Recent Posts

13401

Find And Run Robot / Re: [Feature request/Plugin idea] add search in dictionary.com

« Last post by mouser on May 29, 2011, 09:34 AM »

Hi Werizon,

Your question is a perfect one for using the webgrab plugin, and ewemoa, the author of the webgrab plugin, suggested the solution to me in a personal message:
You can accomplish what you want using the dosearchontrigger command.

Here is the alias import text; you can go to the alias tab, open up myaliases.alias and right-click to "import" this:

Code: Text [Select]

1. 1000>>>mdict>->search reference.com for "$$1" | dosearchontrigger webgrab http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/$$1 `<div id="rpane">([\s\S]*)<div id="v2" class="sep_top">` `%1` html>+>^mdict (.+)$

Alternatively here is a screenshot of the alias:


Essentially what you are doing here is telling FARR to *perform* the webgrab "search" after the user types something that matches the expression "mdict blah.." and then hits enter; so this acts as if the user had typed "webgrab http://...." with the $$1 replaced.

13402

DcUpdater / Re: Run program after update?

« Last post by mouser on May 29, 2011, 09:23 AM »

a) Is it possible to run a program after downloading an 'unzip' type update? The zip file would contain a program that I want to start after unzipping.

not yet, but i will add it.

b) If instead I use the Run updatemethod, how do i pass parameters to my setup file so that I can run it silently?

hadn't considered that but i can add an option for it.

13403

General Software Discussion / Re: Software recommendations for writers

« Last post by mouser on May 29, 2011, 01:14 AM »

I'm thinking about putting together a page for these things

-caveatrob (May 26, 2011, 05:44 PM)

I think that would be very useful 

13404

Living Room / Backup Strategy: "The Threes"

« Last post by mouser on May 29, 2011, 12:46 AM »

I'm trying to get back into good backup habits.  I thought it might be worth documenting a new approach I'm taking.

FIRST A WORD ABOUT RAID:
Note that many people use a RAID approach to keeping their data safe; I have not adopted RAID yet and still have some uneasy feelings about it, but it may indeed be a good alternative solution to part of the goals I am outlining here.  HOWEVER -- While RAID does a good job of protecting your data against a hard drive hardware failure, that is only one of the goals of backing up data.  The other main goal is to keep backups against accidental modification/deletion/overwriting/corruption of files, which is only discovered days/weeks/months after it occurs without notice.

Three "tiers" of backup software:

• 1. Full disk imaging (software example: Macrium Reflect); backup full drives once per month; scope: all content on all drives; keep a few old images, delete old image to make room.
• 2. Broad document backup (software example; Backup4All); performed weekly or every couple of days (perhaps even daily); scope: all user data documents, even large databases; incremental if space allows; mirrored to spare hd if not; can delete old copies if space is limited.
• 3. Instant versioned/incremental backup (software example: FileHamster); keeps instant copies of every version; scope: small set of important documents that are frequently modified by user.

Justification:

• The full disk imaging is the comprehensive approach that backs up everything; but it takes too long and occupies too much space to perform too frequently.
• The instant versioned/incremental backups are too cpu and space demanding to have run on EVERY file that you might modify (for example if you have large databases that don't version well).
• The broad document backup may be best performed by mirroring directories onto a spare drive, which can be done quickly at the end of each day, occupying little extra space and taking little cpu.

Where to backup: 3 internal drives
I think a 3-internal-drive pc is the best way to go here:

• 1. A super fast system C drive (10k rpm, or solid state drive); 100gb or so.
• 2. A fast user document drive (10k rpm preferably).
• 3. A large backup drive (2tb preferably; speed not too important, but 7200rpm is nice)

All backups go from the system and document drive to the internal backup drive, which should be very fast to perform.

Alternatives: You could use an external usb drive for backups, but you want the connection to be fast if you are performing instant versioned backups; an alternative would be to back up from the system drive to the user drive, and vice versa, which is fine if you have enough space.

Lastly I think it make sense to keep copies the lastest full drive images on a removeable hard drive that is left outside of the house.  Using a hard drive dock will let you buy 2 hds and swap them every other time with a drive kept offsite.  Or you could upload to an online backup space.  This will protect from fire/theft.

13405

Living Room / Re: General Poll: What should there be more of on DonationCoder?

« Last post by mouser on May 28, 2011, 08:48 AM »

i voted.

13406

Living Room / MOVED: Tutorial: Visual C# For Beginners - Part 1 (With Pretty Pictures!!!)

