Messages

51

Living Room / Re: How to check xlsx files for malicious macros or virus

« on: March 03, 2018, 11:19 AM »

Apparently even CSV files (!) can be vectors for an exploit: http://georgemauer.n...7/csv-injection.html

I find that having a Linux VM to open files I don't trust (Office docs, PDFs, etc) keeps my mind at ease.  VirtualBox is free and will work great for this.  It's not necessarily completely fool proof (I imagine that even OpenOffice could be have some vulnerability), but I figure it would sandbox things well enough.

52

General Software Discussion / Re: online bookmark service to import 100K Linkmans for search on road

« on: January 11, 2018, 09:09 AM »

Would the github alternative above accomplish more, or is it the same thing?

-Steven Avery (January 11, 2018, 04:43 AM)

The github suggestion was just a simple way to get something like a single page website for free.

53

Living Room / Re: How a researcher hacked his own computer and found 'worst' chip flaw

« on: January 07, 2018, 04:01 AM »

Regardless of the FUD, I think the technique is fascinating.  From the little I understand, the attack uses instructions that access inaccessible memory, but the instructions are "never executed" so they don't cause the program to crash. However the processor does "speculatively execute" the instructions so they affect the cache. And by observing the cache behavior the attacker can determine the contents of memory that the program is not permitted to access.

Amazing.

54

Living Room / Re: Whatsapp Desktop: can it do videocalls?

« on: January 07, 2018, 03:51 AM »

Try it and you tell us.

-mouser (January 06, 2018, 05:14 PM)

OP said he tried but couldn't figure out how.  I think he was wanting to know if he was missing something.

55

General Software Discussion / Re: online bookmark service to import 100K Linkmans for search on road

« on: January 04, 2018, 04:08 PM »

It's been a long while since I used Linkman.  It looks like there's a capability to export bookmarks using an HTML template; they provide 5 examples. Perhaps one of those (or a modification of one of those) can get your bookmarks exported to a webpage (website?) and you can drop that on some web server to access from anywhere.

An simple way to get a free webpage is to create a project on github or bitbucket and export the HTML as a Markdown-formatted readme.md file.  I think that github at least will also allow simple HTML in the readme.md.

I'm not sure how well this would scale to 70MB/100K links though.

56

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Vegas Pro Edit 14 $20 on Humble

« on: December 22, 2017, 05:53 PM »

Vegas 14 may be upgraded to version 15 for merely $199

-Curt (December 22, 2017, 04:13 PM)

Keep in mind that at the moment, Vegas Pro Edit 15 (the 'Edit' edition of Vegas Pro 14 is what is in the Humble Bundle deal) is offered for $150 until Dec 26:

  - http://www.vegascrea...m/us/vegas-pro-edit/

57

Found Deals and Discounts / Vegas Pro Edit 15 $25 on Humble

« on: December 14, 2017, 01:36 PM »

Humble has a new bundle that includes the Vegas Pro Edit 14 video editor in the $20 tier:

  - https://www.humblebu...pro-creative-freedom

The bundle runs until Christmas day if I did my calendar math right.

I haven't used Vegas Pro because it's expensive and I don't do a lot with video editing, but it seems to have a good reputation.  It used to be owned by Sony but at some point last year it was acquired by Majix.  The SKU that's in the bundle is "Pro Edit" which is the less expensive of the three SKUs.  The other Vega SKUs are "Pro" and "Pro Suite" which appear to add things that are of little interest to me.

Vegas Pro is up to version 15 right now; I'm not sure what changes/features have been added between 14 & 15.  Vegas Pro Edit 15 is on sale for $150 right now on the official site; the normal price is $500 according to that page. (I don't know if this one of those "Oriental Rug" situations where something is perpetually on sale, or if it's an actual deal).

There's also a bunch of other stuff in the various tiers, but I'm only potentially interested in Vegas.

Anyway - if anyone has actual experience with this tool, I'd appreciate comments about whether this $20 deal might be worthwhile for someone like me who has only modest video editing needs. Right now I mostly just clip video snippets now and again.

58

Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"

« on: December 07, 2017, 07:58 PM »

WTF fun fact #8202

...prove that the use of true facts...

I guess it's a sad reality of today's "alternative facts" world that someone might feel the need to explicitly label "facts" as true.


WTF fun fact #8210

in medieval years, an hour was divided into 4 puncta (quarter-hours), 10 minuta, or 40 momenta. So if you asked someone to "wait a moment", turns out that you really asked them to wait for about 90 seconds.

