Whatever Matt Feels Like Posting

Ever since I found out about image sonification (converting an image to a sound or vice versa - in this case, with the horizontal axis corresponding to time and the vertical axis corresponding to pitch), I'd wondered if anyone had ever been able to listen to music "upside-down" by reversing the image vertically so that low pitches become high pitches and vice versa, but I could never find one. However, while trying to find a free program I'd downloaded a while back that used a different approach to image sonification (but I'd either deleted or forgotten about), I finally stumbled upon a program that can edit music as if it were an image, including turning it upside-down!



And there's even a free demo! Isn't it amazing when something you wish existed turns out to exist after all? :)

I never did find the other program that I forgot the name of, though, but I'm wondering if anyone out there happens to know of it.

Its method of converting an image to music, using my uChIN RA G userpic as an example:



Assuming that the red channel is mapped to piano, the green is drums, and the blue is flute (there's over 200 instruments to choose from, I think), most of the piece would be silent (for the plain black background), but towards the middle, the piano would play at only one pitch that is slightly lower than the highest pitch it allows (since all red values on the text are 248), the drums would play at two pitches (that one plus a slightly lower and quieter one for green values of 192, corresponding to the darker yellow/orange pixels), and, occasionally, the flute would play at that same high pitch (as there's only a few pixels - namely, the white pixels - where the blue is 248 instead of 0). And there's options to treat it as a grayscale image and only play one instrument, invert the colors (useful if there's more light colors than dark colors), lower the resolution to make a shorter piece, change the tempo, or have the tempo be faster whenever the instruments are quieter (to reduce the silence in this example).

If you didn't understand that, don't worry - you'd probably understand it better if you'd used the program I'm trying to describe, so that means you probably haven't. But if you do understand that, do you know what the program I'm talking about is called? Thanks!

bº²f fº λºⁿ└ ┒ºⁿ└∪ɘl¡

ONTD Games Giveaway

Which video game character would you like to have as your real-life BFF? One random response will win a $60 Amazon gift card! [Full contest rules here.] Don't forget to share your favorite gamer moments on ontdgames at 3 p.m. PST for Free For All Friday (FFAF).

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Hmm... That would be hard to decide, but I'd probably choose either:

- Luigi. We'd make good friends because we've both felt left out fairly often.
- Yoshi! I've always wanted to ride around on a Yoshi...plus, I've always wondered what various songs that aren't from Mario games would sound like with the extra drums that get added to the music when you're riding Yoshi. :)
- Rosalina. Pretty much anything she says makes the universe seem beautiful, so I'd love to have her around whenever I'm depressed. And she's very pretty. Although if she became my BFF, she'd have to make the choice between leaving the Lumas behind or putting them in danger of being eaten by pathvain_aelien :P
- Kirby, because I'd never have to vacuum again :P
- A MissingNo., because then whenever I'm running out of something, I could just put five random objects, then one of whatever I'm running out of, into my backpack and get 128 more :)
- Mr. Game & Watch. I don't know why, but the idea of coexisting with a two-dimensional person with limited animation frames just seems interesting for some reason.
- The main character of Miegakure (unreleased video games still count, right?), because I've always wanted to go into the fourth dimension, especially when my headphones are tangled :P
- Doctor Hurley from Brain Challenge. She seems like an intelligent and interesting person. Also, ( my second reason for including Doctor Hurley was a dumb reason, so I'm retroactively LJ-cutting just this part in 2018 ) Also, she's cute. :)
- /crazymegavideo/ oh wait, she's from a video game that only exists in my weird dreams :P

EDIT: Ooh, thought of another good one!

- Peach, because in Super Princess Peach (which I don't have, but still) she can easily change her emotion at will, and I sure wish I could change my emotion at will :)

File 2

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Mario × 5
Last Saved January 27, 2012

Anti-bullying month
Who is the biggest bully in your life? One response chosen at random will win an Amazon Kindle. [contest details] (sponsored by bullying_begone)

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WHOA! Perfect timing, bullying_begone - today, I met my first real-life bully in 11 years. (So far, people online have only been mean to me when I actually say stupid stuff, so I don't count those.) In fact, this is a rare occurrence of me using my uChIN RA G userpic without having banned someone from commenting in my journal.

