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1301

Living Room / Re: how to learn finance

« Last post by IainB on January 14, 2017, 02:30 PM »

@kalos: Sorry if those links were "incomprehensible" definitions for your purposes. There would probably be a useful "Finance for Dummies" or a "Teach Yourself Finance" (or similar), which might be more readable. I hadn't thought of them.

1302

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 - Collection of Hacks, Tweaks, Improvements

« Last post by IainB on January 14, 2017, 01:55 PM »

@tomos: Thanks for your comment above.
I had not trialled the thing in Starter - a Startup Manager + Task Manager + Services Manager for Windows, and had assumed (perhaps incorrectly) from the article that it was Windows 10 but not necessarily earlier versions!

Anybody reading this and who tries it out in Win10, please post a comment about it here. Thanks.
I will eventually post a comment if I get around to trying it anyway.

1303

Screenshot Captor / Re: ScreenshotCaptor - Auto Capture modes

« Last post by IainB on January 14, 2017, 01:31 PM »

@viau2555: I have for years been using "screen-scrapers" of one form or another, and I thus may be familiar with the context - at least - of the sort of problem you are working on.

Objectives:

• The objective seems to be to capture an image of a scrolling screenshot of the whole on-screen report, or something.
• Failing that, the objective seems to be to capture an image of a screenshot of each of the 60 or so pages of on-screen report data.
• Post-capture, the objective is then to OCR any alphameric text in the captured image(s). You apparently intend to use the Adobe Acrobat for that, and I presume that the full version does that.

Possible approaches:

• NirSoft's SysExporter: as @Ath suggested, this would probably be the best approach, as it would grab the actual data rather than an image of it. That doesn't seem to work in your case.
• ScreenshotCaptor: You already tried that and it doesn't seem to work in your case, presumably because the report is in a proprietary output/display format, or something. If it were able to be displayed in a browser, then SC would probably be able to capture the image, and also the $FREE MS OneNote screen clipper - which seems to capture an entire scrollable web page with no hassle.
• Individual page display capture: This seems to be where you are at, at present.

Without knowing more about the application you are trying to capture the data from, it is difficult to imagine what constraints you are operating under, but I would suggest that most data analysis/management applications have some sort of output functionality - e.g., (say) to export the data, or to output to printer as a file in PDF format. I presume you have explored this avenue.

Since you wish to get the data into a form you can independently manipulate it with - e.g., (say) Excel - then taking/exporting the data from the database directly in some way would be the best approach, as it will be error-free, whereas anything else (e.g., image capture and then OCR) would be undesirable as an alternative, simply because it will introduce errors.  I presume you have explored this avenue.

However, if you are now stuck with the only option seeming to be the tedious capture of the 60 or so screen report images and then OCRing those, then I suppose that is what you will have to do.
Rather than try to design, build and test an automated image capture process, I would suggest that you do it manually and focus instead on identifying the best (least error-prone) OCR system to use, post-capture. You may find that Acrobat does not fall into that category for your requirements.

Ideally, you will need an OCR system that captures alphameric data in columnar form - assuming that the on-screen report has columns.
There may be others, but there is only one system that I have come across that:

• (a) captures directly from the screen,
• (b) then immediately OCRs the text and with great accuracy.

- and it can be very accurate and with few (if any) errors, where the captured image is clear and the characters in the text are unambiguous. That is ABBYY FineReader:

So I would suggest that you consider using that as you can capture each screen and OCR it in one step, for all 60 or so screens.

ABBYY FineReader is a professional OCR solution allowing you to convert scanned and photographed
documents as well as PDFs into editable formats.
______________________________

The special thing about this software is it's efficiency in use - that, in one step, it can capture tabulated on-screen text, OCR it and send it to Clipboard in tabular-spaced format for use in any document, or directly to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet (if Excel is already installed).

ABBYY FineReader has been reviewed and discussed elsewhere in the DC Forum. It is frequently available and offered for $FREE as a promotion for other ABBY software. It usually comes as part of the ABBYY FineReader vX.0 Sprint suite of software bundled with some scanners.

Hope this helps or is of use.

1304

General Software Discussion / Re: Microsoft OneNote - when "Snip" might refer to something potentially huge.

