Recent Posts

1201

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 Announced

« Last post by Shades on March 18, 2015, 09:21 AM »

Maybe the Outlook/Office you were using hadn't all the necessary patches? That would be my first guess. Besides, What version of Exchange is running? If your Outlook is 2 versions older than the Exchange it connects to...your usually SOL.

1202

General Software Discussion / Re: my problem with programming

« Last post by Shades on March 17, 2015, 11:02 PM »

Perhaps UML could be considered a solution here in this case.

1203

General Software Discussion / Re: is it possible to easily build a GUI mockup?

« Last post by Shades on March 17, 2015, 08:42 PM »

Simple mockups ain't that difficult to do. Long time ago I used TurboPHP to create something for a prospect. While that never took off, I did like TurboPHP. Mind you, this was around 2006 or so.

You can still find the binaries and installer on the Google Code site I linked to earlier. Fair warning though...in case you are interested, you should hurry with the download, because Google will be closing Google Code (I forgot when). The installer is slightly less than 8 MByte, so it should not take long. Doesn't look like there is much development going on though, the installer is from 2007. 

1204

General Software Discussion / Re: Recommendations for a free image viewer with strong editing features

« Last post by Shades on March 13, 2015, 06:55 AM »

One of the DC members here (Vitaly if memory serves me right) has made RWpaint, which has editing covered pretty well.

PaintStar is another alternative (also free, but this one can be used as portable...at least the version that I have here does)

And if Gimp isn't what you like, there is Krita.

Still, a good viewer is not an editor and a good editor isn't a good viewer.

1205

Living Room / Re: Interested in doing my own car maintenance.. Advice?

« Last post by Shades on March 10, 2015, 10:49 PM »

Is it not common to apply a coating on a new(er) car once every year or two, depending on the harshness of winter?

To clean roads of snow, municipalities use salt...which turns snow into a brown/blackish sludge that finds its way into every nook and cranny on the bottom and sides of your car. In no time your car will look eerilie similar to that brown/blackish sludge all year round. That is the reality in the Netherlands. However, there is a coating that protects your car. I only know it is called 'bitak'/'bitac' and that works very well for rust prevention.

If all you do is driving over smooth asphalt, then that coating easily lasts for years. Hence I always thought it was applied to any car. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

1206

Living Room / Re: Interested in doing my own car maintenance.. Advice?

« Last post by Shades on March 10, 2015, 12:13 AM »

My mother drove for a taxi company when I was a young kid and I spent quite some time in his garage and houses. The guy did all the maintenance himself...or delegated to his sons. His garage had a hole in the floor where an adult could stand in. It was all tiled up, had stairs for easy entrance, room for tool storage on decent height. All that was left was to drive the car over the hole, leaving the bottom exposed for any kind of job you require. Very safe for when you need to work under a car.

 

1207

Living Room / Re: Please help superboyac build a server (2013 edition).

« Last post by Shades on March 08, 2015, 10:44 PM »

When you add mirroring, your file-system will generate more overhead. Simply stated, you sacrifice speed for stability. Doesn't matter which file-system and/or RAID setup you use.

Also, verify the health of the disks in your storage pool(s). It is possible that one of your disks is generating a lot of interrupts, dragging the speed of all other drives down.

There is still a long shot (especially with older drives): drive alignment. Any partition management tool (Minitool has freeware for this) can verify this for you and allows you to align one or more partitions. If the partitions id filled with lots of data, this will take quite some time (hours). An empty partition is aligned within seconds. This really matters if disk I/O is of significance to you.

If you want speed, having a trustworthy backup strategy in place for your data and turning off any mirroring functionality is your best bet.

And if you are not comfortable with that, then your backup strategy isn't as trustworthy as you think

1208

Living Room / Re: I'd like to get a Windows Tablet: help me decide.

« Last post by Shades on March 07, 2015, 04:33 PM »

Android and iOS don't carry nearly as much "baggage" as Windows does. The systems on which those mobile OS's are build, do.

