Messages

5951

Living Room / Re: Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

« on: November 18, 2011, 09:10 AM »

Business can't seem to resist trying to control the customer: Remains of the Day: Barnes & Noble Restricts Internal Storage on Nook Tablet

5952

Living Room / Re: RIAA Doesn't Like the "Used Digital Music" Business

« on: November 18, 2011, 06:06 AM »

Yes. Exactly.
It rather looks like the RIAA may have just shot themselves in the foot.
They have been playing King Canute all this time, trying to fight the tide of CHANGE that threatens to make their business model (and themselves) obsolete by supply-chain compression, using an imaginary (unproven) threat of loss of business revenue as justification. Now when someone apparently buys into the imaginary aspect and starts selling second-hand bits of the imaginary "product", the RIAA don't like it.

Sheesh.

5953

Mouser's Zone / Re: IDEA - Webpage archiving

« on: November 18, 2011, 05:30 AM »

This might be a bit off-topic, but it might help.
I can recommend the FF add-on Scrapbook for personal browse-archiving of those pages you want to keep - and their files and nested sub-sections (if you want them).
For example, I have just copied this discussion thread with a single copy command.

The discussion thread runs over two "pages", but I enabled the FF add-on AP (AutoPage) before I made the copy. AP makes the pages appear as a single continuous flow of pages, with separation gaps between each "page".

The nice thing about the Scrapbook saved pages is that the folders where they reside on your disk can be indexed by WS (Windows Search), so that they then become integrated into your client-based information repository. If you have an image indexing tool scanning the same folders, then the images from the saved web pages can all be included in your image database as well. It's surprising what Scrapbook sometimes captures that you never saw on reading the original page.

5954

General Software Discussion / Re: Ccleaner settings Windows

« on: November 18, 2011, 05:05 AM »

I have been a user of CCleaner (and Revo Uninstaller) for ages, and, coincidentally only today I was using CCL experimenting with it to see just how much disk space it could recover if I set it to be be more aggressive than usual - e.g., including (for the first time) getting it to zap the Font Cache. The results were quite impressive.

I think @hpearce is correct though in what he says. Anyway, I won't be getting CCL to zap the Font Cache very often.

One problem I have noticed though is that using registry cleaners seems to occasionally blow away my xplorer² bookmarks (they are held in the Registry) - which is very frustrating (tedious to rebuild my bookmarks). I have now set up a regular backup and easy restore process for the bookmarks - on the advice of the author of xplorer² at http://zabkat.com/
Incidentally, he reckons that registry cleaners generally are a waste of time, but I can't agree with that as it does seem pretty certain that junk tends to accumulate in the Registry, over time.

5955

Living Room / RIAA Doesn't Like the "Used Digital Music" Business

« on: November 18, 2011, 04:34 AM »

Fascinating: RIAA Doesn't Like the "Used Digital Music" Business

Why am I  not surprised by this?     

5956

General Software Discussion / Re: lightweight software for organizing notes? (not web-based)

« on: November 17, 2011, 06:31 AM »

@brotherS: Just to emphasise: Samurize is not a note/text tool - it's just a system that lets you build obects onto your desktop.
Why I liked it was because I could get my dead simple ToDo.txt file displayed dynamically on the desktop, along with some interesting widgets (e.g., CPU and HDD temps.). Change the ToDo.txt file, the desktop text changes too.

I didn't know about the AHK Memo that @Winkie mentioned. That looks quite good - but according to the notes it may be obsolete or has been superseded. In any event, its text task file could probably be what you could have embedded in a Samurize-controlled desktop.

Let us know what you end up using please. I'd be interested.

5957

General Software Discussion / Re: text editor with 'hyperlinks'? simple wiki? (local, not online)

« on: November 17, 2011, 06:13 AM »

Yes several PIM wikis or ToDo wkis use hyperlinks like this. I think you need to take a suck-it-and-see approach and try them out to find one that suits your needs best.
MS OneNote uses hyperlinks too, as a possible item of interest.

5958

General Software Discussion / Re: lightweight software for organizing notes? (not web-based)

« on: November 16, 2011, 06:25 PM »

+1 for Notezilla from me.     