« Last post by mouser on May 28, 2011, 02:47 AM »

This topic has been moved to Developer's Corner.

https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=26897.0

13407

General Software Discussion / Re: alternative to filehamster?

« Last post by mouser on May 28, 2011, 12:54 AM »

Just a follow up post that i am having a few frustrations with File Hamster (like silently truncating the file filter strings, huge memory use) -- so I would advise people considering it to trial it heavily to make sure it works well for you before you purchase.

13408

Activation/License/Language Help / Re: Can't paste keys from clipboard

« Last post by mouser on May 27, 2011, 04:20 PM »

Don't worry you can always generate another.  Sounds like it didn't copy the first time you tried the Ctrl+C, so just try again.

13409

Little Voice Commander / Re: Adding spoken word option

« Last post by mouser on May 27, 2011, 07:35 AM »

I have completed the version that will speak words, and I have uploaded it as the new version.

BUT there are *no* speech files present, so nothing new for the end user.

But for anyone who wants to add speech files, just add them under any subdirectory (new or existing) of the VpMedia directory; they should be of the form word.mp3 or word.wav or word_1.mp3, word_2.mp3, etc.

And again, feel free to add your own word images and sounds of things around your house, etc.

13410

LaunchBar Commander / Re: Launchbar Commander bug - flyout display with custom fonts selected

« Last post by mouser on May 26, 2011, 12:31 PM »

Thanks for reminding me about this -- I'm embarrassed to say someone reported this a long time ago and I never got around to fixing it.
Going to try to do some updates on my apps in the next few days so I'll try to fix it.

13411

LaunchBar Commander / Re: LBC feature request - start a specific .mcf file from the command line

« Last post by mouser on May 26, 2011, 12:30 PM »

Sure that would be easy to add.
Thanks for the kind words 

13412

LaunchBar Commander / Re: "Official Bug Tracking and Feature Request Thread" has no activity since 2007

« Last post by mouser on May 26, 2011, 10:59 AM »

Best to start a new topic in the Launchbar Commander section.  The "Official Bug Tracking" threads are hard to keep updated.

13413

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR and Dropbox - conflicts...

« Last post by mouser on May 26, 2011, 10:40 AM »

quick answer to one part of your question: FARR does not need to use the quickdoclauncher.exe helper; you'll find an option to disable that on the General options tab (uncheck the "Use document launch helper utility").

I say that because FARR does not (should not) be locking any of its settings files.. can you find out more specifically what dropbox is upset about?

One solution for your problem (and someone else mentioned this same problem with dropbox before), is for me to add a setting that says "DO NOT SAVE THE SETTINGS FILE", which you could use on all but one of your pcs?  i think that would solve the dropbox conflict errors.. which i assume are being triggered because all copies of the program are trying to save different copies of their file on top of each other.  im not sure now that's being detected..

But first it would be really helpful to know what dropbox is detecting specifically that is upsetting it.

13414

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Certificate

« Last post by mouser on May 26, 2011, 06:52 AM »

I actually bought some certificate stock with gold+blue foil ribbons quite a while ago, for just such a use.
So all we need to do is figure out the text for it, and we'll do it for the upcoming NANY 2012.

13415

TapTap / Re: CTRL-C shortcut not recognized in Win7-Explorer

« Last post by mouser on May 26, 2011, 05:20 AM »

Hmm that's strange..  I wonder what could explain it not working.. Could you experiment a little and try to figure out if the problem is:
1. TapTap doesnt even get invoked from inside windows explorer
2. TapTap can detect some keys from within Windows Explorer, but not ctrl or shift
3. TapTap detects the keys and can send most keys just not ctrl+C or ctrl+V
4. TapTap is sending the Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V but windows explorer is ignoring them.

13416

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: Clipboard Help+Spell - Top Priority Requests for 2011

« Last post by mouser on May 26, 2011, 05:12 AM »

yes i will; now that image support is added, proper unicode and richtext seem to be the next logical steps.

13417

General Software Discussion / Re: alternative to filehamster?

« Last post by mouser on May 26, 2011, 04:55 AM »

This discussion has been very helpful to me -- I tested most of the software here and finally decided to buy File Hamster Advanced (thanks for the discount link).

A brief summary of what brought me to buy File Hamster is as follows:

Long ago I wrote a "power user backup guide" extolling the virtues of having a two-tier backup system.  The first tier is making full disk images, perhaps once a month.  And the second is for making versioned backups of your documents much more frequently, perhaps once a day.

