Recent Posts

3451

General Software Discussion / Re: Custom webmail recommendations (to switch from gmail)

« Last post by 40hz on May 31, 2013, 12:14 PM »

Best bet IMO is to have somebody inexpensively host it for you under your own domain name.

Some, like Godaddy, will give you one free mailbox if you register the domain through them.  Basic POP3 e-mail host plans are also pretty cheap no matter who you go through. I'd suggest paying the small premium for an IMAP account. That way your folders will automatically be in sync among your devices if you still want to use an e-mail client. No need to futz with PSD and other message stores if you get a new machine either. And you're also backed up because your messages remain on the IMAP server.

If you already have a registered domain I'd strongly suggest springing for some small (5-20 mailbox) hosting plan. Prices are low, and there's some real bargains if you shop around.

If you're an Outlook fan who needs the full functionality, go with Microsoft's Exchange Online service. It runs about $5/mo per user with no contract. With that you get the full capabilities of Outlook, like shared calendars and contacts, invites, etc. It's a very good deal if you need all that. And you can pay it month to month so it's very affordable. 

 

3452

Living Room / Re: Recommend some music videos to me!

« Last post by 40hz on May 30, 2013, 10:56 PM »

Here's some basic kick-ass rock from Grace Potter and the Nocturnals.

3453

General Software Discussion / Re: Shift to Linux

« Last post by 40hz on May 30, 2013, 10:28 PM »

Also, while we're at it: Why exactly are Linsux users too dumb/lazy to spell "Windows" correctly? Can't Linux stand out without having superior operating systems bashed verbally?

-Tuxman (May 29, 2013, 03:27 AM)

Freudian slip, perhaps?

-skwire (May 30, 2013, 06:57 PM)

Methinks OS Envy.  

-Tinman57 (May 30, 2013, 07:57 PM)

No, just some VCIW snarkiness. Apparently it still annoys some BSD fans that they're using it - and nobody is impressed - or even cares that they do.

3454

Living Room / Re: Market Waiting For Windows Blue

« Last post by 40hz on May 30, 2013, 04:14 PM »

Microsoft is trying really hard to destroy itself. I have always developed software for Windows and this really bothers me, because if they go down, they probably take me with them.

-vlastimil (May 30, 2013, 04:29 AM)

They've already thrown many of their Partners under the bus with how they're positioning their cloud offerings. Especially partners who primarily handle SMB clients and do not offer custom programming or client application development. Microsoft's new message seems to be that if you're not a 'vertical' market provider who's heavily into modifying and/or customizing Microsoft products for your clients, Redmond no longer needs you.
 

3455

Living Room / Re: Recommend some music videos to me!

« Last post by 40hz on May 30, 2013, 02:51 PM »

Felicia Day immediately followed by Florence Welch?

What can I say other than: Go Gingers! 

 

3456

General Software Discussion / Re: Shift to Linux

« Last post by 40hz on May 30, 2013, 02:47 PM »

^One thing that tends to surprise most regular Linux users is how much their hands feel tied when they need to go back to Windows in order to do something. Like use a program you can't get to run under Linux. That, and just how inelegant and rigid the whole Windows environment starts to feel once you've experienced something else to compare it to.

I'm amazed how many people (especially the real "power-users") haven't gotten on board with Linux yet.

3457

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

« Last post by 40hz on May 30, 2013, 02:35 PM »

Watched Banlieue 13 the other night starring David Belle, one of the developers of Parkour^w.

-4wd (May 30, 2013, 01:22 AM)

That's a fun movie. Great performances by David Belle, Dany Verissimo-Petit (this waif can out punk Joan Jett!), and especially Dominique Dorol as arch-villian Taha. L

I especially loved the funny scene where Taha asks his henchmen if anybody has any ideas, and when none are forthcoming, begins shooting them one by one until a gang member by the name of K2 desperately comes up with a suggestion.
 

3458

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

« Last post by 40hz on May 30, 2013, 09:08 AM »

I'd give it a 4 on a scale of 10.

-40hz (May 30, 2013, 12:20 AM)

A bit too generous, I'd go for 3.  

-4wd (May 30, 2013, 01:22 AM)

You're probably right. I was originally going to opt to give it a 3. But I threw in an extra point because the cast made such an extraordinary effort to wring at least some drama out of so little a script. Something the female characters IMO did much better than the guys in this film.

