Messages

151

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: RightNote Pro 50% Off Thru January 31

« on: January 24, 2014, 10:19 AM »

I stuck my nose in to see if anyone had pointed this great deal out already and find that (again!) I'm behind the curve! 

I'd add my own vote for RightNote, though: I'm permanently on the lookout for the perfect note keeper and RightNote is one of the two I keep running (the other being CintaNotes -- which is faster, needs less screenspace and is tag focussed but falls behind when you care about formatting and image stuff.)

152

Easy Screencast Recorder / Re: LATEST VERSION INFO THREAD - Easy Screencast Recorder - v1.12.01 - Apr 22, 2015

« on: January 23, 2014, 10:15 AM »

I used Easy Screencast Recorder yesterday to "watch" a program being used so I could compare what was being done onscreen to what happened behind the scenes.

Worked brilliantly. (Capturing a VNC window -- I wondered before trying it if it'd work at all and was delighted to find that it was completely fine with it.)

However... I used the preferred / default settings, which means that I have a .ASF video. And the first six minutes of it is filled with irrelevant stuff I'd quite like to delete. (If you're squeamish, you'd probably rather not know that the bit I don't want to keep contains photographs of the insides of someone's lower intestine. Oh. Sorry. Too late. )

The easiest answer, particularly given the starting file format, seemed to be Microsoft Movie Maker. Impressively, it carved the video up into sort of chapters -- presumably on the basis of what appeared to be going on onscreen -- so I could delete the colonic bits wholesale. And I could even add titles and credits. Gosh.

Only thing was, when it came to saving the amendments, the quality had dropped through the floor. Most of the onscreen text wasn't readable anymore. This despite the fact that the filesize had gone from under 4Mb to over 17. 

Presumably MovieMaker re-encoded the output using something completely inappropriate. (I can spell "codec" on a good day but -- even having read Vurbal's brilliant explanation above -- trust me, I'm definitely drowning rather than waving!) There don't seem to be any useful options to tweak quality or active codec or anything...

So... does this apparently simple thing (remove the first 6:22 of an .ASF file) require me to install a zillion new programs, spend a couple of hundred dollars, face due north with a pencil up one nostril and recite poetry to appease the gods? Or am I missing something somewhere?

153

N.A.N.Y. 2014 / Re: NANY 2014 Release: Process Piglet

« on: January 21, 2014, 02:03 AM »

Read this with some interest, and I've shoved The Piglet onto my netbook to see how it behaves.

Neat little program. (And I also think the name, and the associated notifications, are a tiny bit fabulous: "Process firefox.exe has pigged out!" I think this is the first notification I've seen that's really made me smile since an old DOS program gave me "Unknown error: get drunk!")

I'd like to cast a vote for leaving it separate to Process Tamer: I use Process Lasso to look after cpu usage but Piglet's a useful adjunct to it, whereas I wouldn't want to risk running PL and PT alongside each other...

154

Living Room / Re: HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL OF DONATIONCODER - 2014!

« on: January 01, 2014, 08:19 AM »

Happy New Year to everyone -- and, well, what THEY said.  

155

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: M3U8 playlists

« on: December 20, 2013, 11:42 AM »

How odd. My MP3 player reads all of them without a problem.

Mystified. Oh well: thanks for trying.

156

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: M3U8 playlists

« on: December 19, 2013, 03:59 PM »

I am sorry I have not looked at this yet. To be honest, I got busy and just plain forgot. I'll try to get to this asap. 

-c.gingerich (December 19, 2013, 02:02 PM)

No worries. I hit the problem today, is all, trying to collect together a playlist of Christmas songs. Like ya do. I just did it by hand instead.

157

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: M3U8 playlists

« on: December 19, 2013, 05:32 AM »

It occurred to me that the problem here might just (hah! "Just!") be that the various fields containing track names etc might require unicode support after all, in order to display sensible content. (This isn't something I know much about -- I'd assumed that unicode would be a superset of the standard character set but if that's a naive assumption, then it might explain a lot.

