Recent Posts

1601

N.A.N.Y. 2014 / Re: N.A.N.Y 2014 Submission: FTP File Uploader

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 06, 2014, 04:15 PM »

I love "chaining" apps. ("New chains for the new year!")
So as an extreme example:
- you do web research with a whole bunch of Firefox Tabs
- then you run Miles' BBSS that produces Text File #1 with matching titles and Urls where you got them from
- then run my PDF maker to turn those webpages into (hopefully readable!) Pdfs
- then you run the dir reader to get the file list, then run this to upload it all into your server/etc!

1602

N.A.N.Y. 2014 / Re: NANY 2014 Pledge: Laptop utility to run any program on Lid Close

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 06, 2014, 04:09 PM »

I don't see a Program Info table. Assuming this one didn't make it by the deadline?

-kyrathaba (January 06, 2014, 11:18 AM)

For some reason I was under the impression we had months to do these, not weeks.  I've been running around trying to get assistance taking college courses.  Looks like the assistance is illusory.  If it's past the deadline then I guess it's a no show.  Sorry for the misunderstanding.

-MilesAhead (January 06, 2014, 11:34 AM)

Well, if you bug Mouser, you can probably slide it in late. As I understand it, it's a "squishy-soft" deadline. It's not like if you miss your tax return by the certain date evil penalties begin to appear!

It's just targeted as "New apps (or other stuff!) for the New Year", aka not really in June. Though I saw something a while back where Mouser thought about just this, and began pondering allowing the apps to be created any time of year, and only "pulled together" about now via the new year.

1603

N.A.N.Y. 2014 / Re: N.A.N.Y 2014 Submission: FTP File Uploader

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 06, 2014, 04:05 PM »

This looks fascinating. I potentially have a project where I have to upload bunches of files and doing it by hand is a pain!

Tip: a "Directory Reader" can read the contents of the folder, then create that text file. For example I use "Karen's Dir Reader" but I am sure there are others. (You may just have to fiddle with the setting to turn off "too much info" in the output file.)

So then you can maybe run the dir reader, then run this, and off the files go!

1604

Non-Windows Software / Re: *NIX: Interesting article on why gamers may become so important for Linux

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 06, 2014, 03:06 AM »

I've not only said it for years, but I've seen it almost everywhere I go (to paraphrase): "If only I could play [my favorite game] on Linux, I'd ditch Windows tomorrow".  I've seen it since the mid-2000's (remember all those "The Year of the Linux Desktop?" articles all over the tech blogs before Android showed up?  Yeah, maybe next year...), and now it's cold, hard reality.  So where are all my switchers?  
Still on Windows.
Why?  Because when you can play with your phone every 10 minutes and Windows 8 came pre-installed on your new laptop and SteamOS is going to be on the next console you buy, who has time to mess around with switching to a Linux desktop?
 

-Edvard (January 05, 2014, 11:35 PM)

Put another way,

When all the cool/cute utilities on DC are done on Windows, when you can no longer believe anything Canonical via uBuntu says, when you don't even know what to do with the Windows 8/8.1 mess, who has time to repeat almost 50 programs in their Linux equivalents?!

I respect the daylights out of Linux as a philosophy. But the Distro Explosion crushed me. "XP works for 9 years" - that's me. Not upgrades every 6 months -2 years that require sturdy data backups I just can't get my handle around. My comp does what I want it to, darnit! But I haven't really seen 12 year support of any of the distros *and* linux copies of the neat tricks that come up in places like here. It really does look like MS's dirty tricks of the 90's really have ruled a few roosts.  

1605

Living Room / Re: Malware attack hits thousands of Yahoo users

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 05, 2014, 04:29 PM »

I dont understand - why get us to search with yahoo now ???!!! (I didnt click the link )

-tomos (January 05, 2014, 04:01 PM)

Hence the meta humor. Making Yahoo report its own security breach! 

