I don't know enough about Inception to get the joke, but yeah, looks like my default quit message happens to be "Quitting". I think when I set it I was mainly just trying to get rid of the silly advertisements that so many IRC clients like to put in the default quit message if you don't change it, but I wasn't creative enough to find anything to say in a generic quit message. I didn't realize that it would have that effect.

I know this is an old topic, but here's an interactive page that makes it much easier to investigate hearing thresholds and such than that YT frequency sweep clip: http://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/

You can slide the frequency around at will to look for dips/peaks in the sound. It might also be useful for getting an idea of frequency response and setting up equalization for your sound setup and such.

I notice the same apparently rather sharp peaks and dips with my (somewhat pricey) headphones, and the upper limit of my hearing still seems to be centered right around 14.5 kHz. I get a different set of peaks/dips on my dirt-cheap desktop speakers, and in fact it seems the latter actually sound more flat (though not perfectly so), at least as far as sine waves go. No idea if it's my hearing or something wrong with my headphones or if maybe it's actually normal. I'm still trying to research this. One thing I'm starting to think which complicates matters is that there's a big difference between what a "perfect" frequency response measuring tool reads and what we actually hear, as I'm pretty sure the frequency response of our ears is anything but flat. Probably by design, even—for instance, in normal hearing the most sensitive hearing range is said to be at around the frequencies that are crucial in speech/communication, which probably isn't a coincidence.

Quote from: p2 on May 10, 2017, 10:41:55 PM
many sites (for exsample german news sites) split their videos in 5sec fragments and lead them all and make the player turn them into one again. so while watching u dont notice, but if u want to download it... x.x
u can easily download the movie, but it's gonna be a few hundred separate tiny files which u would have to put together using a video cut software, the amount of work is really insame! (actually did thart once, but only once!)

That would be quite possible to automate via a script and the right tools, but it's true that most people likely wouldn't bother. Just remember that it still wouldn't necessarily stop someone who really wanted to pirate it.

Yeah, that was pretty trivial. I just checked the page HTML source and found the MP3 link immediately. (It's violin music.)

You're trying to solve the same problem that the music industry has been trying to solve for ages via DRM (and mostly failing ). I think the big commercial movie and streaming sites use some sort of DRM-based encryption that requires special browser plugins and the like. I haven't researched those, so I have no idea how they work or how effective they are.

The best you can really do is make it so that it takes enough effort to get a raw download that most people won't go to the trouble, while realizing that if someone really wants it badly enough, they'll eventually find a way anyway. If you're serious about it, you should consider applying for registered copyright on the works so that you can legally prove copyright infringement if someone does pirate them.

Yeah, I think the tables thing really depends on exactly what you're trying to do (and maybe even just how you personally think about things when designing a page, sort of like how different people have different programming styles and approaches). Right now, my personal attitude about tables is that, first of all, they're fine if you're just presenting tabular text data (like how tables are traditionally used in print)—that's what they were really intended for. For layout and appearance, it's more proper to use CSS. I've found that using non-table elements works well for certain layout tasks, but for ones where I really do want table-like layout behavior, it's possible to still use divs and such but use CSS's 'display' property to make the browser display them exactly as if they were tables. This method is nice because I get all the table-like behavior and (IIRC) it has good browser support. Opinion on whether it's "proper" seems to be divided, but IMO there's nothing wrong with it because you're not literally using tables for layout in the HTML and you're still using CSS as it was intended: to dictate presentation. (And if it is somehow "bad", the W3C shouldn't have included it in the CSS standard in the first place, so there. )

I believe there is a "flex-box" thing that's supposed to provide some of the flexibility of the old tables, but browser support doesn't yet seem as widespread as the method I just mentioned.

I like it because it develops problem-solving and critical thinking skills, and because it lets me make my computer work for me by doing exactly what I want or need it to do (and not merely being limited to what some other programmer decided to make it do). It's also awesome to be able to create a program (or even a game; +1 what DJ Omnimaga said) that I wish existed but doesn't. I don't have to settle for just wishing!

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on April 02, 2017, 04:29:37 PMNow to be fair, I don't miss tables in the slightest. Divs are much eaiser to deal with. But I wish the div/CSS3 era came out way back then. Would have been epic.

I feel it depends on exactly what you're trying to achieve. I can't always seem to get non-table boxes to do exactly what I want when laying them out horizontally without occasionally resorting to adding CSS rules to make them display like table cells, though maybe it's just me. (For instance, trying to get them to use all horizontal space while spreading their space in particular proportions comes to mind.) But for other types of layout or organization, they work pretty well. I haven't managed to really get the hang of floats, either, let alone stop them from doing awful things like overlapping each other if there doesn't happen to be enough space (and I hate seeing this problem happen frequently on sites I visit, making everything unreadable).

What I do like about external CSS files is that they greatly simplify the HTML and come closer to the ideal of separating content and presentation (though it's not perfect, as I sometimes seem to run into limitations in CSS that end up require me to at least slightly alter the HTML anyway).