Operating systems such as Linux and BSD have networking ingrained into them. Pre-Vista Windows versions actually used the BSD implementation to do networking.

Building on a base that has networking down means that this system is build around different design principles. You will still find 20-year old code in the most current versions of Windows (after all, backwards compatibility). Design choices that were made in the beginning of Windows are most probably biting the Windows Phone OS in the rear-end now.

As I own a Lumia 520 I concur with anyone about noticing a huge difference in battery life when WiFi is enabled or not. WiFi = off > close to 36 hours on a charge. When it is on, barely 24 hours. What most people forget is how much energy is spent on finding a WiFi network. If you commute and cross between a lot of dead spots or areas with a lot of (protected) WiFi networks, your phone will spent a lot of extra energy trying to find and/or connect to WiFi networks.The same applies to connecting to a 2G/3G/4G network.

Design choices in a mature software product made in a period where computers were mostly stationary will bite in the current mobile trend. But that is 20/20 hindsight for you.

All I want to say is that most people don't see that a simple (and logically sound) request can have a huge impact on a code base. Making any drastic change in a mature code base, without sacrificing (too much) backwards compatibility? Don't expect it coming soon...   

1209

Living Room / Re: Multimeters are indispensable when working with any electrical apparatus.

« Last post by Shades on March 04, 2015, 05:03 PM »

And for the elite: a digital or analog oscilloscope...

1210

General Software Discussion / Re: Need SSL Certificate Recomendations

« Last post by Shades on March 04, 2015, 04:51 PM »

Self-signed, perhaps? At least you can make these last 10 years...

Or is it for the company and it's clients. Because for internal use only, I wouldn't be bothered too much about makin' me some certificates


(it is bad to make such long lasting ones...I am familiar with the do's and don'ts)

1211

General Software Discussion / Re: Lazesoft Recovery Suite Home

« Last post by Shades on March 01, 2015, 05:59 AM »

Burning the CD shouldn't be a problem with(in) the operating system the LazeSoft software is installed.

The instructions you mention are for the situation where you actually have to use the recovery CD to boot your computer from. I didn't encounter the instructions you mention on the LazeSoft homepage either (the section that explains how to burn a recovery CD).

In general, for proper instructions, always check the website of the company that makes the software first. If they can't be bothered to have such a section on their website, don't buy their crap.

1212

General Software Discussion / Re: Why won't my laptop run Firefox?

« Last post by Shades on February 27, 2015, 08:41 PM »

That is only the date from some of the files in use by your driver(s).

Better use tools like SIW to properly identify your computer or parts thereof, so you can visit the manufacturer's website and extract from the information on that website the true age of your laptop.

And if the above is too much work...the date of the BIOS/UEFI on the motherboard of your laptop is usually a better indicator of the true age of your laptop. Again, tools like SIW will show you this info at practically first glance.

1213

General Software Discussion / Re: Why won't my laptop run Firefox?

« Last post by Shades on February 26, 2015, 06:04 AM »

Sounds like the network configuration from FF is botched. Get a portable version of FF and try again (to my knowledge this version doesn't use anything but the bog standard network settings).

If that works, you can either continue using portable FF or install FF and use the settings from the portable one (profiles from both FF's are separated).

If this also won't work, take a good look at your network configuration in IE (perhaps it is set to use a (3rd party) proxy, which could filter traffic depending on browser or whatnot.

FF asks you, just after installation, if it should copy settings from IE before it connects to a website the first time. If you didn't do that before, try this and see how that goes. Or vice versa.

1214

Living Room / Re: "Renaming" a Windows 8.1 system that already has Office 365 installed

« Last post by Shades on February 25, 2015, 05:50 PM »

When you run services, such as an oracle database server on that pc, than it is unwise to change the name of your computer.

But if you don't, I don't see any problem.

