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Main Area and Open Discussion / General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software
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on: May 12, 2013, 06:58:27 AM
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This is what I do now. - I created an 'app' from the 'create new gdocs' link. It placed an icon on the desktop. I assigned a global shortcut to it. It takes 1-2 seconds to create a new note (a gdoc). Not as fast as simplenote or resophnotes, but it'll do
- Create a new gdocs when the inspiration comes, with the global shortcut
- Install syncdocs, so you have a local copy to every gdocs you create. Make sure that explorer index the syndocs folder. Then, when it's time to search, open an explorer window; the explorer search is damn fast, indexes the text, and the results are displayed with context; they are better than how onenote does it
Convoluted, but reliable, crossplatform, and full featured. requires only easy to find software (your file manager, gdocs). Everything works on and offline. (create new .doc instead of gdocs when offline) The gdocs editor is way better than any of the native .doc editors (or rtf, or odt) Interesting, I had been using a similar approach, but I stopped using SyncDocs as it seemed redundant (for my purposes) in the face of the latest incarnation of Gdrive (Google Drive). So I just settle for enabling Gdrive on my computer, and having my documents in a Gdrive folder on disk, where they are automatically synced up to the Cloud (Gdrive). Win7 indexes the documents for search. Where you say "...the results are displayed with context; they are better than how onenote does it", do you mean how Win7 indexes the OneNotes Notebooks' content documents for search? I thought that worked the same - i.e., not differently, so neither better nor worse. At any rate, that seemed to be the case when I was using OneNotes 2007, but since I have been using OneNotes 2013, I find the syncing of a NoteBook in almost real-time to the Cloud on SkyDrive works perfectly well, and it's still indexed by Win7. |
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Main Area and Open Discussion / Living Room / Re: Internet freedoms restrained - SOPA/PIPA/OPEN/ACTA/CETA/PrECISE-related updates
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on: May 12, 2013, 06:27:59 AM
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As usual, Falkvinge nails down a rather pertinent point: United States Government Shows The World It Doesn’t Understand The Internet, Claims “Ownership” Of Specific Files.I hadn't realised the US Government was doing this, until I read the post. (Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.) The United States Department of Defense has “claimed ownership” of CAD drawings of a plastic, printable pistol. In doing so, they apparently believe they can stop the files from existing. The result is obviously the complete opposite, which calls into strong question the judgment and ability of United States Government to set Internet policy at all.
When the public received the means of production through 3D printing, it was obvious that you could no longer regulate which objects were allowed to exist and which didn’t, just as you can no longer regulate distribution of information. Well, obvious to anybody but bureaucrats in governments who insist they cannot lose any control.
The think tank Defense Distributed has been developing 3D printer drawings for weapons parts for some time. First, they published drawings for vital parts for the AR-15 rifle (the civilian version of the military Armalite M-16) which could be printed by anybody in their homes, and then moved on to creating an all-plastic weapon which could be printed by anybody without dependence on other manufacturers, the “Liberator” in 17 parts.
This was not a matter of breaking the law of weapons regulations – this was a matter of the law having become unenforceable and obsolete through advancements in technology.
Late yesterday, the United States’ Department of Defense contacted Defense Distributed and told them that the United States government were seizing the drawings and claimed ownership of the files. This move was utterly ridiculous, as the drawings had already been published. The immediate effect was that Defense Distributed complied, and everybody else started seeding the files like wildfire. This is cause for concern – not the fact that the files exist, but that the US Government can be so completely boneheaded to think they can prevent information from existing by saying so.
The pistol drawings exist in the form of a magnet link which picks the file from whoever has them, with no central repository. The other files from Defense Distributed have also been censored by the United States government, which contain vital (printable) parts for an AR-15 and similar things, but these files are similarly available through a simple link. Predictably, their distribution has gone absolutely stratospheric.
We have long seen how the US Government is completely boneheaded and unfit to set and shape Internet policy, due to their simply not understanding of what the Internet is and how it works. This episode underscores that conclusion strongly.
Part of the reason the US doesn’t understand the Internet is because of the country’s vastly substandard infrastructure, since they have allowed cable companies and telcos to dictate what the Internet should look like (and the US is therefore far, far behind countries like Romania and Lithuania – countries that were considered near-developing countries 20 years ago, a timeframe that policymakers in Washington are apparently stuck in. We’ll be returning to that in a separate article.)
In any case, this episode shows that the US government is simply unfit to even have an opinion on shaping the future Internet.