What I hate is that it can be darn confusing trying to get things to line up exactly how I want and the fact that browsers tend to vary in their interpretation and support of CSS rules (though this seems to have improved a bit over time).

I also hate how the standards developers seem to have forgotten what HTML was originally intended for: to render text on a device-independent basis, not to be an absolute pixel-perfect page-layout engine. Meaning, presentation and style elements were intended to be optional, as not all clients (or users—consider sight-impaired people using screen readers) support them. Very limited text-only devices were supposed to be able to render the text in alternate ways the best they could, and the content was intended to still be usable. Today, we have nonsense like fixed-width layouts and increasing numbers of sites designed to completely break when I enlarge the text size for accessibility reasons. The "full site" zoom (which scales the entire page instead of just the text) isn't usually adequate because so many sites apparently think it's cool to use a fixed-width layout (often making their lines of text already way too many characters long for comfortable reading, just to add insult to injury) so that it results in horizontal scrolling to read every single line, making the site go from barely legible to pretty much unusable.

The current HTML standards seem to place the full weight of making a proper device-independent and accessible site on the web developers, either making it far more work or providing features that encourage them not to bother. As a result, Web accessibility is a huge hit-or-miss mess.

Thank goodness they had the sense to make CSS so that it can be trivially overridden by the user. It's a pain, but if I have to, I at least have the option to apply my own rules in my browser to whip a messed-up site back into some kind of usable state.

I also really dislike how half the sites nowadays require JavaScript to be usable at all. Sure, interactive content legitimately requires it, but there's no excuse for sites with static content that give you nothing but a blank page if you have JavaScript off. More and more web sites are turning into "apps" (even those that really don't need to be), but, since really good programmers are fairly rare, there are huge numbers of sites that require JavaScript for things that shouldn't need it, or use it just to do really annoying things (like lightbox nags and ads, after the original pop-ups of the '90s were already considered by virtually everyone to be bad and blockers developed for damn good reasons), or do it such a horrible way that it doesn't work properly at all or requires 500 GB of RAM and several decades of CPU time to render a couple of lines of text. JS was once considered a mere supplement to HTML; it should have remained that way for the vast majority of pages. It's capable of greatly enhancing and improving the usability of web pages, but sadly I always seem to encounter far more cases of it making them as difficult to use as possible instead. On the bright side, at least it's just JS and not Flash.

I feel your pain; 86 crashes can be a pain to recover from sometimes.

The worst crash I had, I had to remove all the AAA batteries and the backup battery, and I think I even put a piece of tape on the ON key to hold it down for a few hours with the batteries removed (somehow that seems to help). It should eventually reset and work again if you do that, even if it takes a while and a number of attempts.

Usually it doesn't take that long, though; often removing the AAAs and holding ON for a minute or so will be enough to drain the remaining charge and allow the processor to hard-reset when you reinstall the AAAs.

Hope that helps!

I seem to remember that TI Connect on Windows ditched support for "legacy" calcs like the 86 even back when it first came out, though I could be remembering that wrong. But yeah, if you (@Switchblade) could answer DJ Omnimaga's questions, and also tell us which linking software and cable you're using, that might provide a clue. Also, you might try using TILP to transfer the files to the calculator if you haven't already; I seem to recall that there were a few strangely-formatted 86 files out there that can confuse some link programs into transferring bad data. As I recall, TILP can properly handle several of the nonstandard variations.

I don't consider myself that great at trying to understand speech with too much noise, either. I often have trouble working out unfamiliar syllable/accent patterns even in crystal-clear speech, for that matter. (But I also get kind of OCD about trying to understand every single word, which means rewinding a TV show a million times and then giving up and turning on the closed captioning just to figure out one particular word. Very annoying, but that's a whole different story. :lol:)

I've to the conclusion that (at least in my case) the odd dips in sound level I'm hearing are likely just my headphones. Whether that's considered normal or a result of headphone age/wear I have no idea, but I got different results when listening with desktop speakers. Also, reading around, it seems that my cutoff frequency of around 15 kHz is considered more or less normal for my age.

Oh yes, the Shepard tone is pretty cool.

One more random tidbit I thought I'd throw in: According to Wikipedia, there are animals like certain bats and whales that can hear beyond 100 kHz but not below 1 to 10 kHz, which means they probably can't hear human speech at all.

Quote from: JWinslow23 on December 25, 2016, 07:19:13 AM
Because I made some new courses.

I think the methods and mechanics I use in these are pretty creative. Perhaps someone else can use them for more polished levels. Tell me what you think!

Those are pretty creative! How did you come up with them?

I liked "Don't Tap Left". It took a few tries to wrap my head around it, but I soon got the hang of it. Same with the Mario Kart level; I was a little confused at first when I thought I was going in circles, but when I remembered the Mario Kart theme, I got the idea that it was keeping track of laps. That's pretty cool. Haven't yet managed to get through "Pacifist: Don't...Shoot" without killing anything yet (unfortunately, the enemies didn't themselves bother reading the name of the level).

Studying the levels to figure out how the mechanics work is fun, too, because the first thing I wondered is how you did that.

