Messages

226

General Software Discussion / Re: thunderbird alternative

« on: April 17, 2013, 05:50 AM »

Needless to say I uninstalled Postbox and haven't used it since.

-J-Mac (April 17, 2013, 05:36 AM)

Can't say I blame you.

I played with it for a while but found some features were either missing until payment was made or just broken. I couldn't find out which, found the lack of contact facilities frustrating and came to the conclusion that I didn't care to persevere. Your experience suggests that I am unlikely to regret giving up.

It does look like a nice implementation of a more stripped-back version of Thunderbird.

I've taken my courage firmly in both hands and installed The Bat! I'm not going to let it do any encryption and I'll be very careful before I let it start to build up local message stores. At the moment, it feels like coming home after being away for months.

227

General Software Discussion / Re: thunderbird alternative

« on: April 11, 2013, 10:20 AM »

As long as so many developers (and users) can't seem to understand that a PIM, a newsreader, and an e-mail client are intrinsically separate things (at least IMO) we'll continue to live with flaky poorly integrated 'features' and bloat.

-40hz (April 11, 2013, 08:48 AM)

I blame Outlook Pro -- pretty sure nobody had tried bolting more than an addressbook onto an email client before then. I'd argue, though, that meeting scheduling managed through an email-ish approach isn't a bad thing, and it's sort of inevitable that you're then going to want a reasonably well-featured addressbook rather than something basic. It's the "let's add presentation graphics and coffee-machine-management" thinking that's responsible for most of the problems, though, as you say.

And what I find most amazing is how few have built-in provisions for backing up their own message stores.

...and, in the case of The Bat (Voyager version) at the point I gave up with it, even when there IS backup, it isn't always reliable. Grumble grumble grumble...

So be it. I've pretty much given up. Claws Mail comes close enough for me. It'll do.

Well, I'm currently playing with the 30 day trial of PostBox, and Claws I'll take a look at too, in due course. Recommendations are usually a good start, anyway -- thanks!

228

General Software Discussion / Re: thunderbird alternative

« on: April 11, 2013, 04:22 AM »

What is it about The Bat that so many people are willing to make excuses for it and its dev team, while at the same time leveling criticisms for the exact same things on its competitors?

I just don't get that part.  

-40hz (April 09, 2013, 09:27 AM)

Where The Bat really gets things right, it gets them very right indeed. The "Sorting Office" is brilliant -- you need something like the Nostalgy addon to even get close with Thunderbird.

I don't actually know that The Bat was written by people who started out in FidoNet (where my first serious exposure to proper electronic messaging happened) but it feels like it. FidoNet, because the transport and storage costs were borne by ordinary home users with modems, took an economical approach to messages that Internet email never bothered to learn -- because somebody else was paying the bill. So emails quote everything the last guy wrote and everything you wrote to him the time before and so on and nobody cares because moving a 200k email costs the same as moving a 5k email.

[Yes, the old fart's grumbling again. Nothing to see here, move along.]

Er, anyway, The Bat supports proper quoting and makes selective editing of quotes (and their reformatting) simple and straightforward, which leads to a conversational view of emails that makes sense of the concept in a way that the current fad for "call every email with the same subject and between the same two people a conversation" doesn't -- in the sense that the former leads to communication where the latter requires research and time and re-reading irrelevances to get to the important bits.

It's a losing battle: for one thing, both sides of the conversation have to cooperate and work the same way, and people are lazy. But I can't make Thunderbird do proper quoting, Outlook has never really supported it, anything that has its roots in *nix doesn't quite get it either (the likes of Mulberry, say) I haven't worked out whether PostBox will (only, I suspect, if an old and no-longer-compatible Thunderbird addon is available for it) and I can only carry on promoting the Cause Of Economical And Communicative Email if I can swallow my concerns and go back to The Bat!

If I'm honest, I think there's never EVER really been a good email client. While databases are at the core of most if not all client email solutions, and while database management systems remain non-bulletproof, there probably never will be.

229

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Copernic Desktop Search Pro Version on Bits Today, 18 July 2012

« on: April 10, 2013, 10:04 AM »

---9 months later the same question.

-Curt (April 09, 2013, 10:07 AM)

I used to use the free version, before it became so restricted compared to the commercial one that I decided I was being bullied and quit. (I may be misremembering, but I think they may also have ditched support for .DBF tables, which was my main reason for using it.) But it IS very good, if you want to pay the money and if you're interested in searching the contents of your files. (If all you care about is filenames, I'd go with Everything, Locate32 or the new version of Listary.)