Interesting item here: Why You Should Set Up Your To-Do List in a Plain Text File (and How to Do It)

5959

Living Room / Please take a look at the knol on Kurt J. Wagner, MD (plastic surgeon)

« on: November 16, 2011, 06:06 PM »

I had put up a Google knol for Dr. Wagner a while back, in time for his 77th birthday. A a friend of mine (Steve, a teacher) in the States who knows Wagner personally asked me to do it - he holds him in very high regard.
I'm posting this here in the hopes of getting some assistance - a critical checking of the knol - and to boost some publicity for the knol.
I am unlikely to be able to spot my own mistakes, since I am very familiar with the thing by now.

Steve just sent me details of Dr. Wagner's autobiography (just published) and I have put that on the knol.
If you visit the knol at Dr. Kurt J. Wagner MD (knol) you will see that the book is for sale here: "Making The Cut: My Story" by Kurt J. Wagner
You will see that he's quite famous, a leader in his field for years, and a nice guy with it. There have even been TV documentaries about him, and he did the 1st "TV makeover".

Net proceeds from the sale of the book are to go to the ASTARR.us, which Wagner founded

Any feedback welcome.   

Thanks.

5960

General Software Discussion / Re: lightweight software for organizing notes? (not web-based)

« on: November 16, 2011, 02:44 PM »

Just edited/added a note about Stickies to the bottom of my picture-post above.

5961

General Software Discussion / Re: lightweight software for organizing notes? (not web-based)

« on: November 16, 2011, 02:31 PM »

@brotherS: Quite coincdentally, I have only today been putting my ToDo list up onto my desktop, using the Samurize tool. It was one of the last applications to have been migrated from my XP to my Win7-64 desktop.

I have it set up so that I can open the .TXT file containing the To Do list in my notepad - I use EditPad Lite as the notepad.
The file is ToDo.txt in My Documents folder.

I can open the file by right-clicking on the ToDo text on the desktop, or, if I hover the mouse over the text, a balloon pops up at that point telling me to [press "Shift+Ctrl+N" to edit ToDo list].

All this and the desktop objects in the foreground are managed through Samurize. That includes:

• the analogue clock, which is built up using 5 or so objects, one of which is the moving seconds hand.
• the red CPU and HDD temperature readouts taken from Speedfan (they are blurry because I converted the .PNG screenshot to .JPG format at 50%, so some of the colour has been lost).
• the battery meter. (Some of the colour has been lost there too.)
• the calender date/time.
• the IP address.
• the blurry Samurize desktop actions (which tells you on mouse hover what actions you can take and the AHK hotkey combos to do so - basically dynamically reload the Samurize configuration file, or edit the file before reloading it).

The above seem to form a single consolidated object on the desktop - you can drag it around if you want.

There are some other objects - 2 x rolled-up sticky notes (from Stickies), the open ToDo.txt file in EditPad Lite, and the Win7 desktop widgets in the background on the RHS of the desktop.

I originally tried out Rainmeter, but settled on using Samurize for this as it seemed by far the more powerful of the two. Though Rainmeter is fairly simple to use, and Samurize isn't (IMO), you can make your desktop stand on its head once you begin to understand how to configure Samurize, and it's not a resource hog either.


I didn't think Samurize (which is quite an old application) would run on Win7, but I was wrong. It runs very well, but I have a glitch that I am trying to fix at the moment - the Taskbar won't always stay in the foreground, though the Start Menu always does. I am unsure what is causing that. It could be my wallpaper changer which changes every 1 minute.

EDIT: 2011-11-17 0945hrs
I am currently trying to see if I can incorporate the ToDo list from Stickies on the desktop, instead of the .TXT file. However, I suspect that I have probably got the best lowest common denominator in the shape of the .TXT file. You can't get much simpler than that.

5962

General Software Discussion / Re: lightweight software for organizing notes? (not web-based)

« on: November 16, 2011, 01:20 PM »

@cmpm: Yes, StickySorter is a great affinity diagramming tool. I think it's probably unique. I reckon it's one of the nicest proggies to come out of MS Labs. Quite useful too. Nice how you can operate on the database using Excel. It could be a PIM (Personal Information Manager) to some extent.

