Messages

26

Living Room / Re: Picking the right mouse for gaming - suggestions?

« on: June 27, 2008, 06:19 PM »

Everyone in our Call of Duty 4 clan uses WIRED mice, as do probably most other players. I once made the mistake of getting a fancy logitech wireless laser mouse, could really notice the difference when you needed pin-point cursor accuracy for shooting etc...

I've had my current Logitech MX510 wired mouse for at least 3-4 years now, still going strong, can't beat it.

Also a quality mouse surface makes a BIG difference to how well the laser/optics work in whatever mouse you choose.
I highly recommend a fUnc mouse mat - a review here: http://www.hexus.net...nt/item.php?item=108

From another review:

A premium mousemat doesn't collect dust as quickly as a cloth mat, doesn't transfer dust as well to the mouse, doesn't cause lots of friction, and lets you position your pointer more accurately. This helps a bit in everyday desktop tasks, but it helps a lot if you're doing something where mouse accuracy matters - graphics editing, or games.

An inaccurate mouse is very annoying when you're trying to do fine work in your favourite image editor, or put a simulated rifle bullet through the earhole of some upstart kid in Sweden.

And as far as accuracy and cleanliness goes, the Func mat seems to be right up there with the best.

fUnc Industries website - http://www.func.net/

27

Living Room / Re: Anyone know of webmail that will filter and forward?

« on: June 19, 2008, 04:39 PM »

Can't beat using Gmail to filter all the spam out of all your email accounts and then just forward the good stuff to your main account. This article may be of some use as well... http://www.z-oc.com/...accounts-with-gmail/

28

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox 3 Released

« on: June 18, 2008, 05:02 PM »

The Nightly Tester Tools http://www.oxymoroni.../web/firefox/nightly
Allow you to force compatibility of any add-ons that are not working. I've been using ALL of my FF2 add-ons for the last 6 months on FF3 alpha/beta versions

I think there are only 2 out of my 13 add-ons that has not had a new FF3 version released.
If anyone needs help in bumping up the version number inside an older add-on then just shout.

29

Living Room / Re: What are your favorite gadgets and gizmos?

« on: June 15, 2008, 05:13 PM »

Nintendo DS with the CycloDS - thanks for the info about that Colors app, my daughter loves drawing and will love this!

iPod Touch has to be my favourite gadget this year easily, will probably get an iPhone 3G this year as well, although the HTC Touch/Diamond phones are looking nice as well.

30

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox 3 - A visual guide to the new features

« on: June 13, 2008, 09:52 AM »

Nice little guide - confirms that it's mostly the under-the-hood improvements I'm interested in, though (the AwesomeBar could be a blessing or a curse, or just plain "whatever" - time will tell).

-f0dder (June 12, 2008, 07:32 PM)

Personally, I HATED the AwesomeBar when I first started on the nightly test builds, it just feels completely alien to what you are used to that bar doing.
Now though, after so many months I don't think I could do without it!

Really is worth persevering with, lost count of the no. of times I can't remember the url of a website so I just type 1 or 2 words from it and it shows me the site

31

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox extensions for Minefield

« on: May 21, 2008, 07:28 AM »

I use FireGestures and keep it VERY simple, I only use ONE gesture and that is to close a tab I've finished reading. So hold the right-mouse button down anywhere my cursor is and draw an L shape.

When surfing I find my left hand does not need to be on the keyboard so no point in hitting CTRL-W to close the tabs like I used to and no point in moving the mouse pointer onto the tab just to middle-click close it.

This way you are reducing your movements and you don't even think about it after a while until your friends/family wonder what the heck you are doing drawing L shapes in their web browsers that don't have gestures installed!

32

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox extensions for Minefield

« on: May 14, 2008, 07:55 AM »

Yes, played for the RedWings, well spotted

I also replaced All-In-One gestures and MouseGestures with FireGestures some time ago, nice and light and fast.

I highly recommend you try SmoothWheel - http://smoothwheel.mozdev.org/
You'll find every other web browser jerky after using this. I slowly turn my mouse wheel 1 click at a time at whatever speed I need to and this enables me to READ any page while I am scrolling. Highly recommended.

33

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox extensions for Minefield

« on: May 13, 2008, 07:32 AM »

I've been using ALL of my previous FF2 add-ons for months on the FF3 nightly builds. I just use the Nightly Tester Tools add-on to "Make Compatible"

If I need to I just hack the .xpi file of the add-on to increase the version number myself - most of my main add-ons have been updated to be FF3 compatible in the past couple of months though.

