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Messages - alxwz [ switch to compact view ]

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26
Cf. the original topic, I never used any desktop search software, but have been considering it for a long time. Now I dl'd and installed both Locate32 and Copernic and while I can't say anything bad (yet) about either program's speed (or resource usage), I discovered a major problem:

Locate32 works nicely and finds results instantly (updating seems to take a long time, though, even without major changes in files in the meantime), but I can hardly see it as a "desktop search", because it doesn't index file contents (unless I'm mistaken, but I don't think so). I'd rather say that it's Windows' classic "Find" on steroids. It's nice and I'll keep it, but it's out of the "desktop search" race for me.

The problem I have is with Copernic (don't really like the interface, and inadvertedly launching a web search drives me nuts, but the core functions seem to work well); it's that it does not look for folder names. I often have the files for a topic in a folder where only the folder's name contains the keyword. The files usually have more specialized names, and the keyword is missing there. I can't (and don't want to) rename all my files to match the search engine's specifications, so I'm SOL.

From what I've read about other programs, I can't find any information about searching for folders.
Does anyone know if one of the other contenders works with folder names?

Edit - Oh, I forgot: IF I'm going to stay with Copernic for file contents (and Locate32 for file/folder names, and Lookout for complete indexing of Outlook contents, sigh), I'll probably have to pay for a license, because CDS is only "free for personal home use". Does anyone know how much they charge for a single machine, single user business license?

27
Living Room / Re: The worst thing about Macs
« on: October 11, 2007, 08:29 PM »
At first, I wanted to comment on the anti-Mac sentiments here, but I dont feel like fighting.

But I can't resist on commenting to this:

Sorry, Zaine, I can't resist: Mini Coopers ARE BMW's! Admittedly, the Mini Cooper S of yesteryear was a Britsh Leyland product (Rule Britannia!), BMW bought out the parent company a few years back...

Do you know that here in Germany British Leyland used to be nicknamed "Britisch Elend" (which translates to "British Misery")?
British Leyland (pre-Thatcher era) was a government-controlled, poorly-run, loss-making conglomerate that was restructured (Rover) and bought out by BMW and boy, did they regret that. BMW lost billions over billions in trying to get Rover going, until they divested of everything but the crown jewels. Here in Germany, the acquisition of Rover is known as one of the worst management decisions ever. However, it wasn't enough of a warning sign for Daimler to keep them from acquiring Chrysler, but that's another story.

28
Site/Forum Features / Re: DonationCredits Discussion
« on: October 11, 2007, 07:12 PM »
mouser, I keep being amazed by your short response times.
Almost looks like you have no life.  :)

Some time ago we decided to do an experiment an give donors 100% control of their donation credits, and not automatically apply any of it to the site.

Hm, I couldn't find any mention of this when I did a search.

When you activate your credits the site recommends you consider giving 50% of your donation to the site account, but it's no longer mandatory.

I must have missed that when I activated. But it's true, I didn't read that stuff.
To set it straight ;), I donated a part of it to the site account now. This site is such an wonderful place on the web.

(note that the reason you go $26.61 in credits instead of $28 is because paypal takes their cut off the top).

Yes, I already guessed that the rest was eaten by Paypal.

29
Site/Forum Features / Re: DonationCredits Discussion
« on: October 11, 2007, 06:29 PM »
After being member for quite a while, I now made an additional donation of $ 28 and got credited 26.61 upon activation.

That's strange, because according to what I thought and what the help page says it should have given only 14.0 credits (50% of 28).

Is there something wrong or did I miss something? Do you treat additional donations differently (i.e., more credits per $)?

Alex

30
I think I'm in as well.

Last year, I discovered the experiment a little bit too late, although I was on a similar journey myself by that time, mainly focussing on GTD (which was the biggest hype at the time and probably still is), which never worked well for me, due to (1) the initial implementation being a bit too much to handle - there's not a lot of guidance in that system how to handle a huge initial overload - and (2) the concept of "contexts" never worked for me, as there still were way too many tasks in a handful of contexts, and having a-hundred-and-something to-dos in your "work" context is only insignificantly better than having several hundred to-dos in a general to-do list, and (3) the lack in daily guidance what exactly to do.