MS Labs also did something called OneNote Canvas that looked  pretty interesting, but it was a developmental dead-end.

If you like SS, then you might like to take a look at the Compendium tool (though it's not "lightweight"). It's used for notes, for knowledge-building/sharing models, and comes from the Compendium Institute at the Open University in the UK. I have played around with this, but not in any productive way. I first came across it being used whilst I was working on a contract at a government department, some time back. It could be a PIM too, but I can't quite see how to use it to good effect as such, so I don't use it.
http://compendium.open.ac.uk/institute/

5963

General Software Discussion / Re: Comment Explorer 2.3.0.0

« on: November 15, 2011, 05:08 PM »

There are 2 modes to the program, Folder and Global.  Folder uses the filename and extension with no path as the key to the comment. Global uses the entire path.  Folder creates a data file in every folder where you create a comment.  Global has one central data file in the same folder as CommentExplorer.exe.

If neither of the 2 modes reflect what you're asking then I don't see how I can do it.  In either mode it's a simple associative array.  String key fetches string comment.

-MilesAhead (November 14, 2011, 02:10 PM)

@MilesAhead: Thanks for this. I think I understand now.
I guess what I am asking for cannot be done by Comment Explorer.
It seems that it has its own wholly proprietary database. I think I need to use the OS file/folder "Comments" field sometimes, and something proprietary to the "virtual container" field at other times.

5964

General Software Discussion / Re: Comment Explorer 2.3.0.0

« on: November 14, 2011, 02:39 AM »

Not sure if this belongs in this thread:
This is a Q relating to putting file comments into "virtual folders" - not reparsed file links, but containing folders which hold pointers to a folder elsewhere.
In xplorer² (which I use most of the time) these are called "Scrap containers".

I was working with some files that I have in an xplorer² scrap container, and wanting to edit the file Comments for that file just for that scrap container view, but I could not.
This is because the Comments field is the same system field as is used in the main Windows Explorer (and xplorer²) window.
If you edit the properties (attributes) of that file in the scrap container, it actually edits them on disk.
But if you delete the file in the scrap container, it does not delete it from disk.

For comparison, I opened up my old 1999 vintage FileAlbum from PC Magazine/Ziff Davis (written by Gregory A. Wolking).
That provides sort of what I wanted, but in the shape of a virtual folder that is insulated from affecting the file properties and has an inbuilt proprietary file/folder commenting field.

The screenshot below shows 3 windows and how the file Radiolab - Numbers 100909a.mp3 appears, with its comments, in each one.

• 1. The scrap container.
• 2. The FileAlbum container.
• 3. The Windows Explorer file listing

What I want to get is:

• sometimes a file listing display with the system file Comments displayed - that's OK, the system can already give me that in file listings in Windows Explorer or xplorer²;
• then sometimes a file listing display in a collection or "scrap" container (or something that serves the same purpose) that displays the same files and the same (system) file Comments and also another field of file comments or notes that is peculiar to the files in that display/view.

Is this feasible?

5965

General Software Discussion / Re: How IBM started grading its developers' productivity

« on: November 13, 2011, 11:07 PM »

This what you get when you carry Taylorism to its logical perfection in the "motivational" feedback of employee productivity:
Steve Lopez: Disneyland workers answer to 'electronic whip'

I suspect that this may be what is implied by the use of the term "motivation", in the IBM/Cast article.

Yep, let's go back to what was already an obsolete school of thought by the 1930s.

5966

General Software Discussion / Re: Photo managers with face recognition?

« on: November 13, 2011, 06:06 PM »

@JavaJones: Just had a thought - which is the tool that you currently regard as your image file/database manager? Is that Lightroom?

5967

General Software Discussion / Re: automated back up software

« on: November 13, 2011, 05:56 PM »

You will need to study the instructions and play around with it a bit (as I had to), to make more sense of the thing.
I must admit that I found that I had to double-check what it did before I felt sure I understood it correctly.

