Messages

4926

General Software Discussion / Re: google results

« on: November 24, 2009, 12:19 AM »

I thought most search engines had started blocking/blacklisting/ranking last sites that did that sort of thing?

-Stoic Joker (November 23, 2009, 06:55 PM)

I believe that you're right but I seem to still get the occasional site that somehow gets into the results but has nothing to do with what I was looking for, (ie. search terms aren't anywhere on the visible page nor is it related), but looking in the source will show the terms there.

It's definitely better than it used to be though.

4927

General Software Discussion / Re: google results

« on: November 23, 2009, 06:05 PM »

It's normally because the website has inserted all types of search terms into the pages' meta data, (or some other non-visible portion of HTML code).  If you view the page source you'll probably find all the terms you searched for enclosed in meta tags, eg.

<meta http-equiv="keywords" content="sex rock roll naked wolfman ad-infinitum>"

I wish all search engines would only index the visible content of websites.

Some websites also set the text colour to the same as the background colour to hide all the bogus search terms just to get you to their site to view the ads.

I've seen sites where the terms in the meta data filled 5 screens, whereas the entire site fitted into one screen or less.

4928

Living Room / Re: Video Formats

« on: November 22, 2009, 06:05 AM »

Click the Options button up the top right.

Under 'Convert To...' choose AVI.

Under 'Device Preset' choose:
a) XviD Fullscreen for 4:3 ratio (640x480), or
b) XviD Widescreen for 16:9 ratio (704x384), or
c) XviD Widescreen Anamorphic for 2.35:1 ratio (640x272).

Select '2 pass' down bottom left.

The above presets are for stereo audio which is fine unless you know the standalone can handle AC3 5.1 in an AVI without down mixing to stereo, in which case it would be better to have any 5.1 audio.

WinFF is the program I use for strange formats like WMV or FLV, (because ffmpeg can handle almost anything), but for almost everything else, (AVI, MKV, MPG2, VOB), I use StaxRip for more control over the output, (but it's still reasonably easy to understand/use).

Give WinFF a try anyhow and see if you like the results on your TV, (the rescaling up of small resolution videos might result in blocky output), otherwise there are plenty of other video conversion software around.

VideoHelp is arguably the best place for guides on how to convert from 'this' to 'that'.  Just click on 'Convert' under the 'How To' heading on the left side menu and then enter some search terms.

4929

Living Room / Re: Video Formats

« on: November 21, 2009, 06:33 AM »

If size is no object then HuffYUV^w encoded video + MP3 if stereo or AC3 if 5.1 AVI.

If size is a factor then x264 in Quality mode encoded video + AAC audio in Matroska container or MP4 muxed file.

If playback on a standalone player with DivX/XviD capability, then MPEG4 ASP profile AVI, (average bitrate around 1500-2000), + MP3 stereo or AC3 5.1 - note, some players don't recognise AC3 audio in an AVI and will either not play the audio or down mix to stereo.

If playback on a standalone DVD only player, then MPEG2, (average bitrate 6000), + AC3 5.1 or MPEG1 Layer2 stereo.

Have a look at WinFF, it has presets for all the above except HuffyYUV, (which would be easy to add).

4930

General Software Discussion / Re: Waking up stand-by windows computer on Lan?

« on: November 20, 2009, 09:27 PM »

WOLcmd - worked for me when I used it.

Netscan also has a WOL manager under the Options menu.

Wake-On-LAN Introduction has a list of utilities, (including the AMD one), to facilitate WOL, eg. ActiveX control for embedding in a web page, perl scripts, etc

If you want to do it remotely, there's also Wake-On-LAN Online.

4931

General Software Discussion / Re: Disks: Why size=performance - Interesting article on speeding up your computer

« on: November 19, 2009, 03:13 PM »

If you only make a 300gig partition on a 1TB drive, I dunno if the LBA-limit trick is going to have any advantage, though smiley

-f0dder (November 19, 2009, 12:39 PM)

I dont follow you there f0dder.......

-tomos (November 19, 2009, 02:17 PM)

I believe he means that as you delete/move/copy files around on your system, newly written data will move progressively further into the inner areas of the drive platters, thus slowing down.  Recent filesystems have a habit of just marking things as deleted but not actually using the vacated blocks until available clean blocks are mostly used.  This is why data recovery programs work so good, (the good ones anyway, eg. GetDataBack).