1215

Post New Requests Here / Re: sound to signal copying is done

« Last post by Shades on February 22, 2015, 04:14 PM »

To my understanding almost all file managers can play a sound after a copy action has finished. Windows explorer can't. Adding this event to the Windows sound themes is not an option. At least not to the first set of links I found with DuckDuckGo.

An alternative copier such as TeraCopy could also be of help.


Then I found this link.

1216

Living Room / Re: The Untold Story of the Invention of the Game Cartridge

« Last post by Shades on February 22, 2015, 03:55 PM »

@rxantos:
That type of computer you can buy already for years. Don't even have to turn the thing of even if you needed to change the CPU. Just push a few buttons on the front of the machine that mark which hardware unit required replacement, wait for the indicator's (led or display) "permission", replace the unit and push buttons in front again to mark the unit has been changed. All that is left to do is wait for "permission" to use the hardware fully again.

Those systems were not affordable by mere mortals. Not buying or maintaining the hardware...or licensing the specialized operating system(s) required by such type of computers.


Things are as they are, because any modular hardware design requires software builders to give a lot more thought and planning to handle hardware changes at any given moment.
Don't think for one second that any of the currently popular operating systems is capable of working with this kind of hardware. At least not without (very) serious rewrites in the best situation to starting from scratch.

Besides that, modularity usually means making use of connectors. Every time you add any connector, you weaken the structure of the electronic circuits. You also lengthen the circuit, introducing more heat generation and susceptibility to RF interference. These things inevitably result in slowing down your circuits, sometimes significantly.

These are only the (basic) technical limitations you will experience with modular hardware. Those technical limitations will already rob a lot "fun" from the idea, but that will be nothing compared to the legal limitations.

Back in the day where we still could "run with the dino's" on a daily basis (instead of that new age sissy and annual thing called: "running with the bulls"), I grew up with a Commodore 64 and at one point in time I was able to buy the Geos cartridge for that home computer. Suddenly my C64 had a complete GUI with a word processor, all kind of tools and the pointer could be managed by joystick, keyboard or mouse.

Still, the Geos cartridge was not that successful. At least I was the only person who actually had one and I went to a lot of places, meeting a lot of people, doing some serious "sneaker-netting" for years (30 to 25 years ago). Concept was there, affordable computers were there and even in those years the modular hardware system never caught on.

1217

Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"

« Last post by Shades on February 21, 2015, 06:52 AM »

Beamer for everyday use. Price is a bit steep, but it is a novel idea.

1218

Living Room / Re: problem with microusb cable

« Last post by Shades on February 20, 2015, 03:04 PM »

Is buying 3 'el cheapo' cables cheaper than buying 1 original cable?

If the answer is yes, then those 'el cheapo' cables are really too cheap to be of any use. I still got all of the usb cables that came with my Nokia phones (that I bought here in Paraguay 7 years ago)...and my Lumia charges just fine with any of them. And. because of the standardization, my cables even charge an S5 and Sony Xperia's on occasion.

Maybe you can get a deal when a phone reseller wants to get rid of old stock (such as original Nokia usb cables...or any other brand for that matter).

1219

Living Room / Re: problem with microusb cable

« Last post by Shades on February 20, 2015, 02:32 PM »

With a general question, comes a generic answer:
Are you sure you need to use a micro-USB cable to charge your phone? Could be that your phone uses a connector that is quite similar to, but not the same as a micro-USB connector.

Depending on the age of your phone and possibly your geo-location, you might have such a phone. In that case find out what type of connector your phone is really using and find/use the correct cable.

That is, of course, you haven't destroyed the connector in your phone already.

1220

Living Room / Re: Please help superboyac build a server (2013 edition).

« Last post by Shades on February 18, 2015, 07:30 PM »

Or you could buy 7 of those 8TByte drives (I am not sure if you can use those to boot from) and a 3TByte boot disk. That would leave you with 59TByte of storage space. That should cover your needs...for a while at least.

