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Messages - Mandork [ switch to compact view ]

Pages: [1] 2 3next
1
Sounds cool!

I presume you seen this and this?  I think they have created their own cut-down MiKTeX installations but I don't remember anymore.  I do have a portable LaTeX on a USB stick but I haven't used it for so long that I don't recall where I downloaded it from.

2
Living Room / Re: Seriously, Youtube is becoming impossible!
« on: September 25, 2011, 07:51 AM »
Another little Firefox add-on that I like for dealing with annoyances is Active Stop Button.  It doesn't do much but when you occasionally have some irritating blinking icon or other animated thing, it generally works to stop the animation.

I too tend to forget that the web even has ads after using Adblock Plus for so long.  I really should donate some money, it is the best.  I don't mind a little bit of low-key advertising here and there but I am a grouchy curmudgeon when it comes to ads, and I actively avoid buying things that are heavily advertised.  Which is kind of weird, because I'm not anti-shopping or anything like that, but something about in-your-face "our products am the bestest!!" ads really drive me nuts.

3
Man, I haven't been on this site in aaaaages.  But I saw this in the newsletter and thought I'd chime in.

I don't have a lot to add, just that my husband bought me an HTC Desire Z as a present for turning in my PhD thesis, and I have to say it's pretty cool.  So far I mostly use it to surf the net (in the house or out in the garden, using the wireless connection), read ebooks, and listen to music, but I like the gadgety-ness of it and being able to install all kinds of crazy apps.

Anyway, this is mostly just to say that I imagine the specific model of phone has a lot to do with the problems people might have, rather than android itself. This particular phone that I have seems to have a decent battery life (I charge it about every other day), doesn't have a noticeable lag, and has all the bells and whistles that I expected it to have, like the ability to watch videos on the web and be annoyed by flash ads on normal websites. But then it's also a UK version that came unlocked, straight from HTC rather than from a phone company, so it doesn't have any branding or apps except HTC's. I don't know how much that impacts things.

4
I haven't been hanging around here very much since I switched to mainly using Linux, but I thought you guys might have an idea of where I should start researching this.  Bear in mind I have pretty much no coding skills but I kind of want to learn anyway, so a little project might be a good place to start.

Anyway I have been collecting various tidbits of information, articles, etc. on a personal tiddlywiki (mostly using the TiddlySnip extension for Firefox) for a few years now, and I have lots of little bits and pieces stored in this way.  I like this particular setup because it is cross-platform and I can keep my wiki online at tiddlyspot for free, so if I want to access it from elsewhere I can.  But I often forget to search the wiki for information. 

I would like to have a program/Firefox extension that would somehow search my wiki first, and then go on to search Google (or whatever search engine) for a given term.  I imagine the results would be presented in a Firefox tab, with a section that marks out which results are from the wiki and then which ones are from the web.  Maybe with tabs, like Dogpile?  That aspect of the design is pretty unimportant at this point.

Can anyone offer some suggestions as to how I might do something like this?  Or, indeed, if something already exists to do it?

5
GOE 2007 Challenge Downloads / Re: SMAU - GOE Challenge 2007 Entry
« on: February 02, 2010, 07:54 AM »
Nevermind, I figured it out.

6
Living Room / Re: Yea, I won't be getting an iPad anytime soon
« on: February 02, 2010, 07:19 AM »
iFlop, I suspect.

7
Sorry, I got a bit tied up with my thesis and I haven't been back to check on this topic!

Mouser, I agree that the whole renaming thing for Ubuntu is a bit silly.  You get kind of used to it after a while, though, and forget about the rest of the world...

Anyway, the wine version I have is 1.1.30, although that may be since yesterday (there was a big update of various things).  Today Instant Boss seems to be better, though other things are causing problems with the screen redrawing.

Chris, what kind of card do you have? I have an Acer laptop (7520) that came with an Nvidia GeForce 7000m, and the driver I have at the moment is version 185.18.14, which I believe I downloaded and installed directly from Nvidia.  Do you get the random black bars across your screen, and various programs not redrawing when you update things?

8
I haven't been on DC in forever, so I hope I haven't put this in the wrong place.

I switched to Ubuntu more-or-less full time almost 2 years ago, and so far most things have been fine.  However, I upgraded to Jaunty a little while ago, and a few things have been giving me trouble.

Instant Boss in particular doesn't seem to run quite right in Wine now.  The biggest problem is that minimizing and then restoring the main window doesn't quite work--the "frame" comes back, but the interior isn't redrawn--it just shows a bit of whatever window was underneath it when it was restored.

Has anyone had similar problems with Wine?  I'm sure there is a better place to ask, but I thought I'd come to where I know people use the program first.

