Recent Posts

3451

Living Room / Re: Proposed IP Treaty declared a 'National Security' Secret

« Last post by app103 on March 14, 2009, 04:38 PM »

More information:

http://press.ffii.or...ss_to_ACTA_documents

3452

N.A.N.Y. 2009 / Re: NANY 2009 Release: Trout (audio player)

« Last post by app103 on March 14, 2009, 04:20 PM »

Small feature request:

(optional) Clicking on the toaster popup will immediately get rid of it.

3453

General Software Discussion / Re: cannot play ripped music files

« Last post by app103 on March 12, 2009, 01:58 PM »

The problem is that the files are encrypted and your license files that you formatted away is your key for decrypting them. Without the key, nobody can decrypt them.

The theory that Microsoft had with this DRM was if they are your CD's and you rip them, if anything happens to the files that makes them unplayable you can rip them again, since you own the CD's. But you can't share those files with anyone else, so illegal file trading isn't possible.

I don't know of any way you can bypass the DRM in these files, unless you can actually play them. Every "DRM remover" and file converter that I know of requires the licenses to be installed on your PC and the files to be playable first. They are considered "fair use" converters, so you can play your files in other software and portable player devices that don't support Microsoft's DRM.

Even the "virtual CD writers" require the files to be playable. What they do is act as a phony CD burner drive, fooling WMP, allowing you to burn an image of an audio CD (saves you money by not having to burn on real CD media), which you can then rip to another format. But you can't burn them to any type of audio CD, real or fake, if they are locked and you don't have the key.

If you have lost your licenses, you are going to have to rip the CD's again (this time try a non-DRM format).

3454

N.A.N.Y. 2009 / Re: NANY 2009 Release: Trout (audio player)

« Last post by app103 on March 12, 2009, 05:11 AM »

That delete key has been a feature since the first version I tried and has always worked quite well here. You can even select multiple entries in a playlist and remove them.

Works on both my 9x machine & XP.

3455

N.A.N.Y. 2009 / Re: NANY 2009 Release: Trout (audio player)

« Last post by app103 on March 12, 2009, 05:05 AM »

Is it just me or can we not remove a song from the playlist with delete key? That would be a nice feature to add.

-mouser (March 12, 2009, 05:03 AM)

Delete key works here just fine.

3456

General Software Discussion / Re: Microsoft's Turn-off mode in IE8 not enough, says Opera.

« Last post by app103 on March 11, 2009, 08:32 PM »

I do agree that IE shouldn't be so deeply integrated into the OS, and it should be completely removable, but the idea of requiring Microsoft to get rid of it entirely is just crazy and not well thought out.

Considering what "IE" is, uprooting it is a bad idea. The libraries it offers are useful. Apart from that, I don't find IE (the browser part) to be very tightly integrated in the operating system, except for Windows Update. Sure, there's a few apps that launch IE instead of your primary browser, but that's not IE's fault. There's also apps that launch explorer.exe instead of the shell handler for Folder/Directory - FireFox, for instance.

-f0dder (March 11, 2009, 06:56 PM)

Here are some signs that point to the fact that it is:

Explorer:


And you can even load web pages in it, unless you have set some non-IE based browser as your default.

IE:


Then there is the nice IE integration with the desktop, too....complete with capabilities supplied by Adobe's flash plugin for IE.


Have you ever seen an IE javascript error message on your desktop after an Explorer crash, when clicking that button that is supposed to restore your desktop? I have, on many occasions.

Have you ever seen an alert from a firewall that the Windows Recycle Bin wants to connect to the internet, when trying to empty it, because of some rogue IE BHO "search helper" on the system? I have.

To me, these are all signs that IE is a bit too deeply rooted in the OS.

3457

Living Room / Re: Facebook: How to Friend Someone Without Showing Your Status Updates

« Last post by app103 on March 11, 2009, 07:07 PM »

That said, I do have people from my work added, including a couple of superiors. Fortunately, it's a workplace where you can wear tshirt-hell t-shirts ("...as a kite" and "swallow or it's going in your eye") without people blinking, so being tagged moronically drunktarded isn't a problem

-f0dder (March 11, 2009, 07:03 PM)

3458

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Free Zinio eMagazine for 1 year

« Last post by app103 on March 11, 2009, 05:50 PM »

Keep in mind that they do allow you to read your magazines online, on their site, without having to install any software. So you can read them without it, now.

3459

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Free Zinio eMagazine for 1 year

« Last post by app103 on March 11, 2009, 05:41 PM »

Be warned that Zinio's desktop reader software is built on Adobe Reader (It's Adobe Reader on steroids) and could very well cause your PC to be vulnerable to a recently discovered exploit.

If you are going to take advantage of this offer, use the web interface to read your magazines and don't download & install the software, at least till Adobe straightens out their issues and Zinio posts an update.