I used X1 for a while, too. Their viewer library (the Stellent one, I think) is still occasionally very useful, but its the only bit of the free version of X1 I kept. Can't remember anymore why I went off it...

230

General Software Discussion / Re: (poll) Six free security tools from Microsoft

« on: April 10, 2013, 09:44 AM »

I have always had a slightly ambivalent relationship with AV tools.

My main desktop machine is more used by my wife (who routinely hits the "temporarily allow everything on this webpage" option in NoScript, sadly) so I have a paid AV package on there (eSet NOD32).

This year, they offered me an almost free update to the full Internet Security offering. I resisted: I have yet to see one of those that doesn't cause more problems than it solves.

My netbook has had MSE for the last two years but, amidst odd reports of it being less secure than it was (because it's become a big enough target, I guess) I've just replaced it with NOD32 too (the second license was reasonably cheap).

Interestingly, dcupdate works a heck of a lot faster now MSE's gone.

So I still use the Malicious Software Removal Tool, even though it's never found anything and makes Patch Tuesday more of a chore than I'd like and Defender's on both systems -- NOD32 replicates quite a lot of its functionality, I think, but they seem to coexist happily.

MSE did find something, once, on my netbook: an infected JPG on some webpage or other, if memory serves. NOD32 seems a decent-enough product, the support is at least reasonably responsive, the program's very configurable, not very obtrusive and seems effective.

I hadn't even heard of the offline version of Defender before reading Fred Langa's article yesterday. Nice to know it exists, I guess. Ditto the Safety Scanner.

231

General Software Discussion / Re: thunderbird alternative

« on: April 09, 2013, 08:56 AM »

Well, I still own a license for the current version of The Bat!, perhaps I should try again.

Coincidentally, though, I just saw a thing on TechRepublic that mentioned a client I haven't previously heard of: i.Scribe. Anyone tried it?

[edit to add]

The free version is limited, the commercial version is $10, adds support for multiple identities/accounts... but the author's spelling is worrying

232

General Software Discussion / Video conferencing

« on: April 08, 2013, 11:17 AM »

I've used an old PC at work to set up an internal chat server. (I used ejabberd, running under ubuntu, in case that means anything to you.) It's been through a couple of incarnations -- in fact, its first existence was based on Openfire, but the latter doesn't seem to want to play ball with me when it comes to updates and nobody cared when I said they'd need to set up their accounts again -- but it seems uncontroversial, it works reliably on a relatively ancient PC that was headed for the junkpile, and it doesn't use any valuable Windows licenses.

Which is all very fine and pleasant but a couple of people are now pushing me to add videoconferencing facilities to it -- the point being that they don't want to install Skype when we might be able to do something internally.

So suddenly I need either one or two things and I'm either googling badly or what I want isn't available without paying some third party to provide it. I need a chat client that can also handle voice and video, and if ejabberd can't handle the binary streams without help, I need some sort of plugin for it.

I started researching this on the assumption that it wasn't going to be rocket science and that I'd find a solution really easily.

Guess what? I haven't got any sort of handle on what to do. There have been suggestions that I need a SIP server (which looks complicated and possibly far more than is actually required) but I have yet to find anything that looks like a simple recipe for what I want to do.

Anybody here done anything like this? Or can point me at an online resource I can go and bang my forehead against for a while, before deciding I'm out of my depth? (I pretend to understand a bit about ubuntu but if I'm honest, I'm happiest with a gui, these days!)

233

General Software Discussion / Re: thunderbird alternative

« on: April 08, 2013, 10:41 AM »

IMAP support is amazing. Even compared to Thunderbird.

-Tuxman (April 04, 2013, 06:13 AM)

Agreed - The Bat remains the best IMAP client, despite the slow development (I've been waiting a long time for something as basic as the option of a two-line message list, but still use it for its unparalleled IMAP support).

-johnk (April 05, 2013, 04:04 PM)

There's a lot about The Bat! that I miss, but I am still looking for something reliable and am sticking with Thunderbird until I find it. (I bought The Bat Pro so I could use Voyager. Voyager, three times yet, stomped on my messagebases and because the internal repair routines just aren't very good and the encryption is excellent, I lost a lot of important email.)