By the way, I'm using the 64 bit version of Ubuntu, if that makes any difference.  There is also some kind of bug with general screen redrawing and the Nvidia driver, which I haven't managed to fix yet. It could be all related, but I'm not smart enough to figure it out.

9
Living Room / Re: What have I done!?
« on: September 16, 2009, 05:17 AM »
I'm a long time member of Phinished (both MA and PhD were written under their auspices) and it's definitely a great place to go for general advice, and especially if you run into trouble.  We make great use of the "time boxing" method, in various lenghts of time, and a lot of people credit it with getting them to actually finish their work.

And Instant Boss is great, too.

10
I never have understood the facebook addiction.  I mean, it's kinda neat to see what people are up to and all, but I probably check it twice a month.  Most of the people who are my "friends" are people that I haven't seen for a long time (old high school friends and whatnot) who occasionally post stuff like the cute thing their dog did or some vacation photos.

My husband's friends, on the other hand....

11
Awesome!  I love Edith Frost.  She's been one of my favorites for a long time.

Thanks for posting this link!

12
Living Room / Re: How many people work from home?
« on: April 11, 2008, 03:36 PM »
I "work" from home, in that I am writing up my PhD right now and can't be bothered to go into my office on campus every day, when I have mostly everything I need at home.  However, I keep applying for temp jobs, because eventually sitting at home all by myself every day makes me a bit crazy...but I do keep in touch with other PhD writers via an online forum which is pretty active, so even though there isn't really anyone here, I talk to people online and make pacts to get things done, keep tabs on what other people are up to, and so on.

I'd love to start a decent freelance business someday, though.  Editing and/or copywriting would be nice.

13
FWIW I would mostly be working with LaTeX/text files and/or OpenOffice when I want to switch between systems.  One of the main reasons why I wanted to dual boot was that the GIS programs (GRASS in particular) seem to be a lot easier to use in Linux, their native system; various ports exist but I always had trouble with them.

tinjaw, I installed Tortoise SVN (in windows) and just created the repository in whatever the native format is, on the fat32 partition.  What do you use to access the repository?  I still haven't tried it in Linux yet.

14
Hooray!  I'm glad you're back!

15
Living Room / Re: Timeline Software
« on: February 28, 2008, 01:56 PM »
Maybe GanttProject?  http://sourceforge.n...ojects/ganttproject/

I also saw a list of alternative approaches here: http://peltiertech.c...arts/GanttLinks.html

16
I'm sure this is a really stupid question, but I thought I'd give it a try anyhow.

I finally took the plunge and reformatted my laptop hard drive and set up partitions to dual boot, with a single fat32 "data" partition.  I haven't installed the Linux part yet (trying to decide between Fedora Core and Ubuntu) but I am setting up the Windows system to be more organized than it was before. 

After trying out FileHamster (mentioned in this thread https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=10212.0) and having a look at Tortoise SVN, I am starting to think that a more "proper" version control system would be a good idea.  Syncing and so on proved to be a pain in the butt, and because I tend to generate scads of changes in my PhD documents (in Word, LaTeX, Access, OOo, GRASS GIS, GIMP, etc, etc, etc...) I can easily get lost in the changes.  This has led me to screw up at least one important document in my file cleanup frenzy before I reformatted the hard drive.

So, the dumb question is this:  can I set up a Subversion system on my laptop to track changes that can be accessed by either Linux or XP?  It's not entirely clear to me whether both systems can understand changes made in a single set of documents.  Does anyone have a good solution for keeping one set of data files and using either operating system to modify them?

17
Living Room / Re: Best place for XP help? Can't install .inf files
« on: February 01, 2008, 01:02 PM »
Thanks, that worked!  I must not have been using the right search terms.

18
Living Room / Best place for XP help? Can't install .inf files
« on: January 30, 2008, 03:39 PM »
I found something about this, only in reference to older versions of windows, and it doesn't seem to be transferrable.

For some reason (too many little utilities?) I cannot install .inf files.  "Install" is not available in the context menu, but all the registry keys seem to be right.

What's your favorite place to look for information like this?  Googling has turned up nothing so far...

19
Maybe Quicknote? http://www.quicknote.de/

It has the ability to set up a line or dot on the desktop that you bump with the mouse to open it up, plus various other features, including a timer:

Often you do not need an advanced text processor but a virtual scrapbook to quickly write down an occasional thought, a plan for the day or an Internet URL. With a plain text editor, which can be used for this purpose, you have to run the program first, then create a new file, then type a line or two and save the file. Too many things to do in order to simply write down a thought? With Quicknote, it does not matter which programs you are currently using; whenever you want to write something down that comes to mind, just 'wake up' Quicknote by touching a small line on the top of your screen with the mouse or by pressing shortcut keys. In its resizable window you can jot down your notes and organize them in categories or even sketch small drawings.
Still, this tiny tool has more possibilities than it seems on the first thought! Beneath the normal text functions, it can convert units, let you directly access frequently run programs, encrypt secret texts, change the system volume by hotkeys, manage windows tasks, and even send notes through a network. It has also a powerful reminding tool, which can remind you of your notes at certain times, run programs or shutdown automatically your PC. The program is absolutely free, so download this handy tool today and concentrate on content rather than form.

