Category: Tech Posts

What is Assisted Living

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Inf

An assisted living care facility like The Residences at Plainview / senior independent living provides residents with extra support with activities of daily living when and how they need it. Services are provided as needed and at an assisted living level of care. For more information, visit now this website or go to a place like harvesthomeinwoodcrossing.com/living-options/assisted-living/.
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What is assisted living?

As the term “assisted living” implies, assisted living and community senior living care provide residents with assistance with activities of daily living when and how they need it. Assistance may include a home-based program, a personal assistant or personal aide, personal care assistant or personal aide, nursing or personal care aides, home health aides, respite care aides, assisted living technicians like the ones on oceanhillsseniorliving.com/living-options/independent-living/, community assistants, and home health aides. There are facilities that are well-equipped with mobility devices or equipment such as this stairlift at https://certifiedstairlifts.co.uk/ to meet the needs of seniors.

Visit sites such as fallbrookglenseniorliving.com/our-community/ to get an idea. 

A resident’s services are limited to those that are listed above. Some states have additional programs.

If a resident requests assisted living care, the local family service agency must provide the resident with a notice of assisted living care or offer to assist the resident in getting the services that are most appropriate to his or her individual needs.

State laws may include limits on how long a resident may be assisted living. In some cases, state and federal programs may reimburse certain costs for assisted living services. Check out sites like www.carltonseniorliving.com/living-options/ for additional guidance.

What is assisted living?

Assisted living like this Assisted Living in Los Angeles, CA provides residents with the care they need when they need it most. This care includes assistance with bathing and eating, medical care and medications, transportation, personal care and assistance with social activities. Some assisted living facilities like the ones from https://www.arborpalmsseniorliving.com/ offer programs for seniors who are unable to live independently.

Is assisted living legal?

Assisted living may be legal under many states’ laws and laws of neighboring states. Please contact your local state attorney general office or local housing office for specific information regarding your rights and responsibilities in this situation. Is assisted living affordable? Assisted living may be affordable, but there are some requirements that need to be considered. There are different kinds of assisted living facilities. Some are available in communities such as the ones from Vista at Simi Valley, where they are often owned and operated by the community itself. Others are available in a private setting. They may require certain level of income to be able to offer the services of an assisted living facility. These assisted living facilities may be located in an individual’s own home or other space. As the name implies, they offer medical and/or psychological assistance.

There are also different kinds of nursing homes. The differences in these are primarily in the type of nursing home. Nursing homes usually are not in an individual’s own home. These are generally either assisted living facilities, long-term care nursing homes or institutionalized nursing homes. Some of the facilities may be very different in design and style from one another and may also have different requirements. Some nursing homes, however, are in a nursing home facility that has a community of nursing homes that are located together. This would include the facilities, e.g., memory care community like the Summerfield of Fresno / memory care nursing homes, that are not owned by a private hospital. The nursing homes that are connected to each other are often called a nursing home community. This is a large area that includes a number of nursing homes and may have different layouts for different nursing homes.

The different types of nursing homes often have different amenities. There may be a large parking lot, pool, gym, tennis courts, golf courses, pools, and more. There may also be restaurants or other places where visitors can go to spend time with residents. Many of the residents who live in the community have lived there for a long time. The nursing homes may have different rates, depending on the type of nursing home that is connected to it. You can visit this site to know more.

10 Very Useful Utilities You May Not Know About

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Inf

Utilities are life-savers. I am usually on the lookout of new ones that give me added functionalities at a low memory cost. Here’s a rundown of 10 very useful utilities I have found. Not all are very light on memory though…

Let’s get started, shall we?

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Music Recognition Service Roundup

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Inf

I just saw the stats of Geekscribes and the article about the music recognition software Tunatic is leading in the number of views. Seeing how people are interested in such services, I decided to dedicate a post about other services of the same type that do work from a computer or are online services. Let’s start:

Update (05.08.10): Added Audiggle (#5)

1. Tunatic

I have already talked at length on this software now. Download and install it, plug in a microphone, record a piece of your unknown track via Tunatic and it’ll probably give you the track name and artist if they are in the database. The problem with Tunatic is that development seems to have stopped, as it can be seen from this line on Tunalyzer’s page: “NB: Tunalyzer should be available for the Windows platform in early 2007.”. Tunalyzer allows you to analyze your own known songs, and have them added to the Tunatic database.

