Messages

1

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« on: May 06, 2021, 04:32 AM »

WinRAR was a good product when I used it in the mid 90's, vastly superior to the generally available options of the time IIRC.  FWIW I've been using 7Z since and agree it's at least as good (I even advocated strongly for the business to use it instead of persisting with WinZip)

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Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« on: May 05, 2021, 07:59 PM »

I don't even remember why WinZip annoys(/ed) me.

-Stoic Joker (May 05, 2021, 05:40 AM)

it was probably a long list (poor compression, no compatibility, very basic functionality, etc etc etc) 

IMHO WinRAR was a tool that was far ahead of the competition (great compression, multi format compatibility, great functionality, etc etc) though that gap has closed considerably (and it only took a couple of decades!)

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Living Room / Re: Movies you've seen lately

« on: April 19, 2021, 12:51 AM »

A little change to the plot line and you have: Shoot 'Em Up.

-4wd (April 19, 2021, 12:03 AM)

or any bruce lee movie, but with guns?

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General Software Discussion / Re: Cannot claim free space in C:\

« on: March 31, 2021, 12:39 AM »

I don't think changing the download location could magically claim lost space in c:\

-hulkbuster (March 30, 2021, 11:41 PM)

its not going to recover any space, but its going to stop taking up space, ie the top 9 video files are nearly 40Gb so downloading to a different drive (DISK!) would be an immediate saving.

you also appear to have a bunch of game stuff there, so moving that to another disk (if you can, they don't HAVE to be installed to C:) would help clear up a bit more space

Deleting stuff you don't need anymore is a good habit to maintain, eg video's you already seen, games you're not playing any more, etc.  YMMV but using one of those uninstaller apps (I use REVO, but there are several others) can be helpful when removing redundant apps or games cos they can clean up a lot of the cruft the regular uninstall routines can leave behind.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Earning More with Cryptocurrency

« on: March 14, 2021, 05:35 PM »

and what appears to be a series of podcasts (note that I haven't listened to any of these yet so I can't vouch for their quality)

https://www.mofi.net/nfts-blockchain-powered-art-trading-cards-music-and-more/

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General Software Discussion / Re: The Great Suspender - Chrome extension to use less CPU/RAM

« on: March 08, 2021, 04:09 PM »

well, its back again this morning, but I'll be watching with interest to see what happens...

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General Software Discussion / Re: The Great Suspender - Chrome extension to use less CPU/RAM

« on: March 07, 2021, 10:05 PM »

the saga continues...

Chrome disabled the marvellous suspender this morning... <sigh>

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Post New Requests Here / Re: [IDEA] Notepad: Highlight all text after X number of characters/words

« on: March 01, 2021, 04:09 PM »

rather than placing an arbitrary limit on the number of characters or words, why not use large(?) counters? 

IE you can count the number of words AND characters as you type, and displaying that in a couple of prominent text boxes should be pretty trivial.  This would get you around having to supply a nominal limit, and it would work for both minimum and maximum character limitations without the need to change anything.

And I'm not sure that replacing double spaces is a valid approach.  White spaces are still counted as valid characters so trimming them will skew your results, at least for character counts

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Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« on: February 19, 2021, 04:48 PM »

I couldn't decide whether to put this here or in Devs Corner, but here goes (and don't be put off the description)

https://github.com/NARKOZ/hacker-scripts

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General Software Discussion / Re: The Great Suspender - Chrome extension to use less CPU/RAM

« on: February 04, 2021, 04:10 PM »

Bad news: this wonderful extension has changed owner and now has been classified as malware by Google.

-brotherS (February 04, 2021, 02:03 PM)

well, that explains this mornings unexpected/unexplained behaviour - Thanks brotherS!

11

General Software Discussion / Re: Need Android Music Player, for Old People

« on: January 21, 2021, 11:12 PM »

pulsar player looks like it could be a contender

Just been playing with it and it seems to tick a lot of your boxes

its tough cos everything these days is targeted at users who want all sorts of trivial functionality (not like when I was a boy...)

12

General Software Discussion / Re: 32bit Linux distro recommendations

« on: January 08, 2021, 04:26 PM »

Solution found - after googling for some time I found a reference to Ubuntu's 'boot repair tool' which solved the problem. 

