Messages

26

Living Room / Re: better battery life out of a laptop

« on: July 10, 2016, 02:36 PM »

• Go through the Services and prune them as much as you can get away with - e.g., according to Win7-64 (or whatever OS version you have now) settings as per BlackViper: http://www.blackviper.com/
  

-IainB (July 10, 2016, 02:12 PM)

Wow, this site is awesome. Thanks for all the tips, and in particular, for blackviper.

27

Living Room / Re: better battery life out of a laptop

« on: July 10, 2016, 08:40 AM »

How can such a modern laptop not support ssd drives?
Reading comments it seems like it does support ssd.

-mouser (July 10, 2016, 07:44 AM)

It has SATA 2.0, which has only very crude NCQ support, and no TRIM feature, meaning any SSD I put into the thing would not work fast, and also would wear out much more quickly than otherwise

Wasting limited write cycles to non-optimized writes...

28

Living Room / Re: better battery life out of a laptop

« on: July 10, 2016, 03:40 AM »

Something worth considering is buying a laptop specifically designed for long battery life.  If you aren't very particular about other features you may be able to get a used one cheap on ebay..
Being able to move to an ssd would be a side benefit.

-mouser (July 10, 2016, 03:17 AM)

Uhh... I'm quite peculiar with my hardware preferences. A huge screen, a large keyboard, win7, and a price cap of $400 (really) were the musts dictating the choice. I'm lucky that newegg gave me this one. And I'd rather stick with it, rather than migrate to a win8+ thingie.

BTW, now that I checked the product page again, I realized it has a built-in card reader. Maybe I can use it like a quasi-ssd, to put the hard drive to sleep after boot.

29

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?

30

Living Room / Re: Goodbye to my father

« on: June 29, 2016, 09:52 AM »

An update:
I just got back from my father's memorial service, which we held in his home of 40 years.
It was much more emotional (for me and others) than I expected.  Mostly I was just surprised at the full life he had and the friends and family who held him in such esteem.

One thing that really jumped out at me was that there were certain things that i paid little attention to during his life -- his writing (he self published a dozen books of stories, novel, etc.) -- took on such significance after his death.

It's not that I didn't on rare occasion talk to him about a particular piece of writing he did that I liked -- but these were very rare occasions.

But after the memorial I couldn't help but think how wonderful it would have been for my father if we had had a day when he was still living, which was just focused on fawning over him and the stuff he made.  I think he would have really appreciated that.

So to all of you who have living parents, my suggestion is, find an excuse to fawn over them for a day, and let them know how amazing they are, etc.

-mouser (June 29, 2016, 09:49 AM)

One of the best piece of advice I heard for a while. Will certainly do.

31

Living Room / Re: Thanks again for the Windows 10 upgrade reminder - NOT

« on: June 27, 2016, 02:22 PM »

Hey 40hz, you may be interested in this piece of news. Apparently someone managed to get a ruling for damages against this idiotic policy of Microsoft.

32

Living Room / Re: Thanks again for the Windows 10 upgrade reminder - NOT

« on: June 15, 2016, 01:34 PM »

Ohh [four letter word of your choice]...

My story is not as tragic as yours, but after recently buying a laptop with win7 (which I specifically wanted), I spent an hour or two of my limited time on the planet reading descriptions of windows update items to avoid that very crap.

I could have spent those two hours doing anything else... But no, Microsoft needs to sell me a new os, doesn't it?

33

Living Room / Re: Goodbye to my father

« on: May 24, 2016, 01:07 AM »

As Isaac Asimov once said, 'Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.'
I am sure he's in peace now, and I hope you'll find a way to get used to his passing away. Please accept my condolences and let me know if I can be of any help.

34

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for VPN recommendation

« on: May 11, 2016, 10:46 PM »

I use these guys' services:
https://www.hideipvpn.com/

And I'm happy with it. The P2P package does the job.

35

General Software Discussion / Re: advice on security setup for my elderly inlaws

« on: May 09, 2016, 02:05 AM »

This was reasonably serious as she's done pretty much everything she was warned against (many times), including handing over the guest & admin passwords and personal info on the basis of a popup <sigh...>

-Target (May 09, 2016, 01:57 AM)

I know I'll sound like a wise-ass after the fact, but why does she know her password, let alone the admin password?