It works for most songs I tested it on, but since development seems to have stopped, I don’t have much hope for the project getting new features.

Read the post about Tunatic on Geekscribes

2. Midomi

This one is a new service I’ve just discovered, but which I don’t use as it was meant to. Basically, it’s an online service where you go, and hum/sing some track you don’t know the details of. Maybe it’s a tune stuck in your head somewhere and you’d like the name. There’s a bar near the top part. So you click on it, hum the song in your microphone and it’ll almost certainly give you the track’s details. It worked for all tracks I tested, even some lesser-known tracks which surprised me. It’s also very fast in its identification.

Read the post about Midomi on Geekscribes

3. Audiotag

This service takes a different approach from the above two. Instead of recording a tune, you need to upload the track or some part of it to the service. You can use a variety of tools to do cut an MP3 track, for example, Mp3DirectCut which is free. After uploading the piece, which should be around 10-15 seconds minimum, it’ll give you the details you want.

I have not tested the service a lot since I would need to do a lot of cutting tracks. But I tested with two tracks, and both were recognized. One was fairly known, the other less-known with almost no lyrics.

Also, there are those facts mentioned in the footer: “recognized queries: 83453; DB size: 1327721 tracks, 96479 albums; last DB update: 4 days ago; added 23636 tracks, 1833 albums“, so I believe Audiotag is a reliable service.

Audiotag is good for people who do not have microphones, but the compromise is that you must have access to the digital track itself to be able to upload it. It doesn’t work for tunes you’ve heard on the radio or stuck in your mind, but it is good to identify that nice tune you downloaded off some site named “Track-01”. 🙂

4. Picard Tagger via Musicbrainz

Picard is not an identifier per-se. It’s a tagger. You give it access to your unknown tracks locally, and it will tag them (if possible) using data from the audio fingerprint database of  Musicbrainz.

When tested, Picard was able to identify some tracks which didn’t have their tags. However, its use is slightly more complex than the 3 above services. The strength of Picard is that it can do recognition on its own without needing to record or upload things. It’s also cross-platform, providing Windows, OSX and Linux support.

You can download Picard here, and check out the docs of Musicbrainz that teaches you how to use it.

5. Audiggle

That one is relatively new to me. The website is clean and simple, so I hope the program is as nice. I immediately went and put it to test. I immediately noticed the .NET requirement. So much for portability. If you need that, Midomi’s for you. But let’s see Audiggle’s worth. Installation was a breeze. First thing, I had to set my Microphone. Problem is I have two Line-Ins for microphone, both listed as “Microphone” so I have no idea about which is which. A note about which microphone belongs to which sound-card would be nice.

Next… What? Registration? What the hell? This is an immediate turnoff for me. Why do I need to register to identify a track. Ok, maybe to track all my identified tracks. Lol. Ok let’s go through this pain. Fortunately, registration is quite fast. Okayyy. First try. Login… “Audiggle is down for maintenance.” Nothing on the website indicates this though. Alright, after 5 mins of retries, it’s still failing.

Guess it’s not ready for the lime-light yet. I’ll come back to it later. If you have more success than me, do leave a comment please!

Do you know a similar service, but which is not mentioned here? Please post it in the comments below!

P.s. There are many other recognition services not mentioned in this roundup. This is because most of them either require a mobile phone or mobile device of some kind (Shazam) or they require you to type notes on virtual keyboards (MusicPedia). These are not really intuitive to use in my opinion, so I shared only the most user-friendly and accessible-to-all services.

Music Identification using Midomi

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Inf

I once blogged about Tunatic, which is a service you use to identify a song. It’s useful in situations where you have heard something nice on the radio or from some other source, and you wish to know the song’s details, like the artist’s and song’s name.

There are many applications that allow you to do this nowadays, but most are on the iPhone, such as the now-famous Shazam.

However, I don’t have an iPhone but I wanted to use such a service. Initially, I was using Tunatic, but the latter has not been updated in quite a long time now. I think it’s a dead project. I had to find an alternative. An alternative that can be used from a computer.

I came across this new service, Midomi. It functions just like Tunatic in that you just record a piece of a song using your microphone and it will give you the song’s details.