Even more interesting to me is that if you asked them to "wait a minute", it turns out that you really asked them to wait for 6 minutes.

59

General Software Discussion / Re: Notetaking software

« on: December 04, 2017, 04:28 PM »

While considering things mentioned in this thread, I came to realize that some editors that I hadn't tried in a while support Markdown along with projects much better than what I have been using.  This makes a "directory-tree-with-a-bunch-of-Markdown-files" much more usable as a knowlegebase/notetaking system.

I've been playing around with Visual Studio Code just a little bit, and I think I'm sold on it.  My barebones KB now has:

  - a project containing references to all the topics/notes
  - side-by-side (with synchronized scrolling) or toggled viewing of the markdown formatted for viewing
  - search across the whole KB
  - git integration

And VS Code is cross-platform, so I get all this on my  Linux boxes too.

The downside is that I have to learn a new editor (but I hear it's pretty good).  On the plus side I get my 100% portable, sync-able, and selfhost-able knowlegebase along with very usable editing and searching.

I hear that Atom has similar Markdown support (I haven't tried it though).

I'm kinda psyched.

60

General Software Discussion / Re: Notetaking software

« on: November 30, 2017, 11:08 PM »

I still mostly use Surfulater - I haven't tried the new online variant, Clibu, that Nev has come up with.  I have only loosely followed the development off and on. I know that there has been some commitment to allowing offline and/or self-hosted data, but I'm honestly not sure how far along that is.

Surfulater still works pretty well for my needs, but I really want it to be able to sync with remote databases so I can have my data at home and at work.  I think there might be workarounds using things like Dropbox, but I'm honestly not sure how well (and safely) that works.

I have been trying to put my newer notes into plain old Markdown formatted text files in a directory hierarchy and use github/bitbucket along with a git repository to handle syncing data between work and home.  I can use whatever grep-like tool to search.  This works, but it's as klunky as it sounds.  And, of course, it doesn't have any kind of web clipping other than what copy/paste to a text file will get you (ie: not much).  It has the major pluses of being 100% portable between Linux and Windows, the data is super easy to share, and it's completely free from obsolescence unless ASCII is ever not supported by computers.  Even if github goes down, I can switch over to whatever remote repository support git provides.

But it's not very pretty or integrated.  At all.  Fundamentally it's just a bunch of text tiles.

61

DC Gamer Club / Re: Free Game on Humble Store

« on: November 30, 2017, 02:21 PM »

"The Bureau: XCOM Declassified" is Free (Steam key) on Humble for approximately the next 2 days

  - https://www.humblebu...au-xcom-declassified

62

Living Room / Re: Movies you've seen lately

« on: November 27, 2017, 07:21 PM »

Junction (apparently also called Hostage)

This was a surprisingly good film, but fair warning: it's a dark film.  Not perfect by any means, but I thought the portrayal of the 4 meth addicts who were the main characters was really good. I thought the actors did a good job of showing the conflict their characters had (for the most part) about doing the right thing at each decision point, but weren't able to - sometimes because of the calling of their addiction but sometimes for other reasons.

It was a nice surprise that the involvement of the police in the movie didn't turn out to take the path that I was expecting the movie to take with it.

I wasn't a fan of the ending, but overall I was glad I watched the movie.  Even if it's not a movie that made me feel good.

I watched it a while back on Amazon. I'm not sure where else it's available.

63

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Black Friday / Cyber Monday 2017

« on: November 27, 2017, 12:29 PM »

SyncBack Pro and SE 25% off.  Includes upgrades.

  - https://www.2brights...bermonday/index.html

64

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Black Friday / Cyber Monday 2017

« on: November 25, 2017, 10:20 AM »

IDM All access is definitely an annual subscription.  I thought the regular price for it right now is $80 for a year, so I'd assume that the Cyber Monday deal is for 25% off of that (so $60 for a year).

I also assume (but don't know for sure):

  - your renewal rate would be at the then going "All Access" rate (so $80 unless they increase it)
  - that the software will stop working if the all access is not renewed

Personally, subscribe-to-keep-working software is not something for me.

When JetBrains switched to a subscription model for their IDEs they got a huge customer backlash that resulted in a decent compromise:  with each yearly subscription came a perpetual license for the version of the software version from the beginning of the subscription period.  That way the subscription provided some value, but if/when your subscription lapsed you still had use of the software (just not the latest version).