At any rate, I'm still seeing the program occasionally just going completely unresponsive. Have you been able to look at it at all since we last discussed this?

158

LaunchBar Commander / Re: LATEST LaunchBar Commander VERSION INFO THREAD - v1.139.02 - Dec 6, 2013

« on: December 19, 2013, 04:28 AM »

I've uploaded a new version (1.39.02) with a minor fix for full screen window detection that may have been suboptimal on windows 7 (it may have thought a maximized window was a full screen window in some cases).

-mouser (December 06, 2013, 06:26 PM)

Have you taken it down again? The portable version is still 1.39.01...

And can I rattle your cage with respect to the new problem with VirtuaWin? Not that I'm threatening to stand over you with a whip or anything -- that would be WAY too easy to misinterpret -- but I keep forgetting I have to reload VW after LBC changes and I think the swearing may be upsetting the more delicate ears in my vicinity.

159

General Software Discussion / Re: software recommendations - photo/graphics editors

« on: December 10, 2013, 02:07 AM »

Coming late to this thread -- blame mouser for highlighting it in the newsletter

I've used a few graphics / photo editors over the years.

For all the proponents of The Gimp, it's always looked to me like the learning curve is way too steep. I have a copy but I've never used it for anything serious.

Sagelight -- the paid version -- is brilliant for photo work. The noise reduction and one-shot HDR functionality components are very new and have become indispensable to me already.

I like Xara Photo & Graphic Designer for object removal but it's a vector tool with photo capabilities added in later and again the learning curve is fairly hefty. And it's quite expensive. But it has a big and committed userbase and the fact that it combines vector and photo capabilities in one package may be a plus.

Serif PhotoPlus: I've had various versions of this for ages and still use it -- particularly if I want to add text or do object extraction, layer-based manipulation or, well, anything that's about changing the content of a picture rather than just tweaking it for whole-image improvements. It's a good companion to Sagelight but they definitely complement each other.

The various free tools mentioned in this thread: there are good points to all of them but -- with the possible exception of The Gimp -- I'm not sure any of them really delivers on all the functionality you're likely to want. Sorry -- I think you may have to spend money.

160

LaunchBar Commander / Re: LATEST LaunchBar Commander VERSION INFO THREAD - v1.139.02 - Dec 6, 2013

« on: December 07, 2013, 03:46 AM »

hmm.. and this is new since the latest version you think?

-mouser (December 06, 2013, 01:59 PM)

Maybe not -- this is my portable setup (used on my work PC, running XP)  and I might have missed the previous update.

Is there a virtuawin option to tell it certain apps should be considered to be on all desktops?

There's a window manager plugin I use that has that sort of functionality but it can only "see" LBC when the config window is open and selecting that to be "sticky" didn't seem to have any useful effect on docks.

161

LaunchBar Commander / Re: LATEST LaunchBar Commander VERSION INFO THREAD - v1.139.01 - Nov 28, 2013

« on: December 05, 2013, 04:44 AM »

I think one of the recent changes may have caused a small problem.

On the (XP) machine my most customised version of LBC lives on, I use VirtuaWin for multiple desktops. Since I updated LBC (yesterday) I've noticed that it has started mattering which order I load LBC and VirtuaWin: if VirtuaWin is running already, the LBC dock is only available in one of my desktops rather than (as previously) all of them. So, for instance, if I move the mouse to the bottom of screen 4 to activate my autohidden LBC dock, I get flipped to desktop 1 before the dock appears -- which came as a bit of a shock the first six times. (Look, I'm not always wearing my most analytical hat, okay? )

I can fix it by exiting from VirtuaWin and reloading it, but this is definitely something I've never had to do before...

It's not a perfect fix: if I modify something LBCish which results in it reloading the dock, it does it in such a way that it "sticks" to the desktop that was active at the time of the reload.

162

General Software Discussion / Re: AllMyNotes or Notezilla - Looking for a Comparison

« on: November 21, 2013, 02:00 AM »

+1 again for stickies -- it's just wonderfully useful.

AllMyNotes is decent enough, but -- for what it's worth -- I've put it on the back burner now as I think RightNote is the best of its type.