(Oh yeah...and that The Shining/Twin Peaks influenced twist "ending" was totally bogus.  )
 

3459

Living Room / Re: No way out? SecureBoot's latest wrinkle for non-Windows users.

« Last post by 40hz on May 30, 2013, 08:51 AM »

Hm, "fast boot" being done deliberately to foil entering the firmware? That sounds a bit too tinfoil-hatty.

-f0dder (May 30, 2013, 07:32 AM)

I think this particular USB issue is probably more in the nature of an "unexpected benefit" rather than a deliberate design. At least at this point. But I still wouldn't put it past Microsoft. I've dealt with them since the days of DOS. And one thing I have learned is not to underestimate their aggressiveness or willingness to push the envelope of acceptable behaviour when it comes to selling software.

Of course, now that this has been pointed out, it will be interesting to see how fast (or if) they fix it. Passive-aggressive responses have served Microsoft almost as well as their all too frequent stonewalling has. My guess is they won't fix  or change their fastboot 'requirement' to accommodate any objections.

And why should they? This is a company that routinely thumbs its nose at national governments, regulatory agencies - and frequently ignores court judgements that go against it. Bill Gates used to openly state his goal for Microsoft was to be an absolute monopoly in which every computer on the planet was running Microsoft software. Eventually he learned that smart CEOs don't use the "M" word in public. But the fact he no longer said 'monopoly' didn't change the company's attitude or goal.

Tinfoil hat? No...I don't think so. Not if you've paid attention for around the last ten years to what’s been going down in the tech world.  And especially not when it comes to Microsoft.


 

3460

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

« Last post by 40hz on May 30, 2013, 12:20 AM »

Just finished watching a small budget quasi-horror flick called YellowBrickRoad.



It had an intriguing premise:

One Morning in New England, 1940, the entire population of Friar New Hampshire - 572 people - walked together up a winding mountain trail and into the wilderness. They left behind their clothes, their money, all of their essentials. Even their dogs were abandoned, tied to posts and left to starve. No One knows why. A search party dispatched by the U.S. Army eventually discovered the remains of nearly 300 of Friar's evacuees. Many had frozen to death. Others were cruelly and mysteriously slaughtered. The bodies of the remaining citizens are still unaccounted for. Over the years, a quiet cover-up operation managed to weave the story of Friar into the stuff of legends and backwoods fairy tales. The town has slowly repopulated, but the vast wilderness is mostly untracked, with the northern-most stretches off limits to local hunters and loggers. In 2008, the coordinates for the "YELLOWBRICKROAD" trail head were declassified. The first official expedition into a dark and twisted wilderness will attempt to solve the mystery of the lost citizens of Friar...and reach the end of the trail. Written by Andy Mitton and Jesse Holland

Unfortunately, it didn't live up to its potential. For openers, unless I had read the above synopsis, I wouldn't have been aware of half the details in it because the film glossed over most of them. Especially the military cover-up part which is almost completely absent except for an extremely brief allusion or two in the first 15 minutes of the film.

Some people have read some of H.P. Lovecraft's elements into the movie. Which was what got me interested initially. But as a Lovecraft fan, I can't really find many HPL influences in it other than the film's employment of a New England setting where weird and unexplainable things had occurred. Those who have compared it to some of Lovecraft's stories like The Dunwich Horror or The Colour Out of Space either never actually read them - or have a far better ability to see thematic influences (that aren't there) than I do.

A very so-so movie. Not really that bad - as long as you don't expect too much - and have an hour and forty-something minutes to kill like I did.

I'd give it a 4 on a scale of 10.

Next up will be The Corridor. Maybe tomorrow night.

3461

Living Room / Re: Recommend some music videos to me!

« Last post by 40hz on May 29, 2013, 08:45 PM »

Felicia Day and the cast of The Guild go Bollywood with the song Game On!

Awesome!

3462

Living Room / Re: No way out? SecureBoot's latest wrinkle for non-Windows users.

« Last post by 40hz on May 29, 2013, 08:38 PM »

And one of the biggest reasons why I'm going to Penguin-land.  I've had it with MS's BS.

-Tinman57 (May 29, 2013, 08:13 PM)

Which Microsoft has anticipated and is now trying to proactively make as difficult as possible going forward.
 

