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2726

General Software Discussion / Re: At last: MP3 Lossless!!!

« Last post by f0dder on January 13, 2010, 07:27 PM »

Personally, I never had any reason to use anything other than EAC with its superior secure ripping mode. I'll take a look at dBpoweramp as well.

-sajman99 (January 13, 2010, 06:24 PM)

EAC's ripping is secure, but I dunno if I'd call it superior - it works by re-ripping each sector multiple times, which strains your drive and can be slow. dBpoweramp utilizes C2 error pointer information, which means it only has to re-rip sectors the drive tells it were ripped problematically - and it does this in a second pass, so the first pass can go full speed (re-ripping a sector means searching back, which is a pretty slow operation). Unfortunately, not all drives support C2, and some that do don't support it reliably :/

2727

General Software Discussion / Re: At last: MP3 Lossless!!!

« Last post by f0dder on January 13, 2010, 05:20 PM »

Yep, EAC is the best ripper-- especially if you have a scratched CD. Other free tools like CDex and Audiograbber reportedly get the job done as well.

-sajman99 (January 13, 2010, 02:01 PM)

...as long as the CDs aren't scratched or copy-protected, in which case I don't think you should use anything besides EAC or dBpoweramp.

AudioGrabber freeware? Last time I used it, it was commercial... and used the sucky XING engine. Or am I thinking about something else with a similar name?

2728

Post New Requests Here / Re: All AutoHotkey (AHK) coders read: No more upx packing of compiled ahk utils

« Last post by f0dder on January 13, 2010, 05:19 PM »

Before Linux had to be able to handle all these Windows file formats, most files didn't even have an extension.  You relied on a program called 'file' iirc that looked at the start of the file and guessed if it was a printer configuration file, a bash script, an executable etc..

-MilesAhead (January 13, 2010, 01:12 PM)

I've always preferred file extensions over having to look at contents (or metadata, as in case of Apple OSes) - for a lot of reasons. Like, being faster and easier to filter by.

2729

General Software Discussion / Re: At last: MP3 Lossless!!!

« Last post by f0dder on January 13, 2010, 01:44 PM »

tomos: for free ripping, go with EAC and also use the AccurateRip plugin... and choose a decent MP3 rate (or do the sane thing and go FLAC if you aren't super-constrained by disk space). If you're willing to pay a bit, go for dBpoweramp - faster ripping than EAC (especially if your drive supports C2 error reporting), but still does it securely.

2730

General Software Discussion / Re: How to disable Flash from caching to disk?

« Last post by f0dder on January 13, 2010, 05:34 AM »

If you are talking about FLV videos I think they dont bypass Firefox cache, they are stored in it, not in Flash internal secret hidden cache... I dont think what you are seeing in Process Monitor is the actual flv file being cache but maybe something else flash related

-thorazine74 (January 13, 2010, 05:26 AM)

Dunno if the FLV vidoes are also stored in the FireFox cache, but for both Chrome and FF (haven't checked with IE) it definitely is the video going to %TEMP% - file size doesn't lie, and when watching one particularly long video I ran out of space, and the video wouldn't stream/play any further.

2731

Screenshot Captor / Re: 2.78. Error On W7

« Last post by f0dder on January 13, 2010, 04:46 AM »

This is what jumps out at me:

"It is W7 running in bootcamp on a macbook pro"

-mouser (January 13, 2010, 04:36 AM)

It does jump out, but I don't necessarily think this is the problem - after all, bootcamp means running Windows natively, not in a VM.

egarlepp: could you try running eventvwr.msc, and check Windows Logs->Application? There might be some additional information available there. Stuff like not having the Visual C++ runtimes installed can also cause this error - don't think it's the case here, though, since mouser uses Borland C++ Builder for his apps.

2732

Screenshot Captor / Re: 2.78. Error On W7

« Last post by f0dder on January 13, 2010, 04:31 AM »

Exception code 0xc0000005 means "access violation": that code tried to write to memory that it doesn't have access to. This can happen for a whole lot of reasons, and it can be terribly hard to track down the problem.

That you get the error in a "The application failed to start correctly" MessageBox indicates that the exception happens before the application starts. This could happen for a number of reasons... one would be failing initialization code in one of the DLLs used by the executable, another could be malware or anti-malware (or stuff that uses system hooks or...) programs playing around. Iirc it's also the generic error message you get when trying to run dotNET programs without the framework installed (really should've been a more informative message!), but SSC isn't dotNET.

