Messages

251

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

« on: January 09, 2013, 06:12 PM »

You are repeatedly pressing the HOTKEY to show the quick paste menu.. I thought you were bringing up the tray icon menu.

Ok I can reproduce this now.  I will fix -- though it's not really a problem per se, it is disconcerting.

-mouser (December 17, 2012, 05:44 AM)

The tray icon menu is another thing. On my Vista system, if I right-click on the tray icon the menu appears briefly where I'd expect -- above the notification area -- then leaps up 1/3 of the screen so it's approximately vertically centred. It's been doing it for a while, it's most disconcerting, but it doesn't do it on the XP or 7 machines I use. Have I set an obscure option that I shouldn't have? I don't think this USED to happen...

252

N.A.N.Y. 2013 / Re: --> DonationCoder.com NANY 2013 Roundup Summary

« on: January 08, 2013, 06:09 AM »

Congratulations, all -- from the weird to the wonderful, there's a ton of effort expended above and I bet few get the thanks they deserve

253

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: OpalCalc 1.43

« on: December 26, 2012, 09:34 AM »

Thanks for the heads-up, Renegade! I shall be downloading my update momentarily. (Christmas stuff? Nah. That was yesterday. )

254

AutoHotkey / Re: Clicking in fields

« on: October 31, 2012, 11:59 AM »

All my "too complicated" lights have come on at once.

-oblivion (October 29, 2012, 12:01 PM)

Yeah, it's not for the faint of heart.  However, it is reliable.

-skwire (October 29, 2012, 01:58 PM)

My "too complicated" lights have continued to blink, at least intermittently. However, I've done pretty much what I said I'd do if I couldn't find anything simpler: I've downloaded a graphic that sits directly above the input field using UrlDownloadToFile, then used ImageSearch to provide its coordinates, which I then add a bit to and feed to Click.

It still feels clunky. But what the heck, it works -- and I don't have to try to decode what's going on at COM level, which can only be a bonus.

Thanks, both!

255

AutoHotkey / Re: Clicking in fields

« on: October 29, 2012, 12:01 PM »

If you're using IE, you can use the COM interface available in AHK_L.

-skwire (October 26, 2012, 01:29 PM)

All my "too complicated" lights have come on at once.

I'm not a proper programmer, honest!

256

AutoHotkey / Re: Clicking in fields

« on: October 29, 2012, 11:34 AM »

You can locate the position of the text label that's usually on the left side of the input, and click a few pixels right of that? AHK or AutoIt can do that for you.

-Ath (October 26, 2012, 01:08 PM)

I know what I'm looking for on the screen but I can't work out how to find it. I thought ImageSearch was going to help but that looks more like a brute-force mechanism for finding a graphic I already have in a specified area of the screen. That's not quite what I'm trying to do: I'm trying to say "please give me the coordinates in the active window of xyz bit of text or a graphic called abc.jpg"

Do I have to use, say, FileCopy to copy a nearby graphic from the webpage, then ImageSearch to locate it? That feels clunky but I can't find anything better...? 

257

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Vladstudio hallowe'en offer

« on: October 28, 2012, 03:17 PM »

Dramatization of my apartment:

http://cdn.decalgirl...ns/_full/library.jpg

 

-TaoPhoenix (October 28, 2012, 08:01 AM)

Oddly, my wife bought that design for me for my kindle last Christmas. I then bought the same skin to fit my Sansa Clip+. It wasn't until today, when I was browsing all those great wallpapers, that I realised who'd created the design originally!

258

Found Deals and Discounts / Vladstudio hallowe'en offer

« on: October 28, 2012, 07:13 AM »

For anyone who likes art, wallpapers, so forth, the zombies have cut quite a lot of cash from the cost of a Premium account with Vladstudio (Ubuntu users may recognise some of his artwork.)

$1.99 for a lifetime membership, until after Hallowe'en. Bargain.

Vladstudio

Mwah-hah-hah-hah-haaaaaaaaaaaaah...

259

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: Database error

« on: October 27, 2012, 04:38 AM »

The bug was only affect upgraders on the first run of the new version.  No point re-downloading new version if you have 2.16.02 and have already restarted it.

