Messages

101

Living Room / Re: PocketPC or Palm?

« on: October 14, 2007, 04:39 AM »

I used Palm for years but I switched to Windows Mobile when offered one by my phone provider as a free upgrade with an extremely useful 3G monthly data offer.   I thought it would play better with my data/gtd system - at least I could easily read .txt files on the memory card, which was surprisingly awkward to do on the palm. I also wanted to finally integrate phone and handheld - my old Sony Clie was not a phone. 

I like it but it is slower than palm.  And somewhat buggier.  But all in all the difference has not been as great as I thought -  the experience is much the same, including the annoyances.  However, many of the available equivalent third-party programs are much more sophisticated on windows mobile than on palm, which I like. 

Stephen Fry (of all people) writes about smartphones here.  And here's a (somewhat old) Palm v. Pocket PC FAQ.

102

General Software Discussion / Re: Have any web-based applications replaced desktop apps for you?

« on: October 13, 2007, 04:45 PM »

I use logmein too.  And I have a gmail account but I back up my gmail into thunderbird.

The supposed advantage of web-based apps is the freedom to move around, but in my travels (Europe mainly) getting regular decent internet access is not something to take for granted.  And it's not as if I would have access to other computers either, without having to pay for them, so since I need my own laptop I might as well have offline apps.

On an extended trip abroad this year (14 weeks) my laptop screen suddenly failed.  I got my smaller laptop from home to use instead - and the hard drive failed after two weeks.  All this time the internet access was spotty.  I pay for internet access in hotels and apart-hotels very often and about 30% of the time the service is problematic.

On my new Dell laptop I use as many portable applications as possible, and although I run them from the C drive (or Q in my case - my data partition) I back them up daily onto usb sticks.  With so much that I can't control or predict, this gives me the most freedom and flexibility for my situation.

103

General Software Discussion / Re: Appaholic - Another nice freeware review page

« on: October 06, 2007, 05:01 PM »

Screen shot... PUKE! Old Win2K screen shots look like crap.

-Renegade (September 18, 2007, 10:30 AM)

Oh, I feel rather embarrassed suddenly.  That could have been a screenshot from my machine.  I always hated the soft-look WinXP icons, so I've been using "Windows Classic Style" for years. 

You've got me interested in skins and styling now....

104

Living Room / Re: how do you represent 'time' in your head?

« on: September 29, 2007, 06:05 AM »

I liked that story too!

People represent time in very different ways, according to NLP practitioners, who find it useful to know how an individual's timeline is constructed.  More information in facsimile here (access to 25 page a day).

105

Living Room / Software download sites - scrapers and non-scrapers

« on: August 07, 2007, 01:12 PM »

Inspired by some comments in the thread  Article: Please don't steal this Web content:

It can be a pretty discouraging situation to be in when someone steals your content like this. It really doesn't do much for encouraging the victim to keep working hard and producing new content.

And I have some mixed feelings about software download sites that do this. On the one hand, they are promoting my software.

On the other, they are copying partial content from my web pages, leaving out important information or presenting it in a way that makes no sense. This is unfair and can make me and my applications look bad.

Most of the time it is for applications I don't have PAD files for. If I had wanted these applications to be included on software sites, I would have created PAD files for them and submitted it, myself.

-app103 (August 04, 2007, 03:40 AM)

Is there a thread somewhere on this site on the good, average and less good software sites, based on how they treat the authors, link back (or not), nick copy without asking (or not)? I'd be curious.

-iphigenie (August 06, 2007, 05:14 AM)

Whenever I googled for software I got very fed up of pages of results from these scraping sites.  They all include the same short descriptions of the software, with no reviews or discussion or comparison, and sometimes no links to the software home pages.  I got so fed up that a couple of weeks ago I created a custom google search which exclude these sites.  I can modify it any time by "including" sites (which are then emphasized in the search results) or by adding more excluded sites.  It works very well for me.

Here are my excluded sites so far:

   download3000.com
   topshareware.com
   softsia.com
   cleansofts.com
   softlandmark.com
   shareme.com
   bestfreewaredownload.com
   safesite.com
   freewarepub.org
   hotlib.com
   freesoft411.com
   freeware-guide.com
   bluesofts.com
   freeware-market.com
   softslist.com
   dirfile.com
   brothersoft.com
   filebuzz.com
   softplatz.com
   redsofts.com

106

JGPaiva's GridMove and Ahk Tools / Re: GridMove - grids here

« on: July 28, 2007, 12:37 PM »

And here are links to other grids in the original feature request thread. 

DoublewideEdged
unnamed for Martin T
Spyda
singx7
3-part reversed
edge vertical split
axcrusik_s
nud super 01 (second version)
An Efficient Desktop

107

JGPaiva's GridMove and Ahk Tools / Re: GridMove - grids here

« on: July 28, 2007, 12:35 PM »

OK, here's the three arrangements with the main section to the left, and then a shot of the triggers.

108

JGPaiva's GridMove and Ahk Tools / GridMove: Grids Here

« on: July 28, 2007, 12:04 PM »

There seems to be no particular place to post grids, so I decided to start a thread.  We can always post links here to older posts with grids attached.

Anyway, here's a grid I wrote for myself (my screen resolution is 1680 x 1050).  It supplies a main full-height area, to the left or right, with choices for the remainder of the space - either one tall space, two shorter stacked spaces or three very short stacked spaces. 

I use it when when I am working in one window but keeping an eye on one or more others.