Because there's so many possible causes, it'll be hard getting anything useful from google searches. FWIW, I used to run 2.56.01 and just upgraded to 2.78.01, and both work on my 64bit Win7 installation.

Are you running any other anti-whatever software besides Symantec? Or an application like AdMuncher? Any "windows enhancers" (virtual desktops, or programs that adds stuff like sticky-windows, minimize-to-tray, window-rollup, ... to all windows)? Anything that sets keyboard/mouse hooks or otherwise injects DLLs into other processes could be potential problems.

You could try monitoring program startup with SysInternals' Process Monitor, but it's pretty GeekBoyPowerHead^TM and extremely verbose - akin to looking for a needle in a haystack.

2733

Living Room / Re: Something on computer is fubar

« Last post by f0dder on January 13, 2010, 04:05 AM »

It was a fairly high end card... though it's main purpose was for music producers.

-nite_monkey (January 12, 2010, 05:19 PM)

And then the follow-up question comes: did you use any of those features?

I'm pretty sure the old Audigy card is better than the onboard sound I use now... but considering I don't need the extra in/outputs and I don't run games with EAX support and don't think I can perceive any audible difference (except perhaps the Audigy suffering more from component noise), the card might be better but not offering me any real added value. Just saying

2734

General Software Discussion / Re: How to disable Flash from caching to disk?

« Last post by f0dder on January 13, 2010, 04:02 AM »

I use Netflix's online player, which is based on Microsoft Silverlight, and it's no better, but at least it doesn't stutter.

-doctorfrog (January 12, 2010, 03:27 PM)

Does that work inside FireFox? Pretty interesting if it does and doesn't stutter, then...

And yeah, flash is kinda stupid, in several ways. But at least it's well-behaved enough to use %TEMP%.

2735

Living Room / Re: Something on computer is fubar

« Last post by f0dder on January 12, 2010, 11:44 AM »

lol, well it was a free card(for me, not for my brother) and it was better than my onboard sound, so I figured why not use it, but then it died on me, so I will just stick with onboard now.

-nite_monkey (January 12, 2010, 10:34 AM)

Better how, though?

2736

Living Room / Re: Something on computer is fubar

« Last post by f0dder on January 12, 2010, 10:30 AM »

Dunno if there's much reason not to use onboard audio these days, unless you have high-end gear connected to your machine. Audio quality used to suck, have low output levels and craptons of component noise... but imho audio quality is decent enough these days, I haven't had my SB Audigy PCI card installed for years. Some might claim "But zomg the sound is not accelerated with onboard audio!" - well, can you tell the CPU consumption hit? . Haven't had any driver problems with onboard audio either for the last bunch of years.

2737

General Software Discussion / Re: At last: MP3 Lossless!!!

« Last post by f0dder on January 12, 2010, 10:00 AM »

You can use all stupid archivers for lossless audio compression. We don´t need hundrets of redundant lossless formats.

-Crush (January 12, 2010, 07:36 AM)

Archivers? Generic compression tools don't tend to work very well with audio data compared to a specialized codec... besides, not all media players are going to support, say, playback of .wav from a .rar file

I agree that we don't need Yet Another Format^TM, though, if it doesn't bring anything really valuable into the mix... and imho MP3HD doesn't. In fact, because of the way it works, I even think it's a downright bad idea

2738

General Software Discussion / Re: At last: MP3 Lossless!!!

« Last post by f0dder on January 12, 2010, 06:12 AM »

ut actually I was favorably surprised by another point, the mp3 encoder.  I used to rely on EasyCDDA, encoding my CD @ 192 kbps ABR.  With Jetaudio Plus I chose 192 kbps VBR and I was astonished by the difference (on the same Sony Walkman, a NWZ-S738F).  The music seems "clearer", "richer" than with EasyCDDA with a similar compression level.

-MerleOne (January 12, 2010, 04:56 AM)

Hm, couldn't find mention of which MP3 encoding engine EasyCDDA uses; the closest "official" info I found in any obvious place was a link to mp3dev.org, which seems to be an old site for LAME? - some review does say it uses LAME, though. And afaik, LAME is pretty much the highest-quality encoder on the market?

JetAudio doesn't mention it's codec either, but a 2007 thread on their forum implies Fraunhofer... I hope that they've either changed codec since, or that Fraunhofer has improved their codec, since it used to have worse quality (except for very low bitrates, but who use 96kbps for their audio? )

But hey, some blind-listening studies have been made where people actually prefered MP3 over FLAC... probably because they've been listening to MP3s so long that they've gotten used to the lossy sound >_<

192 kbps ABR is mostly something like 110~180 kbps, while 192 kbps VBR always is 192 kbps.