« Last post by IainB on January 14, 2017, 06:53 AM »

After reading this about how a Microsoft "Garage" experiment changed things:
Lynbrook Public Schools digital journey and the unexpected app that changed everything

 - I downloaded the Snip app from: https://mix.office.com/snip

This Snip would:

• seem to be a potentially very nifty tool - and not just for OneNote users either.
• seem to not only create some disintermediation, but also bypasses the incessant drive for "monetisation", so is potentially disruptive too.

I am trialling it now. I rather like it. My first attempts at sharing:

• my first Snip:     https://mix.office.c...zfm92ddmg?autoplay=1
• my second Snip: https://mix.office.c...0rj5k4yaa?autoplay=1

Note: Try opening the links in a new tab, for best rendition. The snips seem to be fed to the viewing browser as two or three separate streams(?) - image, video and audio - and the video part seems to always play, whilst the static image and the audio part might not play. Thus, seems bit buggy in some browsers.
Opening the links in a Chrome incognito window seems to work first time, indicating that it could possibly be a cookie problem.
Interestingly, they seem to work just fine in MS Edge and IE, for some reason...   

This is a screenshot clip of the above Snip toolbox "Library":

1305

General Software Discussion / Starter - a Startup Manager + Task Manager + Services Manager for Windows 10

« Last post by IainB on January 11, 2017, 11:03 AM »

2017-01-12 0558hrs - Just added to the list: A handy 3-in-1 tool replicating some existing Windows 10 settings functionality - Starter - a Startup Manager + Task Manager + Services Manager for Windows

Starter is a Startup Manager cum Task Manager cum Services Manager will help you manage your Windows startup items & programs and more. The tool also lists all processes & information on memory usage, DLLs, priorities, thread count, etc.

EDIT 2017-01-15: Starter has not been tested by me. @tomos comments below that it worked on Vista but has not been updated since and so may not work on later versions of Windows.
At the website http://codestuff.obn...roducts_starter.html  it says:

Microsoft Windows 9x, Me, NT, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista.

1306

General Software Discussion / Re: What is Runtime Broker, and Why is it working so pathetically bad?

« Last post by IainB on January 08, 2017, 07:23 PM »

Worthwhile workaround tip to try: Using Process Hacker, I invariably restart the Runtime Broker process as a matter of course when trying to fix excessive CPU or RAM usage in Win10-64 Pro. I also restart any (other) apps with excessive CPU or RAM usage.

1307

Living Room / Re: how to learn finance

« Last post by IainB on January 08, 2017, 06:49 PM »

@kalos: Here are some inks to such terms:

• debt and equity markets - link.
• fixed income - link.
• securities - link.
• derivatives - link.

They are just that - i.e., terminology.
Follow the links, and, once you understand the definition of the terms (in the context of "finance"), you will be able to find quite a lot of information about that specific definition, on Internet searches. Beware of web sites wanting you to trade in any obscure financial markets - e.g., binary options trading (discussed elsewhere on DC forum) or futures trading. You can lose all your money and be made bankrupt pretty quick with those. They are just for speculative trading ("speculative" here is used as a euphemism for "gambling").

Self-education on these financial terms and their use can be obtained from reading books (e.g., a book on accountancy and finance from a second-hand bookshop, which latter tend to have lots of perfectly good old textbooks on such subjects), or visiting free course links as suggested by @rgdot. Don't sign up for a paid course though, as that will probably lead to their signing you up for a speculative trading account and could introduce you to the full meaning of the financial term "bankrupt". Take care.

For example, I know of a Dutch guy - an economist with a PhD in economics and who lectured in economics - who apparently bankrupted himself in about 1988 by "going long" on a futures trade, on a "You can't fail with this stock" transaction.   
Not sure whether he ever recovered, financially or personally. It completely ruined (stopped) his imminent marriage as well.

1308

Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"

« Last post by IainB on January 07, 2017, 04:25 AM »

It's not April Fools' Day, so I took a serious look at this ARStechnica post: Chilean officials can’t identify a strange IR signal seen by its Navy

That seems inexplicable - and very interesting.
The video was apparently taken by Chilean Navy pilot(s) on November 14, 2014, but the Chilean Navy are apparently only releasing the information this week (Jan. 2017)?
Interesting that the helocopter crew were testing out a new thermal imaging camera ,,, when they spotted a ready-made thermal imaging anomaly...

In NZ, there are 12 bottles of beer in a crate of beer. There are 12 daylight hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not.

