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2176

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

« Last post by IainB on June 04, 2015, 09:05 PM »

I have IainB's 5300 if no one beats me to posting. I wasn't sure what to do because it's a complicated big post. I was gonna just post a snip but I could use some advice.
(Iain, it's the Tresorit one.)
_______________________

-TaoPhoenix (June 04, 2015, 06:45 PM)

I would have missed your post had I not seen my name in the feed-reader (it shows the first line of each post).
Crikey! I hadn't noticed my post counter had got up so high.
I reopened my post from my FF cache and screen-clipped it into OneNote, and here it is:

2177

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Tresorit - Cloud storage service (FREE) - Mini-Review. (WARNING!)

« Last post by IainB on June 04, 2015, 08:28 PM »

...To me, it seemed that if you're running a backup service, you can expect a lot of stationary data. ...
________________________

-TaoPhoenix (June 04, 2015, 06:57 PM)

Having been responsible for the configuration and review of operational backup procedures for several large data centers, I can confirm that this is exactly one of the things that one would expect and find in practice.
Furthermore, I can confirm that the usual working definition of "secure storage" in IT parlance would not include the risk that any user's data would get deleted within X days if it had not been accessed - that would be preposterous, and is the main reason why I am so embarrassed about having missed this in the Ts & Cs and recommended the service. It would not be correct to call that a "secure storage service", by definition. If it was called such, then it would be blatantly misleading.

2178

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Tresorit -WARNING! Mini-review contained a grievous error of omission/fact.

« Last post by IainB on June 04, 2015, 05:03 AM »

2015-06-04 2025hrs: WARNING! Looks like my review above contains a grievous error/omission of fact.
I had not noticed and so had failed to point out that in the Terms and Conditions of Use 11/11/2013 (see the spoiler that I inserted in the Opening Post at the time) it says:

XIV Inactive Free Accounts
62. If You have chosen a plan with no charge ("Free Account") and if Your Free Account was inactive for at least one-hundred and twenty (120) days and no valid User Plan is bound to Your Free Account, Tresorit will send You a notice. Fifteen (15) days after such notice, Tresorit may suspend Your Free Account or delete all of Your Content related to Your Free Account, and/or we may terminate the Agreement between You and Tresorit.
_______________________________

- and that this point is not mentioned (though it arguably should have been) in the section XIX Termination by Tresorit.

I thought I should post this so that other users who started using Tresorit on my recommendation would be made aware of the facts.
APOLOGY: I sincerely apologise to anyone who might have been discombobulated by this news. I most assuredly would never have recommended Tresorit had I known, or at least not without some major caveats.
=================================

How I discovered this:
I had not needed to add to my workdata archive backup (which is what I intended Tresorit for) for a while, and so had not played about with Tresorit lately, but, prompted by the recent discussions (above), a few days ago I started up my Tresorit and it said the software (GUI) was out-of-date, so the latest version was downloaded and installed.
However, after the software had updated, I was unable to log in. So I logged a service query on the Tresorit Support desk via Submit a request:

​2015-05-30
Unable to log in to Tresorit on desktop - "Wrong email or password".
Yet I have not changed either my email address or password.
Please confirm that my Tresorit account is still active for this email address ([email protected]).
_______________________________

Tresorit Customer Service responded with an email:

2015-06-02
 Hi!
Thank you very much for contacting us.
We can only confirm that your account has been deleted, however if you re-register the 50GB space will be there waiting for you.
Thank you very much for your cooperation, have a nice day!

Best regards,
The Tresorit Team

This email is a service from Tresorit Customer Service. Delivered by Zendesk.
_______________________________

Somewhat confused as to how my account could have been deleted (I didn't recall having done it, and no-one else had access to it), I tried to "re-register" but kept hitting a brick wall.
So I replied to Tresorit Customer Service:

2015-06-02
Thankyou for your email (below).
I went through the re-registration process, which obliged me to delete my account, even though you advise (below) that it is already deleted. There was no change and I was still unable to access the account.
So I repeated the re-registration process - again, no change.

So, I am still stuck at the original state as per my initial request for assistance.
Thus, I am still unable to login to my account with the correct email ID and password, and you advised me that the account has been deleted and gave me directions to re-establish my account, which directions, when followed,  seem not to work (twice).