3460

General Software Discussion / Re: Microsoft's Turn-off mode in IE8 not enough, says Opera.

« Last post by app103 on March 11, 2009, 01:16 PM »

You know, for years people have complained about Microsoft including IE with Windows, wanting them to stop.

But they fail to consider this:

If Microsoft didn't include a browser with their OS, then what would you use to visit a site and download your browser of choice?

How do you visit a site and download Chrome, Firefox, K-Meleon, Opera, Safari, or any other browser if you don't have a browser to begin with?

I do agree that IE shouldn't be so deeply integrated into the OS, and it should be completely removable, but the idea of requiring Microsoft to get rid of it entirely is just crazy and not well thought out.

What would be the alternative to Microsoft including IE? Would it be better to include a bundle of every browser in creation for the user to choose from? How would this be any different than a bloated OEM crapware bundle? And you just know if they did that, that some browser developer somewhere would cry foul because his wasn't included in the bundle. Before you know it, you'll need an extra 8G of space just for the browser bundle or Microsoft will have to toss in another 2 DVD disks with the setup files for all of them.

And why target Microsoft and nobody else? Does Apple's OSX come with a browser? Who made that browser? How is it really any different? Why doesn't anyone cry about Apple doing it, like they cry about Microsoft?

I haven't had a single malware issue that wasn't due to a user just clicking "install". That is not IE's fault. IE provides a mechanism which provides great functionality. What we really need, rather than removing IE from Windows, is to educate the userbase so they know better. That is what I do and 9 times out of 10, I never have the same user back for the same problem.

-Josh (March 10, 2009, 05:29 PM)

Since the release of IE6 SP2, I have not seen a single issue with drive-by malware installs that was the fault of IE. Just like you, the issues I have seen were the results of the user clicking install.

In the case of the drive-by installs I have seen, they were the fault of another company's software, mostly Flash and Java, which are not exclusive to IE, nor are they Microsoft's products.

Or they were IE based browsers like AOL, or the one that was once included with Ares Galaxy, or an IE based RSS reader, none of which included the extra safeguards built into the Microsoft supplied IE user interface. Again, not the fault of Microsoft if another developer gets lazy and skimps or takes shortcuts on their own product.

One of the nastiest pieces of malware I have had to remove was Winfixer/Virtumundo, which gets on a system by exploiting a vulnerability in an older version of Sun's JRE. The problem is that Sun doesn't uninstall the old vulnerable versions when you upgrade your JRE. They leave them on your system to be exploited. So just because you have everything up to date, you can still be a sitting duck to the drive-by malware attacks that the older stuff is vulnerable to.

And most people don't know this and don't know they have to remove the older JRE versions. I sure didn't before I got hit with the first attack (for the record, the browser used was Firefox). I thought the newer versions of JRE that I was installing required the older ones to stay on my machine. I thought they were installed as patches on top of the older version, like some other software I have does. I thought the extra entries in add/remove programs was so I could roll back if I had any problems with the newer version. I never for one moment thought that Sun was doing something so stupid as leaving multiple exploitable individual versions on my machine.

And I am sure most users are as oblivious to that issue as I was. And you don't have to be a stupid newbie to think that. I know plenty of experienced knowledgeable power users that don't know.

And this is not the fault of Microsoft, and not related to IE.

3461

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Xchat script for tircd (Twitter)

« Last post by app103 on March 10, 2009, 10:15 PM »

Just to tell you how it all worked out...

Finished my "simple script" and restarted xchat.

Got about halfway through the list and tircd crashed. (was a lot of commands to group over 300 people by their interests)

Restarted the server and it worked beautifully, though.

But I may end up running a second copy of xchat as a dedicated twitter client.

I am thinking about writing a full tutorial on how to set it all up.

Many thanks for your help. 

3462

Finished Programs / Re: IDEA: Shell extension to show total play time of media clips

« Last post by app103 on March 10, 2009, 08:08 PM »

Hi SKWire,

What in the world is "Trout" program in your Sig all about!?!?  What does it do?

Thanks!

G!:)

-gonwk (March 10, 2009, 08:04 PM)

Best darn audio player ever!   

https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=16157.0

3463

General Software Discussion / Re: Acrobat bug can lead to malware installs without even opening an infected file

« Last post by app103 on March 10, 2009, 10:37 AM »

I just wanted to make people aware that this is not a "Windows only" issue, nor is it an "Adobe Reader only" issue.