Thunderbird did something like that to me too, not all that long ago. (A bug that corrupted email being moved from an IMAP to a local folder.) But Mozilla noticed the problem and fixed it -- something Ritlabs never did, despite my repeated bug reports.

But I miss: proper quoting; the marvellous rules; not having to put up with Thunderbird's idiosyncratic HTML support; the scheduler; so many things... it's just a shame that Ritlabs give every impression of not giving a flying damn about their customers.

234

General Software Discussion / Re: anyone else using Vipre2013 antivirus?

« on: April 08, 2013, 10:26 AM »

my preliminary research showed Vipre to be a pretty darn good piece of software... but now I am not so sure.

Anyone else have any thing to say on this?

-techidave (April 06, 2013, 08:06 AM)

I bought a lifetime license for Vipre at the end of 2011, for my netbook. Again, my research found lots of good things said about it.

My own experience wasn't so good. I gave up with it after about a month of bad experiences and frustrations (like XYPlorer having to be whitelisted before its update could be run and the XYPlorer website being listed as a source of malware (which it isn't.)

I keep thinking about trying it again, to see if it's learned better behaviour in the last year or so -- but it sounds like it hasn't. Probably a bit late to ask for a refund, though...

Currently running eSet's (rather underrated) NOD32 AV on the netbook and we seem happy with each other thus far

235

Screenshot Captor / Re: LATEST VERSION INFO THREAD - ScreenshotCaptor - v4.0 - March 26, 2013

« on: April 04, 2013, 04:49 AM »

Just spotted this (as a result of recommending the program to a colleague) on the main ScreenshotCaptor page:

Ability to embed textual comments in files or add attractiv captions to images and printouts.

Oddly, the missing 'e' attracted my attention, so maybe it's an attractive misspelling in more ways than one

236

Multi Photo Quotes / Re: Latest Multi Photo Quotes Release v2.00.01 - March 25, 2013

« on: April 02, 2013, 05:08 PM »

Awesome! 

-mouser (April 02, 2013, 02:22 PM)

I thought so. I don't always agree with Samer, but he's one of the -- apparently, anyway -- genuinely independent commentators whose opinion is always worthy of consideration. And a thumbs-up from him is a definite bonus

237

Multi Photo Quotes / Re: Latest Multi Photo Quotes Release v2.00.01 - March 25, 2013

« on: April 02, 2013, 10:56 AM »

Have you seen:


this?

238

General Software Discussion / Re: Recycling hardware

« on: February 26, 2013, 12:54 AM »

Windows 7's virtual XP mode might be a way round that.

-oblivion (February 25, 2013, 11:30 AM)

Does it allow software to pass an OS version check by lying when you install something, reporting that you are attempting to install it on XP and not Win7?

-app103 (February 25, 2013, 05:56 PM)

Yes. XP doesn't know it's running virtually. Version checks only report XP, from inside the VM.

I'm currently experimenting (at work) with a piece of software that requires the presence of a 16-bit NetBIOS stack to run. XP has it, 7 doesn't (and can't be given it.) The software works in XP mode and, once the application's been "published" to the Win7 host, appears to be running directly on the Win7 desktop. It's VERY cool. (I never EVER thought I'd say that about a Microsoft product!) The only downside is that it takes a long time to start up, the first time it's used after rebooting -- effectively because you're not just loading a program, you're booting a machine and THEN starting a program.

239

General Software Discussion / Re: Recycling hardware

« on: February 25, 2013, 11:30 AM »

This means that once I move beyond XP, my old Jornada may be completely useless.

-app103 (February 25, 2013, 11:03 AM)

Windows 7's virtual XP mode might be a way round that. At least, it seems to be a full, honest-to-goodness virtual machine with enough ability to talk to USB and optical drives that things that don't work any other way, can.

What I'm not sure about is if Win8 has anything similar.

240

General Software Discussion / Re: Recycling hardware

« on: February 25, 2013, 08:26 AM »

So the question is: what should I do with the thing?

-oblivion (February 25, 2013, 06:35 AM)

I'm keeping them to donate to a museum in a few years.

-Renegade (February 25, 2013, 06:51 AM)

I think my ex-wife still has an Intertec Superbrain (twin Z80 processors, ran CP/M off two vertically-mounted hard-sectored 5 1/4" floppy disks) sat in her attic, waiting for me to find a good use for it. One day I'll retrieve it and find a museum for it, I keep telling myself.

