Recent Posts

16426

Screenshot Captor / Re: Capture rounded corners in Vista/Win7 Aero Glass

« Last post by mouser on May 03, 2010, 03:18 PM »

New beta version uploaded -- should be faster and more reliable at capturing.

16427

Living Room / Re: My new digital camera...

« Last post by mouser on May 03, 2010, 01:54 PM »

thanks for sharing the heartwarming story hamradio 
looking forward to seeing more nature photos taken with your new camera 

16428

UrlSnooper / Re: Opera Turbo

« Last post by mouser on May 03, 2010, 01:36 PM »

ah interesting. thanks for that info JJ!

16429

Living Room / Re: The conflict of interest that is Google

« Last post by mouser on May 03, 2010, 01:36 PM »

that's a good point, i have no idea what share of their revenue comes from where.  would be nice to know.

16430

Living Room / Re: The conflict of interest that is Google

« Last post by mouser on May 03, 2010, 12:48 PM »

Of course there's always the possibility that Google just doesn't have enough motivation to fix their results since they do in fact make money on these sites, so it could be an error of negligence rather than the even nastier explicit promotion of such sites, but regardless still a morally dubious approach to content ranking and product development/progress (or lack thereof).

i dont think they have to engage in explicit promotion of these sites -- in fact they probably have a weak effort to occasionally go after the worst offenders.  but that's just standard operating procedure for corporations and government programs and every other organization that has an incentive to look the other way when abuses are occurring.  this isn't a superhero comic with arch villains whose goal is to destroy mankind.

google is making billions off of these sites hosting their ads -- these sites are the geese that are laying the golden eggs.   i return to my hypothetical example above - while it's important to make an occasional public showing of going after such sites, it's also important to their business model to never make any drastic changes that would substantially decrease their revenue stream.

16431

UrlSnooper / Re: Opera Turbo

« Last post by mouser on May 03, 2010, 11:47 AM »

it should list all urls in all traffic -- and the browser really can't make a difference.
however one thing that can happen is that browsers may use "cached" versions of pages, so that when you view a page it may not be re-fetched from the internet if you have already viewed it recently.  one way around that is to manually reload/refresh the page in your browser.

16432

UrlSnooper / Re: How to list only accessed files by removing links?

« Last post by mouser on May 03, 2010, 11:45 AM »

i'm afraid there is no real way for the program to know which links have been used or not.

16433

Screenshot Captor / Re: Capture rounded corners in Vista/Win7 Aero Glass

« Last post by mouser on May 03, 2010, 11:33 AM »

just realized i should be able to automatically handle the delay by checking the screenshot, so that should do away with that option and make it a little more reliable.

16434

Living Room / Re: could two numeric keypads work at the same time

« Last post by mouser on May 03, 2010, 10:36 AM »

i could plug another usb keyboard in to the machine whilst also keeping the current logitech keyboard plugged in. with a bit of luck i can fit both on the desk at the same time and just use the programmable keys on the logitech and use the standard keys from the smaller keyboard.

nudone that is sounding crazy.  

i think it makes more sense to look for one of these fancy customizable keyboard accessory devices that give you a set of customizable programmable keys that we have talked about in the past -- they are like supercharged external numpads with more keys.

16435

Find And Run Robot / Re: Need help with running FARR in portable mode on a USB drive

« Last post by mouser on May 03, 2010, 10:19 AM »

i expected to get an ini once i ran the FindAndRunRobot.exe but it found my old settings. what else do i have to do to set it up so i can run it on a UFD?

Great question.

By default on winXP FARR should use the directory it is running from to store it's settings files.  But on Windows Vista and Windows 7, by default FARR will use your documents and settings directory.  So it sounds like you ran the program on windows 7 and it found your existing settings file.

So what you want to do is change the directory where FARR stores it's settings -- you do that in FARR the same way you do it in all of my applications, by editing the configdir.ini file in your FARR directory.

If you just add the line: PORTABLE=TRUE
to the top of the configdir.ini file, that will solve the problem and tell FARR to save all of its settings files in the current directory where FARR is run from.  You could also use the line: CONFIGDIR = .

16436

Living Room / Re: A really cool modern visual illusion

« Last post by mouser on May 03, 2010, 03:19 AM »

i guess that's your way of saying you see the optical illusion too

16437

Living Room / A really cool modern visual illusion

« Last post by mouser on May 03, 2010, 03:09 AM »

I'm not sure if i should be as wowed by this as i am, but while fooling around with screenshots today, i stumbled on a kind of visual illusion.

Look at this normal screenshot of notepad window from windows xp, which has a nice 3d raised effect on the border and on the upper right titlebar buttons, etc.


And now look what happens when you simply rotate it clockwise 180 degrees.. all of a suddent the buttons look like they are indented, etc.. the visual part of brain examining shadows suddenly reinterprets the image, and it looks really strange. at least to me it does -- so much that i had to keep checking to see if i didn't have a bug in my rotation function!


Or maybe i'm the only one who finds this cool and for whom it seems like a visual illusion?

16438

Living Room / Re: Ergonomic mouse and keyboard

« Last post by mouser on May 03, 2010, 02:20 AM »

maybe you should give it away to someone on dc?

16439

Screenshot Captor / Re: Capture rounded corners in Vista/Win7 Aero Glass

« Last post by mouser on May 03, 2010, 12:14 AM »

glad to hear it -- thanks for the reports and testing.

ps. i've uploaded a new version that let's you configure the delay used when trying to do window captures, since i don't know how big the delay has to be to be reliable -- it would be nice to hear if people find that they can reliably capture windows with transparency with a very low value < 100.  for this i highly recommend changing the hotkey to not use alt+prtscr to capture active window.