I labeled the numbers to creae a "guided tour"; if you follow them in sequence you can see how the triggers relate to the grid shapes (from larger windows to smallest).

109

DC Member Programs and Projects / Re: The right software?

« on: July 27, 2007, 05:28 PM »

Here's a helpful list called "45 best freeware design programs"; it includes some for working with photographs.

110

General Software Discussion / Re: How to work with (display, format, restructure) big amount of structured dat

« on: July 16, 2007, 08:53 AM »

Had you thought of using a wiki?  There are so many indexing and categorising possibilities with the sophisticated ones (MediaWiki, obviously, but also PMWiki for example) that jumping around should be easy.  And I believe with most of them you can insert pages, which dynamically update when they are edited, into other pages (like master pages).

By zoom, do you mean visually until text is unreadable, like with a pdf file?  I don't know how you could get that view of a collection of pages on a wiki or with html but with html you can zoom in and out of tables very easily in a browser.  Also, you can click around pages with indexes and categories and use inserted pages to make very long pages with automatic indexes and stuff like that.

I thought of a wiki because it is organised on the fly and yet links are easy and maintain themselves automatically, and categories are easy to change and add.  Most of them have good search engines too.

111

General Software Discussion / Re: What's a good memorization software?

« on: May 05, 2007, 06:17 AM »

Anyway, what a long day, I wasted all Friday checking out memory software, great.  That's going to impress the ladies.

-superboyac (May 05, 2007, 12:51 AM)

LOL

Yes, supermemo is crazy.  Sometimes when I'm searching the endless FAQ-style help pages to work out how to do something I actually feel embarrassed -  as if someone were watching me and having a laugh.  But the program somehow still works for me. 

I am going to keep my eye on FullRecall though. 

112

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Power/sound/screensaver options back to normal - remind or automate

« on: May 03, 2007, 04:16 AM »

Thanks for the suggestions.  My laptop sometimes doesn't play happily with hibernation but I'd forgotten about forcing standby, which could work ... except for how to remember to put my laptop onto standby every time I leave it for a while.  That's just the kind of memory habit I have problems with.

Idlemute is useful; "Force mute or umnute on startup" will help me.  Something that forces the power/screen/screensaver options on startup would be useful. 

But I'm getting an idea how to do this .... rather than have a program running all the time to detect when the settings are changed, I could add shorctuts to the settings onto a special launcher alongside a simple text popup reminder program.  Then I just have to train myself to go to the launcher instead of changing the settings directly, and I can quickly set myself a reminder to change them back.  I'll look at LBC for this....

113

Post New Requests Here / IDEA: Power/sound/screensaver options back to normal - remind or automate

« on: May 01, 2007, 06:42 AM »

So you're watching a film on your laptop and you set your monitor/power/screen saver options so nothing kicks in to disturb it.  But then you forget to change the settings back again before you go to bed.  The next day you go to work and your monitor stays on and your screen saver doesn't start...

Or you mute your system sound because your partner is sleeping, and the next day you don't hear anyone paging you on IM ...

What would really help me is a script which detects when I fiddle with power/sound/screen saver options and then automates changing back to my default options (perhaps overkill) or simply automates pop-up reminders for me to do it (perhaps better - more flexible).

Either way, if when it detected any change it popped up and gave me a choice to "ignore pop-up and keep new settings", "ask me again/revert settings in x hours", or "ask me/revert settings on next startup", then I'd feel safe changing my settings but not too nagged.

I looked at the scheduling hibernation thread and at a couple of other power management scripts but what I'm not finding is a script being triggered by changing these kind of settings (including individual system sounds etc).  Makes me wonder if I'm missing something obvious. You know, when x runs, run y.  ...?

114

General Software Discussion / Re: What's a good memorization software?

« on: April 24, 2007, 10:53 AM »

I've used supermemo on and off for years - you score your own answers (from I can answer that in my sleep! through yes, I got that right by the skin of my teeth to not a clue!) and it calculates optimal repetition schedules.  It can work amazingly well.  You can also use it to slowly devour difficult texts, extracting and repeating hard bits etc (called incremental reading).   It is extremely flexible, if perhaps over-complcated.  There are plentiful but horrendously organised help files.  If you only want to create some flash cards it would be overkill to get the newest version ($45) , but older versions are offered cheaper or free, so it's worth trying out.

I first came across it when looking for ways of storing information: it automatically extracts a register of words and contents and can be useful as a quick-search repositry for reference material.  I don't use it for that though. I am currently learning German vocab with it, and Firefox keyboard shortcuts, and the occasional piece of personal information that I keep forgetting. 

115

Living Room / Re: OK - lets get to know each other... who are you, what do you do, where from?

« on: April 23, 2007, 06:55 PM »

So, since there was a invitation in the newsletter to post to this thread ......

I'm Gez, an opera singer.   English by birth, Irish by blood. Based in England (Greater London now) but posting from Berlin, where I am staying for 14 weeks, singing two productions in a row.  My singing career is going well but I've decided to move into directing operas during the next 10 years.  I love singing but I have the most fun using my brain, and directors do that all day (or at least they can if they choose to).

I got into computers rather late, despite Sinclair Spectrum experiences as a child, but I'm known in my business as a bit of a geek.  I made my own website and am capable of basic but useful troubleshooting when colleagues have computer woes.  I write the odd little AHK or Notetab Pro script (slowly and painfully).  I have AD(H)D, and since realising this (and starting medication) I've stopped obsessively surfing for tools to do my organising for me.  Now, instead, I am trying to organise myself .... but I still enjoy searching for tools to help me.