Messages

2651

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« on: November 24, 2011, 09:46 PM »

My addition to 'Do It' Professional Trades Guide
    Satanists do it for the hell of it.

2652

Living Room / Re: Shoehorning Cody into a QR code.

« on: November 20, 2011, 09:30 PM »

I tried some things today to get a higher-res image of Cody in the QR matrix. I must have done something different, I was able to get something with almost twice the resolution. This one still is a rich text in a QR and I used the save function to export the decoded text, so I don't know if you can view Cody by copying the decoded text into the viewing program. Let us know if you can extract and view this, I know I can using the same programs as before. The text file is attached below as before, QRcode won't load *.rtf files, so I load rich text in a text file.

2653

Living Room / Re: Shoehorning Cody into a QR code.

« on: November 20, 2011, 01:18 AM »

Yes, you have to save the decoded text to a file and then open that in WordPad or Jarte. Copying the text directly into the program doesn't work. If you are having trouble getting the block to decode properly, it may be a camera problem. The camera may have difficulty capturing the code completely(it's a very big, very complex block). You may have to click on the image to expand it(the small image is a thumbnail), and then right-click on that(if you have a Windows browser, I presume non-IE browsers can do this also) and save the picture(or copy it to a picture-manipulation program, save it from there) and then scan that. I don't know if it can be copied directly into the decoding program and scanned successfully. The whole thing is a kludge because QR wasn't set up to do this as I said at the beginning and this project pushes the boundries of QR. Would anyone like to try encoding the text file in some other system to see if that works better. I doubt any other system could encode Cody directly.

2654

Living Room / Shoehorning Cody into a QR code.

« on: November 20, 2011, 12:41 AM »

QR codes are designed to store text or URLs, not pictures. So it was in a spirit of adventure that I tried to get a very small lo-res Cody into a very big QR.  I had to reduce the size of an already-small-to-start-with Cody to get him to fit in a 1,852 character space. I copied that into WordPad, then Notepad, ran that through Touch Up Soft's QRcode v2.10 to get the block below. I was able to recover the file using the same program, but not using either of my other QR decoding programs or Google's ZXing. I was able to view the resulting file using WordPad or Jarte, but not with LibreOffice. I have attached the text file I used if anyone wants to try encoding it with a different program. It will be interesting to see if anyone has an interest in this project. I copied the matrix from here and also saved it and was able to extract and view Cody on my computer from what is here.

2655

Living Room / Re: Moving up to ESET NOD32 v5

« on: November 16, 2011, 10:16 AM »

I got bitten once by a trojan called "Privacy Danger". Took me a couple of days on another computer to get what I needed to get rid of it. Could I really feel safe with a free program like MSE after that?

2656

Living Room / Moving up to ESET NOD32 v5

« on: November 14, 2011, 10:20 AM »

My virus signature subscription for my current antivirus NOD32 v4.0.424 expires this week; so I have been researching alternatives because if I am going to change AV, now is the time to do it. What I have seems to be at or near the top of the heap in the contentious AV business. About the only change I expect to make is to move from NOD32 v4 to v5. The PCMag review says it is low on malware blocking, but I use Sandboxie to handle that. Both reviews say NOD32 is good at scanning potential programs. I use MalwareBytes also for that. Does anyone have any better reviews to suggest than the ones below?


ESET NOD32 Antivirus 5 Review & Rating  PCMag.com

ESET Smart Security 5 - CNET

2657

Living Room / Re: Wow: Google insider explains why Big G may lose the Internet wars

« on: October 18, 2011, 11:23 PM »

I found these articles on the subject. What opinions do you people have on them:

But today I click on my newsfeed and see tumbleweed blowing through the barren, blank page. It’s a vast and empty wasteland, full of people who signed up but never actually stuck around to figure out how things worked in this new part of town. One simple click takes me back to Facebook, and my wall is flooded with updates and pictures from 400+ friends. This just isn’t a contest, and it never will be. 

A Eulogy for Google Plus

Chiming in with a different social network

2658

Living Room / Re: Wow: Google insider explains why Big G may lose the Internet wars

« on: October 15, 2011, 09:40 PM »

Maybe Google doesn't have to be that innovative. Maybe all that you need is "everything that the other service has +1" is enough. Maybe innovation can be bought. Microsoft products are certainly very well-stuffed cornicopias and seem to satisfy users who use only a quarter of what's available. Linux programs may only do one thing each, but people seem to keep adding to what's available. How many people here have G+ accounts? If the service give people a bigger sandbox to do what they want to do and fix mistakes in while having the potential to attract all their friends and audience, people will flock to it. Is there anything that G+ lacks that the common blogger and forum user wants?  I don't think so. G+ is the newest toy on the market, it should attract new users just because of that. Google has said they will shut down Buzz, if G+ works out and gets enough audience, they may move the Blogger people over to there. What does Blogger offer that G+ doesn't?(I presume that Blogger is a cloud service, not on the operator's own hardware and that it is a Google product) I believe they have said that the Lab was shut down so that they could concentrate on making what they were already doing successes, if that happens they should restart the Lab. They seem to be quite friendly to innovation, I can see no reason why they wouldn't do that.

