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Recent Posts

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326
Living Room / Re: Looking for smartphone
« Last post by 4wd on July 02, 2020, 07:55 AM »
I see the one 4wd got is available here (.de) for under 200€ but couldnt find it on uk amazon...
-tomos (July 02, 2020, 04:46 AM)

I got it for AU$297, (~€183), from Amazon AU but it had a Oppo Promo and they included their ET102 ENCO Free earphones, (normally AU$149 apparently).

@4wd, maybe you could let us know how the screen and camera/s fare (just generally -- I'll have a look at an in depth review at some stage).

Screen is great compared to the G5+, (comes with a screen protector already fitted plus a TPU case), bright enough for me to use it inside/outside and very sharp.

Camera uses Omnivision sensors and the default camera app is apparently a little underwhelming, (it does have Electronic Image Stabilisation), but there is a GCam port [direct apk link] available that you can sideload that improves photos a lot.

I presume you'll be ripping out the OS, or have you done it already? :-)

Atm, I'm leaving it stock, (first Android phone I haven't rooted pretty much immediately but probably will in a couple of months when I start getting annoyed at the limitations of a non-rooted phone).
What's really annoying is some messaging apps don't provide any means of a complete chat backup, (Viber for instance, compared to Signal/WhatsApp which backup everything), which I could restore fully if I had root.

Most I'll do currently is disable some of the stock apps via ADB, (eg. GMail, some Oppo apps), otherwise their version of Android 10, ColorOs 7, is reasonably stock ... I'm probably going to miss some of the Moto Actions and I'll miss the Moto Clock because of the easy to read battery level.

Some nice things I didn't know:
  • You can do gestures when the screen is off to start things, V = torch, O = camera, || = play/pause track, < = previous track, > = next track, plus you can set others, (^, W, M, etc), to run apps.
  • A system wide Dark Mode
  • You can have the nav buttons autohide, (like Windows taskbar), or forego them altogether and use swipes up from the bottom, left-side = back, middle = home, swipe and hold = recent, (good for me because I always used Moto's single button nav which used the FPR for navigation).
  • Besides VoLTE it can also do VoWiFi, (if your provider lets you - which mine does).

A local review.

... and it doesn't crash when this image is used as the backdrop ;D
327
Living Room / Re: Looking for smartphone
« Last post by 4wd on July 01, 2020, 07:44 PM »
The main thing I find disappointing is that the new Moto phones do not seem to want to improve on 720P resolution.  Such a big heavy phone should have 1080P FHD.

...

Another less than stellar "feature" of my e5 is that any photos I take look like total crap.  Streaming video isn't too bad if the WiFi has good bandwidth, but anything less than 1080P is unacceptable these days.
-MilesAhead (July 01, 2020, 09:44 AM)

Well, it is their budget phone series, most manufacturers have a line that is 720p, ordinary camera, 2-3GB RAM, 16-32GB eMMC Flash, MTK or SD4xx SoC, etc, (eg. Samsung Galaxy A01) ... you'd need to move to their G series for better specs ... which is what they hope you do.
328
Living Room / Re: Looking for smartphone
« Last post by 4wd on July 01, 2020, 07:57 AM »
New phone after 2.5 years: Oppo A52, probably one of the best bang-for-buck phones currently available.

phone_a52black_01_med.jpg

SnapDragon 665
Adreno 610
4GB/64GB
Android 10
1080x2400 LTPS IPS display
NFC
Dual 4G SIM + uSD (not hybrid tray)
Quad camera
802.11 a/b/g/n/ac WiFi
BT5.0
5000mAh battery with QC3.0
Fingerprint reader on the power button
etc

Included a pair of Oppo ENCO Free earphones free.

ET102.png
329
General Software Discussion / Re: Fastest/Easiest HDD to HDD transfer?
« Last post by 4wd on June 25, 2020, 06:58 PM »
MiniTool was the other program I was trying to think of, really good software.

Since it was a clone of the old drive, if it was an MBR drive then the cloned drive would be also, should have mentioned it but most of my drives are GPT to start with so it's rare I have to convert them.
330
General Software Discussion / Re: Fastest/Easiest HDD to HDD transfer?
« Last post by 4wd on June 24, 2020, 10:16 PM »
  • Connect the drive,
  • clone the old drive to it using EASUS, AOMEI, etc partitioning software,
  • remove the old drive, install the new one,
  • boot the computer, if the new drive has the wrong or no drive letter, change it using Windows Drive Manager,
  • fire up the partitioning software again and resize the partition and create the second one,
  • reboot

Job done ... I've done this more times than I can remember, including 6 times within the last 2 months upgrading my own and friends drives.