The thing about Midomi is that you are supposed to hum the song, or sing the lyrics. I can’t do any of those well. So I just stuck my microphone near my speaker playing the unknown song to test the service. Guess what, it works!

I kind of not followed the procedures because I didn’t sing or hum myself but the important thing is that it can identify songs with Tunatic’s simplicity.

What seriously amazed me is how many song Midomi is able to identify. I used it on some well known tracks from Ill Nino and  Muse and it successfully passed the test. I then tested it using some lesser-known tracks from the Drum and Bass genre (which does not have singing and is almost un-hummable). It gave me all the correct titles, where I expected it to fail like Tunatic did. Hell, it even identified a track from the Metal Gear Solid 4 OST which I got from Youtube! (Drebin 893)

Overall, Midomi is AMAZING! It even gives you the option to buy the desired track if that’s what you wish. For me, it’s the Tunatic replacement of choice.

The requirements are that you need a microphone and Flash Player. You’ll need to allow Flash to access your microphone and speakers, but this shouldn’t be a problem since it prompts you.

So if you have some song whose name you don’t know, or who performs it, head to Midomi and give it a try. It does not deceive.

PHP Lessons 9: Session and Cookies

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Guest-GS

Hello there, back with some PHP lessons. It’s been quite a while. Got loads of projects to deal with at work and wasn’t feeling like typing codes at home.

This lesson will deal about session ($_SESSION) and cookies ($_COOKIES)…(This kind of cookie has nothing to do with cookies our grand-mother used to cook for us 😀 )

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Windows 7: Solutions to can’t sleep problems.

by
Inf

win7-logo

Hello folks. Sorry for lack of recent posts. Been taken up with uni lately. Anyway, I have recently migrated to Windows 7. I have to say Microsoft has done a magnificent job this time, especially when I compare Win7 and Vista. Performance on Win7 is awesome. And there are lots of usability improvements, which makes 7 a very nice software.

However, I was having a problem: I couldn’t manually sleep my computer. If I did it from the Orb/Start menu, the screen would turn off, the PC would shut for like a millisecond, before starting back up, and prompting me for login.

Turns out there are a few things that can cause this error, and they are easy to troubleshoot. Try these steps if you are having the same problem as me.

1) Update your drivers.

This should be pretty obvious. An old driver might be causing an issue. So just update your drivers, specially for your video card and it should correct any problem. If it still doesn’t work, move on.

2) Try to see which requests are keeping the PC on.

Open a Command Prompt. You can do it by typing “cmd” from the Run menu, or simply open the Start Menu, and type “Command Prompt” in the “Search Programs and Files” bar.

Type this command: “powercfg -requests” without quotes. Then press Enter. You will see a list of programs that could be making requests. Windows Media Player is a usual culprit. Just close them, and it should work. If you have “None.” marked, move on.

3) A specific device is keeping the PC from sleeping

Still in the command prompt, type “powercfg -devicequery wake_armed”. You will see a list of devices that can wake up your PC. For me, I got my Network card, Keyboard and Mouse in that list. Turns out it was my mouse that was responsible for waking up the machine.

What to do? Simple: Go to device manager ( Start Menu – Control Panel (View by: Large Icons, top right)  – System – Device Manager (left sidebar) ). Find your device that you think is causing the problem. For me it was the mouse, but I had to try disabling each individually. So, find your mouse in that list, e.g. Mice and other pointing devices, right-click it, choose Properties and go to the Power Management tab. Uncheck the box “Allow this device to wake the computer“.

Validate the windows with Ok, close Control Panel, and you should be all ok. Try sleeping your computer now.

That’s it for this small guide. I hope it helps you. Step 3 solved my problem. My computer now sleeps when I want it to sleep. 🙂

PHP Lessons 8: Server Constants and HTML Forms

by
Guest-GS

Hello there, it’s been a while, I’ve been very busy with work and some personal project, so i had to delay the PHP courses, but anyway, I’m back and today we’ll have a look at Server Constants.

Take a look at www.geekscribes.net, on the right side, we have a search form, when you type in a search keyword and press Enter, the page loads and it fetch every results according to what you typed. Ever wonder how it works? Don’t go any further, today I will show you bring a boring html form to life.

Before I start, if you missed the array tutorials, then please, go to the link below, and read the post, give it a try.. because you’ll need to understand how arrays work in order to understand this lesson fully.

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