With all due respect, though the Tresorit blurb claims that the service is "ultra-secure storage and sharing", I am having considerable difficulty seeing how the problems above reconcile with that claim.
​​Could you please explain to me​:

• (a) ​ what Tresorit Co. intended by deleting my account ​in the first place ​(if it indeed has been deleted)​,​ and
• ​(b) ​how you ​now ​propose to ​go about restoring ​the account ​and its contents, from backup, ​to its original status​ and without loss of data,​ and
• (c) ​how you propose to ​go about granting me access, and
• (d) why you have invalidated my account ID and password combination, and
• (e) what steps have been taken to prevent this sort of foul-up happening again and what assurances Tresorit Co. can give me that it will not happen again and that my account and data will remain secure in future?

Thankyou in anticipation of your reply.
Regards,
_______________________________

Tresorit Customer Service replied:
​

2015-06-03:
Hi X.,
Thank you very much for getting back to us.
First of all your account is validated now, so it should work fine.

Let's see:
1. We could only see that your account was in a deleted state that means that either someone deleted it for you (by accessing your email address and initiating the deletion) or you have not logged in to Tresorit for more than 120 days and as per the terms of service we deleted the account. In that case you should have received at least 3 mails telling you to log in.

2. The moment your account is deleted, your files become deleted as well, so we cannot restore them for you.

3. Your login/pwd combination was invalid because the account you tried to access was not accessible anymore.

We can guarantee you that Tresorit never deletes your account only after being inactive for 120 days.

Thank you very much for your cooperation, looking forward to your response, have a nice day!

Best regards,
The Tresorit Team
_______________________________

At the moment, I am still trying to get back into my account, but without much luck so far.
I shall update the opening post regarding the Ts & Cs, and keep this thread updated with further progress.

2179

Living Room / Comparison of FREE Cloud Storage services.

« Last post by IainB on June 03, 2015, 11:11 AM »

EDIT: 2015-06-07 0524hrs: Title of this opening post was changed to reflect what this thread seems to be turning into.

OneDrive v. Google Drive?
I have been mulling over this comparison for a while.
As far as I am aware, OneDrive does not muck about with (e.g., alter or compress) your files, whereas Google Drive does.
From experience, for documents, Google Drive/Docs will create "GDocs" copies of some of your files, and duplicate them, then later delete and update them to new formats. All without the user's say-so.
The duplication comes from when they changed "labels" to "folders", thus forcing duplication of documents which you had tagged with multiple labels. That seriously pissed me off. The labelling was a brilliant idea and they should have left well enough alone.
For images and videos, Gdrive is unreliable in Picasa, because they compress your images/videos, and it's a one-way lossy compression, so you can't rely on Gdrive for uncorrupted backup of your photos OR videos.
So, from my perspective, Gdrive is unreliable - not so OneDrive.

However, I don't really have that much experience of OneDrive, except that it does a sterling job with my OneNote Notebooks and User Preferences syncing and MS Office document storage/backup (as one would expect), but I was unsure of the image/video storage aspects.

What I wanted was someone else to tell me about their greater experience.

I just found this by Glen Lipka:
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)

Google Drive vs. Microsoft OneDrive
2015-06-02

I have been using OneDrive for a while now as our cloud service. However, complaints have forced me to reconsider. Here is a quick summary of my thoughts on the subject.

Pricing
OneDrive pricing.
15 GB    Free
100 GB    $1.99/month
200 GB    $3.99/month
1 TB    $6.99/month (includes Office 365)

Google Drive Pricing.
15 GB    Free
100 GB    $1.99/month
1 TB    $9.99/month (includes Google Apps)

They both offer office apps, but the full Microsoft Office suite is much more powerful and has both online and offline versions. With that said, Google is still 50% more expensive at the 1TB level.

Price Winner: Microsoft
___________________________________

Displaying Pictures/Videos
I have alot of photos online. I used to use Picassa, but it just didn’t the one feature I needed – folders! I organize my photos by year and then by month. Tags aren’t always good enough. I loved the Picasa photo editor, especially the red-eye removal, but without folders it just wasn’t going to work for me. Recently, Picasa has been merging into Google+. Actually, it’s pretty confusing what is happening there. I don’t use Google+, so I just don’t know what to think about their solution. With Picasa, YouTube, Google+ and Drive it is hard to understand what Google is doing. It feels like a lack of leadership/coordination to me.

