Washita and Other Weird Tales

My e-book, Washita and Other Weird Tales. written in 2023-2024 and published in 2024, has been added to this blog. You can find the main pa...

Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts

Friday, April 25, 2025

Keyboard Shortcuts 1

Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard Shortcuts

This list covers Windows 10 shortcuts. Some shortcuts may not work with Windows 11. The ones I have tested do work with 11. Sources: MSN, Internet.

Ctrl + A - Selects all content.

Ctrl + C (or Ctrl + Insert) - Copies selected items to the clipboard.

Ctrl + X - Cuts selected items to the clipboard.

Ctrl + V (or Shift + Insert) - Pastes content from the clipboard.

Ctrl + Z - Used to undo an action, including undelete files.

Ctrl + Y - Used to redo an action.

Ctrl + Shift + Esc - Opens the Task Manager.

Ctrl + Shift + N - Creates a new folder on the desktop or File Explorer.

Alt + F4 - Closes an active window. (If no active window is present, a shutdown box appears.)

Ctrl + D (Del) - Deletes a selected item to the Recycle Bin.

Shift + Delete - Deletes the selected item permanently, skipping Recycle Bin.

F2 - Renames the selected item.

Esc - Closes the current task.

Alt + Tab - Switches between open apps.

PrtScn (Print Screen) - Takes a screenshot and stores it in the clipboard.

Windows key + I - Opens the Settings app.

Windows key + E - Opens File Explorer.

Windows key + A - Opens Action center.

Windows key + D - Displays and hides the desktop.

Windows key + L - Locks the device.

Windows key + V - Opens the Clipboard bin.

Windows key + Period (.) or Semicolon (;) - Opens the emoji panel.

Windows key + PrtScn (Print Screen) - Captures a full screenshot in the "Screenshots" folder.

Windows key + Shift + S - Captures part of the screen with Snip & Sketch.

Windows key + Left arrow key - Snaps app or window left.

Windows key + Right arrow key - Snaps app or window right.

Saturday, March 29, 2025

Movie Region Codes

Movie Region Codes
Movie Region Codes

Regional Codes

"Alternatively called country codes and zone locks, regional codes are restrictions that allow motion picture studios to control the home viewing of movies in different countries. They are useful for preventing certain countries from viewing movies before the appropriate release date for that region." Source: MS Bing

Movie Region Codes

R1, R2, R3, R4, R5, R6 (Region Code)

Region codes indicate that a DVD is released in a certain geographical area or region, and it's not viewable on a DVD player outside of that region. This was designed to stop people from buying American DVDs and watching them earlier in other countries or for older films where world distribution is handled by different companies.

0 - Region 0 is not an official setting; discs that bear the region 0 symbol either have no flag set or have regions 1-6 flags set.

1 - United States, Canada, Bermuda, U.S. territories.

2 - Europe (except Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus), Middle East, Egypt, Japan, South Africa, Swaziland, Lesotho, Greenland, French Overseas departments and territories.

3 - Southeast Asia, South Korea, Republic of China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, Macau.

4 - Mexico, Central America, Caribbean, South America, New Zealand, Australia, Papua New Guinea and much of Oceania.

5 - India, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Africa (except Egypt, South Africa, Swaziland, and Lesotho), Central and South Asia, Mongolia, North Korea.

6 - People's Republic of China.

7 - Reserved for future use (found in use on protected screener copies of MPAA-related DVDs and "media copies" of pre-releases in Asia)

8 - International venues such as aircraft, cruise ships, etc.

ALL - Region ALL discs have all eight flags set, allowing the disc to be played in any locale on any player.

Blu-ray Disc Region Codes

Blu-ray Discs use a much simpler region-code system than DVDs with only three regions, labeled A, B, and C.

A - Includes most North, Central and South American countries and Southeast Asian countries including the Republic of China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea.

B - Includes most European and Middle Eastern countries, all of Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

C - Includes the remaining central and south Asian countries, as well as the People's Republic of China and Russia.

Monday, March 17, 2025

Digitally Remastered Movies

Digitally Remastered Movies
Digitally Remastered Movies

"Digitally remastered" means that an older not-digital movie has been re-edited, remastered, and is released on DVD. Some really old movies look very bad compared to the new digital movies. Then they remaster it to make it look better, edit & recolor the video, et cetera. Remastering generally implies some sort of upgrade to a previous existing product, frequently designed to encourage people to buy a new version of something they already own.

