Recent Posts

2201

Living Room / Re: Movies or films you've seen lately

« Last post by 4wd on November 26, 2014, 10:09 PM »

Must have Witch Hunt (1994) in amongst your old VHS tapes also 

Detective Philip Lovecraft lives in Los Angeles in the 1950s when an ambitious Senator is holding hearings, on Magic. Magic is the new influence in Tinsel Town. Lovecraft is unique in that he is the only one who refuses to use magic in his work. Shortly after he is hired, he finds his client, Kim Hudson, accused of the murder of her husband, a film executive. Philip uses the tallents of a local witch, Kropotkin, to explain what is happening only to see her accused of the murder and sentenced to be burnt at the stake.

2202

Living Room / Re: Thoughts on "Piracy".

« Last post by 4wd on November 26, 2014, 08:40 PM »

In Australia, films and movies come out significantly later than elsewhere.

So, many people in Australia get a VPN account, then get a Netflix account (or similar) in an area where movies and TV shows are available.

Is this piracy?

I believe that the answer is obvious:

Yes. It is piracy.

-Renegade (November 26, 2014, 06:44 PM)

Actually, I don't believe the answer is that clear cut.  Broadly speaking, in Australia if you can find a product cheaper anywhere in the world and you can get it to Australia to use then that's OK as far as the governing body in Australia is concerned, which is the ACCC.  And is what the idea of competition is supposedly all about.  It doesn't matter if the product is or isn't for sale in Australia.

What you would be violating would be Netflix' and their distributors Terms & Conditions.

That's not piracy, that's bypassing regional restrictions which is probably summary execution under DMCA.

Another interesting example is games on Steam, technically it's illegal, (under Australian Consumer Law), for Steam to not allow Australians to buy a, (Steam based), game from Russia where it's far, far cheaper and register against their Steam account.
Since Steam offers their service in Australia, they are required to abide by Australian law but do they?  Nope.

What did you expect? They are the grandsons of criminals exiled to down under. I say burn them all. But only after we pile stakes through them.

-eleman (November 26, 2014, 06:57 PM)

And yes, a pair of my ancestors were convicts - one was a highwayman and the other a prostitute 

2203

Living Room / Re: Matchstick - A streaming stick using Firefox OS [Kickstarter]

« Last post by 4wd on November 26, 2014, 05:40 PM »

SDK has been released: Matchstick SDK

2204

Coding Snacks / Re: Folderwatch (a MAC application) for PC's

« Last post by 4wd on November 26, 2014, 05:11 PM »

A couple more freebies:
DSynchronize
Yadis! Backup

BTW, I recently uninstalled BTSync from all my computers and VPSs, it was too resource hungry when it came to syncing files/folders numbering in the tens of thousands.

2205

Living Room / Re: ebay snipping

« Last post by 4wd on November 26, 2014, 04:51 PM »

Basically it comes down to one question when trying to win an auction using sniping:

Do I really want to win?

If the answer is 'Yes', then an online service with multi-server redundancy is the way you want to go ... and you'll probably have to pay for it.

If it's 'No', then use a program on your computer or a free online service, (the free ones don't normally provide redundancy), but be prepared that you might not win because of things like, eg. power outages, ISP is down, computer blows up, you're having hot sex and forgot to turn the computers power-saving off, the city the data centre is in suffered an ebola outbreak, the data centre turned into SkyNet, etc, etc, etc.

If you don't trust the online service (why would you pick a service you don't trust?):

• unlink your ebay account from any monetary account, (PayPal, bank, credit card, etc)
• turn off TFA (if you use it - I do) and only enter the auction/account details an hour or so before auction end
• after the auction, turn TFA back on or change your password if you don't use TFA

2206

Living Room / Re: ebay snipping

« Last post by 4wd on November 26, 2014, 03:11 PM »

http://en.m.wikipedi...actor_authentication

If you only use a username and password to log in then you don't use TFA.

2207

Living Room / Re: ebay snipping

« Last post by 4wd on November 26, 2014, 03:04 PM »

If you don't give the online service or a pc-based program your login details how do you expect it to bid on your behalf?

I use Gixen occasionally but it won't work if you use two-factor authentication - I don't expect any of them would.

2208

Living Room / Re: Movies or films you've seen lately

« Last post by 4wd on November 26, 2014, 04:37 AM »

Predestination - which has the most convoluted temporal paradox I've ever seen in a movie.

2209

Post New Requests Here / Re: Move files to folders named after part of filename

« Last post by 4wd on November 25, 2014, 10:57 AM »

I just now figured out a context menu item like this Rename REGEXP PATTERN "(.+\d{4})-(\d{4})(\s)(\d{8})\.(.+)" TO \1\\\0
which is much more complicated.

-dcwul62 (November 25, 2014, 07:09 AM)

Why did you make it so complicated?

Regretfully the setfoldate would not work here.

Why would it, they're files not folders.

2210

Post New Requests Here / Re: Move files to folders named after part of filename

« Last post by 4wd on November 25, 2014, 06:08 AM »

Um, you have DOpus why don't you just rename them into the folders?

2211

Living Room / Re: 2014-2015: Best tablet specs for ebook reading

« Last post by 4wd on November 25, 2014, 03:32 AM »

For interests sake:



1440x900 7" Android tablet, using FBReader - I could zoom out two or three more times and it would still be perfectly readable to me at 300-600mm distance.

2212

Living Room / Re: New square monitor (27" 1920x1920)

« Last post by 4wd on November 24, 2014, 06:36 PM »

I'd rather swivel my head side-to-side than nod my head up and down all day long.