See, today in College Connections class (which was hard enough before I knew one of the other students would bully me), we did a couple of group activities, and the first was a common camp activity that's starting to get old, so you may have heard of it - it's that one where there's a "chocolate" "river" and two "islands" and we have to all cross to the other side using "marshmallows". (EDIT: Due to pathvain_aelien's confusion, I should say the only reason I put stuff in quotes in the previous sentence was to show they were pretend marshmallows or islands or whatever, and were actually rubber square tiles, hula hoops, etc.) The first time we did it, I lost two marshmallows in a row by forgetting to make sure someone else had their foot on them before I moved mine off of it, so once we were done, one guy who had collected about half of the marshmallows whacked me in the head with them. One girl said something like, "Hey, don't hit him with the marshmallows!", but no one else seemed to notice. It didn't physically hurt that much, and the pain went away quickly, but it still hurt me emotionally.

Then we had to try to do the same thing again, but faster, now that we knew the strategy. Although I had finally figured out to leave my foot on each marshmallow until I knew someone else's foot was there, I messed up in some other way that I still don't quite understand, so that guy hit me upside the head again (which, at the time, I thought was him still not forgiving me for my errors the first time), and either that same girl or a different girl told him not to, but again, no one else seemed to notice.

So after that activity and the other one they did (luckily, this time only 10 people had to volunteer to participate, because I was too depressed to want to participate in anything else), we discussed the differences in everyone's strategies and stuff. I called out the guy who had hit me with the pretend marshmallows, and since I was so depressed, I don't really remember what all was said, but at the time, it seemed like no one would talk to him about it because the professor didn't see.

After class, though, the guy did apologize to me, saying that it wasn't supposed to actually hurt and that normally he does it to everyone when they mess up. I asked him why he hit me the second time, because I didn't remember messing up that time, but he pointed out that I did, and now I vaguely remember. Nonetheless, I still couldn't fully accept his apology because it was still uncalled for, especially since he only hit me even though everyone - including himself - messed up at some point. And, as it turns out, the professor had noticed after all; she sympathized with me, saying that his behavior was uncalled for, and that she would talk to him about it.

Repost this entry or I'll hit you with marshmallows

Have any of you had a Livescribe Echo Smartpen? Because I got one for my birthday, and from what I've seen so far, it's almost impossible to figure out because:

1) The info buttons in the interactive tutorial don't work regardless of how hard I tap them. (And yes, I know to tap them with my "smart"pen and not, say, my finger :P ) All the other buttons work just fine, but the info buttons don't.

2) Docking my "smart"pen to my computer supposedly automatically transfers notes to Livescribe Desktop, but it doesn't. The website said that it's recommended to plug it into a USB port on the back of my computer rather than on the side, but I don't have any on the back. Does this mean that I can't use my "smart"pen just because I was unlucky enough to buy a laptop with no USB ports on the back?

3) Similarly, my pen doesn't recognize the "computer" command to upload my notes to Livescribe Desktop, regardless of whether or not I write it legibly enough so that it actually says "Computer" and not "Computep" on the pen's screen, despite Livescribe Desktop claiming that the command works.

4) A screenshot of Livescribe Desktop in the tutorial shows some elements of the interface that seem to be missing from my copy. They should be here:



EDIT: ellaina02 helped me figure all of these out, but seriously, why don't they tell you step-by-step how to do all this stuff in the correct order?

Adbyowjomnat

Today, I spent half the day registering as an official college freshman. Yay!...?

I spent the other half trying to fix a problem with MS Paint that made it so slow, one click made it nearly stop responding. At least I finally fixed it! (Note to future self having the same problem: I had to go into Registry Editor and delete the Paint registry. Can I have my autism cure now?)

Major in Reposting (Not Responding)

Yesterday, the fire alarm at the hotel I'm staying at went off for no apparent reason. Not only that, but it took way too long for me to get out of the room and I didn't have the common sense to head for the stairs instead of the elevator. Had there really been a fire, I probably would've died even if the fire were all the way on the other side of the hotel (knowing me, I'd inevitably somehow end up there or accidentally do something that somehow makes it come to my side of the building). :(

Amazingly, the fire alarm managed to out-scary every single scary dream I've had, even the "somethinged to hell" one...

Stop, drop and repost

I'm not sure if the person who made the 2009 version of this has made a 2010 one yet, but I decided I might as well make it anyway:

Go to your Calendar and find the first entry for each month of 2010. Post the first line of it in your journal, and that's your "Year In Review".

← 2009 2011 →

( minced for depth )

Fill out your year in review

The "Unscreen to reply" button wasn't working, so apparently I shot it with square bullets.



Uh-oh. LiveJournal is being possessed by 100,000 demons at once.

Shoot 66,600,000 repost buttons and win a FREE* LiveJournal entry!!!

Can someone get J to join Brain Buddies?

Show to your -1 friends

Illiterate viruses pretending to be anti-spyware programs are annoying. Finally got rid of it, though. Yay!