Topics

1

Living Room / Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts

« on: September 15, 2009, 06:23 PM »

As search engines begin to incorporate more and more opinion data into their results, the distinction between fact and opinion may start blurring to the point where, as David Byrne once put it, “facts all come with points of view.”

  http://www.nytimes.c...agewanted=1&_r=1

Via http://www.bookforum.com/blog/4452

I found this interesting, how sentiment can be incorporated into search results for companies, products or ideas, they use an example and I quote "Using Newssift, a search for Wal-Mart reveals that recent sentiment about the company is running positive by a ratio of slightly better than two to one. When that search is refined with the suggested term “Labor Force and Unions,” however, the ratio of positive to negative sentiments drops closer to one to one."

2

DcUpdater / DcUpdater failing to check

« on: March 28, 2009, 04:40 PM »

Ive been using DcUpdater for, ohh years now, and its always looked and closed if nothing new is available, just lately though it is telling me that its failing to retrieve info from web and then sits around waiting for me to do something with it.  Some of the ones it doesn't find I can ask it to check manually and it does this ok,

here is the latest log

3

Living Room / DRM and spore

« on: September 20, 2008, 02:19 AM »

An interesting article at opendemocracy blog  http://www.opendemoc...the-future-of-gaming on the DRM issue and gaming particularly spore.

Spore - "the most hotly anticipatedcomputer game of the year" according to CNN - has quickly become the mostcontroversial game of the year and, quite likely, of the whole decade.

4

Living Room / Jeddai Knight training!

« on: September 11, 2008, 08:25 PM »

The wonderful things they will teach at universities, i hear surfing is available in some places but i had not heard of this before

Bring your own light sabre: Uni launches Jedi course

By Europe correspondent Emma Alberici

Posted 1 hour 14 minutes ago
Participants dressed as Jedi Knight characters perform with their light sabres

The force is strong: The university says Star Wars can shed light on political and social issues (Reuters: Issei Kato, file photo)

The UK's first Jedi course teaching personal development through a Star Wars syllabus will open to students at Queen's University in Belfast from November.

According to its publicity material, the course, Feel the Force: How to Train in the Jedi Way, teaches the real-life psychological techniques behind Jedi mind tricks.

It also claims to examine the wider issues behind the Star Wars universe, like balance, destiny, dualism, fatherhood and fascism.

The university says it hopes to attract young Star Wars fans and introduce them to education through open learning.

No prior qualifications are required and the blurb informs students that light sabres are not provided.

So there you go, all you aspiring Darth Vaders

From http://www.abc.net.a...08/09/12/2362719.htm

5

Find And Run Robot / FARR not launching stuff

« on: June 13, 2008, 02:40 PM »

my laptop has decided FARR shouldn't work.  I have updated FARR to most recent version, tried going back to last stable release and so on, but FARR sems to only want to launch superflexible fiile synch lol. Everything else i try and launch either has no effect at all or launches the quickdoclaunch and nothing else.

Any suggestions as to why this may be happening?

Edit   It works fine on my desk computer, its just the laptop thats got its knickers in a twist

6

Living Room / Free eBooks

« on: June 12, 2008, 02:27 PM »

Courtesy of freedownloadaday.com a site which has, to quote

Planet eBook is a great way to grab electronic versions of many works of classic literature. They've got dozens of great works of literature that you can download for free. These volumes are items that the copyright has lapsed on (George Orwell's 1984), or works that are in the public domain (Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol). they run the gamut from Grimms Fairy Tales and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche.

The books are available as PDF.

http://www.planetebook.com/

7

Living Room / Thief caught on Webcam

« on: May 12, 2008, 12:15 AM »

I just found this article at http://www.theage.co...s_cid=rss_technology

Police have arrested two men and recovered $US5500 ($5800) worth of stolen computers and electronic devices after the owner of one of the purloined laptops was able to connect remotely to her Apple MacBook and photograph the thief.

Kait Duplaga, 19, returned to her New York state home on April 27 to find the unit she shared with two other flat mates had been ransacked.

A bit of luck involved, and some expense, but she got her laptop back as well as other stuff.  Go Kait Go   

There is a still of the perps at the link

8

General Software Discussion / Small program i could run to restart a stubborn service?

« on: November 07, 2007, 05:13 PM »

Hi
I'm looking for a little program to restart a service that refuses to do what it is supposed to when i reboot the computer, the service starts but it doesn't actually do what it should till i stop it and restart it  .  At the moment I'm using a couple of bat files to stop it then restart it, this works fine but is beginning to be a bit tiresome, particularly if i forget to do it, so what I am looking for is a program that i could run that would restart a selected service or services and then I could have this set to run at startup.

Does such an animal exist somewhere that anyone knows of?

Thanks
George

9

General Software Discussion / Office 2007 Compatability Pack

« on: September 30, 2007, 11:44 PM »

I recently installed the above mentioned pack and discovered that on my laptop, a celeron 1.5 with 764mb ram, that word ran very very slowly and was using heaps more resources than usual. processor usage at times reached 100%, it wasnt all word of course but it was a big player, it also would go "not responding".  I've uninstalled the pack and its back to normal, hardly leaps around for joy on my laptop but works ok.

Any one else had this problem? and if you did, did you find a way to overcome it as I can see more and more documents being produced in these formats soon.

