Tutorial: Customizing the Lightbox

shythemes:

This tutorial gives an overview of ways to change the appearance of tumblr’s lightbox to look, for example, like this:

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Tutorial: Pixel Union photosets

shythemes:

Pixel Union’s extended photoset script allows you to adjust the gutters/margins between images in photosets, and makes photosets responsive to any post width. You can find a complete set of instructions and the original files on the github page, but in this tutorial, by an anonymous request, I have simplified it to make it quicker and easier to install.

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Harry Potter Ambient Noise Masterlist

preoccupiedpepper:

ambient-mixer:

Some Harry Potter inspired background noises for you all!

Getting to Hogwarts

• Platform 9 ¾
  
• Hogwarts Express
• Storm On The Hogwarts Express
• Hogwarts Express Compartment 
• Death Eaters - Hogwarts Express
  

At Hogwarts

• Rainy Hogwarts 
  
• Hogwarts After Dark 
  
• The Great Hall At Hogwarts
  
• Halloween At Hogwarts
  
• Christmas Cheer At Hogwarts
  
• Hogwarts Grounds In Summer
  
• Snape’s Office 
  
• McGonagall’s Office 
  
• Regan Ravenclaw’s Study
  
• Owlery
  
• Under The Hogwarts Lake
  
• Hogwarts Grounds
  
• The Black Lake 
• The Forbidden Forest
  
• Working By The Great Lake
  
• These Halls Are No Longer Safe
  
• Quidditch
  

The Four Houses

• Gryffindor
• Gryffindor Tower Sounds 
  
• Gryffindor Fireplace
  
• Gryffindor Dormitory
  
• Gryffindor Common Room - Rainy
  
• Gryffindor Common Room With Pets
• Slytherin
• Slytherin Common Room
  
• Slytherin Dormitory
  
• Study Like A Slytherin!
  
• Slytherin Evening
  
• Slytherin Study Room
• Hufflepuff
• Hufflepuff Dormitory
• Evening In The Hufflepuff Common Room
• Cozy Hufflepuff Common Room
• Hufflepuff Common Room w/ Harp
  
• Ravenclaw
• Ravenclaw Common Room
• Ravenclaw Dormitory
  
• Ravenclaw Window Sill
  
• Ravenclaw Study
  
• Ravenclaw’s Lazy Sunday
  

Study and Learn

• The Perfect Hogwarts Library
• Hogwarts Library Realistic
  
• Transfiguration Classroom
  
• Classroom 11
  
• Potions Class
  

Hogsmeade

• Hogsmeade
  
• Rainy Hogsmeade Afternoon
  
• Three Broomsticks Inn 
  
• Madame Puddifoot’s Tea Shop
  
• Hogsmeade Before Christmas
  

Outside Hogwarts

• Malfoy Manor
• Breakfast At The Burrow
  
• Shell Cottage
• Diagon Alley Shops
• Weasley And Weasley
• Weasley’s Wizarding Wheezes
• Leaky Cauldron
  
• The Quidditch World Cup
  

I usually don’t like these things, but I put on the Cozy Hufflepuff Common Room one about an hour ago and I’ve accomplished more in that hour than I normally accomplish in four. 

itsleightaylor:

I just tweeted it and I figure I should also post it here. 

This website literally GRADES YOUR ESSAYS. You can choose your grade level, if you’re using American or British english, what type of paper it is (essay, short story, biography…), and it even checks for plagiarism. THEN once it’s grading your essay, it shows you grammatical errors, suggestions for better sentence structure, and a lot of other things. Reblog to save a life. 

You only need ~300 words to talk about everyday things

funwithlanguages:

This is part of my guide on how to start learning a language quickly and efficiently. You can find the whole guide here. (Note: an earlier version of this list had 200 words. I added some more in order to cover a wider range of situations.)

If you learn just 300 well-chosen words in your target language, then you can talk about most everyday things. (By “words”, I really mean lemmas, i.e. I’m counting “run” and “runs” as one word.) When trying to talk about a topic, there will probably be a few key words that you don’t know, but you can ask for or look up those words and then use them for the rest of the time that you’re talking about the topic. You can see an example of how using the 300 words works.