Never had a problem with programs that have been cloned to the new drive, worst that has happened has been the drive letter is different, changing it to the correct one and rebooting has always fixed it.
Can always boot into Safe Mode at 4 to fix drive letters and repartition.
331
General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 Announced
« Last post by 4wd on June 18, 2020, 06:49 PM »
A month or so ago I thought I'd re-enable the Insider update, (had it enabled a year or two ago), and almost immediately ran into the same problem I had previously on different hardware and after having reinstalled Win 10 a couple of times.

Micro-freezes, every few seconds the system, (or maybe just the mouse/keyboard input), would freeze for less than a second.

Oddly enough during regular use I hadn't really noticed it, as soon as I started playing a FPS game it became blindingly obvious.
Tried different things, eg. completely disable firewall just in case it's MS trying to phone home, unplug non-essential peripherals, kill any of my usual background programs, etc, etc - couldn't work it out.

In the end I just reverted to the release stream and the problem disappeared.

Second time it's happened, basically a completely new computer and still no idea what caused it.

Anyone had anything similar?
332
General Software Discussion / Re: any software can do a batch S&R "multi strings" in "multi files" at a time?
« Last post by 4wd on June 18, 2020, 06:23 PM »
dnGrep - https://dngrep.github.io

dnGrep allows you to search across files with easy-to-read results. Search through text files, Word and Excel documents, PDFs, and archives using text, regular expression, XPath, and phonetic queries. dnGrep includes search-and-replace, whole-file preview, right-click search in File Explorer, and much more.

Features:
  • Search across text files, Word and Excel documents, and PDFs
  • Search for files in archives - zip, 7z, rar, jar, and many more
  • Search using text, regular expressions (regex), XPath, and phonetics
  • Many search filter options
  • Search-and-replace, including undo
  • Whole-file preview
  • Right-click to search in File Explorer
  • Move/copy/delete result files
  • Open line results in a custom editor, like Notepad++
  • Bookmark search patterns for later use
  • Try out complex searches in the Test window
  • Save search results
  • Light and Dark themes
  • Much more!

Just a note: The plugins for Word, Excel, and PDF are search only, no text replacement.
333
Living Room / Re: Gadget WEEKENDS
« Last post by 4wd on June 10, 2020, 08:54 PM »
Does anybody have any recommendations for other "emergency kit" type things (minus fire extinguishers/med-kit/snow stuff)?
-Stephen66515 (June 10, 2020, 02:57 PM)

For the UK?

Decent walking shoes, a decent pocket knife/multitool, a couple of litres of water, and a basic understanding of which way is South.

Then walk East or West, the coast is less than 70 miles away no matter where you are and long before you've walked even 15 miles you'll be falling over a made road, fence, houses, MacDonald's, fish and chip shop, off-licence, etc.
 ;) :P
334
Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"
« Last post by 4wd on June 10, 2020, 12:52 AM »
The Un-Smartphone, open source rotary dial cell phone, (kits are available for the 3G version):

rotaryphone_4g_preview.png

  • Real, removable antenna with an SMA connector. Receptions is excellent, and if I really want to I could always attach a directional antenna.
  • When I want a phone I don't have to navigate through menus to get to the phone "application". That's bullshit.
  • If I want to call my husband, I can do so by pressing a single dedicated physical key which is dedicated to him. No menus. The point isn't to use the rotary dial every single time I want
    to make a call, which would get tiresome for daily use. The people I call most often are stored, and if I have to dial a new number or do something like set the volume, then I can use
    the fun and satisfying-to-use rotary dial.
  • Nearly instantaneous, high resolution display of signal strength and battery level. No signal metering lag, and my LED bargraph gives 10 increments of resolution instead of just 4.
  • The ePaper display is bistatic, meaning it doesn't take any energy to display a fixed message.
  • When I want to change something about the phone's behavior, I just do it.
  • The power switch is an actual slide switch. No holding down a stupid button to make it turn off and not being sure it really is turning off or what.

The perfect gift for that crotchety old relative who either can't get to grips with technology or who complains that their smartphone does things that they didn't want without having touched it, (I mean you, dad :-\ ).

