We’ve got bigger fish to fry

By Lars in Politics, Uncategorized Tags:

20121214-154211.jpg

President Barack Obama said prosecuting pot users in states that have legalized the drug won’t be a top priority for his administration.

“We’ve got bigger fish to fry,” Obama told ABC News’ Barbara Walters. “It would not make sense for us to see a top priority as going after recreational users in states that have determined that it’s legal.”

Last month, voters in Colorado and Washington legalized recreational pot use for adults, though marijuana remains illegal under federal law.

The Obama administration suggested last week that it was considering plans to undermine the voter initiatives. In his interview with Walters, Obama did not say whether his administration would go after producers and suppliers of marijuana in those states. The administration has cracked down extensively on the medical marijuana industry in California, despite its legality under state law there.

Software that allows you to create scores from a variety of sources

By Lars in Uncategorized 5,811 Comments

This is another aggregating effort of mine, a kind of blogging I have little respect for and I feel should be cordoned off to a category that won't pollute the main feed.

I just found this recently and am so blown away I had to share. They make other sheet music software that's looks fantastic, too. Also check out:

http://www.sibelius.com/home/index_flash.html Sibelius is unique in having an iPad app

Polyphonic Transcription

AudioScore Ultimate is the full-featured version of the

AudioScore Lite audio transcription software included with Sibelius 7.


Transcribe CDs and MP3s

With AudioScore Ultimate 7, you can open a CD track or MP3 file and transcribe it to a score. The software employs the most intelligent technology available today to convert up to 16 instruments or notes at a time into multiple staves, with up to four voices per staff.

After transcribing your music, you can send it directly to Sibelius or save it as a MusicXML, NIFF, or MIDI file for use in most other music programs. You can also print a professional-quality score directly from AudioScore.


UltraSound

Enhanced audio recognition engine–new in AudioScore Ultimate 7

Version 7 now features a significantly enhanced audio recognition engine, and more accurate transcription with improved barline determination and note recognition. You’ll also experience improved sound quality when you play back individual notes within the original recording. There’s an Instrument recognition and Instruments pane for quickly allocating notes to instruments—plus a clearer and more straightforward transcription process.

Create a printable score

View, edit, and play back nuanced performances

AudioScore Ultimate 7 enables you to view, play, and edit the most intricate nuances of a performance—such as the subtle changes in pitch, volume, and timing.

You can also produce new versions of music using MIDI instruments—you choose which ones. AudioScore analyzes the original music in great detail, and plays it back with tremendous realism. Open one of your favorite songs and enjoy hearing it performed by a brass band or string quartet.


AudioScore recognizes:

  • Styles ranging from solo and chamber music to jazz and pop
  • A wide range of music performed by non-percussion instruments
  • All pitches ranging from F0 to C8
  • Notes from chords that even the ear cannot distinguish
  • Moderate sustain or reverb
  • Triplets, duplets, key signatures, and clefs
  • Pitch and volume changes at a resolution of 0.01 secs
  • Instrument audio characteristics for chromatic visualization

AudioScore also transcribes notes and rests as short as a 32nd note


Perform directly into Sibelius with a mic

With AudioScore Ultimate, you can create musical scores by singing or playing into your computer using only a microphone—no prior musical knowledge required.

AudioScore Ultimate provides instant graphical feedback about the pitch of your performance over time, so you can see mistakes and make adjustments while performing. Train to sing and play more accurately in tune and immediately see the improvements on screen. There’s even a built-in metronome if you need it.

 

Typecast Acquired by Monotype!

By Lars in web design Tags:

TYPECAST

Create better web typography with less hassle!

A promising future for Typecast

This is amazing news for Typecast and our team. It means we’ll be making Typecast our full-time focus … forever. For you, it means more features and improvements to look forward to.

During private beta, so many of you sent us lovely tweets saying how promising Typecast looked. Well, the future of Typecast just got a whole lot more promising, and we couldn’t be more excited! We hope you are too!

But why, and how, and what now?

We know you probably have lots of questions, like ‘Why sell when you’ve only just launced beta?’ and ‘Does this mean the end of Typekit, Fontdeck and Google fonts in Typecast?’ so we’ve explained everything in our blog.

This is a terrific day for Typecast, and the start of something really special. Thank you for helping us make Typecast an app worthy of this sort of attention.

[Ed.]

20121105-094959.jpg

Big companies kill innovation with their bureaucracy. How can Typecast possibly expect to be unaffected?

As the .Net article suggests, ours is a bit of an atypical situation. Monotype knows our work and trusts us to keep Typecast on track. They didn’t acquire us to change us. They want to help and learn from us, and so we’re continuing pretty much as is.