Tuesday, February 25, 2025

Audio Formats

Audio Formats:

MP3 - MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III:

Name of the type of file for MPEG, audio layer 3. Layer 3 is one of three coding schemes (layer 1, layer 2, and layer 3) for the compression of audio signals.

Layer 3 uses perceptual audio coding and psychoacoustic compression to remove all superfluous information. It also adds an MDCT (Modified Discrete Cosine Transform) that implements a filter bank, increasing the frequency resolution 18 times higher than that of layer 2.

The result in real terms is layer 3 shrinks the original sound data from a CD (with a bit rate of 1411.2 kilobits per one second of stereo music) by a factor of 12 (down to 112-128kbps) without sacrificing sound quality.

3 - Southeast Asia, South Korea, Republic of China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, Macau.

4 - Mexico, Central America, Caribbean, South America, New Zealand, Australia, Papua New Guinea and much of Oceania.

5 - India, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Africa (except Egypt, South Africa, Swaziland, and Lesotho), Central and South Asia, Mongolia, North Korea.

6 - People's Republic of China.

7 - Reserved for future use (found in use on protected screener copies of MPAA-related DVDs and "media copies" of pre-releases in Asia)

8 - International venues such as aircraft, cruise ships, etc.

ALL - Region ALL discs have all eight flags set, allowing the disc to be played in any locale on any player.

WMA - Windows Media Audio:

Short for Windows Media Audio, WMA is a Microsoft file format for encoding digital audio files similar to MP3 though can compress files at a higher rate than MP3. WMA files, which use the ".wma" file extension, can be of any size compressed to match many different connection speeds, or bandwidths.

WAV:

WAV is the format used for storing sound in files developed jointly by Microsoft and IBM. Support for WAV files was built into Windows 95 making it the de facto standard for sound on PCs. WAV sound files end with a .wav extension and can be played by nearly all Windows applications that support sound.

FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec:

Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) is an audio compression codec that employs a lossless data compression algorithm. A digital audio recording compressed by FLAC can be decompressed into an identical copy of the original audio data.

Audio sources encoded to FLAC are typically reduced to 50–60% of their original size.

It can handle any PCM bit resolution from 4 to 32 bits per sample, any sampling rate from 1 Hz to 655,350 Hz in 1 Hz increments, and any number of channels from 1 to 8.

Channels can be grouped in cases like stereo and 5.1 channel surround to take advantage of interchannel correlations to increase compression.

Tuesday, December 17, 2024

Helpful Writing Tips

Writing Tips
Writing Tips - AI-Generated Image

Some thoughts on writing short stories:

  • If it becomes a job, write one paragraph and quit for the day.
  • Less is more.
  • Keep it simple.
  • One paragraph a day is fine.
  • Write three paragraphs a day if possible.
  • Extreme detail is not necessary.
  • Outlines are helpful. You can search the internet and find many pages to help do this.
  • Research then write.
  • Prepare the outline for one paragraph the night beforehand.
  • Learn something new every day.
  • "Me time" is a dumb phrase. But take it when you can.
  • Go somewhere relevant.
  • Remember the camera on your phone.

Tuesday, November 5, 2024

Windows File and Folder Attributes

These were gathered from the internet and placed here for my own use. I believe I found them all through the use of Google.com.

R = Read only

H = Hidden

S = System

C = Compressed

N = Not Indexed

L = Reparse Points

O = Offline

P = Sparse File

I = Not content indexed

T = Temporary

E = Encrypted

Tuesday, July 16, 2024

Internet Error Codes

-What is Error 400?

Error 400: Bad Request means; the request is incorrect.

-What is Error 401?

Error 401: Unauthorized means; the client does not have the required privileges to access the site.

-What is Error 403?

Error 403: A 403 Forbidden Error occurs when you do not have permission to access a web page or something else on a web server.

-What is Error 501?

Error 501: Not Implemented means; the server does not support the service type or the called protocol.

-What is Error 404?

Error 404: Not Found means; the requested resource no longer exists or has been moved, or the address may be misspelled.

-What is Error 500?

The server encountered an unexpected condition that prevented it from fulfilling the request.

-What is Error 503?

The Web server (running the Web site) is currently unable to handle the HTTP request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server.

-What is Error 520?

Error 520 is essentially a catch-all response when something unexpected happens or when the origin server incorrectly interprets or does not tolerate a request due to a protocol violation or an empty response.

What is Error 521?

Error 521 occurs because the origin web server refuses a connection from Cloudflare. More specifically, Cloudflare tried to connect to your origin server on port 80 or 443 but received a connection refused error.

Source: Google