10

General Software Discussion / Screenshot Captor featured on lifehacker

« on: September 27, 2007, 07:27 PM »

Freeware application Screenshot Captor is an advanced, full-featured screenshot application boasting an impressive feature set that rivals the shareware favorite, SnagIt. For example, Screenshot Captor has tons of options for capturing your full screen, specific regions or selected windows; it has excellent callout functions, like standard arrows and highlighting tools along with the excellent blur effect you see in the screenshot above; and it can automatically open screenshots in your favorite image editor or email screenshots as soon as you take them. In all, Screenshot Captor may be the most full-featured screenshot app I've seen, freeware or otherwise. On the other hand, it does have a slightly steeper learning curve, so if there's a downside, that may be it. Screenshot Captor is donationware, Windows only.

http://lifehacker.co...ot-captor-304548.php

11

Living Room / Before I head to the computer shop... (Memory slot problem)

« on: September 14, 2007, 01:31 PM »

I just got myself an extra gig of ram which I tried to install.  I got a continuous sort of beeping tell me something was wrong, so I check it was all installed ok sitting right that sort of stuff, still beeped, so on a first in last out basis i took out the last stick, and it booted ok.  So after a bit of playing I've determined that there is most likely a dodgy memory slot as the memory (all of it) works in other slots.  I presently have the new memory installed in the first 2 slots.

So has anyone got any ideas as to what I might try before I spend more money 

Any help and most suggestions accepted gratefully 


It's a gigabyte ga-m51gm-s2g mother board with an AMD 3800 x2 processor

12

Living Room / Firm sues over comments

« on: September 12, 2007, 01:50 PM »

Here in the land down under we seem to have upset a certain maker of computer software and they decided to sue a community forum 

Firm sues forum to silence critics

Asher Moses
September 12, 2007 - 1:06PM
AdvertisementAdvertisement

In a move that could set a nasty precedent for Australian website operators and their users, a software firm is suing a community website over comments published on its message board.

http://www.theage.co...2/1189276778252.html for the full article

13

General Software Discussion / Kinship diagrams (and genealogy)

« on: August 16, 2007, 11:20 PM »

I was wondering if anyone has any experience or knowledge of kinship programs.

The reason I ask is I found genepro2007 http://www.genopro.c...amily-tree-software/ which did what i needed it to do for a specific task (a simple family kinship diagram in this instance).  Now after talking with the lecturer of the course involved the university may be interested in buying a licence and it would be good to have other options for them to look at, as i imagine that it would be useful in sociology, archeology and other subject areas.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Cheers
George

14

Found Deals and Discounts / RETURNIL - Giveawayoftheday

« on: July 09, 2007, 02:16 AM »

For those who have been looking at returnil, it is todays giveaway, at http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/ for the next 23 and a bit hours

15

General Software Discussion / Karens Replicator

« on: June 21, 2007, 07:57 PM »

I just discovered that Karen of Karen's power tools has released new versions of some of her programs, including replicator, which I've seen mentioned a number of times in these pages.  http://www.karenware.com/

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Living Room / A monitor (and keyboard) in the grand style

« on: June 08, 2007, 05:32 PM »

just saw this and thought some of you may be interested, its a modification to a monitor in brass and marble lol, some people really do have too much time, but it looks kinda good http://steampunkworkshop.com/lcd.shtml

modified to add picture so post could be blogged:

17

General Software Discussion / Ideamason on special

« on: May 15, 2007, 04:53 PM »

There has been some mention of a program called ideamason as a notetaker, organizer etc.  I thought it looked good and have been trying it out. 

It has many features, most of which I haven't found yet, but what I have seen so far, it looks like the program i've been after.  I'm a student (undergraduate liberal arts) and find the idea of being able to organize notes and research material directly in one place which will also help put it into a structured written format really appeals. You can import stuf from endnote, link files web pages create citations lists export to word (and other word processors tho word is specifically supported) and much besides.

I found the user support area very responsive, I couldn't get it to work, odd things happened and I'd uninstalled it but still sent off a message to them thinking I wont get a reply, and a few minutes later they responded, and after a few email returns, mostly caused by attachments not appearing i got the thing to work.

For those interested, its not compatible with window blinds, so you need to set window blinds to ignore it, works a treat.

Ohh I have no material interest in this I'm just a guy looking for something useful.

The good news is that they have it on special until June 30, Regular price is now $69 for a single licence and for students $59 with other options for 2 or more licences (one licence per computer not per user unfortunately)  So while i haven't decided if I'm going to buy it or not yet, this price reduction brings it more within my budget.  (Upgrade protection is included for 12 months, but looking at the website the upgrade there is free so i have no idea what the policy is long term but the guarantee is for upgrade protection for 12 months

http://www.ideamason.com/default.htm

18

Clipboard Help+Spell / Memory Usage

« on: May 04, 2007, 04:37 AM »

This may be covered elsewhere but i couldnt see it so here i go

I have started playing around with this now and I have it set to start minimized.  Everything is fine and it works really well but until you maximise and then minimise it, i've discovered that the memory usage stays quite high, compared to what it is when normally lying at rest in that thing we dare not call a tray.

Just to let you know if you didnt and no one else has mentioned it.

Ohh i saw screenshot captor over at VNUNet.com , they gave it 5 stars and said what a great program it was 

19

ProcessTamer / the tamer stops all

« on: April 20, 2007, 03:46 PM »

I'm not sure where i should ask this but this seems an appropriate forum.

I installed processtamer on a laptop (intel 1.5 celeron, so it needs taming the poor little beast) BUT when i set it to start at windows startup, the startup process didnot finish correctly, the programs that usually start in the tray started but where not visible, when the cursor was over the task bar it showed it was busy, i could do things on the rest of the desktop, right click and so on, and the only way i could get rid of it was to unplug the computer and take the battery out  ,  Anyone got any ideas???

Cheers