EDIT: GAH!  I think I replied to the part you didn't quote....oh well....back under the rock  

...- are you saying making a 300gig partition wont be as good as the way they do it (or *will* be as good...) [or neither maybe ? lol]

To my thinking, it should be the same bearing in mind any access to any other possible partition on the same drive will immediately negate any advantage gained in transfer rate.
But having a single 300GB partition on a 1-2TB drive seems like an awful waste of resources to me.

4932

General Software Discussion / Re: Paragon Drive Backup+Recovery 10 Free - good full drive imaging tool

« on: November 19, 2009, 02:40 AM »

@Ashraf, just to round out your list:

As per Macrium Reflect, the commercial version of Paragon Backup & Restore, (either Drive Backup Pro 10, System Backup 2010 or Backup & Recovery Suite), include WinPE2.1 based recovery media - usually a separate download for licensed users.

Paragon Backup & Restore Free 10 will also restore to a different hard drive or partition providing:
a) for a partition, that the initial backup was not a complex backup, (ie. doesn't include the MBR and/or First Track data).  Otherwise it will, basically, complain there is no empty drive to restore to.
b) if it is a complex backup, (contains MBR and/or First Track), then the restore operation is to an empty drive.

Also, Acronis TIH will restore to a different drive/partition, (how I used to migrate my system to a bigger drive - completely forgot it had a clone feature).

4933

Living Room / Re: Tech News Weekly: Edition 46-09

« on: November 17, 2009, 05:31 AM »

To be perfectly honest, I don't know what the legal implications are in this country of the government attempting to bypass security systems in software.

-Ehtyar (November 16, 2009, 10:54 PM)

I would then be hopeful that they, (the government), are then able to be prosecuted under the same laws that prevent us, (the populace), from circumventing software security - the DMCA crap we got foisted with under the supposed FTA.

Under a fair and just legal system this should be the case.......but what country has one of those?

4934

Living Room / Re: Tech News Weekly: Edition 46-09

« on: November 16, 2009, 03:33 PM »

2. Given Google's penchant for catching everything, (data-wise), I think the more appropriate interpretation of SPDY should be SPiDeY Web.

4935

Living Room / Re: Portable computer

« on: November 13, 2009, 05:27 PM »

Both come with 2Mb of memory and a 320Gb HD.

-zridling (November 13, 2009, 03:19 PM)

Wow, they sure pack the OS in these days.  How much is left for running your apps?

4936

Living Room / Re: When you make your 100'th Post

« on: November 12, 2009, 01:47 PM »

Quiver in fear

4937

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for freeware ghost clone with boot manager

« on: November 12, 2009, 01:15 PM »

You're really making us work for this.....give Virtual Floppy Drive a go.  Just tried it on XP and it let me change the contents.

Just noticed you mentioned no floppy drives previously.



EDIT: Let he who has understanding reckon the number of the beast, for it is a human number.

Woohoo!  Post 666....proof that I am truly evil!!!  

4938

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for freeware ghost clone with boot manager

« on: November 11, 2009, 09:28 PM »

FloppyImage is free and allows you to read/write disk images to/from physical disks (I've used it for adding images to UBCD, you may need to select "Create compatible IMG files" under "Settings").

-beermatt (November 11, 2009, 05:34 PM)

Good catch!  I won't have to keep downloading WinImage to create an image now

Also if you have a network it may be worth looking at FOG..?

I think that requires user-interaction, like PiNG, which is why I didn't suggest PiNG in the first place.  My read was tinjaw was looking for a 'Hit button, wait for reboot' kind of restoration.

4939

Living Room / Re: How would you improve a standard PC keyboard?

« on: November 11, 2009, 03:26 AM »

Ahahaha, apparently neither of us read the entire thread :S

* Ehtyar sorry

-Ehtyar (November 10, 2009, 11:43 PM)

Nah, 'sokay - mine will only work for US keyboards but for anyone who wants to do some other keyboard, I recommend KeyTweak.

4940

Living Room / Re: How would you improve a standard PC keyboard?

