Recent Posts

1901

Living Room / Re: Things your kids will never know - old school tech!

« Last post by Darwin on November 05, 2008, 07:43 PM »

Bias ply car tires...

-mikiem (November 05, 2008, 07:11 PM)

Good one! Hadn't thought of that one...

Also:

When I was a kid our phone was on a party line.  Easy way to spy on the neighbors.

-bcpaladin (November 05, 2008, 04:30 PM)

though I think it's already been mentioned elsewhere in the thread. Having said that, it's got to be one of the most foreign of concepts to a teenager today, used, as they are, to the privacy afforded by a cell phone. They'd be blown away by the landline, rotary, telephone in the kitchen that I grew up with. No privacy what-so-ever!

1902

General Software Discussion / Re: What application is stealing my keystrokes?

« Last post by Darwin on November 05, 2008, 01:27 PM »

Sorry, Tinjaw, I've failed miserably -  I can't retrace my steps to get back to that fourm 

1903

General Software Discussion / Re: Quicksilver Goes Open Source

« Last post by Darwin on November 04, 2008, 04:27 PM »

Dang! I'm sitting in the library on the iBook with Mail, Safari and Word open. Word has two documents (two separate chapters of my dissertation) open and I have been editing them... and it all works. Seamlessly. Impressive given that Office 2008 is not supported on a G3 and most forum postings I've read about doing so suggest that Word runs too slowly to be useful. I shouldn't be THAT surprised - I also run Office 2007 on an (even) old(er) Compaq Presrio under Win2k and it's very smooth there as well and that machine will easily handle what I'm asking this iBook to do, but still...

QuickSilver is such a pleasure to play with and learn. I really should be keeping notes so that I can detail my discoveries.

1904

General Software Discussion / Re: Dexpot: Probably the best virtual desktop manager around

« Last post by Darwin on November 04, 2008, 04:15 PM »

You're not thinking of PowerPro, are you?

1905

General Software Discussion / Re: What application is stealing my keystrokes?

« Last post by Darwin on November 04, 2008, 01:35 PM »

Crap! I was reading a forum yesterday that discussed about three options to allow you to do this (though the consensus was that it isn't possible to use an app to reveal third party shortcuts reliably). Unfortunately, it was completely unrelated to my problem and I didn't bookmark or "note" the site! Let me try to retrace my footprints and see if I can dredge it up.

1906

Mouser's Zone / FARR and Screenshot Captor featured on Download Junkie

« Last post by Darwin on November 04, 2008, 01:33 PM »

Download Junkie

Congratulations, mouser 

1907

Living Room / Re: Apologies

« Last post by Darwin on November 04, 2008, 01:26 PM »

Ask Mouser to pose for it ...

-Carol Haynes (November 04, 2008, 01:12 PM)

+1 for this idea 

1908

General Software Discussion / Re: Excel 2007 question

« Last post by Darwin on November 03, 2008, 11:44 PM »

ASAP Utilities is a fantastic, free Excel add-in that should allow you to do this, although I suspect you already have it installed and that I've misunderstood what you're after 

1909

General Software Discussion / Re: Quicksilver Goes Open Source

« Last post by Darwin on November 03, 2008, 11:41 PM »

I think iWork is showing higher memory use because it has to convert the documents from office format right?

-nontroppo (November 03, 2008, 05:30 PM)

Hadn't thought of that... perhaps, but then, once the document is converted and opened I would expect CPU usage to fall off. Lots more testing required, in any case. FWIW, Googling reveals that Office 2008 is considered a bit of dog no matter what hardware it runs on. Dog slow loading, that is... People have reported that using Leopard's firewall to block Office from connecting to verify DRM dramatically reduces load times. However, Tiger's firewall doesn't allow me to do this. Another trick is to disable WYSIWYG previewing of fonts in the General tab of Word's preferences. This had an indiscernible effect on my system, likely because the limiting factor is power under the hood (or rather, the lack thereof). I think I'll just live with it. I'm not going to be doing much with the iBook anyway so can't see spending $80 on an iWorks licence when I've already got Office 2008, especially given that I can't be sure that it's going to be that much quicker, anyway.

1910

Living Room / Re: Things your kids will never know - old school tech!

« Last post by Darwin on November 03, 2008, 03:20 PM »

I hear, you, Zaine. I'm frequently amazed from the perspective of realizing that many things I think of as being relatively recent innovations were available back then. Car phones, for example.

1911

Living Room / Re: Things your kids will never know - old school tech!

