Messages

2926

Living Room / Re: Keeping track of software license/serial keys

« on: April 06, 2006, 06:07 AM »

I'm hoping that once  the notes are exported, they can be processed somehow with a little bit of work to be imported into whatever the new program I have chosen.  Yeah, it's a pain

-superboyac (April 05, 2006, 09:55 AM)

As I have also said elsewhere, anyone who wants to be a Software Hero of the People should write a notetaking file conversion program    Something of the sort should be possible, no doubt with limitations.  The author of Jot+ Notes offers his registered users a free-standing tool to convert numerous other formats into Jot+ format.  Export to text file and re-import may be possible, but I suspect with a lot of work.

KeePass seems to me a good and useful tool, as long as you accept that it's narrowly-focussed.

2927

Best E-mail Client / Re: Pegasus Mail?

« on: April 05, 2006, 09:29 AM »

multiple accounts.

-pmowbray (April 05, 2006, 07:25 AM)

I've been using it for a mailing list, with only one e-mail address / user ID.  I found setting up extra ones impenetrably opaque.  The UK magazine Computer Shopper's recent review complained that PMail has "confusing" configurations.

Just set up The Bat! with the same single account, it remains to be seen if it's easier to set up multiple ones.  Multiple accounts seemed easy in the free version of Pimmy.

2928

Living Room / Re: Keeping track of software license/serial keys

« on: April 05, 2006, 09:23 AM »

superboyac,

I keep all my licenses in my notetaking program

-superboyac (March 19, 2006, 12:55 AM)

But as I have said elsewhere, the number of notetaking applications is approaching astronomical.  What are you going to do when your current favourite is superceded?  It probably won't be easy to convert from one format to another.

2929

Living Room / Re: Keeping track of software license/serial keys

« on: April 05, 2006, 09:15 AM »

One of the nice things about AnyPassword (which doesn't interfere with RoboForm as the free version isn't automatic) is that the fiedls have a single click to copy to the clipboard function.

-Carol Haynes (March 19, 2006, 06:41 AM)

CarolHaynes,

One of the nice things about KeePass is that it can enter the data without accidentally copying it to a clipboard enhancer, that is, it apparently understands at least some clipboard enhancers and circumvents them (at least, that's the effect).  I certainly don't see the data appearing in the free version of ClipCache.  On the other hand, KeePass is meant for storing just passwords/logon data, not registration information: and the avoid-the-clipboard trick is probably more important for day-to-day logons than rare and occasional (we hope) re-entering of program registration details.

I suppose one could use DS Software's PassPack, which just gives you an encrypted note, and store the emails.  It's tiny, free, and stores data in one small file, but it wouldn't have many convenience features.

2930

Living Room / Re: Keeping track of software license/serial keys

« on: April 05, 2006, 09:03 AM »

I used to palm notes. Now I keep all this stuff categorized as "serials" in gmail.

-vamp07 (April 04, 2006, 09:20 PM)

vamp07,

Take a look at this DC thread on Downloading your Gmail account, which points out that it's unsafe to rely too heavily on Gmail.

2931

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: GeminiSoft Pimmy

« on: April 05, 2006, 09:01 AM »

Thanks - that's a pretty complex strategy 

Erstwhil I use The Bat! to download/maintain the actual backup of my mail.

What put you off The Bat!?

I had used mailbag assistant in the past --

=== cut ===

it natively supports most formats.  (All but Opera, really).  I've since lost my registration, however, and don't have enough need for it right now to warrant the price.  Maybe with a 50% discount . . .

I was interested to see that the ForKeeps one can cope with CompuServe messages, which would be useful for me, whereas Mailbag Assistant doesn't claim to.  It's very expensive, though.  Hmmm...  maybe 50% discounts twice over... 

2932

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: GeminiSoft Pimmy

« on: April 05, 2006, 03:45 AM »

Allen,

Given your other DC thread on Downloading your Gmail account, what strategy are you using now?  Using Pimmy as you main email client, despite its slowing down with big message bases?

Have you looked at things like Fookes Software's Mailbag Assistant or the ForKeeps Message Archiver for long-term message storage?  (I haven't, just wondering)

2933

General Software Discussion / Re: Review of File Renamers — let's make a list

« on: April 04, 2006, 09:08 AM »

Virtually every corporation/company I've ever worked for severely restricts what users can see and do

-zridling (April 04, 2006, 05:05 AM)

Security is a common justification for paranoia, but in this case I don't think its strictly speaking a security (as in hack attack) issue.  The IT Dept. try to force us to use networked directories beause they claim to back those up, whereas they can't back up the directories on your local hard disk.  But they don't understand what real users need to do.

