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In SSC 4.3, is it possible to create or make the "base" / initial background transparent?  So it you import or draw objects, save the file in .png & open it in other apps, it won't show any background color - only the object(s) themselves?

Yes it is, though SC does not make it immediately obvious how to do this, and I should maybe make a new blank image dialog that would let you set options on a per-use basis.

But here is how you do it:

• First, go to the Edit menu and choose Resize Image.
• Now check the box marked "Resize Canvas", and then check the box "Use transparent background".  This is the critical step.  It's the fact that this checkbox is checked that will tell SC you like to use transparent backgrounds.
• Now whenever you do File -> Create new blank image file, your background will be 100% transparent.

Tip:
To see transparent areas better, go to "More Interface Options" tab in options and choose "Background Style: Inner Chessboard".

Don't go into it expecting much.  It's not really a mystery movie just a low key slow small non-rushed character-study movie.  You are either going to love it or hate it.

Cold Weather:
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Loved it.

The real question is, what's the option to turn off this behavior, and if there is no option for it? Surely they would have an option for it.

Your weekend cheer: Russian dashcams capture human kindness

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzBInt4zljQ" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzBInt4zljQ</a>

from http://www.waxy.org

Great 

I think the best thing for me to do might be to check for all all white/black capture, and show a special message suggesting the possible cause of the problem.

#1 sounds great idea, i shall add it.
#2 i dont understand how that differs from request #1

#3 are you saying you just want to be able to hide some of the existing quick paste menu items?

I always love watching threads like this -- nice work, BigVent! 

 

I agree with everything you're saying, which is basically why these ad experiments we do every few years always end with removing the ads.. I just think they convey the wrong message about the site and will scare off the very people we'd like to stay.

And as has been pointed out -- it's especially troubling for our site because the ads so often tend to recommend things that we ourselves would NOT recommend.  Maybe we could solve this by only allowing clothing advertisers:)

Still, i think there's some value in experimenting with them every few years to see what kind of revenue they generate, what kind of feedback they generate, if they affect the site, etc., and see what kinds of options there are.

Past the $300 mark -- thanks everyone! 

Ok, here's my latest try:
[attachthumb=1]

Too much more warning and we're going to get into the silly zone..

Ok let's turn the tables on these scammy ads and turn this experiment into a public service  

I've modified the ads now so that they are prefixed by this text (subject to improvement):

"During May of 2013 we are experimenting with showing automatic google ads on our forum threads to visitors who are not logged into our forum. The following ad was not chosen or endorsed by our site, but *might* be useful to you.

Be smart and ignore ads recommending some junk registry cleaner or computer speed up service, or ads claiming they've detected something wrong with your computer. When in doubt, post a question on our forum and get real advice from real people!"

If you have suggestion for better wording/warning, let me know.

What I was hoping was that adsense would show ads strictly based on the content of the thread, but that seems like wishful thinking..

Are there ad services where you can choose and approve a small number of "sponsors" each month, and only show ads from them?

We might have to cut this experiment short (or switch to text ads?), as the main effect so far is having my disgust for google quadruple.

I see these as dangerous because they're items we'd all recommend *against* anyone using

agreed -- i see this as a real problem -- the ads that google most wants to put on our pages are programs that we would normally advise against.. i guess that's the main point of advertising.. yuck.

Just read a couple of books on Django in my ongoing quest to design the next best web framework..

I have never seen that ad before.. thats ridiculous -- how can google adsense possibly allow that as an ad !?
i am going to add it to blacklist immediately.  i am honestly shocked that google would allow such an ad.

in fairness, i have ads enabled and all of the ads i've seen are clear about what they and are clearly normal advertisements, are and none are "click to download" types.  for example here's the last one i saw:
[attachthumb=1]

so far all the ones i've shown are normal but unrelated to the topic -- maybe that's because it has enough mined data about me that it is trying to show me things it thinks i want regardless of page contents, or maybe that's just because its going to take some time for page contents to be reflected.  time will tell.

BUT

the one you are seeing looks pure evil!

I am trying another advertisement test.

I've re-enabled an old feature of the forum that we experimented with a few years ago that ads an advertisement entry at the bottom of a forum thread with more than a few posts on it.  However, it will only show when you are not signed into the forum, so no forum members will see it.

Since these advertisements won't show to signed-in forum members, the real question will be whether such advertisements has any effect of scaring people off or reducing the number of people who sign up to participate on the forum..  If so then they are unacceptable.  But rather that hypothesize let's experiment and see how it feels.

ps.
If you deliberately want to see ads in the forum out of curiosity or because you like them, i enabled a kludge:

• Go to your Profile Forum Information page.
• Find at the bottom where it says "Chance of Displaying Advert. (0-100)" and enter a value of 101, and save.
• Now you should see the forum ads on the bottom of any thread with more than a few posts.

It would be nice to see Raymond do a follow up comparing cpu usage.

Ok so on at least one case, we have more clues.

As previously stated, the hang seems to be coming when querying the OS for the icon index of a shortcut file (.lnk file).

The further clue is that at least in once case, the shortcut is pointing to a network file, which is why it's timing out, and that in fact if you bring up properties dialog in windows explorer for the shortcut file it also hangs.

So if *ALL* the hangs are caused by same phenomena, then one solution might be to have FARR resolve shortcuts and skip trying to get icons for those that refer to network share files.

The Raymond.cc blog has just put up a serious comparison of the memory usage of a ton of different antivirus programs.

It's not easy to evaluate such things given all of the different factors involved, but the results are informative.  Definitely worth a look to see where your antivirus program of choice comes in.  Is your favorite tool a memory hog?

http://www.raymond.cc/blo...t-on-system-memory-usage/


[attach=1]

Did you figure this out yet? Something is quite confusing about this.  Can you clarify what behavior you are seeing when you launch LBC.  Don't launch it twice.

Can you elaborate how you envision using this?

Do you mean literally you want to always use the PrtScr key to toggle the visibility of the Quick Capture Bar, and then use that to make your captures?

I could possibly add a hotkey configuration entry for toggling the quick capture bar -- then you could set that to PrtScr if you wanted to.  Or, since there is already a "toggle visibility" hotkey, i could make an option to say that instead of toggling main window visibility that should toggle quick capture bar visibility..

Based on my first report back, preliminary findings suggest that the hang may be occurring because the operating system is taking multiple seconds to resolve an OS api call to SHGetFileInfo to get system icon index for a display result.

Now there are a few options here for me to fix the problem.

The first may be to discover if the slowdown ONLY occurs when trying to resolve icons to LNK files -- if so, an easy solution might be for ME to resolve the lnk shortcut links and then request system icon indices for the real files.

To help determine if that  is a viable solution will require some more debug testers, or perhaps if there is something about the icons in the files that this triggers on -- it's still completely unclear what specifically triggers this slow icon request -- it may be just that windows is deciding to occasionally clear it's icon cache after N requests, etc., and that it's completely unpredictable.

The second option would be a more clever deferred-icon resolution approach, where i update icons in a separate thread, showing them with generic icons until while they are pending resolution.  This is feasible though not exactly fun.

Welcome to the syoung!

We actually know of this problem!
It's due to a security program blocking screenshot tools.

ZoneAlarm is one program that does this, Kaspersky is another.

This thread has some more discussion of the issue:
http://www.donationcoder....rum/index.php?topic=20962

Solution is simply to add Screenshot Captor to the allowed list.

Another thing that would be good to do is write to these companies and tell them how incredibly irresponsible it is for them to be causing this behavior without telling the user why the screenshots are made blank.