But it was an open question to anyone who studied the breach if the ads were only served on the master page of yahoo.com, I wouldn't have seen them with a browser search.

1606

Living Room / Re: Malware attack hits thousands of Yahoo users

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 05, 2014, 03:51 PM »

Well, for a little meta humor, let's try this search link:

http://search.yahoo....i=UTF-8&fr=moz35

I do raw yahoo searches out of the Firefox search window, so I'm not sure if that might have avoided the malware even at the theoretical level. But whatever little was left, I am presuming adblock goes  a long way to mitigate.

1607

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

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 05, 2014, 09:40 AM »

I just got around to putting this in. : )

It's cute, and I'm terrible on the weather! I never feel like pulling out my phone or trying to go to weather.com etc. The 5 day is good enough for me. (I don't need ten, and the last five change anyway!)

1608

Developer's Corner / Re: Can a user force an alternate routing to a website?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 05, 2014, 09:17 AM »

Then the cache got updated as well. The best way to go is as 40hz suggested: changing the DNS servers your connection to the internet uses.
...

-Shades (December 22, 2013, 10:15 AM)

I looked at an article that Shades gave me on this stuff. I might have done that if I were having terrible overall problems. But it's mostly one single site, with a few occasional flukes elsewhere, and the downside of messing this up bothers me.

So today I went a different route. I went to a proxy server at proxybrowsing.com and pasted the url in there, and it seems to work much better (at least for now!)

My logic is that whatever fluky local glitch in my exact connection, it doesn't exist from their side. So we'll see!

1609

N.A.N.Y. 2014 / Re: NANY - Image Capture and Upload Program

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 04, 2014, 08:44 PM »

So you would like it to auto-save to the disk as well as copy to the clipboard?

-c.gingerich (January 04, 2014, 04:35 PM)

Yep! The big use case is to be able to drill (and save) a bunch of fast screen shots in a selectable folder, and each time it copies to the clipboard, where the best ones go into a Sticky. If I needed to upload them and get the URL that's much more rare for me. If I needed that step I'd go select that in the options and stuff.

1610

N.A.N.Y. 2014 / Re: NANY - Image Capture and Upload Program

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 04, 2014, 04:30 PM »

The history only saves upload URLs.... I can may it store saves/auto-saves also.... I am going to make it so you can choose the auto-save location, just have not got to that yet.

I'll take a look to see if I can pin down the error.

Thanks!

-c.gingerich (January 04, 2014, 04:28 PM)

Yep! The big missing item I can't get to work is to save the actual screenshot right into the clipboard (as well as on disk in the autosave!). Then I'd go back to the history and "right click to copy the URL" afterwards.

1611

N.A.N.Y. 2014 / Re: NANY - Image Capture and Upload Program

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 04, 2014, 04:06 PM »

Some thoughts:

- I'm also getting Runtime error 2 at line 891 intermittently but it's a bit tricky to reproduce. I got a whole bunch at once and then it went away a little.

- Hmm. The auto saves seem to be going to:
C:\Documents and Settings\user.NONE-79DB031E3D\Application Data\ICUP\Auto-Saves
Feels a little obscure but I can live with a shortcut for now and just pull them out. (I just found Open Autosave Folder).

- "View Last Image" isn't showing the autosaved images. Maybe all that's from the tight integration into the image site that is down.

- Corner case: It doesn't seem to capture the images from the nany "overlay tool". Not that big of a deal, but that tool is useful to quickly produce "annotated" pictures aka the (something) overlain with the annotations / image mod etc.

- "Right click on a item in the history box and you can copy the URL, copy image to clipboard" -- even legit captures aren't going into my history for further editing.

1612

General Software Discussion / Re: In search of ... assistance with a tenacious BHO ...

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 04, 2014, 03:33 PM »

barney, if I may ask, what security software are you using that let this thing slip through?

Might be time to start looking for a replacement.