« on: November 10, 2009, 11:39 PM »

Why not turn the left caps-lock key into an enter key? (for those who don't have a problem randomly hitting it by accident)

-Ehtyar (November 10, 2009, 07:08 PM)

Love it!! 
....
So easy: why didn't I think of that before?? I never use the CapsLock (well, not previously  )

-Perry Mowbray (November 10, 2009, 09:53 PM)

Or the registry version is way back up here

4941

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for freeware ghost clone with boot manager

« on: November 10, 2009, 11:13 AM »

An off the top of my head suggestion:

Use GRUB4DOS as the boot menu, setting it up per normal for booting into XP/Vista.

For the recovery part, first create partition images using Partition Saving.
Create two Partition Saving boot floppies, one has an autoexec.bat that will restore the XP partition, the other to restore the Vista partition (Partition Saving has rather extensive options, the archive has a description and examples on how to create an options file).

So the autoexec.bat on one floppy might have 'savepart -r -f XP.cfg', to restore XP.  On the other floppy it might have 'savepart -r -f Vista.cfg' to restore the Vista partition.

Then turn the two floppies into images using WinImage (30 day trial), (eg. RestoreXP.img and RestVsta.img), and use GRUB4DOS to boot them from it's menu.

This should give you a boot menu with your four choices and costs nothing except a little reading and preparation.

4942

Living Room / Re: I'm Going to HELL! Please feel sorry for me... :(

« on: November 10, 2009, 01:01 AM »

Huntsman? Use a broom? CRIPES! You need a forklift for those things~! Up to 30cm?  

-Renegade (November 09, 2009, 10:44 PM)

Nah, we only have the titchy ones here in Oz, about 10cm across is the biggest I've seen.

...So... what are the laws in Australia regarding fully automatic weapons?   (I assume that Howitzers and bazookas are out of the question...) And what's the largest legal caliber?

Any full/semi-auto rifles, full/semi-auto and pump-action shotguns are basically a no-no due to a typical knee-jerk reaction on the part of the government.  (Before anyone points out, full-auto rifles/shotguns were never legal here prior to the new laws.)

Largest legal calibre, hmm, probably the .460 Wetherby (if you can find one), otherwise go blackpowder and get a .50 calibre  Personally, nothing says go away better than a 12 gauge at close range

They're seriously primitive in comparison. All my friends that have moved there complained about it. Well... All my friends that move out of Korea period complain about crappy ISPs, slow speeds, and ridiculous caps and policies. Sigh... $140 AUD for... Sob sob sob sob~!

Probably the best deal is $88 for 1500/256 from RegionalConnect for uncapped.  A friend regularly downloads 250-300GB/month on that.

I heard that the entire Australian Internet infrastructure is up for a rehaul though. I'm sure that will be very welcome.

Nope, it won't.  It will cost more for end users who will be forced onto it by having the existing infrastructure ripped up, see Ehtyar's Tech News item number 4.

Personally, they can take their National Broadband initiative and shove it up their collective ....[censored]....

EDIT: Oh yeah, add to that their National ISP based content filtering which you'll be forced into because they own the whole network and it's time to seriously think about starting a revolution in this progressively backwards going country.

I gloat a bit when I tell them that its because our infrastructure underlying the internet is 100 years old and then I crawl off somewhere and feel privately very inadequate...

-Darwin (November 09, 2009, 11:55 PM)

Let me join you with our antique phone cable system. 

4943

Living Room / Re: I'm Going to HELL! Please feel sorry for me... :(

« on: November 09, 2009, 10:00 PM »

I most certainly won't be looking forward to funnel webs though... Yikes! Spiders just creep me out entirely!

-Renegade (November 09, 2009, 08:03 PM)

You're lucky then, funnel webs are predominant in Sydney.

We just have snakes, redbacks, european wasps, more european wasps (come and take the bl**dy things back you b*ggers!), etc down here in Melbourne, (as well as some excellent four-wheel driving).

As for beaches, the Mornington peninsula both bay and ocean side.  Or travel a little further east to Ninety Mile beach/Gippsland Lakes or west down the great Ocean Road to Apollo Bay, etc, etc.

Regarding internet, basically you're screwed - welcome to the real world.

Although when you get here and have a place go to Whirlpool and use their plan finder to find an ISP but whatever you do, DO NOT choose BigPongd.

EDIT: Oh yeah, regarding the spiders please don't hurt the Huntsman^w spider if you find him in your house, just pick him up on a broom or something and stick him outside.  They're not poisonous and do a good job wandering around eating insects although they do get rather large so you might be surprised by one staring down at you while sitting on the toilet.