-Curt (January 12, 2010, 05:06 AM)

Hm, don't you mean that CBR will always have constant rate? ABR is still variable bitrate, and don't give 100% predictable output size... but more so than VBR. See this

2739

General Software Discussion / Re: How to disable Flash from caching to disk?

« Last post by f0dder on January 12, 2010, 12:21 AM »

Using RAM instead of disk is nearly always faster.

-doctorfrog (January 11, 2010, 06:33 PM)

FWIW my %temp%, firefox internet cache, firefox profile dir (including the sqlite databases!) are all on a RAMdisk - and I still get the stuttering when viewing flash videos in FireFox... I think it's pretty safe to rule out disk access as being a factor.

Chrome doesn't seem to stutter, and that's even though I haven't moved it's internet cache to the ramdrive - the flash file being streamed obviously goes to %temp%, though, so that is going to RAM. And either flash or chrome is being really lame about something - with procmon I see massive amounts of repeated QueryStandardInformationFile spamming on the file, wtf? And it keeps doing it even when playback is done... so until I navigate away from the now-done video, it's producing zillions of entries like

[Select]

07:00:18,1721718 chrome.exe 2528 QueryStandardInformationFile R:\temp\fla7E25.tmp SUCCESS AllocationSize: 20.472.832, EndOfFile: 20.472.452, NumberOfLinks: 1, DeletePending: False, Directory: False
07:00:18,1721948 chrome.exe 2528 ReadFile R:\temp\fla7E25.tmp END OF FILE Offset: 20.472.452, Length: 16.384

I assume it's the flash plugin's fault though, since exactly the same happens in FireFox.

2740

Living Room / Re: Show us the View Outside Your Window

« Last post by f0dder on January 11, 2010, 11:44 PM »

when you said "slightly" you weren't kidding.

-mouser (January 11, 2010, 04:20 PM)

Yeah, those pictures are patently bad, so much it's actually kinda cool.

• 1. Motive: since the view outside your window is basically just a wall, it's going to... kinda suck.
• 2. Lighting: it's too dark to see anything.
• 3. Angle: have you been drinking, kiddo?

Playing with mum's new camera, p3lb0x?

2741

General Software Discussion / Re: "Renaming" a list of names (not files)

« Last post by f0dder on January 11, 2010, 01:54 PM »

Regular expressions can do a lot of nice stuff, and get complex text manipulation over and done with in a jiffy - they're pretty darn nice. Just don't try and go do silly things like parse HTML with regex

2742

General Software Discussion / Re: "Renaming" a list of names (not files)

« Last post by f0dder on January 11, 2010, 03:12 AM »

tomos: try Notepad++ - it's built-in regex engine is relatively weak (because it uses the one from the Scintilla editing component, rather than PCRE/whatever), but should be able to handle a simple regex like this.

2743

fSekrit / Re: fSekrit won't open after OS reinstall

« Last post by f0dder on January 10, 2010, 10:30 PM »

Kamots, are you still with us? Had a chance to test the SekritReader files posted above?

2744

General Software Discussion / Re: Pimping My Dell Inspiron Mini

« Last post by f0dder on January 10, 2010, 08:44 PM »

1GB RAM (fixed size on CPU/Memory daughter board)

Aww, that's a bit on the low end, even though Win7 is somewhat less hungry than Vista. Might be sufficient if it's only going to be used for light work, though... guess you won't be running heavy stuff anyway with that CPU

I won't use a personal firewall most of the time as I will be inside private LANs. When I am using public WiFi I will run a firewall.

Why bother? Just keep Windows' built-in firewall enabled (doubt you can feel a resource hit from it, even on that hardware) - it's fine for not getting exploited, which is what you should be worried about

I'd stay away from the Norton stuff - don't have personal experience with NIS 2010, but experience with previous products have been less-than-stellar. High resource consumption, not that good detection rate, and a b!tch to uninstall when you get tired of it. Might have changed, but somehow I doubt it - do they still use HTML for the interface, rendered with the IE engine? Very bad choice for a security product

PerfectDisk for real-time disk defragmentation.

Good choice - it's the best defragger I've come around since the venerable Nuts&Bolts for Win9x (gosh, that software was fast; seemed to do much more extensive pre-planning (resulting in less data shuffled around) than any defragger I've seen since). The user interface has become perpetually heavier and uglier for every new major release though, which is a shame.