-Innuendo (January 04, 2014, 12:11 PM)

It would be interesting to hear which anti-virus programmes *are* good against this type of thing -- I wonder if any are?
The laptop I cleaned was using avira pro which has a very good reputation - used use it myself but gave up on it cause it got too many false positives and didnt make it particularly easy to report.

-tomos (January 04, 2014, 02:26 PM)

I'm finding the "Anti-Virus" programs are terrible at this kind of thing. The toolbars/BHO/etc get there as "authorized installs" because the AV programs see them as "agreed to by that byzantine EULA" and therefore OK.

The types of approaches that work for me the few times I've had to deal with this stuff are much more low level and/or left-field.

1613

General Software Discussion / Re: Too many programs in my start menu!

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 04, 2014, 03:24 PM »

Oh, you are using XP? You are in luck!

This will make it a nice compact, single column, scrolling menu that won't take over your entire screen:

• Right click your taskbar and select Properties.
• Click the Start Menu tab.
• Select the 2nd option, Classic Start Menu
• Click Customize.
• Under Advanced Start Menu options, check Scroll programs and Show Small Icons in Start Menu.
• Click OK.
• Click OK again.

-app103 (January 04, 2014, 11:30 AM)

Haha App!

That's very promising! Along with "Sort", to make stuff in a sensible order.

I have a bit of enthusiasm for this today, I'll go uninstall twelve-ish pieces of junk "Stuff I'm bored with" now too. (A lot of the deletions are legit programs, but for example I can remove FF-Aurora since I'm no longer interested in ultra fast updates, and so on.)

Tip of the week!

1614

N.A.N.Y. 2014 / Re: NANY - Image Capture and Upload Program

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 04, 2014, 01:56 PM »

I have updated ICUP to 1.0.1.12- I added the option to auto-save the image if the upload fails. Imm.io has been down for the past few days and I needed a way to quickly keep my screen shots.

-c.gingerich (January 04, 2014, 12:39 PM)

Forgive me for "not looking", but does it auto-save even if you select a button/toggle to turn off all uploading? I've been idly looking for something that can do rapid fire screenshots and saves all in one step when they don't need to go into a Sticky.

1615

General Software Discussion / Re: In search of ... assistance with a tenacious BHO ...

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 04, 2014, 01:55 PM »

Just to close this, nothing worked.  Wasn't really optimistic, but there's always a chance.  Yes, I did pay attention to detail, did not skip any [known] steps, got response(s) indicating success, all to no avail.  So I restored a backup that wasn't, lost a pregnancy worth of data, but did get rid of the problem.  'Course, I still don't know the cause, so still subject to reinfection.  Pretty much a worse end to a bad situation  .

-barney (January 04, 2014, 12:07 AM)

Yikes Barney!

I've grown lazy in my old age, but this is the type of thing I used to have a special "radioactive" machine to test low level stuff on. Did you ever figure out the source so that "for next time" we can apply (as someone said) "the hive mind" at it?

1616

General Software Discussion / Re: Too many programs in my start menu!

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 04, 2014, 07:47 AM »

Organize your Start Menu into folders.

-xtabber (January 04, 2014, 07:39 AM)

Well that's an interesting idea! But I am rather confused.

- I am just one "user" so I don't understand how moving start menu items to different "users" either works or helps.
- Does this stuff work on WinXP?
- How do I create new folders in WinXP and then move the items to those folders? In theory that could work, with one folder housing 30 rare entries it would help.

1617

General Software Discussion / Re: Too many programs in my start menu!

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 04, 2014, 07:12 AM »

Somewhere in these two tips is the middle ground. I do have a lot of cruft because I try out tons of programs but really use less than say 40. I also made a shortcuts folder on my desktop with the top 10 "power hitters".

Though when I'm under some 75 apps I do prefer the Start Menu for those semi obscure things I keep stumbling into every six months.

So my post this time was to check that there wasn't just some cute little utility I wasn't aware of.

1618

General Software Discussion / Too many programs in my start menu!

