Messages

326

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: New FARR wiki: BookOnAStick

« on: February 27, 2012, 01:52 PM »

Damn i missed having the first reply.. but then you cheated me out of it!

-mouser (February 27, 2012, 01:35 PM)

I posted it in a hurry and a bit of a guilt trip this morning -- after all, I've had it in one piece for a week! -- and then it occurred to me that I ought to add a bit of extra info for people who might find it a bit odd/inexplicable/not-tiddly-ish or whatever...

I'm not about to modify the source, for obvious reasons, but I'll pass on things I've tested and found helpful once I've, er, tested them and found them helpful.

But I think BOAS is a wonderful piece of work and the speed it appears in FARR is a credit to you as well as Little Girl. The only thing I did here is played around a bit, did some testing, and made an icon!

327

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: New FARR wiki: BookOnAStick

« on: February 27, 2012, 01:34 PM »

A couple of other issues, while I think of it.

One of the more useful things in BOAS (in my view, anyway) is the diary. (Every writer is supposed to keep a journal, and that's a Good Thing to use.)

First, it's hidden under utilities. So put yourself a link somewhere -- in the menu, perhaps -- that looks like this:

[[Utility::Diary|Open Diary page]]

If you're VERY brave, you can edit the menu and add this to the top of the page:

<input class="menu_button_full" value="DIARY" onclick="go_to('Utility::Diary')" type="submit" />

(More info on this is in Help::Links) This adds a full-width button to the bottom of the menu.

Now: what that page does is allows you to create a page, named for today, in the Diary:: namespace.

Another useful link, if you want to be able to read back your diary entries, is [[Diary::]] which just produces a list of all the pages in that namespace -- in other words, all your diary entries.

You may also notice that the "help" button's gone a bit mad in the editing screen. I may have a fix for that, but I haven't tested it yet, so bear with me...

Of course, what BOAS is all about is a resource for helping you to write the bestselling novel you have lurking within you. There's lots of stuff geared towards that that I haven't touched on, mostly because a lot of it is already in there.

What I particularly like about this, though, is that it's nearly instant. I prefer how it works in Firefox, but it takes longer to load Firefox than just using the boas alias inside FARR.

I don't, by the way, claim any credit for any of this. Just evangelising... BOAS' author, Little Girl, has been extremely helpful and informative and I'm just passing bits and pieces on...

328

FARR Plugins and Aliases / New FARR wiki: BookOnAStick

« on: February 27, 2012, 02:11 AM »

There are two standalone wikis in the world that I'm very fond of: WikiOnAStick and BookOnAStick. The latter is based on the former: a bit like the relationship between the wikis already built into FARR.

With mouser's help, I've put together a package that you can use to add BOAS to FARR. (It can't be automated, sadly.) I will do something similar with WOAS, when time permits...

Note first, however, that BOAS' author uses Linux and Firefox. There are some issues with Internet Explorer, not least of which is the fact that the icons that BOAS uses (and the opening screen refers to) appear as text links. The pencil icon is the word "edit".

The next version of BOAS will be based on a version of WOAS that fixes most or all of these issues; a pre-release of WOAS that pretty much works is already available but BOAS' author is waiting until "pretty much" is removed from that phrase.

BOAS is licensed under v2 of the GPL. I've probably taken a few liberties repackaging it in this way but the original is untouched and all credits are contained therein. (It's self-modifying HTML so it's its own source code, if you see what I mean.)

This WILL be updated. However, I'd like to hear how others get on with it.

329

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: NoteFrog Pro (clipboard information manager) - Mini-Review

« on: February 23, 2012, 05:44 PM »

By the way, I am continuing ß-testing on NoteFrog as new updates (versions) come out.

-IainB (February 23, 2012, 03:03 PM)

Aha. Then you've noticed just how blasted irritating I'm being.

330

FARR Plugins and Aliases / New wiki

« on: February 17, 2012, 08:06 AM »

I'm currently playing with adding WikiOnAStick to FARR.