I don't understand what the TinyApps blog entry quote is trying to say with regard to file rename utilities.

I think he's trying to say, suppose you have a directory with a file called foo.bar in it, and you're about to copy it to another directory.  But, that directory already contains a different file with the same name, and you want to keep both of them intact.  The idea is to avoid conflicts or overwrites by renaming files on the fly, adding suffix numbers to the file names if source and target names are the same.  Rather a specialised trick.

any idea if there are other utilities exist other than 1-4a and Lupas Rename that can do what you say?

I haven't looked at many other renamers.  RenameFiles 2.42 at http://renamefiles.it-falke.com  can see my C: drive, though it's more basic than some mentioned so far (but available in German as well as English, for our small but honourable German contingent).  Many other sorts of programs work fine, such as the excellent DoubleKiller.  In both these cases you can just type in the path you want, and the program will go there.  This doesn't work with BRU, where nothing happens.

2934

General Software Discussion / Re: Review of File Renamers — let's make a list

« on: April 04, 2006, 03:40 AM »

Here's another interesting sideline from TinyApps blog

Question about drag & drop with auto incrementing of filenames #
Is there a method for dragging and dropping a list of files with the same name into a new folder and have them automatically increment the filenames rather than give an overwrite warning? Two instances where I've seen this work: when dragging files from a search result window into Nero (screenshot) and when dragging email messages from Outlook Express into Explorer. I'm not looking for a renamer to change the original filenames, but rather a way to create new files with incremented names. Answers sent to "mail AT tinyapps DOT org" will be appended to this post.

UPDATE: Jorg Kliemann has kindly crafted a solution.

Continuing, here's the solution:

DROP++ #
Jorg Kliemann has generously crafted DROP++ (source available here) using AutoIt (itself a mostly open source project) to address the drag & drop overwrite problem mentioned recently. Simply drag and drop a group of files from search results or any other Explorer window onto its icon; DROP++ will copy the files and autoincrement the resulting filenames. If you're tired of seeing "Confirm File Replace - This folder already contains a file named foo. Would you like to replace the existing file with this one?", give DROP++ a try. (By the way, holding Shift while clicking No to the above dialog behaves like "No to All", which is otherwise not provided.)

2935

General Software Discussion / Re: Review of File Renamers — let's make a list

« on: April 04, 2006, 03:32 AM »

Please let's not overlook drawbacks and problems.

The company I work for have gimmicked the networked computers so that many applications are unable to see the C: drive (IT Dept. trying to force you to use networked drives only).  This is true of both Bulk Rename Utility (BRU) and Oscar's, for example.  I e-mailed Jim Willsher, BRU's author, and he replied:

Yes, they will have implemented Group Policy to restrict access to the drive. My utility reads the Shell Namespace, which will honour the restrictions. Your other utilities will operate on the drive directly.

My "other" relevant utilities that do work are the multi-rename tool built into Total Commander (thank goodness), 1-4a and Lupas Rename.

2936

General Software Discussion / Re: Review of File Renamers — let's make a list

« on: April 03, 2006, 10:48 AM »

Command-line tool, Renamer, formerly BKRenamer: http://www.orbit.org/renamer/

Favourably mentioned in Mark TAW's smallwares, viz.:

a great regular expression, command-line no-install tool. BKRenamer is great when you have to do a change all the file names in several directories because it can search through subdirectories as well.

2937

General Software Discussion / Re: Review of File Renamers — let's make a list

« on: April 03, 2006, 05:56 AM »

Personally I think Command line commands is a must if you really want to automate anything with utilities like that

-patteo (April 01, 2006, 01:09 AM)

Don't overlook Horst Schaeffer's LMOD (click DOS/BATCH, then LMOD)

Quote from Horst's Web site:

LMOD extracts data from an input source (STDIN): from redirected DOS screen output, for example, or from any (ASCII) file. The extracted information is inserted into a given text or command string, and sent to STDOUT for redirection into a file.

You may extract a complete line, a part of it (starting column, size) or words (by number), even several items from a source line in any order. And this will be done either for a single line, or for a given range of lines of the input source.

