Messages

151

Living Room / Re: Google Ends Privacy

« on: January 29, 2012, 07:11 AM »

anyone having potentially damaging conversations over someone else's network pretty much deserves to be caught IMHO.

-Eóin (January 28, 2012, 11:02 PM)

Foresight is a good thing, yes. But *every* network is someone else's network. Just like every land-line is someone else's, yet we expect privacy of our (analog) phone conversations. Or used to, anyway.

152

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Release: Ethervane Echo

« on: January 28, 2012, 03:54 PM »

One of my favorite features in Ditto is naming clips with quick paste text and searching them using /q.  I am unsure if this feature is already available in Echo but please consider adding it.

-nsathishk (January 28, 2012, 03:46 PM)

Not available yet. I am considering something like it - an ability to assign names or tags to clips - but I need to find a way of implementing it without disturbing the basic design of the app. I've posted some thoughts on it earlier on in this thread, for example here and here.

It's not likely to happen very soon, but it *is* on the wish list.

153

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Release: Ethervane Echo

« on: January 28, 2012, 03:40 PM »

I'm using the latest Version 1.0.6.110 and have a question about deleting a clip.  If I have a clip highlighted and delete using the keyboard or the context menu with the mouse it's gone.  There is no confirmation whether I would like to delete the clip.  I checked the preferences and Prompting > BeforeDeletingClips is set to True. 

-bob99 (January 28, 2012, 01:54 PM)

By default, Echo only prompts if you are deleting 10 clips or more. You can reduce that number to 1, so that Echo will always prompt:

Preferences -> Prompting -> ClipDeleteTrigger

Also, is there any type of listing that tells what all of the individual preferences settings do?  I've figured out some of them or read in earlier posts what others do.  Chances are I won't use many of them, more of a learning experience for me.

I know, my fault. This is the one help topic that I have not completed yet.  At the moment there is no complete description. (Originally that Preferences dialog was supposed to be only temporary, so I put off documenting it until I had the final design.) For now, please ask here, I will reply to all questions.

154

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Release: Ethervane Echo

« on: January 28, 2012, 12:15 PM »

It's working fine for me on my Win7 (64bit) machine -- only the "Help" submenu windows appear behind the main window when the feature is on.

-jash (January 28, 2012, 09:11 AM)

I.e., the help file? This would be normal. When you open help, you're starting a separate application. That application will be hidden behind any "on top" window, just like any other app.

is there also a setting to keep the main window open/maximized after pasting clips?  A similar setting already exists for copying clips, but I couldn't find one for pasting clips.  

This isn't available because it isn't really possible. In order to paste, Echo has to minimize / hide itself first, so that the previously active window becomes uncovered. Otherwise that window would not process input events, so the paste feature would not work at all. (Or, it would not work in a lot of cases, which is just as bad.)

In theory, Echo could hide, paste, then restore itself. But that won't work either due to how Windows blocks applications from stealing focus. Windows allows applications to activate themselves and grab focus only in three ways:

• when you physically activate the application (e.g. by a click)
• when an activation hotkey is pressed
• an application that currently has focus may yield focus to another app.

There are no exceptions. So, once Echo's window is deactivated, the OS will not let Echo get focus again without any action from the user. (Echo could "restore" the window, but it will not receive focus until you click it or press the activation hotkey.)

155

Living Room / Re: Looking for password "scheme" suggestions

« on: January 27, 2012, 02:04 PM »

...and just for your amusement, I should add that here in Poland the Anonymous and other hacking "collectives" have been ddos-ing and hacking into various government sites in response to the government's signing of ACTA. Apparently the prime minister's computer was secured with username 'admin' and password 'admin1'. Our PM has a new nickname now :-)

156

Living Room / Re: Looking for password "scheme" suggestions

« on: January 27, 2012, 02:00 PM »

Like I've said before, a password is only as secure as the server it's stored on.
If somebody gets in, it doesn't matter if your password is d1O@n3A$t or mickey mouse.
$0.02

-Edvard (January 26, 2012, 06:47 AM)

This is rule number one for me. It used to be that we were supposed to make passwords "easy to remember but hard to guess". Yeah, make it so that your family or your boss or your pals won't guess it (if that's who you want privacy from), but beyond that, the complexity, bits of randomness or key length don't matter much anymore. Once a server gets hacked into, there's no telling what happens next.

For the really important stuff (where I could lose money or critical access, like banking or my domain control panel) I use long, complex passwords; other than that I don't even bother any more.

What happens in the end that someone hacks into your ISP and they can't even tell exactly what was accessed. Or one day you find unauthorized charges to your credit card, because you paid with this card online once and some idiot thought it was a good idea to store your cc number on their badly secured server "for your convenience". (I was lucky and got every penny refunded by VISA within a week; the charges were obviously fraudulent, like $20 every hour from some UK gambling joint until the account was empty.)