-mouser (October 26, 2012, 05:22 PM)

Phew. I was really worried for a while, there -- like, has my database been scrambled or something. Thanks as always, mouser!

260

Clipboard Help+Spell / Database error

« on: October 26, 2012, 03:54 PM »

I've just developed an error with the new version of CHS.

Error DBG109: DBISam Engine error #11949 SQL parsing error - expected column name but instead found WindowTitle in SELECT SQL statement at line 1 column 112

Help!

Running under 32bit Win7

261

AutoHotkey / Clicking in fields

« on: October 26, 2012, 11:54 AM »

I have an AHK routine that picks up some information and pastes it into an input field on a webpage.

What I'd like to be able to (but can't) is use some sort of keyboard shortcut that put the cursor into said textfield then hit ^v to paste the text. The reason I can't is, apparently, that the developer of the code for the relevant webpage wrote it in dotNet and (he says) there's no way to communicate back out of it to the host PC to set up a keyboard shortcut. So that's that, and all I can do is take advantage of the fact that the field never moves relative to its containing frame, pick an appropriate coordinate and click there.

There's a lot to go wrong with that approach. If IE develops a left-hand bar -- history, for instance -- we'll be clicking in the wrong place.

Can anyone suggest any other possible approaches?

262

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: File manager Desk & Archive

« on: October 25, 2012, 12:33 PM »

Looks like an interesting approach to file management but the portability thing would be a must, for me. My portable hard disk is my primary operating environment most of the time

263

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Listary Pro for only $9.95 on Friday 19 October

« on: October 22, 2012, 01:25 PM »

My two penn'orth... Listary for me does stuff that my file manager of choice (Opus) doesn't help with. The point of Listary interacting with file dialogues is not to enhance the file manager in current use, it's to bring the file manager into most file dialogues.

For instance: I often create pdfs via a pdf printer. Listary remembers the places I routinely save pdfs and offers them to me. It doesn't do that when I'm just saving files, because it's a different dialogue generated by a different program. It's significantly more reliable than Windows "recent places" thing (which I never found works well) and with a bit of work I can set up a favourite locations list too.

Its only deficiency from my point of view is, in comparison with the program I used to use (FileBX) it doesn't switch file dialogues into details view and sort most recent first automatically, which fbx did and I still miss. But it's a brilliant program for anyone who uses multiple storage locations on their system, in my view. And it's portable too.

264

Screenshot Captor / Scrolling capture wonderfulness

« on: October 02, 2012, 05:22 PM »

I got presented, late this afternoon, with an 800 page PDF that had clearly never been intended to be printed. Actually, most of it didn't need to be, but there are four pages with a lot of detail, in tables, set out in a tiny font that, even blown up to A3, still comes out no bigger than about 5pt.

Nothing I have that can edit PDFs could do anything helpful.

Eventually, after much messing around, I did this:

Use a freebie PDF splitter (I used PDFill -- I don't like it, it crashed twice, but it did the job on the third attempt) to pull out the relevant pages into a standalone PDF.

Use SumatraPDF (I don't like Adobe and avoid it whenever possible) to display the new file and zoomed in until the text was all extremely visible.

Used ScreenshotCaptor in its capture scrolling object mode to capture the document to a PNG that can then be cropped and scaled appropriately and printed using a poster-printing mode.

And It Just Worked. Well, I helped it by counting the vertical and horizontal moves (15 x 4, in case you care) but I didn't even have to fine-tune the final join. Perfect.

More brownie points for me and every chance of upsetting a number of people who clearly believe the best way to hide important information is to print it extremely small and protect the PDF against text copying. Hah.

Okay, it's sad, I was on my own and nobody was around but I actually said aloud "Mouser, you're a genius!" (If you were listening VERY hard, you might even have heard me.)

  

265

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: XYplorer on BDJ on September 5th

« on: September 05, 2012, 05:04 AM »

...and a bump to remind you

266

General Software Discussion / Re: Ritlabs "support" gem

« on: August 24, 2012, 09:43 AM »

I note The Bat Pro is on BDJ today, with a 50% discount.

It's sad, really: it's a really decent, capable, configurable email client that I've loved for years -- until it (or rather, Voyager) ate my email archives, proved immediately afterwards that its backups weren't anything of the sort, and immediately after that their support wasn't worthy of the name. I went to Thunderbird too.