I remember the days when they looked futuristic. (I also remember learning Z80 assembler on one of the things. Now there were some futureproof skills. )

(Oh, and a perfectly excellent operating system whose size could be measured in kilobytes!)

241

General Software Discussion / Recycling hardware

« on: February 25, 2013, 06:35 AM »

(Yes, I know this area's for software. Bear with me!)

I have an old Dell Axim X30. It was an attempt to find a better way to do PDAish things than my old Psion 5mx, which kept needing its screen cable replacing but which had functionality oozing from every pore.

The X30 didn't cut the mustard. It'd synch with Outlook (but I didn't care whether it could or not) and I couldn't find any good ways to make it do things I felt useful. So it got shoved to the back of a drawer and forgotten about.

I found it again recently. Of course, Dell quit supporting them long ago, and I don't expect a 624MHz cpu is quite as exciting a prospect these days as it was when it was new.

So the question is: what should I do with the thing? I'm pretty sure its SD handling doesn't extend beyond 2Gb (ie not SDHC) and a bit of a play online hasn't suggested anything to me along the lines of "this hack will enable you to resurrect your Axim as a shiny and capable linux device." But I'm ever so averse to throwing something away that is still functional. Should I reinstall ActiveSync on my PC and see if it leads me to anything I didn't think of a few years back, shove it back in the drawer, or Something Else?

Here's the software bit: does anyone know if there's a way to get a usable linux onto it without requiring that I study Complicated Things for several years first?

242

General Software Discussion / Re: Removing dual-boots

« on: February 04, 2013, 05:01 AM »

I'm sure it's a coincidence, but techsupportalert.com have published this helpful article today.

It includes links to legitimate downloads of Win 7 ISOs.

Oh, and as a final addendum to the previous note, the partition resizing went perfectly too.

243

General Software Discussion / Re: Removing dual-boots

« on: February 02, 2013, 04:14 PM »

Just resizing partitions now but it all looks good. One note: it was "bootrec /fixmbr" as the first step and the second step was scary - it claimed that it could see 0 Windows partitions. I rebooted anyway and it all worked perfectly :-)

Thanks to everyone for all your help!

-- Tim

244

General Software Discussion / Re: Removing dual-boots

« on: February 02, 2013, 01:47 PM »

Addendum:

I just noticed the link to get the recovery disks charges $20 for a copy - supposedly because of "licensing requirements." That sounds like a crock to me.

-40hz (February 02, 2013, 11:58 AM)

You're probably right.

Anybody you know with a copy of Windows 7 can create a boot/recovery disk for you - as you probably can yourself.

If I borrow an optical dvd writer from somewhere, yes, I can.

I've got a note of Carol's instructions (thanks, Carol!) I have a full image of the system and bootable recovery media (that will enable me to restore the backup) and I still have the recovery partition on the hard disk that will give me a factory restore, from which I can reinstall Paragon and recover again -- albeit replacing my dual-boot system with the same dual-boot system -- so I think I have my belt, braces and a parachute all in place.

Wish me luck: I'm goin' in.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Removing dual-boots

« on: February 02, 2013, 10:34 AM »

Perfect - thanks!

I shall be sorry to leave too -- I've enjoyed watching ubuntu evolve, but I'll probably make some space on my desktop machine for it instead.

246

General Software Discussion / Removing dual-boots

« on: February 02, 2013, 08:45 AM »

My netbook dual-boots between Win7 and Ubuntu. Been that way for a couple of years, works fine.

But I have a lot of Windows stuff, a lot of time and effort invested in it, and Ubuntu only rarely gets used. So I want the space back.

I think I can probably use Paragon's Hard Disk Manager suite to remove the partitions and redistribute the space (I have a primary and an extended partition. The extended partition contains all the linux-relevant partitions and an NTFS partition that I set up to be shared between the two OSes. So undoing all that it going to be fun and I'll probably do it a bit at a time, for safety.)

However, Grub has moved into the MBR and I can't work out how I'm going to make it go away.

The general answer courtesy of Google is to boot from the Win7 installation disk, start the recovery console and use fixboot.

I can't do that. I don't have a Win7 installation disk or a DVD drive.

I can't even work out how to install the recovery console. I'm obviously being stupid today.

Any ideas?

247

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: [Bug] Menu displaying

« on: January 25, 2013, 12:46 AM »

Left-clicking does not produce same bug as right-click?