I've actually got everything to work without too much difficulty -- to the point where I'm wondering about maybe packaging it up for use by others. (For what it's worth, I think it's much easier to use than tiddlywiki and although it's not quite as pretty as the GTD wiki thing, it's much easier to work with, in my view.)

Two issues.

First, WOAS is, after a period of nothing happening, under development again. This means that if I try to come up with a distribution mechanism, I'm going to have to worry about preserving previous user data. (WOAS, as a standalone html file, can only be updated by opening the new version and importing data from the original file. I don't think I can automate it, although if I can work out a means of keeping the old version I can perhaps write a note on the front page of the new version to import the old data using the relevant bit of functionality...) This is starting to sound complicated already. Can someone give me a brief list of Things To Read and Things To Do to help me create this stuff? (I am, naturally, assuming that it's not going to be completely beyond my modest capabilities, of course!)

Second, I can't work out where to put the icon in my live version to make something that's not a C:\ in a box appear when I type WOAS. I'm using a butchered version of the alias that starts gwp, but nothing I've tried so far works. (Point 2a: does it have to be a 32x32 icon or will the program support other sizes if I add them?)

331

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR v2 - Official Bug Tracking and Feature Request Thread

« on: February 15, 2012, 04:11 PM »

Saw some very odd behaviour with the new version of FARR, but I'm not sure I can reproduce it again.

Basically, I was interfering with it quite a lot, looking for ways to make it faster and otherwise customise it. Decided, several months late, to watch the screencasts.

Excellent screencasts. 

So I got to the point of customising the fonts. I set the editbox and small fonts to Verdana (in 14 and 9 point) and the large font to Andre, 20.

Then I started playing with the line heights.

The small font lineheight controls went a tiny bit nuts. The result height box was the only one that was settable, and everywhere within the window to its left functioned as if I'd hit the left arrow, and everywhere to its right (including the slideline height control and the OK button!) functioned as if I'd hit the right arrow.

Aggravatingly, I can't now duplicate it, which probably means I did something else too.

Oh, I forced the thing into small mode before I started tweaking it, hang on... aha. That's the one. Force the results to the small font then open options and tweak the font settings. 

I've also had a play with the tiddlywiki and gtd wiki things. Both have infuriating aspects that are undoubtedly their fault rather than FARR's, but while playing I found myself in IE a couple of times, leading me to wonder if it's possible to make FARR use the default browser (at least for external links) rather than invoking IE...

...which leads onto another point, which is more a suggestion: there's another standalone wiki that I think is FAR(R) easier to use than tiddly: WikiOnAStick.

332

Post New Requests Here / Re: Thunderbird attachment processing

« on: February 14, 2012, 01:24 PM »

I think Attachment Extractor would cover your request

-tomos (February 14, 2012, 09:28 AM)

Certainly looks promising, at first glance. I'll try this and the FiltaQuilla solutions and see what works best -- thanks, both!

333

Post New Requests Here / Thunderbird attachment processing

« on: February 14, 2012, 05:30 AM »

A robot sends me emails, sometimes several times a day. The email always has an attachment (a textfile) that always has the same name, although the contents will vary (and, if everything works as it's supposed to, will never be the same twice.)

What I want to be able to do is find some means of saving those attachments into a single folder but with unique filenames.

I used to use The Bat, which could be persuaded to do something helpful in this regard. But now I use Thunderbird, so although I can make it give me a list of all the emails from the robot sender, I can't find a way to save off all those attachments in any way that's not extremely tedious.

I don't really care how they're named -- and as they're textfiles, I don't even care if they're all concatenated into a single output file. Just something I can search afterwards...

I suppose a good general purpose approach would be to name the files yyyymmddnnn.txt and maybe a hotkey trigger to paste the next filename in sequence into the "save as" editbox might be one possibility... wouldn't save all the hard work but would simplify things a lot. Better yet, though, would be the ability to take the date info from the currently selected email, but that might be asking rather a lot.

334

General Software Discussion / Re: Is WinZip still worth updating?

« on: February 10, 2012, 03:36 AM »

I always found 7zip reliable.  If you're looking for an alternative interface, be aware that PowerArchiver supports 7zip too:

-rjbull (February 09, 2012, 02:37 PM)

So it does.