1309

Developer's Corner / Asshole-Driven Development (ADD)

« Last post by IainB on January 06, 2017, 08:01 AM »

In my bazqux feed-reader, I have a feed from Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/).
They post lots of interesting stuff seemingly randomly-picked from all over the WWW and from different time-periods.
They had this today: Asshole driven development (2007)

The author of the article lists a few ADD approaches, but in the comments people have listed maybe a hundred or so more - from their own experiences - and I was very impressed with both the quality and the humour of the descriptions. Many of the ADD methods described I too have personally experienced in real life - they were usually notable in that they contributed in some way to project delay/failure.

One of the ADD methods listed is something like "CYAD" (Cover Your Ass Development) and that is one which, from memory, I recall was identified in the programming for the development of a nationwide ATM (Automated Teller Machine) network project which was using IBM hardware (ATMs and dumb 3640 network switches) and IBM CICS (a transaction server OS language), driven by an obscure proprietary IBM programming tool/protocol with the acronym CTAM (Customer Transaction Access Method), interfacing with IBM host mainframes. However, the analysts working on the project amusingly used the acronym CTAM as code for Cover The Ass Method, because that was what they observed had been going on.

The project was closed down and restarted with a "refreshed" (i.e., new) design team and the design objectives were expanded to include future-proofing the system with full EFT-POS functionality at the outset. The network was re-designed to be non-proprietary and hardware-agnostic (any manufacturer brand of terminal hardware could connect to it), utilising any old ATMs and replacing the dumb 3640 switches with Tandem Non-Stop computers as distributed intelligence/data network processing nodes, using ACI Base24 applications.

It was super-political. I recall the initial designers who had been unceremoniously dumped from the project kept lobbing grenades into the refreshed project, writing long reports as to why the new design was infeasible - it simply couldn't work, etc.. You'd think they worked for IBM (which I suppose they did, in a way).They only went quiet after the network went online and fully operational, as scheduled. Funny that. Could they have been wrong?   

1310

Living Room / Re: What books are you reading?

« Last post by IainB on January 05, 2017, 02:01 AM »

@kath-accubizbooks: That would be Katherine LaBarca. Owner, President of AccuBizBooks (Trenton, FL), I presume?

I don't know whether DC forum members would be interested in what you read (why don't you try us and see?), but I suspect that you would probably be able to pass some useful comments/tips on any accounting software we might have discussed or reviewed on this forum, and also suggest some other software we might not have known about.
I for one would always be interested in any discussions regarding financial modelling or accounting-related software, or books on same.
EDIT 2017-01-06 2300hrs: Yes, I wondered whether I was replying to spam - seems like I probably was. Pity. It would have been good to get some fresh input on the subject of financial/accounting software.

1311

Living Room / Re: What books are you reading?

« Last post by IainB on January 03, 2017, 04:58 AM »

I didn't like it. Maybe my expectations were too high, but I found it boring and slow paced ... But that just me; you should give it a chance ...

-panzer (January 03, 2017, 04:20 AM)

Yes, always a good idea to give a book "a chance". Maybe get a pleasant surprise. One never knows what one risks learning from a book until one reads it.     
It's like a kind of adventure - e.g., The Catcher in the Rye, or Mein Kampf, or The Log from the Sea of Cortez.

Mind you, I'd usually have a preference for non-fiction if I expected to learn something, though sometimes fictional stories can be quite thought-provoking, if not educational - especially SF.

1312

Living Room / Re: good Videos [short films] here :)

« Last post by IainB on January 01, 2017, 10:46 AM »

This YouTube video version of a poem is a good example of use of the medium and of the hope for democracy in the USA (apparently based on the premise that it ain't there yet):
EDIT 2017-01-02 1637hrs: Just thought I'd better clarify, before someone criticises me for posting a politically biased comment or patiently explains it to me, that I am not so blind as to not see that this video and the quoted words (not necessarily the poem per se) seem to make a thinly-disguised pejorative polemic against the election of citizen Trump - who has been elected as president, by the people, in what I understand was a fully democratic process that the people have been contentedly using for donkey's years. So I am categorically not advocating nor supporting arguments one way or the other regarding that democratic process.

• So, yes, I can see that the polemic was probably made by people amongst the minority that "lost" - those voters who presumably didn't vote for Trump and yet who may still wish to see their religio-political ideology forcibly trump the wishes of the democratic majority ("sore losers", as some have called them).
  
