Topics

51

AutoHotkey / Always on top

« on: October 04, 2011, 01:56 PM »

Just a quick question -- I hope!

I want to make a GUI button that I can float over another application, but I can't work out if I can create a GUI with an always-on-top type of attribute.

If I can't, can anyone suggest something I could bolt on that would have a similar effect?

52

Found Deals and Discounts / A new Humble Bundle

« on: September 28, 2011, 01:15 PM »

There's a new Humble Bundle

Frozen Synapse is a turn-based strategy game which, if you pay "above the average" for, also gives you access to 3-5 more games.

It's only around for two weeks, apparently. The last bundle was excellent -- not sure that this one's my speed but I'm sure it'll appeal to some of you 

53

Found Deals and Discounts / PowerTools Lite 2011

« on: August 23, 2011, 02:11 PM »

...now released as freeware.

http://www.macecraft...com/download/ptlite/

Not as capable as its (commercial) big brother -- jv16 PowerTools -- and also not quite as geared to the power user, this is still a halfway decent product (for those of us who don't condemn all registry cleaners as unnecessary junk, anyway  )

54

Post New Requests Here / Auto-renumbering email attachments

« on: August 12, 2011, 09:38 AM »

...or something.

I have a problem. An automated process sends me occasional emails with textfile attachments.

Mostly, I just file them, against a time when I might need to find some bit of information in one of the attachments.

Last time I needed to do this, I used Copernic -- but I don't have that available anymore.

Thing is, the attachments always have the same name.

I use The Bat! (or rather, the Voyager variant thereof.) I thought I could ask The Bat to search inside attachments, but I couldn't work out how.

So all I can do is save the attachments to disk and search them with something else.

But in order to save them to disk, I have to give each file a different name, so I don't overwrite information.

There are currently 200-odd relevant emails. I REALLY don't want to have to go through that process manually, one at a time.

Can anyone suggest an approach to this?

55

General Software Discussion / Realtime backups

« on: August 04, 2011, 10:39 AM »

I don't backup enough.

I upgraded my desktop machine's internal HD to a terabyte beast a while back and I now use the old drive in an external case, connected via USB, to make the occasional image (I use Paragon. It's okay, but the current version seems to have abandoned incremental backups, so I'm stuck making the occasional image and I don't use it for file-based backups.)

The old drive isn't big enough for more than one image, and when I picked up a deal on eBay for an Iomega 500Gb Prestige USB drive with their backup software thrown into the deal, I thought it was a Good Plan.

The drive works fine.

Their realtime backup software -- QuikProtect -- works if I install it on my netbook (Win7 Starter) but the install to my desktop (Vista, 32-bit, 4Gb RAM) didn't just not work, it caused the first bluescreen I've had on the system.

I used to like Iomega.

I had to use System Restore, via Safe Mode, to get the system to boot normally again.

I posted a query on their forum and the only response so far is a suggestion that I might like to try the most recent version of the software, here's the download link. (Since I downloaded it on Tuesday, I can't imagine that I was that far behind the times. Easy response, for sure, but it assumes that I'm stupid and I'd FAR rather they assumed intelligence first.)

So I have two questions:

1. Does anyone with any experience with Iomega's QuikProtect have any suggestions as to whether I should put my system back in the firing line again or just give up with it?

2. If I wanted something that did a similar job -- effectively backing up a configurable number of generations of a configurable set of files and folders, in realtime on a "set and forget" basis -- to a USB-connected HD, would I have to hand over serious quantities of money? (Hint: I felt guilty enough about the new HD. Please don't make me hand over more extra cash than I have to!)

I guess if I forget the "realtime" bit, I could probably do the job for free with something like Toucan... it's just that I'll forget.

56

AutoHotkey / Preventing fullscreen and getting back when that's failed

« on: July 27, 2011, 12:00 PM »

I have a problem.

I've built an autohotkey script that, amongst other things, prevents Alt-Enter from doing anything. That was on purpose...

Thing is, under certain circumstances, a DOS app can force Windows to push it to fullscreen. If that happens, there's no way back...

Is there a way I can detect if that's happened and temporarily re-enable Alt-Enter?

-- tim

57

Found Deals and Discounts / Revo Uninstaller Pro at Bits Du Jour

« on: June 06, 2011, 04:03 AM »

For anyone who wants all the extra features, with a 50% discount...

Revo Pro at Bits Du Jour

I haven't decided yet. I'm tempted, though...

58

Living Room / Sound problems

« on: May 14, 2011, 01:50 PM »

I have a problem, and I'm not sure how to fix it.

My desktop PC isn't exactly new -- just over 4 years old, AMD Athlon 64 2.2GHz 3500+ cpu, not exactly storming but okay, 4Gb RAM, running Vista.

The hard disk it came with was 160Gb and, armed with an Amazon voucher I got for my birthday back in February, I replaced it with a WD Green 1Tb drive.

I THINK that might be where things started going wrong. It's a big drive, but it's not the fastest.

Nothing I do sound-wise that involves any sort of processing at all (eg games, playing MP3s) plays the sound smoothly. My netbook (Win7 Starter, 1.6GHz cpu half the RAM) plays everything fine, in comparison.

I've done everything I can think of. I checked the drive was UDMA, I've tweaked all the caches I could find, no difference.

I've even disabled the onboard audio and installed a (admittedly oldish) sound card, to take some of the load off the CPU. Things improved slightly, but only slightly, and the improvement might even be in my imagination.

