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Messages - Mandork [ switch to compact view ]

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51
DesktopCoral / Er...what am I missing here?
« on: May 31, 2007, 06:07 AM »
DesktopCoral sounds like it could be useful for me sometimes, but I don't understand how to put things into the dock area.  Dragging shortcuts from the desktop doesn't work, and there don't seem to be any instructions.

What am I missing?

52
Darwin--Yay for archaeologists faffin away!  But you get to use cool words like "morphometric".  I'm stuck with "landscape".

Anyway, back on topic.  The other thing that I am finding is that the more serious work I do, the more I find comparable (or sometimes better) apps that are open source or free, which I would image (naively?) means that the people who are interested in them will continue to make them work in XP flavor.  A lot of them are originally Linux/Unix things, anyway, so when the time comes I will probably actually find it easier to run, say, GRASS GIS on a Linux box than my current XP one.  Hopefully by that time, I will have passed through the serious procrastination stage and gone on to genuine research....    : :-[

53
I have a SanDisk drive with U3 on it that I used today for the first time.  WTF?  I disabled autorun on all my drives ages ago, and I wasn't really expecting to have some huge "launch" area come up.  The university's networked PCs didn't like it all, either, and it took ages to shut it down.

Bleah.  I'll be unistalling that ASAP.  What do you need a separate launcher for, anyway?  I'm genuinely curious.

54
Yeah, I like Google and the miscellaneous apps and so on.  The trouble lately seems to be that no matter what I search for, my results seem to get less and less relevant.  I don't really mind ads on a page so much (except the ones that get in the way of whatever you're trying to do) as I do having to trawl through endless pron sites, obviously illegal software, crazy crackpot health sites, and just plain junk to get to the useful things out there.

I read somewhere about the "hidden internet"...someday I should Google it and find out how to search more effectively.   :P

55
In general, I like XP, but I think that's mostly because I've had it for so long and messed around with it so much that I'm pretty familiar with it.  Despite my fiancĂ© muttering about bit rot and installing every darn piece of crappy freeware (DC excluded, of course) and wierd Firefox extension that takes my fancy, I'm only recently starting to wonder about reformatting and reinstalling (for the first time!).

That being said, all the previews of Vista that I've seen make it look like it would irritate the heck out of me, and I think I'm going with Linux for the next computer I buy.  No idea what flavor yet, but it's going to be at least a year or two barring major catastrophe.  There's also the political and personal distaste for big closed corporate overlords, plus the fact that I can run just as many bells and whistles on a totally free distribution of Linux as I can on Vista, and the advantages start to fade.

The only thing is Word 2003--I have a serious love/hate relationship with it.  On the one hand, it makes me angry almost every day.  It has so many irritating problems!  On the other, I have figured out how to customize it to within an inch of its life, and I find it really awkward to use other programs or default settings on other machines. 

Has anyone tried the new Office?  I really don't like the way the toolbars looked in screenshots, so I haven't even given it a second look.

56
ContextMenu Commander / Re: ContextMenu Commander
« on: May 05, 2007, 10:22 AM »
Indeed!

It's pretty basic, but it does what it says on the tin, as the British say.  You can add files either by drag & drop or via the File menu or toolbar button.  You can have three different profiles, into which you put the appropriate info.  Highlight the files you want to change, click the checkmark, and presto!  There are three fields (Category, Manager, Company) that are "office only", which seems to mean .doc and .xls, because they didn't apply to an Access database or any of the Open Document formats. 

Also, you can't add comments to a folder this way, but the HobComment program mentioned above does an admirable job of this. 

It has a limited period (15 days, I think) before you have to register it, but it's still free.

Seems to be pretty good so far!

57
ContextMenu Commander / Re: ContextMenu Commander
« on: May 04, 2007, 06:32 AM »
I just found something that seems to do what I want, and I thought I'd share:  http://www.tilti.com...php?id=2_metachanger

Appears to be freeware, somehow it seems slightly dodgy, but is this just because it feels miraculous to find it after a frustrating search?   :-\

58
ContextMenu Commander / Re: ContextMenu Commander
« on: May 04, 2007, 04:48 AM »
Is this still in development, or did you get tired of it?  It sounds really, really cool.  I think that I would heavily promote it to everyone I know.