34

General Software Discussion / Re: I need a good DVD converter!

« on: May 08, 2008, 07:38 AM »

http://www.dvdcatalyst.com - the 7-day trial is fully functional, it is not free but is so cheap I believe it is so much better. I have converted most friends/family to purchasing this as the author provides fantastic forum/email support and the strongest selling point is that not only can you convert to ALL APPLE products but also just about any other device.
If you get a new device that isn't supported the author will just quickly add support for you.

35

General Software Discussion / Re: KMPlayer going commercial?

« on: April 11, 2008, 11:59 AM »

KMplayer here, plays everything I ever throw at it. I tried GOMPlayer after also hearing many good reports about it but it didn't take long before I found some clips it couldn't play and it tried to take me to a codec site to download codecs. Installing codecs into my windows system is something I tried to stop doing a few years ago as you can wreak havoc with your machine and get plenty of playback issues once you start messing with different codecs on your system.

36

Living Room / Re: USB Flash Drives: What to look for or avoid.

« on: March 07, 2008, 04:22 AM »

I've just got this 8gb Dane-Elec here in the UK, good price and performance seems as good if not better than my previous 2gb pendrive.

http://www.7dayshop.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=777_6&products_id=103796

edit by jgpaiva: replaced tinyurl link with actual link

37

Official Announcements / Re: The site is now back online (March 6th, 2008)

« on: March 07, 2008, 04:18 AM »

Great to see the site back, really appreciate all the hard work and effort put in to get this back online.

Thanks again

Fedorov

38

General Software Discussion / Re: newspond: prettier, smarter app enters the news aggregation scence

« on: February 20, 2008, 08:01 AM »

I saw this yesterday and bookmarked it, quite like the look of this site.

39

General Software Discussion / Re: Should I get my new laptop with hard drive partitioned?

« on: February 20, 2008, 08:00 AM »

I've setup my partitions in the same way for over 10 years now, ultimate speed..

This is on 2 x Western Digital 10,000 rpm Raptor drives

Hard drive 1:
C: Windows (20gb)
D: Games - also save email attachments and all browser downloads on here
E: Apps - I custom install every application here and keep my docs/data here as well

Hard drive 2:
F: BACKUP (1 huge partition)

I use Acronis Trueimage every night to take an incremental image of my C/D/E partitions onto the F drive, only takes < 2 minutes

The Windows paging file is on this 2nd drive fixed at min 2gb max 2gb so it is NEVER dynamically resizing itself and being on a separate drive, while the operating system is busy with it's own windows files, if it needs to use the paging file they do not impact on each other.

InternetExplorer and Firefox browser cache files are forced onto the F: 2nd drive to not clutter up my 1st drive.

Windows temp files are all forced to F:\WinTemp instead of the default c:\windows\temp or c:\user\....

In other words, all the temporary/cache crap stays out the way of the operating system C drive.

If/when I install new drivers and anything goes wrong I normally only need to restore the C:Windows partition - so I can restore a completely wrecked machine in < 5 minutes every time.

Splitting everything up sensibly across drives and partitions makes the maintenance of it so much easier when you have problems. My WindowsXP machine was NEVER clean installed since it was released, I think I ran the same install for 5 years solid and all my friends with CLEAN installs still wondered how my system was so much faster than theirs.

I use this strategy on all PCs I work with, people never believe me when I tell them I can restore with Acronis in under 5 minutes, it's easy when you only have the OS on the small C: partition.

40

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox 3 beta 3 expected today

« on: February 11, 2008, 06:08 PM »

I've been running nightly windows builds of FF3 for a few months now - I'm still shocked at how stable this is, I yet to see it crash in all these months, works perfect almost! Very fast rendering speeds, page zoom is nice and lots of other small features that really make it a nice upgrade.

41

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Qimage, "Professional Photographic Printing Software" - a second look

« on: October 18, 2007, 03:29 AM »

I've been a registered Qimage user for as long as I can remember - I use it purely for printing.

Image Resizing I do in Photoshop and noise removal I have various plugins in Photoshop for that as Noise removal is supposed to be the FIRST thing you do to your images before tweaking them further.

42

General Software Discussion / Re: What's your preferred File Manager

« on: October 17, 2007, 03:58 AM »

If Explorer crashes you normally have to reboot your PC, if Total Commander crashes (very very rarely) you just kill the process and load it again.