  
• And yes, I can see the irony in this, but that does not detract from the beauty of the poem nor from the legitimacy of the inspiring hope that the democratic process can be improved still further, because it certainly doesn't seem to be there yet - even the president-elect said, quite seriously, that the election process was "rigged", and his opponents and detractors have belatedly claimed that "the Russians did it", or something (Yeah, I know - right? Them darn Ruskies.), rather than seek an internal locus of control for responsibility for failure to win the election (or rig it properly in their favour, if they had rigged it - as the president-elect may have been implying).
  
  
• And yes, I can see that one implication there, of course, could be - from what he said - the hope that the president-elect intends to change something to better align things with a pukka democratic process, because, as a relative "wild card" he might just be the right person to do that, whereas the status quo so-called and self-styled "professional" political candidates sure as heck weren't going to do anything in that regard, having apparently studiously ignored the opportunity to do so over the last 8 years and seeming at times to have been more concerned with attacking/dismantling the American Constitution, rather than making it a stronger democratic construct to ensure a more egalitarian society with improved access to equal franchise, freedom and liberty. So, sure, there's the hope that he will try to fix that for all whilst he "drains the swamp". We shall see.
  

I should also say that one thing I don't support and didn't like about this otherwise rather good video is the raised fists, which could potentially be a further discrete fascistic incitement to the sort of mindless post-election violence against people and in "protest" riots that was experienced (if not encouraged) in parts of the US. However, I am aware that that mindless violence was probably committed by and probably revealed a lot about a relatively small minority of American people and their perception of the need for real "democracy" - the majority presumably seeing it as being undemocratic to go around thumping people and causing property damage because your party lost a democratic election to a sizeable majority, or something.

Published on 22 Dec 2016
In these dark days Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman found comfort and hope in the work of Leonard Cohen. Together they recorded this new version of “Democracy.” Amanda composed the piano and Neil recorded the lyrics. Their friends David Mack and Olga Nunes created this stunning video to go with the song.

A storm is brewing. PEN America will help writers and artists and citizens survive and thrive through this maelstrom.

Join Amanda and Neil in supporting PEN America today. www.pen.org

1313

N.A.N.Y. 2017 / Re: NANY 2017: Scratchpad - A simple way of recording notes, with autosave!

« Last post by IainB on January 01, 2017, 10:07 AM »

@camerb:
Thankyou for giving us Scratchpad.   
By the way, I think you might have meant the version in the table in the OP to be "2016-12-31", not "2006-12-31".

I too - similar to @tomos - use other tools for scratchpad functionality, but I am always interested in trying out new tools, since that is the only way I am likely to run the risk of finding something better!   
So, I shall give this new tool a whirl and provide some feedback later.

1314

Living Room / Re: For 2017

« Last post by IainB on January 01, 2017, 09:55 AM »

Yes, to paraphrase Tiny Tim: "A happy and prosperous New Year to us, one and all!"

Also:

... I was reminded by a post - at brainpickings.org here - of something that Steinbeck wrote - in his letters, that could also be be relevant to the New Year of 2017 which for us is just beginning. He wrote it on January 1, 1941, when the world was in the midst of the WW2 Holocaust:
Quote
"... Speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy. It’s as though the whole race were indulging in a kind of species introversion — as though we looked inward on our neuroses. And the thing we see isn’t very pretty… So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing — that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression on the instincts of the million years that preceded. ..."
____________________________
- but he went on in very thoughtful and philosophically optimistic vein for the future of the good in mankind.

-IainB (January 01, 2017, 09:29 AM)

1315

Living Room / Books I am reading: The Log from the Sea of Cortez (Steinbeck)

« Last post by IainB on January 01, 2017, 09:29 AM »

Reading again a book - The Log from the Sea of Cortez - which I think with Of Mice and Men (a profoundly thoughtful book) formed my introduction to a man who became one of my favourite writers - the American author John Steinbeck (though I have not read all of his books).



I'm not sure, but I think The Log may have been the first book by Steinbeck that I read (it was either that or Of Mice that was the first, anyway). As a child of 12 y/o I found it (a Penguin paperback) amongst the books at home, and, being interested in all things biology and including marine biology (my earliest years included living beside the sea, and later on the seaside was never far away and I was fascinated by marine pond life), I was curious enough to read the book.

