Topics

1

Screenshot Captor / Screenshot Captor in Switzerland

« on: March 23, 2015, 10:10 PM »

Screenshot Captor was featured on Libellules today. This is a French language software blog in Switzerland.  I visit it regularly and often find software I haven't seen on other sites. One of the comments also made a reference to LaunchBar Commander. Chrome browser seems to do a good job of translating the site.

2

Living Room / "Cool" Möbius

« on: July 12, 2013, 08:20 AM »

"Cool" superconducting magnet on a Möbius strip.

3

Living Room / What else does Mouser do?

« on: July 11, 2013, 09:39 AM »

Found this in my email this morning and thought, "Man, that guy is into all kinds of stuff!"



Then saw it was from Mouser Electronics

4

General Software Discussion / Excel graphics?

« on: July 01, 2013, 06:23 PM »

Seems like there's a better way, but it works for him.

Painting with Excel.

5

Living Room / Periodic Videos by Brady Haran

« on: June 24, 2013, 08:55 PM »

For the last few months I've been watching and enjoying a lot of educational YouTube videos produced by the Australian independent film-maker and video journalist, Brady Haran. These are short videos about computers, mathematics, physics, chemistry, language, philosophy, and other topics.

It appears Brady has moved to the University of Nottingham in the UK, and many of his videos are produced with the assistance of faculty from that institution.

Perhaps many of the regular visitors and contributors to DonationCoder are familiar with these videos, but I don't see any references to them in the forums and thought they might be of interest.

Computerphile         
Numberphile      
Sixty Symbols
Periodic Table of Videos
Deep Sky
Test Tube
Backstage Science
Words of the World   
BibleDex
My Favourite Scientist      
Foodskey
PhilosophyFile
PsyFile

More about Brady here: http://periodicvideo...are-my-channels.html and here:  http://bradyharan.com/

6

Living Room / Peer Review and the Scientific Process

« on: April 14, 2013, 03:11 PM »

Over the last couple of weeks I've been watching a lot of YouTube videos on science and mathematics-related subjects. Most of these have been made by Australian-born video journalist and film-maker Brady Haran - many in conjunction with scientists and mathematicians at the University of Nottingham.

Brady Haran

This morning I watched one of the videos on his Test Tube web site.

The video is about a breakthrough in the field of "atomic switches" by physicist Phil Moriarity and his team, but what I found interesting and important was Professor Moriarity's discussion about the absolute requirement for peer review in the scientific process.  This discussion starts at about the 8:43 point in the video.

I work in an industry where opposition groups bring forth so-called "research" or "evidence" that has not undergone this peer review process, and don't seem to understand why our whole scientific process depends on it.

7

Living Room / CyberNetNews - Still alive?

« on: January 04, 2013, 07:53 AM »

Visiting CyberNetNews has been a part of my morning routine for quite a while, but it appears the site went static a couple of weeks ago, and I don't see any links in their "Sponsors" section. Has the site died? 

8

General Software Discussion / CyberNet News shout out to skwire

« on: September 28, 2011, 09:04 AM »

This morning, CyberNet News has a shout out to DC's "skwire" for his Text 2 Folders app.

9

General Software Discussion / Retracing DonationCoder's footsteps

« on: August 16, 2011, 12:48 AM »

I am, for the most part, what you might call a lurker on this forum. I'm not a developer, but enjoy looking for, testing, and playing with software of all types. When I enter this forum I just about always scan Page #1 and maybe click back to Page #2.  Tonight I decided to go all the way back to Page 146 and to an entry by Mouser on May 13, 2005. 

Wow! From there it was like taking a walk through a really cool museum. Discussions about the new Thunderbird email client; Mouser posting an entry about a new tool/toy called Google Earth; GrafxShop; konfabulator, thinbasic; Qumana; and on and on.

Found a link to a French language software blog that my version of Chromium now easily translates - led me to a file manager I'm going to try called  Multi Commander.

It's pretty amazing how things have changed in just 6 years!  Try taking a stroll down the DonationCoder memory lane sometime.

10

Found Deals and Discounts / O&O Software freebees

« on: March 02, 2010, 05:52 PM »

Does anyone know much about the O&O Software products?  There's a defragger, uneraser, file eraser, and cache manager.

Over at CyberNet News they have links to free licenses. I think most of the licenses are for older versions, but it appears you may be able to use them for discounted upgrades. I'm not familiar with their products.

11

General Software Discussion / WinPatrol Plus - 99 Cents today

« on: January 29, 2010, 10:49 AM »

BillP Studios is offering WinPatrol Plus  today for only 99 Cents.

It was featured on Lifehacker today, so his site is getting hit pretty hard, but I was able to get it after a few tries.

12

General Software Discussion / Best Screen Capture Tool

« on: April 17, 2009, 02:42 PM »

Lifehacker has a Hive Five Call for Contenders for Screen Capture Tools. I see several votes for Screenshot Captor among the comments.

13

General Software Discussion / Postbox - a new Mozilla-based email client

« on: February 11, 2009, 12:14 PM »

Gonna give it a test drive.

http://www.postbox-inc.com/

14

General Software Discussion / Authenticated proxy issue with Google Earth

« on: February 02, 2009, 01:35 PM »

The Google Earth 5.0 Beta is out, but downloading requires using the Google Updater which doesn't support authenticated proxy servers (which we have here at my workplace). For many months now I've gotten this message:

"As you've discovered, due to certain security changes in Microsoft Windows, Google Updater 2.0 isn't able to support proxy servers that require authentication. We understand that some users would like this functionality, and we've added it to our list of requested features. User feedback is very important to us. We're working on a variety of improvements, so please stay tuned."