I also "pressed the button." I have uninstalled Winzip (and took the opportunity to tell them why, when the "why oh why are you doing this dreadful thing" webpage opened ) and replaced it with my shiny new PowerArchiver -- which cost me about the same (thanks BDJ!) as the WinZip upgrade would have done.

I have yet to experiment with the commandline tool, but I'm pleased it's there. And the developers appear to be thinking seriously about portability, which is also important to me (my most important "computer" is a portable HD.)

335

General Software Discussion / Re: Is WinZip still worth updating?

« on: February 09, 2012, 04:12 AM »

I seem to have opened a can of worms... 

I'm always a little nervous about experimenting with too many archivers; my last serious experiment with Something New was a highly recommended freeware package called IZArc that, despite alleging Zip compatibility and all the rest of it, choked on an archive with several thousand files in it. Whatever I use, I want to be able to have complete trust in it...

The 7Zip engine seems reliable, although I dislike the interface. (It always seems to be more of a struggle to create archives than it should, somehow.) So I'll try jZip (in its "corporate with no extras" flavour) to see if it's a better interface to 7Zip than 7Zip's own, and there's a few others that probably deserve a look.

Does anyone know of a zipfile manager that can do something I've only ever found a straightforward way to do with ARJ -- archive all files from a folder that are more than x days old, preferably via a commandline version? (FreeArj is good but it doesn't look like it's ever going to be anything more than a nod to an archiver that used to be a lot more important than it's ever likely to be again...   )

336

General Software Discussion / Re: Is WinZip still worth updating?

« on: February 07, 2012, 11:06 AM »

I gratefully accept the opinion of, er, every contributor here that WinZip's not worth wasting more money on. 

337

General Software Discussion / Re: Is WinZip still worth updating?

« on: February 07, 2012, 05:38 AM »

People still use Winzip?

-Josh (February 07, 2012, 03:58 AM)

That's one answer I thought I might get. 

338

General Software Discussion / Is WinZip still worth updating?

« on: February 07, 2012, 03:56 AM »

I've had a paid license for WinZip since the Nico Mac days.

I've been getting more and more reluctant to stay current with it; I have the ability to create zipfiles with Directory Opus, my primary file manager, and if I want better than "normal" zip compression there's always 7zip...

But I still regard Winzip as the de facto standard, despite all this.

So now Winzip's on v16 and they want me to upgrade from my 15.5 license. They're trying to tempt me with a freebie WinZip Courier license.

I can't see a good reason to go for it. Apart from the fact that they seem to want me to keep paying for something I already have and the only important new functionality in recent years is effectively proprietary technology that only reduces my confidence that I can unzip a zipfile with pretty much anything including native Windows. The last couple of upgrades haven't given me anything new that I've cared about and I can't see that this one will either. I like the interface but rarely use it, because the shell integration is actually all I need about 80% of the time.

So... what does everyone think? Do I finally cut WinZip loose, on the assumption that the program's sailing off into the sunset pretty much regardless and it might as well do it without my investment? Or am I missing something that might be (or become) important if I don't upgrade again?

339

Screenshot Captor / Re: LATEST VERSION INFO THREAD - ScreenshotCaptor - v3.0 (!) - Feb 5, 2012

« on: February 06, 2012, 04:31 AM »

Aha. Oops. 

Thanks!

340

Screenshot Captor / Re: LATEST VERSION INFO THREAD - ScreenshotCaptor - v3.0 (!) - Feb 5, 2012

« on: February 06, 2012, 04:01 AM »

The current download doesn't seem to be renamable to .zip...

...well, that's nonsense, actually. I can rename it to screenshotcaptor.zip all I like, I just can't open it and extract its contents. 