3464

General Software Discussion / Re: Acrobat bug can lead to malware installs without even opening an infected file

« Last post by app103 on March 10, 2009, 10:21 AM »

There is a reason Apple has made their software installable on only a limited amount of hardware. If apple had the same amount of hardware to support, they would have the same issues. The issue is not microsoft product centric, it just falls that way because A. Apple controls very tightly what hardware their products will install on without hacking, B. Linux is not supported by many major manufacturers minus the server side because it, in all reality, is not a feasible product for enterprise-wide deployment on a desktop scale, and C. Microsoft, like it or not, is the largest software company in the world and it's products are capable of supporting an infinite number of platform configurations. Microsoft has catered to what it's users want which is an OS which can install on any platform and perform a variety of tasks out of the box. Many of the problems we are seeing in many of these products relate to features which are either new, or very often not utilized as often as people proclaim.

-Josh (March 09, 2009, 09:25 PM)

Looks like OSX, iPhone, and possibly *nix may be vulnerable to this too.

http://isc.sans.org/...ry.html?storyid=5932

3465

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Xchat script for tircd (Twitter)

« Last post by app103 on March 09, 2009, 07:48 PM »

That will work great!

Really, thank you so much.

I had no idea you could do that.

3466

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Xchat script for tircd (Twitter)

« Last post by app103 on March 09, 2009, 06:05 PM »

You can tell xchat which channels to join: Press Ctrl+S to open the server list, there click on "Add" and a "New Network" will be added to the list. Change its name to something more appropriate, like "twitter", and click on "Edit". Here you specify the server for this network, it is probably "localhost" (if the port differs from 6667 append it to the hostname with a slash: "localhost/8889")

Now there is a bunch of checkboxes, of which the one about automatically might be the most interesting. Below that, we see a list of text boxes, one is named "Favorite Channels". This is where you keep your list of channels you want to join. However, I recommend using the helper dialog that pops up when you click a third button, the one with the "..." right of the text box.

And without scripting we can go only this far.

-housetier (March 09, 2009, 05:58 PM)

I know I could do that, but I am not sure how many search & grouping channels I may want to create. It could be a lot. I don't want to have issues with overloading that little box.

If the list of people and channels does not change often, you could use something I call "simple scripts" which are a list of xchat commands that are executed by xchat. But if you want more comfort and features, we need a real script...

-housetier (March 09, 2009, 05:58 PM)

Can you tell me more about what you mean by "simple scripts"?

3467

General Software Discussion / Re: Acrobat bug can lead to malware installs without even opening an infected file

« Last post by app103 on March 09, 2009, 02:43 PM »

If you are going to use Firefox integration for any PDF reader, please consider installing PDF Download to give you a dialog asking what you want to do, when you hit a PDF.

It will stop unexpected (and sometimes undesirable) surprises, by giving you an option to open in browser, externally, save to your hard drive, or view as html.


^{Bonus: it also allows you to convert pages to PDF, preserving links.}

3468

The Getting Organized Experiment of 2006 / Re: Time Management Video

« Last post by app103 on March 08, 2009, 11:02 PM »

I only posted this because I thought others might be interested in it. I don't even remember what it covered (and since I have sworn off paying attention to other people's time management advice, I am not about to watch it again)

3469

Post New Requests Here / IDEA: Xchat script for tircd (Twitter)

« Last post by app103 on March 08, 2009, 09:21 PM »

I am running tircd (an ircd proxy for the twitter API) so I can use xchat as my twitter client.

tircd allows me to group people that I follow, by creating a new channel (just /join), and then just /invite who I want in it.

It also allows me to perform searches by /join #whatever followed by /topic [searchterm]
or /join #hashtag  followed by /topic #hashtag #hashtag

I need an xchat script that will automate all of this for me and

• autojoin a specified list of channels on my tircd
• change the topics on those channels (each will be different)
• invite a specified list of users to some of those channels.

Something like this:

/join #example1
/topic example1

/join #example2
/topic #example2 #example2

/join #example3
/invite person1 person2 person3

This has to work only with the tircd and not interfere with any real irc networks & channels I may also be connected to.

This can be in either perl or ruby, because my python plugin doesn't work with the version of python that I have installed on my machine. (it's for 2.4 and I have 2.6) And I am not sure why I can't get tcl to work.

I also need another script that will automatically convert any & all links I post on just the tircd channels to tinyurl links. I do not want to have to use a /tinyurl command. It must work on links that appear anywhere in a message I post. It also must not affect any other channels on any other network. I don't want to automatically send tinyurl links everywhere, just to twitter.

I don't know the first thing about xchat scripting, nor do I know perl or ruby...otherwise I would try to do this myself.

3470

General Software Discussion / Re: Making my life difficult - Windows 98 - advice needed

« Last post by app103 on March 07, 2009, 08:49 AM »

64meg would be a bit on the low end for Win2k... but if you could get a RAM stick for cheap, it would very likely be a much better choice than keeping a win98 machine together with duct tape

-f0dder (March 07, 2009, 08:23 AM)

A stick? Most old PC's require them in pairs. And on many, in order to make an increase that would make a difference, you'd have to replace, not add, and possibly all 4 of them...being careful not to exceed the maximum allowed per slot.