I get a bit frustrated with the limitations of the tree format, particularly at note creation time -- first work out where to store this, make someplace for it, then create the note -- and although there's a place for it when reviewing quantities of stuff of a piece, for straight knowledge capture and retention I think you have to go a long way to beat Cintanotes.

163

General Software Discussion / Re: The Open Source debate

« on: November 13, 2013, 06:28 PM »

If anyone knows how to make a 16-bit netbios stack appear in Win7, they'll get their deus ex machina. But so far...

-oblivion (November 13, 2013, 12:44 PM)

Does the app run on WinXP?  If so, Win 7's "Win XP Mode" might work for the app - if the machines are running Win 7 Pro or better.

-mwb1100 (November 13, 2013, 01:49 PM)

XP Mode works. So does any other method of running XP in a VM.

Problem is, that's a VM that needs its own antivirus, distribution, individual configuration and an entry in the AD in order to see printers and the guys who worry about installing this stuff reckon it'll be a major job to distribute and maintain (my view: no harder than it is now, but there y'go) and in order to keep the machine happy, they also reckon that a new 64-bit machine with a spare couple of gig of RAM to give to the VM is about the minimum and the older kit around the place would all have to be upgraded, so vast costs all round.

The encapsulated problem and the only known solution is here and it appears that Sybase don't care enough to write an update to the relevant program With XP going out of support and increasingly not available on new kit, we have a bit of a problem.

164

General Software Discussion / Re: The Open Source debate

« on: November 13, 2013, 12:44 PM »

He "won't allow" something? Lets get real, Napolean...IT works for the organization. Not the other way around. Software decisions are a management not an IT call.
 

-40hz (November 13, 2013, 11:00 AM)

Mm. Management are the ones who are peppering the place with Bloody iPads and demanding Bring-Your-Own-Disaster sooner than the infrastructure can support it. Management can't make decisions if they're not informed of the options; they also can't be informed if they have their fingers stuck in their ears because they're not smart enough to understand what they're being told -- or prefer to believe that a deus ex machina will materialise at the 11th hour.

If anyone knows how to make a 16-bit netbios stack appear in Win7, they'll get their deus ex machina. But so far...

165

General Software Discussion / Re: The Open Source debate

« on: November 13, 2013, 02:06 AM »

Thanks, everyone -- lots of useful stuff there, although maybe not the >BAM!< refutation I was after.

Interesting that this debate is OLD but still not put to bed.

166

General Software Discussion / The Open Source debate

« on: November 12, 2013, 05:27 PM »

I am still fuming over this.

Today, in a meeting at work, I mentioned that one of our senior doctors was looking at an open source product that might be a worthy replacement for the aging and soon-to-die (it won't run under Win7) clinical information system we use.

One of the IT attendees said straight away that he wouldn't allow anything open source running in our environment. Why? I asked. "Well, it's insecure. If the code's available to anyone, then anything could happen. A security nightmare."

Aghast as I was, I had no instant answer. I mumbled something incoherent about open source encryption tools that probably nobody there gave any credence to at all and the conversation moved on.

We all know that viewpoint's nonsense. But I could really use a short, understandable-by-idiots, refutation of the "common sense" view that open source software is "obviously" a security disaster waiting to happen.

The fact that 80% of the internet is running on open source software probably won't cut it. The idiots all "know" that the internet is a dangerous place and clearly everything's held together by string, cobwebs, eggstains, a little glue and the determined efforts of the only software houses worth mentioning, Symantec and Microsoft, and trying to tell them otherwise needs something solid, instant and understandable.

So does anyone have anything helpful -- and preferably unarguable -- I can throw at them?

167

General Software Discussion / Re: LastPass - What are your thoughts?

« on: November 09, 2013, 05:05 PM »

Not me, I think it's safer to wait for a while, cause people are reporting many problems with this major version change.

-lotra (November 09, 2013, 02:14 PM)

Most of the changes seem to be cosmetic -- and, once you get used to them, the lack of need to keep clicking up in the toolbar or the Lastpass icon, are reasonably good.