I recently bought a lot of time and self-management books, all of them of US and British origin, although I'm from Germany, but local authors generally keep repeating ideas from American literature. Among those are classics like the books from Charles Hobbs (a book and concept blatantly copied by Hyrum Smith and the Franklin Planner folks), Alan Lakein, Alec Mackenzie and Neil Fiore. Really interesting reading, but I'm not even halfway through yet.

Mark Forster (yes, I have his books no. 1 and 3, too) has a very good point when he says that changing your "system" every month is counter-productive. However, I don't believe in "systems" anymore. The only "system" that could possibly work for you is something that you custom-made for yourself, nothing pre-made for a general audience. You certainly have to adapt those concept for your real life situation and pick ideas from here and there. Edit: Sorry, noticed a little bit too late that iphigenie said essentially the same thing. So all I can do is agree. But I also think that some of the concepts visited last year deserve another - and closer - look.

I'm looking forward to how this will work out.

BTW: Minidiscs? Cool.

--
Alex

31
Living Room / Re: Need a small, closed (!) forum
« on: October 01, 2007, 02:36 PM »
Thanks, but in the meantime I went with a Google group which is good enough for what I need ATM.

32
Living Room / Re: Need a small, closed (!) forum
« on: September 16, 2007, 12:01 PM »
jgpaiva, Google Groups seems to fit the bill. A pity you can't break it down into sub-forums, but otherwise it seems to offer what I want.

steeladept, I don't know if Groove could offer forum discussions. But it's probably too expensive, anyway. And depending on a local client that's Windows-only, from what I know.

tinyvillager, Vanilla requires your own server/webspace, which I don't have.

Thanks to everyone.

33
Living Room / Re: Need a small, closed (!) forum
« on: September 16, 2007, 10:43 AM »
Thanks sri,

but from what I've seen on both sites neither will let you set up a closed shop.

34
Living Room / Need a small, closed (!) forum
« on: September 16, 2007, 10:13 AM »
Does anyone know where to find a place on the web to set up a small forum for discussions of a small group of people (4 to 5, ATM, but up to a dozen should be possible)? It should be organizable into different topics and threads (just like a real forum) and enable users to upload files and images, although I don't need lots of storage space for that.
Most importantly, it should be a "closed shop", not open to the public. Neither readable by outsiders (access should be password-protected) nor indexable by bots like Google's. The intended use is for a small workshop.

I don't have an own server to set this up, which would probably be best, so I need a hosted solution. Preferably free. ;)

I looked at a lot of collaboration platforms (like Basecamp, Joyent), but none I found so far will let you organize messages by topics and threads like a real forum. Some include chat solutions (like 37signals' Campfire), but real-time chat is not what I'm looking for. Wikis (like pbWiki) can't be structured in the way I need.
There are sites that give you free forums (like freeforums.org or nabble.com), but the forums you can create there all seem to be open to the public.

Any pointers?

35
Regarding xplorer^2 for thumbdrive, there was a lot of discussion in the zabkat forums, and last time I looked,  the developer had finally (kind of) given in and offered a special build to registered customers that would be able to run on a thumbdrive, for $ 10 extra, IIRC. But it was non-upgradeable and you had to request a new one when a new version of x2 was released. He didn't specify how many of those hand-made upgrades you could get for free.
I was tempted to order one (I bought x2 a while ago when it was on discount here) because XY still does not support dual panes and x2 looks like a great solution for a thumbdrive.
However, I always found x2's find and sync features confusing and couldn't find my way around there very well.

So I use DOpus most of the time (but don't feel the urge to pay the steep upgrade price from 8 to 9).

It's a pity that at the same time a thumbdrive-capaple version of DOpus was released they pulled the Win98 version. I admit, though, that there aren't many Win 98 machines around any more and most of them aren't ready for USB mass storage devices.

Oh, I forgot: My current solution for my thumbdrive is TC.

36
As an update: No, the XP fix did not solve my problem.
I ran into the display issues again, yesterday. When I had a look around task manager, I noticed that explorer.exe was using 10,000 (!) GDI objects. Killing explorer.exe and restarting it (I didn't feel like shutting down the machine w/ two dozen documents open) did help. 
Now I wonder how the number of GDI objects could go up that far.

37
From a completely different angle, there's something I suddenly remember:

The old Mac OS had a great ability: You could switch your color display to grayscale.
I've never seen that with Windows and it's yet another thing that the "new" Mac OS (X) lost.