On the other side, Microsoft does a great job of creating a nice interface for pictures. It has lightboxes and plenty of options. No red-eye removal, but the experience for viewers has been pretty good. My only complaint for Microsoft has been the lack of proper codecs to display DivX videos. It can display simpler formats, but I usually compress my videos using the DivX converter so they take up less space.

Display Winner: Microsoft
___________________________________

Sync Stability
If Microsoft had this part of the system under control, I would just give them the crown. It’s a better UI at a better price. However, the sync stability has been a nightmare. They are trying to embed this into the operating system, but honestly, they just fucked it up royally. Constant sync errors and confusing UI makes me worried about losing files constantly. The error icon is constant and the solution (re-open the file) is sketchy at best. Microsoft Office asks me the question, “Do you want to keep the server version or yours?”. This would be fine if they gave me a way to DIFF the two versions. How the hell should I know which is the right version?! They were supposed to be sync’d. No one else is editing!

You can see how Sync problems are by far the most infuriating issue. The importance of a stable sync can not be exaggerated.  Google’s sync, seems to be much more elegant. The progress of the sync is much clearer. It also asks you if you mean to delete on both the server and local. (Microsoft is unclear when this happens). The speed seems ok so far.  I have to test it more, but right now…

Winner: Google
___________________________________

Sharing and Identity Management
They basically have the same sharing model. However, Microsoft wants you to use their Microsoft account and Google wants you to use their Google account. (Duh!) So it comes down to which one of those accounts is more prevalent in people’s lives, especially me and my family.  The answer is: We all use GMail. None of us use Microsoft. My phone is Google, my watch is Google.

Microsoft has tried numerous times to improve their email client, but ultimately, I keep having spam problems. Using GMail (and most recently Inbox) eliminates spam from my life. I’m not switching. Also, the Microsoft Phone is still DOA, so I am not buying that either.

Winner: Google
___________________________________

Summary – Split Decision!
So for now, I switched all of my normal files to Google Drive but left all of the photos and video at OneDrive. There are fewer sync problems with photos because I am not actively editing them.  I will experiment with the photos at Google, but the extra storage expense is making me wary.

I hope this comparison helped you in some way. I’m just trying to educate, engage and entertain.  Not always in that order.
___________________________________

In my case, OneDrive would seem to be:

• The winner on price. (From the costs given in the above.)
• The winner on display. (I learned that from the above.)
• The winner on sync. (From my experience, though syncing images/videos has yet to be tested by me.)
• The winner on Sharing and Identity Management. (Outlook being far superior in functionality and integration with Social Networking.)
• The winner on Data Integrity & Security. (QED).

Couple this with the Cavalier approach of Google in it unilateral killing-off of Google products, leaving the users with nothing else, then any Google user would probably be wise to reconsider whether their data was actually safe in Google's hands. The reverse would seem to be more clearly the case.
So, it looks like it's "Goodbye Google" from me to even more of their services, in addition to those they have already pulled.

2180

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by IainB on June 02, 2015, 07:48 AM »

Lunchbox suicide.

An Irishman, a Mexican and a blonde Englishman were doing construction work on scaffolding on the 20th floor of a building.
They had sat down to eat lunch, and were opening their lunchboxes when the Irishman said, "Corned beef and cabbage! If Oi get corned beef and cabbage one more time for me lunch, den Oi'm going to jump off dis building!"
 
The Mexican opened his lunch box and exclaimed,"Burritos again! If I get zese burritos one more time I'm a gonna jump off too!"
 
The blonde opened his lunch and said, "Bologna again! If I get a bologna sandwich one more time, I'm jumping too!"'
 
The next day, the Irishman opened his lunchbox, saw corned beef and cabbage, and jumped to his death.
The Mexican opened his lunchbox, saw a burrito, and jumped, too.
The blonde guy opened his lunchbox, saw the bologna and jumped to his death as well.
 
At their triple funeral, the Irishman's widow was weeping. She said, "Oh, if only I'd known how really tired he was of corned beef and cabbage, I never would have given it to him again!"
The Mexican's widow also wept, and said, "I could have given him tacos or enchiladas! I didn't realize he hated burritos so much."
The two wives looked expectantly at the weeping blonde guy's widow. She dabbed her eyes with a tissue and said, "I just can't understand it. He always made his own lunch."