Make her machine login right into the guest account, without any password etc.

36

General Software Discussion / Re: advice on security setup for my elderly inlaws

« on: May 09, 2016, 01:28 AM »

Make her use the guest account on windows, rather than an ordinary account or administrator. Make the machine start with guest account, and it will be a more effective security solution than any "firewall" or antivirus can ever hope to be. You can convert her account to a guest, if you don't want to mess up with the way she is used to.

And make her understand that never ever should she give her credit card number or similar sensitive information on the web.

I did these with dad, and he's happy ever since. Every now and then he wants to order a few books online, but I do that for him. It takes less time compared to handling the mess his credit card info would cause on sites of ill-repute.

37

Living Room / Re: Android - Observations from Long Term Use

« on: April 20, 2016, 11:21 PM »

Updates (of the os, as well as the apps) seem like serving a single purpose: making the device slower, so that you'll go buy a new one.

-eleman (April 20, 2016, 01:28 PM)

And this is different from computers in what way?

-4wd (April 20, 2016, 07:49 PM)

True point. I still use office 2007 on win7 Though technically, you can get more ram or upgrade the cpu in a computer, if you feel like it. That's not an option with android devices.

Battery Life.  Not sure if this is just the battery in general, or some of the settings (I'm thinking it's battery life after a few experiments- I thought it might be gmail being open, but it syncs when I bring it to focus, so not sure that's the case).  I leave my ipad for a week, and do nothing to it... and come back to it with the battery near full.  Do the same with the android device, and it's dead.  That's my use case for the device- I don't use my tablet everyday.  So that's the major complaint I have.

-wraith808 (April 20, 2016, 08:13 PM)

There certainly is a misconfigured app or service involved. But equally certainly, you're not to blame. Some idiot app's default settings is probably calling home or seeking a gps signal or whatever. Android devices need 5 times more tinkering than ios or winmobile devices, and not everyone has the will/time/energy to tinker.

SD Cards.  You have this great facility to add storage- and only some things are able to be put there.  And there seems to be no rhyme or reason to what is able to be put there.  I now only use my SD card for long term storage of items and content.  It's 4 times larger than my internal memory, and I can't put my apps there and have to have them on my 32GB internal using space.

Again, on the tinkering front, there's a solution (albeit not the prettiest one). But I hear you. Why do we need to find custom solutions (requiring partitioning of the sd card and formatting one of the partitions to ext3) for issues as basic as this one?

38

Living Room / Re: Android - Observations from Long Term Use

« on: April 20, 2016, 01:28 PM »

I find android devices agreeable, provided that nothing is updated. ever.

Updates (of the os, as well as the apps) seem like serving a single purpose: making the device slower, so that you'll go buy a new one.

39

General Software Discussion / Re: Cookies click driving me crazy

« on: April 15, 2016, 12:52 AM »

After all, it's the ones that don;t announce their presence that you have to worry about.

-questorfla (April 14, 2016, 10:39 PM)

Exactly. The ones that do announce their presence, in this vein, are nuisance with those stupid boxes insulting the obsessive compulsive side of me (and apparently a lot of other people). So we're seeking a solution to get rid of that nuisance.

40

General Software Discussion / Re: Cookies click driving me crazy

« on: April 05, 2016, 12:32 PM »

This is what you are looking for.

41

Living Room / Re: What Killed the Middle Class?

« on: April 02, 2016, 11:44 AM »

I think the American people were primed -by dissatisfaction - for a grand social experiment back then...and the other options just really sucked.

-Stoic Joker (April 02, 2016, 08:07 AM)

Don't call a black president "a grand social experiment". You may be mistaken for a bigot. Or a racist. Or both.

-eleman (April 02, 2016, 10:39 AM)

That's just hypersensitivity driven fear trying to quell honest and open dialog. Because the first time anyone does anything it is in part, or is completely - by its own nature - experimental. Due to the fact that nobody really knows how it is going to turn out. If the thing in question involves people, it becomes a social experiment ... And if the thing being tried by those people for the first time is a really bid deal, well... Ain't that grand.

It simply is what it is. and if one equivocates on admitting the risks involved in a venture...they are also subsequently eroding away at the level of success it can therefore claim to have attained ... And frankly, I think that's rather sad.