I'm pretty new to the MM stuff but thought it'd be fun to play with, so we got it back around Christmas. Here's my first "real" level:

38F9-0000-02EB-A039
"I Just Want a Blinkin' P-Switch!"

I wonder if maybe I got a little carried away with the length or difficulty, but there were just so many concepts I wanted to try out. So if anyone happens to try it and wants to give feedback/criticism, feel free.

I plan to try out other levels posted here once I get a chance; they sound interesting!

I'm 34, and I don't know of any of those ultrasonic mice repellents ever being used around me.

I tried the clips on the noiseaddicts site DJ posted. 14 kHz appeared to be the highest I can hear, except for on the 21 kHz clip only, I hear a faint, lower hum that definitely doesn't sound like 21 kHz. I got a similar effect with certain frequencies in Audacity above 20 kHz, but not the same ones. I still think there's some kind of aliasing going on.

So I set the project sample rate to 96 kHz instead of the usual 48 kHz (don't know if my sound card can actually do 96 kHz, but figured I'd give it a try), and the weird phantom tones at frequencies above what I can hear disappeared.

Then I realized that the faint clicks that happen when a sound starts and stops seemed to be having a psychological effect of making me think I was hearing the tone when I really wasn't (because the clicks were cluing me in to when the tone started and stopped), so I went through a series of tones in Audacity with quick fade-outs at the end to avoid the clicks. Then, if I could tell that the tone stopped with my eyes closed, I decided I could hear the sound. So now, finally, it looks like roughly 15,300 Hz is the frequency where I begin to have trouble reliably recognizing the tone, at least with the headphones I'm using.

And I thought determining my hearing range was going to be a simple task.

I tried the test again with one ear at a time, and the results I got are still consistent; that is, where the sound appeared to pan to the right, I heard a dip in volume when playing it just in my left ear.

However, I also found that while the dips always seem to occur at roughly the same points, the effect seems to vary slightly depending on exactly how the headphone cups are positioned on my ears. So I have some suspicion that at least some of this is due to the headphones. If I manage to find a different set to test, I'll report the results of those.

Another thing I discovered: the waveform this video plays seems to be altered a bit, presumably due to the lossy audio compression. So I can hear aliasing noise (or some other artifact) at frequencies above and below my actual threshold of hearing, which makes it confusing to tell the actual range. When I generate and play raw, uncompressed sine wave tones in Audacity at those frequencies I don't get this noise. The spectrograms of the raw sine tones vs. the ones in the video also appear different even though the waveforms look and sound more or less the same. Finally, it's possible that the high frequencies are actually filtered a bit when the video is encoded for quality reasons (again, to suit the audio encoding scheme used).

So, I think a more accurate test would require a video using only uncompressed or losslessly-compressed audio.

Just for the record, the way I listened to the test video was by setting the volume to the maximum that the loudest-sounding frequencies were still comfortable to hear, then left it there. I didn't crank it up further to try to hear the high frequencies better. Under these conditions, my hearing range is apparently 30 Hz to around 14–15 KHz right now.

I listen to music on headphones frequently, but usually no more than a couple of hours or so at a time. I prefer decent or maybe even rather high volume but try not to go overboard. But I have no idea what sound level it would equate to. Other than that, I'm not normally exposed to loud noises.

It's known that people inevitably lose the ability to hear high sounds as they age, though frequent exposure to loud sounds without protection accelerates the process.

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on December 06, 2016, 07:38:17 PM
@Travis have you tried putting one of your ear next to each speaker while blocking your other ear to see if it makes any difference? Try with each ear. If you see a difference then maybe your hearing abilities became slightly different from ear to ear?

That makes sense. Maybe I'll try it with the headphones on and playing sound out of just the left side, then the right side, and see. I seem to remember listening to some demonstrations of some interesting auditory illusions once that involved left vs. right ear sounds but can't remember what it was now.

QuoteIn my case I used to be able to hear very high pitched sounds slightly when at max volume, such as this in 2009 https://www.omnimaga.org/humor-and-jokes/if-your-over-18-you-wont-hear-anything/ , but I just listened to that MP3 clip Eeems posted in that thread and nowadays it's no longer the case. On http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2009/03/can-you-hear-this-hearing-test/ , 14 KHz is the max I am able to hear. That said, headphone quality might come into play there, but I could be wrong. I am using $25 headphones right now (from back when the only expensive headphones being sold in Canada were EB Game exclusive's Turtle Beach)

My headphones are a Seinnheiser model and were much over $25 (I don't remember the exact cost but it was over $100; I bought them several years ago), and I consider them very good quality. But it could be that another pair of headphones would give me another result. Unfortunately, I don't have another pair handy to test at the moment.

It could be that my onboard motherboard sound is crap quality, too. Who knows. (I will say that there's more noise and interference in the analog output than should be considered acceptable.)

I would certainly expect the quality of the speakers, headphones, and other equipment to play a big factor, so this stuff is tricky. At the very least, don't use something like a cheap $5 microcassette voice recorder and speaker to judge your hearing abilities or you might think you can't hear anything over 4000 Hz or so.