Designer's project page.
335
Living Room / Re: Gadget WEEKENDS
« Last post by 4wd on June 09, 2020, 05:47 PM »
I picked it up when they had their range discounted on Amazon AU, (the 1200A, 1500A, and 2000A were $80, $90, and $100 respectively).

Set up an alert on 🐫^³
336
Living Room / Re: How to identify email address at the end of lines with RegEx?
« Last post by 4wd on June 08, 2020, 07:09 PM »
... I was sure that it wouldn't be enough in any case.
-wraith808 (June 08, 2020, 07:58 AM)

How can you say that?
😏
🤣
337
Living Room / Re: Gadget WEEKENDS
« Last post by 4wd on June 08, 2020, 12:09 AM »
Picked up a portable car jump starter, (1500A peak), recently ... now I have to wait for the battery to die to test it.  In the meantime it can act as a portable battery pack with QC3.0.

Be interested to try this on my Landcruiser, only a 3.4l diesel but of the old indirect injection glow-plug variety, (20:1 compression ratio), not the more modern common rail direct injection versions ... unfortunately the battery doesn't want to die :-\

51fonDOPLBL._AC_SL1000_.jpg

Amazon [AU]

Also a set of Tronsmart Spunky Beat TWS earbuds

spunky-beat-true-wireless-bluetooth-earbuds.jpg
338
Living Room / Re: How to identify email address at the end of lines with RegEx?
« Last post by 4wd on June 07, 2020, 11:03 PM »
If would be helpful to know where this is going to be used, eg. in a spreadsheet, PowerShell, JavaScript, etc - there are system calls that could possibly do a better job of validating an email than a single RegEx although you still need to separate a suspected email address out of the input.

In PowerShell you could cast the assumed email address to the MailAddress type and let the system validate it, email addresses are no longer restricted to just ASCII characters.

eg. Valid email addresses:
johndoe@🚌.org
John.Doe@やる.net
Jö[email protected]

Plain old ASCII valid email addresses:
John.Doe(Donationcoder)@nowhere.net
[email protected]
"John..Doe"@nowhere.net
"John. .Doe"@nowhere.net
"John@Doe"@nowhere.net

PS. The RegEx's given above fail the simplest email address: admin@localhost  ;)

Maybe you'd need to (roughly):
  • look for a @ within the last 256 characters of the line, (max length of the domain part is 255);
  • see if there are any pairs of quotes within the maximum allowed length of the local part, (64 chars), if there are you'd need to allow a lot more ASCII characters than you normally would, (eg. spaces, @);
  • if there is an odd number of quotes then check that the 'odd' ones are escaped (\\);
  • if there are no quotes in that 64 chars then take the chars at the first space backwards from the @;
  • pass what you have to the system for validation.

Probably a lot more needs to be done in there before you can be sure you pick up anything that might be an email address.
339
Post New Requests Here / Re: Idea: Task Manager "Lite"
« Last post by 4wd on May 16, 2020, 11:34 PM »
Save to a .ps1 file and run
-wraith808 (May 16, 2020, 09:38 PM)

Ha!  Spent 90 mins trying to get the output from Get-WmiObject into a ListView ... and gave up :-[

I was going for something using a GUI, still haven't quite worked out getting arrays into a ListView yet.
2020-05-17 14_32_24-PTM.png
340
Post New Requests Here / Re: Sort/organize mp3 files by bitrate, into folders
« Last post by 4wd on May 13, 2020, 09:02 PM »
Add the four lines needed to create the folder, and change the Remove-Item line to Move-Item.
341
General Software Discussion / Re: The best uninstaller
« Last post by 4wd on May 12, 2020, 06:26 AM »
Throwing another uninstaller into the mix: BCUninstaller - haven't used it, (I use Revo Pro Portable).

Bulk Crap Uninstaller (or BCUninstaller) is a free (as in speech) program uninstaller. It excels at removing large amounts of applications with minimal user input. It can clean up leftovers, detect orphaned applications, run uninstallers according to premade lists, and much more! Even though BCU was made with IT pros in mind, by default it is so straight-forward that anyone can use it.

BTW, Revo Uninstaller Pro is $8.25 on BjD for the next 19 hours.
342
Finished Programs / Re: DONE: Organize files into folders based on flename wildcard parsing
« Last post by 4wd on April 20, 2020, 04:44 AM »
https://github.com/Cinchoo/ChoEazyCopy
343
Living Room / Re: How can I find the link of an embedded video file?
« Last post by 4wd on April 13, 2020, 10:22 PM »
Unfortunately the creator has not enabled the download feature ...
-kalos (April 13, 2020, 08:18 AM)

Doesn't answer what I said.

