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2901

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« Last post by rjbull on May 10, 2006, 04:27 AM »

John Buckham's been mentioned here a couple of times, since he has a webpage summarizing the different outliners available (although it's a bit dated).

-superboyac (May 09, 2006, 10:35 AM)

I like his page because the reviews are clear, fair, short but adequate, and literate.  The drawback is that it's more than a bit dated, it's very very dated.  IIRC, he doesn't even mention MyBase, or quite a lot of others; no Treeline, no TreeDB, not even Keynote.

I recently tried Jot+ which he calls the best two-pane outliner, but it's nothing special. 

One interesting thing; Jot+'s author provides import from a lot of other formats, either in Jot+ itself or via an external conversion program.  That might mean a more general translation program would be feasible.  If that were so, some of the concerns about committing to the "wrong" program would lessen, if not go away.

combine them into one perfect notetaking utility.  Kind of like Frankenote, or "The Ultimate Notetaker"

Frankenote?  Brilliant name!   

I wish I had a secretary to do my non work related tasks.

Don't you mean you wish you had a secretary to do your work-related tasks?  The non-work-related tasks are generally more fun...

2902

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: HTML Organizer/Viewer

« Last post by rjbull on May 08, 2006, 09:48 AM »

I doubt whether anything truly valuable is placed in open view

??? Why would anyone even use the web then - and why would anyone want to republish stuff that is of no value.

Actually as I understand it just about everything published on the web is copyright (even if the owners don't know it). A lot of people won't be

-Carol Haynes (May 08, 2006, 09:39 AM)

OK, I phrased that badly, and focus on my own uses, but how valuable is valuable?  Most of the stuff I personally save from the Web is pretty much links to software sites, postings from a.c.f. and just occasionally "how to" articles.  To an extent, if I share that with anybody, it'sfree advertising.  I wouldn't bother to lift DC reviews or the like wholesale (unless I was afraid the site would disappear) but I'd just write a quick description and save the link.  Stuff that I would consider very valuable (or at least expensive), like Derwent patent information, I wouldn't share and isn't easily available on the Web even from subscription services.

2903

Living Room / Re: Madness is contagious!

« Last post by rjbull on May 08, 2006, 09:31 AM »

his music became more and more abstract. Some performers consider is virtually unplayable

-Carol Haynes (May 08, 2006, 08:40 AM)

I take it they don't like Stockhausen, Boulez or Xenakis, either 

I am doing a degree in Humanities with Music (for fun really

Looks interesting, but well above my level.  Musical notation is just tadpoles on telephone wires to me   

"For fun" sounds euphemistic, hard to do an OU degree on top of a job and everday life.  Oh, well, you might meet someone agreeably rich at the summer school 

2904

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: HTML Organizer/Viewer

« Last post by rjbull on May 08, 2006, 08:25 AM »

The reason for my question was that as I see it Surfulator is designed for grabbing stuff for the web so that you can read/search and store a copy locally. Given that most of the material is grabbed in this way republishing any of it is likely to infringe copyright.

-Carol Haynes (May 08, 2006, 05:42 AM)

At work we use a service that interprets copyright so severely that they won't let us store "their" data for more than 90 days     But I think you're being too sweeping.  Yes, much stuff on the Web is copyright, but much of it is little more than advertising puff they would be pleased for you to disseminate.  I doubt whether anything truly valuable is placed in open view, and having to pay and jump through hoops to get it is likely make you very aware of its status.

2905

Living Room / Re: Madness is contagious!

« Last post by rjbull on May 08, 2006, 08:17 AM »

I have been studying Beethoven recently as part of my uni course.

Listening to one of his late works (Grosse Fugue Op 133) is enough to drive anyone insane - he plainly was when he wrote it.

-Carol Haynes (May 08, 2006, 07:32 AM)

Beethoven would have been deaf by then (I think), so he would have been under great stress.  Music of all things is subjective and personal; maybe you just aren't susceptible to classical music?

