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^^ I don't recall reading anything by Iain Banks. He didn't have a very long innings, did he?

30 years?

His first novel, The Wasp Factory, was odd, affecting and unsettling: I remember the disconcerting feeling, after I'd finished it, that I'd never really been made to feel sympathy with a complete psycho before.

His SF output, written as Iain M Banks, started with Consider Phlebas and introduced The Culture, a system that housed most of his later SF. (Actually, Walking On Glass was sort of sf too, but I might be the only person in the world who liked it -- it's often forgotten.)

Non-SF novels included The Crow Road (which was televised) and Complicity (which was filmed).

I haven't read all his books, by quite a stretch, but I haven't read anything of his that I didn't like, at least to some extent. He often didn't create characters that were easy to sympathise with, or even like, but you couldn't complain about the quality of his creations, which were almost always stunning.

Oh, and you might remember the fuss about Feersumm Enjinn.

I think he grew in importance with every book, and as The Wasp Factory was pretty important from the get-go, I think he was a major loss.

The notice in The Scotsman might remind you of some things you've forgotten about him.

This is another.    R.I.P. JV.     

Definitely one of the greats.

[am]

Now I am privileged.

Posted to me:

[attachthumb=1]

31,000. Wow. 

In the portable mode try just setting screenshot directory to: Screenshots

That would work -- sorry, braindead Friday.

I bumped into a spot of weirdness earlier today.

I was running SSC from a thumbdrive, copied from another portable install. The latter is always G: so SSC gave me an error about not being able to find that drive to drop screenshots into. Recovered nicely: created a screenshots folder and suchlike and wrote the latter's address into the settings. Thing is, it set a drive letter on it. So I looked in the help for a useful current drive variable and didn't find anything, so I just deleted the E: and hoped that'd work.

I was documenting a delete and reinstall process at the time, and the final part of the delete process was a reboot.

On SSC's next start, it seemed to be looking at the correct folder, but it was empty. Odd. No matter; finish what I'm doing, worry about it later...

...so eventually, I'd discovered that the initial folder it had created was

E:\PortableApps\ScreenshotCaptor\Screenshots

and when I'd told it to use

\PortableApps\ScreenshotCaptor\Screenshots

it had created

E:\PortableApps\ScreenshotCaptor\PortableApps\ScreenshotCaptor\Screenshots

instead of continuing to use the initially-created folder.

So... dear mouser, please can I have some portable-friendly variables I can use in path specs in SSC configs, please? (Or if there are some already, can they please have a prominent bit of the Help file so I can find them when I need them?)

Er, and although I hate to bring this up, I found this in the help:

"Miscelaneous Tips and Tricks"

Should, of course, be "Miscellaneous"

*** Great News! XYplorer has agreed to extend this deal for another day - Enjoy! ***

Lifetime License and half the price at > http://www.bitsdujour.com...xyplorer-lifetime-license

Looks like it's going for three days in a row, as it's still available today

Not an achievement, but still, 1962 is the year I'm born,

My birth year too. Which means I'm going to have to stop pretending to be older and more venerable than everyone else here. Hmf.

I CAN go on being grumpy, though, I think. I'll probably have to do a bit more of it if I'm going to reach a similar number of posts to yours. Congratulations -- and 1962 is 100 in base 196.2, of course.

Nothing terribly clever going on here. The machine my portable HD spends most of its life attached to has its taskbar autohiding at the left edge (I like the extra space you get in the notification area in XP) and the LBC menu autohides at the bottom. I have many menus -- and submenus -- containing portable apps, the default control panel and start menu shortcuts bracket a menu that autostarts a dozen other programs [note to self: ask Mouser about maybe putting a configurable and interruptable delay on such things so I don't have to worry about hitting it by accident] and the "most used" list get icons on the main bar.

[attachthumb=1]

It's not pretty, it's functional.

A +1 from me for something like this. LBC is a massively useful way to keep track of my portable apps but when I set it up, I cleverly dragged and dropped and ordered and tweaked but never thought to replace the drive reference to %APPDRIVE%.

My main install of LBC on my portable hard disk has 286 nodes.  