341

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Revo Uninstaller Pro at Bits Du Jour

« on: January 28, 2012, 09:59 AM »

Last time I remember an uninstaller doing anything useful was early versions of Cleansweep... Looooong time ago

-iphigenie (January 28, 2012, 04:42 AM)

QuarterDeck. Now THERE was a company. (I tbhink I've still got an installation CD for CleanSweep, up in the attic. One day, it might be worth a few pennies. Or not.  )

342

General Software Discussion / The Bat! and why I've given up with it

« on: January 28, 2012, 09:56 AM »

Well, to be fair, I haven't quite given up on The Bat!, I've given up with its portable sibling, Voyager.

This is why.

I have a bad habit: I don't delete email that I might, conceivably, need again.

The Bat! allows this, on paper. I can create offline archives of mail, I can create rules and filters that let me handle automatically incoming email that I know I don't need to read but do need to keep, and I can do it in such a way that I don't have to store everything on mail servers that either have storage limits or might not be indefinitely reliable.

Add to this the fact that I've been moving more and more of my work into a portable environment, so I can carry a cheap portable HD with me rather than an expensive laptop.

The Bat! Home doesn't run portably. But upgrading to Pro allows the user to install Voyager, a portable version that encrypts the messagebases for security but otherwise works just like the normal version. So, some years back, that's what I did.

Every so often, I've fallen over bugs. Strange behaviours that I've reported to RitLabs, that they've investigated and, mostly, been unable to reproduce, and apparently unwilling to consider important.

For instance, creating virtual folders of unread mail items and moving emails from that environment to another folder in quantity often kills Voyager and corrupts messagebases.

Since the recent upgrade to version 5, for some reason my sent mail got picked up by a rule that had previously worked correctly and filed as incoming mail, and lost from the sent folders. So, a couple of weeks back, I decided I'd work through the rulesets and try to find out where the problem was but, before I did that, I'd search out my sent mail using Voyager's powerful search facilities and move everything it found to a single archive folder (in other words, in an account with no external links.)

It crashed.

Reloading Voyager showed that the several folders that had contained my sent mail were all empty. I ran maintenance. Maintenance claimed to have recovered several thousand messages and fixed the damage.

Guess what? It had done nothing of the sort.

Voyager also has the ability to run automatic backups. My most recent backup was only a couple of days old; I tried to restore the damaged folders from there.

That failed too.

RitLabs told me that my backups were not good enough, that if I want to be able to recover from these sorts of issue, I should keep better backups. Implication: their internal backup is not good enough.

There is no way, even knowing the encryption password, to recover mail using anything other than the installed copy of Voyager.

There are no guarantees that this won't happen again.

I've recovered what I can, exported it to mbox format and started using Thunderbird.

I've been recommending The Bat! for years, for anybody who wants something that can be made to jump through almost any hoops and who's prepared to get to grips with its complexities. I am no longer inclined to recommend it to anybody at all. 

As there are a few Batfans  around here, I thought I'd share...

343

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: NoteFrog Pro (clipboard information manager) - Mini-Review

« on: January 22, 2012, 04:05 PM »

Can work on something. Probably not for V2.0, but something like that is very possible.

-berry (January 22, 2012, 03:46 PM)

AllMyNotes exports as RTF (I think because its text defaults to richtext and it supports images) and delimits items with --- followed by some text specifying the route to the node in the tree that could be either ignored or imported along with the rest of the item, for simplicity.

On a sample of two, I'd say options of plaintext and richtext and a user-specified inter-note marker and you'd get rjbull's and my approval. Or, more to the point, you'd be able to offer a competitive upgrade route...

344

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: NoteFrog Pro (clipboard information manager) - Mini-Review

« on: January 21, 2012, 03:02 PM »

In the immortal words of Maxwell Smart, "Sorry about that".

-berry (January 21, 2012, 02:18 PM)

Forgiven.

Try downloading again?

Will do.

There is a raw text input capability under the "Stack" menu - "Import all text items from a directory.."

I think it would be better if you could import from a single file with some sort of delimiter to separate items. If I were to try to make individual text files for the stuff I've imported, it'd have been a longer process than an item at a time via the clipboard. (I shall assume that that would have worked, with the right version, a good deal more smoothly than it actually did!)