2181

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: PowerISO 6.0 (100% Discount) - CD/DVD image file processing tool

« Last post by IainB on June 02, 2015, 07:44 AM »

If PowerISO is too much trouble, then consider IsoBuster Pro - Mini-Review

2182

General Software Discussion / Re: Microsoft OneNote - audio search settings

« Last post by IainB on June 01, 2015, 12:41 PM »

I posted about Searching for information in audio notes in OneNote.
That was in ON 2007.
Here is the relevant settings panel to enable audio index/search in ON 2013:

2183

Living Room / Re: Peer Review and the Scientific Process

« Last post by IainB on June 01, 2015, 03:58 AM »

Highly amusing, deliberately bogus piece of dietary weight-loss research recently published:
I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss. Here's How.
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)

John Bohannon
Filed to: debunkery   
    diets
    chocolate
    pseudoscience
    biology
    health
    medicine
    editor's picks

5/27/15 1:23pm

I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss. Here's How.

“Slim by Chocolate!” the headlines blared. A team of German researchers had found that people on a low-carb diet lost weight 10 percent faster if they ate a chocolate bar every day. It made the front page of Bild, Europe’s largest daily newspaper, just beneath their update about the Germanwings crash. From there, it ricocheted around the internet and beyond, making news in more than 20 countries and half a dozen languages. It was discussed on television news shows. It appeared in glossy print, most recently in the June issue of Shape magazine (“Why You Must Eat Chocolate Daily,” page 128). Not only does chocolate accelerate weight loss, the study found, but it leads to healthier cholesterol levels and overall increased well-being. The Bild story quotes the study’s lead author, Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D., research director of the Institute of Diet and Health: “The best part is you can buy chocolate everywhere.”

I am Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D. Well, actually my name is John, and I’m a journalist. I do have a Ph.D., but it’s in the molecular biology of bacteria, not humans. The Institute of Diet and Health? That’s nothing more than a website.

Other than those fibs, the study was 100 percent authentic. My colleagues and I recruited actual human subjects in Germany. We ran an actual clinical trial, with subjects randomly assigned to different diet regimes. And the statistically significant benefits of chocolate that we reported are based on the actual data. It was, in fact, a fairly typical study for the field of diet research. Which is to say: It was terrible science. The results are meaningless, and the health claims that the media blasted out to millions of people around the world are utterly unfounded.

Here’s how we did it. ... (read the rest at the link).

2184

General Software Discussion / Re: OCR - comparisons of different software/capability

« Last post by IainB on May 31, 2015, 03:19 AM »

Just made a significant correction to my post at Re: OCR - comparisons of different software/capability

Looks like I was mistaken about OneNote being unable to scan that red-coloured text error message.
Trouble is, I learned from this that OneNote is disabled by default (and which cannot be enabled) from scanning scrap images of single lines of text. Of what purpose/use that is, I have no idea.    

2185

General Software Discussion / Re: OCR - comparisons of different software/capability

« Last post by IainB on May 31, 2015, 01:50 AM »

@Nod5: Thanks for the link re extra cores support. I did pick up on that reference whilst I was reading over your detailed posts in the DC Forum.

@wraith808: Thanks for your comment. From what you say, it rather sounds like software in the 2000s is not too dissimilar to what cars were reportedly like in the 60s/70s - you had to pay through the nose for any "extra" feature - e.g. a heater for the passengers, delayed wiper switch, ... Sheesh. Archaic and greedy marketing for little or no real added value.

2186

Find And Run Robot / Re: Some shortcut keys don't work anymore.

« Last post by IainB on May 30, 2015, 08:47 AM »

I don't want to expand the work effort that may be required here, but it seems to me the issue (as above) might not be just whether FARR supports the Ctrl+Shift+Left/Right when making a selection, but to confirm whether FARR and its plugins are intended to consistently support standard Windows behaviour in any/all text selection, text navigation and text manipulation key combinations.
This could include, for example:

• Ctrl+Shift+Left/Right - for making a text selection (currently not supported in FARR).
• Ctrl+Left/Right - for skipping back/forward to the beginning of a preceding or following word (currently supported in FARR).
• Ctrl+BackSpace/Delete - deletes preceding/following word (currently supported in FARR)

2187

General Software Discussion / Re: Microsoft OneNote - Images disappeared? Needs fix for corrupted cache.

