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We are going to wake up one day and find out that half of the content on the internet (facebook accounts, twitter accounts, reviews, kickstarter donations, amazon reviews, etc.) is fake paid content designed to manufacture momentum and positive press.

I wouldn't worry that half of the Internet is written by AI, if three fourths of the readers will be bots - statistically we still get ahead...

With two windows it works, but sometimes I need more. Also, if I get a quick look at another, non-work related application, this disrupts the alt-tab sequence.

Instead, I have begun to use the Win7 feature... I order all my work related apps in the task bar (some are already pinned, so always appear in the same place anyway) and use Alt + number to select the relevant window.

I am not sure if it should go here or into general apps, as there might be a tool for this, but I cannot find anything...

Basically, I want to select two (or more) apps from the list of running apps (in Win7). Then I want Alt-Tab to switch only between those applications.

How times have changed!

If the users get Thingamajig Suite for free up to version 4.12 and then they don't get 4.13 (or 5), they are "screwed"? Even though 4.12 is perfectly usable and useful (in spite of little quirks and bugs)?

It is interesting to note how the focus has shifted from the product itself to the development (or support, if you may) of the product. Back in the old days (ekhm, ekhm) you got the floppies and that was it - that was the final product of the developers' minds. To get any improvement you had to wait three years for the next version, if any... Nowadays, if you find a perfect freeware gem and you see it has not been updated in nine months, you don't bother to download it...

It is good that now people know the difference between initial cost and TCO, but let's find some balance here... There are projects which require intensive maintenance and there are those which do not. Naturally, if I move all my contacts and photos and blog intensely on the new social networking site and it suddenly disappears from the face of the Earth, I have every reason to be irritated - here my time investment was so high that the fact the the initial cost was insubstantial (i.e. zero) is not that important any more. On the other hand, if I get this little puzzle game, I can play it all night long and more, even though the authors have long moved to more lucrative ventures...

Edit: I've just read through the blog entry to the end and it is clear the author is putting free webservices in opposition to free software. In that case, disregard the above.

I see two problems here: first of all, all the described solutions could more or less do what you want. If you knew any of them, that would be exactly the easiest solution. It is rather difficult to say which of them would be easiest when starting from scratch...

The other problem is that the requirements must be specified very precisely. Typography is more than "stuff with fonts". If one program is better than another with "typography" (which might not be the best way to put it, but let's leave it at that), it means that the final result looks or "prints" better - that is, you have more control over the placement of the elements, text and graphics are properly aligned (and tenths of milimeters count here!), justification is both precise and flexible, etc. I have laid out scientific books in Word and did a decent job with it, but any professional could tell that the tool used could be better.

This is important, as my preferred solution i.e. Word mail merge tools, could work well enough for you, but the printed output could be unacceptable for other people involved (this might also be an issue with Access).

Why Word mail merge? Because it is dead simple. You could start with a simple template and a table of elements and build it up to direct Access access (sorry ) and macro-managed scenarios. I will not go into details, I think the help is accessible enough as it is - basically you set up one document with text placeholders and conditional fields and then feed it with another document, database, text file, etc. (By the way, Indesign also has a similar function - data merge http://tinyurl.com/c66x7m Maybe you should take a look at that first?)

Access seems to be very well suited for this as well. However, as I do not know it thoroughly, it would not be my first choice.

Finally, I would not dismiss xml - this is exactly the stuff was invented for. There are myriad solutions for going from database to xml and from xml to finely printed documents, you don't have to go fully DTD and xsl to do that any more (but you can).

If the system feature (Recently Opened Documents) contains all needed elements, this might be a good starting point...

Monitoring the opened documents is possible as well (e.g. Nemo Documents). Obviously, it should be done by the file extension.

Thank you for that link...

What I had in mind was somewhat less ambitious. I realize quite well that restoring by processes is rather unrealistic. I think I would settle with the restoration of _documents_ which were open at a specified moment. Although I am not sure all my tools register in the last opened documents as specified by Windows...

