Thysbelon.Logo of a Hummingbird moth.

Did You Know Styluses for Capacitive Screens Don't Have to be Expensive?

You may have heard of active styluses, which have lots of features and are battery operated; but did you know that styluses for capacitive touchscreens can be simple and inexpensive? Passive styluses do nothing except conduct the electricity from your finger to the tip of the stylus, so they work with almost any touchscreen and don't need to be charged.

I learned this thanks to Kommando Tech's article "What Is a Stylus Pen and How It Works". Please read their article if you want more information.

IDEO Field Guide to Human-Centered Design

The IDEO field guide is a very useful resource for anyone who wants to get into product design as a career.

A good product should solve a problem. The IDEO field guide is all about how to communicate with people to find and solve problems.

There are Other Search Engines

With Google getting worse and worse lately, it's helpful to use at least two different search engines. I use both DuckDuckGo (which shares results with Bing) and occansionally Google when the former fails.

There's also this list of academic alternatives to Google compiled by Edward Clark. I haven't used any of these, but you may find them interesting.
When I do academic research I usually use JSTOR, but most of their articles are locked behind the need for a school account or payment.

I've also heard of search.marginalia.nu. According to its creator, it's not designed to answer questions, but to show you websites you didn't know existed.

How to Remove Line Breaks in Excel

Microsoft Forms responses can be downloaded as an Excel Spreadsheet; but the fields will often have unnecessary line breaks, which causes these fields' names to be discarded when importing the spreadsheet into an MS Access database.

Remove line breaks:

  1. Open the Find & Replace box
  2. Click on the Find field and press Ctrl + J on your keyboard
  3. Leave the Replace field blank
  4. Click "Replace All"
  5. Save your workbook
  6. Close and reopen Excel. This is necessary because Excel will automatically fill the Find field with whatever was last used, and it is impossible to delete line break characters from the Find field, so Find will be broken until Excel is restarted.

Peepy's Secret Midi (Almost Finished)

Emamouse's songs for ItemLabel use a lot of complex harmonies that remind me of the classical piano music I've been playing lately. The song "Peepy's Secret" has a lot of buzzing sound effects that make the song trippy and surreal, but it also makes the notes a little hard to hear; so to understand the song better, I decided to transcribe a midi version of it. I didn't finish transcribing the end of the song because I was getting a bit tired, but I hope you still find my midi useful. Feel free to download this Peepy's Secret midi and adapt it into sheet music or reference it for covers (credit to me would be appreciated).

This transcription would not have been possible without this stem splitter AI and this transcription of the chords and melody of the verse and chorus by mathyfurret. If you plan on finishing this midi, please download the stems I split with the AI.

As I was writing this post, I just realized that the entire time I was transcribing the song, I accidently had all the stems set to a bass-boosted EQ. 😅

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