Some of them are separators.  

Just not very many.  

So I force my portable HD to be G: everywhere I use it. But I tell myself off every time I do it.

[edit]

And I've just realised, when I edit a node that only has a local reference to an icon (because it's a menu, say) changing the drive reference to %APPDRIVE% doesn't result in the "save changes" button becoming available unless some other change (to the comment, say) is made.

So there I was, wanting to come here to check if there was a way to do something, used LBC's "visit forum" option in the Help menu only to discover that, apparently, this isn't a forum.

It's a "fourm".

Sorry, mouser. Trivial, I know.

[FVD Speed Dial with Full Online Sync"]

regarding Speed Dial - maybe test "FVD Speed Dial with Full Online Sync":
https://addons.mozilla.or...fox/addon/fvd-speed-dial/ ? I don't remember why I don't use it.

Nor do I. But I tried it a while back and there was something about it that made me want to switch back to the original Speed Dial. So I did.

Speed Dial does get occasional updates -- the last one was fairly recently -- and although FVD is definitely prettier, SD has all the functionality I need (and possibly more than FVD has?)

I have quite a lot of favourite extensions in common with various other suggestions posted here and I'm not going to list all of them because of the yawn factor. However, a couple of less common suggestions that I'd like to +1:

Possibly my favourite Firefox extension is Speed Dial. I don't do bookmarks, I do dials. I can categorise sets of places into dial "groups" and I really like the way this works.

I'm also extraordinarily fond of Newsfox. I've tried all sorts of RSS readers but this one just works for me, and I use it all the time. There are a couple of minor idiosyncrasies -- sorting is slightly counter-intuitive -- but I've stuck with it for some years now and it's yet to disappoint me.

Cor blimey mate, you mean you can't tell?

I am NOT Dick Van Dyke. There's more to English accents than cartoon cockneys, y'know...

[I]

Yay for Non American accents. So which accent is it?   

It is English. The one that I think sounds completely normal and Americans think sounds either old-fashioned and quaint, or like a criminal mastermind.

You mean you was 'oblivious' to it?

My online name has quite a long history. I used to run a FidoNet BBS; I called it "Oblivion and You" after a song called "You And Oblivion" by a musician called Robyn Hitchcock. (The latter's been doing stuff with Peter Buck of REM lately, but he tends to be regarded as obscure, sadly.)

Then I discovered a rollercoaster called Oblivion at a British theme park called Alton Towers. It trumpeted itself as the world's first vertical drop rollercoaster. (100 feet in freefall, effectively, and it holds you over the drop for just long enough for you to wish you'd never got onboard.)

So the BBS gained a subtitle. The world's first vertical drop BBS. Nonsense, of course, but as I never had more than a handful of users, nobody much cared.

When the BBS' hard disk died, I spent a while wondering whether it was worth resurrecting the machine, but reluctantly decided it was more work than it was worth. (I think it was one of the last handful of FidoNet nodes in the UK: it wasn't quite me turning out the lights as I left but I was pretty close).

So the name lives on, sort of. I still miss Fido...

The avatar is a shameless copy of the Oblivion (rollercoaster) logo that I built a small animation with, mostly because I wanted to see if I could. (A close inspection will reveal that my animation skills are not exactly brilliant, but I think it's probably okay for a beginner )

(And modest too.)

My modesty, as you have clearly indicated, is just one of my fine attributes.

I just discovered I never noticed my 100th. <sniff>

Still, just to commemorate the fact that I must have written a hundredth post at some point (and, of course, it must have been perfectly crafted, beautifully enunciated and carefully delivered in a non-American accent) I've just updated my avatar.

Needless to say I uninstalled Postbox and haven't used it since.

Can't say I blame you.

I played with it for a while but found some features were either missing until payment was made or just broken. I couldn't find out which, found the lack of contact facilities frustrating and came to the conclusion that I didn't care to persevere. Your experience suggests that I am unlikely to regret giving up.

It does look like a nice implementation of a more stripped-back version of Thunderbird.