But if you do that, you will be pleasantly surprised that it will automatically back up specific files and folders exactly how you want. It seems to be a very good backup/archive proggy.

5968

General Software Discussion / Re: Gmail annoyances - can they be fixed using add-ons, Stylish and Userscripts?

« on: November 13, 2011, 05:45 PM »

My responses in bold following your comment text:

They've upgraded all their UI's across their services (YouTube really blows now).
...
Sure, you can have the new HD themes, but jeez those are annoying.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Well, YouTube is arguably the only decent Google interface now, but there's still the bad ergonomics, and all that white which makes you reach for a pair of snow-goggles - all of which is definitely breaking some cardinal rules for good layout design. You could put that down to ignorance, I suppose - they could make bigger mistakes - e.g., Buzz, Wave...    

____________________
I do hate that the text buttons were replaced with icons. At least give ME the choice! Also, the bottom row of REPLY/FORWARD/DELETE buttons of each email was removed. So I created a better keyboard shortcut for deletion (at https://mail.google..../#settings/shortcuts).
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Yes, I can't understand them mucking about with the buttons/text like that - and that's just more breaking some cardinal rules for good layout design.
By the way, re those missing REPLY/FORWARD/DELETE buttons: I presume that you know that REPLY/FORWARD are now in the reply text field?
But the missing DELETE - that's another mistake IMHO. Even though I don't usually use it, it was handy (good ergonomics). I would usually use the standard "#" key (i.e., Shift+3 key combo) for DELETE anyway.

-zridling (November 13, 2011, 03:59 PM)

5969

General Software Discussion / Gmail annoyances - can they be fixed using add-ons, Stylish and Userscripts?

« on: November 13, 2011, 03:31 PM »

Gmail used to have several annoyances and things that really were inefficient/ineffective or just downright ergonomically undesirable.
Slowly but surely, Google improved and tuned the thing, so that Gmail became pretty good and a breeze to use.
And where it wasn't so good, there were add-ons/extensions that you could get (in Firefox and Chromium at any rate) that made it better - e.g., and especially Lifehacker's Better Gmail add-on.

However, if you - like me - consider that with the latest changed and smartened-up Gmail, Google would seem to have completely screwed things up, then help may be at hand for some of us, as the user community starts to fix the screw-ups in Gmail. This help is in the form of:

• Userscripts (for which you need the Greasemonkey extension and scripts from http://userscripts.org/scripts/ )
• Style changes - for which you need the Stylish extension and the styles from http://http://userstyles.org
• Better Gmail (which is a time-saving bundle of userscripts and styles).
• Maybe some other add-ons/extensions

However, I am having problems getting these to work nicely on the current version of Gmail, and I assume that I am not alone in this.
It is so bad that it makes me wonder whether Google are not doing this deliberately - either as some kind of experiment, or to drive users away - e.g., rather than withdraw/abandon the service as they have been doing with so many of their products/services lately and that they had previously been so "excited to announce...etc." (or similar BS).

So I thought I'd start a discussion to see if we could pool our knowledge/experience to help each other.

Currently I am seriously considering that, if I can't get Gmail to work better and have better ergonomics, then I shall migrate to Hotmail (Windows Live) - which has been seriously improved and looks very nice. But there's the change inertia to overcome if I want to do that, and Google still have not made it easy to migrate so I may be locked in to some extent.

5970

Find And Run Robot / Re: Hanging behavior -- FARR Problem?

« on: November 13, 2011, 03:16 AM »

I have done that - changed the setting. Then I exited FARR and restarted it for good measure. Will report back if/when this odd hanging recurs.

5971

General Software Discussion / Re: Experts opinion on very odd Camera -> Card -> File Copy corruptions

« on: November 13, 2011, 02:35 AM »

+ 1 for what @mouser wrote: I assuage my paranoia to some extent by using xplorer² "robust copy" when moving/copying my critical/archive data around.

5972

Find And Run Robot / Re: Hanging behavior -- FARR Problem?

« on: November 12, 2011, 08:48 PM »

@mouser: Thanks.
Do bear in mind that I'm not certain that it is necessarily a FARR-related issue anyway. It may be that something else I have configured in my system is knocking FARR out.