« Last post by Darwin on November 03, 2008, 02:02 PM »

I remember being in university and coming home for the summer to find that three guys I had graduated from high school with had gone fishing the previous summer (1989 or 1990). When they came back they each bought an IROC (Chevy Camaro) and had cell phones installed. The extravagance was shocking to a kid living on about $7000 a year! Anyway, the cell phones were huge and cost an obscene amount of money to operate. Still can't get over the waste of it all. Of course, I am not by any stretch immune to wasting money... Witness my software addiction 

1912

General Software Discussion / Re: Quicksilver Goes Open Source

« Last post by Darwin on November 03, 2008, 09:04 AM »

Hmm... I like iWorks! It's funny, though: Office 2008 apps take a LONG time to open, but once open they're responsive. iWorks opens more quickly and is responsive as well. However, Office apps barely touch my CPU but leave only about 80MB of RAM free. iWorks, on the other hand, pegs my CPU to about 90% used and leave me with 180MB 70MB of RAM free... If I could figure out how to start up Office apps more quickly I'd be content with it. Right, off to google that now...

Just to note, though - iWorks is visually stunning, even on my old computer with no fancy graphics capabilities. Just how underpowered the graphics card is was driven home for me yesterday when I decided to show my parents some of QuickSilver's (great, this post script gets this post on topic!) power. On my iBook when I open Quicksilver for the first time I get the QS splash screen. It's innocuos and pleasant enough, but that's as far as it goes. On my parents' iMac, wow! The QS sort of emerges, shimmering, as if rising out of perfectly still water... I don't really care about this, but did *note* it!

EDIT: changed iWorks' reported RAM usage... I ran this test four times for each suite using the same xlsx file and checking usage with iStats Pro (under Dashboard). To make this test really valid, I'll have to restart the computer between each usage of one of the suites... As one might perhaps expect (at least if one is approaching this from a Windows background), opening Excel was much more brisk the second, third, and fourth times, though I did ensure that it wasn't running when I had Numbers running and vice versa. Because I am running iWorks as a trial AND it has to convert Office 2007/2008 document formats before opening them, I am not concerned with its load time.

1913

Living Room / Re: When you make your 100'th Post

« Last post by Darwin on November 03, 2008, 08:14 AM »

Keep going, manimatters and mahesh2k - congratulations, keep them coming 

1914

General Software Discussion / Re: AntiVirus with decent anti-spyware (realtime) detection

« Last post by Darwin on November 03, 2008, 05:30 AM »

My apologies for not replying to this.

-Josh (November 03, 2008, 01:01 AM)

No worries! I'm using Webroot AV and AS 6 on my XP and Vista machines and am very happy. One odd thing is that I had two licenses that were upgradeable (from 5.x to 6), both deriving from the same original purchase of Spysweeper (took advantage of an offer to get a second licence), and yet one upgraded to Internet Secuity Essentials and the other to AV and AS... strange!

I'm running BitDefender on my Win2k machine. It's 'sped up' a lot since I first installed it and all seems well.

1915

General Software Discussion / Re: AntiVirus with decent anti-spyware (realtime) detection

« Last post by Darwin on November 02, 2008, 04:39 PM »

So, Josh, what did you finally wind up deciding on?

1916

General Software Discussion / Re: How do you launch stuff?

« Last post by Darwin on November 02, 2008, 04:30 PM »

Ah... hadn't realised that Enso is being replaced by Ubiquity... Downloading as I write this. Gotta love lazy Sunday afternoons   

1917

General Software Discussion / Re: Codeweavers - no good deed goes unpunished

« Last post by Darwin on November 02, 2008, 04:25 PM »

So my point was that if they promised they'd do something if certain conditions were met, and are breaking their promise after only one condition was met, then they are liars and I say good riddance if they go out of business.

If that's not what's happening then I clearly misunderstood and I take back what I said.

-Deozaan (November 02, 2008, 12:16 PM)

Well, it is *sort of* what's happening. Essentially (as I understand it), each time one of the conditions was met, their software was going to be free for a day. With the huge response to this giveaway, they've cancelled any future giveaways. So, really, they've delievered all of the "stuff" they were ever going to give, but have decided to make it a one time offering rather than doing it each time a condition was met. Personally, I'm OK with that, but I can see where you're coming from 

1918

General Software Discussion / Re: How do you launch stuff?

« Last post by Darwin on November 02, 2008, 04:19 PM »

ubiquity... haven't heard of that one - will have to take a look. Thanks for the pointer (I think  ) 

1919

General Software Discussion / Re: Quicksilver Goes Open Source

« Last post by Darwin on November 02, 2008, 04:17 PM »

Ooh! Thanks for the pointer about itStat Menus! I'll disable Dashboard (and Expose) and reclaim (a modicum of) resources. I should probably just run with an alias to the Activity Monitor stuck in the dock, though.