I still miss The Bat -- but not enough that I'm prepared to trust it with valuable data again.

267

Found Deals and Discounts / XYplorer on BDJ on September 5th

« on: August 14, 2012, 06:00 AM »

Got this a couple of hours ago:

Hello XYplorer User Forum member,

on Wednesday, Sept 5, 2012, XYplorer's Lifetime License Pro will be
available at BitsDuJour with a 50% discount. That means you can save $30 /
€25. You might make a note for yourself and spread the word to your friends
and colleagues.

Consider this a "spreading of the word."

268

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Giveaway: Wondershare Fantashow (movie/slideshow maker)

« on: August 03, 2012, 07:56 AM »

In case it interests anybody, on my site there is a new giveaway for Wondershare Fantashow.

-rgdot (July 11, 2012, 10:51 AM)

I left a comment but got no response. (I even went back and checked a few days later.) Just looked again today and my comment has evaporated. 

269

Living Room / Re: MP3 players for podcasts

« on: July 24, 2012, 12:00 PM »

Easiest would be to just swap SD cards.

-40hz (July 24, 2012, 07:07 AM)

Cheapest, definitely. But the database rebuilding process is time-consuming and to go through that every time I put the 32Gb SD back in :shudder:

I don't know about you, but I never felt the need to keep a full podcast list on my portable device.

That's not what I do. I never -- or very, very rarely -- listen to podcasts more than once, but I tend to accrue them slightly faster than I listen to them, with the result that I have a backlog. So my PC has a folder of unheard podcasts on it, and my MP3 player gets loaded with the oldest few from that folder -- depending on available space -- which get deleted from the PC straight away and deleted from the MP3 player in due course, once played. I don't want to get to a position where I've emptied the playlist, so once I've listened to maybe 2/3 of the 10-20 podcasts on the player, I delete the listened-to ones to make space and copy a new batch to the end of the playlist.

Is that weird? I'm starting to think nobody else does this, or anything like it...  

And since that's such a small number of items to keep track of, it's easy for me to just 'drag and drop' without getting too fancy about it.

Mostly, that relies on playback being acceptable if the order isn't an issue or if the player's very good about playing things back in the order delivered. My Zen wouldn't do that -- it always tried to sort things by artist -- and while I think the Clip might be better at handling things in the order written to disk, I'd rather take control, if possible.

I'm currently experimenting with Mediamonkey. It will export an m3u playlist directly to the player that I then have to hand-edit to remove the drive letter from each line, but it might do most of what I want, one way or another. (I just have to wait 20 minutes, while the media's refreshed, to find out!)

This is so blasted complicated that I am beginning to think that it IS me that's weird, here.  

270

Living Room / Re: MP3 players for podcasts

« on: July 24, 2012, 05:33 AM »

I'm not an MP3 "power user" if you will, in that I haven't taken the time to figure out playlists and some of the other options. The way I work it works for me.

-bob99 (July 20, 2012, 08:14 AM)

I think maybe I need to become a bit of a "power user."

I have a Sansa Clip + already, with vast amounts of music on it, spread between internal memory and a 32Gb micro SD card. I'm currently trying to work out if I should buy another one just for podcasts, buy an SD card just for podcasts that I swap with the music card when required, or something else entirely.

My podcast management process with the Zen has been relatively painless: use MediaMonkey to delete the podcasts I've listened to from the top of the playlist (which helpfully deletes not just the playlist entries but also the associated files) then use the Zen media management software to copy the next oldest podcasts off my hard disk to the bottom of the playlist (which transfers the files and makes playlist entries in one go.) [Mediamonkey won't file-transfer to device-hosted playlists -- or I can't make it do so, anyway.] Finally I can reorder the playlist so I get the right sort of mix (for instance, I'd rather alternate between comedy and serious than have too many of one sort one after another) and still ensure that I don't listen to something newer than something else I haven't heard yet. That gives me a playlist I can return to, it means I don't have to do any navigation if I'm listening in the car or vacuuming the house -- my two main things for this.