I recall that, initially I had somehow been expecting the book to be fictional. I discovered that it was a non-fictional account of a six-week marine specimen-collecting boat expedition that Steinbeck and a marine biologist friend (Ed Ricketts) made in 1940, along various coastal sites in the Gulf of California (also known as the Sea of Cortez). The book introduced me to a few new things/ideas (e.g., that people might have the time and inclination to explore a coastal region, collecting specimens, just out of scientific curiosity) and I learned a special new word - "littoral":

littoral /"lIt(@)r(@)l/
· adj. of, relating to, or on the shore of the sea or a lake.
· n. a littoral region.
– ORIGIN C17: from L. littoralis, from litus, litor- ‘shore’.
Concise Oxford Dictionary (10th Ed.)
__________________________

I learned that what was special about this word was that, for a biologist, it described a narrow environmental band along all seashores around the planet - an environment that provided a unique ecosystem that supported a diverse collection of flora and fauna specialised to survive in that environment and not generally found elsewhere - i.e., usually only in that band between low and high tidal marks.
As a result, whenever I find myself on a seaside beach (lakes seem to be less diverse/interesting), in whatever country I happen to be, I invariably end up wandering along the beach, exploring the littoral by myself, or with my children, and it always reminds me of the book The Log from the Sea of Cortez, though I have always thought the title of the book somewhat misleading, since it is a log of a voyage along just a tiny part (the littoral) of the Gulf of California - i.e., hardly a pukka "sea" voyage per se.

I was reminded by a post - at brainpickings.org here - of something that Steinbeck wrote - in his letters, that could also be be relevant to the the New Year of 2017 which for us is just beginning. He wrote it on January 1, 1941, when the world was in the midst of the WW2 Holocaust:

"... Speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy. It’s as though the whole race were indulging in a kind of species introversion — as though we looked inward on our neuroses. And the thing we see isn’t very pretty… So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing — that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression on the instincts of the million years that preceded. ..."

- but he went on in very thoughtful and philosophically optimistic vein for the future of the good in mankind.

1316

Living Room / Re: Knight to queen's bishop 3 - Snowden charged with espionage.

« Last post by IainB on December 31, 2016, 04:15 PM »

Historically, we know from their actions leading up to WW2, and their actions during the "Cold War", the Cuban crisis and the subsequent collapse of the USSR and the Berlin Wall, that the Russians would seem to have deservedly earned the reputation of being pariahs of modern "democratic civilization".

Then they harboured the "traitorous criminal" Snowden, who had fled to Russia to avoid being banged up in chokey for - likely as not - the rest of his life, for the SnowdonGate revelations published by the UK's Guardian newspaper, about the US NSA intrusively spying on what seemed to be just about everybody and in every nation and distributing information-gathering (hacking) viruses and whatnot across the Internet.

So it was not too surprising to me when I read the other day that Obama had apparently restarted the old Cold War practice of sending a bunch of Russian diplomatic officials home as punishment for some wrong the Ruskies were alleged to have committed - in this case the official reason was that they had apparently committed a "wrong" by hacking into US government-operated networks and leaking the information they had gleaned to WikiLeaks, or something, though I also gather from media reports that Julian Assange has stated the Russian government was not the source and the Russians have also denied it.
Then I read today in ARStechnica.com that:

White House fails to make case that Russian hackers tampered with election
... Sadly, the JAR, as the Joint Analysis Report is called, does little to end the debate. Instead of providing smoking guns that the Russian government was behind specific hacks, it largely restates previous private-sector claims without providing any support for their validity. Even worse, it provides an effective bait and switch by promising newly declassified intelligence into Russian hackers' "tradecraft and techniques" and instead delivering generic methods carried out by just about all state-sponsored hacking groups. ...

Historically, ARStechnica seems to have a record for its tendency, to push the politically correct line ad nauseam, so I reckoned this take on the JAR was probably a reasoned conclusion from some investigative journalism (for a change) and someone having read the report with their critical thinking cap on.

There seems toe be something hilarious in all of this, because, in the US government making the apparently unproven and unsubstantiated allegations/accusations about the Russian hacking (QED), and trying to take retribution for same, they have compounded themselves in a classic case of "the pot calling the kettle black", and they are also being hypocritical in this when in fact it is the US government (via the NSA) that would seem to be categorically the worst hacking offender on the planet - QED as per the published SnowdonGate revelations and which nobody has denied.

So is all this apparent BS about the Russians "fake news", or "truthism", or something?

Some people (not me, you understand) might say that, either way, it clearly creates a dichotomy which has the potential to demonize, stigmatize and antagonise the "evil" Russians, in what looks to be some kind of US government political cover-up whilst pointing the blame elsewhere, and it might thereby make it even more difficult to later reverse and give Snowden a pardon, but I couldn't possibly comment.