Strangely it isn't included in the distros despite the fact that this seems to be a common problem.  Most 'answers' point to a file system corruption of some sort, but clearly this isn't always the problem or the solution and nobody seemed to acknowledge that.

I've subsequently moved to a puppy install as I found some of the windows in Mint wouldn't resize to fit my screen...

13

General Software Discussion / Re: 32bit Linux distro recommendations

« on: December 20, 2020, 04:12 PM »

Gives me the impression that there is something going wrong with the boot partition on your drive. You better use a proper partition management tool to completely wipe all partitions from that SSD. On Windows my personal preference is MiniTool Partition Wizard. But Acronis is also OK. The partition manager built into Windows itself isn't that great, so I would not use that to wipe a drive clean. GParted on Linux is also OK to wipe all muck from a hard disk.

-Shades (December 20, 2020, 03:37 PM)

thats a pretty safe bet 

FWIW the drives been wiped a few times now (its part of the mint setup) so a windows based solution is out of the question.

My guess is that the boot procedure is pointing to the wrong place, but I don't know how to diagnose that

14

General Software Discussion / Re: 32bit Linux distro recommendations

« on: December 19, 2020, 10:42 PM »

thanks for that, I'll have to work through it

Sounds like you ended up in the Grub shell environment.

actually it was busybox (and that was referenced on one of those links, thanks!)

Also, a boot partition on a hard disk needs to have a specific bit set. This is normally managed by the installation software.

this is what I would have expected, but I'm going to have to work through this slowly cos I have no familiarity with nix setups.

I'm actually wondering if the setup isn't selecting the USB as the boot drive.  I noticed in the manual partition setup that was the default, but i'll need to dig into it a bit further

All these installation issues make you see Linux from a not so flattering side.

it does kind of take the shine off all that 'easy to use' propaganda

But Windows 10 also comes with its own problems.

fair to say thats pretty standard for windows 'updates' so it probably doesn't come as a surprise to anyone.

FWIW the SSD I used came out of my old win10 desktop.  The interesting bit is that the netbook booted into win10 straight away, no questions asked.  Impressed me no end considering whats under the hood

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General Software Discussion / Re: 32bit Linux distro recommendations

« on: December 19, 2020, 02:39 AM »

and on it goes...

got Grub installed, and it boots to a menu listing Mint (woohoo...)

boot mint and splash screen comes up, but it resolves to a command prompt of some sort (with a 'type help for a list of commands' message)

meh...

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General Software Discussion / Re: 32bit Linux distro recommendations

« on: December 17, 2020, 06:54 PM »

been looking at the setup again this morning and it appears that in order to install you must already have a suitably partitioned disk

I ran through the (mint) install again but used the options to setup partitions for boot and install...

still didn't work though...

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General Software Discussion / Re: 32bit Linux distro recommendations

« on: December 17, 2020, 04:20 PM »

My previous response was a little stronger than I intended. I guess I'm still disappointed in my purchase I made all those years ago.

-Deozaan (December 17, 2020, 01:12 AM)

HA!  its all good, but its interesting to see how long the sour taste of a disappointing purchase lasts!!

One of the most lightweight Linux distributions (with a desktop environment) I remember having success with on my netbook was CrunchBang. Unfortunately it has been discontinued for many years now.

seems like there are a couple of forks - here's one

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General Software Discussion / Re: 32bit Linux distro recommendations

« on: December 17, 2020, 03:51 AM »

Update - tonite I was able to successfully install mint BUT grub (apparently) failed to install.

One step forward and...

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General Software Discussion / Re: 32bit Linux distro recommendations

« on: December 16, 2020, 06:45 PM »

Appreciate your time in responding

How are you installing Linux?

I've sourced the various ISO's and written them to a multiboot USB stick, then booting a distro from usb and selecting install

Do you keep the Windows partition?