Ravel composed his famous Bolero near the end of his working life.  He apparently died of Alzheimer's disease, or something similar, and there's some thought that Bolero is as repetitive as it is because he was already affected.

What university course are you doing?

2906

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: HTML Organizer/Viewer

« Last post by rjbull on May 08, 2006, 04:42 AM »

Coming soon is the ability to publish Surfulater content to your local PC or a Web server so you can share it with colleagues and friends.

That sounds interesting but won't it cause all sorts of copyright issues? You would be effectively publishing other people's work???

-Carol Haynes (May 07, 2006, 07:30 PM)

It sounds like nevf has invented the printing press, but what you print with it is still your own responsibility?  Copyright is a serious issue, and has to be dealt with, but information is frequently only useful if it can be shared.  Proprietary file formats need special viewers to read their files.  It seems to me a sad lack that not every notekeeping program has a freely-distributable read-only viewer, or some equivalent means of making the information available.

2907

Living Room / Re: Do you Suffer from Computer Anger Management - How do you handle it?

« Last post by rjbull on May 05, 2006, 03:43 AM »

sometimes it feels like screaming at top of your lungs is the only way to release the frustration.  i have a feeling that by the time it builds up to that point there is no other solution.

-mouser (May 04, 2006, 05:06 PM)

Remember the Smack-A-Mac?  It was a small imitation Apple Macintosh made out of foam rubber.  Normally it stood on top your monitor.  Whenever you felt the circumstances were right, you took it off, punched it, jumped up and down on it, threw it against the wall, and then you put it back again...

2908

General Software Discussion / Re: Klipfolio 3b

« Last post by rjbull on May 04, 2006, 06:07 AM »

Firefox scrapbook is one of the reasons I'm not using Opera...

-f0dder (February 01, 2006, 06:25 AM)

OBook Plugin for Opera Browser version 1.0 beta 5 is a scrapbook work-alike for Opera

2909

General Software Discussion / Re: One-hit wonders

« Last post by rjbull on May 03, 2006, 10:12 AM »

I'm thinking of Onfolio. Great program, but I've never met anyone who uses it.

-zridling (April 07, 2006, 06:10 PM)

Onfolio is now free; see DC https://www.donation...62.msg24223#msg24223

2910

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« Last post by rjbull on May 03, 2006, 10:11 AM »

NEWS: Onfolio Acquired by Microsoft
New release of Onfolio free in the Windows Live Toolbar
March 8th, 2006, Microsoft announces the acquisition of Onfolio and the release of a new version of Onfolio with the Windows Live Toolbar.

It is an add-in for the Windows Live Toolbar, which you can download from the Windows Live Toolbar download site.

Probably free because it's labelled a beta.

2911

Living Room / Re: WiFi not working - any suggestions, please?

« Last post by rjbull on May 03, 2006, 08:43 AM »

Is it *all* of your internet that fails, or just DNS (Which can feel like everything due to almost everything depending on it.)?

-PhilKC (May 03, 2006, 08:34 AM)

I don't know enough to know about the DNS, but, as you'll see from my last post, I hadn't got as far as setting the network up properly.    I have yet to try it, it's on another PC, but it looks like the right approach.  I really think the manuals should have said something about how to set up networking, and they didn't 

<later>

PhilKC, your extensive Web site is very easy to navigate   

2912

Living Room / Re: WiFi not working - any suggestions, please?

« Last post by rjbull on May 03, 2006, 08:36 AM »

@noth(a)nk.you, m_s: I wondered about ZA and tried turning it off, but no change...

@mouser:  had a quick look at those links a while back, couldn't see anything obvious. 

I hope Google (everyone's friend) may have found me what I needed to know about setting up WiFi networking here Connecting to the Wireless Network in the Regent-Carey Library. (Windows 98, ME)

Now all I have to do is try it...  <sigh>

2913

Living Room / WiFi not working - any suggestions, please?