I've taken my courage firmly in both hands and installed The Bat! I'm not going to let it do any encryption and I'll be very careful before I let it start to build up local message stores. At the moment, it feels like coming home after being away for months.

[Claws Mail]

As long as so many developers (and users) can't seem to understand that a PIM, a newsreader, and an e-mail client are intrinsically separate things (at least IMO) we'll continue to live with flaky poorly integrated 'features' and bloat.

I blame Outlook Pro -- pretty sure nobody had tried bolting more than an addressbook onto an email client before then. I'd argue, though, that meeting scheduling managed through an email-ish approach isn't a bad thing, and it's sort of inevitable that you're then going to want a reasonably well-featured addressbook rather than something basic. It's the "let's add presentation graphics and coffee-machine-management" thinking that's responsible for most of the problems, though, as you say.

And what I find most amazing is how few have built-in provisions for backing up their own message stores.

...and, in the case of The Bat (Voyager version) at the point I gave up with it, even when there IS backup, it isn't always reliable. Grumble grumble grumble...

So be it. I've pretty much given up. Claws Mail comes close enough for me. It'll do.

Well, I'm currently playing with the 30 day trial of PostBox, and Claws I'll take a look at too, in due course. Recommendations are usually a good start, anyway -- thanks!

What is it about The Bat that so many people are willing to make excuses for it and its dev team, while at the same time leveling criticisms for the exact same things on its competitors?

I just don't get that part.  

Where The Bat really gets things right, it gets them very right indeed. The "Sorting Office" is brilliant -- you need something like the Nostalgy addon to even get close with Thunderbird.

I don't actually know that The Bat was written by people who started out in FidoNet (where my first serious exposure to proper electronic messaging happened) but it feels like it. FidoNet, because the transport and storage costs were borne by ordinary home users with modems, took an economical approach to messages that Internet email never bothered to learn -- because somebody else was paying the bill. So emails quote everything the last guy wrote and everything you wrote to him the time before and so on and nobody cares because moving a 200k email costs the same as moving a 5k email.

[Yes, the old fart's grumbling again. Nothing to see here, move along.]

Er, anyway, The Bat supports proper quoting and makes selective editing of quotes (and their reformatting) simple and straightforward, which leads to a conversational view of emails that makes sense of the concept in a way that the current fad for "call every email with the same subject and between the same two people a conversation" doesn't -- in the sense that the former leads to communication where the latter requires research and time and re-reading irrelevances to get to the important bits.

It's a losing battle: for one thing, both sides of the conversation have to cooperate and work the same way, and people are lazy. But I can't make Thunderbird do proper quoting, Outlook has never really supported it, anything that has its roots in *nix doesn't quite get it either (the likes of Mulberry, say) I haven't worked out whether PostBox will (only, I suspect, if an old and no-longer-compatible Thunderbird addon is available for it) and I can only carry on promoting the Cause Of Economical And Communicative Email if I can swallow my concerns and go back to The Bat!

If I'm honest, I think there's never EVER really been a good email client. While databases are at the core of most if not all client email solutions, and while database management systems remain non-bulletproof, there probably never will be.

---9 months later the same question.

I used to use the free version, before it became so restricted compared to the commercial one that I decided I was being bullied and quit. (I may be misremembering, but I think they may also have ditched support for .DBF tables, which was my main reason for using it.) But it IS very good, if you want to pay the money and if you're interested in searching the contents of your files. (If all you care about is filenames, I'd go with Everything, Locate32 or the new version of Listary.)

I used X1 for a while, too. Their viewer library (the Stellent one, I think) is still occasionally very useful, but its the only bit of the free version of X1 I kept. Can't remember anymore why I went off it...

I have always had a slightly ambivalent relationship with AV tools.

My main desktop machine is more used by my wife (who routinely hits the "temporarily allow everything on this webpage" option in NoScript, sadly) so I have a paid AV package on there (eSet NOD32).

This year, they offered me an almost free update to the full Internet Security offering. I resisted: I have yet to see one of those that doesn't cause more problems than it solves.

My netbook has had MSE for the last two years but, amidst odd reports of it being less secure than it was (because it's become a big enough target, I guess) I've just replaced it with NOD32 too (the second license was reasonably cheap).

