Article: Why Do We Have Leap Years?

A leap year (or intercalary or bissextile year) is a year containing one additional day (or, in the case of lunisolar calendars, a month) in order to keep the calendar year synchronized with the astronomical or seasonal year. Because seasons and astronomical events do not repeat in a whole number of days, a calendar that had the same number of days in each year would, over time, drift with respect to the event it was supposed to track. By occasionally inserting (or intercalating) an additional day or month into the year, the drift can be corrected. A year that is not a leap year is called a common year.

A leap year, also known as an intercalary year, is the one containing an extra day, normally February 29th, although this varies in certain calendars. In the Gregorian Calendar, which is used by most of the world, a leap year occurs every four years or 97 years out of every 400. This is done as a way to keep seasons, astronomical events, and time differences in sync. Without leap years, the Gregorian calendar would lose veracity in just over a hundred years, leading to time differences between day and night, and moving the equinox early.

 

The Gregorian method adds a 29th day in all years divisible by 4 except for years that end in -00, like 1900 or 2100, the extra day is not added. However, there is one more exception to the exception: for years ending in -00 that can be divided by 400, the extra day is added. The years 1600 and 2000, for example were leap years, as 2400 will be. This approach makes the Gregorian method the most accurate way to create leap years, allowing it to fall behind only one day every 8,000 years.

Other calendars don’t do such a good job of creating leap years. Examples of that are the Julian and the Coptic calendar, which create leap years by simply adding an extra day every four years, regardless of any other consideration. This method, which was in common use until a few centuries ago, would push the calendar a day forward every 130 years. 

Article: Things you didn’t know VLC media player can do

VLC media player (also known as VLC) is a highly portable free and open-source media player and streaming media server written by the VideoLAN project. It is a cross-platform media player, with versions for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BeOS, MorphOS, BSD, Solaris, iOS, and eComStation.

VLC media player supports many audio and video compression methods and file formats, including DVD-video, video CD and streaming protocols. It is able to stream over computer network and to transcode multimedia files.

VLC used to stand for VideoLAN Client, but since VLC is no longer simply a client, that initialism no longer applies.

For most people, VLC is the favorite media player because it plays everything they throw at it without hiccups. No hunting for codec. But VLC can do a lot of other things as well. Find out how many of these listed below you knew, and how many you did not.

1. Rip DVDs: VLC includes a basic DVD ripper. You probably would never use it when there are better DVD rippers available, but it helps to know that you can in fact, get a decent quality DVD rip with VLC. To rip a movie follow these steps:

• Go to the Media menu and choose Convert/Save. Click on the Disc tab.
• Here you can adjust the Starting Position and rip only specific titles or chapters.
• Enter file name making sure to end with .MPG, and start ripping.
• Click Save. 

2. Record videos: With the new VLC, you can record videos during playback. The record button is hidden by default. To see it, click on View>Advanced Control. The record button will now appear. Clicking on the button while playing a movie or video will start recording. Clicking again will stop recording.

3. Play RAR files: Do you know VLC can play videos zipped inside RAR files? They play like normal video files and you can even use the seek bar. If the RAR file is split into several files, no problem. Just load the first part (.part001.rar ) and it will automatically take the rest of the parts and play the whole file.