3463

Living Room / Re: Market Waiting For Windows Blue

« Last post by 40hz on May 29, 2013, 08:34 PM »

Sounds about right to me. If Microsoft doesn't believe it, I can introduce them to a few dozen clients who will tell them:

• You're making the same marketing and 'attitude' mistakes you made with Vista
• Stop trying to wall in the PC platform
• Stop trying to do an end run around our IT department
• Stop trying to bully us into accepting whatever you decide to give us rather than what we're asking for
• Bring back the old start button and desktop
• Ditch Metro - or whatever you're calling it
• And please understand "better" is not more productive if it requires massive retraining or changes in workflow on the part of our employees.

Attention Microsoft! Your business customers have spoken.

What part of "This is Bullshit!" don't you understand?
 

3464

General Software Discussion / Re: Unbelievable: USA Intellectual Property Theft Commission Recommends Malware!

« Last post by 40hz on May 29, 2013, 08:01 PM »

The only thing a move like that would accomplish is to start a full scale war of attrition on the Internet.

I hope they table this for the utterly stupid idea it is before killer bots, DNS poisoning, drive-by malware attacks and DDoS exchanges become the norm.

Cowboy style "justice" may appeal to our baser instincts. But anybody can assemble a posse. And the people who are asking for a blanket authorization of vigilante responses might want to consider that any number can play that game if you abandon good law and decent behaviour.

Besides, when it comes to the sort of technology (and creativity) needed for war game hacking, I think the court advantage is squarely with "the rest of us" rather than corporate security or IT departments.



So...shall we play a game?

3465

General Software Discussion / Re: Shell Extension City Freeware Website Comeback

« Last post by 40hz on May 29, 2013, 02:34 PM »

I'm ecstatic! SEC was one of my almost daily visits. Glad to see it's back.

3466

Living Room / Re: When you make your 100'th Post

« Last post by 40hz on May 29, 2013, 02:32 PM »

(see attachment in previous post)

Chris on form (as ever )

-tomos (May 28, 2013, 03:23 PM)

It's not the volume that's noteworthy, it's the sustained absence of meaningful content! 

-cranioscopical (May 29, 2013, 12:43 PM)

Well...to quote the I Ching : Persistence furthers. No blame.

3467

Site/Forum Features / Re: Some guidelines and rules about posting on the forum

« Last post by 40hz on May 29, 2013, 02:17 PM »

Is this a hard and fast rule mouser?

We really don't have hard and fast rules here.. everything is a bit squishy.

-mouser (May 29, 2013, 01:33 PM)

I prefer to think of it as "snuggley" myself. 

3468

Living Room / No way out? SecureBoot's latest wrinkle for non-Windows users.

« Last post by 40hz on May 29, 2013, 08:52 AM »

Matthew Garrett's blog recently posed an interesting new concern (emphasis added) regarding Secure Boot (Link here.):

Secure Boot isn't the only problem facing Linux on Windows 8 hardware
May. 28th, 2013 05:20 pm
mjg59

There's now no shortage of Linux distributions that support Secure Boot out of the box, so that's a mostly solved problem. But even if your distribution supports it entirely you still need to boot your install media in the first place.

Hardware initialisation is a slightly odd thing. There's no specification that describes the state ancillary hardware has to be in after firmware→OS handover, so the OS effectively has to reinitialise it again. This means that certain bits of hardware end up being initialised twice, and that's slow in some cases. The most obvious is probably USB, which has various timeouts as you wait for hardware to settle. Full USB support in the firmware probably adds a couple of seconds to boot time, and it's arguably wasted because the OS then has to do the same thing (but, thankfully, can at least do other things at the same time). So, looking for USB boot media takes time, and since the overwhelmingly common case is that users don't want to boot off USB, it's time that's almost always wasted.

One of the requirements for Windows 8 certified hardware is that it must complete firmware initialisation within a specific amount of time, something that Microsoft refer to as "Fast Boot". Meeting these requirements effectively makes it impossible to initialise USB, and it's likely that certain other things will also be skipped. If you've got a USB keyboard then this obviously means that your keyboard won't work until the OS starts, but even i8042 setup takes time and so some laptops with traditional PS/2-style keyboards may not set it up. That means the system will ignore the keyboard no matter how much you hammer it at boot, and the firmware will boot whichever OS it finds.

