Recent Posts

11026

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: Interaction with the keyboard layout hook?

« Last post by mouser on August 11, 2012, 07:11 AM »

CHS does not hook keyboard stuff (at least not as far as i can remember), other than registering global hotkeys.
It certainly doesn't mess with keyboard layouts.

I wouldn't dismiss SoftMaker Office so quickly -- it wouldn't be too surprising if they didn't have something to switch keyboard layouts and have a resident tool.

There are others on the forum that switch between language layouts so they might have a better guess about this stuff.

Bottom line: It *shouldn't* be related to CHS -- please let me know if you find more evidence that it is.

11027

Skwire Empire / Re: Release: sWeather (tray-based weather app)

« Last post by mouser on August 10, 2012, 11:33 PM »

very nice. 

11028

LaunchBar Commander / Re: open folder by mousemove

« Last post by mouser on August 10, 2012, 11:05 PM »

Welcome jacky and dsbelden, I'm glad you like the program and I hope you'll kick up your feet and stay awhile here.

I'll see what I can do about having the folder buttons auto open.

11029

General Software Discussion / Re: Request for help finding an old DC forum post

« Last post by mouser on August 10, 2012, 10:22 PM »

40hz, those are the kinds of values i'm talking about.. i wonder if i just imagined that thread..

11030

General Software Discussion / Re: Request for help finding an old DC forum post

« Last post by mouser on August 10, 2012, 07:57 PM »

That's not the one i was thinking of.  It was some registry setting that was somehow set to some non-default value for a user..

11031

General Software Discussion / Request for help finding an old DC forum post

« Last post by mouser on August 10, 2012, 07:53 PM »

There was a forum post/thread discussion where we were troubleshooting a problem with someone's windows setup, and it turned out to be a registry setting that was not giving programs enough time to gracefully shutdown on windows reboot/shutdown.

But I can't find the post/thread.  Anyone remember this?

11032

Living Room / Re: Should we pre-emptively retire old hard drives?

« Last post by mouser on August 10, 2012, 08:54 AM »

CAN A FAN BREAK DOWN WITHOUT THE USER BEING NOTIFIED?

sure can.  i've lost a cpu when the motherboard fan failed.

there are tools to check fan speeds that should/might be able to tell you which fans are running and at what speeds.

11033

Living Room / Re: Should we pre-emptively retire old hard drives?

« Last post by mouser on August 10, 2012, 08:17 AM »

60C is too high for a drive, i would make sure you have good backups of what's on that drive.

11034

Developer's Corner / Re: newsletters - how to do them properly

« Last post by mouser on August 10, 2012, 07:23 AM »

Great question.  I'm sure there are people who run newsletters for a living and have smarter things to say, so please don't expect my thoughts to be definitive.  However I will share what I've learned.

First things first, I think the number of people you are emailing is the most important factor to be considered.  Anything under a couple hundred and you probably don't have to worry too much about the rest.  Once you start getting into the thousands of subscribers, it gets much more hairy and the dangers go up in terms of risking that the big email providers will start blacklisting your email address, and risking that your mail server will start to freak out trying to send so much mail.

Ok so some observations:

• Users need to be able to very easily unsubscribe from the list.  I like to give them a link to check to unsubscribe, and let them know they can just hit reply and say unsubscribe.
• We use phplist to do our newsletter mailings, which is open source.  Phplist can be a bit clunky, BUT it is capable of sending 70,000 newsletter emails without killing the server.  It has been a bit tricky to figure out how to configure it and the server so that this can be done without crashing the server load.. (Generally we send those emails over the course of a 2 day period).
• There are gentler programs for sending email newsletters if you only need to send a couple hundred emails, and you have other options when you aren't sending so many, like desktop applications for newsletter sending.  I don't have any experience with those but they are probably good options until you start needing to send tens of thousands.
• On the other side of the coin, if you need to send hundreds of thousands, you may be better off out-sourcing the sending of your newsletter to one of these other services that specialize in that.  Again I have no experience with the bigger players in this kind of thing.  I hear mailchimp is one of the best commercial tools and services.
• One of the main things that we worried about with the donationcoder newsletters was that some of the newsletter emails will inevitably be marked as spam.  That in itself is not a problem.  The concern I always had was that it would end up hurting the domain itself so that ALL emails from our site would start to risk being marked as spam.  Now that never actually happened, but it became such a feverish concern of mine that we ended up setting up a secondary domain name just for sending the newsletters, in the hopes that any catastrophe that caused the newsletter emails to trigger some severe spam blacklisting would not effect the main domain name.  That's another reason people who send large volume newsletters often outsource them to 3rd party servers.
• As for newsletter content -- it seems to me that the newsletters that are really "successful" in terms of building a real relationship between the writer and the readers are the ones where there is a real personal connection.  I'm a pretty private person so that's not really something I feel that comfortable with, but I admire those writers who can make that kind of connection with their readers.
• Having said that, if you're just writing a newsletter about your products, it's not like having a heart-to-heart conversation with a friend, and you may be better off not trying to make it something it's not, and just give a straightforward report on updates and news.  Still, I think if you are writing for a small product or company, it's better to write it from your perspective, signing them with your name, etc. -- as opposed to presenting the newsletters as coming from an anonymous press release.
• Speaking as someone who received newsletters occasionally, but doesn't often read them much -- for me there is a threshold of frequency over which I will unsubscribe.  Occasionally some newsletter will start sending me updates every week, and that's just too much for me and i will unsubscribe.  Once a month and even if i never read it i don't mind.

11035

General Software Discussion / Re: "Do copy acceleration utilities actually lower file transfer speeds?"

« Last post by mouser on August 10, 2012, 06:26 AM »

Excellent report by Samer.

However, I will echo what some of the commenters on the post have said, which is that when I have used suched utilities such as SuperCopier and Terracopy, it's not because I wanted to speed up the absolute transfer time for copying a large number of files, it's because they are much more robust and flexible -- and fail much more gracefully -- wheras default windows copy will completely abort and die midway if a single file copy out of a thousand fails.

11036

Find And Run Robot / Re: How Exclude Certain Folders From Search?

« Last post by mouser on August 09, 2012, 09:22 PM »

If you go to the options, there is a tab labeled "Search Folders".
You can UNCHECK directories there to not search them (or re-order them).
If you want to search only SOME subdirectories of a listed folder, double click it and add some subdirectories to exclude.

11037

Living Room / Re: How Blogging (or Coding) Can Rot Your Teeth

« Last post by mouser on August 09, 2012, 05:15 AM »

Thanks for the post, app 

11038

LaunchBar Commander / Re: Backup folder location-relocate from default

« Last post by mouser on August 08, 2012, 01:45 PM »

A similar request was made recently for a different one of my programs.  I am adding to my todo list the ability to set custom backup directory locations.

11039

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: Newbie's observations, suggestions

« Last post by mouser on August 08, 2012, 01:43 PM »

On the initial crashes, I'm not sure, but I may have set the Capture hotkey to Ctrl-c, while at the same time CHS was set to automatically monitor the clipboard. Perhaps that set up an internal conflict?

yes, that makes complete sense -- i should probably check for that situation and catch it.

One other thing I noticed, CHS doesn’t seem to show up on the Win7 start menu, nor can I Pin it there.

now that is odd -- can any other win7 pros comment on that?

11040

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: Newbie's observations, suggestions

« Last post by mouser on August 08, 2012, 12:17 PM »

Hi Paul,

Glad you like it.

Also, I'm not clear if my registration will apply to more than one machine.

sure -- you can use it on all your pcs.

Is there any benefit to "periodically reestablish clipboard"?

occasionally other programs may modify the clipboard "chain" -- meaning they tell windows they want to receive clipboard events, and then they crash or fail, and the clipboard chain is messed up, preventing CHS from receiving clips.  This option simply re-registers CHS with windows every so often to make sure this doesn't happen.  But you can uncheck the option.  If you ever don't hear the copy clip sound you can manually re-establish clipboard chain from the right click context menu on the CHS icon.

Any way to order peer subfolders in the tree?

yep, edit a group and in the upper right you will see "Display Order Weight".  The smaller the number the earlier in the ordering.

Browse button for image editor option. Small deal, but I noticed it.

quite right, thanks for pointing that out; will fix.

I'm getting extra Copy sound notifications after a copy.

this is a bit concerning to me.. so you mean you are hearing the copy sound twice in a row?  i would explore this a bit further -- are you getting duplicate clips? is it happening on every capture?  There is a "statistics" tab in the options -- maybe look there to see how the clip events change after each capture.  I wonder if you don't have another program running that is causing the behavior.