* Note 1: Being able to speak doesn’t mean that you’ll immediately be able to listen to and understand the language. See note #2 on the guide. However, you can have conversations if the other person slows down and speaks simply, and you can also practice writing.

Here’s the list of 300. I hope it’s a useful guideline and starting point for you. I may revise it, so please refer to the original post for the most up-to-date version. In addition to these general words, there will probably be some others that will be among the most useful for you (e.g. “class” if you’re a student). When you find yourself using them again and again, learn them too.

* Note 2: You should really think of this as a list of concepts. Your goal isn’t to translate each word to a word in your target language, but to figure out how to express that concept in your target language. In some cases, a concept may translate to multiple words (for example, I listed “you” as a concept, but in some languages there are different words for “formal you” and “informal you”). Some concepts may translate to no word at all, but rather a certain grammatical structure (for example, Russian doesn’t use the verb “have”; to say “I have a cat” in Russian, you say “at me there is a cat”).

Use a dictionary to find out how to express these concepts in your target language (for some subtleties, you’ll need to google or ask in a forum). After that, I suggest memorizing the words by making yourself a Memrise course with the words and going through the course. Learn to be able to go from the concept to the word in your target language, not the other way around; you want to be able to produce the word, not just recognize it. You should also learn how to pronounce your target language. To hear native speakers pronounce words in your target language, check out Forvo.

—

This list has been translated into: Finnish, French, Spanish.

Version 1 of this list, which had 200 words, was translated into: Afrikaans, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Thai.

If you’d like to translate this list into another language, please feel free! :) Just include a link back to this post, and let me know when you’re done so that I can link to your list here.

—

First Verbs

1. be
2. there is
3. have
4. do
5. go
6. want
7. can
8. need
9. think
10. know
11. say
12. like
13. speak
14. learn
15. understand

Conjunctions

1. that (as in “I think that…” or “the woman that…”)
2. and
3. or
4. but
5. because
6. though
7. so (meaning “therefore”; e.g. “I wanted it, so I bought it”)
8. if

Prepositions

1. of
2. to
3. from
4. in
5. at (a place)
6. at (a time)
7. with
8. about
9. like (meaning “similar to”)
10. for (warning, this one has several meanings that you need to take care of)
11. before (also as a conjunction)
12. after (also as a conjunction)
13. during

Question Words

1. who
2. what
3. where
4. when
5. why
6. how
7. how much
8. which

Adverbs

1. a lot
2. a little
3. well
4. badly
5. only
6. also
7. very
8. too (as in “too tall”)
9. too much
10. so (as in “so tall”)
11. so much
12. more (know how to say “more … than …”)
13. less (know how to say “less … than …”)
14. as … as … (e.g. “as tall as”)
15. most
16. least
17. better
18. best
19. worse
20. worst
21. now
22. then
23. here
24. there
25. maybe
26. always
27. usually
28. often
29. sometimes
30. never
31. today
32. yesterday
33. tomorrow
34. soon
35. almost
36. already
37. still
38. even
39. enough

Adjectives

1. the, a (technically articles)
2. this
3. that
4. good
5. bad
6. all
7. some
8. no
9. any
10. many
11. few
12. most
13. other
14. same
15. different
16. enough
17. one
18. two
19. a few
20. first
21. next
22. last (meaning “past”, e.g. “last Friday”)
23. last (meaning “final”)
24. easy
25. hard
26. early
27. late
28. important
29. interesting
30. fun
31. boring
32. beautiful
33. big
34. small
35. happy
36. sad
37. busy
38. excited
39. tired
40. ready
41. favorite
42. new
43. right (meaning “correct”)
44. wrong
45. true

Pronouns

Know them in the subject (“I”), direct object (“me”), indirect object (“to me”), and possessive (“my”) forms.