And hope that it isn't one of those machines that requires proprietary ram, like some old NEC machines do. If it is, it could end up costing you about $400 to go from (4)16mb to (4)32mb. The price of ram for those machines has gone up over the years and getting much harder to find.

3471

General Software Discussion / Re: Making my life difficult - Windows 98 - advice needed

« Last post by app103 on March 07, 2009, 07:40 AM »

I would reccommend webmail for an outdated OS in which one can't update IE to the latest version. Otherwise you are going to expose her to all the unpatched vulnerabilities in Outlook Express or something else that relies on IE.

If you are going to set her up with GMail, you might want to create a shortcut on her K-Meleon toolbar to point here: https://mail.google....il/?ui=html&zy=a

That's the HTML version suitable for slow PC's and dialup. It's what I use on my 9x machine of similar specs. The standard GMail doesn't work well on an old PC like that one.

An additional button on the toolbar that you might want to add is a bookmarklet to take her to the Google Mobile version of whatever page she is visiting. This is handy for sites that are too heavily scripted to load on slow PC's. This was a huge frustration saver for me.

[Select]

javascript:location.href='http://www.google.com/gwt/n?_gwt_pg=0&u='+document.location.href;

Antivirus: Avast (background scanning) AND BitDefender Free (this is for on demand scanning, right click file in explorer and scan it before opening it)
Firewall: Zone Alarm 3.7 (just a firewall, and nothing more, effective, stable, easy to use, & suitable for an old pc)
Anti-spyware: Spybot Search & Destroy (make sure you run it & vaccinate that PC!)

PDF reader: I would stay away from Adobe for security reasons, and because it isn't very light. Older versions of Sumatra are pretty crappy and latest version doesn't support 9x.

I'd either go with Foxit 2.1 (lighter) or 2.3 (might be a bit too heavy). (Avoid v2.2. It has a bug that doesn't allow copying text on 9x)

Photo Editing: (yes, she will want this)

Some older scanners came with Adobe Photo Deluxe, which worked quite well on 9x as long as it wasn't v2.5 + MS Office 97, 2k, or XP. If you have any plans on ever putting Office on that machine, go for a newer version of Photo Deluxe. (doesn't have issues with MS Works, as far as I know)

Some other older scanners came with a free copy of Corel Print House. That wasn't so bad for a beginner, either.

And then there was the ones that came with MGI Photosuite.

All of these are better than MS Paint, and lighter than anything you will find available today. Check around for anyone that might still have a disk for one of these from an old scanner that they might be willing to donate to this project of yours.

And no matter what else you install for images, make sure you give her a copy of Irfanview, too.

IM Client: Miranda Set it up to be able to work with Yahoo, AIM, and MSN. Those are the 3 services she will be most likely to want or need.

Make sure you also install Quicktime Alternative and Real Player Alternative.

Some very lightweight sticky notes to remind her to do whatever it is she needs reminding of. (the older we get, the more reminding we need)

And when you are all finished, give her few small lightweight free games to play while she is waiting for pages to load. All 4 listed on that page work well on 9x, and the Uno game is one of the best free implementations of the classic card game that I have come across.

3472

General Software Discussion / Re: Making my life difficult - Windows 98 - advice needed

« Last post by app103 on March 06, 2009, 03:42 PM »

Here is another site you may be interested in, if you don't already know about it: http://www.mdgx.com

He has a lot of system tweaks, bug fixes, and security patches for Win98, some to fix more recent things that Microsoft won't because they dropped support. Some of those unofficial patches would be essential for survival, so make sure you take a look.

3473

General Software Discussion / Re: Making my life difficult - Windows 98 - advice needed

« Last post by app103 on March 06, 2009, 03:23 PM »

you can get V2 of the service pack here: http://majorgeeks.com/download4131.html

3474

General Software Discussion / Re: Making my life difficult - Windows 98 - advice needed

« Last post by app103 on March 06, 2009, 12:49 PM »

K-Meleon would be the best choice on 9x. Anything else is outdated or inferior.

As far as getting the updates, there is an unofficial service pack that should have everything from MS in it, and then some, available on this forum...along with any and all info you would need about software for running Win98 in the modern world.

http://www.msfn.org/...ndex.php?showforum=8

See the sticky posts in that section for all the info you need.

Oops, forgot the other link with the rest of the goodies that you will most likely be amazed by:

http://www.msfn.org/...dex.php?showforum=91

3475

General Software Discussion / Re: Another Curve-ball For You Guys!

« Last post by app103 on March 06, 2009, 11:50 AM »

But if you would like to give it a try, it's called Home Library

So is it worth creating an account to get the app?

-siouxdax (March 06, 2009, 10:36 AM)

If it's anything like the application that I fell in love with (and the developer of Home Library did too) I would say yes.