Topics

1

General Software Discussion / looking for a simple windows app to track time

« on: May 21, 2019, 04:55 AM »

I'm looking for a simple time tracker for windows. All I'm asking for is something to let me know how much time I spent in a software I'll specify (it will be Trados translation software). By looking at that figure I'll be able to assess how badly I procrastinated during the day.

I checked a few time tracker applications, but most are really huge behemoths, some weighing 60+ MB for an installer. They are titanic-scale tools when all I need is a small rubber boat. I don't want to issue invoices. I don't want to use it as a team. I don't want to print reports for the past 5 years... All I want is to see how many hours I spent on Trados since I woke up in the morning.

I even thought about programming something in autohotkey but couldn't think of an algorithm to do so.

Have you seen any such tiny and crude time tracker?

2

Site/Forum Features / topic notification system is ignoring the ignored user list when sending e-mails

« on: June 16, 2017, 10:35 AM »

I guess the subject is self-explanatory.

3

Site/Forum Features / Discussion of ignore feature

« on: May 12, 2017, 04:32 AM »

Wut?

4

Living Room / better battery life out of a laptop

« on: July 10, 2016, 03:11 AM »

I have this huge laptop with a smallish battery and a not-so-mobile cpu. Therefore I get 2-3 hours of use on a single charge. So I'm trying to be creative with increasing battery life with it.

Of course I did all the usual stuff. The screen brightness is as low as I can use. Power settings are very very conservative.

I thought of replacing the hard drive with an SSD, which would consume a tad less power, but apparently the chipset does not like SSDs, so that wouldn't work.

I'm a translator, so my workload is not heavy on the cpu, but every minute or so, the segment I translate gets written to the disk. So the disk never gets to go to sleep; it's always on.

Then, another idea hit me. What if I made a large ramdrive, and worked on that, letting the disk sleep meanwhile, and at the end of the day, copy the ramdrive back to the disk.

Do you think that would help reducing the power consumption significantly? Would it be worth the bother? Or would I be spending 3 hours to configure a system to a much less reliable state, just to get 5 minutes more battery life?

5

Living Room / 50% discount for a programming game

« on: March 02, 2016, 03:10 PM »

The audience here may be interested in this. I got it and even though I'm not a hardcore programmer, already got much more than $2 worth of fun.

6

Living Room / 23rd Century here we come

« on: March 23, 2015, 12:26 AM »

Apparently plasma torpedo is invented.

Looking forward to McCoy's miracle curing device.

7

Living Room / Donating to EFF

« on: January 08, 2015, 09:24 AM »

Recently, I got some good business, and earned more than my usual fare. OK I thought, a good time to donate here and there. One of the donations I made was 5 (five, the one with Lincoln) dollars to EFF (Electronic Frontier Thingie). And today I got a (transatlantic) letter from them, thanking me for my generosity (since when 5 bucks is called generous?). Anyway... The stamp on the letter cost $1.15. Think of the time and effort spent to send the letter as well...

I'm not sure I'll donate to EFF anymore. It's kind of them to send a dead tree thank you letter, but really... for 5 bucks, I feel like it's really wasteful.

btw, before anyone asks; I didn't ask for a letter for tax purposes.

8

General Software Discussion / memory use and reason

« on: September 16, 2013, 09:49 AM »

Skype taking 160 MB of memory?

What the f is NSA running on my computer?

9

Living Room / Discount on subscriptions to Nature

« on: July 12, 2013, 08:10 AM »

Nature offers huge discounts on subscriptions as a promotion.

Me likey.

10

Living Room / Protests in Istanbul

« on: May 31, 2013, 04:49 PM »

Well, I know politics per se is not in the focus of DC, but tomorrow morning I'll be at Taksim square in Istanbul, joining the protests against the increasingly authoritarian government. If any DC members are around (and is willing to get a sniff of pepper spray from the police) I'd be glad to meet them there. My phone number is +90-541-3770399.

Çağrı

11

Living Room / Google Reader gone

« on: March 14, 2013, 08:23 AM »

Google Reader's gone the way of dodo.

Google willfully axed functionality (sharing etc.) from Reader to boost google+, a product no one demanded, and now it's axing Reader completely on the grounds of falling usage.

Way to go Google. You really inspire confidence in all your users.

Any desktop RSS aggregator recommendations? I certainly will not invest time and effort in another cloud junk. Experience, after all, is learning a lot of things you shouldn't do again.