What you can do with LMOD:

    * set environmental variables with information from (DOS) screen output
    * get keyboard input
    * generate a command using extracted input data
    * generate a list of commands for each item of a given (file) list
    * extract (and modify) range of lines from a file
    * modify lists or tables, arrange columns

To set a variable: generate a SET command (or WINSET / SETX), and execute it thru a temporary batch file. This method also works under Windows NT/2000.

Special Features:

    * change case for extracted data
    * tabs (to given column) for formatted output
    * right aligned fields (numeric data in tables)
    * insert CR+LF to generate several lines for each input line
    * omit CR+LF at end of output (to append later)
    * insert line number (to generate filenames, for example)
    * insert special characters by code number or in quoted string

Redirect a DIR listing and use LMOD for file renaming.

2938

General Software Discussion / Re: Software Cataloguing App?

« on: March 27, 2006, 07:55 AM »

CatDisk: I use Directory Opus, not Total Commander. I appreciate the tip, but that's a no-go for me

-moerl (March 27, 2006, 05:27 AM)

Sorry, I wasn't clear.  CatDisk is a free-standing program.  The TC plug-in is completely separate and unrelated.  CatDisk is probably the granddaddy of this kind of app with its long history on DOS before going to Windows.

Discomania... "Last updated Dec 29 1998 - Platform Win9x/NT". No thanks

"In a pinch, a stone ax still works..."    I've come across people who still like it, especially as it's free.

SOFTCAT. ...  I'll report back.

I eagerly await the mini-review 

2939

Living Room / Re: Planet Earth starts tonight

« on: March 27, 2006, 07:50 AM »

Have to say though I was a bit disappointed with the Lechuguilla footage.

-Carol Haynes (March 27, 2006, 05:31 AM)

I rather thought the same.  They kept telling you the formations were 6 metres long, but there wasn't really a sense of scale.  I've seen better-lit and more impressive still pictures of British caves.  Maybe the series is trying to do either too much, or too little: it certainly majors on eye candy, but I felt that David Attenborough's own earlier series were more informative.

2940

General Software Discussion / What Changed - search for modified files and Registry entries

« on: March 27, 2006, 07:44 AM »

What Changed

What Changed is a simple utility that searches for modified files and registry entries. It is useful for checking program installations. There are two steps for using What Changed: 1) First, take a snapshot of the state of the system   2) Second, run What Changed again to see the differences from the previous snapshot.

What Changed uses the "brute force method" to check files and the registry. Since it is a free tool, no support is provided. Also, as a quick and dirty utility, it might be in need of various user-friendly features, but hey, it's free.

found via TinyApps blog

2941

General Software Discussion / Re: Software Cataloguing App?

« on: March 27, 2006, 05:11 AM »

A disk cataloguing plug-in is available for users of Total Commander.

CatDisk  http://www.swconnection.com/index.html
Shareware
(I'm a registered user of the DOS version, but it's now 32-bit Windows)

Disk Explorer Professional  http://www.tjelinek....tion=d&setLng=EN
Free for personal use.  Looks very powerful.

Discomania  http://www.fortuneci.../jobbs/79/index.html
Freeware

Try asking in alt.comp.freeware for more?

2942

Living Room / Re: Planet Earth starts tonight

« on: March 27, 2006, 04:36 AM »

CarolHaynes,

I hope you were rivetted last night?  We've seen pictures of the "guano bats" before, but they had plenty of other things that I hadn't seen, like the Yucatan cenotes.

2943

Living Room / Re: Downloading your Gmail Account

« on: March 21, 2006, 09:14 AM »

The Bat! seems the favoured email client on DC, and I notice TheBat!'s Web site has a link for Lycos Mail.  Is that any kind of competitor for Gmail?  Or just mutual backscratching, as Lycos in turn recommend The Bat!?

2944

General Software Discussion / Re: Must-have apps in the System tray?

« on: March 21, 2006, 04:30 AM »

my no-frills tastes; I was perfectly happy with the look and feel of DesqView!

-longrun (March 20, 2006, 01:00 PM)

DOS+QEMM+NDOS/4DOS+DESQView was the most productive system I ever had...