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 03, 2014, 09:38 PM »

Heh I installed so many practice programs... that now my last row of the start menu/programs is off the screen!

Is there a trick to "compact" all that blank space so you can see them?

1619

General Software Discussion / Re: BrowserID - Mozilla's solution to the password problem

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 03, 2014, 08:14 PM »

Well, it's been a couple of years since BrowserID was first introduced. But I stumbled across this thread again today while looking for information about OpenID and looked into BrowserID. Apparently it's now called Persona.

More technical details about it can be found here: https://developer.mo...la.org/en-US/Persona

Any new opinions on the matter since this was originally discussed 2.5 years ago?

-Deozaan (January 03, 2014, 07:10 PM)

Well, for me it at least some FF add-ons cause interference. (I don't know which ones; I blanket turned them all off and got it to work.)

Meanwhile, it doesn't seem to be supported anywhere, so it's like a "toy" that I can't even try out.

But overall trying to tie all authentication into the browser feels just a little fishy somehow.

I also don't know what it means that some sites are using the email address AS the ID!

1620

Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 03, 2014, 06:29 PM »

(see attachment in previous post)     (see attachment in previous post)
HYDROFILL - Desktop Hydrogen Refueling Station

Does anyone here have a device that uses more power than it's battery can supply in a day?

-Arizona Hot (January 03, 2014, 05:53 PM)

At the risk of sounding clueless... are we including things like older iPhones and iPads? Both of those will drill down the battery with use in like four hours! When they try to keep the program states, they burn the battery sitting idle in just over a day.

1621

N.A.N.Y. 2014 / Re: NANY 2014 Release: Process Piglet

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 03, 2014, 06:27 PM »

Hmm. "...And then does this a few times without compacting."

Maybe. But then I'd wish the browsers would do their own compacting and go "back down" to a sensible size. I guess it's a vestige bit of being a luddite where I just hate to see "huge" memory usages for viewing what should be a "simple" web page. Maybe the Plugins get involved too.

Update:
I still don't like seeing 416 megs used, but I have spotted a "process Palemoon.exe has gracefully lowered its memory use" message!

-TaoPhoenix (January 03, 2014, 04:15 PM)

Garbage collection is very processor intensive in many cases.  So you'd get into a position where your browser was regularly slowing down your machine rather than just appearing to use a lot of memory.

-wraith808 (January 03, 2014, 05:07 PM)

Some of all this does matter though, because I have an older laptop with only 500ish megs of ram! So I def see performance lags on that laptop, so if the browser is using that all by itself, then the laptop might be desperately caching to keep up.

1622

N.A.N.Y. 2014 / Re: NANY 2014 Release: Reference Overlay Tool

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 03, 2014, 06:20 PM »

I played with this again today - it's nice as a "temporary poor man's crossfade" when you want to do something a little artsy but don't want to mess for hours in a photo program.

1623

N.A.N.Y. 2014 / Re: NANY 2014 Release: Process Piglet

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 03, 2014, 04:48 PM »

I eventually turned it off now that I know how silly programs can get.

1624

N.A.N.Y. 2014 / Re: NANY 2014 Release: Process Piglet

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 03, 2014, 04:15 PM »

Hmm. "...And then does this a few times without compacting."

Maybe. But then I'd wish the browsers would do their own compacting and go "back down" to a sensible size. I guess it's a vestige bit of being a luddite where I just hate to see "huge" memory usages for viewing what should be a "simple" web page. Maybe the Plugins get involved too.

Update:
I still don't like seeing 416 megs used, but I have spotted a "process Palemoon.exe has gracefully lowered its memory use" message!

1625

N.A.N.Y. 2014 / Re: NANY 2014 Release: Process Piglet

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on January 03, 2014, 02:54 PM »

Well I had thought that PaleMoon/Firefox "had solved the memory leaks". Apparently according to piglet, not exactly.

Can someone explain what the browser is *doing* with all that space? You can go to some random webpage (not even a video) and all of a sudden it spikes!