12

N.A.N.Y. 2013 / N.A.N.Y. 2013 text-writing improvement idea

« on: February 04, 2013, 04:37 AM »

I have an idea to improve text-writing, but I am unable to implement it, if it has to be done properly. I can fix a crude version of it in autohotkey, in a day maybe, but it wouldn't be worth using. So if anyone finds it useful and can work it out, here it is:

I sometimes use specific words more frequently than I like. It would be a nice and very unique feature if I could implement a check for repetitive words in typing. For instance, a beep or display a pop-up (at user's option of course) if any word (other than those in a whitelist. we don't want to make the computer beep every time we write "the", "I", "a", "in", "that", "and" etc. You get the idea.) is typed twice in the list of last n words (let the user define the variable n).

In a nutshell, it is basically to remind me I repeat some words too much. Basically, it serves to help me produce better texts. Basically, it would warn me against writing "basically" three times (four technically) in only so much words.

I believe I can use some form of array to store a fixed number of words typed (separated by spaces, quotation marks, punctuation etc.), and check every new word against those in the array, and make a beep if a match is found. But the whitelisting function and the user defined number of last words to be checked are beyond me.

Even a further refinement would be to provide an option to query a thesaurus and offer replacements. But I am not sure that would be wise to provide such a tool to college freshmen writing essays.

Anyway, if you like the idea, it's yours now.

13

General Software Discussion / switch black and white in tiff files

« on: January 23, 2013, 02:22 AM »

I'm looking for a simple software to switch colors in b&w tiff files. There are hundreds of pages of documents scanned weirdly, with the background in black, and the text in white. I need to print them, but the black background would make me bleed ink.

So if only I can find an utility to make blacks white, and whites black... In batches preferably.

Any ideas?

14

General Software Discussion / European Parliament Votes to Reject ACTA

« on: July 04, 2012, 08:38 AM »

Europeans are on a row these days. Yesterday the ECJ ruling to overrule the limitations software producers impose in licenses, and now this:

The European Parliament decided to reject ACTA once and for all.

Some institutions of Europeans are surprisingly responsive to the public. Even I (a citizen of Turkey, not EU) called a member of the European Parliament, told him that I was calling from Turkey, and I had objections against ACTA. I asked him to reject the treaty, and he said he would consider it.

I don't think I could have such a civil and respectful conversation with any Turkish MP. I would receive an angry rebuke at best.

Anyway, this is good.

ed.: grammar fix

15

DC Member Programs and Projects / simple (crude even) alarm clock

« on: May 31, 2012, 04:42 AM »

I wrote this one to discipline my work hours and increase my productivity. It's a very very crude alarm clock that you control with the Scroll Lock key.

Press the scroll lock key once and it asks you when should the alarm bell ring. Enter desired time in the HHmm format (i.e. 1830 for 6:30 p.m.) and don't turn off the computer.

The program is very crude, and it does not check the validity of the time you entered. So don't set the alarm to 18301 or to minnesota. Nothing serious should happen. It just wouldn't ring.

To change the alarm time or disable the alarm, press scroll lock again and read the instructions (two short lines, really).

Anyway, the source code is in the archive. There is also the compiled exe. Place alarm.wav in the same folder with the exe, and just run the exe.

Let me know if you like it.

16

General Software Discussion / looking for a replacement for miranda

« on: March 10, 2012, 10:00 AM »

I use miranda to cater my MSN and GoogleTalk needs. But I must have been getting old, for day by day, the gazillions of options miranda offers look more of annoyances, rather than amusing capabilities and potential. Add on top the new version notifications received each week, and you have a not so happy user.

I know I can turn off new version notifications, but what if there comes an important security bug fix? I wouldn't want to miss it. But instead, the software annoys me each week about a trivial fix regarding gadu gadu, or something with emoticons in ICQ or so.

Anyway, lately miranda began to interfere with alt-tab functioning on my windows. Perhaps it is fixable with some kind of option hidden deep down somewhere. But I no longer have the energy to try.

So I'm shopping for a miranda replacement.

I just want two things:
1. basic googletalk and msn support (no video chat, no file transfer, just plain and simple 15 years old functionality, though I won't refuse a quality software just because it offers a couple of extra features)
2. a lightweight gui

lack of mirandesque maze of options would be a plus.

What would you recommend?

17

DC Website Help and Extras / attack of uggs

« on: December 06, 2011, 11:59 AM »

About the recent spammer activity... I was thinking... A good idea would be to make new members wait for 12 hours or so before allowing them to post new topics. Replies would be allowed though. Just an idea. Don't know how that can be done.

edited for grammar.