1. I
2. you
3. she
4. he
5. it
6. we
7. you (plural)
8. they

Nouns

If your language has grammatical gender, then learn each noun as “the [noun]” with “the” in the correct gender. (e.g. in Spanish, instead of learning language = “idioma”, learn language = “el idioma”.) This will help you remember the gender.

1. everything
2. something
3. nothing
4. everyone
5. someone
6. no one
7. (name of the language you’re studying)
8. English
9. thing
10. person
11. place
12. time (as in “a long time”)
13. time (as in “I did it 3 times”)
14. friend
15. woman
16. man
17. money
18. country
19. (name of your home country)
20. city
21. language
22. word
23. food
24. house
25. store
26. office
27. company
28. manager
29. coworker
30. job
31. work (as in “I have a lot of work to do”)
32. problem
33. question
34. idea
35. life
36. world
37. day
38. year
39. week
40. month
41. hour
42. mother, father, parent
43. daughter, son, child
44. wife, husband
45. girlfriend, boyfriend

More Verbs

1. work (as in a person working)
2. work (meaning “to function”, e.g. “the TV works”)
3. see
4. use
5. should
6. believe
7. practice
8. seem
9. come
10. leave
11. return
12. give
13. take
14. bring
15. look for
16. find
17. get (meaning “obtain”)
18. receive
19. buy
20. try
21. start
22. stop (doing something)
23. finish
24. continue
25. wake up
26. get up
27. eat
28. eat breakfast (in several languages, this is a verb)
29. eat lunch
30. eat dinner
31. happen
32. feel
33. create (aka “make”)
34. cause (aka “make”)
35. meet (meeting someone for the first time)
36. meet (meaning “to bump into”)
37. meet (an arranged meeting)
38. ask (a question)
39. ask for (aka “request”)
40. wonder
41. reply
42. mean
43. read
44. write
45. listen
46. hear
47. remember
48. forget
49. choose
50. decide
51. be born
52. die
53. kill
54. live
55. stay
56. change
57. help
58. send
59. study
60. improve
61. hope
62. care

Phrases

1. hello
2. goodbye
3. thank you
4. you’re welcome
5. excuse me (to get someone’s attention)
6. sorry
7. it’s fine (response to an apology)
8. please
9. yes
10. no
11. okay
12. My name is
13. What’s your name?
14. Nice to meet you.
15. How are you?
16. I’m doing well, how about you?
17. Sorry? / What? (if you didn’t hear something)
18. How do you say ______?
19. What does ______ mean?
20. I don’t understand.
21. Could you repeat that?
22. Could you speak more slowly, please?
23. Well (as in “well, I think…”)
24. Really?
25. I guess that
26. It’s hot. (talking about the weather)
27. It’s cold. (talking about the weather)

—

Now that you’ve learned the 300 basic words, how do you learn more? I suggest practicing writing.

—

Example

Here’s a demonstration of how you can use the 300 basic words to talk about most things. I took a paragraph from a website, and then I rephrased it using only the 300 basic words + a few others.

Here’s the paragraph:

I have had a good run, producing more films than virtually anyone else. And I believe better films (okay, maybe I am biased, but..), and ones with more consistent returns, but damn! It is harder now to justify investment or commitment than ever before — even when the tools have improved and the talent pool grown like never before.  Film, like all the culture economies, has been turned on it’s head, but unlike the others, since the work at the top still delivers a return, our leaders and corporations act like business is as it’s always been.

Here’s the rephrased version. It doesn’t sound as nice as the original, but it’s still completely understandable. I bolded the words that aren’t in the basic word list the first time that they appear. When writing or talking, you can ask for or look up those words and then keep using them.

I have done well and made more films than almost all other people. And I think that my films were better (okay, it is me saying that…) and they almost always made money. But! It is more hard now than at any time before to say why you’re making films – though the things we use are better and better people want to work for us. Films, like other things that make money from culture, are not like they were before. But what’s different for films is: because the films that make the most still make a lot of money, the companies that make films work like nothing is different.

If you’re wondering how you can express something using just (or mainly) the basic words, please don’t hesitate to ask me. I’ve had a lot of practice. :)

Click here to return to the basic word list or here to return to the guide homepage.