30 fps: NTSC Video for computer use
29.97 fps: NTSC Video for television use
24 fps: PAL Video
16 fps: The threshold between perceived fluid motion and jerkiness

MS-DOS - Where it all started

2008-08-21T20:36:00.004+08:00

Yes, I do realise that posting rate has slowed to an absolute crawl. Please be patient. I'll post anything that comes to mind.

So, this post takes you to the history of computing - Before we had the luxury of GUIs (Graphic User Interfaces).

Computing today is easy and intuitive. We've got buttons, checkboxes, and text fields to work with. Most programs have been simplified to such an extent that even a person new to the program would be able to work it, just by reading labels and tooltips.

However, decades ago, there wasn't such luxury. Back then, all human-computer interaction was done in what's known as a Command Line interface. On Microsoft-based computers, the interface is called MS-DOS in short, standing for Microsoft Disk Operating System.

A command line interface allows the user to operate the computer through a series of text commands. The user enters a command, and the system inteprets the command. The system would carry out certain actions, and provide output.

This is a typical MS-DOS window:

Let's say I wanted to open a folder, I would issue a command, and hit enter. This is what the screen would look like:

I entered the command "cd test", which translates literally to: "Change the directory to 'Test'." Of course, back then, what we call folders were called directories.

I could then proceed to show all the files in the directory with the command "Dir".

Things have improved so much over time, haven't they? Today, programs that run on the command line level still exist. In fact, they are not extremely uncommon. In truth, programs that run on the command line are in no way inferior to programs with Graphic User Interfaces. They are simply lacking in the aesthetic and, in a limited way, the user-friendliness side.

Megapixels

2008-08-09T11:30:00.002+08:00

This word came into popularity along with digital cameras. In fact, the megapixels value is still considered a figure of merit for digital still cameras today. In this post, I will attempt to explain what the term really means, and how it affects the final picture.

The term megapixels is based off the term pixels, which is short for "picture elements", which, in turn, refers to the little colored dots that make up your image onscreen. Every image, be it a JPG picture, or the actual screen image you are looking at now, are all made up of pixels - Little dots of color that, when put together, represents a complete image.

The term megapixels is simply the count of the number of pixels in an image.

Think about this with an example: Let's say I have a camera, and the largest picture it can take has the dimensions of 1600 x 1200. This means that the picture is made up of 1600 pixels horizontally, and 1200 pixels vertically.

This image, then, is a 1.92 megapixel image, and since this is the largest picture the camera can take, the camera is likely to be labelled "1.92 megapixels".

How did I arrive at the number? I simply multiplied the two dimensions. In this case, the calculation should run thus:

1600 x 1200 = 1920000

But why the horrendously large number? This calculation gives the number of pixels in the image, and so naturally produces a large number. What we are looking for is the number of "mega-" pixels, which means we have to divide the answer by a million to get a slightly less daunting answer:

1920000 / 1000000 = 1.92

So now you know how the number is obtained, let's move on to its significance.

We know that, just a few years back, the best cameras were in the 2-3 megapixel range. Today, even the non-professional, compact cameras that are easily affordable are in the 5-8 megapixel range, while professional cameras have gone beyond the 10-megapixel mark.

But what does that really mean?

Well, from our definition of the term megapixel, we know that the larger the number, the more pixels there are in the image. Thus, newer cameras can produce images containing more pixels. But why?

The answer is simply this: The more data used to represent the image, the more details can be preserved.

Why is this important? Well, this means that the image can be enlarged to an extremely large size without pixellation or other artifacts. This is difficult to explain in words, so consider the following images.

Let's say this picture was represented by 320x240 pixels. When magnified to the size of 3200x2400, every pixel becomes ten times as large. At this rate, pixellation is very evident.

But what if the original image had a higher resolution? Say, 1600x1200?

When magnified to 3200x2400, every pixel is only twice its original size. The image remains clear. To get the same amount of pixellation as the earlier image, the original image needs to be magnified ten times, in other words, the same amount of pixellation will happen only when the image is 16000 x 12000.

There is also another advantage of having high resolution images. When the image is to be displayed on a medium capable of having a very high resolution, such as a HDTV or in print, the image will not appear as detailed if it does not have a high resolution.

Polar Magic

2008-08-02T21:00:00.005+08:00

Hey, why am I posting a Maths topic? Well, I like Maths, and I love computer graphics, so why not put the two together, and see what we can get?

In this post, I'd assume that you know how graphs in the Cartesian form work. I'd assume that the majority of readers would have learnt that in school.

If you don't know what I mean by "Cartesian Form", it is simply this: When using the cartesian coordinate system, any point on the graph can be uniquely identified by a pair of x and y coordinates. X determines the distance between the point and the vertical axis, and Y determines the distance between the point and the horizontal axis.

The cartesian system is usually the first system to be thought in schools, since it is the simplest and most intuitive.

For those of you who need a refresher, just stare at the following graph of y=x², and feel nostalgic ;D :

But today, we're not going to talk about the cartesian coordinate system, instead, we would delve deeper into Mathematics, and look at the polar coordinate system instead.

With polar coordinates, individual points are not defined by x and y. Instead, they are defined by r and θ, the latter being read as "theta".

The variable "r" determines how far the point is from the origin, which is defined in the cartesian coordinate system as (0,0). The variable ? defines the angle in which the point makes if a line were to be drawn from the point to the origin. Graphically, it looks somewhat like this:

It's really hard to describe polar coordinates beyond what is done here. Instead, your best bet would be to pick up a graphing calculator, or you can also pick up a free graphing application for your computer, such as GraphCalc, and try throwing in some equations for fun.

Here are some simple test equations for the beginner.

Let's try something simple. How about r = 2?

From the above graph, we can see that when r equals a constant, it creates the graph of a perfect circle.

Now let's have it vary a little. How about r = θ?

Looks like we have a spiral! The coefficient determines how far the individual spirals are spaced apart. Using the same scale as the previous graph, but now plotting r = 2θ, we get:

Alright, can we get more artistic than this? The answer is YES! From this point on, since we're looking at things from the artistic point of view, I will remove the axes so that they're not in the way.

So what's that really artistic equation I'm talking about? Actually, I am speaking of a family of equations, and the graphs they create are called polar roses.

Here, try this yourself. Plot the graph of r = sin((4/3)θ):

Ha! Nice, isn't it? Here are a few more equations you can try with:

r = sin((5/7)θ)

r = sin((1/2)θ)

Let's try using the tangent function instead of the sine function:

r = tan((4/5)θ)

r = tan((8/7)θ)

Cool, hunh? But let's take this a step further. Let's multiply our original function by a sine function. What this does is that it repeatedly diminishes and increases the value of "r", giving a very nice effect, which I would personally call a polar butterfly. (Bearing in mind that there is no such official term :P)

The equation then, looks somewhat like this: r = sin((a/b)θ) * sin(θ+90°)

Note that the "+90°" part is there to re-orientate the graph such that it is horizontal. You can try it with your graphic application/calculator if you like.

Let's plot some butterflies!

r = sin((3/5)θ) * sin(θ+90°)

r = sin((3/2)θ) * sin(θ+90°)

r = sin((8/9)θ) * sin(θ+90°)

Now it's your turn! Be creative and try different values as the coefficient of θ. Enjoy!