« Last post by IainB on May 30, 2015, 06:04 AM »

This is cross-posted from: Re: OneNote now on Mac as well, +FREE everywhere, + Cloud service powered.

OneNote now on Mac as well, +FREE everywhere, + Cloud service powered.[/b][/i][/u][/url]

...I installed the Clip to OneNote button in my toolbar, and pressed that, after logging in to Live, and waiting for the desktop app to sync the note after clipping it, the result was this:
 (see attachment in previous post)
_______________________

-Jibz (March 19, 2014, 02:53 AM)

At the time you posted this, I didn't have any idea what you might have done (to get the image placeholder with the red "X" in the upper LH corner), and couldn't reproduce it at my end.
However, I was reminded of your post when I had a heart-stopping moment the other day - all the images clipped to my largest OneNote Notebook appeared to be just that - i.e., the image placeholder with the red "X" in the upper LH corner.

Background:
__________________________________
This was after my HP ENVY 14 laptop (Win7) had died and I bought a new (refurbished) Toshiba Satellite L855 laptop (Win8).
As part of the process of migrating to the new laptop under Win8, I copied all my OneNote notebooks from the previous (Win7) laptop's drive/user directory to the new laptop's drive/user directory. This was a straightforward process, though it took a little time to copy across.

Previously, all my OneNote Notebooks had been client-based only, except for the free trial OneNote Notebook as per this discussion thread - that was on my OneDrive (was SkyDrive), and had appeared (been automatically synced) amongst my client-based OneNote Notebooks.
If I had had all my OneNote notebooks on my OneDrive in the first place, then I would not have had to worry about manually migrating them to the new laptop. So, recognising the value of having them accessible on the web and on any client I was using, and having read up on it to establish that the technology was very sound, I used the OneNote functionality to "move" all my client-based Notebooks to OneDrive. The location of the Notebooks then changed from a directory under my Windows User ID to https://skydrive.liv...edit.aspx/Documents/… and these all started syncing.

When the initial syncing had completed, I could open my Notebooks on my laptop whether I was online or offline, and could operate on the offline cached copies as though they were client-based, just as before. However, whenever I was online, syncing was active, and any offline changes/updates to the Notebooks promptly automatically synced to the Cloud. According to what I had read, syncing whilst online is incremental and in real-time (not necessitating high bandwidth consumption). It all worked a treat. Perfect.
__________________________________

After my heart had resumed beating, I did some frantic investigation/searching and discovered that:

• (a) Not all of my Notebooks were affected.
• (b) All of my Notebooks contents/images seemed to be intact, correct and available via access to the OneDrive on the web (Phew!).
• (c) There were many forum posts about this problem where all the images in a OneNote Notebook had been replaced by image placeholders with the red "X" in the upper LH corner.
• (d) In Notebook Sync status view, one of my Notebooks (the largest one, which was the one with this problem) seemed to be stuck in syncing and kept instantly restarting syncing as though it were making no progress.

From the forums, apparently this problem only occurred where you had the Notebook resident/synced on OneDrive, and it was apparently caused by corruption/failure problems in:

• A: The client-based folder: C:\Users\[UserID]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneNote\15.0\OneNoteOfflineCache_Files
• B: the client-based file: C:\Users\[UserID]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneNote\15.0\OneNoteOfflineCache.onecache

The recommended fix was to delete the contents of the folder in A and delete the file in B, and initiate syncing (it should start automatically anyway). So I went offline and closed down OneNote. I then moved A and B from their home directory to a backup folder, and created an empty older per A in the home directory.
Then I went back online and started up OneNote again and opened the problem Notebook. The image placeholders with the red "X" in the upper LH corner were still there, but, as I watched, they were progressively replaced with the correct images as the syncing fetched them to the client and rebuilt the deleted caches. Eventually syncing stopped/completed.
Folder A as moved to backup was 70.8kB
File B as moved to backup was 80.1MB.
The newly rebuilt caches were of the order of 665MB (!) and 80MB respectively.
Looking in the folder A, I found thousands of files which are actually image files (irfanview tells you this from the record header, and you can view the record header yourself to see that is the case), but with names and an extension like this: ff046756-6c2d-419f-a52f-575638a5560a.onebin

Conclusions:

• The cause is corrupted/broken offline caches - possibly caused by an erratic or interrupted Internet connection interrupting the syncing process, resulting in incomplete caching syncs.
• No data seems to have been lost, and this problem is thus not a showstopper.
• The fix is as above, and a repeat occurrence could probably be avoided by ensuring OneNote Notebook syncing has completed before shutdowns.
• It might be worth experimenting - I don't know - to establish whether breaking down very large Notebooks into smaller ones could make for a quicker recovery if/when this happens again. This would probably require a good understanding (which I don't have) of the actual syncing process.
• Everything about OneNote (so far) seems to be rock-solid and reliable otherwise.