No.  I swapped out with a 'spare' 256Gb SSD.  Drive was formatted to ext(x) then I let the installer choose what to do with it (some overwrite everything, some don't)

Not to offend, but the suggestion of my previous post: get a slightly better laptop and try a full-fledged version of Linux on that, still stands.

no offence taken  .  This is not my everyday machine (have a current desktop for that), it is more of a convenience (like a more capable tablet) that I use for a variety of things (nothing serious) at different times.  The intent here is to teach myself some nix familiarity/capability so a desktop type setup seems like the most suitable option, and I don't want to have to faff about with a live distro all the time (for obvious reasons).  Given that purchasing another machine just for this doesn't really make a lot of sense, nor does it make good use of the stuff I've already got. 

All those small Linux distros have one thing in common, compromises in software and functionality in one way or another. Those compromises are likely to bite you in the end, unlike a full version of Linux.

Given that I have no real knowledge or experience with linux at the moment I'm unlikely to recognise or understand what those compromises are.  Should I get to a point where I need/want a full time linux environment then clearly I would need to consider the hardware components.  Just at the moment though this isn't on my radar

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General Software Discussion / Re: 32bit Linux distro recommendations

« on: December 16, 2020, 04:29 PM »

well, that was interesting, and not at all what I was hoping for.

As I said, I've tried a bunch of live distro's and for the most part they all run fine.  But I don't really want to use a live version, I'd rather setup a regular install which is where the trouble starts.

I've tried puppy (4 versions), peppermint, bodhi, mint, antix, porteus, and several others (after googling for suitable 32bit distro's), both live and (attempted) installs.  And any number of these would probably be suitable if I could only get them to install successfully.  Where I have been able to run thru the install process, the consistent result on reboot is a 'dos' screen with a flashing cursor (not a prompt), and usually a message to the effect that the boot files couldn't be found...

This should be a pretty simple process, especially given that one of the touted benefits of nix is the ability to use it on older hardware.  And FWIW there's absolutely nothing wrong with the netbook, it's been a rock solid little machine that has served me very well.  I understand that its underpowered by today standards (and was probably a little lacking even in the day), but it's still perfectly functional and I'd like to continue to use it albeit in a different role. 

And I really don't see the point of throwing it away just because its old.  I understand its limitations, and am happy to work within them, but buying something else to do the same job isn't a consideration (nor does it need to be)

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General Software Discussion / 32bit Linux distro recommendations

« on: December 16, 2020, 05:47 AM »

Looking for some recommendations for a nix distro for my atom powered netbook.

I've been trying to install a bunch of different distros but none will actually install.  Some just don't boot properly, or go through the install process then still don't boot.

FWIW I'm a total nix noob.  I've toyed briefly with a few live distros over the years but never made the effort to take it seriously. 

I figure now's as good a time as any to make the effort, and hopefully pick up a few new skills

22

Living Room / Re: How do you get melted rubber out of carpeting???

« on: December 12, 2020, 01:14 AM »

Now I still don't know how Wheat Fungus applies to a house on fire - But...I'll leave this here for other folks to figure out.

-Stoic Joker (December 11, 2020, 05:43 AM)

FWIW flour is potentially explosive.  The attached isn't a great example, but a google search will turn up plenty of very dramatic incidents

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Living Room / Re: How do you get melted rubber out of carpeting???

« on: December 10, 2020, 08:15 PM »

Hey! Smut is frowned upon.

-cranioscopical (December 10, 2020, 08:02 PM)

just wondering if you guys read what I wrote, not what you think I wrote...

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Living Room / Re: How do you get melted rubber out of carpeting???

« on: December 09, 2020, 10:24 PM »

if she hasn't noticed the smell of the thinners, then he's probably safe enough (at least for the time being

-Target (December 07, 2020, 04:00 PM)

Light just one match and it will be moot soot.

-cranioscopical (December 08, 2020, 06:01 PM)

Fixed that for you.

-Deozaan (December 08, 2020, 06:14 PM)

-cranioscopical (December 09, 2020, 10:11 AM)

won't that just leave him with a bunch of asholes?

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Living Room / Re: How do you get melted rubber out of carpeting???

« on: December 07, 2020, 04:00 PM »

Oh sorry, did I forget to mention that upon walking into a room smelling of eucalypt the first words she will say are, "What have you done?"

-4wd (December 07, 2020, 03:17 PM)

if she hasn't noticed the smell of the thinners, then he's probably safe enough (at least for the time being  )