Messages

6576

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: personal library of books database

« on: February 27, 2009, 06:26 PM »

You could get some good lookups from the aNobii (related to the Latin word for bookworm) site here:
            http://www.anobii.co...nobi/anobii_home.php

Is a great site for bookworms.

6577

Living Room / Re: Cool animated history of the Internet short film

« on: January 31, 2009, 03:21 AM »

Well Paul, I never laid claim to any originality of thought in what I wrote in my post here. All sheep tend to think the same.
I just thought I'd mention what I did. Sorry, it won't happen again, I promise.

I must admit that I got bored with reading the comments under the post of that animation anyway, and there's doubtful knowledge to be gained in such discussions, since opinions tend to prevail. So, I  went off to see what Wikipedia said on the matter and posted the URL on this site. There was a good point made about Compuserve too, in the comments. I don't think the Wikipedia item mentioned IBM's SNA. I recall that EDS used to have a superb overview of the WWW/Intranet

By the way, I listened online to telekaster's "pyramid", and captured it with Audacity. Getting the right volume threshold for that music is a bit tricky though - I am still learning to use Audacity.

6578

Living Room / Re: Cool animated history of the Internet short film

« on: January 30, 2009, 07:51 AM »

An interesting animation, but it is so elementary and superficial as to be potentially grossly misleading. As it skips along the timeline, it omits mention of great chunks of historical fact, giving the  impression that those missed events might never have happened. In at least one case, I suspect that it may even be wrong, where it refers to the invention of the layered protocol by the OSI or something. From memory, I think IBM's SNA (Systems Network Architecture) was the invention - of a 7 or so-layer protocol.

The graphics are good, and the music is very good. I followed the link to the music site for telekaster (http://www.pjtv.com/...page&page-id=102).

This animation could be compared to someone with minimal knowledge starting a topic on Wikipedia. It will take a while for people with knowledge to update the thing and flesh it out, except that will never happen with an animated film - so it will be forever wrong.

By the way, the Wikipedia history of the intranet is here:
http://en.wikipedia....#Before_the_Internet

6579

Post New Requests Here / Re: Anyone want to take a Gander on this Goose? (Google Notebook Alternative)

« on: January 27, 2009, 05:23 AM »

Well, as one of the "early adopters" of Google's Notebook, I was sorry to see that it was about to be discontinued. Hats off to Google for the idea of Notebook, but, though Google had seemed to keep adding new/improved features, I always found the thing a bit kludgy - and it had a poor response time. My use of Notebook therefore faded away, and finally went to nothing after I started using Scrapbook to save my precious stuff to my laptop's hard drive - I often want access to my stuff offline.

The suggested online alternatives to Notebook might be all well and good, but because I often want access to my stuff offline, Scrapbook is just right for me.

6580

Living Room / Re: Thumb trackball wanted

« on: January 01, 2009, 05:43 PM »

I've just got back from a trip to Thailand. In Panthip Plaza (a well-known computer hardware and software shopping centre) in Bangkok they had all manner of mice for sale, including just about every version of trackball and thumb-ball mice I had ever seen - and some I had not seen before.

FWIW, in about 1990-something I used to have a thumb-ball mouse that came with a 286-driven (I think it was that) Toshiba laptop (LCD screen). It clipped onto the RHS of the keyboard. Worked quite well, once you got used to it. This predated the central finger-sticks and touchpads.

6581

Coding Snacks / Re: Idea for a MP3 (and maybe other formats too) silence remover.

« on: December 07, 2008, 06:59 AM »

I'm not sure, but I think you may find some freeware that does this already:
e.g., mp3DirectCut, MP3RepairTool.

6582

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Simple line by line truncator

« on: November 23, 2008, 04:50 AM »

That's interesting. I recall coming across something being able to do this years ago in a text editor built-in to a proggy that I used (in DOS). I think it may have been in Lotus Magellan or 4DOS. I remember thinking at the time "I wonder who could make use of this?" (I couldn't). You selected the text as a block, using the cursor and mouse keys, copied it, and the copy just excluded everything outside the block. It left embedded spaces intact, if they were included in the block.

Update 2009/07/01:
I have just found that you have this same feature in MS Word.
Refer "The 10 most useful Word shortcuts" http://blogs.techrep....com/10things/?p=475
- esp. see point #10 (Alt+Drag vertically)

6583

Post New Requests Here / IDEA: Create a modern version of Lotus Agenda

« on: November 22, 2008, 11:32 PM »

Reading the post about deviantopian's To-Do Tree (I didn't try it, but it looked nifty) made me think of something else.
What started me thinking was the screenshot with that "sidewise tree" hierarchy view - it was redolent of the Lotus Agenda "Category" tree, and made me realise (again) that when someone has an idea they will generally be surprised to find that it has already been invented.   

Lotus Agenda (currently available as DOS freeware from IBM) - now THAT would be an application worth emulating by Donation Coder. It was a super-sophisticated free-form PIM + text database, that just happened to be useful for To-Do lists, amidst lots of other things.   

Anyone in Donation Coder up to the challenge of recreating Lotus Agenda? (Don't say "Chandler" - that's nowhere near like it, and never will be, given the rate and direction it is proceeding in.)