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Main Area and Open Discussion / Living Room / On the lack of standardisation in "tagging" .
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on: May 11, 2013, 01:21:48 AM
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On the lack of standardisation in "tagging" . I use the Firefox add-on Scrapbook to capture/save web-page snippets or whole webpages. Scrapbook is very handy as I can sort/search through the saved data using the Scrapbook index/search. I could also use the Win7 index/search function, though it is usually easiest/fastest to search using Scrapbook, as I can then open the page material, and add text notes (which are also searchable) or stick-it type notes (which do not seem to be searchable), all within the browser. Though the Scrapbook saved file formats are easily accessed using a browser, I have been exploring the use of .mht and .maff files as alternative ways of capturing/archiving the web page data, using Mozilla Archive Format or UnMHT. The .mht (stands for MIME HTML, I gather) format standard seems to have been around for a while, but is relatively little-used. There is an MHT viewer in Win7, and Win7 also has the Problem Step Recorder - which generates an .mht file and will even email it if you want - if you inspect the contents of the file, you will see that it is set up as an email. You can read .mht files in the MHT viewer or in a browser (but not necessarily always with identical results!). When you go exploring, you invariably risk discovering something that you did not know about before. I stumbled upon something described as a potential "alternative" to using Evernote, though the alternative was not of itself of much interest to me. The alternative was in the shape of the FF add-on TagSpaces, but the way in which it enabled you to explore and tag your files - i.e., including .mht files - in a "view" of the directories on the hard disk - was interesting. For tagging, it simply appended the tag to the filename, enclosed in square brackets.There are probably over a hundred metadata fields (columns) that you could use for files in Win7, and you can view these as columns in Windows Explorer. Why did the developer not use one of those? Well, I haven't asked the question of the author, but I presume the answer would be "It's just too hard due to the multiplicity and inconsistency of standards, so I developed my own standard using the filename", or something along those lines. For example, this tagging method is applied by TagSpaces to the filenames of image files also, thus avoiding using the the "Keywords" IPTC metadata field in the image file for tagging. So, thinking of the image files, I checked it up and established that Google Picasa uses the Keywords field for tagging and it uses other image file metadata fields for other things - e.g., the face recognition tags are apparently now put (or can be put) into an "XMP" tag. (I don't know much about XMP.) But it seems that both Picasa and Windows Live Photo Gallery use those photo-recognition and other tags too, but not always in the same way, because they are apparently each based on a different "interpretation" of the relevant standards. In fact, this image tagging might not conform to a consistent standard by any significant group of photo-tagging software. I am unsure whether this would be deliberate. If you want to read more on this, refer these links (the last one is probably the most informative): It's rather a confused picture, and some of it seems to explain why I had to invest many hours in restoring tags to my image files a couple of years back, following a Picasa update. Yet it also indicates that Picasa would seem to be one of the more "stable" in this regard.  "The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from."
- Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks, 2nd ed., p. 254.
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Main Area and Open Discussion / Living Room / Free and Fast ‘Roof2Roof’ Internet Available in Richmond, CA
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on: May 10, 2013, 09:07:15 PM
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Lucky people in Richmond! (Wait for the ISPs to start protesting...) (Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.) Free and Fast ‘Roof2Roof’ Internet Available in Richmond, CAPosted on May 8, 2013 by brewster Image: Antenna on 2512 Florida Avenue, Richmond to offer free Internet for those with antennas on their roofs As a free service to Richmond residents, the Internet Archive has installed a 70 foot tower on its physical archive building in Richmond California to offer free and fast Internet to those with roofs that can see the tower. Those wanting to use this community wireless service would need to buy and install a directional antenna on their roof to connect, but from then on their Internet access is free. In this way we call it a ‘free and fast roof2roof network’ since it will generally not reach people’s laptops inside houses. The signal will work at over 1 mile to a suitable antenna with line-of-site to our tower. Wifi receivers with directional antennas can cost as little as one hundred to two hundred dollars from vendors like ubiquiti. Gayle McLaughlin, mayor of Richmond, when we told her about this, said: “We are dedicated to closing the digital divide in Richmond. Providing free access to the internet is a great benefit for our residents helping us create a better and more equitable city!” Image: End-user window mountable antenna for connecting to Internet Archive's tower We have achieved 80 megabits per second in both directions with this technology, so this should support many people’s normal Internet use. Typical commercial Internet access runs at 1/10 this speed, so the fastest residential Internet in Richmond will likely be this system. Currently average of 4 users are connect to our tower but we hope this will grow. We hope that intrepid individuals will connect to this system in a way we have called “tier 3″. While we do not have the budget to provide tech support, we hope that entrepreneurs, enthusiasts, or non-profit organizations will help others get online. Another step would be to expand the number of houses and buildings that could connect to this system by putting repeater antennas on high locations to expand the number of rooftops with line-of-site to this backbone. If you are an owner of a tall building or structure and are interested in participating, please let us know by writing to info@archive.org. We would be interested in paying for the equipment and do the installation for a couple of well placed locations. Location: Height 70′ above ground level, 2512 Florida Avenue, Richmond, CA. Some more details on the equipment. The network identifiers (SSIDs) include ‘archive.org’ in their names, and the 2.4GHz ones are open with no password or encryption. Thank you to Ralf Muehlen for setting up this system, and thank you to the City of Richmond for allowing an tower to be installed with no delay or hassle. Onward to a Free and Fast Internet for All! |
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Main Area and Open Discussion / Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]
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on: May 09, 2013, 11:26:18 AM
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Psychology 101 - Group behaviour.