But, FWIW, to me the most useful method for generating a fairly secure (in the outdated sense) password is to start with a quote or a line from a book or a song that you know well and take the first (second, third, take your pick) letter of each. Make some of them numbers or add punctuation if you want, but the important thing is to use a fairly long quite, and not something obvious like "to be or not to be".

Another way that I've used a few times: just type nonsense on the keyboard but in such a way as to let your fingers do the work for you. Type keys that feel natural to press one after another, so that the typing itself has a "flow". For example, if you use only the left hand, typing "wjzu" on a QWERTY keyboard is hard and slow, but typing "wdax" is quick and feels natural. Extend this to 10 or 12 characters and learn this flow, then your muscle memory will do the rest. I sometimes forget my PIN, but I remember the pattern of buttons to push, that's just as good.

157

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Release: Ethervane Echo

« on: January 27, 2012, 05:02 AM »

hi tranglos  i have  4 quick veiws set-up  clips, sticky,urls, and all clips  is there a way to fix it  to  have the stickys only show up in the stickys and   the all clips quick veiw  ive tried filters but  the best i could come up with is using a time filter   Ethervane Echo  is working great  thanks

-hangdawg (January 26, 2012, 11:08 PM)

You can add a "Sticky clips" filter to a view and reverse it, so that the filter will show only non-sticky clips.

There may be one hitch however: for this to work, the option to match ALL filters much be selected if there is more than one filter. If you have a view that already uses multiple filters, and the filters are joined with OR ("Match any filter" is selected), then this won't work. Echo can only apply "any of the filters" or "all of the filters", but not "any of these filters AND this one as well".

It will work for the default view though, which contains no filters initially.

158

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Release: Ethervane Echo

« on: January 26, 2012, 08:24 PM »

1.  As requested earlier in this forum, I too would like an "always-on-top" feature. 

-jash (January 11, 2012, 10:46 AM)

Done in the latest release (out now). Please let mew know if there are any problems.

159

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Release: Ethervane Echo

« on: January 26, 2012, 08:19 PM »

New version released January 27: 1.0.6.110

See the top post in this thread for download links.

Two new features by request:

ADDED: A new option to keep main program window on top of other windows (often called "stay on top"). Disabled by default. To enable, click View -> Keep on Top of Other Windows.

- This is somewhat experimental. I have managed to get it to work correctly on my system, but if you observe any problems, please disable the option and let me know. Particularly if dialog boxes should become inaccessible (hidden behind the on-top main window).


ADDED: Echo can now store its database and configuration files in any user-specified folder. This works the same way for both the desktop and portable editions. Custom folder can be specified on the command line or in the master.config file. This is useful for example if you want Echo to keep its data and configuration in a folder that you can easily include in your backup.

The folder does not have to exist, but Echo must be able to create it if it does not.

a) Command-line usage (you can add that to the shortcut used to start Echo):

[Select]

ethervaneecho.exe -f:<your custom folder here>

Note: it's "-f", then a colon, then the folder. If the folder contains spaces, it must be put in quotation marks:

[Select]

ethervaneecho.exe -f:"c:\my random stuff"

b) master.config file usage (will affect everyone using Echo on the same computer):

[Select]

; in the [EchoDatabase] section
[EchoDatabase]

; add this line:
directoryoverride=<your custom folder here>

For more information see relevant topics in the Help file (master.config and command-line arguments)

OK, so this is a small update I wanted to get out the door, because there's plenty of other stuff queued up that needs more time, so the next release may take a bit longer (unless it's an urgent bugfix, but let's hope not :-).
 

160

Living Room / Re: SOPA Shelved - ACTA is Worse

« on: January 25, 2012, 02:00 PM »

I don't really have a problem with theoretical communism (Marxism). I actually think that it is a better system.

-Renegade (January 25, 2012, 10:00 AM)

Be that as it may, it wasn't even communism that got whacked above, it was a seemingly insignificant entity known as Communist Party USA. I'm saying insignificant, because despite all the alleged subterfuge and infiltration, they don't seem to have influence the actual policy one bit.

161

Living Room / Re: SOPA Shelved - ACTA is Worse

« on: January 25, 2012, 09:40 AM »

(Or maybe I'm just swallowing the bait.)

-tranglos (January 25, 2012, 07:40 AM)

Hmm...you think maybe?

-40hz (January 25, 2012, 09:15 AM)

Yeah, I know. False equivalences like these are a hot button thing for me, can't help it! It's like a bunch of thugs try to mug you at night, you fight back, and in newspapers all of you were "committing acts of aggression". Standard journalistic fare. I have a huge allergic reaction to that, and it shows

162

Living Room / Re: SOPA Shelved - ACTA is Worse

« on: January 25, 2012, 07:40 AM »

Unfortunately, if you want to do something about cockroaches, then your only option seems to be to exterminate them.