1317

General Software Discussion / Slimjet updated to 12.0.14.0 (2016-12-21)

« Last post by IainB on December 31, 2016, 12:43 PM »

I can't seem to find a way to get Slimjet to auto-update, so i manually update it.
v12.0.14.0 is still the latest version I can find as at 2017-01-01.

I today found a useful chrome store add-on to perform the same role as the excellent Firefox self-destucting cookies extension  - it's called Tab Cookies. It seems to work very well and does what it says:

• Get in control of your privacy automatically deleting the unused cookies created in each tab when you close it.
  This extensions deletes all the cookies created in a tab (which are not used by other tabs) when you close the tab. In this way your privacy is guaranteed.
  
  For example, as long as you stay on gMail, you are logged in, but once you close that tab (and all the others which are or have been on a Google site) the tracking cookies of Google disappear. Same for Facebook,
  

I searched for it after getting a message from https://www.washingtonpost.com/ that I had already read 2 pages and wasn't allowed to read any more. I found that interruption unspeakably annoying. - I mean, who the heck do they think they are and what gives them the right to monitor how many pages I read of anything and interrupt my web browsing and take control like that?
Sheesh.
I was also annoyed by the assumptions it made - I had got to that particular page not because I wanted to read that particular page or even their blasted organ per se, but because it was a link referred to by a post on another website. When I follow a link, I am generally not too interested in whose website it is.

If I had not found the Tab Cookies add-on or similar, then I would have just blocked the washingtonpost.com domain in my browser and they could shove it. They don't have copyright on news.

1318

Living Room / Movies you've seen lately - The Day the Earth Stood Still + Enemy Mine.

« Last post by IainB on December 30, 2016, 09:35 AM »

This being Christmas and a time for the Christmas message of goodwill and love to all mankind, we - my daughter Lily (15 y/o) and son Brian (6 y/o) and I, watched two SF movies that reflected that message in their own uniquely different ways:

• The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951 version). This is about a humanoid alien who comes to earth to warn the inhabitants that they must learn to be more peaceable or risk extinction at the hands of the aliens' robotic policing machines.
• Enemy Mine This is about the friendship that develops between two mortal enemies - both being space fighter pilots - a human and a Drek lizard, who crash-land on a habitable asteroid in a science fiction  future.

At the end of the second movie, my daughter asked me whether I thought the US Democrats and Republicans would ever be able to coexist peaceably like the Drek and the human. I replied "Yes, but probably only in fictional stories".

1319

Living Room / Reader's Corner - 10 free ePub Readers for Windows 10

« Last post by IainB on December 29, 2016, 04:41 PM »

I reckoned this post was worth mentioning here as it could be quite useful: (I already use Calibre, which is one of those mentioned, and which I did a Mini-Review of on DC Forum)
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)

10 best free ePub Readers for Windows 10
E-Books and e-book readers are probably one of best things to happen over the past few years. They don’t only let you carry too many books around in one device but also let you do your part in the conservation of the environment. ePub is a digital file format meant for e-books, and here in this post, we’ve discussed some of the best ePub readers available on Windows 10.

Free ePub Readers for Windows 10
We have covered some desktop freeware as well as some Windows Store ePub readers here. Let us take a look at them.

1. Calibre
Calibre eBook Reader is probably the best e-book library management tool you can ever have. And also if you own an e-book reader like Amazon Kindle or the likes, this software comes to your rescue. It lets you maintain a digital library of books and also lets you sync them across the devices. It can convert e-books to various other formats including the .txt and .pdf formats. The support for plugins lets you add more functionality to the tool and do a lot more.

2. FBReader
FBReader or Favourite Book Reader is a multi-platform tool that lets you read ePub files on various devices. Other than ePub format, FBReader can work with fb2, mobi, rtf, html, plain text, and a lot of other formats. It is a simple yet amazing tool. You can customize your reading experience completely by adjusting the looks and the feel of the book. You can have custom colors schemes and also create and save bookmarks in the book. Click here to download FBReader.

3. Bibliovore
Available to download on Windows Store, Bibliovore is a great ePub reader that supports Windows 10. It comes with synchronization features and uses Microsoft’s OneDrive to share the same files across different devices with the same account logged in. Bibliovore comes with the features like Day/Night reading mode and the ability to edit metadata of the files. Also, you can adjust font parameters and set bookmarks. Visit Windows Store to download Bibliovore.