I initially got crashes, until I nulled out the "capture" hotkey. Not sure what that setting does.

Hmm.. maybe it's as simple as the hotkey being used by another program? But i'm not sure why that would cause an error.  the purpose of that option is if you want to DISABLE CHS from watching the clipboard and only have it create new clips when you hit that hotkey.

11041

Living Room / Re: The pleasure and possibilities of living a time-shifted life?

« Last post by mouser on August 07, 2012, 09:09 AM »

I've seriously considered timeshifting my consumption of news.. Trying to make sense of the news of real-world events is incredibly inefficient, and so little of it has any immediate impact.  It seems like it would be so much more manageable and relaxing to read newspapers and watch news shows on a 1yr delay.

11042

DC Website Help and Extras / Re: DC Mug/TShirt Designs that would be nice to have an artist for..

« Last post by mouser on August 06, 2012, 10:00 PM »

ha! that's fun, i like it.

11043

LaunchBar Commander / Re: moving nodes

« Last post by mouser on August 06, 2012, 09:37 PM »

duplicate post, see here for answer: https://www.donation...ndex.php?topic=31865

11044

LaunchBar Commander / Re: Move nodes up/down or to different part of tree.

« Last post by mouser on August 06, 2012, 09:36 PM »

I know this can be confusing, the trick is that if you drag a node to the RIGHT of another node's text title, the graphics will change to indicate that if you release you will drop and reorder it.  You may want to enlarge the tree panel size a bit to make it easier.

I have to admit this is definitely a confusing thing, though once you get the hang of it it makes moving nodes pretty easy.

Let me know if you get it working.

11045

General Software Discussion / MOVED: Move nodes up/down or to different part of tree.

« Last post by mouser on August 06, 2012, 09:34 PM »

This topic has been moved to LaunchBar Commander.

https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=31865.0

11046

Living Room / The pleasure and possibilities of living a time-shifted life?

« Last post by mouser on August 06, 2012, 07:03 PM »

With the power of sophisticated digital video recorders (like Tivo) and digital streaming services (like Netflix), it's becoming increasingly convenient to watch previously aired episodes of a series all in a row.

I know I'm not the only one who has found this to be infinitely more rewarding than trying to catch these shows one at a time, once per week, as they air originally.

The benefits of watching shows in this "time-shifted" manner are numerous:
Much better continuity since the previous episode is fresh in your mind.
The show has aired long ago so you have time to decide if it's something worth your time.

But I was thinking, it's not just tv shows that are receiving this "time-shift" treatment, where we ignore new things and instead set our focus back a few years to items that are *purposefully* new to *us*, because we avoided them at release time.

All things periodical seem to benefit from such an approach: comic books for example.  I know people buying video games routinely ignore the new releases knowing that if they simply wait a few months the prices will drop precipitously.

I wonder if this approach can't be extended to other less-obvious domains of life?  What would life be like if one purposefully shifted their entire focus of life back 5 years?

11047

Screenshot Captor / Re: Main window seemingly wouldn't appear

« Last post by mouser on August 06, 2012, 12:26 PM »

Someone was just emailing me about this I think (maybe it was you); I will fix, exactly as you suggest.

11048

Living Room / Re: Typing Speed Competition!

« Last post by mouser on August 05, 2012, 06:22 PM »

This is what it would look like if someone used a macro to cheat.

out of curiosity can you explain how you would use a macro to cheat on something like this?

Nevermind, i see you can copy all of the source text and then paste using a tool that will past in clipboard using keys, like my own Clipboard Help+Spell:




Let's see someone beat my score now

11049

Living Room / Re: Typing Speed Competition!

« Last post by mouser on August 05, 2012, 03:58 PM »

I have demanded proof from josh, certain that it was a photoshop scam.. I have lost my wager and am now forced to acknowledge Josh is more skilled than me.  I am still coming to grips with the repercussions of this new information.  Is this today's new Army? Fastest typists on the planet?  My world is rocked. 

11050

Living Room / Re: Typing Speed Competition!

« Last post by mouser on August 05, 2012, 03:35 PM »

I REFUSE to accept that josh is a better typist than me.
Something is fishy.