One thing that I have been trying to figure out (see here https://www.donation...p?topic=8339.new#new) is a way to change things on the "summary" properties tab for multiple files at once.  So, for instance, I can highlight several files of various kinds, right-click, and add a "comment" to all of them at once.  Or, if that's not possible, a way to view all of these properties in a table format and just tab to  the next field and change it, like you can in Windows Media Player 9, for instance (see screen shot).  If you want to change the tag info for several files, all you have to do is tab to the next one and it works just like a spreadsheet would.  I'm thinking of something like the file tags for .mp3s, but for regular files--.doc, .txt, whatever. 

It gets really tiresome to go to the summary tab for every file, because as far as I can tell you have to do each one individually. 

59
ironically,
it's the Context Menu  smiley

Thanks!  I get confused in MS's documentation between shortcut, right-click, and context...they don't seem to use it consistently, probably in their quest to dumb things down for the confused.  Funny how not being forced to know the right term just makes it harder to figure things out....

Thanks for pointing out the ContexMenu Commander thread.  It looks like it's still in development...right?

60
Thanks for your effort!  However, the scroll lock AHK script seems to just open the properties window, which is the same thing that alt + enter does.  I still have to select the appropriate tab and field for each file.

As you might have gathered from my "visitor" status, I'm pretty much a complete dunce with anything to do with code, even AHK or HTML (!) code, although I'm trying to learn.  I searched around the interweb to try and learn something about the whole NTFS multiple data stream issue, and I'm afraid I was rapidly in over my head.  Although this may be pointless technophobia, it seems that perhaps you can mess up your files if you're not careful?  I don't know about that, though.

One thing I have come across that may be of interest or shed light, however, is:

A shell add-in/utility that adds an option to add a comment to a folder to the right-click menu in Explorer (uh, what is the right term in this context?), called Hob Comment http://www.dr-hoiby....CommentExt/index.php.  This will only work for one file at a time, though--it does not appear in the menu if you select more than one.

No idea how it was done, though!

61
I've searched all over the web and tried a zillion different programs, but nothing quite seems to do what I want.

I have a bunch (hundreds) of files that I would like to add a "comment" to, in the summary tab of the file properties.  As far as I can tell, the only way to access this is to right click-> properties-> summary -> and type in the comment (see screenshot).  I have tried selecting several files at once, but when you do this, the summary tab is all greyed out. 

Does anyone know of a way to edit several of these at once, or at least more quickly?  Even if I could just tab to the same field in the next item on the list, like you can in Windows Media Player (for example), that would be helpful. 

I messed around with recording a macro in DoOver, but I don't know how (or if it's possible) to make it generic, so that I could just select a file and hit a hot key that would go straight to the comments field.

Kind of like tagging, only for all files, not just music or photos.

Any suggestions?

62
Living Room / Re: Windows XP Annoyance: ToolTip pop-ups
« on: April 21, 2007, 09:09 AM »
Just download Tweak UI from Microsoft.  It will also give you the ability to tinker with other hidden settings without the need for 3rd party software or messing around with the registry:

http://www.microsoft...oys/xppowertoys.mspx

63
Finished Programs / Re: SOLVED: desktop icon manager/grouping
« on: February 09, 2007, 07:02 AM »
I was just going to ask if anyone knew of a thing like this...

Some background:  I have a somewhat complicated directory structure, so I have made a few shortcuts to frequently used folders that are nested inside other categories and folders.  A typical path is something like this: 

C:\Documents and Settings\Dad\My Documents\Me\Downloaded Articles\PhD Related\Spanish Language

I'd like to clean it up but I'm not sure how, to be honest...and I also use EndNote 7 for my references, and many of the said articles are hyperlinked to the appropriate pdf files.  I don't know if EndNote will understand to change the links if I move the folder that holds the files somewhere more sensible, like C:\Articles.  But I digress.

I was thinking that I would like to assign "zones" to the desktop so that shortcuts to system folders and non-system folders stay in a group together.  Ideally I could sort each group by name in the usual way, e.g. right click->arrange icons by name. 

Are we all talking about the same thing?  Sorry, I'm a bit dense...

64
>>I am not able to get GridMove to work! The first time I run it, the program freezes after I click "OK" on the info box about tooltips. The .ini file is created and so is an empty plugins directory. When I run the script after windows kills it, I get the GridMove tray icon. However it is not clickable and none of the functions of GridMove work. Same thing happens after deleting the newly created files.

>>I was having the same problem before I check the "Turn off advanced text services for this program"[right click the GridMove.exe and goto Compatibility tab]

Just wanted to say that I was having the same problem, and the above solution also worked for me.  I just found this collection of things today via Lifehacker, and it's pretty cool stuff!

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