I stand by that advice, and there are quite a few good programs for doing this on demand.  But recently I've become interested in having a versioning backup tool that works instantaneously every time a file is modified, without having to wait for me to run the backup tool manually or on schedule every X hours.

After trying every one of these tools I could find, I concluded that there is no perfect software for this.  None that I could use to backup everything automatically as soon as it was changed, that was low enough on cpu use AND versatile enough to handle everything that I might need backed up.

The main reason for this "failure" is that there are some files I need backed up regularly that are just too hard for the casual versioning backup tools to manage efficiently (my mail program database files can be 100+ megabytes large and change frequently).  There are some clever backup tools to handle these kinds of changes by storing changes at the block level, but these programs are unsatisfactory in other ways.

So anyway, I reached the conclusion that no INSTANT VERSIONING backup tool was going to serve 100% of my non-disk-imaging backup tools, and that I was still going to need a regular (maybe daily) backup tool for some files.

Once that is accepted, we arrive at a new question -- is there a fairly restricted SMALL set of files that I consider high enough priority that I want versions of them backed up instantly -- both for standard backup reasons and to have detailed version history in case i need to roll back stuff, and which can be backed up efficiently by existing solutions.

And the answer for me was a definite yes:  My written text/document/office files, and most of all my programming source code files.

And once I settled on that narrow scope of purpose, File Hamster clearly stood out to me as the best solution for instant versioning source code backup.

NOTE: At this time I can't really recommend File Hamster if you have a huge number of files you want to put under version control -- from what i can tell the program is really not designed for that kind of thing.

13418

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Certificate

« Last post by mouser on May 26, 2011, 04:21 AM »

I think it's a great idea. 

13419

Living Room / Re: Man vs. Mississippi

« Last post by mouser on May 25, 2011, 07:15 PM »

Artilce in Popular Science magazine about DIY protection from the recent flooding:
http://www.popsci.co...pi-river-who-winning

from boingbong

13420

Living Room / Re: Wiki software with authentication

« Last post by mouser on May 25, 2011, 08:26 AM »

I love dokuwiki for this kind of thing, it's very simple flat file system but has built in nice user access stuff:
http://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki

However i don't think it has a way to let people edit but mark as pending until admin approves -- if you find a wiki engine that does let me know.

13421

Little Voice Commander / Re: Adding spoken word option

« Last post by mouser on May 25, 2011, 06:44 AM »

The TTS (text to speech) has gotten a *LOT* better, and for many applications it would be fine.
This however is a perfect case where recorded human voice is superior, since it's of a relatively limited scope of predefined words, and it's nice to let people customize it with their own voice if they want.

13422

General Software Discussion / Re: Fold 1.3.0.0

« Last post by mouser on May 25, 2011, 04:46 AM »

I wonder if you couldn't convert this into a very useful general purpose tool, that took a list of files, or even better commandline lines, and opened each one and resized it/tiles it.

For example, my file might list:
C:\Program Files\irfanview.exe "e:\mypicture1.jpg"
C:\Program Files\irfanview.exe "e:\mypicture2.jpg"
C:\Program Files\irfanview.exe "e:\mypicture3.jpg"
C:\Program Files\irfanview.exe "e:\mypicture4.jpg"
C:\Program Files\photoshop.exe "e:\mypicture5.jpg"
and have it tile these launched applications?

just an idea.

13423

Little Voice Commander / Re: Adding spoken word option

« Last post by mouser on May 25, 2011, 04:40 AM »

Your voice would be just fine. 

13424

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: PC game launcher/organizer/frontend

« Last post by mouser on May 25, 2011, 04:31 AM »

sounds cool zissakos, keep us informed about your progress and show us some early versions!

13425

Little Voice Commander / Adding spoken word option

« Last post by mouser on May 25, 2011, 04:14 AM »

I was talking to app about features to add.  One idea that would be really easy to add is to have an option where the program can speak what's shown, so if kid types B and it shows "B is for Bees" with a photo of a bee, then it would speak the words "B is for Bees".

I dont think the text-to-speech is good enough, so i'd like to use recorded mp3 files of a real person speaking.

The files should be named word_1.mp3 so for example "bee_1.mp3", etc for all the words found in the default VpMedia directory. the # is so that it can support different alternative voices.

I will add the feature if someone volunteers to record the 50-60 mp3 spoken word files that would be needed to accompany the initial image set.  Any volunteers?