Recent Posts

2026

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

« Last post by Edvard on November 21, 2008, 06:21 PM »

Oh man, you had to start with the toys...

This is the beast I wanted with a passion.
The Big Trak

If only I had the money for some simple robotics and a microcontroller, I'd build a DIY version with my son and relive the memories.

I STILL want one...

2027

Living Room / Re: church managment software

« Last post by Edvard on November 13, 2008, 12:07 PM »

I've been recommended to look beyond church-focused projects and look at CRM software.
SugarCRM comes highly recommended, and there is also the free (both ways) vTiger which implements SugarCRM's open source engine.

2028

Living Room / Re: church managment software

« Last post by Edvard on November 13, 2008, 10:33 AM »

I know a lot of churches have been using Fellowship One, no idea how much it costs.
For a small church, I would also recommend one of the many open source solutions that have cropped up in recent times.
ChurchInfo is a nice full-featured project forked from InfoCentral after they decided to abandon PHP and re-tool with Java (they are still re-tooling).
ChurchLedger goes another step in that they bundle an open source software package with domain hosting.

I've seen a few projects started here and there for other purposes like church social networking and website CMS aimed specifically at churches, but these are the fullest feature-wise.
I'll put out some radar and see if I can't pick up more...

2029

General Software Discussion / Re: Any good free OCR software?

« Last post by Edvard on November 11, 2008, 05:03 PM »

I've used SimpleOCR in the past. It does okay. All I needed was a text output for a client from a 2nd-generation photocopy. The periods came out as degree symbols

I've heard good things about Softi FreeOCR which uses the Tesseract OCR engine that Google took over development from HP.

Here's a list of some others:
http://www.ilixis.co...recog_shareware.html

2030

Living Room / Re: Drawing with 2 mice

« Last post by Edvard on November 10, 2008, 08:30 PM »

Well, it wouldn't be too hard hacking in support for "fancy touchytouchy screens" in separate apps, but this would be without the device showing up a as a regular "pointing device" in Windows... that would take quite some redesign.

It would be nifty to be able to resize windows by "dragging two corners" at the same time and such

-f0dder (April 08, 2007, 06:34 AM)

Looks like Windows 7 has the capability of doing this with touchscreen now.
Dual mouse control for the same functionality shouldn't be too hard to hack in...

2031

General Software Discussion / Re: Editor for PDFs: recommendations, please?

« Last post by Edvard on November 10, 2008, 04:47 AM »

I'd have to give Acrobat the benefit here. Expensive as it is, there really is none better.
You could try Foxit's pdf editing software, but I have no experience with it.
If it does what it says on the tin, then it's a steal at $99 usd, compared to Adobe's base price of $299 for Acrobat Standard to $699 for Acrobat Pro Extended.

2032

General Software Discussion / Amazing games from coder Kenta Cho

« Last post by Edvard on November 07, 2008, 06:45 PM »

Browsing through my Xubuntu repositories, I kept seeing games written by this guy, so I decided to try a few of his games.
Amazing! Fast-paced with solid game play and flipped out graphics. Lots of Windows versions too.
Check it out:
from Wikipedia

ABA Games is a Japanese creator of freeware video games run by Kenta Cho. Cho is most famous for his shoot 'em ups, mostly featuring abstract reinterpretations of retro classics with each game having a specific unique feature and using randomly generated levels. He also created BulletML, a custom markup language for defining 2D shooter firing patterns, which has been used in a variety of games. Most of his games were written in the D programming language and use Simple DirectMedia Layer for graphics.

Macworld described Kenta Cho as one of today’s best independent game programmers.

http://www.asahi-net...s8k-cyu/index_e.html

      

Pictured are my two current favorites, Mu-cade and Torus Trooper.

w00t!! MOer sp33d!!

2033

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

« Last post by Edvard on November 07, 2008, 06:36 PM »

Oh, I miss those. Painfully.

Speaking of pain, do you remember the filmstrip of Star Wars?

ow. ooh that smarts...

2034

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

« Last post by Edvard on November 07, 2008, 01:35 PM »

Home movies on a Super 8 projected on a bedsheet in the backyard with popcorn popped in a pan on the stove



Aw man... Good times... *sigh*

2035

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

« Last post by Edvard on November 07, 2008, 12:41 PM »

It still exists for those old-school die-hards: http://www.nextag.co...516-D1E5337755F0E2D9

I had a friend in grade school who would eat the paste, but as I recall it had a faint peppermint smell to it, so it didn't surprise me.
That smell takes me back every time...

2036

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

« Last post by Edvard on November 05, 2008, 06:26 PM »

More description please...
Did it also launch applications?
What exactly autohid? The virtual window part?
Is it mentioned in my Virtual Window Managers Mini-review?
Was it DM2?
Was it mentioned here?

2037

Living Room / Re: Ubuntu appears to be getting slower

« Last post by Edvard on November 05, 2008, 10:35 AM »

Hmmm... disappointing. I thought 8.04 was a step in the slow direction, but this is giving me the heebie-jeebies.

Most reports are pointing at the recent kernel changes, but if that's the case we'd see the same kinds of slowdowns with other distros, right?
I'm probably not going to skip Intrepid, but I'm going to keep an eye out for what may be the real cause.
In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, I've been really questioning the 63 instances of console-kit in the process list, even though others have noticed it and found no benefit to removing it altogether. 

Is there any way to remove pulse audio without removing the whole shebang? Good thing Xubuntu still doesn't install it by default. Alsa+jack+realtime kernel handles all my audio needs (I play around with multi-track recording every once in a while), I don't need Pulse's mess trying to handhold everything in the middle of it. I have noticed that LADSPA plugins are noticeably, frustratingly noisier with 8.04.