Does anyone know if there is there a way to get this file without going through Google Updater? Is it a big issue for them to support authenticated proxies? I'm not familiar enough with it to know.

15

General Software Discussion / Photology - Photo collection filtering

« on: November 25, 2008, 09:44 AM »

I recently downloaded and am testing Photology, a free download that indexes your photo collection and then lets you find photos by applying filters like faces, sky, color, location, orientation, and time of day.

It doesn't get everything right, but not bad.

The initial indexing takes a while because it not only indexes the file names and locations, but it must do some sort of analysis of the images so it can apply the filters. You tell it which folders to index, and then it watches those folders for new images and adds them to the index.

The program used to be offered for sale, but earlier this month it was made available for free (donations accepted).

16

Found Deals and Discounts / GemX Crazy Summer Specials

« on: June 20, 2008, 10:23 AM »

For anyone who still has an interest in GemX products, they're having a pretty big summer sale. Good through July 20, 2008.

$59 for the FULL do-Organizer (usually $162)
$25 for TexNotesPro (usually $50)
$10 each for all of their other applications

http://www.gemx.com/

17

General Software Discussion / FARR in PC World's "Tips and Reviews"

« on: June 18, 2008, 08:37 AM »

FARR was highlighted today in the "Product Tips and Reviews" newsletter I get from PC World, with this link to their download page.

http://www.pcworld.c...on.html?tk=nl_ptxdwn

Nice writeup by reviewer Laura Blackwell with a plug for "DonationCoder".   

18

General Software Discussion / How much email do you keep…and why?

« on: February 01, 2008, 01:46 PM »

Over the last several weeks I’ve noticed several threads like these:

https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=11286.0

https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=7563.0

https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=7813.0

talking about email searching and archiving. I must admit to being stunned to see the magnitude of the email stores being discussed – tens of thousands of emails, multi-GB size mailboxes, archives and .pst files, email histories of 10 years or more, etc.

Perhaps it’s a stereotype of engineers (I’m a Chemical Engineer) that we can be packrats who don’t like to throw anything away that we think we might use again, but I guess I must be an anomaly.

Partly because of document retention policies where I work (email Inboxes and Sent Items folders are purged every week of any email older than 60 days, and mailbox sizes are limited to 200 MB), my Inbox is pretty lean. Right now my workplace Inbox has about 25 items and my total mailbox (all folders) is about 80 MB including attachments. My home mailbox is similar – I probably have about 15-20 messages in my Inbox with fewer than 50 messages in other folders.

My wife, on the other hand, has messages from last summer reminding us to send bathing suits with our girls for their Girl Scout swim party!

So I’m a little curious to hear why people keep all the email they do, how frequently they actually search or otherwise access archived email, and how they decide what to keep. For those that may have business reasons for keeping email, do they ever have concerns that they’ve kept too much (i.e., stuff that would turn up during a “discovery” process in litigation?)

I must admit that I do cut-and-paste bits of information into Evernote or into Copernic-searchable files, but email for me is a pretty transient thing.

19

General Software Discussion / Spicebird

« on: January 19, 2008, 09:28 PM »

Has anyone been following the development of Spicebird?  www.spicebird.com

I downloaded and am trying out the 0.4 Beta. It's got email, calendaring, task lists, and instant messaging. It's built on top of Mozilla Thunderbird, Sunbird and xmpp4moz.

From the website, here's the development roadmap.

Spicebird Roadmap

Spicebird 0.4

Integration of email, calendaring and instant messaging into one suite
Home screen
Application related applets
Tasks as a separate application

Spicebird 0.7

Code cleanup and remove temporary code
Basic email tabs
Calendar theme cleanup
Fix card view
Restore and test lost features (import/export dialogs? calender prefs, etc.)
Blogs as Email (Thunderbird addon/Spicebird built-in)
Post to blogs just as you send mails to your friends!
See comments as replies to your mail
Event filter should detect more patterns and allow context based operations on matched within the mail.
Instant Messaging
UI improvements to make is as easy as typical IM application
Store IM conversations
Home screen applet for buddy list
Card view improvements
Formatting options instead of just keyboard shortcuts
Better chat window
Move accounts configuration to accounts wizard
Support account types using gateways
Get license issues resolved
Better message alerts

Spicebird 1.0

Integration with a CMS (Drupal)
Document management
More views for calendar and tasks
Microsoft Exchange connector
Multiple backends for tasks management
Partial project management features
A more meaningful address book
Last conversation/chat with a contact
Source of contact

Later

Social networking inside address book

20

Found Deals and Discounts / GemX 50% off Holiday Sale

« on: December 22, 2007, 03:54 PM »

GemX  http://www.gemx.com is having a 50% off Holiday Sale throught January 20, 2008. I just bought WizQuote for $10.

Looks like they have modularized their do-Organizer since the last time I looked at it. Now you buy the base system (on sale for $12.95) and then purchase the other modules you want - calendar, contacts, journal, etc - separately. The modules are also on sale - priced from $5.95 to $9.95.

Their website says they have a new release of do-Organizer due in January, with updates to TexNotes Pro, SurfGem and Wizquote in the first quarter of 2008.