« Last post by rjbull on May 03, 2006, 05:32 AM »

I'm in the UK.  I just bought a US Robotics MAXg wireless ADSL gateway plus matching MAXg PC card for my Win98SE laptop, a Thinkpad T22.  The gateway's configuration page says it has an Internet connection, and the right lights are on.  The PC card seems able to see the gateway, and gives a bar graph of link power.  ZoneAlarm Pro knows there's a new network.  Unfortunately, the rest of the computer doesn't believe them.  Browsers don't browse, e-mail clients say they can't connect to the server.  This happens whether I'm using WiFi or a wired connection.

Please, what else do I need to set or change?

2914

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Run bat files transparently

« Last post by rjbull on April 28, 2006, 09:05 AM »

put your command line into a normal shortcut (.lnk) and set the properties to  run minimized, and to close when finished.

-bliss (April 28, 2006, 08:39 AM)

You may need to put CLS and EXIT and the end of the batch file for this to work, under some versions of Windows.

I sometimes put logging into the batch file itself, using:


------------------------------------------------------------------------
LOGECHO   Echo with date/time           Ver 2.2 (c) 2001 Horst Schaeffer
------------------------------------------------------------------------

LOGECHO is used like ECHO, and supports the tokens for all sorts of data
from the current date and time. LOGECHO was especially made to produce
custom entries for logfiles, but it can also be used to write commands
into a temporary BAT file (to rename, set, pkzip etc...)

Tokens (see also: LOGECHO /?):

        upper case tokens:              lower case tokens:

        $D  day                             $h  hour
        $M  month (01..12)              $m  minutes
        $N  month (Jan..Dec)            $s  seconds
        $H  month (hex 1..C)            $c  sec/100
        $Y  year (00..99)
        $C  century (19|20)
        $W  day of week (Sun..Sat)
        $V  day of week (0..6)
        $Z  day of year (001..366)

        $$  Dollar symbol
        $+  new line


Example for a logfile (to append use double redirection symbols!):

        LOGECHO ----------  $W $D $N $Y, FDNC>> FD.LOG
        LOGECHO # $h:$m:$s  GUS %NL% node\>> FD.LOG


Horst's Web site is http://home.mnet-online.de/horst.muc/  LOGECHO is included in his PBATS collection.

2915

Living Room / Re: Unprotected Wireless Lans?

« Last post by rjbull on April 28, 2006, 08:09 AM »

I find it strange Netstumbler lists ALL protected WLAN's as WEP-protected

-moerl (March 29, 2006, 06:22 PM)

Have you tried Boingo?  It's really a tool for finding WiFi hotspots, but apparently contains a signal strength meter.  It's free, but I think the install tries to sign you up to their network.  I haven't tried either program, but was just wondering.

2916

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« Last post by rjbull on April 27, 2006, 08:28 AM »

Treepad Asia does not really work with Asian languages. It works only if you have that language version of Windows installed.

-tokjdm (April 27, 2006, 06:02 AM)

I didn't realise that.  It's not good.  Treeline supports Unicode, I think, but is still a standard treepad-style organiser.  Its data format is XML, so you have some hope of conversion later.

2917

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« Last post by rjbull on April 27, 2006, 05:26 AM »

I really wish MemoryMate had been better adapted to the Windows environment. The current version released by Brownbag simply does not work

-tokjdm (April 27, 2006, 05:08 AM)

You're not the only one to say that about Memory Mate; see e.g. John Buckman's outliners page

Scrapbook is nice and I used it for some time but the search and formatting functions are too limited (and I had problems with bugs at the time, v2.20 may be better).

ScrapBook 2.20 is dated 21 April 2006, so it's hot off the press.  I haven't used it "for real," but it looks best suited to simple actions and short records.  Pity...

It occurs to me that despite being tree-style, you might find Treepad Asia a possible stopgap because it supports Asian languages.  You can always ignore the tree style    You get rather better search facilities if you use the free Treepad viewer, but it's still limited compared to Memory Mate.  I've been tinkering with Treepad Lite lately, largely because it has a simple file format, and most other programs can directly import its files anyway.  So if I do find something better, it won't be such a problem to change.