16440

Screenshot Captor / Re: Capture rounded corners in Vista/Win7 Aero Glass

« Last post by mouser on May 02, 2010, 10:27 PM »

Deo,

try the new version, should capture Chrome now, and not have that problem with maximized windows.
download url is unchanged ( https://www.donation...nshotCaptorSetup.exe ).

remember to try changing the options as i showed above if you want to keep the original shadow effect.

16441

Screenshot Captor / Re: Capture rounded corners in Vista/Win7 Aero Glass

« Last post by mouser on May 02, 2010, 08:58 PM »

i can confirm that.. let me try to figure out why chrome fails.

16442

Screenshot Captor / Re: Capture rounded corners in Vista

« Last post by mouser on May 02, 2010, 06:13 PM »

Here's a sample comparison:

First we have an image with full transparency and shadow preserved (auto-remove border setting of 0).  Note that the capture is bigger than the normal window bounds in order to preserve the gradual shadow effect seen in Aero Glass, and note that the actual window pane titlebar area is semi-transparent which makes it take on the background darkness:


Now we have the same window captured with the options to crop/trim the mostly transparent shadow area outside the dominant border, so the image is smaller.  And note also that this image uses a new option to flatten any semi-transparent areas inside the border, which makes this image only have 2 values of transparency -- purely transparent outside the border, and purely opaque inside the border (note that the black corners you see are the pure transparent areas, and so you wouldnt see them if you put this on a white background) :

16443

Find And Run Robot / Re: opening a single outlook email

« Last post by mouser on May 02, 2010, 05:53 PM »

 

16444

Find And Run Robot / Re: [Feature request] Context sensitivity and alias list

« Last post by mouser on May 02, 2010, 05:51 PM »

..to add another field/simple result list/tab/something to FARR that could hold multiple selected files.

this was along the lines of what i was thinking.. a way to queue up files or put them in a basket for working with.

16445

Find And Run Robot / Re: opening a single outlook email

« Last post by mouser on May 02, 2010, 05:25 PM »

if you can find a commandline tool that can do it, then you can use farr to trigger that commandline tool.

16446

Find And Run Robot / Re: opening a single outlook email

« Last post by mouser on May 02, 2010, 05:02 PM »

can you explain what you mean by opening a single email?

16447

Screenshot Captor / Re: Capture rounded corners in Vista

« Last post by mouser on May 02, 2010, 03:56 PM »

i put some hints on mouseover for some of them.

as a quick guide -- if you set the "auto-remove" from 200 to 0 you'll see the difference.  a value  of 0 will result in capturing a larger area outside of the window that includes the existing Aero shadow effect -- i think this is what winsnap does for example.

if you set it to a high value like 200, SC actually detects the shadow and trims it away. this is useful if you don't want a shadow in your image.

the flatten settings i'm going to add a few more options for, but basically they remove the transparency inside the window that SC by default now preserves.  this could be important for compositing when you dont wan't the background to show through it.  one example you can see is if you keep the transparency, and change the background color to red, you will see through your capture; or if you add a shadow you'll see the semi-transparent regions get darker.  flattening will avoid that.  i'm going to add another option to only flatten within detected borders.

16448

Screenshot Captor / Re: Capture rounded corners in Vista

« Last post by mouser on May 02, 2010, 03:21 PM »

i'd be interested in hearing if anyone finds the options i added useful, or what Windows Capture settings you prefer.

16449

Screenshot Captor / Re: Capture rounded corners in Vista

« Last post by mouser on May 02, 2010, 03:18 PM »

it took 2 or 3 solid days of working to get it all working.. half a day to most of it, and then another 2.5 days of trying to get it working as well as i could and tweaking.  i'm sure we will still find some minor issues but i'm glad it's basically working! thanks to everyone for being patient and reminding me this feature was needed.

note to coders 1: one lesson learned is that Win7/Aero glass on vmware operates in non-accelerated non-3dgraphics-card-simulation basic-theme mode, which CANNOT reproduce the semi-transparency (at least my vmware 6 can't, maybe newer ones can), and so is not useful for testing such stuff -- that's why i thought for the longest time that this corner transparency issue was already solved.

note to coders 2: i give credit in the help file but i should say so here as well, that Ian Griffiths's write-up of capturing transparency provided the eureka moment for me on how to get transparency information (and convinced me that trying to find a set of windows api functions to do it was hopeless): http://www.interact-...7/01/30/recoveralpha ; a word of wisdom to those coders trying to use this method -- it won't work perfectly as described on that page, because Aero glass effects don't do a pure linear alpha blending.. unless you can figure out the exact blending algorithm MS used (i couldn't) you are going to have to come up with some heuristics for recovering the underlying transparency and source colors (one thing i did was solve for the white-background pixels instead of the black ones since those seemed less muted).

16450

Site/Forum Features / Re: Discussion: How can we Improve DonationCoder?

« Last post by mouser on May 02, 2010, 02:47 PM »

some of the things that are out of our direct control (having more coders participate and share their skills) are things that would be helped by things that are in our direct control, like organizing and making it easier to locate and browse content already created and shared on the site, in ways that gothic and skrommel and others have suggest -- making a better software section where everything can be found in an orderly way.

so i propose we put the organization/exposure/view/browsing improvements as our first priority.

i think that means moving to some kind of cms/wiki system for the main pages of the site, especially the software/reviews areas, instead of static html pages uploaded with ftp, which is how the site was started in 2005 and still exists today.