-IainB (May 29, 2014, 04:48 AM)

2188

General Software Discussion / Re: Top OneNote tips

« Last post by IainB on May 29, 2015, 08:23 PM »

Refer: Microsoft OneNote - some experiential Tips & Tricks

The "orphaned" tip (above) and others have been/are being gradually collected there.

2189

Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"

« Last post by IainB on May 29, 2015, 07:04 AM »

I really like this U.K. National Grid status
That is a seriously impressive dashboard.

2190

General Software Discussion / Re: Free Simple RSS Editor

« Last post by IainB on May 29, 2015, 01:48 AM »

OIC - I think.
You apparently want to generate your own website's feed address - is that right?

If so, then this might help:
How to generate an RSS feed address for a website?

2191

ProcessTamer / Re: Process Tamer not tame some 64-bit processes on Win7/64 or Win8.1-64 PRO.

« Last post by IainB on May 28, 2015, 11:27 PM »

Since making the above comment/post I have reason to suggest that it looks as though PT does have problems with at least some 64-bit processes in Win8.1-64 PRO. Not sure if the two problems below are connected:

2192

General Software Discussion / Re: Free Simple RSS Editor

« Last post by IainB on May 28, 2015, 09:13 PM »

I might be missing something here, but I'm not sure I understand what exactly you are trying to edit.
For example, the DCF feed address is:
[https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=mi9ekvt647tf1t4tbugu88svg7&type=rss;action=.xml]
What/how would you want to edit that?

2193

Mini-Reviews by Members / Microsoft Money Plus Sunset - Mini-Review

« Last post by IainB on May 28, 2015, 06:35 PM »

Original post date:	2015-05-28
Updated:	2016-04-06

Basic Info

Application name:	Microsoft Money Plus Sunset "Sunset" versions of Microsoft's leading commercial product, MS Money - a set of comprehensive accounting and budgeting software. Released by Microsoft in 2010 as $FREE software.
Thumbs-Up Rating:
Support:	This is a fully-finished, but discontinued and unsupported Microsoft product. Refer: Support (MS Money Sunset notice) Support for Microsoft Money (old MS support site) KB2118008 - What Is Microsoft Money Plus Sunset? Microsoft (MS) Money Help, Information and FAQ Pages Gaier Software - Restore Microsoft Money Online Quotes with MSMoneyQuotes There are/were various discussion forums on the Internet, possibly the main one being: http://money.mvps.org/ Download the software from: Money Plus Sunset Deluxe - from Official Microsoft Download Center Money Plus Sunset Home and Business - from Official Microsoft Download Center Info. in the software package: Help file. Flash videos (relate to pre-Sunset versions): Money tour, Manage your accounts, Pay bills online, Create a budget.
Application Version Reviewed:	The Deluxe and the Home & Business versions are the two "Sunset" versions of this leading accountancy software package that Microsoft decided to give away ($FREE) when they pulled out of the market for such software.
Application Specs.:	The functionality and features of the Deluxe and the Home & Business packages are listed in a table below.
Test System Specs:	Win7-64 HP, Win8-64, Win8.1-64 and PRO, Win10-64 PRO
Supported OSes	Compatible with: WinXP Win Vista Win7-32/64-bit Win8 and 8.1 32/64-bit and PRO Win10-32/64 and PRO - refer also Re: Windows 10 Announced - legacy app. support.
Upgrade Policy:	No upgrade. This is a "Sunset" version - a complete and fully-functioning product, wrapped as a self-contained and licenced package.
Pricing Scheme	$FREE

1.0 Intro and Overview:
Both versions are excellent accounting packages and were generally recognised as being market leaders up to the point when MS pulled out of the market.
Whether you want a tool to help you better manage your personal finances, or to manage a business, this software will do extremely well. You'd have to pay out quite a lot of money to buy anything similar.
As a lapsed accountant with long experience of, and a keen interest in, accounting systems and software, I can say from that experience that I have yet to come across a better-written or more comprehensive commercial accounting package developed for home or business use.
The "suck-it-and-see" approach (try it out for real) would probably verify that for most users who might be interested in finding out.