-Stoic Joker (April 02, 2016, 11:33 AM)

Venture? Electing someone with a different skin color is a venture? How is that even a variable involved in the analysis? How is that a new thing? BO is the 44th president of the US. Not the first one.

If Donald Trump gets elected, will he also be an experiment, on the grounds that he is the first one named "Donald"? How about Hillary? Will she be an experiment on the grounds that she will be the first one with ovaries? What about Ted Cruz? The first president to be born in Calgary? Grandiose experiment... really.

These are irrelevant. You can't call the ordeal an experiment on these grounds. An experiment is a process aiming to assess the impact of an independent variable on a dependent variable, with reference to an existing hypothesis. I really would like to assume you did not hypothesize a black president would behave different than FDR or Ronald the Cowboy just because of his skin color.

The true way to overcome the evil of class distinctions is not to denounce them as revolutionists denounce them, but to ignore them as children ignore them. [Charles Dickens]

42

Living Room / Re: What Killed the Middle Class?

« on: April 02, 2016, 10:39 AM »

I think the American people were primed -by dissatisfaction - for a grand social experiment back then...and the other options just really sucked.

-Stoic Joker (April 02, 2016, 08:07 AM)

Don't call a black president "a grand social experiment". You may be mistaken for a bigot. Or a racist. Or both.

43

Living Room / Re: What Killed the Middle Class?

« on: April 02, 2016, 12:15 AM »

Someone who openly mentions/mentioned 'socialism' winning the US presidency? Pigs will fly before that.

-rgdot (April 01, 2016, 07:37 PM)

I wonder how many pigs flew before someone black won US presidency? Or will fly before 2017 when someone without a penis will be elected if people don't get over their 'socialism' obsession? Times change.

44

Living Room / Re: What Killed the Middle Class?

« on: April 01, 2016, 03:05 PM »

Bernie, the 70+ years old fella loved by the youth, apparently thinks about these problems as well. It is interesting to hear about the pressure on and bleak future of the middle class from someone who has a real shot at the presidency.

45

General Software Discussion / Re: Scroll Lock as system volume mute toggle

« on: March 21, 2016, 08:22 AM »

You don't need an external utility to mute volume.

Try

Send {Volume_Mute}

in autohotkey. You can make it more functional and robust by adding a variable to keep the state of mute, and an if statement to check it.

46

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.

47

General Software Discussion / Re: hulu & tor

« on: February 15, 2016, 09:34 PM »

Get a cheap VPS in the USA and run a proxy/vpn on it

-4wd (February 15, 2016, 07:17 PM)

Nope. It ain't do.

I've attempted Hulu with half dozen vpn providers from small timers to the high profile ones hitting numerous servers. Hulu detects them and blocks playing the content. Extreme irritating and I get the same damn response from them.

-eleman (February 15, 2016, 09:01 PM)

Maybe so but I said VPS 

If you just want access to stuff in the USA, it's cheaper than a VPN provider, (eg. $9/year).

-4wd (February 15, 2016, 09:19 PM)

Uhh yeah, my bad. In my defense, it's 5 AM in this part of the world

48

General Software Discussion / Re: hulu & tor

« on: February 15, 2016, 09:01 PM »

Get a cheap VPS in the USA and run a proxy/vpn on it

-4wd (February 15, 2016, 07:17 PM)

Nope. It ain't do.

I've attempted Hulu with half dozen vpn providers from small timers to the high profile ones hitting numerous servers. Hulu detects them and blocks playing the content. Extreme irritating and I get the same damn response from them.

49

General Software Discussion / Re: hulu & tor

« on: February 15, 2016, 12:13 PM »

Is there any way to watch hulu videos using Tor? Hulu recognizes tor and cuts me off.

-holt (February 15, 2016, 12:09 PM)

Tell your representatives you elect to the congress that you're fed up with copyright maximalism, and maybe your grandkids will live in a more sensible world.

There's no quick fix of the kind you are actually asking for.

50

Living Room / Re: What are you doing for your/with significant other on valentines day?

« on: February 12, 2016, 02:21 PM »

Uhh, will get a clean shave and iron my suit, for the divorce hearing on the 15th