If you start with a cage containing five monkeys and inside the cage, hang a banana on a string from the top and then you place a set of stairs under the banana, before long a monkey will go to the stairs and climb toward the banana.
As soon as he touches the stairs, you spray all the other monkeys with cold water.
After a while another monkey makes an attempt with same result ... all the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Pretty soon when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.
Now, put the cold water away.
Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one.
The new monkey sees the banana and attempts to climb the stairs. To his shock, all of the other monkeys beat the crap out of him.
After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs he will be assaulted.
Next, remove another of the original five monkeys, replacing it with a new one.
The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment...... with enthusiasm, because he is now part of the "team".
Then, replace a third original monkey with a new one, followed by the fourth, then the fifth. Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs, he is attacked.
Now, the monkeys that are beating him up have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs. Neither do they know why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.
Finally, having replaced all of the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys will have ever been sprayed with cold water.
Nevertheless, not one of the monkeys will try to climb the stairway for the banana.
Why, you ask? Because in their minds...that is the way it has always been!
This, my friends, is how bureaucracy operates... and this is why, from time to time:
ALL of the monkeys need to be REPLACED AT THE SAME TIME.
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Main Area and Open Discussion / General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software
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on: May 07, 2013, 08:25:57 AM
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Atlantis looks good as a word/text processor, but for general note-taking software, I think InfoSelect v8 (not the v9 or v10) is still hard to beat, and OneNote would be tops, because your notes can include text, images with embedded text, files, and voice audio (even the lyrics from songs in MP3 files) - which are all searchable from the Windows 7 Search/Index function, and from within OneNote itself - see here: Microsoft OneNote 2007 - some experiential Tips & TricksFrom the reviews, Scrivener seems hard to beat as a sophisticated creative writing tool, though I have not tried it yet. |
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Main Area and Open Discussion / Living Room / Re: Adobe drops the gauntlet - going forward it's cloud - or nothing.
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on: May 07, 2013, 01:16:22 AM
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Take a trip back in time, to when the producers dictated to their customers. (Did they ever stop trying to do that?)
Archaic, and arguably exactly what you would expect from a good corporate psychopath.
Anyone could guess that this sort of thing was likely to happen. Google are doing it by default now. Another example is Microsoft's Office 365, but that's not dictating terms to anyone, yet.
Throwing down the gauntlet is a challenge to fight. This seems to be nothing like that. It is arguably anti-trust, oligopolistic or monopolistic practice. They don't expect a fight.
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Main Area and Open Discussion / Living Room / Re: New PC double-take
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on: May 07, 2013, 12:54:14 AM
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@40hz: Oh, thanks for that. That's very informative.
I wondered why new PCs would come loaded with proprietary 3rd party DVD players - since XP days. I usually found them lacking or they wanted money to upgrade to a version that actually did anything useful. So I tended to not use them, preferring to use (for example) VLC, Winamp or Real Alternative. Nowadays I usually just use VLC and nothing else, and I continue to disable Windows Media Player because of its DRM functionality and because it tries to call home - I block it at the firewall too, just in case. (A pity to not use MS MP, as it has a good database system.)
I was interested in Win8, because MS has apparently cunningly embedded some cross-integration with MSO 2013 + Win8 + IE10 + SkyDrive + Outlook.com), so you don't necessarily get the whole ball of wax unless you upgrade to all the latest versions of these things. It's called "lock-in" I guess, but it is cunningly done with a velvet glove, though the proverbial iron fist is probably inside that glove.