The difficult bit, I think, is keeping the playlist in synch with the files. I could edit the playlist with a text editor but that won't do the file management. I can move files around anyway I like but filenames aren't as helpful as the ID tags that the media software shows me.

Rockbox's native playlist features are -- I gather -- really powerful but the Clip + just doesn't have the most usable screen/interface for this stuff.

<sigh> I think I feel a request to a programmer coming on...

271

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: OpalCalc 1.43

« on: July 20, 2012, 10:14 AM »

Yes Win calc is treating it as (5 - 4 + 2) ÷ 10 × 2, but I'd rather use the standard mathematical precedence where divide and multiply have higher priority - i.e.: 5 - 4 + (2 ÷ 10 × 2). What do others think?

-Twinbee (July 20, 2012, 09:53 AM)

Proper mathematical precedence, definitely. If I wanted a stupid calculator, I'd use the one they sell in the supermarket for $1.56 (at current exchange values according to OC.)

272

Living Room / Re: MP3 players for podcasts

« on: July 20, 2012, 09:37 AM »

If you already have a smartphone, most have an app specifically for podcasts.

-40hz (July 20, 2012, 09:10 AM)

My wife has a smartphone. I bought her a 32Gb SD card for it and loaded all her music onto it in the hope that she'd let me "inherit" her (rather newer) Zen MP3 player but she insists that battery life on the thing is only just good enough for using it as a phone and a portable web browser without making it play music too.

My own cellphone is a not-too-ancient but not-too-smart Sony that I bought because I thought it'd be a decent alternative MP3 player, but its playlist management is either not good enough or I'm not smart enough to get it to work the way I want -- either is possible!

273

Living Room / MP3 players for podcasts

« on: July 20, 2012, 06:23 AM »

I have two main MP3 players. The new kid on the block, a Sandisk Sansa Clip 8Gb with a 32Gb SD card, holds pretty much all the music I have, works very well, cost me far less than a 40Gb player should have done and, in general, I'm pretty happy with it.

Its downside is that any time I want to mess around with its contents, it's quite time-consuming, mostly because it's a lot of stuff to load into a database. So my old player -- a now venerable Creative Zen V+ 4Gb creature -- is still in fairly constant use as a player of podcasts. I download anything up to about ten podcasts a week (mostly BBC programmes with a side order of Answer me This and The Bugle) to a PC.

I have a "Pods" playlist on the player. The idea is that it's not terribly static. Every so often I delete the podcasts I've already listened to from the player (which automagically removes them from the playlist) then transfer the oldest twenty or so to the player (using the Creative media software to automatically add them to the end of the playlist, more-or-less in chronological order.)

So far so kludgy. (Actually, it works quite well!)

The problem? Well, the player's starting to show its age. In particular, the OLED display is getting dim. It's still readable, but it's a challenge in bright light -- and if it gets much worse, the player's going to be unusable.

So I need to think about a replacement.

Ideally, I want something inexpensive and probably no more than 1-2Gb. But it MUST be reliable with: knowing how far it's got through an MP3 and being able to resume it painlessly at powerup; playing 30-60 minute MP3s without choking; and playlist support for playlists that are externally editable with something like Mediamonkey.

Anyone got any suggestions?

274

Living Room / Re: Strange Windows Explorer problem - anyone know how to fix this?

« on: July 20, 2012, 05:03 AM »

When Windows Explorer opens the Documents library (on Win 7 x64) everything appears normal but there are some files that when you double click to open them they cause Windows Explorer to freeze and you have to use task manager to restart Explorer.

-Carol Haynes (July 20, 2012, 04:26 AM)

Could it be an AV issue? Something doing realtime scanning on certain files in certain locations, perhaps, that might need its behaviour tweaked?

275

General Software Discussion / Re: A unified solution for note taking and task management

« on: July 17, 2012, 05:49 AM »

@PaulKeith - I was just wondering...on your travels...have you ever found a feedreader that worked exactly the way you thought one should? Because I certainly haven't.

-40hz (July 14, 2012, 08:41 AM)

Just my two cents: while I suspect I may not be the average user of feedreaders, I've only ever found one I liked, and it's a Firefox addon called Newsfox.

It took a bit of messing around to get it to work how I wanted it to: in particular, the sort options are unintuitive (but I got the info I needed from the forum.)