I reckon that if you can come up with a find-and-run like FARR (which, imho is nothing short of a brilliant piece of work), then you might have the capability to do a leapfrog over Lotus Agenda and bring it to Windows if you so wanted. What to use? XML, or SQL, or maybe...hmmm - so many choices! If you do decide to take up the challenge, then please feel free to use me as a ß tester. I used to be a Lotus Agenda uber-power user, so was familiar with most of its features, constraints and limitations.

6584

Living Room / Re: Paperless office - software scans photos and extracts text as a database search

« on: October 02, 2008, 05:47 PM »

That was the one - Evernote.
Many thanks, Grorgy.

6585

Living Room / Paperless office - software scans photos and extracts text as a database search

« on: October 02, 2008, 07:46 AM »

Question for the foum(s):
What is the software that automatically scans photos and extracts text on the fly as a database search? The images don't need to be scanned and OCRd.

I read about this when browsing, sometime within the last month or so, and, maddeningly, I cannot find any trace of it now - in bookmarks or scrapbook, and it does nor show in my Google Desktop search. The idea of this software was that you could get rid of paper after taking photos of it - anything, such as receipts, documents, whiteboards, for example - and the text was identified with some new OCR-like technology.

At the time, I didn't think I could use it. Now I think I could.

Has anyone seen or read about this software? I have a feeling it was freeware to individuals. (Thanks.)

6586

Living Room / Re: Should I Stay Or Should I Go -- A Social Networking Dilemma

« on: September 28, 2008, 12:55 AM »

I would agree with the comments above regarding "One ring to rule them all" (i.e., one "Social Network" site or your own website provides a base reference for the others). This is exactly what I ended up doing quite a while back. now. Some years back, I started using RealContacts and then LinkedIn, because they were relevant to business (not social) networking.

The thing is, social networks take time, are of questionable use, and maintaining your profile and persona on them uses up your cognitive surplus. I therefore did not follow all the invitations of friends/acquaintances to join Plaxo, Where-are-you-now, Facebook, etc. I recently joined Facebook (after it had sorted its gaffs in data security out) and set up a personal profile there, which linked to my professional profile on LinkedIn.

I later joined Plaxo, leaving my profile empty except for links to my  personal profile on Facebook and my professional profile on LinkedIn.
This seems to work for me, but it still takes time and cognitive surplus to maintain these things - tasks which I did not "have to do" before.

6587

General Software Discussion / Re: Do you keep two computers synchronized? i.e. work + home. If so, how?

« on: September 17, 2008, 05:40 PM »

Thanks for the interesting thread. I tend to use Microsft's FolderShare to link to whatever files I need across my PCs, because it meets my 4 main criteria for use:

1. Good functionality (i.e., it does what it should).
2. Good price (i.e., FREEware or, at worst, reasonably-priced shareware).
3. Self-contained and independent (i.e., no forced dependencies on other, unnecessary or proprietary products).
4. Stability (i.e., it works, and has no annoying bugs - ß products are OK though).

I had not heard of DropBox or Live Mesh (mentioned in the comments above, so I went to the home pages for these two to run through the intros.

Result: I am going to try out DropBox.

WARNING! --- Start of rant ---
I went to Live Mesh first and clicked on "Take a tour", only to have a pop-up tell me that I had to "Install Microsoft Silverlight for a better experience on this site". Yeah right. Criterion #4 just fell over and I hadn't even got anywhere near the software I was interested in. Strike one. What beats me about this is why anyone in their right mind would force a dependency on an unnecessary product in order to communicate their sales benefits pitch. Experience shows demonstrably that, to be successful, marketing communications must operate at the lowest common denominator. They will never know how many people they just turned away by that single simple act alone.
On top of that the "Silverlight" pop-up wanted to access some new site - "agappdom.net" - that would not own up to who/what it was, so I became suspicious of it.
Live Mesh can get lost for all I care.
---End of rant ---

6588

Older Newsletters / Re: --> Newsletter For September 11th, 2008 - Codename "Mapping the Members"

« on: September 13, 2008, 02:37 AM »

This would not be the same as knowing "which members are located where", but I use ClustrMaps (http://clustrmaps.com/) on the blogs I maintain. It gives a useful and anonymous picture of where in the world the people accessing the blog are located. I guess you could use it on members'-only pages to show anonymously where in the world members are accessing the pages from.

I have a distaste for any organisation or person holding much identification of individuals and the details about them, so ClustrMaps is quite a good compromise - because it is anonymous.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Mini-review of 1-hour software by Skrommel: CAPshift v1.7 and ShiftOff v1.2

« on: August 24, 2008, 08:24 AM »

Thanks. The TechRepublic article you pointed to seems comprehensive on remapkey.exe.

6590

General Software Discussion / Mini-review of 1-hour software by Skrommel: CAPshift v1.7 and ShiftOff v1.2

« on: August 24, 2008, 03:22 AM »

Thought you might be interested by a sort of review posted here:
Tip - dispatching the CapsLock gremlin with Microsoft's remapkey.exe http://tips4laptopus...ck-gremlin-with.html

It refers to the Microsoft remapkey.exe utility.
Both CAPshift v1.7 and ShiftOff v1.2 are regarded as being useful, but redundant if you use remapkey.exe.