SharePoint users have this issue in spades, as SharePoint is (deliberately) incredibly well-integrated with MSO, IE and the Win OS, but you have to have all the latest versions of everything to be able to use all the latest functionality. On a treadmill for life, paying a tollgate fee to MS as you rotate.
Anyway, I still have MSO as an incentive to migrate to Win8, but the disincentives seem to include the sorts of thing you mentioned above, and others - e.g., the dropping of ClearType functionality (ergonomics is kind of important).
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Main Area and Open Discussion / Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]
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on: May 06, 2013, 10:58:30 PM
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^^ I didn't get the joke until I googled "Yakov Smirnoff". Never heard of him before. He's very clever/funny. e.g., from: Wikiepedia Yakov SmirnoffRussian reversal
Russian reversal or "In Soviet Russia" is a type of joke originated by Smirnoff, and is an example of antimetabole.[5] The general form of the "In Soviet Russia" joke is that the subject and object of a statement are reversed, and "In (Soviet) Russia," or something equivalent, is added, and the verb is often left unconjugated and articles are omitted, mimicking perceived Russian-accented speech. The original was:
In America, you can always find a party.
In Soviet Russia, Party always find you!
Other examples include:
In America, you break law.
In Soviet Russia, law breaks you!
In America, your work determines your marks.
In Soviet Russia, Marx determines your work!
In America, you assassinate presidents.
In Soviet Russia, presidents assassinate you!
In America, you watch Big Brother.
In Soviet Russia, Big Brother watches you!
Smirnoff's use of English allowed him to smooth over grammar differences in transitioning from the setup to the punchline. For example, he omits the articles "a" and "the" (which the Russian language doesn't have) in the first reversal joke above, to better preserve the congruence. Also, verbs are often left unconjugated, such as in the joke "In America, you listen to man on radio. In Soviet Russia, man on radio listen to you!"
In 1985, Smirnoff appeared on a Miller Lite commercial featuring Russian reversal jokes.[6]
In America, there's plenty of light beer and you always find a party. In Russia, Party will always find you.
See also: Transpositional pun
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Main Area and Open Discussion / Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]
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on: May 06, 2013, 08:52:44 AM
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Illuminated script.
A new monk arrived at a monastery. He was assigned to help the other monks in copying the old illuminated texts by hand. He noticed however, that they were copying from copies, and not the original manuscripts held in the scriptorium. So he went to Father Florian (the Armarius of the Scriptorium) to ask him about this. He pointed out that if there was an error in the first copy, then that error would be continued in all of the other copies.
Father Florian said, "The monks of this monastery have been copying from the copies for centuries, but you make a good point, my son. I shall check on this right now."
So saying, Father Florian went down into the cellar with one of the copies to check it against the original. Hours went by and nobody saw him come back up. Eventually, one of the monks went downstairs to look for him. He heard sobbing coming from the back of the cellar, and found the old monk leaning on a table, on which were open the copy and the original manuscript. The old man was crying.
The monk said to Father Florian, "What's wrong father?"
The old monk replied in a choked voice, "The word is 'celebrate'! "
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46
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Main Area and Open Discussion / Living Room / Re: New PC double-take
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on: May 06, 2013, 05:43:11 AM
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Um...have you tried playing a movie on either a DVD or Blu-Ray disk with your new PC yet?  That's one "experience" that's very different under Windows 8.  I am contemplating a move to Win8, but am a bit reluctant at the moment because Win8 has got pretty bad reviews from some who have already switched. My Win7-64 Home Premium seems to be pretty much rock-solid and useful. |
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Main Area and Open Discussion / Living Room / Re: Camera technology - Impressive resolution of photography of a crowd scene.
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on: May 06, 2013, 05:03:58 AM
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^^ Thanks Curt. I had seen those shots.
Using the tried-and-tested technology, I would assume that all crowd scenes could be gathered and imaged as per the OP link to the the Vancouver Canucks Fan Zone taken before the riots.
Why would police/government agencies therefore not have been taking high resolution crowd surveillance images before and during and after the Boston event? I mean, if they were already running a bomb-threat exercise including rooftop surveillance, Navy Seals and sniffer-dogs...?
It may be that the Boston high resolution images haven't been made publicly available as they are confidential surveillance images for use only by police/government agencies, and could infringe on someone's privacy rights, or something.
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