I suspect many junkpile-organiser-type programs would be able to squirt out their contents as a textfile with optionally some sort of separater between them -- although I can't say I've researched the subject, it just strikes me as sensible -- which would give you an import route at least for plaintext, as long as you could specify the delimiter...

I've also set up a forum for discussion http://notefrog.com/forum  - you will need to register, too much spam otherwise.

Registered. Not yet confirmed, but I'll do that next...

Your captcha is very hard even for real people.

345

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: NoteFrog Pro (clipboard information manager) - Mini-Review

« on: January 21, 2012, 11:32 AM »

And, unfortunately, there is no "calendar view" in V2.

-berry (January 20, 2012, 04:35 PM)

I don't even remember asking for that! Might be because I was looking for something more like ePIM than how my modus operandi has settled into now...

That said, future releases of V2 will introduce a searchable, free form tagging capability outside the note itself so you can have distinct tags that are not contained within the note. The capability is not in the base v2, but will be implemented in a future v2 release.

Now that IS something that will enhance the product.

Assuming your email address is the same as before, I'll send you a link to a beta download shortly. Based on results so far, it should be pretty close to a pre-release version.

Received with thanks.

Initial discoveries: the idiosyncratic interface that I remember from last try is almost gone, and (I'm afraid) I think that's probably all to the good. Good or bad, most people expect to find things that (interface-wise) behave like most other things, and I'm no different from anyone else in that if I can avoid reading tracts of documentation before making any use of a given program, then I will. The FAQ bit presents an I-beam rather than a pointer and still looks like the previous version, which probably needs a look. Also, there's a missing tooltip on the help, tools and utilities toolbar button.

I'm currently running it on my netbook, which is a (Win7Starter) 1024x600 screen. The above help toolbar button opens a window that will fit onscreen but starts in such a way that the bottom of the window is offscreen. If I move it up so I can see it all, it doesn't remember where I moved it to because next time I open it, I have to move it again.

More seriously, in an attempt to give it a quantity of data to chew on, I switched on automatic capture and spent a while copying data out of my AllMyNotes junkpile.

I don't like the popup "comunication (sic)" window that says what it's found, whether it's a dupe or not and that it's being added (or not.) It's intrusive, its options aren't obvious or even obviously necessary (Copy and clear -- I can see and understand what they do but where's the "Don't notify me again" checkbox?) and it's just not what I expected to happen.

At this point, I wanted to create a note inside of NF to store my notes about its behaviour. Insert item? Can't find it. Why not?

[Later] because it's only a toolbar icon. I can't right-click in the stack or pick an option off the Item menu, both of which were the things I expected to work.]

Then I started getting clipboard errors being reported by NF when I hit ^C in AMN.

Now I get more clipboard errors than not. "Unable to access Windows clipboard. Some program must have it locked." If I try again a few seconds later, it often works but this behaviour, once started, just gets more and more frequent. It doesn't make a difference if I'm running CHS or not -- which I thought might be the problem -- and the NF "reestablish clipboard chain" option doesn't help either, so it's not that sort of an issue. Background data handling running slower than it needs to given the number of incoming data items, maybe?

I saw the issue created by CHS too -- NF and CHS clearly can't comfortably coexist, which is a shame.


There's an issue with the search: I added something via the clipboard that included the term "NoteFrog" then switched to NF and searched for it (this was because I couldn't work out how to add an item inside of NF directly) and only got the "use it or lose it" default initial entry. It might well be because indexing hadn't caught up yet but I feel there should be some sort of suggestion that search results may not be accurate if the indexing process is currently busy...

I think I'd like some sort of import feature too. If only because migrating from another datastore an item at a time isn't pain-free...

...I bet you wish I hadn't got involved, now...

346

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: NoteFrog Pro (clipboard information manager) - Mini-Review

« on: January 20, 2012, 03:11 PM »

Only just found this thread, or I'd have stuck my oar in before...

I played with NoteFrog for a while some months back -- Berry might remember my TechSupportAlert email address -- and came, slightly regretfully, to the conclusion that it wasn't going to work for me in its current form and I gave up.

But I really wanted to like it.