Interestingly, dcupdate works a heck of a lot faster now MSE's gone.

So I still use the Malicious Software Removal Tool, even though it's never found anything and makes Patch Tuesday more of a chore than I'd like and Defender's on both systems -- NOD32 replicates quite a lot of its functionality, I think, but they seem to coexist happily.

MSE did find something, once, on my netbook: an infected JPG on some webpage or other, if memory serves. NOD32 seems a decent-enough product, the support is at least reasonably responsive, the program's very configurable, not very obtrusive and seems effective.

I hadn't even heard of the offline version of Defender before reading Fred Langa's article yesterday. Nice to know it exists, I guess. Ditto the Safety Scanner.

Well, I still own a license for the current version of The Bat!, perhaps I should try again.

Coincidentally, though, I just saw a thing on TechRepublic that mentioned a client I haven't previously heard of: i.Scribe. Anyone tried it?

[edit to add]

The free version is limited, the commercial version is $10, adds support for multiple identities/accounts... but the author's spelling is worrying

I've used an old PC at work to set up an internal chat server. (I used ejabberd, running under ubuntu, in case that means anything to you.) It's been through a couple of incarnations -- in fact, its first existence was based on Openfire, but the latter doesn't seem to want to play ball with me when it comes to updates and nobody cared when I said they'd need to set up their accounts again -- but it seems uncontroversial, it works reliably on a relatively ancient PC that was headed for the junkpile, and it doesn't use any valuable Windows licenses.

Which is all very fine and pleasant but a couple of people are now pushing me to add videoconferencing facilities to it -- the point being that they don't want to install Skype when we might be able to do something internally.

So suddenly I need either one or two things and I'm either googling badly or what I want isn't available without paying some third party to provide it. I need a chat client that can also handle voice and video, and if ejabberd can't handle the binary streams without help, I need some sort of plugin for it.

I started researching this on the assumption that it wasn't going to be rocket science and that I'd find a solution really easily.

Guess what? I haven't got any sort of handle on what to do. There have been suggestions that I need a SIP server (which looks complicated and possibly far more than is actually required) but I have yet to find anything that looks like a simple recipe for what I want to do.

Anybody here done anything like this? Or can point me at an online resource I can go and bang my forehead against for a while, before deciding I'm out of my depth? (I pretend to understand a bit about ubuntu but if I'm honest, I'm happiest with a gui, these days!)

IMAP support is amazing. Even compared to Thunderbird.

Agreed - The Bat remains the best IMAP client, despite the slow development (I've been waiting a long time for something as basic as the option of a two-line message list, but still use it for its unparalleled IMAP support).

There's a lot about The Bat! that I miss, but I am still looking for something reliable and am sticking with Thunderbird until I find it. (I bought The Bat Pro so I could use Voyager. Voyager, three times yet, stomped on my messagebases and because the internal repair routines just aren't very good and the encryption is excellent, I lost a lot of important email.)

Thunderbird did something like that to me too, not all that long ago. (A bug that corrupted email being moved from an IMAP to a local folder.) But Mozilla noticed the problem and fixed it -- something Ritlabs never did, despite my repeated bug reports.

But I miss: proper quoting; the marvellous rules; not having to put up with Thunderbird's idiosyncratic HTML support; the scheduler; so many things... it's just a shame that Ritlabs give every impression of not giving a flying damn about their customers.

my preliminary research showed Vipre to be a pretty darn good piece of software... but now I am not so sure.

Anyone else have any thing to say on this?

I bought a lifetime license for Vipre at the end of 2011, for my netbook. Again, my research found lots of good things said about it.

My own experience wasn't so good. I gave up with it after about a month of bad experiences and frustrations (like XYPlorer having to be whitelisted before its update could be run and the XYPlorer website being listed as a source of malware (which it isn't.)

I keep thinking about trying it again, to see if it's learned better behaviour in the last year or so -- but it sounds like it hasn't. Probably a bit late to ask for a refund, though...

Currently running eSet's (rather underrated) NOD32 AV on the netbook and we seem happy with each other thus far