18

Mini-Reviews by Members / Captcha Brotherhood

« on: August 18, 2011, 09:48 AM »

App name	Captcha Brotherhood
App url	http://ocrhood.gazcad.com/default.aspx
App version reviewed	Beta v1.1.5
Test system specs	Run of the mill XP box
Supported OS	Windows with Jdownloader
Support methods	forum, email
Upgrade policy	N/A
Pricing scheme	What pricing? This program exists so as to avoid paying money

Intro

There was a time when web was populated only by human beings (and spiders). Then came bots of every kind. Web site owners invented captcha to verify that the visitor of their site was a human being, and not a spammer bot. Then captcha began to be abusive and tiresome for humans. Especially with the advent of file sharing sites. You had two options to download a multi-part file from the likes of rapidshare: You either sat alongside your computer for long hours, or paid up to become a member. Then humans responded with download managers like JDownloader. However captchas stood as a barrier against long download nights. Captcha brotherhood appeared as a solution.

Now you run captcha brotherhood whenever you are available before your computer. You answer captcha checks received by others in the brotherhood. You collect points for your correct answers. And then those points are used for your downloads whenever you are not available for captcha monkeyhood. Some other person available thousands of kilometers away will do the work for you then.

Who is this app designed for:

Script kiddies, habitual downloaders, anyone who is fed up with or does not want to pay to download sites.

The Good

Works as advertised. The new autominimize option makes it less distracting. You can also transfer the points you have collected to friends.

The Bad

Distracting banner. Too frequent updates. Gets confused if you install it to a non-standard location. This software is in the grey area of legally accepted conduct, but so are the file sharing sites that require captchas.

Conclusion

Do not pirate software. Pay if you ever come across something called a not-shitty hollywood movie these days. But if you don't want to for any reason, this program may serve your needs.

19

General Software Discussion / What is Mozilla trying to do?

« on: June 23, 2011, 06:31 AM »

I waited for a while to jump on the bandwagon of Firefox 4, to give some time to add-on authors to adapt to the version change. When I finally made the jump on June 1st, one of the add-ons I use (linkification) was still not updated to work with FF4. I know this is about the developer of the add-on, rather than Mozilla, but the version change did certainly not help.

Now they bumped the version number to 5. Four more add-ons I use will be out of service with this update. Is it worth the change one wonders.

If I preferred to use a browser that changed the major version number every quarter just like Chrome does, I would use Chrome. Wouldn't I?

Why is Mozilla adopting this weird scheme of development, do you have any idea?

I don't need a fresh add-on compatibility nightmare every three months, so I'll not upgrade. Will you?

20

General Software Discussion / Looking for a linkification tool

« on: April 13, 2011, 07:41 AM »

Here is my problem:

I need to paste tons and tons of URLs into html files, and make them links as well.

In other words, I have addresses like this:

[Select]

http://url1
http://url2
http://url3

and so on...

I need to make them look like this:

[Select]

<a href="http://url1">http://url1</a><br>
<a href="http://url2">http://url2</a><br>
<a href="http://url3">http://url3</a><br>

Can you think of a solution? I currently use a combination of excel and notepad, but I feel there must be a better way.

21

General Software Discussion / A niche script need

« on: January 13, 2011, 05:21 AM »

I need a greasemonkey script (or firefox add-on) to remove link trackers from links. Let me tell it with an example:

The link is provided on the page as follows:
http://www.rapidshar...ction-Signs.rar.html

I need it to be:
http://hotfile.com/d...ction-Signs.rar.html

There are numerous tracker sites, so the script I am looking for should be able to handle more than one site, not just the one in the example.

Have you seen any such script?

22

General Software Discussion / how to make a list of fonts you have

« on: September 18, 2010, 05:26 PM »

I have more than 10K fonts on my computer. Naturally, I can't install them all at once. That would bring windows to its knees.

I need to make a list of these fonts. A list of filenames won't do, since most of them have irrelevant file names. For instance 00195934.ttf may be "Times New Roman". Hence "dir *.ttf /b>list.txt" is not an option.

Font viewer utilities show the names of individual fonts, but I can't find one that can list all fonts in a given folder.

Have any one of you come across such a utility?

23

General Software Discussion / Wanted: Free and simple cutting optimizer tool.

« on: November 07, 2009, 07:05 AM »

I have big plates of wood, and I have to cut them in predefined sizes and shapes. I am looking for a software to tell me how to cut them so as to minimize the waste.

Also I need my father (aged 70) to be able to use it, so nothing too technical would be a better choice.

I tried a few like cutlist, but most have clumsy interfaces, and some have their fair share of bugs.

Cheers,
E.

--
Indecision is the key to flexibility. [Brian Schottlander]