2659

Living Room / Re: Smart Response Technology and partitioning

« on: October 15, 2011, 08:50 PM »

I presume that you want to seperate your internet files from the main Windows partition. If you keep your other partitions only for backups of those files, there shouldn't be a problem. I presume you don't want to do that because of the space of duplicated files. Even if that is so, you probably still want a seperate partition for your original Windows install files and your other software install files.

2660

Living Room / Beware of YouTubeDownloader 3!

« on: July 18, 2011, 10:12 PM »

I have been using YouTubeDownloader to get local copies of YouTube videos. I have been using v 2.7.2. Last night I checked, downloaded v 3.2 and installed it. It didn't use Orbit Downloader to download the test video and downloaded slowly, I put it down to a congested Internet connection. I tried again this morning, still slow. I checked the BienneSoft website, saw the Pro version there, read about it and found out that it does have download acceleration(but only 4x, I believe my Orbit uses 8 threads). It has a multi-download function, the license is $19.95 and doesn't expire. Do they really need to remove download acceleration to get  people to buy the Pro version? After complaining and using the uninstall, I wasn't able to reinstall the 2.7.2 version. I got a message saying "You can't install an older version."  I didn't take that lying down. I set a restore point before installing v3.2, so I used it and after Windows was finished re-booting, I was able to re-install v 2.7.2. I then found a v3.0 download and after sandboxing Windows Explorer using Sandboxie I tried installing v 3.0. I got the same message, so I dumped the sandbox. V 2.7.2 still worked fine and used Orbit. This is my warning:
Don't update to YouTubeDownloader v3.* unless you want to pay for the Pro vesion.

2661

Living Room / Update for Windows XP (KB2541763)

« on: June 29, 2011, 10:30 AM »

This morning my computer was frozen while rebooting after the latest Windows Update. I had to manually shut down and reboot it. Has anyone else had a problem with this update? The descripion of the update is: A update that enables Internet Explorer in Windows XP, in Windows Vista, or in Windows Server 2008 to parse fragmented TLS/SSL handshake messages is available.

2662

Living Room / Re: Show us the View Outside Your Window

« on: June 14, 2011, 01:51 PM »

Ughhh, my mom works out in Lichfield Park (about 15 miles west of here, not far at all!) and both Qwest and Cox refuse to run lines from the north side of the road (newly populated over the last couple of years with housing) to the south side (ranch she works at) so she went from AOL (ughhhh ) to HughesNet, against my IMMENSE amount of criticism of them, their crappy service, and insane pricing scheme (instead of my recommendation of a 3G dongle with a cell service provider). She complains all the time.

</topic de-railing>

-wreckedcarzz (June 14, 2011, 01:07 PM)

Steven complains about HughesNet also. He said he can send email only sporadically and is always getting disconnected.

2663

Living Room / Re: Show us the View Outside Your Window

« on: June 14, 2011, 01:14 PM »

This is the result of my trial of Adobe Photoshop. It's a view of the road up to here(or very long driveway) and the valley below. It's not as big as the original 17 megabyte panaorama because I only have 1 gigabyte of RAM(300 megabytes free). Photoshop said I didn't have enough RAM for a Content-aware fill of the edges of the original panorama. That panorama looked much worse than I remembered it in Photoshop. This cut-down version of the original will have to do.

2664

Living Room / Re: Show us the View Outside Your Window

« on: June 14, 2011, 01:02 PM »

I'm on the Members map. I think that would tell you more than anything I could say.

-Arizona Hot (June 14, 2011, 12:47 PM)

Jeez, you're way out there O_O


I'm glad that there is a internet provider which enables me to have a broadband connection here. Otherwise, I would have to use HughesNet like my brother Steven.

-wreckedcarzz (June 14, 2011, 12:48 PM)

2665

Living Room / Re: Show us the View Outside Your Window

« on: June 14, 2011, 12:59 PM »

That's right. The clock says 11:36 PM! I guess that's why they call it the Land of the Midnight Sun

-Deozaan (June 14, 2011, 03:02 AM)

Yes, and in the winter it's the Land of the Noon Stars.

2666

Living Room / Re: Show us the View Outside Your Window

« on: June 14, 2011, 12:47 PM »

I'm on the Members map. I think that would tell you more than anything I could say.