... is there a third party solution?

Use Google, best you're going to get without giving us:
a) the URL;
b) the account details to access it so we can see what works.
344
Found Deals and Discounts / Re: VideoProc/Digiarty 3.5 - Free with option to get their new video editor free
« Last post by 4wd on April 02, 2020, 08:08 PM »
VideoProc 3.5 is available for free atm here.

Fill in the 6 question survey to the right and you'll also receive their new video editor for free when it's available.
345
General Software Discussion / Re: youtube downloader?
« Last post by 4wd on March 31, 2020, 04:33 AM »
I found this 'rotating galaxy' video,
4K Galaxy, Nebula Motion Background ,Milky Way, Free Video Background,
but it's rotating the wrong way (as countless comments point out). I searched duckduckgo on how to do it in avidemux; all I can find out is that -apparently- my later avidemux v.2.7.5 no longer has a 'reverse video' filter function/option, whereas earlier versions do.
-holt (March 30, 2020, 03:01 PM)

From StackExchange:

Code: Text [Select]
  1. ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf reverse reversed.mp4

Take note:
This filter buffers the entire clip. For larger files, segment the file, reverse each segment and then concat the reversed segments.

FYI

Or:
1) Download an earlier release of AVIDemux.
2) Openshot can do it.

Of course then the background is running in reverse.
346
Living Room / Re: What books are you reading?
« Last post by 4wd on March 30, 2020, 06:31 AM »
Simply search on the title and either borrow the book or add yourself to the wait list.
-MilesAhead (February 29, 2020, 10:34 AM)

Just a PSA about this:

The Open Library, (Archive.org), has removed the wait list for all books during the current pandemic.
347
Living Room / Re: How can I find the link of an embedded video file?
« Last post by 4wd on March 29, 2020, 08:48 PM »
Any hint?
-kalos (March 29, 2020, 08:20 AM)

Sure, it'll be streamed using HLS or MPEG-DASH protocol.

Ask the creator to enable offline download for mobile devices.
348
Living Room / Re: Share your tips and comforts for dealing with the stress and fear of a pandemic
« Last post by 4wd on March 29, 2020, 02:42 AM »
A lot of free virtual tours available if you're trapped in an elevator or something, the list is courtesy of OzBargain:

Free Virtual Tours / Live Cams of Popular Museums / Zoos Around the World

Which was courtesy of HUKD.

Do some virtual traveling.
349
General Software Discussion / Re: Dancing Ants
« Last post by 4wd on March 25, 2020, 07:01 AM »
Perhaps Masque Solitaire Antics:
https://www.old-game...que-solitaire-antics

FYI
350
DC Gamer Club / Just Cause 3, Far Cry 5, Far Cry 5: New Dawn discounts
« Last post by 4wd on March 24, 2020, 06:51 PM »
Three games that I own, have played, and think are very good:

[Steam] Just Cause 3 AU$3.44 - Very Positive Reviews
Just Cause 3 XXL Edition AU$5.84

The Mediterranean republic of Medici is suffering under the brutal control of General Di Ravello, a dictator with an insatiable appetite for power. Enter Rico Rodriguez, a man on a mission to destroy the General’s hold on power by any means necessary. With over 400 square miles of complete freedom from sky to seabed and a huge arsenal of weaponry, gadgets and vehicles, prepare to unleash chaos in the most creative and explosive ways you can imagine.

[GamersGate] Far Cry 5 AU$19.11 - Activates on UPlay, (you need to link your account)

Welcome to Hope County, Montana, land of the free and the brave but also home to a fanatical doomsday cult known as the Project at Eden’s Gate. Stand up to cult leader Joseph Seed, and his siblings, the Heralds, to spark the fires of resistance and liberate the besieged community.

[GamersGate] Far Cry 5: New Dawn AU$23.10 - Activates on UPlay, (you need to link your account)

Dive into a transformed vibrant post-apocalyptic Hope County, Montana, 17 years after a global nuclear catastrophe.
Join fellow survivors and lead the fight against the dangerous new threat the Highwaymen, and their ruthless leaders The Twins, as they seek to take over the last remaining resources.
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