2945

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Notes Snippet organizer

« on: March 21, 2006, 04:27 AM »

The biggest problem I've had with this program is rearranging the order of notes - It cannot be done.  I would like to rearrange notes by "drag & drop" & simply arranging alphabetically.  Can any of the other programs mentioned do this?

-skywalka (March 20, 2006, 07:10 PM)

Skywalka,

I've only looked at a few programs, but most of them allow note rearrangement.  Really, that's pretty fundamental.  Take a look at these two freewares to start with;

Treepad Lite
Keynote

Treepad comes in several more advanced payware versions as well as the freeware Lite version.  For more on this whole class of programs, look at this (very long) DonationCoder thread on notetaking software
https://www.donation...pic=2362.0;topicseen

2946

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« on: March 21, 2006, 04:08 AM »

Black Hole Organizer has had RTF for ages, and seems to have a good deal of "mind share."  It looks more like a database for text scraps than an outliner.

I'd like to try this out, but they have no trial version.  And to be honest, it doesn't look like it offers anything special.  But that's an empty statement because you really have to just get your hands on these things to know for sure.

-superboyac (March 20, 2006, 10:54 AM)

Last time I looked, trial versions were available:

BHO main page  http://www.lincolnbe...ch.com/blackhole.asp
Download link 1 http://www.lincolnbe...each.com/blkhole.exe
Download link 2 http://www.lincolnbe...ownloads/blkhole.exe

The look-and-feel seems slanted towards a text snippets database.  Organising functions are more limited.  My main disappointments are (a) not indexed (yet, anyway) so retrieval not very fast, and (b) search logic less powerful than I'd like, as I'm looking for something to deal with very large collections of text.  However, BHO has been around a long time and seems to have a lot of followers; here's a link to "Dr. File Finder's" review  http://www.drff.net/...views/drff02-50.html  (if you think that means anything).

2947

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« on: March 21, 2006, 03:56 AM »

for the forseeable future I will continue with Keynote. 

-kfitting (March 20, 2006, 09:05 AM)

I thought as much; there still isn't anything (that I know of) in the freeware world to touch it.

(Cost does factor in... I cant afford to spend $100 on this!) 

It's not just the cost to you, either.  If I want to share the data with other people, I need either a freeware, or a payware that includes a freely-distributable read-only version.

I'll have to figure out how to convert all my Keynote files over.

Anyone who wants to be a programming hero beloved of the people should start writing a conversion program 

PS - regarding your comment about this thread: I kind of agree with you, sifting through this is going to be hard for a newcomer.

I think I was hoping for a definitive answer, or at least a set of very clear recommendations, and there doesn't seem to be one.

Looks like someone needs to develop better software for forums too!

Hmmm...  aren't you a programmer? 

2948

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« on: March 21, 2006, 03:47 AM »

I've been thinking about this topic since the thread was stared and I think I know what I want, I just don't know what it looks like... so here it goes in words.

-Rover (March 20, 2006, 09:02 PM)

What you said sounds a lot like the sticky notes program Magic Notes

I suspect that's not really what you meant, but you might find Magic Notes  useful as a stopgap or adjunct to other things.  I seem to remember someone (kfitting?) saying they used Stickies (Zhornsoftware)  in a similar way.

2949

Finished Programs / Re: DONE: Eject!

« on: March 20, 2006, 08:27 AM »

eject the cd.tray when the tray icon is clicked, or something like that.
But there are numerous utilities out there to do that, i think.
(can Wizmo do it for you?)

-jgpaiva (March 20, 2006, 04:58 AM)

Yes, Wizmo can do that.

2950

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« on: March 20, 2006, 08:25 AM »

@rjbull:  Keynote revolutionized the way I work and organize things.  I totally understand that note-taking is slightly different from the writing end of things... but I dont think the two are mutally exclusive!

-kfitting (March 17, 2006, 07:22 AM)

It's just that the notes I might keep are not necessarily oven-ready for any particular use, they'll generally have to be "massaged," in which case not having them in the same application seems to matter less.  If they were all more or less ready to go, then I wonder if a single-pane ECCO-type outliner might be better.

for the type of writing I do, Keynote 1.6.5 is fine.  For notetaking, Keynote was fine, until I saw Opera's email approach.

What are you using at present?  I'm thinking that even abandoned, and lacking features some people want, Keynote is still the most highly-developed freeware of its kind, and able to compete with quite a few paywares.  It didn't quite float my boat, but I might have persevered if it had had Boolean search.