2745

Living Room / Re: Something on computer is fubar

« Last post by f0dder on January 10, 2010, 08:36 PM »

The sector zeroing can still make it feel like you're "curing" a drive (and thus imply the sense of low-level format) because it'll kick in sector remapping - this remap only happens on writes, not reads. Dunno if sector remap can be turned off and/or cleared, perhaps I should take a look at the ATAPI specs (are they available for free?) - I'm certain it's possible somehow, but wouldn't be surprised if it's some vendor-specific trickery that might not be available through ATAPI/SCSI.

Sounds weird that S.M.A.R.T doesn't report any remapped sectors, though... Anyway, S.M.A.R.T has always felt like a bit of a failure to me: never really reported anything interesting before the drive was dead, lack of standardization across vendors, lack of proper documentation - especially the fact that you have no idea what the reported values represent, you can only see if they change, and whether they're above/under threshold. Yay.

2746

Living Room / Re: Netbooks, Portable Applications, and USB/SDHC Flash Drives.

« Last post by f0dder on January 10, 2010, 08:30 PM »

I couldn't live with the slowness of flash cards or USB flash devices for neither data nor programs - even the fastest drives I've seen reach nowhere near harddrive speeds. And then there's the issue of the flash memory erase cycle count... I have absolutely no clue how many erase cycles today's "consumer grade" flash memory can handle, nor how fast you reach that with regular use... but I don't want to find out, either (theoretically the cells should just go read-only, rather than losing content, but does anybody have experience with this?).

And then there's the issue of USB not necessarily being 100% stable. It's been quite a while since I've had any major issues with it, but I've had flukes here and there... and a girl_friend of mine got some pretty weird filesystem corruption happening. Yes, turning off disk caching for the drives help, but that makes them unbearably slow

Personally, I'd keep programs and data files on the HDD - possibly under TrueCrypt protection, whether container-, partition- or full-system style (for my own laptop, I have a container file with sensitive files, most other stuff on the laptop isn't super critical; I've considered doing full-system encryption anyway, though). You could couple that with some sync to either SDHC or USB-flash so you can use your portable setup and keep it, well, synced. Good idea doing that in addition to the online stuff, it's faster and you never know when their servers go crashing or you lose connectivity.

2747

Living Room / Re: Great Britain is frozen!

« Last post by f0dder on January 10, 2010, 08:15 PM »

f0dder, you're a brave man going cycling at minus five

-tomos (January 09, 2010, 03:01 PM)

Ah, it's not that bad - as long as the roads aren't too slippery. Can be nasty if the salt-trucks haven't been around, though...

(Oh, a beard certainly helps - and it's kinda funny to feel your beard getting frozen by your exhaled air )

2748

Living Room / Re: Something on computer is fubar

« Last post by f0dder on January 10, 2010, 08:12 PM »

I decided to go with the Low Level Format tool at HDDGuru first rather than diving straight in with MHDD.

-4wd (January 10, 2010, 04:10 AM)

Hmm?

AFAIK there hasn't been such a thing as "low-level format" after MFM drives were phased out... tools claiming to do "low-level format" usually just overwrite every sector with zeroes. Drive capacity is actually somewhat larger than size_of_all_sectors, since there's per-sector error correction and head sync stuff... but unless there's something I haven't been told, you don't have access to that data via ATAPI nor SCSI commands.

Might be possible to reset the bad-sector remap table though, so a "low-level format" could be a combination of that and zero-filling all sectors.

2749

General Software Discussion / Re: recommendation: sabayon linux

« Last post by f0dder on January 10, 2010, 08:03 PM »

for most other stuff I don't believe in having a zillion folders or files inside a folder

You should see the donationcoder smf attachments/uploads folder

-Gothi[c] (January 10, 2010, 12:28 PM)

Caching http proxies can also produce craploads of files. If I was designing a system with such properties, I'd introduce a level or two of subfolders, to have "somewhat more sane" number of files in each folder. Squid, for instance, does this. Can't be done for Maildir, though

2750

Post New Requests Here / Re: Display-drivers stretching hack for small screens

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2010, 02:43 PM »

It answered my second question, not the first

Maximized applications have special state - the most important being that you can't drag them around (well, not until Win7 anyway). So if you can move them around after having scrolled using GimeSpace, their maximized state is not being preserved... this could lead to some inconsistencies, though I can't think of any off top of my head; I'm mainly asking out of curiosity