Some might think that it's stupid, but I used it a lot for distraction-free writing. I found it much easier to concentrate without the visual noise of a color display.
And you could switch back to color for browsing and the like.

38
i stand by my opinion that a lack of a forward delete key is an incredible oversight.

You're completely right with that (and it annoyed my like hell after I got my first - used - Mac, which happened to be a notebook, as late as 2001).

Again: I'm not into a p****ng contest, but I had kind of an impulse reaction on the originally quoted article. Sorry.

39
It looks like the key we're speaking of (in the first place) is labeled (correctly) as backspace/backward delete in some countries, but labeled (ambiguously) "delete" in the US. This wasn't the case with former Apple notebooks (AFAIK), and it certainly isn't the case with my antique Pismo and my iBook with German keyboards.

I have to admit, though, that I was wrong here, somehow. Mea culpa.

However, I still don't understand how a Mac seems to have two delete keys in two different places. I think you're refering to the (backspace) "delete" key and the ("standard", forward) "delete" key on desktop Mac keyboards. Those are two different keys, and from what I have seen they're labeled differently.

Macs did indeed lack "true" (forward) delete keys from the beginning. Early Macs only had backward delete (like typewriters). From what I know, the forward delete keys were added later in Mac history (on desktop keyboards), and they didn't work in all applications. But my knowledge of early Macs is second-hand, I admit that as well. I do have some 1st gen Powerbooks and some old Mac keyboards, though, and all of them have a backspace, but no "delete" key. But all of them are German keyboards.






40
A discount here at DC would be a dream come true.

Tom Davis seems to be rolling out a new beta every other day now.
Unfortunately, I don't have any spare time ATM to play with it  :(

41
With 9x, I typically run into the problem with modern multi-tab browsers (Opera, K-Meleon) very quickly.
I do use the resource meter, but it doesn't help a lot here (and consumes some resources itself).

Regarding the XP problem, it seems to be better now, AFAICT.

Oh, I forgot: The 9x resource meter tells you how low your resources are but not which app uses how much. Has anyone seen an alternative resource meter for 9x which can do this? I tried to find one some time ago but couldn't (I think I even tried Sysinternal's Process Explorer which didn't do it, either, if I remember correctly).

42
DC Website Help and Extras / Re: Where are Nudones blog posts?
« on: July 28, 2007, 12:02 PM »
https://www.donation...5/05/dlgxrsizer.html

I went to this search from the blog page, this search doesn't seem to search the forum, otherwise it would have found another result.

43
DC Website Help and Extras / Where are Nudones blog posts?
« on: July 27, 2007, 05:50 PM »
Having searched the forum (via the search feature) for any mention of TaskTracker (which I keep running into issues with), the only result I got was an older blog post from Nudone (about DialogXRsizer), but when I tried to follow the link, the page could not be found. The same is true for every link to Nudone's blog.

Why are those posts gone, although the search can find them?

And could the posts possibly be restored?

44
I'm having a strange problem with my XP box at work where every once in a while Explorer will go crazy and fill the whole screen with the gray of the task bar (XP is set to "classic" look) or lose the icons of my quick launch bar (which I have dragged out of the task bar and running along the entire right side of the screen) or similar things. When I open search, the search boxes can sometimes be distorted and surrounded by all gray. This usually happens when creating new Explorer windows. Looks like this might be the source of the problem.

Now I've changed to these settings (set to 5120) and hope that things will improve. Thanks!

Regarding Win 9x: I sometimes still use Win 98 SE on an old machine and while it's generally okay, I keep running into the "low resources" problem (running out of user/GDI resources because the resource heaps were too limited by design). I've seen enough descriptions of this problem, but nobody seems to ever have patched it. A similar simple fix for 9x would have been great.

45
Yep, and being free of guilt, I now immediately want that silly membership kit!

And you'll have to mail it overseas!  :D

And after that order, I'll probably download and reinstall all the software on this site...

Then I'll probably donate another 2 (or even 3) cents.  ;)

Speaking of the original post, the part I liked most was the random postage.

46
Okay, mouser, it works:

Following your sneaky, guilt-inducing post, I just had to offload almost all my credits which I've been sitting on for so long. It weren't so many, anyway.

Although it was the software (Process Tamer, to be exact) that initially led me to this site, I sadly have to say that I don't use any of it now. Not because it's bad (I tried some and it was great) but because I just don't need any of it (my needs are very moderate).