2667

Living Room / It's A Small World lyric translations

« on: June 06, 2011, 01:06 AM »

"It's A Small World" is a Disney boat ride where you listen to animatronic children dolls singing the title song in various languages. There are translations of the lyrics at two sites:  It's A Small World After All lyrics and International Lyrics Playground. Since we have members who speak these languages natively, I thought they might enjoy looking at the translations and let us know what they think of them. Wikipedia has an article here on the subject. Here are Asian girls singing the song.

2668

Living Room / Anybody seen many pictures with sound?

« on: May 30, 2011, 01:27 AM »

I have a HP 525 camera which can take still pictures with an embedded sound recording. Nice idea, but aside from HP Photosmart software and the SoundPix Plug-in, there doesn't seem to be much of anything which does something with it or can use it. Also, the SoundPix plugin only works with Internet Explorer(is there something like this for other browsers?). I know other manufacturer's cameras offer this also(it uses EXIF 2.2). Has anyone seen much that uses this or is this something like animated gifs, unused mostly in favor of something more elaborate?

2669

Living Room / Re: Show us the View Outside Your Window

« on: May 25, 2011, 05:29 PM »

I don't think you want to see my view. This IS Arizona!

If you think this panorama is BIG, you should see the picture from which it was reduced to fit in the size limit here. That picture is 17 megabytes in size(17068 x 3883).
 (see attachment in previous post)

-Arizona Hot (May 23, 2011, 06:17 PM)

Is there any way you can get rid of that huge black border around it? That makes it take up a lot more space than is necessary.

-Deozaan (May 23, 2011, 07:28 PM)

Maybe, but I would have to use a different editing program to do that. It was easier than I thought and I was able to use the original program. Still a very big picture.

2670

Living Room / Re: Show us the View Outside Your Window

« on: May 23, 2011, 06:17 PM »

I don't think you want to see my view. This IS Arizona!

If you think this panorama is BIG, you should see the picture from which it was reduced to fit in the size limit here. That picture is 17 megabytes in size(17068 x 3883).

2671

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Micro-mini Review of Lipsum text generator

« on: May 04, 2011, 06:56 PM »

I got into this recently when trying to get the LibreOffice extension to work(I couldn't). I found the original Latin text of  "De finibus bonorum et malorum " by Cicero" (all 5 sections). I prefer the Latin text to lipsum's gibberish. I found a few other things also. I know there is a Wikipedia article, but it is longer and this is a Quick Reply.

2672

Living Room / Re: DC T-Shirts idea.

« on: January 23, 2011, 11:19 PM »

2housetier
Hm, it looks like semacode is not very popular. There are many applications (online / desktop / mobile) which can read QR but I can't find anything valuable for semacode*. Two or three midlets but nothing for desktop. The only online reader is "facebook app". I don't have F. account so I don't even know what such term means

*) This might not be completely true. You can find generators at least.

-fenixproductions (January 08, 2009, 08:01 PM)

Really, I was able to find only 2(the one by P2 Labs described here is a 3rd one), which QR code readers for PCs have you found? The QuickMark one requires you to register with an ID and password and you have to give an email address for verification. They produce this QR code for DonationCoder:



These are the ones I found:

Free QR Code Reader & Generator Software for Windows

QuickMark Mobile Barcode - QuickMark for PC

2673

General Software Discussion / Re: remove objects from photos

« on: January 05, 2011, 12:32 PM »

Cyberdiva:

I used Inpaint. There is a download link to get it in another thread. Look for it. I was able to get a better version of the apples by zooming in much more, shrinking the red brush to 5 and making multiple inpaint passes.  But, it still looks bad (see below), the beefsteak looks ok and the carrots might be acceptable. As in Renegade's example and my test using Inpaint, you can get good results removing objects from the main body of pictures(see pictures below). Kalo's pictures just don't give good results many times. Forget about the beer and other such pictures.

2674

General Software Discussion / Re: remove objects from photos

« on: January 04, 2011, 10:26 PM »

My test of using Inpaint on Kalo's images(second image below) was a disaster. I don't know what the problem was. Maybe there wasn't enough background.  I got the best results using Microsoft Paint and a background-colored brush. Given the previous example, Photoshop's content-aware fill might do better. But given the result below, I am doubtful. I did try using Inpaint to duplicate Renegade's results. (I got a screenshot of the first image) The results below aren't quite as good as Renegade's, but close in my opinion. So, I think that even Photoshop couldn't remove the items from those pictures.

2675

General Software Discussion / Re: remove objects from photos

« on: January 03, 2011, 04:22 PM »

Has anyone already found a way for Kalos to get the  pictures they want? If so, I won't try to produce them using Inpaint.