Maybe now's a good time to backtrack to 7.04

[Edit] or maybe Debian... Yeesh

2038

Living Room / Ubuntu appears to be getting slower

« Last post by Edvard on November 04, 2008, 04:42 PM »

Can't remember where I first saw this, but it pointed to a link on Slashdot, which pointed to:

With the release of Ubuntu 8.10 coming out later this week we decided to use this opportunity to explore how the performance of this desktop Linux operating system has evolved over the past few releases. We performed clean installations of Ubuntu 7.04, Ubuntu 7.10, Ubuntu 8.04, and Ubuntu 8.10 on a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 notebook and used the Phoronix Test Suite to run 35 tests on each release that covered nine different areas of the system. After spending well more than 100 hours running these tests, the results are now available and our findings may very well surprise you.

http://www.phoronix....bench_2008&num=1

I thought things slowed down abit from 7.10 to 8.04, but 7.04? That's a while back and nobody's noticed?
Thoughts from our resident Linux camp?

2039

General Software Discussion / Re: What would your ideal Operating System be like?

« Last post by Edvard on November 03, 2008, 10:53 AM »

I'm puzzled about the no-install idea, though I can see how that would be desirable for portability.
How about ZeroInstall? It doesn't work for Windows (yet) perhaps some of us could help out?
http://0install.net/

Myself, I like having what I need right where I expect it to be, rather than depend on a 'cache' of my desired app.
Still being on dial-up is a pretty big monkey wrench in the works as well...

2040

Living Room / Re: Linux needs more haters

« Last post by Edvard on October 28, 2008, 03:17 PM »

hehe- He needs a little javascript that plays this wave file when you open the page.

...And us fanboys should post this one

2041

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

« Last post by Edvard on October 28, 2008, 01:48 PM »

<EDIT> Actually, something just occurred to me. The one thing these cards were really good for was their ability to be used as building blocks. Literally and metaphorically!

If you had a good routine coded on those cards, you could always just drop it into a new 'stack' (i.e. program) and reuse them. Everybody who did a lot of "card work" had a shoebox full of neatly rubber-banded routines and subprograms they could "compost" (as we used to say) into their latest project. There was even a feature on the keypunch machine that would allow you to make duplicates of a stack of cards with just the push of a button. Great for archiving and version control purposes. So I guess you could say that punch cards were one of the earliest examples of reusable code and software repositories.

-40hz (October 28, 2008, 12:51 PM)

That's it. If I ever get around to writing the Grand Unified Linux Package Management System, I'm going to call the repositories "Shoeboxes"
 

2042

Living Room / Re: Printers that print on paper-roll ?

« Last post by Edvard on October 28, 2008, 12:36 PM »

*facepalm*
http://news.bbc.co.u...chnology/2917739.stm

2043

Living Room / Re: Printers that print on paper-roll ?

« Last post by Edvard on October 28, 2008, 10:16 AM »

I managed to mis-read the subject line as "Printers that print on bog-roll ?"

-Darwin (October 28, 2008, 08:52 AM)

seems to be a kindof a theme there for you lately Mike

thanks for the link!

-tomos (October 28, 2008, 08:57 AM)

You're not the only one...
http://www.halfbaker...let_20roll_20printer

2044

Living Room / Re: Linux needs more haters

« Last post by Edvard on October 28, 2008, 04:33 AM »

I knew it: https://www.donation....msg122820#msg122820
After the post where he asked for suggestions I asked myself "Jeez, is he running out of ideas already?!?"
Sure, he'll be missed and I am sure others will take up the slack, but I don't care two bits either way.

I agree with the rant about Pulse Audio though. Absolutely stupid idea.

2045

General Software Discussion / Re: Best Python IDE

« Last post by Edvard on October 27, 2008, 05:05 PM »

Anybody tried ActiveState's Python IDE?
http://www.activesta...vepython/index.mhtml
Haven't heard much about it, but the self-promotion is wicked.
Also, look here:
http://wiki.python.o...g/moin/PythonEditors
And here:
http://wiki.python.o...elopmentEnvironments

2046

Living Room / Re: Eggnog season is upon us!

« Last post by Edvard on October 27, 2008, 04:37 PM »

I thought you meant cheesecake.
Hmm... that might not a bad combination either...

2047

General Software Discussion / Re: BlueGriffon

« Last post by Edvard on October 27, 2008, 03:46 PM »

Sure it sounds like a frustrating process, but we're also dealing with the fluid world of web pages.
It doesn't surprise me that, in a world of almost-overnight changes to how people present content, an editor for it would be hard-pressed to stay relevant with a static application.
I haven't read the release notes or version history at all, but I imagine entire re-writes might be justified when certain methods suddenly become too inflexible to work with an ever-changing format.
Let's hope this new project will be built with that type of flexibility in mind from the beginning.

2048

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

« Last post by Edvard on October 27, 2008, 03:33 PM »

Ugh, I can't stand longhand writing style. Might be fast to write in, but it's darn hard to read sometimes... one would suppose I'm good at reading it since I work at post.dk, manually typing in the receiver for letters the OCR system can't handle. But it's more a matter of pattern recognition than actually reading the darn crud

-f0dder (October 26, 2008, 05:00 PM)

No, I mean have the captcha text in cursive (er... "longhand"). Especially if one used different script styles for each captcha.

2049

General Software Discussion / Re: which Linux version for my laptop

« Last post by Edvard on October 27, 2008, 11:11 AM »

+1 for audacity
There is none better.

2050

Living Room / Re: 007 James Bond

« Last post by Edvard on October 27, 2008, 11:10 AM »

My opinion on DST?
I think they should have us set our clocks for a half-hour back and LEAVE IT THERE!