ASCII art bonanza!

 Asciiquarium, Term::Animation, Weatherspect  2 Responses »
Mar 092013
 

I’ve posted new versions of both Weatherspect and Asciiquarium, so the three people on the internet who still care about ASCII art will be thrilled.

Weatherspect v1.11 just distributes some of the critters in the trees, instead of having everything walk along the bottom of the screen.

Asciiquarium v1.1 (only 8 years after 1.0!) adds a few new random creatures, plus a fish hook that will occasionally snag an unwary fish.

Don’t be sloppy with your floppy

 Uncategorized  1 Response »
Oct 062012
 

I ran across this artifact from a bygone era the other day, and went searching for the story behind it. Surprisingly, I could find no pictures of it, so I decided to record it for posterity. Now future generations will know that terrible computer jokes existed long before facebook, when cavemen had to physically pass the jokes to one another like the very floppy disks the DiskProtek was made to defend.

The only reference to the DiskProtek that I’ve found at all is this trademark registration. It looks like it’s expired and is available for the low price of $159 if you’d like to enter the lucrative Archaic Computer Novelty business.

It hasn’t held up very well, but it’s probably close to 20 years old, so it’s a wonder it isn’t a bag full of dust at this point. Obviously the DiskProtek corporation produced a quality product.

Read on for the text from the back.

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How to crop audio in Audacity

 Uncategorized  1 Response »
May 102012
 

If you search for instructions on cropping in Audacity, you’ll get a lot of people explaining how to do two things that you don’t want to do:

1. Remove a selected section (that is, cutting, the opposite of cropping)
2. Save a selection to a file

If you just want to select a range and remove everything on both sides, neither of those pieces of advice help. The confusion is caused by people answering questions they don’t understand, and the fact that Audacity uses the term “Trim” instead of crop. Of course, if you read an article like this one, you will be even more confused, because he uses the term “Trim” to mean Cut!

Anyhow, all you have to do is select the range you want, then Edit -> Remove Audio -> Trim. Or just hit Ctrl-T.

Start Ninja

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Apr 272012
 

If you’re annoyed with the startup chime of your Mac, my friend Dan Tullis has developed an app that will cool your rage: Start Ninja will disable the startup chime so you won’t have to remember to turn your volume down before you shut down your machine.

C# MIME Types

 Uncategorized  4 Responses »
Sep 242011
 

Recently, I needed to implement a minimal web server in C#. The .NET HTTP classes worked great, but there’s nothing built in to provide MIME types (other than looking in the registry, which I don’t trust to be complete/consistent). So I extracted the data from the Debian /etc/mime.types file for anything with a file extension and created a simple static class to do lookups for them.

Usage examples:

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// do a lookup
String mimeType = MimeType.Get(".jpg");

// the dot is optional
String mimeType = MimeType.Get("jpg");

// non-existent extensions will return the default application/octet-stream type
String mimeType = MimeType.Get(".foo");

// you can also provide an explicit default type
String mimeType = MimeType.Get(".foo", "text/plain");

You can download MimeType.cs or view it in-line below.

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