-IainB (January 25, 2012, 04:20 AM)

Iain, I don't understand. First you have the big business, which does what you say it does. (That's what you get when profit is the sole purpose. When a person acts for profit before everything else, we call that person a sociopath or worse. But when a group of people band together as a corporation and do the same, we call them the most productive members of the society and bestow all kinds of accolades on them, and indeed let them effectively run our countries - yours and mine both. End digression.)

And then you have a small party, whose ideology is to stop them from doing all that. Yet they are both cockroaches to you, how?

Or how you could say entities like the Communist Party are more "successful" than the big business - that's equally puzzling. How do you measure success to arrive at this outcome?

(Or maybe I'm just swallowing the bait.)

163

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Mini-Review: RightNote

« on: January 23, 2012, 11:11 AM »

KeyNote can import the HJT.  Sometimes the files look right in KeyNote, and the tree always seems correct, but usually some of the notes are blank.  I don't know why.  I wondered if KeyNote's import was getting confused about RTF vs. plain text.

-rjbull (January 23, 2012, 10:34 AM)

I wrote that import procedure 10 years ago. Even a minor later change in HJT file format may be causing all sorts of trouble, I'm afraid.

164

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Release: Ethervane Echo

« on: January 23, 2012, 07:53 AM »

Adding to the application filter list some way to add modifiers to the program name, which must exist on the title of the window copying from, would probably be good enough.

-yarond (January 22, 2012, 05:24 PM)

Welcome to DC, Yarond, and thanks for your suggestion.

I agree with you all the way and have added your idea to the wishlist. Just to be sure though: do you think it would be sufficient to simply have a list of (partial) window titles, independent from the list of filtered applications? That would be easy to do, but in that case these titles would match any application, so a filter might sweep too much.

A better alternative is to be able to say "this application *and* any of these (partial) window titles". It would provide for better fine-tuning of the filters.

165

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Mini-Review: RightNote

« on: January 23, 2012, 07:40 AM »

It's great to see the review, RightNote certainly deserves attention. I've posted about it before, so I'll just add that RightNote imports KeyNote files very well and is a fine replacement for it.

(There is a hitch though if your KeyNote file contains "virtual nodes" that point to non-existent files. I can help with that if needed.)

166

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Release: Ethervane Echo

« on: January 22, 2012, 05:07 PM »

possibility to configure the directory for saving the database
possibility to configure the directory for saving the application-settings (ini)

-Sascha (January 12, 2012, 01:27 AM)

Done, the next release will have it. The custom folder can be specified in the master.config file or on command-line; the Help file will have all the details.

167

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Bits - Ultra Recall

« on: January 22, 2012, 12:43 PM »

first study the future...:

1) http://blog.surfulat...whats-neville-up-to/

-Curt (January 13, 2012, 11:00 AM)

Are they talking about apps that run in the browser? (:shudder:)

168

Living Room / Re: As a counter-point to the SOPA/PIPA demonstration

« on: January 22, 2012, 07:41 AM »

Well, the censorship continues:

http://rt.com/news/i...license-revoked-333/

-Renegade (January 20, 2012, 10:59 PM)

PressTV is almost lucky. Al Jazeera got bombed instead, in Baghdad, when the war criminals did not like their news.

169

General Software Discussion / Re: Recommend less known macro apps and text expanders

« on: January 21, 2012, 08:05 AM »

My humble advice is to use AutoHotKey, if you have the skills to code.   If not, shell out the $60 for MacroExpressPro. It's quite powerful and has a responsive support forum.

-kunkel321 (January 20, 2012, 05:41 PM)

I've been using AutoHotkey for a long time - for window management, app launching and text expansion. It's just that  *am* a sucker for a convenient UI. I have quite a lot of expansions defined for email, for my translation work and for coding. AHK does not make it easy to organize them, and every so often I catch myself deciding not to add a new expansion simply because it will make the script even bigger and harder to manage than is already is.

Or, if I wanted to change the prefix character for example, I'd have to modify every entry in the AHK script, while a UI-based application might store a prefix in one place and apply it to all expansions (or better, all expansions in a particular category).

Other than that, AHK is the best utility so far. All the commercial apps impose some short-sighted limitations. Just to give an example, in ActiveWords you can choose a trigger key for some of its functions, but it can only be a function key F1 to F12; you don't even get to choose modifiers. Something like that disqualifies a program immediately (to me), and each and every one of them has these kinds of limitations somewhere. Either you MUST use a prefix character (useless for typo correction) or you cannot use one, or the only way to activate a feature is to press CAPS LOCK (I actually use caps lock e.g. when translating END USER LICENCSE AGREEMENTS for example, since they are often in all caps, who knows why!), etc. Or they can launch apps, but are not smart enough to activate an app if it is already running, which is critical to me (e.g. press Win+Z to launch Firefox, but if it's already running, activate it instead.)