5973

General Software Discussion / Re: Experts opinion on very odd Camera -> Card -> File Copy corruptions

« on: November 12, 2011, 08:46 PM »

+1 for what @curt said: That's why I wrote:

I found that it's safest to use the software that comes with the camera to transfer files to my laptop - either directly from the camera or from the card when it had been inserted into my laptop's car-reader.

5974

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR and Indexing Option - Feedback Requested

« on: November 12, 2011, 08:35 PM »

Yes, + 1 from me - absolutely re the issue of the longevity/turnover of SI (Search/Indexing) tools in the market.    

It has been a source of frustration to me that some perfectly good SI tools have been introduced into the market and then ongoing development/support gradually ceased without any real explanation as to why that happened. They fall into a class of software that has been termed "abandonware".

Two SI abandonware tools that occur to me are ADS (AltaVista Desktop Search) and GDS. From what @JavaJones and/or @Josh write, maybe Everything is about to join that class too?

One of the first to go that way - that I recall - seemed to be ADS - refer AltaVista’s Local Desktop Search Re-Emerges…

I started using the GDS ß and stuck with it during all its problems and until it became rather good. I was a bit miffed when Google informed us recently that they were going to abandon GDS, but I accepted the fact and de-installed the tool. However, when I was upgrading to Win7-64, I thought I'd give the inbuilt SI - i.e., WS (Windows Search) - a whirl and so turned on indexing for my main hard drive. It took a while for WS to build its index in the background, but once it had done that it seemed to pose no real system overhead or annoyance that I could detect - which seemed to be very different to my experience of the horror of the built-in Win XP SI.
(I sometimes wonder what difference - if any - having the new 7200rpm hard drive may have made, as opposed to having the old 5200rpm one.)

I do not easily praise Microsoft, and so, having played about with WS a fair bit by now, I think they deserve praise. I discovered that WS seems to be almost "too" good (better than GDS) - it will search everything, including stuff you may never need. After I spent some time tuning it (GDS was never able to be so easily fine-tuned), it seemed to be able to perform faultlessly. Furthermore, Microsoft has been consistent and persisted with improving its inbuilt OS SI and integrating it with its own products (e.g., Outlook, OneNote) and ensuring that it can look into common third-party archive file formats (e.g., .ZIP).

What I miss though is the ability that GDS gave to index across Gmail and also documents/files on your other PCs, giving you an index for nearly all your disparate files/data. That was something potentially very useful.

So what?
Well, experience/history would seem to indicate that desktop indexing/search providers have been able to produce some excellent stuff, but they seem to be relatively "impermanent" and cannot be relied upon indefinitely. (I don't understand why this might be.)
Thus, putting an interface or plugin to FARR to use your index/search tool of choice is a useful way of accommodating that as a fact of life.
If FARR were to have its own built-in SI tool, then that would arguably be re-inventing the wheel as far as WS goes - which is apparently a perfectly good wheel, so why bother to expend time/effort in developing and supporting a good third-party imitation?

Just my opinions/needs here:

• Personally, I don't want/need to run two SI tools simultaneously whilst one of them gets out of ß and up to speed either. It would probably be an unnecessary/avoidable system overhead, though possibly of academic interest. (I would be interested in it, at any rate.)
• I don't see the need to inadvertently or otherwise turn FARR into some kind of self-contained comprehensive GUI for the OS either. The OS already has one. FARR (and a lot of its plugins) seems to fit as a superb niche player, making up for the deficiencies/inefficiencies of that OS GUI. Windows' IS (WS) does not seem to be one of those deficiencies/inefficiencies.
• If FARR could somehow replace that ability that GDS gave (to index across Gmail and also documents/files on your other PCs, giving you an index for nearly all your disparate files/data), then I could be seriously interested. (That would be heading towards PIM nirvana for me.)    

5975

Find And Run Robot / Re: Hanging behavior -- FARR Problem?

« on: November 12, 2011, 03:13 AM »

@anandcoral: Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't see how that can be it because FARR hangs whilst it is idle -  doing nothing - i.e., not searching.