I recently licensed Total Commander on 3 work colleagues PCs - I suggest to people to force themselves to use it for 2 weeks and then try going back to Explorer, they can't go back to Explorer and everyone loves Total Commander once they get used to the keyboard shortcuts, dual-pane etc...

43

General Software Discussion / Re: What's your preferred File Manager

« on: October 16, 2007, 08:33 AM »

In the Show menu - CTRL-F12 gives you a dialog to type any filters in, CTRL-F10 returns to showing you all files.

44

General Software Discussion / Re: What's your preferred File Manager

« on: October 16, 2007, 07:36 AM »

As voted already... Total Commander, so fast and stable - maybe what a lot of people don't realise is that it bypasses the standard Explorer way of copying/moving files so it's much faster, believe me I've tried doing the same things in Explorer and it's painful to watch.

I also recently took up the offer of a lifetime license for XYPlorer, purely on the basis that I appreciate Don's commitment to the product, support and almost daily new versions with very nice features.

45

General Software Discussion / Re: What's your preferred File Manager

« on: September 14, 2007, 03:27 AM »

I've voted Total Commander as I've used it everyday for the last few years... BUT... the current offer of a lifetime license on XYplorer was too good to resist. I've been watching the rapid development of XYplorer over the last 6 months and the regular releases with new features is superb, I've bought a license so I'm going to force myself to use it in preference of Total Commander and see how I get on

46

Best FTP Server / Re: ASRT: 5/7/05 - BEST FTP SERVER - POST SUGGESTIONS PLEASE!

« on: January 12, 2007, 08:26 AM »

Thanks Ken, I might check Raiden out, although zFTPServer is installed on my Vista machine right now, was easy to setup and is working nicely

Regards.

47

Best FTP Server / Re: ASRT: 5/7/05 - BEST FTP SERVER - POST SUGGESTIONS PLEASE!

« on: January 12, 2007, 05:52 AM »

Sorry to raise an old one here, but like Mouser I've been a registered BlackMoonFTPServer user for a few years, however this software hasn't been updated for a LONG time now and there are many more new products so it may be worth doing a new review of these products now? Even the forums at blackmoon are down and out

I'm running Vista these days and while most tools I've used for many years still work I'm a bit reluctant to install BlackMoonFTP - it needs to do this stupid online license file and if the forums are down and the product not updated then I feel like ditching this and trying something new that is updated regularly.

http://www.zftpserver.com/ - is getting rave reviews among the many I found over at snapfiles.com so I'm going to try this under Vista to see how it goes...

I'm interested to hear of any other FTP Server's that are updated regularly that run under Vista.

Regards.

48

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Hide current window / restore any hidden window

« on: December 21, 2006, 10:54 AM »

Hi, thanks for the suggestion I'll give that a try, looks like AutoHotKey could be useful for this, seems a popular tool.

49

Post New Requests Here / IDEA: Hide current window / restore any hidden window

« on: December 21, 2006, 09:05 AM »

Hi all (first post) longtime lurker - too long!

http://tinyurl.com/y9nh4e

Believe it or not WatchCat 2.0 even works under Windows Vista - I have been using this great tool for so many years now, just very unfortunate that the author stopped working on it, his site disappeared but there are still a few freeware sites like the one above still listing his great program.

I have a copy of it should anyone wish me to email to them for cloning these simple features

In a nutshell I use the Hide/Show windows functionality of this program like a "Boss key" - I have the key to the left of my "1" key set to HIDE my current window, so in the event of me using my web browser for my online banking I can quickly press this key to HIDE my Firefox window.

I've then got Alt + this same key (to the left of the "1" key, above TAB) will show a popup window down in my tray which lists all my visible windows and also my HIDDEN windows, I can then press the UP arrow key to quickly select my HIDDEN window from a list, press enter and it restores to my screen!

WatchCat does a billion other cool things with windows - maybe leave those for future enhancements!
Below are some screenshots of WatchCat so you can better understand how it looks, the only other thing this tool would need are the 2 options in the main options window you can see where you can tell it to always start with Windows and also to hide the WatchCat icon from the system tray so nobody else knows it is running on your machine - I've had this on my machine for probably 7 or 8 years now and nobody knows I have it.

You can see in the screenshots I've hit the Alt + hotkey to show my window list, it shows SnagIt as a window, but more importantly it shows I have this Firefox window and Notepad hidden (blue H icon denotes "hidden").

I have YET to find any other tool that can give me this simple hide/showing of windows with a couple of hotkeys...

Thanks!

Fedorov.