The table below shows a comparison of Sunset (and earlier) version features:




2.0 Using MS Money (Sunset)
2.1 Start-up: After installation (using whichever of the 2 Sunset versions you wanted), when you start up MS Money you will see this screen:




2.2 Home screen: You will then get to the Home screen: (click to enlarge)
Note that this screen behaves like a browser, but with the apparent constraint that it can take you to relevant MS Money links only.




2.3 Help file: Accessing the Help file will show you this. Note the differences highlighted.




2.4 Tutorials: There are some quite useful/helpful video tutorials. These can be started from the menu, or directly from the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Money Plus\MNYCoreFiles\WebCache\  (Start with the smallest file, MSMoneyTour.swf, which will load the others.)
Filenames:

• Accounts.swf       5.6MB
• Bills.swf              4.7MB
• Budget.swf        26MB
• MSMoneyTour.swf   16.2kB
• tourIntro.swf       4.1MB

3.0 Who this software is designed for:
Home or business users wanting to manage their financial affairs and budgets.

4.0 The Good:
Software which is just very good and well-designed for what it does.
Ergonomically very good and intuitive GUI, and a very good Help manual and context help/tips.
Suits elementary and complex requirements alike.
If this was the first accounting and budgeting package that you started to use, then it could very well be the last, as you would probably stick with it.

5.0 The needs improvement section:
Nothing to report here.
However, if you had wanted the costly service add-ons of an accounting package that can operate online service transactions with your bank account, then you would be out of luck. Those bundled services were disabled in the Sunset product, since banks would be (or were) unwilling to support online services to a retired product.

6.0 Why I think you should use this product:
For home or business users wanting to better manage their financial affairs and budgets, this software could be of enormous help.

7.0 How it compares to similar software
It used to, and probably still does, outclass most other accounting packages in this market sector (home & business accounting and budgeting software).
When MS pulled out of the market, the leaders included:

• Quicken,
• Intuit, and
• MYOB.

- producing variously good desktop accounting package and/or online accounting services (e.g., similar to MSN Live MS Money).
There is a lesser-known product called NewViews that was a superb DOS-based accounting package, which was belatedly rewritten with a full GUI for the Windows OS - it could well be a a good alternative to MS Money or the other contenders.

8.0 Conclusions:
The MS Money Sunset packages are superb value-for-money at $FREE.
You would probably have to spend several hundreds of dollars to get anything else as good.

2194

General Software Discussion / Re: OCR - comparisons of different software/capability

« Last post by IainB on May 28, 2015, 12:48 AM »

I don't know for sure, but I would expect that the OCR engine would probably be a common core process throughout the ABBYY range of software that involves image OCR scanning.
What my post above shows is that the post-processing of the scanned image that is fed into the OCR engine can make quite a bit of difference to the quality/accuracy of the OCR scan outputs.
ABBY Screenshot Reader clearly does some pretty smart stuff - e.g., it will scan for and output columnar information if you tell it that is what you want.

2195

General Software Discussion / Re: MS Project questions

« Last post by IainB on May 28, 2015, 12:27 AM »

 

2196

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox Extensions: Turn on tracking protection to speed up browsing.

« Last post by IainB on May 27, 2015, 11:48 PM »

In terms of line utilisation efficiency, I learned first-hand that ads and other junk were bandwidth hogs, back in the days when I used JunkBuster, and I lamented its going. This simple FF tweak is looks like it will achieve much the same thing. Worth a try-out at any rate. So, if you haven't already got this set (I do), it might be worth doing.
Turn on Tracking Protection in Firefox to Make Pages Load 44% Faster
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)

Melanie Pinola
5/26/15 9:30am

Even if you don’t care about the privacy implications of tracking cookies and other technologies sites use to identify us online, you might want to turn on Tracking Protection in Firefox anyway for a potential big speed boost.