You'll also get the shock of your life when you flip down the sun visor in the car and have one drop in your lap 

4944

Living Room / Re: How would you improve a standard PC keyboard?

« on: November 08, 2009, 11:19 PM »

I'm also very into a block of programmable keys similar to the numpad but with no functionality other than what you assign them, and a small LCD display just for convenience functions (like when using fullscreen apps etc). Something similar to the relatively well known Logitech G15 that's not ugly would be nice.

-Ehtyar (November 08, 2009, 10:57 PM)

Well, you could save up your pennies and get the Optimus Maximus.  Has it seen the light of day yet?  Apparently shipping....crap, now I want one.

Also, why the *frack* have peripheral manufacturers still not made a mouse with a wheel that supports side scrolling *as-well-as* non-retarded right-click?

Not sure what you mean but Logitech, (for one), make mice where the scroll wheel also does sideways scrolling by tilting it left or right, also A4Tech made mice with 2 scroll wheels for vertical and horizontal.

And my mouse switches to sideways if whatever is on screen fits vertically and not horizontally.

It might be worth little test to get a key mapping utility to make it behave instead like an Enter key and see how that would work out. I may just do that.

-mwb1100 (November 08, 2009, 08:51 PM)

Attached is an archive containing the required remapping for a plain US keyboard as well as an undo file.

4945

General Software Discussion / Re: Paragon Drive Backup+Recovery 10 Free - good full drive imaging tool

« on: November 08, 2009, 11:05 PM »

The easiest way to explain mounting an image is probably just to say it's virtually the same as mounting a CD/DVD image in any of the virtual CD/DVD drivers, (eg. DaemonTools, Alcohol, VirtualCD, etc).

About the only difference is that with mounting a backup image the drive letter is assigned on-the-fly.

4946

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Discover new places with Plarker

« on: November 08, 2009, 04:58 PM »

Is there a problem with the site?

I just keep getting site not found.

4947

Living Room / Re: OPENOFFICEMOUSE

« on: November 08, 2009, 04:30 PM »

Nah the MMO mouse already exists. It's called the Razer Naga

-p3lb0x (November 08, 2009, 12:16 PM)

Ugh! The buttons are positioned too far back, my thumb would end up in a permanent hook if I tried using that thing.  Plus at only 200"/s tracking speed it's too slow for serious gaming.

I'm much more interested in the Sentinel Advance which has 6m/s tracking so I can do a 180 in <1.058493728ns and has headlights for dust particle avoidance on my mousing surface.

I wonder if I could play videos on the OLED while gaming....hhmmmm....

4948

Living Room / Re: Tech News Weekly: Edition 45-09

« on: November 08, 2009, 04:45 AM »

4. I didn't really mean for you to include my acronym in your post....sheesh, now everyone will think I'm just some uncouth aussie yob...........oh wait......

4949

General Software Discussion / Re: Paragon Drive Backup+Recovery 10 Free - good full drive imaging tool

« on: November 07, 2009, 05:06 PM »

As my lawyer advised me, I can't recall.

-MilesAhead (November 07, 2009, 12:12 PM)

Ahhh, the Political Defense

4950

General Software Discussion / Re: Any XP users switching to Windows 7 yet?

« on: November 06, 2009, 07:51 PM »

MS disables it in desktop editions because of any possible driver compatibility problems, (and you have to admit there are a lot of drivers that really shouldn't have seen the light of day).

Taken from Wikipedia^w and paraphrased on MSDN:

Very basically, each process is still limited to 4GB because of the 32bit addresses, but the OS can use a processor control register to map that 4GB space above the 4GB. So process "A" might have it's 4GB virtual address space start in physical ram at 8GB, process "B" at 12GB, etc.

That implies that software doesn't specifically have to be written to use memory above 4GB, just be coded to be PAE friendly, (eg. various ramdisk drivers - this is probably a bad example but I'm sure f0dder will tell me if it is ), because the CPU will take care of where that process will run.

The point was: A 32bit OS can address more than the physical limitation of 2^32 if the OS chooses to, (barring hardware limitations).  Thus it's an arbitrary limit imposed by the designer of the OS, eg. MS.

EDIT: Dang it! f0dder beat me again!