2918

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« Last post by rjbull on April 27, 2006, 04:47 AM »

tokjdm,

I find this thread very interesting. I have been looking for the ultimate note taker for years and am not satisfied with my current choice (one note). Someone talked earlier about Memorymate (a DOS program) and this is still my reference today (although I can't use it any longer because of the format restrictions).

-tokjdm (April 27, 2006, 12:53 AM)

I still haven't seen anything as clean, simple and effective as Memory Mate, with its limited but sensible Boolean search terms and indexed database, giving retrieval that's both fast and precise.  For large quantitites of scraps of unstructured data, the tree model isn't very useful, certainly not as useful as a full-text, free-text database.

Another important factor is unicode compatibility

You might want to look at ScrapBook which is a small freeware cardfile program with a Unicode version, but, you would probably find it too simple for most needs.  This Wiki entry on cardfiles might also be relevant.  ScrapBook was mentioned in a recent post on TinyApps Blog

Infoselect and Inforecall are just tree-based programs, like treepad

Info Select for DOS didn't start that way.  It was a bit more like Memory Mate, and put little windows that matched the search on screen.  I haven't looked at the Windows version because of the cost.

2919

General Software Discussion / Re: Desperately seeking help with 1-4a Rename

« Last post by rjbull on April 26, 2006, 09:36 AM »

I'm EXTREMELY confused by the interface after working with it for almost two hours.

-zridling (April 26, 2006, 04:41 AM)

The interface is somewhat strange, yes.  I suspect that's in part owing to attempting to put everything on a single screen without a help file.

It X's files, and then it doesn't. It won't preview parts of names, and despite examples using $$ everywhere, it shows nothing.

I think "X-ing" files, marking them for operations, is controlled by more than one thing.  That is, you have to specify the right wildcard in the top left hand box, and ask 1-4a to perform an operation.  E.g. if I want to search-and-replace say "044" in a filename with "zzz," it doesn't mark files with an X until the right wildcard is set, and I've ticked the "Replace" box, and set the search text to "044."

I doubt that helps very much; I only needed 1-4a for simple operations, mostly inserting or replacing bits of text, though I didn't have any problems with those.  Since I discovered the power of Total Commander's inbuilt equivalent, I've seldom used 1-4a.

Just noticed something else.  If I launch it form a COMMAND.COM DOS box under Win2K, it comes up with a plain top bar.  If I launch it with the switches "/e /noc" (expert mode, no online check = don't connect with the Internet) it announces its version number on the top bar.

Possible work-around for the looong FAQ: save to disk, reduce HTML to plain text, search/view with your favourite file searcher/viewer?

2920

Living Room / Where I'm from! (was Re: Suggestion: Stop Hiding those Licence Keys!)

« Last post by rjbull on April 24, 2006, 04:33 AM »

I have spent time in the YOU ESSE OF HAY, and Chinese beer resembles the worst of their beer.

-beanfoto2 (April 22, 2006, 08:29 AM)

A Brit I vaguely know who's a long-time US resident sometimes drinks Miller Light as it's the only one he likes.  You can find proper breweries here and there, but you have to know where they are.

It's strictly of the " straight in, straight out" lager variety, with virtually NO individuality.

They also told me Chinese beer wasn't like our beer 

Bear in mind tho' that these are the personal opinions of a tee total Buddhist, ( I only drink Guanzhou's pineapple shandy for sore throats and the Guinness for the vitamin B12 when I need it, ( I'm also a vegan, and B12 is in short supply)).

And in Buddhist Tibet they eat yaks, partly because they haven't always got anything else...

<phew> talk about boldly going off topic where no man has gone behind before...

What else did you find out about the lady photographer?

She's now 80, and writes books about education...

2921

General Software Discussion / Re: Privacy solution for external USB drive?