I've been wondering about iWorks... Will have to take a look 

1920

General Software Discussion / Re: Quicksilver Goes Open Source

« Last post by Darwin on November 02, 2008, 11:02 AM »

  Spotlight

1921

General Software Discussion / Re: Reliable web page capture...

« Last post by Darwin on November 02, 2008, 09:24 AM »

I've used Evernote 2, NetSnippets, and now Ask Sam 7. All of them do a good job. Ask Sam is the best of the bunch WRT retaining the exact formatting of the page being saved. Of course, it's VERY expensive (I got it when it was on sale)...

1922

General Software Discussion / Re: Quicksilver Goes Open Source

« Last post by Darwin on November 02, 2008, 09:21 AM »

OK... In Quicksilver I have:

Apple Address Book
Apple Mail (really impressed by this, BTW! I love how it auto-creates Virtual folders based on the e-mail address)
Dictionary
iTunes
Keychain
Safari
Shelf (not sure why I loaded this one...)
Spotlight (I'll probably lose this one - I find it simpler to use Spotlight directly)
Terminal
Text Manipulation
Windows

As I noted above, I should probably ditch the bulk of these in the interest of resources... but it all seems to work without hiccoughing!

With Safari, QuickSilver (I'm typing in it now), and Synergy running, and with iStats Pro running in Dashboard, I have 93% of my 500Mhz CPU idle and 175MB of RAM reported as free. Nice and smooth. Haven't played with Office too much, yet, but will. I copied my entire PhD folder over, so have LOTS of Office documents to play with. I suspect that I'm not going to switch to using this as a work machine, though, as I can't imagine having several Word documents and Excel spreadsheets open simultaneously.

1923

General Software Discussion / Re: Codeweavers - no good deed goes unpunished

« Last post by Darwin on November 02, 2008, 09:02 AM »

Well, I registered etc etc.
But all I am offered is Mac downloads rather than Linux. No use to me at all.  Not quite sure how this happened, but it seems to have happened to a lot of other people too. I've requested a change, but am well aware that all the requests they are likely to receive from this will really overload a support system really intended for paying customers/other things.

-Dormouse (November 02, 2008, 08:27 AM)

That's a result of the server being hit so hard, the default was the Mac package - you had to select Linux when requesting the key. The server hit meant that often that part of the page didn't load properly. At least, that was my experience.

Sounds to me like another person/group/entity who lies and doesn't keep their word.

The world won't miss this company.

-Deozaan (November 02, 2008, 01:24 AM)

I'm having trouble figuring this comment out as well? How did they lie/not keep their word? Do you mean because they've stopped the challenge with this point? Or is it something else? 

1924

General Software Discussion / Re: How do you launch stuff?

« Last post by Darwin on November 02, 2008, 08:59 AM »

now they're working for Mozilla, Enso has basically died...

-nontroppo (November 02, 2008, 08:04 AM)

That's too bad! I haven't really played with it much as under XP I've been re-acquainting myself with FARR - it's a happy reunion! I'll give it some time over the coming days.

1925

General Software Discussion / Re: Quicksilver Goes Open Source

« Last post by Darwin on November 02, 2008, 08:56 AM »

I've installed the dictionary, spotlight, text and other plugins... I'm on my Vista machine, so can't remember! I'll fire up the iBook and get back to you. I *know* that I have too many plugins installed (same problem with FARR under XP), and need to pare them down. One thing I have done, as I only have 576MB of RAM, is run without any Dashboard widgets opened. I miss iStats Pro and the weather widget, though. As I haven't really noticed much of a performance boost, I think I'll leave iStats Pro running.

I'm also running Office 2008, despite dire warnings on various boards not to with my specs. It loads faster than NeoOffice 2.25 and there's no lag when I am typing text into Word (as there is on NeoOffice). Note that PaintShop Pro X and X1 both opened a good deal more slowly under XP with a gig of RAM, so I can live with it! Especially given that the main motivation in getting the computer updated was to play with Quicksilver! Sorted...

Spotlight IS impressive. I was completely unaware of it indexing in the background and it finds text within pdfs, word documents, excel files, etc. If it's possible to do so (?), I'll install WDS 4 under Win2k and report back - I can do this in a virtual machine AND an 8 year old notebook.

All this experriment is accomplishing, at the end of the day, is making me want a new(-er) MacBook! Doh