So... @berry, if you remember the email exchange I had with you back in April last year, I'd be interested to know if you've moved NF in directions that might mean it works better for me. In particular, tag management in a way more like that used by CintaNotes and easier reminders...

I'm currently using AllMyNotes coupled with CHS for this sort of stuff but AMN's insistence on a tree structure is beginning to be problematic for me, and its programmers are clearly far more mouse-oriented than keyboard -- which is also less than ideal. NF's idiosyncracies a year ago finally persuaded me that it wasn't yet ready to take over the contents of my brain in a way that I could work with, but (and you may recall I offered this at the end of our last exchange) I'd be completely happy to play with beta versions if you want another tester. 

347

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Ashampoo Photo Commander 9: $9.99

« on: January 19, 2012, 04:33 AM »

^ well that's a judgement in itself

-tomos (January 19, 2012, 04:09 AM)

I expected it would be interpreted that way. 

Thing is, Xara (for vector work) is, and has been for many years, superb. Particularly the speed:functionality ratio is stunning. I want to get better with it, just because what can be done with it is quite breathtaking.

I'm usually a bit behind the curve with Xara, however. The pricing is normally beyond me so I pick up special offers on older versions and because it does stuff that (for me, anyway) is a bit less than mainstream, I keep it for cases of specific need but don't use it much.

The current thing brought a specific need (an awkward bit of photo manipulation that would have taken a very long time with a normal clone tool) and a special offer on pricing together and I bought into it. The "magic" extraction tool really is very good (even if I still have difficulty remembering how to get at it) and seems to match the capabilities of things I've only seen as very expensive Photoshop plugins.

The vector capabilities of Xara remain better than anything else I've ever used. It and a graphics tablet create the smoothest freehand lines I've ever been able to manage, without much (or sometimes any) need for post-editing of curves. But I CAN'T learn to like the interface.

I have Sagelight myself (and illustrator & Freehand for vector) so probably not going to be investing in Xara anyway...

I've never had the chance to play with Freehand. Well out of my budget range! 

348

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Ashampoo Photo Commander 9: $9.99

« on: January 19, 2012, 02:08 AM »

Xara started out as a vector programme, I wonder how advanced the photo aspect is...

-tomos (January 17, 2012, 03:30 PM)

They bury the photo manipulation stuff quite deep, considering the fact that "Photo" is the first word in the name after "Xara". My view on it so far -- given that I've had a copy for a while and still tend to defer to Sagelight and Serif first, for photo work -- is that it's still primarily vector-oriented and the interface is still too, er, Xara to make it a good tool for photo manipulation for non-Xara fans.

What I need to do, I guess, is force myself to use it for something, rather than take the line of least learning curve, and see if I get good results. I think I'm too lazy.

349

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Ashampoo Photo Commander 9: $9.99

« on: January 17, 2012, 02:05 AM »

I'm beginning to wonder about all these image editors.  There are so many of them now.  Maybe we need a DC review   

-rjbull (December 23, 2011, 03:26 PM)

Problem is, I think, different packages have different strengths.

I use Serif's PhotoPlus X4 (commercial, pretty decent and I get discounts having been a Serif customer for millennia) but have recently found that the colour manipulation facilities and algorithms in Sagelight beat anything else I've tried hands down. But for layer-based editing, it's still PhotoPlus.

But Xara's P&G7 has a really good tool for removing unwanted junk from photos. Mostly, though, it's a vector editor with a good pedigree and a community of enthusiasts -- and an interface I struggle to get my head around.

(I last tried Ashampoo's thing a couple of versions back and thought it average to poor. But my take on this stuff is always extremely subjective, so probably best not to ask me to do a proper comparitive. )

350

Screenshot Captor / Re: LATEST VERSION INFO THREAD - ScreenshotCaptor - 2.103.01 - Nov 13, 2011

« on: January 08, 2012, 05:12 AM »

Try my Webcam Video Diary for that:
https://www.donation...ideoDiary/index.html

-mouser (January 07, 2012, 12:39 PM)

Looks good, I'll try it -- thanks!

(And Happy New Year, by the way!)