Brett’s TextExpander Snippets

By Lars in Tools Tags:

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been so long since I’ve posted to CODEXNEXUS! I suppose it’s because of all the attention I’m giving to my personal sites… and my offline life. Ugh. If I created this site to chronicle all of my struggles with learning how to code (or design websites, whatever), then you shouldn’t that be reflected here? Instead, it looks like one with no purpose, written by someone who can’t bother to include his own content.

So much old material on the shelf to put in place, I don’t know where to start. But start again I must! This one here going back to early summer, when I discovered this on Brett Terpestra’s site. How helpful. The only resource more helpful that I know of is Chris Coyier’s CSS-Tricks.

Finder view of the download

Finder view of the download

Anyway, here’s the READ ME file from his super super cool Textexpander shortcuts/tools that he offers free to download and use THANKS, BRETT!, exported (⌘-alt-E in Byword) to HTML from Markdown, of course:

Just collecting a few of my favorite TextExpander snippets here, feel free to use. I have these set to expand after a Tab, but they should work with just about any expansion settings. Related commands all have similar beginnings to make using the “Suggest Completions” feature easier.

Snippets

Tools.textexpander

  • Hyphenate clipboard

    Hyphenates the contents of the clipboard, ignoring spaces after punctuation or leading/trailing spaces. Should probably just be a Service, but this is actually faster, most of the time.

  • Encode email address

    Takes an email address in the clipboard and prints an ASCII-encoded (non-human-readable) version with mailto: prefix.

  • Clipboard HTML link

    Makes an html hyperlink (code, not rich text) from a url in the clipboard. Uses the Fill feature to request the link text.

  • Markdown Link

    Makes a Markdown format link from a url in the clipboard. Uses the Fill feature to request the link text.

  • Rounded Corners

    Uses the Fill feature to request a pixel radius, and creates cross-browser CSS for rounded corners. There are 5 variations, one for each corner and one for all corners.

  • CSS Reset

    Your typical CSS reset code, in Meyers and YUI flavors.

  • Shorten clipboard url

    Shorten a URL in the clipboard, using bit.ly, go., is.gd or tinyurl. Slightly faster than the AppleScript versions available from TE, and they handle a wider range of possible inputs.

  • Make URL

    Take whatever text is in the clipboard and provide a best-guess URL for it. Handy if you have a qualified domain and just need the protocol added, or if you have an email address and want it to be a mailto: link.

  • Hashbang

    Instant hashbangs for ruby, osascript and bash.

  • Paste Markdown references

    Takes a list of urls in the clipboard, in just about any format, and converts them into a list of Markdown references. Titles are generated by domains, incremented for repeats and sorted alphanumerically. Duplicate URL’s are stripped from output.

Lipsums.textexpander

  • Placeholder Nav

    Basic unordered list with dummy links.

  • Standard Lipsum

    Three lipsumX commands for 1, 2 or 3 paragraphs of standard Lorem Ipsum.

  • HTML Lipsum

    Ordered list, unordered list, and the full medley of HTML Lipsum for styling.

Keystroke commands way faster mouse clicking

By Lars in technology 6,756 Comments

Keystroke commands way faster mouse clicking

Just found this article called “Keystroke commands often faster than switching to mouse clicking“

and thought to share the link and a portion of it because it’s an important topic I will be addressing a lot in the future.

The world is growing so fast that we can’t afford to hold on to many of the work habits people take for granted. The only efficient manner of operating a computer is to become a power-user. There is no other way to stay ahead of the game without learning how to program your computer to execute custom tasks en mass.

My latest interest is in sharing code. I’m convinced that all efficient coders take advantage of these. If you want to move fast with your code, it seem there’s no other way around this.

Here’s a bunch of links I ported over by saving a Google search in Instapaper and then coping the rich text over to my entry field in Blogsy:

  1. 27 Utilities for Saving and Sharing Code Snippets

    designshack.net/…/27-utilities-f…Cached

    by Joshua Johnson – in 166 Google+ circles – More by Joshua Johnson

    Jul 30, 2010 – “Organize and share your code snippets. Snippetsmania is a free accessible collection …

  2. 35+ Desktop Utilities To Manage Your Code Snippets

    www.tripwiremagazine.com/…/manage- …Cached

    Jul 1, 2011 – Code Collector Pro lets you easily organize, use and share code snippets using a …

  3. Code Snippets – Snipplr Social Snippet Repository

    snipplr.com/Cached – Similar

    Snipplr lets your store and share all of your commonly used pieces ofcode and HTML with other …

  4. Easily Store & Reuse Code With Snippets | Mac.AppStorm

    mac.appstorm.net/…/easily-store-reuse- …Cached – Similar

    Aug 4, 2010 – The basic idea here is to create a central repository for all the snippets … Adding your own code snippets couldn’t be easier. …snippets to code snippet web apps like Snipplr, Pastie, and Snipt.