Big or small, all commercial apps have these little traps. AHK is the only one that does not. So I want to put that functionality in a nice, polished UI, and without all the complex scripting that AHK does (because that's beyond my immediate need and coding skills, not because there's anything wrong with it).

170

Living Room / Re: Dreamhost Hacked - Password changes mandated

« on: January 20, 2012, 07:28 PM »

Thanks for the heads-up! And, Bother!

171

Living Room / Re: As a counter-point to the SOPA/PIPA demonstration

« on: January 20, 2012, 12:50 PM »

2) They're not going to get a fair trial. It is imperative that these people receive due process.

-Renegade (January 20, 2012, 10:58 AM)

Extradition hearings should be interesting.

Union Carbide (now owned by Dow) is guilty of one of the biggest environmental catastrophes of all time and nothing significant has happened to them. Nothing.

What you said.

I'd like to see some rule of law applied. But... That's too much to ask. I know... I'm a radical freak. I believe in equality and the rule of law and other insane concepts like that... 

You're a radical, terrorist-sympathizer leftie! Welcome to the club, there's plenty of room.

To add just one more example - when Muammar Gaddafi was on the run, Europol (or was it Interpol?) sent out a WANTED notice, level orange, which means "pretty important". The same "wanted" notice for Julian Assange was level red.

172

General Software Discussion / Re: Recommend less known macro apps and text expanders

« on: January 20, 2012, 12:38 PM »

winautomation is.. simply great. stable and very kind support team. (but wait a little, the next version is going out from kitchen now)

-flamerz (January 20, 2012, 12:34 PM)

Thanks, that's good to know. It's the most expensive of the bunch, but looks very neat, and the developers certainly appear to have experience writing this kind of software.

173

General Software Discussion / Re: Recommend less known macro apps and text expanders

« on: January 20, 2012, 12:37 PM »

I do not have an addition to the list but will highjack the topic a moment to offer a   if you decide to take this further.  And I would be interested in a better/easier expander if you decided to offer it as donationware or for a modest fee.  Especially if it is along the ease of use of Ethervane Echo.

-bob99 (January 20, 2012, 12:25 PM)

Thanks, Bob! Anything I write is and will be free (at least until I lose my day job.)

I did entertain the idea of writing shareware for a living once, which could certainly be more fun than my usual fare, but I'm not a business person. Over the years I've received offers to "monetize" (ugh!) KeyNote, PhoneDeck and Radio. These offers were met with my hollow laughter

174

General Software Discussion / Re: Recommend less known macro apps and text expanders

« on: January 20, 2012, 12:32 PM »

I'll mention Automate as it doesn't appear on your list. It always did what I needed.

• Easy to use
• Rather expensive

-cranioscopical (January 20, 2012, 11:00 AM)

Any strong points, unique features? Can you say what it cost?

(I love enterprisey websites like this. No screenshots worth a damn (just small, partial screens), no price list anywhere, and when you want feature details, they push a PDF download That tells me they don't want me to buy their product. Too bad, I'm still curious!)

175

General Software Discussion / Re: Recommend less known macro apps and text expanders

« on: January 20, 2012, 09:35 AM »

...Why I'm asking: I am looking for a capable automation app with full macro capability. I find the big players clunky as well as expensive, so I'm hoping there's more.

But I am really asking also because I'm seriously considering writing my own, better text expander. (Just an expander, not a full macro app.) It ain't easy; reading the copious comments in AutoHotkey source code is an adventure! But none of the expanders I know of, except AHK, works the way I need it to, and requesting a simple feature as a registered user of One Of the Above has proved futile. Plus, I have a bunch of ideas for possibly unique features, which is really the only thing that makes it worthwhile to start a project like that.

Plus plus, let it be said, I am sick of the silly acrimony between Some Of the Above, well known on DC, and I am doubly sick of how they spite the customers e.g. by encrypting user data files as well as their downloadable libraries, to prevent migration or interoperability with other products. Or how they prohibit discussing alternatives on their forums. Or how impatiently some of them respond to customers' inquiries on their forums (there are exceptions). Or how they try to undercut each other by releasing a free app almost identical in name and UI to a competitor's commercial product. Or... I could go on, but you already know all of that.

So I'm interested in alternatives, but also in your experience of using the ones I know of. (Unless you just wish to say that AHK rules, I know and I agree, and my project-to-be would not nearly encroach on its ruler-dom :-)

I should also say I have registered three of the apps listed in the OP and have trialed all but one. And I use AHK all the time, too, and I bow before its might and wisdom at every sunrise and sunset! (No, really, I am not being sarcastic. AHK is awesome, and its source code should be a teaching aid. Seriously.)