I haven't seen reports of problems but have experienced some of my own -- running Portable Firefox, on a portable HD under WinXP, the new popup-when-you-click-the-icon-in-the-form functionality comes up blank, and the option to do autofill from the main Lastpass menu is several clicks away. But it's okay on my other systems, and you can restore the previous functionality from the "notifications" setting so I'm not entirely sure waiting for bugfixes is necessary.

(I've reported the problems to LastPass and tried some of their suggestions to no avail; it's starting to look like it might be a conflict with another addon but I haven't got it pinned down yet.)

And, like I said, on my other systems 3.01 looks pretty solid. It's just a change in behaviour that rattles people a bit, I suspect.

168

General Software Discussion / Thunderbird signatures

« on: October 21, 2013, 12:13 PM »

Okay, so graphic-heavy signatures are a Bad Thing. <sigh> But I use Thunderbird at work, because it lets me store a zillion emails without the same issues that plague Outlook users, and I need to update my email signature to include a new logo.

I HAVE done this before. But I can't remember what I used, and right now the editors I have that know about html are including

Code: Text [Select]

1. <img src="filename" ...

instead of

Code: Text [Select]

1. <img src="data:image/*;base64,...

The latter style works. The former, for some reason, doesn't.

I'm quite sure I could dig around and find an encoder and amend the code. But I'm lazy, and I'd rather find out either how to make the first style work, or a wysiwyg-type html editor that will look after things like Thunderbird-compatible html email sigs without having all the extra stuff you need to make websites.

(I'm completely sure that I've missed something terribly obvious, somewhere. But I know, every time I've had to do something like this -- and you can probably tell that it doesn't exactly happen very frequently -- I've had to jump through the same set of hoops and failed to make a note of what I did for next time!)

Any helpful advice gratefully appreciated! (Well, almost any. "Encode your graphic and stop being lazy"-type answers will attract derision and may even encourage me to find out how to email a rotten egg smell.)

[Later edit]

Okay, so nobody actually wanted to say it...

I've dug a bit deeper. If I do the Recommended Thing -- basically, make a new email with TB, design away until I have something that looks right, then save it as html, sometimes it works.

But some of the time things go Weird. Like odd shifts of paragraph style, without any obvious way to put them back again. I've assumed that Thunderbird's documented preferences for simple html over "original" html are for better reasons than just processing oomph.

It annoys me that I seem to have to use TB itself to generate these files to have much chance of success -- albeit only about 70% if I'm trying to be too clever -- but that I can't edit TB-generated files inside TB.

Oh, and TB uses file links, not base64-encoded stuff. (I still can't work out what I did to make that happen last time round, a couple of years back.) And sometimes it just shows an outline where the graphic should have been, and more often than not attempts to make the graphic come out at exactly the right size -- in comparison to the text -- fail miserably too.

I wish they'd let me go back to sending plaintext emails.

169

General Software Discussion / Re: LastPass - What are your thoughts?

« on: October 17, 2013, 05:39 AM »

They replied:

Hello Lynette,

Thank you for reaching out. Please enjoy your extended Premium subscription, which is now due to expire 2014-09-25.

Can't get better service than that! 

-CleverCat (October 17, 2013, 02:26 AM)

What astonishingly nice people.

170

General Software Discussion / Lotus Approach

« on: October 09, 2013, 11:26 AM »

I'm a bit of a fan of Lotus Approach. I'm not going to justify that here (but I have good reasons!) but this is more of a plea to anyone who might have any skills with LotusScript and might either be able to point me at some useful online howtos or give me some idea of how to achieve what I want.

I have a table containing nearly 2 million records, the last 1500-ish of which were created from a dubious source and almost certainly contain some corrupt data. I want to squirt out those last records, along with some info collected from a joined table, for analysis.

Approach doesn't seem to "do" record numbers. If it were dBase (look, I'm old, okay, deal with it) I could just open the table with no active index, position the current record somewhere around the point where the problem first occurred and issue a command like "copy next 1600 to outfile" and that would be that. Approach won't let me do that. The record number is dynamic, effectively, so if there's a sort in use, record 1 will be the record that was sorted to the top rather than the first record in the table.