  5. 10 Popular Sites Like Snipt (Updated: May 31st, 2012 …

    www.moreofit.com/…/Top_10_Sites_Lik…Cached

    May 31, 2012 – Snipt is your collection of frequently used commands orcode snippets. … So, what …

  6. 10 Popular Sites Like Github Gist (Updated: Jun 10th …

    www.moreofit.com/…/Top_10_Sites_Lik…Cached

    Jun 10, 2012 – We’ve explored the net and found a lot of quality codeand git sites like Github Gist.

  7. goodywebs: Code Snippets – Snipplr Social Snippet …

    www.goodywebs.com/…/code-snippets- …Cached

    Sep 13, 2011 – Code Snippets – Snipplr Social Snippet Repository … Even better, it integrates an “Export to Snipplr/Snipt/Pastie” feature that’s …Cricketers wife’s photo collection Riana Ponting Kellie Hayden …

  8. storage – Best Application for storing code snippets – Stack…

    stackoverflow.com/…/best-application-fo…Cached – Similar

    Best Application for storing code snippets [closed] … +1 Bravo forSnipplr! – unhillbilly Feb 18 ‘10 …. Code Collector Pro also has a quite nice sharing feature – upload to …

    Get more discussion results

  9. www.pastie.org – Similar Sites and Reviews | Xmarks

    www.xmarks.com/site/www.pastie.org/Cached

    Code Snippets – Snipplr Social Snippet Repository. Snipplr lets your store and share all of your …

  10. Snippets Features & Benefits

    www.snippetsapp.com/features.htmlCached

    Using scrippets, you can share your favorite snippets via public code repositories . Snipplr, Pastie, Gist …

 

Offline WordPress tools you can use

By Lars in Uncategorized 5,358 Comments

Composing your blog posts in a browser has a number of disadvantages. First is that web browsers can swallow up all of your (RAM) memory and either crash on you or require that you periodically restart it, if you interrupt your writing with visits to certain web pages for reference, or like most people, compulsively gawking at Facebook, YouTube or any other web distraction that your addicted to. Even if your computer is upgraded to the point that memory is never an issue, there’s still the various distractions around the admin panel and worst of all, the reliance on good Wi-Fi (i.e. working internet connectivity). So, if you’ve been wondering, “Gee, there’s gotta be a better way to do this”, I got the answer for you.

For Windows:

http://en.support.wordpress.com/xml-rpc/windows-live-writer/

http://www.qando.net/?p=11218

For Mac:

http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/

Harder when it’s from the top of my head

By Lars in Uncategorized 6,231 Comments

We often use the term “from the top of my head” without even thinking about it, don’t we? Like, where are the ensuing thoughts really coming from? My guess is that it’s in fact from the frontal cortex.

Anyway, this post is from just such a place. Consider this a beginning coder’s journal entry.

So I have a hard time composing in the WP dashboard post post submenu (whatever) and wonder if others do too. It always bugs me to rely on a browser when I know my character entities would be much safer entered in any other program. I have:

  • TextEdit
  • Transmit
  • Espresso
  • TextMate
  • MarsEdit
  • Pages ’09
  • lastly, the CS4 Suite of bloated tools

I want to try the full screen feature of Pages, but I’m afraid of the CPU drag on my ’08 MacBook Pro. I love what I see others doing with TextMate, but so far Espresso is my text editor of choice.

Facebook hype will fade

By Lars in Uncategorized 5,410 Comments Tags:

January 07, 2011|By Douglas Rushkoff, Special to CNN

from CNN page:

“Appearances can be deceiving. In fact, as I read the situation, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Facebook. These aren’t the symptoms of a company that is winning, but one that is cashing out.

The object of the game, for any one of these ultimately temporary social networks, is to create the illusion that it is different, permanent, invincible and too big to fail. And to be sure, Facebook has gone about as far as any of them has at creating that illusion.

If you were there for Compuserve, AOL, Tripod, Friendster, Orkut, MySpace or LinkedIn, you might have believed the same thing about any one of those social networks. Remember when those CD Roms from AOL came in the mail almost every day? The company was considered ubiquitous, invincible. Former AOL CEO Steve Case was no less a genius than Mark Zuckerberg.

Yet social media is itself as temporary as any social gathering, nightclub or party. It’s the people that matter, not the venue. So when the trend leaders of one social niche or another decide the place everyone is socializing has lost its luster or, more important, its exclusivity, they move on to the next one, taking their followers with them. (Facebook’s successor will no doubt provide an easy “migration utility” through which you can bring all your so-called friends with you, if you even want to.)