So... any suggestions? If I upgrade the soundcard to something vaguely respectable (maybe something by Creative, not too expensive but not dirt cheap) might that help? Do the external USB audio processors do a similar job to PCI, or do I need PCI with dedicated hardware to make the difference? Or am I wasting my time and I should either replace the hard disk with something faster (maybe put the original back with the terabyte drive as a secondary unit), or bite the bullet and ditch Vista, or...

Any and all suggestions welcome!

59

General Software Discussion / Anyone use The Bat! Voyager?

« on: April 26, 2011, 11:17 AM »

I know there are a few The Bat! users around here.

I've been using the program for years. A while back, when I started to do more and more portable computing, I invested in the Pro version so I could use Voyager, the portable version of The Bat!

It's always been well-behaved, and I dislike deleting any email I might need to refer to later, so I set up a local account and I have a series of rules and filters that move mail from a live email account to one or other of the local folders, giving me encrypted storage of my email archives that's available even when I can't get at the 'net.

Which is all very fine and pleasant in theory.

However, some months ago, I started seeing a recurring problem. Mark a message as read (from the virtual "all unread mail" folder I created) then move it to a local, archive folder to hold stuff I've dealt with. Mostly, it works. Sometimes, it crashes violently, taking out the real source folder that the relevant email was in, often the destination folder also, sometimes others.

The folder maintenance routine in The Bat recovers anything it finds into files you're supposed to be able to read with a text editor. But that doesn't happen with Voyager, because it encrypts everything it stores. Result: I've lost absolutely tons of mail, my last good backup also has some corruption and my every attempt to recover mail from the backup generally lasts a couple of hours before the next crash.

Tech support haven't been much help, sadly.

So... any opinions on best way forward? I know there's a new version of TB -- v5 -- just come out, but they say it's a complete, ground-up rewrite and that sounds like a step into the dark. (There's no Voyager v5 yet anyway.) If I'm to replace TB with something else, I need similar levels of configurability, a similarly competent editor, the ability to manage multiple accounts and protocols without causing me to break into a sweat, and speed and reliability even if it's managing thousands of stored emails. (I grant it might be a while before my archive's that big again.  )

60

Post New Requests Here / Podcast Conversion and dates

« on: March 21, 2011, 09:30 AM »

I am a bit of a podcast addict. Sadly, I get a bit behind and -- because I TRY to be organised -- I keep my podcasts in a single folder, so I can sort them in date order, and transfer the oldest first to my MP3 player.

Mostly, this works very well. But one of the podcasts I regularly get comes in M4A format. Although the software I use to transfer stuff to my player converts things on the fly, I prefer to do the conversion myself so I can control the output quality and filesize a bit better.

So far, I have found the easiest way to do this is to use fre:ac (the new version of BonkEnc, still free though) to do the conversion to MP3, output the files somewhere away from the originals, then use another little freebie (filedate) to re-datestamp the new files to match the originals, so they don't get sorted to the end of the list. Fiddly and time-consuming, especially if you've only just got round to it after a few weeks of letting M4As build up...

Two related requests, then. Either a program that can suck in an audio file (or a list of files) and squirt out an MP3 with the same time/datestamp as the original, optionally deleting the original... or if doing that is too complex for a "snack", a program that can display two lists of files, allow them to be lined up by hand in case filenames don't quite match, then apply the date/timestamps from the source list to the destination list.

61

Living Room / Win 7 XP mode

« on: March 05, 2011, 11:20 AM »

Hi...

I have a problem.

My mother-in-law has a Win 7 64-bit desktop PC, that they bought when their XP box died.

My father-in-law's favourite computer game won't run on Win 7.

Microsoft's virtual XP/compatibility mode thing is a 500Mb download. It'll fix their problem.

They live in the middle of nowhere and their home broadband connection is Miserably Slow. It also suffers dropouts and general unreliability.

So... I want to download the relevant installation package for them. I have a nice quick broadband connection and a 500Mb download probably won't take much longer than the last time I downloaded a linux distro.

Thing is, if I try to download from Microsoft, it wants me to do a WGA thing. And I can't run the download on a machine that has an acceptable version of WIndows 7, as my netbook is Starter edition (dual-booting with Ubuntu!) and my desktop is Vista.

There must be a way to download it some way that doesn't require the download to happen on the machine it's to be installed on, but I can't find anything useful out. Anyone got any helpful suggestions? (I expect I've missed something obvious somewhere, but hey, I'm old and grumpy and entitled to make the occasional small mistake!) 

62

General Software Discussion / Rostering software

« on: January 12, 2011, 05:32 AM »

I don't know where to post this, but I have a concept for a program that's probably a bit more than a snack but probably less than a full program...

It's come about because my wife has picked up the job of coming up with a staff rota at her workplace.

What would be useful to her, I think, is a program that could help with managing this.

You'd need to be able to handle a list of people, each of whom would have a number of hours to work in a given day, but where a working day would extend for longer than any one person would work. You'd need cover for the whole day, too.

I envisage a program that could be told a person's working week in terms of the number of hours, and a visual week planner that would be able to switch on a person for a given day and drag a bar, representing their shift, left and right on screen, with customisable gaps for meal breaks and the like. You'd want to be able to see that you'd allocated everyone's time over a time period -- a week, 4 weeks, a month -- and you'd also want to be able to see at a glance that you'd covered the work that needed to be done, so no unstaffed gaps.

Sort of a combination of project and time management but with a heavy emphasis on the visual elements and none of the stuff that these types of program might worry about related to charging and the like.

Does anyone know of anything that might already exist? Or be able to suggest an approach using something spreadsheety, perhaps, but without requiring coding skills I don't have?