Basically what the title says... I am working with several windows open (different programs) and decide to call it a day. If I don't want to hibernate (maybe I should, but on my previous machine this led to crashes, so I got wary of it), I have to restart all the apps and documents when I restart the computer in the morning...

It would be nice to have an app that would remember what was running at system close and restore them at startup.

Some ideas:

- Manual "snapshot" instead of recording the system shutdown, possibly with "Snapshot and close"
- Permanent and editable exclusion list, possibly with items which run at startup anyway to be excluded automatically

I am trying to run FARR at startup as elevated (to use Everything). However, it just does not work - it seems that nothing happens... I've checked the scheduler events several times, they seem to be OK... Anyone knows what might be the problem?

Something is definitely amiss...

I have downloaded and installed FCalc - it is visible and working. Some other plugins, e.g. nircmd, are not. Also the updater does not work as it should - it just reports FARR is up to date, does not show the plugin list at all.

Unfortunately, that didn't work... It looks like FARR does not see the plugins directory at all.

I have moved to another computer (from XP to 7), so I reinstalled FARR and copied the plugins into the program folder. However, none of them are working - they are not seen by FARR at all, reinstall/update shows that everything is up to date. Any ideas?

Currently I do not have any AV active - some of the tools conflicted and crashed at startup.

Switching off the helper helped, though - now programs start instantly. Thank you!

I only wonder what functionality I will lose?

I did not help...

Process Explorer shows that quickdoclauncher grabs all resources from one core (i.e. 50%) and seems to choke there a bit... I do not know if it helps.

I have fought off a virus/trojan infection - one of the symptoms were serious performance problems...

I was pretty sure that I have succeeded, but one thing was not right - all programs were very slow to start. I have tried many malware detection programs, but nothing was showing up. Then I had an idea... start a program from menu! (I run all programs from FARR normally.) Surprise, surprise - it worked normally!

So, now I have FARR which takes about 15-20 seconds to run ANY program (including calculator, Paint, etc.). I do not know how does it relate to the infection, if at all. Anything I could do or check?

You could use EventGhost for this, as it has server/client communication. For control you could use its OSD or webserver. For display e.g. IrfanView. The additional advantage would be built-in multimedia functions, which could be used for the projector, A/V equipment etc.

In fact, there is not that much difference: the scraper can do lists of results as well (with the -m) switch and WMS can do one-shot searches, of course. WMS has definitely better formatting (as it uses internal FARR formats), the scraper might be better for longer pieces of text (with the -f option).

Here is another example (for Urban Dictionary):

1000>>>urban>->showmemo Urban Dictionary definitions for $$1:;;;appcapappendmemo C:\Program Files\Internet\PageScrape\pscrape.exe -uhttp://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=$$u1 -e"class=.index.*[0-9].>(.*)<.a>.*word.>(.*)<.*definition.>(.*)<.*example.>(.*)<" -m -f"\n\$1 \$2Definition: \$3\nExample: \$4">+>urban (.*)

It is not that pretty, probably the regex could be better. However, I do not think FARR allows formatting in the results window (after all, it was not meant for such things), so it will be a bit hard to read.

From reading the topic I was under impression that WMS does only predefined searches...  Still, it works a bit different, so maybe the scraper will still be useful for someone.

I've missed FARR TimeZone, as it's not listed in the update app... I don't mind at all though, as this made me find the scraper.

As the unit converter alias was quite handy, I have decided to look into time zone reporting utility.

Unfortunately, there was no command line utility which I could use for that purpose, although there were quite a few sites with that info... Then I got the idea: how about a general scraper that would get that info?

I've found this utility:

http://www.webscrape.com/

With this getting an alias was trivial:

[copy or print]
1000>>>time>->showmemo Time in $$1:;;;appcapappendmemo C:\Program Files\Internet\PageScrape\pscrape.exe -uhttp://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/results.html?query=$$u1 -e"Current Time.*big>(.*)<">+>time in (.*)

(BTW, how to display the result in a nice format while typing? For now I see the url, which is rather ugly looking...)