-Deozaan (November 24, 2014, 12:54 PM)

it's really true -- moving the head/eyes vertically is *MUCH* more uncomfortable than horizontal movement.

-mouser (November 24, 2014, 01:11 PM)

You two ain't gonna last long in the Zombie Apocalypse.



Spock: He is intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking.

2213

General Software Discussion / Re: Internet connection settings (wifi laptop)

« Last post by 4wd on November 23, 2014, 05:50 PM »

https://www.virtualb...h03.html#idp54270432

2214

Finished Programs / Re: DONE: Batch adjust shortcut targets

« Last post by 4wd on November 23, 2014, 01:21 AM »

Moved BSM v0.7 from my above post to this one.

It'll stay as it is for a little while before I implement possible process interrupt and counting ... bit of other work to do first.

2215

General Software Discussion / Re: Internet connection settings (wifi laptop)

« Last post by 4wd on November 23, 2014, 01:16 AM »

Use a USB WiFi dongle exclusively for the VM, then just disable the WiFi the host is using.

2216

Living Room / Re: MaskMe extension - PMI (Plus, Minus, Interesting)

« Last post by 4wd on November 21, 2014, 09:17 PM »

MaskMe has been superseded by Blur - the free version of Blur, apparently, no longer lets you sync or backup across computers which reduces its usefulness now.

DoNotTrackMe is also being folded into Blur.

2217

General Software Discussion / Re: windows services manager. such a thing?

« Last post by 4wd on November 21, 2014, 05:32 AM »

And there I was just making a joke about a possible mockup image 

2218

Living Room / Re: Hard Drive SMART Stats - from the BackBlaze Blog

« Last post by 4wd on November 21, 2014, 05:26 AM »

@4wd: Blimey. What did you do to get that result? Why does it have the Plus and Minus next to the 100% Health report? I've never seen that before.
Did you somehow set the offset to -1639, or did HDS do that?

-IainB (November 21, 2014, 05:03 AM)

The +/- appears when you put in an offset - which you can do next to any of the S.M.A.R.T. values.

That drive is over 5 years old and still spinning its wheels.

You can run a Low Level Format a couple of times to see if the sectors get remapped, (what I usually do when a HDD starts getting flakey), or use something like MHDD.  Fill up the HDD with big files a few times, at some point it may trigger the remap if the sector gets hit enough times and produces errors.

2219

Living Room / Re: Hard Drive SMART Stats - from the BackBlaze Blog

« Last post by 4wd on November 20, 2014, 08:02 PM »

^Those stats indicate that it's still a good working HDD AFAIAC 

Remember this one:



Almost three years later:

2220

General Software Discussion / Re: windows services manager. such a thing?

« Last post by 4wd on November 20, 2014, 07:37 PM »

Would it not be better to have the ability to chain from one profile to another rather than have one hotkey that calls two at the same time ...






 

2221

General Software Discussion / Re: Obtain list of SSID from my antenna wifi

« Last post by 4wd on November 19, 2014, 08:30 PM »

NetStumbler

2222

Living Room / Hard Drive SMART Stats - from the BackBlaze Blog

« Last post by 4wd on November 19, 2014, 06:28 PM »

Hard Drive SMART Stats

I’ve shared a lot of Backblaze data about hard drive failure statistics While our system handles a drive failing, we prefer to predict drive failures, and use the hard drives’ built-in SMART metrics to help. The dirty industry secret? SMART stats are inconsistent from hard drive to hard drive.

With nearly 40,000 hard drives and over 100,000,000 GB of data stored for customers, we have a lot of hard-won experience. See which 5 of the SMART stats are good predictors of drive failure below. And see the data we have started to analyze from all of the SMART stats to see which other ones predict failure.

From experience, we have found the following 5 SMART metrics indicate impending disk drive failure:

    SMART 5 – Reallocated_Sector_Count.
    SMART 187 – Reported_Uncorrectable_Errors.
    SMART 188 – Command_Timeout.
    SMART 197 – Current_Pending_Sector_Count.
    SMART 198 – Offline_Uncorrectable.

2223

Living Room / Re: Do any wifi-DIRECT adapters actually exist?

« Last post by 4wd on November 17, 2014, 08:05 AM »

From Wikipedia^w:

The Wi-Fi Direct devices negotiate when they first connect to determine which device shall act as an access point.

Direct essentially embeds a software access point ("Soft AP"), into any device that must support Direct.

That sounds suspiciously like the Virtual AP functionality in Windows 7+ without going through the hassle of typing commands.

2224

General Software Discussion / Re: Does anyone have know why you cannot map a drive letter to an FTP drive

« Last post by 4wd on November 17, 2014, 01:24 AM »

4WD.  Highly suggest you check this one out on whatever you were trying.

-questorfla (November 17, 2014, 12:36 AM)

Already looked at NetDrive but considering its cost I thought DirectNetDrive might work out a bit cheaper for you 

But I don't need something like this since I don't do any mapping of drives ever, (direct S/FTP or UNC for me).

2225

Finished Programs / Re: DONE: Batch adjust shortcut targets

« Last post by 4wd on November 16, 2014, 11:09 PM »

Try this version, BSM 0.7

Now fully internal file list retrieval which, oddly enough, is faster than using DOS for small numbers of files but only about 25% slower for large numbers, (eg. 75 seconds as opposed to 60 seconds for 768780 shortcuts) ... so not too bad.

Seems to handle accented characters OK, @gpsTao - it handled all the shortcuts you sent me on my system fine.

Because it now uses purely AutoIt for file retrieval I might have a look at updating the statusbar with file numbers while it's searching and perhaps being able to cancel the search.