« Last post by rjbull on April 21, 2006, 08:48 AM »

I'm pretty sure I've seen thumb drives with built-in thumbprint recognition systems, but that might be more security than you want.

2922

Living Room / Where I'm from! (was Re: Suggestion: Stop Hiding those Licence Keys!)

« Last post by rjbull on April 21, 2006, 08:46 AM »

And you wouldn't like the chocolate here

-beanfoto2 (April 21, 2006, 06:47 AM)

I'm in the UK.  The landlord of my local pub likes Chinese beer.  He knows because he did a charity cycle ride in China.  And a lady photographer I once met said she liked it too...

But I doubt it would get through the customs to mouser 

2923

Living Room / Re: Downloading your Gmail Account

« Last post by rjbull on April 19, 2006, 08:11 AM »

As far as actually being a competitor for gmail, lycos isn't one -- the only significant competition I see is Yahoo/MSN -- both of whom are seriously overhauling their webmail clients.

-allen (March 21, 2006, 09:18 AM)

Allen,

Have you noticed that Yahoo has a new email beta out now?

2924

General Software Discussion / Treepad Lite 3.0 released

« Last post by rjbull on April 18, 2006, 05:15 AM »

Those of you who like tree-style hierarchical notekeepers / outliners / PIMs might like to know that Treepad Lite, the small, freeware version of Treepad, has finally been updated.  From their Web site:

New features in version 3.0

April 15, 2006

Options
* Added: a settings screen containing many new options. You can access the settings screen through "menu: View/options" or the new options toolbutton.

Toolbars
* Added: a new button to open the options screen has been added to the file toolbar
* Improved: the 'Follow Hyperlink' icon on the 'navigate' toolbar has been replaced with a better icon.
* Improved: the 'Search article' icon has been replaced with a nicer icon
* Added: the right-click toolbar menu now also contains menu items for the infobars
* Added: the right-click toolbar menu now also appears when right-clicking on the article title bar, just below the article.

Skins
* Added: one can now switch between ten skins to adjust the appearance of TreePad's toolbars. Menu/view/skin or toolbar popup-menu/skin. The following skins are available: classic, silver 1, silver 2, blue sky, blue metallic, chrome, aluminium, vanilla, purple and green. The 'classic' skin corresponds to how the program looked during the last few years.
* Added: a new skins menu has been added to the toolbar popup menu, as well as to the view menu

User-interface
* Added: Windows XP themes support
* Improved: the tab below the article has been replaced with a nicer looking panel displaying the name of the article
* Updated 'About' screen, menu: help/about

Tray icon
* Many new tray icon options, such as: show in tray when minimized, show in tray when active, show in tray and taskbar when minimized, etc. etc. Menu: View/options

Tree
* Added: a tree folder icon for each node. You can hide (and show) this icon using the options screen, menu: view/options

Hmmm...  haven't tried it yet, and a bit ungenerous to criticise a nice little freeware, but those features seem designed to make it look prettier, not make it more powerful...

2925

What's the Best? / Re: Anti-Virus Package

« Last post by rjbull on April 13, 2006, 10:52 AM »

UK members might like to look at the latest edition (dated June 2006) of Computer Shopper, which has a review of anti-virus packages.  Very briefly, they rated them as follows.  Ratings take into account accuracy of detection, where F-Secure, Kapsersky, Steganos and NOD32 were best, but also cost of purchase, cost of renewal, features and interface.

5   Kaspersky
5   Steganos 2006 (*)
4   Trend PC-cillin 1.4
4   McAfee 2006
4   F-Secure 2006
4   AVG Free Edition 7.1
3   ZoneAlarm AV 6 (excluding the firewall)
3   Norton 2006
3   NOD32 2.5
2   Bullguard 6.1
1   Panda Titanium 2006
1   Avast! 4.6 home edition

(*) Steganos is a re-packaged Kaspersky with less features, but very cheap.

URL for the magazine is  http://www.computershopper.co.uk  though I don't think they post the magazine article.