-mouser (January 24, 2013, 08:41 PM)

No. The menu is positioned just above the taskbar as it should be.

248

General Software Discussion / Re: PicPick vs FastStone Capture vs Screenshot Captor vs Jet Screenshot

« on: January 24, 2013, 09:52 AM »

For what little it's worth -- particularly given that there doesn't seem to be much to choose on the  functionality front -- SC is my preferred option of those mentioned here. I agree that the UI feels perhaps a tiny bit cluttered but it's never let me down yet, it seems to be able to cope well with everything I've ever needed from it, AND, apparently unlike the others with the possible exception of PicPick (which I can't use at work) it has a portable version. [I FAR prefer portable software these days: my preferred computing environment is the one that only exists when I plug in my portable HD and fire up LaunchBarCommander (from which everything else flows!)]

I don't do the scrolling capture thing often, but the one time I needed it (and I badly needed it to work quickly and effectively, can't remember why but it was a big window, maybe four horizontal screens by eight vertical) after not too much effort, I got what I needed.

249

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Earlier versions of Serif software at bargain prices until 4 Jan. 2013

« on: January 17, 2013, 07:16 AM »

For what little it's worth, I've used most of Serif's "big hitters" over the years. I also vary between slightly and deeply unhappy with some of their sales techniques (they phone me to keep me "up to date" every so often and I generally end up getting quite annoyed if I get one of the sales monkeys who's been taught to use the customer's first name in every sentence alongside asking questions to which the psychologically obvious answer is "yes" which of course creates a drive to go on saying it) but their products are mostly at least okay and sometimes excellent.

PagePlus has been a pretty fair PDF generator for quite a while, but its ability to edit PDFs from other sources has been limited, at least up to X5. (I have X6 but have so far only used it for one major piece of work.)

DrawPlus is, as several have said, a pretty decent vector graphics editor. Xara is faster and possibly more capable but it doesn't think the way I do and I generally get on better with DP. (My favourite Serif deal was when they offered me DP and a graphics tablet at what was -- for the time -- an extremely good price. I've been addicted to graphics tablets ever since and only use a mouse when I absolutely have to.) Most of the avatars I've ever used have been homebrewed using DP. The current one's no exception

PhotoPlus isn't the best photo editor around (although it's pretty capable). I tend to split my time between SageLight for tweaking the overall image, PhotoPlus for adding things like text or for lifting things off backgrounds, and Xara for object removal. As I do far less of the latter two things, you might correctly guess that I don't use PhotoPlus all that much anymore.

I have used WebPlus. I don't much like it, but I've been asked to make a couple of static websites for people in the past and because that's not really my main area of expertise (something of an understatement, if I'm honest!) I've been happy to use anything that lets me do design and doesn't make me worry about anything too complicated. Given that, it's fine -- but I looked into the Serif-hosted bits of functionality a year or so back and found the whole idea gave me the heebs.

Serif's techies have usually been better to deal with than their sales guys. Their technical support -- on the odd occasions where I've needed it -- generally has been quite good. There are odd exceptions -- there's a file dialogue bug that they've been aware of for some years that I think remains unfixed, for instance -- but if you can either put up with or get shot of the aggravating salespeople, most of the products are at least acceptable and at best significantly better value for money than their competitors.

250

Living Room / Re: Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz dies at 26

« on: January 13, 2013, 06:00 PM »

I have obviously spent a very long time with my head under a rock. I spent some time today, having seen this post here and deciding I needed to know more about the whys and wherefores of this, reading various news reports, analyses and the like, and found out a lot that I don't think I'd properly realised about the US justice system. Despite paying a fair amount of attention to the Bradley Manning case, I somehow felt it was the exception rather than the rule.

Clearly, I was wrong.

Even though I'm currently reading a polemic disguised as a work of fiction by Cory Doctorow (Pirate Cinema, got it via the Humble ebook Bundle, and very good it is too), who has also written this tribute, I hadn't quite got to grips with the pervasive nature of the concept of "intellectual property" and the way the legal industry has found to keep itself in dollars by continually redefining crime in its respect in more and more abstruse ways.

And although the treatment of Aaron Swartz by the US justice system is utterly reprehensible, I'm quite sure there's no room for complacency for those of us who aren't US citizens.

I hope some lessons are being or will be learned.

But I fear they will not be. There's too many lawyers' jobs on the line.