If that is not an option, you might consider to differentiate between data you want to keep and data you need direct access to. Direct accessible data is the data you need to store on your server, the other data could be on a NAS, a cloud, a set of (portable) hard disks or DEV/NULL...the only storage facility that dwarfs all the clouds combined!

Spoiler

Just don't expect to retrieve anything

1221

Living Room / Re: Three articles on what kind of high quality (gaming) monitor you should buy

« Last post by Shades on February 17, 2015, 08:07 PM »

IPS is superior for sure. On my desk you'll find a high quality LED screen (22.5 inch) and a cheaper IPS screen (22 inch). Both have a resolution of 1920x1080. You wouldn't think the difference would be that big, but it really is.

However, after disabling refresh rates that do not apply to your monitor in Windows, I don't have the option to go to 120Hz though. Still, the difference is very noticeable at lower refresh rates, so it would be safe to assume it is even better at 120Hz.
 

1222

Living Room / Re: The Face Detection Algorithm Set to Revolutionize Image Search

« Last post by Shades on February 17, 2015, 07:28 PM »

I foresee plastic surgeons making as much money as oil sheiks do...soon  

Or that this profession is soon to be labelled as 'hackers'.

1223

General Software Discussion / Re: FireFox = total crap? And Jobs was oh so right about Flash, anyway. NoScript?

« Last post by Shades on February 16, 2015, 05:43 PM »

The Av (free) solution I prefer on resource strapped PC's remains BitDefender. That is lighter on resources and less intrusive in other ways than the competition, while getting good results.

FF is definitely a memory hog...but not necessarily much worse than Chrome or Opera. If you did not do this already, take a look "under the hood" of your OS with Process Explorer (you can get that for free from Sysinternals (a Microsoft owned company)). It will show you much more than the standard TaskManager does and allows you to terminate a process or process tree.

It also shows you info such as hard disk I/O, network I/O, interrupt use etc. This info might give you a better insight in what is happening on your computer and take (more) appropriate action(s).

As you said, your OS is old and likely your hardware has the same age. Electronics do not last forever and when moving parts are involved, it's even worse.

For example, your HD might be the reason why your systems slows down so much. During hard disk I/O, you expect some rise in the Interrupt values Process Explorer shows you. However, if those values are higher (above 5.0) when the system is idling, your hardware is fighting with each other and that is the first sign of bigger troubles. Also, when this number is high, you will experience tremendous amounts of slowing down. The same is true for network I/O.

With FF, who writes a lot of info to (virtual) RAM, generating a lot of network I/O (flash usually means streaming video), while the AV solution is doing a lot of disk I/O to keep your system safe...it doesn't take too much imagination to see that even minor hardware hiccups can cause big slowdowns on any computer. Aging hardware can throw you unexpected curve balls, be sure of that, at least.

Tools such as Process Explorer give you much more insight in what is happening in the background. On every computer I own, work with or have worked with, it is the first thing I install (actually, it is portable, so I should say: copy).

 

 

1224

Living Room / Re: Movies or films you've seen lately

« Last post by Shades on February 09, 2015, 09:57 PM »

The Little Death - Funny movie that is enjoyable for the music alone. But if you are blessed with the type mind that is a joy forever...you will more than like the story as well. There is a whole plethora of relationship styles being shown in this one...that's for sure.  

1225

Living Room / Re: wierd mouse click problem

« Last post by Shades on February 08, 2015, 07:58 PM »

True ergonomics there 

Should have told you that I never use or have used the Logitech software that came with the mouse. Besides the base functionality of pointing and clicking I don't have or want specific functionality being added by the bloated crap that is Logitech software.

The only reason my last Logitech was a gaming mouse was because of its configurable weight. Anyway, my Logitech mouses still would act up and keep adding undesirable behavior until I had enough of it and bought a replacement. Perhaps that is the reason why my Logitech's lasted around 5 years, instead of the more common response from other forum members stating only a functional life-span of 1 to 3 years.