The best I can come up with is to create a numeric field to hold a record number and find a way to work through the records, auto-incrementing that field.

Approach will let you create a field that auto-increments when new records are created, but it won't work retrospectively.

Apparently, this sort of problem can only be solved with LotusScript. There's even a handy LotusScript function that would allow me to get the record number: docwindowobject.CurrentRecord = recordnumber

But how to write a script that will let me use that to create a usable record number that I can then use to identify records I want to export even if I have a sort applied? No idea. Does anyone have any experience with making Approach jump through this sort of a hoop?

171

General Software Discussion / Re: Objective upgrade Netbook with XP to Netbook with Win 7

« on: October 08, 2013, 04:31 AM »

Though I do advise to make a clean W7 install, if only for stability and sanity.
W7 can quite easily be installed from an USB stick. Step-by-step procedures all over google.

-Ath (October 08, 2013, 01:39 AM)

In case it's available at a discount from the standard version, I would also say that my netbook (which came preinstalled with Win7 Starter Edition) works fine with that version. The only notable issues for me are: you can't set wallpaper (but there's a freebie called Oceanis Change Background that works very nicely) and you can't spread your desktop over multiple monitors (but if your netbook allows you to plug in an external monitor W7SE will cheerfully use it AND remember what screen resolution is appropriate for it.) There probably are other deficiencies but I've never found any reason to consider upscaling to a fuller version of W7...

172

General Software Discussion / Re: LastPass - What are your thoughts?

« on: October 08, 2013, 02:07 AM »

[...] I increased the iterations (from 42? "Don't Panic" I guess) up to 5000 [...]

-x16wda (October 03, 2013, 05:16 AM)

Interesting. Mine was at 500.

-Deozaan (October 04, 2013, 05:34 AM)

Ye gods. Mine was at 1. Now fixed. Agreed on the "they should communicate this stuff better" point -- and I AM a paid user.

173

Living Room / Re: Sci-fi novel now available from DC member kyrathaba!

« on: October 05, 2013, 05:48 AM »

Personal problems

-kyrathaba (October 04, 2013, 02:28 PM)

Wow! Sounds like you have a pretty full plate right now. Hang in there.

-40hz (October 04, 2013, 08:11 PM)

+1 to that. Been there, got the T-shirt -- it's not going to be fun but I'm sure you'll get things sorted out.

174

General Software Discussion / Re: Sagelight Image Editor

« on: September 30, 2013, 01:59 AM »

I get more impressed with Sagelight the more I use it. The HDR tools -- which effectively allow you to simulate HDR effects from a single Jpeg -- are quietly impressive, a definite +1 on the noise reduction tools, the Bokeh thing can also produce stunning results and it can use Photoshop-compatible plugins. What's not to like?

I've only recently discovered a workflow that's my current new toy: the undo brush, used in reverse. For instance, increase the saturation of the entire image to a level that you envisage for just (say) a flower, use the undo brush, use the feature within it to fill the entire workspace with the image state before you increased the saturation, then use the brush to remove the undo from the flower: effect, a supersaturated flower against a normal background.

Most "serious" image editors make you think in layers and Sagelight is different: it took me a long time to understand how to work with it and get the sort of results I could see (from the examples on the website) were possible, compared to the other image editors I use. There are still things I wouldn't use it for, but I've reached the point where I won't do ANYTHING with a photo before I've taken it through Sagelight at least once.

I also have no affiliation with the software or its author beyond the normal loyalty you might expect of any happy user.

175

Living Room / Re: Sci-fi novel now available from DC member kyrathaba!

« on: September 09, 2013, 10:25 AM »

No,you have a recent copy. When I get home I will send you the very most recent file, just to be sure...

-kyrathaba (September 09, 2013, 10:20 AM)

I really must write more clearly.

The copy I'm reading and found a couple of misplaced apostrophes in is the one Amazon delivered to my Kindle. The copy YOU sent me either doesn't respond well to me searching for "it's" or has already been corrected.