4. Bookviser
Bookviser is another e-book reading application available for Windows phone as well as PC. Bookviser gives you access to over thousands of e-books available for free to download. If you are an avid reader, Bookviser may create an amazing bookshelf for you where the books are neatly organized and easily accessible. There are tons of amazing features available such as instantaneous share button lets you share clippings of text from books to various social networks. And the other features like text to speech and automatic backups makes this tool more usable and advance. Bookviser comes with all the basic features such as Day/Night mode, bookmarks, etc. Click here to download Bookviser.

5. Freda
Freda is again a similar application available for Windows phone as well as PC. It lets you read ePub, TXT, HTML and FB2 files. It offers free downloading of e-books from websites such as Project Gutenberg, Feedbooks, etc. You can look up dictionary definitions and translations while reading your book along with. Themes can be easily adjusted, and bookmarks can also be easily managed. Freda is dyslexic friendly and includes OpenDyslexic font making it easier to read for people affected by dyslexia. Visit Windows Store to download Freda.

Tip: CDisplay Ex is a free Comic Book Reader for Windows.

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6. Icecream Ebook Reader
Another e-book reader with great features is Icecream Ebook Reader. Amazing UI and overall feel of this tool make it preferable. Comes with all the features of an e-book reader such as text themes, annotations, bookmarks, inbuilt dictionary and much more. A paid version of this application is also available which comes with more features and support. Icecream Ebook Reader is a fine e-book reader, and it does what is says.

7. OverDrive
OverDrive is another Windows Store application that lets you read ePub and other e-book formats on your computer screen. Other than e-books you can also listen to tons of audiobooks available on the internet. Moreover, you can even borrow e-books from digital libraries to which you have already subscribed, and you can automatically return titles to avoid any late charges or fees. You can create reading lists, wish lists, etc. OverDrive is a perfect tool for you if you have already subscribed to a digital library or of you have a digital library setup at your school or college. Visit Windows Store to download OverDrive app.

8. Books Bazaar Reader
It is a Windows Store application available for free to download. Books Bazaar gives you access to thousands of free titles available online. You can customize the entire reading experience by customizing themes and switch between Day/Night modes. The application also supports bookmarks, annotations, and highlights. Moreover, you can create reading lists and also share highlighted pieces of text from a book. Visit Windows Store to download Books Bazaar Reader.

9. Sumatra PDF
Sumatra PDF is basically meant to read PDF files, but it supports ePub and various other e-book formats as well. So you get the functionality of a full-fledged PDF reader with the ability to read ePub files too. Sumatra PDF is fast, fluid and portable application that you can carry around. Click here to download Sumatra PDF.

Read: 5 websites to download free eBooks legally.

10. Cover
Cover is a Windows Store application which was basically meant to read Comic books but you can for sure read ePub files and other e-book formats as well. All the basic settings can be adjusted, and you can edit your books/comics as well. A library is automatically created for you, and you can arrange your books properly in virtual shelves. You can highlight text, take snapshots and easily send them too. Visit Windows Store to download Cover.

Tip: Martview is a cool free animated eBook reader for Windows 10.
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These were the ePub readers available out there for Windows 10. Did we miss out any? If so, please mention them in the comments section below. Some of you may be interested in following this link for eBook readers for Windows 10 Mobile Phone.

I happen to own an Amazon Kindle, and I personally use Calibre to continue reading books on Windows that I was reading on my device. Also, I sometimes edit the metadata for the documents that I create personally and Calibre can handle that part too pretty well.
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1320

Living Room / Vera Rubin (dark matter) dies 2016-12-25, at the age of 88.

« Last post by IainB on December 28, 2016, 01:06 AM »

I have just read that on Sunday 2016-12-25, at the age of 88, Vera Rubin passed away.
She was a rather special discoverer.
She was the astronomer-scientist and later a women's advocate, whose 1970 published research observations identified, quite by chance (i.e., it was not central to the research project), that there was a minor and inexplicable anomaly in the orbital velocities of stars about a galactic centre - their orbital velocities were not quite what was mathematically predictable according to known laws of physics.

Her further research observations published in 1980 pinpointed the likely cause as being an unknown - some kind of matter was postulated - that interacted via gravity but not via the spectrum of electro-magnetic forces - - it was "invisible" across the spectrum, and cast no electro-magnetic shadow.)