65

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Black Friday / Cyber Monday 2017

« on: November 24, 2017, 11:55 AM »

On Cyber Monday (Nov 27) everything at IDM (that's UltraEdit and friends) is 25% off:

  - https://www.ultraedi...er-monday/index.html

They say "everything", but it isn't clear to me if upgrades are included.  "All Access", which is a 1 year subscription to all products, is imcluded according to the email.

66

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Black Friday / Cyber Monday 2017

« on: November 24, 2017, 01:42 AM »

XYplorer Lifetime license is 50% off on Black Friday (sale will be done about 20 hours from my posting this):

  - https://www.xyplorer.com/

Black Friday Sale 2017!

Black Friday is back! We offer the XYplorer Lifetime License Pro at 50% off:
It’s only US$ 39.95 instead of US$ 79.95!

67

DC Gamer Club / Re: Latest GOG Giveaway

« on: November 21, 2017, 07:30 PM »

New GOG giveaway for the next 36 hours (until November 23, 2PM UTC): MDK

The MDK giveaway introduces their Black Friday Sale.

Disclaimer: I'm just passing the info along. I don't even know what the MDK game is about, much less if it's any good.

68

DC Gamer Club / Re: Free Game on Humble Store

« on: November 21, 2017, 07:26 PM »

Another Free Game on Humble: Brutal Legend

  - https://www.humblebu.../store/brutal-legend

Free for the next 16 hours days, redeems on Steam.

69

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: VMware Workstation 14 Pro 40% off today

« on: November 21, 2017, 07:22 PM »

I've licensed VMware Workstation for quite some time now and have a license for 12.x.  I'm probably not going to upgrade to 14 (they skipped v13 - I assume for superstition reasons).  There seems to be only a few new features that as far as I can tell are all geared toward corporate use except for adding  support for newer CPUs.

So unless I upgrade my CPU to something that v12 doesn't support, I'd be paying for nothing useful.  I speculate that this lack of useful new features is due to a combination of:

    1) VMware 12.x is already pretty feature packed
    2) VMware laid off a large chunk of the workstation development team a year or so ago.

I don't have much experience with VirtualBox, but I've heard that it works pretty well.  My expectation is that v12 will serve me for a long while, and when it comes up short I plan to try out VirtualBox.

That said - I'm really happy with VMware - I use it every single day and have for a long time.  I just don't feel a compelling reason to pay for an upgrade.

70

DC Gamer Club / Re: Free Game on Humble Store

« on: November 16, 2017, 01:23 PM »

Another Free Game on Humble: KILLER IS DEAD - NIGHTMARE EDITION

  - https://www.humblebu...ad-nightmare-edition

Free for 2 days, redeems on Steam.

There's probably a deadline for Steam activation before the key becomes invalid, but I don't know what that is.

71

Living Room / Re: Large yet compact storage

« on: November 13, 2017, 02:45 AM »

Keep in mind that even if swapping the SSD is physically possible (and maybe even easy) there is the additional complication of getting the contents of the old drive over to the new drive.

You might find something like this to be helpful: Sabrent USB 3.0 mSATA II or III/6G SSD Enclosure Adapter

(Note: I have not used the above item)

72

DC Gamer Club / Re: GOG Connect - DRM-free access to your Steam library

« on: November 11, 2017, 12:22 PM »

Sorry, I was just being lazy.  I'm really good at that.

73

DC Gamer Club / Re: Latest GOG Giveaway

« on: November 10, 2017, 12:34 AM »

New giveaway until November 11, 6PM UTC - Syberia: http://www.gog.com

Also, Syberia and Syberia 2 are on GOG Connect until November 13, 11PM UTC if you have the games on Steam: http://connect.gog.com

74

General Software Discussion / Re: Backup4all v.7 supports 37+ online backups (!)

« on: November 01, 2017, 07:01 PM »

I read "S3 compatible" as meaning they use the same protocol, but the providers had their own storage farms.  If they are all delegating their storage to Amazon, then your point about lack of redundancy might be something to consider.

75

General Software Discussion / Re: Backup4all v.7 supports 37+ online backups (!)

« on: October 31, 2017, 03:19 PM »

Note that Upgrade prices for Backup4all are hidden:
you have to paste in your key

-tomos (October 31, 2017, 01:30 PM)

There's a nondescript "Upgrade Prices" link at the bottom of the Upgrade page that lets you see prices without having to punch in a key.  I'd link directly to the price widget, but it's a Javascript thing that doesn't seem to work on its own.

It looks like the upgrade from any previous version of Backup4All Pro to v7 Pro is $21. But there are different prices depending on exactly what version/variant of B4A you're upgrading from and to.