We will move on, just as we did from the chat rooms of AOL, without even looking back. When the place is as ethereal as a website, our allegiance is much more abstract than it is to a local pub or gym. We don’t live there, we don’t know the owner, and we are all the more ready to be incensed by the latest change to a privacy policy, or to learn that every one of our social connections has been sold to the highest corporate bidder.

So it’s not that MySpace lost and Facebook won. It’s that MySpace won first, and Facebook won next. They’ll go down in the same order.”

CSS is to HTML as a CMS is to… HTML

By Lars in Uncategorized 5,034 Comments Tags:

You have a website with 100 pages on it. All 100 pages use the same style.css file. You’d like to change the background color of every single page. You make one adjustment in the CSS file, and that background color adjustment will be reflected across all 100 pages. You don’t need to edit each of those pages individually. That’s the core benefit behind CSS: abstracting the design away from the markup.

Now you want to make another change to those 100 pages. You’d like to include the publication date underneath the title of each of the pages. That is something you’ll need to edit the HTML to do. If those 100 pages are based on a template, as they would be when using a CMS (Content Management System), you can make one adjustment to the template file and the date adjustment will be reflected across all 100 pages. That’s the core benefit behind a CMS: abstracting the content away from the markup.

The point is that once a website is any more than one page, there are going to be shared resources and it’s time to use a CMS. Just as the zen garden taught us that using CSS is vital to allow design freedom and make redesigns easier, the ultimate freedom comes from also using a CMS where we also aren’t locked to any specific HTML. HTML isn’t for content these days, it’s for describing content. DATABASES are for content.

I have made this scientific chart to drive home the awesomeness of this all.

Okay, so here’s a new post

By Lars in Uncategorized 6,204 Comments

Just messin’ around here, as I’ve yet to finalize the structure of the content for Codex Nexus, and know that Google brings some people to this site for whatever reasons, and so I wanted something to show up that might entertain. Here is a long comment I just posted on Professor’s Bart Ehrman’s  Facebook wall:

@all:
I, like David Waters mentioned above, would “rather study than waste my time on any other form of entertainment.” And I too had a life changing experience of the divine, or “numinous” kind (c. 1991). I subsequently embarked on a personal quest to learn all I could about the historical Jesus scholarship that was flourishing then. 20 years later, thanks to great minds like Dr. Ehrman’s, I’m still expanding my knowledge of the early texts and the history/politics that shaped them. I no longer believe in ghosts, fate, or even my potential to survive the death of my brain. I’ve come to understand that at the core of all metaphysical inquiry (i.e. religious worship) lies 3 basic rational desires:
  1. ESCAPE: making sense of the loss and the finitude of life.
  2. CONSOLATION: making sense of all the pain and suffering of sentient beings, plus the riddle of consciousness itself.
  3. PURPOSE: making sense of life’s origin’s; the how (and why, for the pious) we got here and what we should do with it while it lasts.
These goals had been pursued relentlessly for millennia before there was anything resembling monotheism or any attempt at realizing a mortal sun-god. They never seem to be sated. Then we get Jesus, Paul and the destruction of the Temple. Much of the rest of history can theologically be understood as post-apocalyptic when viewed this broadly. If this assessment seems too premature to you, then perhaps you’re simply bereft a thorough study of the humanities, which would include a history of the classical and Hellenistic ages (800 – 50 B.C.E.), the Roman and medieval European ages (50 B.C.E. – 1500 C.E.), the Renaissance and so on. At a certain point in your education you begun to understand that our abject ignorance of the intricate workings of cellular life and the evolution of the human brain’s neocortex have kept us from truly understanding ourselves throughout most of our existence on Earth.
While an objective understanding of the human mind may elude us still, we’re making tremendous advances in the study of the brain’s functions. Neuroscientist and author of an upcoming guide to spirituality, Sam Harris, has far better words than I could offer that explain the potential for a rational kind of spirituality that puts bullshit in it’s place and prepares the way for modern fact-seeking worshipers to face a future that seems ever more uncertain with courage, peace, hope, compassion, etc.
To those unable to trust their soul to modern scholarly research, I recommend a reading from Ludwig Feuerbach’s “The Essence of Christianity” (oder Das Wesen des Christentums) instead of their Bibles. It’s only been translated once and we have the original!
When discussing the TRUTH, as some of you seem fond of doing, keep in mind Ehrman’s guideline of distinguishing between whether the truth in question is of an HISTORICAL or THEOLOGICAL nature. There is much confusion to be had otherwise.
Anyone who believes completely in the existence of pure evil personified should be warned that the historical Jesus studies are the cleverest guise He has yet to conceive. They appeal to our sense of reason as well as our natural desire to understand the physical reality of our devout ancestors. Such people would be best to head the warning of Martin Luther, who wrote:
“Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.”
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