So, though it had previously been thought a set of cardinal rules in physics that:

• Everything interacts via gravity.
• Everything interacts via electromagnetic forces.

- here was something unknown that did not seem to obey the latter rule.

The name eventually given to this unknown was "dark matter" (arguably a bit of a misnomer), but it is still theoretical and an unknown. However, what subsequent research has established is that, theoretically, the universe is (must be) filled with this matter, with a ratio of 5-10 times more of it than the ordinary and more sparsely distributed matter. Ordinary matter is what makes up stars, planets, gas and the flora and fauna of earth, for example.

Good write-ups:

• Vera Rubin, 88, Dies; Opened Doors in Astronomy, and for Women
• How one person discovered the majority of the universe – The work of Vera Rubin
• Vera Rubin - Wikipedia

1321

Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"

« Last post by IainB on December 27, 2016, 12:29 AM »

...Whatever happened to mucilage, anyway?

-x16wda (December 26, 2016, 08:53 PM)

Well, I don't know whether it is still used in glues, but, since it is organic and edible and it has medicinal applications, I gather that it still has uses in some dairy products and in medicines - refer Mucilage - Wikipedia.  Mmm, mucilage, nom, nom, nom...

Maybe it has been largely replaced by synthetic forms of the mucilage now.
From my school science days, I seem to recall that mucilage used to be used to stick paper labels onto glass bottles holding chemicals, but over time the mucilage would tun into a hardened varnish which stuck OK to the bottles and was difficult to remove, but not to the back of the labels, so there were all these old bottles of chemicals in the chem lab that couldn't be so easily identified because their labels would have fallen off. Ruddy nuisance. Some of those bottles had potentially deadly contents too, so taste or sniff was out.   

1322

Finished Programs / Re: IDEA: Shell extension to show total play time of media clips

« Last post by IainB on December 27, 2016, 12:00 AM »

Not sure if this is what is wanted, but the Length of .mp3 files is given as a column in Windows Explorer with the format hh:mm:ss

1323

Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"

« Last post by IainB on December 26, 2016, 07:36 PM »

@Arizona Hot:
Thanks for the clip to that children's choir. That girl soloist certainly seems to have perfect (or near-perfect) pitch and a beautiful voice. I love the rest of the choir - they are doing a great job.

I'm 110 some days, so I looked at those "pictures for old people" and bugger me if I couldn't remember any of them! Oh, wait...

1324

Living Room / Re: Strange problems with my laptop.

« Last post by IainB on December 26, 2016, 03:00 PM »

Well, I don't think I have experienced anything exactly like what you describe, though I have experienced something quite similar on two laptops. In both cases the problem was a progressively failing HDD. The latest was the most severe case, and it was on a used laptop that I had been given - OS was Win7-x86.

The conclusion with that was that the HDD was failing and the drive was spending an inordinate amount of time repairing itself as best it could, but was meanwhile progressively running out of available space to re-allocate bad sectors to, or something. I would have found out about it a lot sooner if I had of installed Hard Disk Sentinel Pro at the outset. However, I only belatedly installed HDS, by which time a lot of the disk was unrecoverable. Fortunately that didn't really matter as the laptop was non-critical and only likely to be used for games for my 6 y/o son. But the lesson there was to install HDS ASAP on any laptop one gets - new or secondhand. That way one gets as early a warning as possible when something goes wrong with the disk, and one can clone a good image and save oneself from a lot of potential hassle.

See if you can establish what the Windows licence key is for that laptop (try the NirSoft ProduKey), so you can get a clean $FREE OS install from MS (using that licence key) on a new hard disk, if it indeed turns out that the disk is going kaput.

1325

DC Gamer Club / Re: Fallout 3 (GOTYE) on Windows 10 Pro.

« Last post by IainB on December 26, 2016, 03:01 AM »

@Shades: No, the location of the correct saved game files does not seem to be a problem. The game seems to know where the saved game files are OK (they also show in its menu as well, to prove it) and then, when you start it to play a new game or a saved game file that you point it at:

• (a) sometimes it fails before it gets anywhere after that, crashing for no apparent reason.
• (b) sometimes it starts loading the saved game file that you point it at, and it puts out the usual sort of stats about that player/game file to pass the time as it is loading that game file, then it crashes, for no apparent reason.

I haven't figured out how to repeatedly force (a) or (b).

But you might have made a useful point - I hadn't thought of using an analysis tool as you suggest. Thanks.