Former Mozilla software engineer Monica Chew and Computer Science researcher Georgios Kontaxis took a look at the top 200 news sites (according to Alexa) and found a median 44% reduction in page load time, as well as a 39% reduction in data usage when the optional Tracking Protection is turned on.

Tracking Protection actively blocks domains known to track users. You might not see huge performance benefits for all sites, depending on how much each site relies on third-party content and similar extras from tracking domains. Still, with a range of between 20% and 90% decreased page load times according to the study—and better privacy control—it’s worth a shot.

To turn on Tracking Protection in Firefox:

    Type in about:config in the location bar and hit enter.
    You’ll see a warning about possibly voiding your warranty. Hit “I’ll be careful, I promise!” to continue.
    Search for privacy.trackingprotection.enabled.
    Double-click that to toggle the value to true.

You can read the researchers’ paper (PDF) here.

Tracking Protection for Firefox at Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2015 | Monica at Mozilla via Venture Beat and Boing Boing

2197

General Software Discussion / Re: OCR - comparisons of different software/capability - ScanTailor

« Last post by IainB on May 27, 2015, 12:47 AM »

The quality of any given OCR result is likely to depend on the quality of the scanned image input to the OCR engine. The better OCR scanning software will generally have done some pre-processing before the actual OCR scan.
The comparison of OCR scan results in the opening post of this thread showed some output of errors.

As a result of reading about ScanTailor in the DC Forum and elsewhere, I had downloaded and installed ScanTailor v0.9.11.1 (2012-02-27) 64bit. (Note that this is not the same as ScanTailor Enhanced that is referred to by @Nod5 in one of his posts.)

I had a sample image - a scan of two pages from a book. I straightened it up and tried to improve the B/W contrast using Picasa, but it OCRed in OneNote with quite a lot of errors that would be tedious to manually correct for. I wanted to see whether ScanTailor could help by preprocessing the image to enable a more accurate OCR scan.
So, take a look at this:
This is the input image (2 pages in one image): (click to enlarge)




This is what ScanTailor saw had been input: (click to enlarge)




After splitting the pages up and doing its work (including adjusting the DPI, deskewing, despeckling, etc.), this is what ScanTailor saw had been output: (click to enlarge)




This is the output (2 separate pages) from ScanTailor showing the OCR result (with some errors highlighted) from OneNote: (click to enlarge)




Pretty impressive!    

References:

• how to crop pdf
• QuickPicZone - tool to quickly make Scan Tailor picture zone
• N.A.N.Y 2013 Submission - BookCrop
• ScanTailor_multi_core
• Re: Review/Tips: "Scanning - VueScan and Associates" Pt.I: Intro & Bookscanning

2198

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox Extensions: AVG Privacy Fix

« Last post by IainB on May 26, 2015, 08:04 PM »

Find at AVG Privacy Fix
Looks interesting. I am trialling it now.
FAQ is here: http://www.privacyfix.com/start/faq

2199

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox Extensions: Security + Privacy block/allow lists -for FF + IE.

« Last post by IainB on May 26, 2015, 07:44 PM »

Blocklists.
Could be potentially useful for FF (Firefox) and IE (Internet Explorer) users. Follow the links and sublinks below to find out more.

The webpage Official EasyList as used by AdBlock Plus shows the separate categories of lists that one can use.
You might want to add some of these to your FF AdBlock subscriptions. Some of the Lists are for IE users.
There is an interesting and similar list specifically for IE users, here: http://www.iegallery...ckingprotectionlists
 - but it also seems to have some relevance for FF users.
Note the Stop Google Tracking one...   

2200

General Software Discussion / Re: MS Project questions

« Last post by IainB on May 25, 2015, 10:50 PM »

Yes, yes...on the surface it sounds like a wonderful idea. The unfortunate reality would be that answers would lead to more questions which would lead to even more answers...leading to even more questions.

I could easily see such a side-project dwarfing the entire DonationCoder site as a whole over time.

-Innuendo (May 25, 2015, 12:28 PM)

Well, I was trying to suggest as much:

Maybe we could consider whether it might be useful and worthwhile pooling our collective knowledge of computerised project management tools and training in same, and documenting it somehow in this site?
However, I'm not sure whether - in that way - expanding the scope of purpose for this site would necessarily be a good idea.

-IainB (May 23, 2015, 09:08 PM)