However, the potential for this is much greater. Considering that the utility does multiple matching, you can get custom searches, various lookups etc. The page itself lists weather, exchange rates, spelling and thesaurus...

EDIT: Changed the parameter to be URL friendly...

Someone asked for this so nicely:  

http://www.donationcoder....=8071.msg212665#msg212665

that I have patched up a simple unit converter alias with the use of GNU units program

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_%28software%29

(wiki lists the windows binary link - you need to install it and/or GNU-WIN).

Here it is:

[copy or print]
1000>>>units>->showmemo Result:;;;appcapappendmemo C:\Program Files\Editing\GnuWin32\bin\units.exe "$$1" "$$2">+>units (.*) to (.*)

Naturally, you may need/want to modify the path and the expression.

Usage:

units 100 miles/hour to km/hour

Result:
* 160.9344
/ 0.0062137119

Was/is there a unit converter plugin for FARR or am I imagining things?

If there is not, I suggest one... I suppose it could work similarly to FCalc (which I absolutely love!), i.e. you type in:
convert 5 meters to inches
and you see the result in the results pane.
Unit autocompletion would be nice.

Wait... just had an idea - type in just "convert 5 meters" and 10 most frequently used conversions (from meters, of course) show up automatically!

Edit: Just found this:
http://units.sourceforge.net/

I am not sure how usable it could be for a plugin...

Could it be a Microsoft Word macro?

The simplest way I can see is to open a document and then a selection of other documents to paste into. A macro would cut selected text and ask for user input (? in Word status bar). The user would input the filename, e.g. "1" and the text gets sent to the open "1.doc" (or "1.txt") document.

Advantages:
1. You stay in Word which might be useful for other word processing tasks you need to do with the text.
2. You have direct preview of all appended files, so you might clean them up immediately.
3. If the document names are short and easy to handle, no need to remember the shortcuts - log entries go into "Log", comments into "Comments" etc.
4. It should be simple - short code, no need for an external app to be running, etc.

Disadvantages:
1. You need Word (duh).
2. The document names may be either informative/usable etc. or easy to enter. I mean if you choose file names "1.txt", "2.txt" (for easy input) you have to rename them later anyway.

Edit: Could you describe the "automated" part of the request in more detail? What would be the criteria for parsing which you mention later (first you write about cutting etc.)?

I use Ctrl+`. It's quite convenient as it does not require looking at the keyboard (I could not do e.g. Win + function or Pause like that) and still does not interfere with my more frequently used shortcuts (I use it a lot, but not as often as my "work" cuts).

I might be a bit obsessive about it, but I don't like to move my fingers from where they belong, i.e. the home keys (yes, I know, the sentence just invites all those NSFW comments ). As my work requires quite a lot of typing - I am a translator - I prefer to have everything close to my fingertips. In my work applications I have most of the commands available as Left Alt + home-or-near-home keys, i.e. JKL;UIOPNM (<- that was easy to type  ). At some point I had even arrow keys redefined as Ctrl+JKL: but it turned out they were not used that much.

Sorry for that aside, but I think it's still on the topic, considering that FARR is all about eliminating that productivity-killing monster i.e. mouse + desktop, menus etc.

OK, here it goes... It's very simple, but it has manual confirmation built-in - the distance measurement is not always correct. Any tips for improvement are welcome, of course.

[copy or print]

use Text::Levenshtein qw(distance);

# Change to your file dir, naturally

opendir (DIR, "N:/Cartoons/New");

@files = readdir(DIR);

foreach $filename (@files) {
print $filename;
$dis = 1000;

# Your filename list text file here

open (INFILE, "Filenames.txt");


while (<INFILE>) {

chomp $_;

if ($dis > distance ($_, $filename)) {
$dis = distance ($_, $filename);

# All my files are avi, you might want to check the extension, too

$best = $_ . ".avi";
}
}
print "$filename = $best \n";
print "OK?";
$response = <>;
chomp $response;
if ($response eq "y") {
rename ($filename, $best);
print "renamed";
}

}