 :)

47
Have you tried Forklift? http://www.binarynights.com/ -- the best thing I've found so far (SFTP/FTP support is critical to me). muCommander is the next best (free) alternative.

I never could get used to "commander" style file managers for general use (although I like the dual-pane display for some special tasks, and Total Commander is hard to beat when it comes to archive or file system support), but I'd really like to see something like DOpus, xplorer^2 or XYplorer (which, hopefully will get a dual-pane option soon) on the Mac. But since they all basically follow the "Explorer" model (which I think is a perfect choice when you have a deeply nested folder hierarchy on your drive, although MS tries very hard to spoil it), which seems to be non grata on the Mac, I don't expect anything like that to emerge.

Ah Scrivener - :true-love: - I've tried endless programs for writers on the PC and they are so flaky in comparison. I wonder what it is about Mac as as a platform that provides the basis for such elegant software (Quicksilver is another example)?

Actually, I left out Quicksilver on purpose. While it's kinda nice, it somehow didn't fit for me, and I think that there are tons of tools on Windows that do similar things and that may be even better.

(Edit: This discussion made me reconsider Quicksilver and watch the Lifehacker videos, and it's probably ahead of everything on Windows. I'll have to try it again.)

Speaking of Scrivener, if only they hadn't decided against real footnotes! I really need them so badly.

48
I had to choose Win 98 from the poll, although this only sits alongside Win 2k and Xubuntu on my only working Windows-compatible machine (Thinkpad 600E).

My other computers run OS X 10.2-10.4.

As for Non-Macs, I'll probably use Win 2k (last non-"product activation" NT-based Windows, and, yes, I bought it) until it finally really breaks.
Then I'll have another look into Linux and hopefully it'll have some mainstream credibility and better apps then.

49
Great, a flame war!  :D

The funny thing is, that I regard OS X as a step backwards in Mac interface usability, and I actually consider Windows to be more intuitive overall.

The worst thing IMO is the jack of all trades, master of none Dock, an application launcher that doubles as a program switcher, task bar, trashcan and whatever else. Or how Apple ruined the "apple" menu. Next are drawers, that slide out of the display area when you have your program window maximized to match the display size. Or windows that suddenly slide into the viewable area. There are way too many moving targets in this interface.

It sucks that you can't move a file, only copy (and go back to clean up the original file after the fact - edit: this refers to moving between different drives or cut/paste via context menu). Column view in the finder is a completely weird idea, and the entire finder is a sorry excuse of a file manager. There are tons of decent file managers on Windows, and not a single one for Macs (Pathfinder follows the finder too closely for my taste). It's annoying that I can't reach some buttons and many menu elements with the keyboard and am forced to use the mouse. And yes, it's completely counter-intuitive that hitting the return key on a selected file doesn't open the file, but goes into rename mode, which is much less useful.

I even hate the oversized trackpad of my iBook, because I keep tapping it inadvertedly. And their once-legendary reliability has gone overboard (my iBook is a prime example for that).

I could go on for a while, so there are a lot of valid negatives about Macs.

But there are also some applications that provide elegant solutions for real productivity problems where I can't see equivalents on Windows. Like Tinderbox, Omni Outliner, DevonThink, Packrat, Mellel, Scrivener and others. Merlin, maybe.

And I enjoy not needing any anti-virus, anti-spyware and anti-WTF for my Mac.
Plus, I don't need to "activate" my OS (wait, it came with a hardware dongle called "Mac", so this point is moot).

No, I'm not into a pissing contest. And I wish Apple had bought Be way back then and put their classic GUI on it instead of buying NeXT and rebranding their OS "Mac OS X".

50
Sorry, but the only "f**king stupid" thing here is the freak that posted this "review".
Obviously, this guy only bought (if that's really true, I doubt it) a Mac to have his bias confirmed.
Take, for example the complaint that "the delete key does not work like a delete key but like a backspace key". That's because it IS a backspace key.
What a dumb*ss.
There are a lot of valid points to critizise Macs, but he missed most of them.
This j*rk clearly wasn't able to deal with something that's just different.
(And, yes, although I have a Mac, I also hate that the interface is mainly geared towards computer illiterates. But that's the very same direction that MS tries increasingly to imitate very hard.)

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