I'm still trying to decide between it and KeyNote; they both do very similar things.  I tried Stickies for a while, but it was faintly annoying, though I don't remember why now.

20
I don't know if this is something I should be able to figure out using a native capacity of Windows XP, or what.  I've been contemplating a clean install of Windows for a while, and as part of that I want to clean up the clutter on my hard drive.  There are zillions of little programs and such that I have downloaded, most of which I never use, some of which I use all the time, and some of which are probably running and doing useful things right now but which I have been using for so long that I have forgotten I installed them.

What's the best way to see how often a program actually runs?  I was thinking that it would be nice to have something spreadsheet-like, that will tell you how many times a program was started and how long it was active in a defined period of time (in the last year, last 6 months, since Windows was installed, etc.).  Presumably there is a way to get at this information somewhere in Windows, but I don't know how to get to it.

Any advice?

21
Living Room / Re: Windows Install Date Thingie: I made it!
« on: January 05, 2008, 06:57 AM »
Just ran across this and thought I'd give it a try.  The horror!  It's been running the same installation ever since it was purchased.  I don't have any disk imaging strategies or anything...one of the many projects that have been put aside while I try to finish my PhD.

Incidentally, all you multiple-install folks, do any of you have any experience with re-activating MS Office?  I am using a technically borrowed computer (belongs to my Dad) which has Office 2003 Pro, acquired through his company for a discount.  I'm not certain if the license is part of their group license, or if it is Dad's own personal one.  Dad doesn't know, either.  Is there any way to find out from the computer itself?  And if I try to reformat and reinstall, can I re-activate Office using a burned copy of the Office CD (Dad has the original on the other side of the Atlantic) and the key information as reported by Belarc advisor, or is there another piece of info that I need?

That's the one thing that has been stopping me from trying any reformat or repair operations.  It's running fine, albeit slowly, and I am afraid to try anything lest I screw up Office.  I'm also familiar with the alternatives (OOo, etc.) and I'm actually using LaTeX to produce the final output, but I have yet to find anything that rivals Word's outline view. 

Unless anyone has a suggestion for the latter....?   ;)

Apologies if this is in the wrong place!

22
I might be being really dense, but it seems that none of the find and replace utilities that I have looked at do quite what I want.

I would like to be able to define a list of standard replacements to make and then store it somewhere, so that when I have a file that I need to do multiple replacements on I can just run it, rather than doing find-replace over and over. 

The particular application:  I have a very long BibTeX file (3500+ entries), some of which are written using the LaTeX codes for characters, and some of which have characters that I put in using ASCII codes, or whatever the places I imported them from used.  Some of them are causing problems when I try to compile the document, and I would like to go through and replace them all with the codes.  I anticipate having to do this more than once, so it would be nice to have a ready-defined list to run.  It only needs to be one file at a time.

The list would be something like:
find  replace
á      \'{a}
Á     \'{A}
é      \'{e}

And so on.  Lots of programs seem like they will do this, but I can't figure out how to avoid typing in the list over and over again.

Sorry if it is a dumb question...

23
Living Room / Re: these new cheap core 2 due laptops - any good?
« on: October 25, 2007, 10:38 AM »
Huh.  Does it work for other kinds of batteries, too?  Like old ordinary rechargeables (and my aging pocket PC)?  I might have to experiment.

24
Speaking of FileHamster, does anyone here actually use it for day-to-day work?  I have downloaded it and started using it (in conjunction with SyncBack, just in case) as a means of keeping track of my PhD thesis stuff.  It seems okay, but I just wondered what others' experiences were like.

25
I sometimes use online apps for portability (like going to visit my in-laws and not wanting to drag the laptop with me) but for the most part I am a bit leery of them.  I imagine that it depends on what you do--if you do a lot of intensive writing (like for a novel or a PhD thesis) I would think you want to keep your words locally; if you mostly write web content or the occasional letter it is probably less important to have it available offline.  Sometimes I unplug the network cable or take my computer someplace with no internet access to stop myself from faffing, so online things really wouldn't work.  On the other hand, I've started using Google Reader to keep track of RSS feeds and I am thinking of setting up a separate email account strictly for newsletters and stuff which I only occasionally look at, instead of downloading them to Thunderbird.  I keep some backup copies on Box.net and a selection of my important photos on flickr, but that's more for convenience when working outside the house.

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