For a newly purchased device, that's going to be Windows 8. It's not too much of a problem with a fully installed Windows 8, since you can hold down shift while clicking the reboot icon and get a menu that lets you reboot into the firmware menu. Windows sets a flag in a UEFI variable and reboots the system, the firmware sees that flag and does full hardware initialisation and then drops you into the setup environment. It takes slightly longer to get into the firmware, but that's countered by the time you save every time you don't want to get into the firmware on boot.

So what's the problem? Well, the Windows 8 setup environment doesn't offer that reboot icon. Turn on a brand new Windows 8 system and you have two choices - agree to the Windows 8 license, or power the machine off. The only way to get into the firmware menu is to either agree to the Windows 8 license or to disassemble the machine enough that you can unplug the hard drive[1] and force the system to fall back to offering the boot menu.

I understand the commercial considerations that result in it ranging from being difficult to impossible to buy new hardware without Windows pre-installed, but up until now it was still straightforward to install an alternative OS without agreeing to the Windows license. Now, installing alternative operating systems on many new systems will require you to give up certain rights even if you want nothing other than to reach the system firmware menu.

I'm firmly of the opinion that there are benefits to Secure Boot. I'm also in favour of setups like Fast Boot. But I don't believe that anyone should be forced to agree to a EULA purely in order to be able to boot their own choice of OS on a system that they've already purchased.

[1] Which is a significant and probably warranty-voiding exercise on many systems, and that's assuming that it's not an SSD soldered to the motherboard…

Apparently this will also eliminate the right to request a refund for any unused and unwanted copies of Windows that come pre-installed on most PCs. Because the catch always used to be you couldn't agree to the EULA or start the setup if you were going to ask for a credit. You had to  install an alternate OS before you ever booted into Windows at all to qualify.

UEFI/Secure Boot apologists can rationalize this to their heart's content. This is still Microsoft we're talking about. Which means the nonsense is never going to stop until Redmond, like the petulant child it is, gets its own way.
 

3469

Living Room / Seriously Cool Dept: Raspberry Pi photos from 29 miles above the Earth

« Last post by 40hz on May 29, 2013, 07:43 AM »

This is just too cool.

From  the folks at Geek.com comes this:

The official camera attachment for everyone’s favorite $25 computer, the Raspberry Pi, released only a couple of weeks ago, but people are already using it in impressive ways. Rather than just make a cheap, DIY camera that sat in his basement, Dave Ackerman made a cheap, DIY camera and sent it far above Earth to snap photos of our planet.

In order to make the RasPi’s flight as smooth as possible, the rig had to be as light as it could be. Ackerman built a lightweight craft in which the Model A was contained, then attached it to a balloon and parachute.
.
.

Read the full Geek.com article here.

Another article over at the Digital Photography Review website has additional information and photos. Link here.

Hmm...all this from a $35 computer + a $25 5-megapixel camera module...

Maybe NASA might consider sending a few of these along next time it goes to Mars?  

Just don't let the military find out about it.  

Uh-oh!

3470

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

« Last post by 40hz on May 28, 2013, 03:14 PM »

I nominate Zaine to be the official full-time DonationCoder.com movie reviewer.

-mouser (May 28, 2013, 08:08 AM)

Seconded!

-barney (May 28, 2013, 12:06 PM)

Agree! I say: Do it.  

3471

General Software Discussion / Re: Shift to Linux

« Last post by 40hz on May 28, 2013, 11:48 AM »

Late, early, or in between - it doesn't matter much once you've arrived.  

Welcome to the penguin party fellow DoCo member Tosim. Always glad to greet another 'Nix' user!

3472

Living Room / Re: Google Buys A Quantum Computer

« Last post by 40hz on May 26, 2013, 12:00 PM »

Thank you.

-pilgrim (May 26, 2013, 08:35 AM)

My pleasure.

@40 - I know there's a link to this somewhere else on this site, I fell down that rabbit hole last time I saw it!

-x16wda (May 26, 2013, 08:12 AM)

Guilty as charged. See here.  

3473

Living Room / Re: Google Buys A Quantum Computer

« Last post by 40hz on May 26, 2013, 07:26 AM »

Hmm...imagine what could happen (if it works) the next time some nation in the EU goes after Google for "yet something else."

 

3474

General Software Discussion / Re: Customizing a second (or more!) computer

« Last post by 40hz on May 26, 2013, 07:14 AM »

If you do want to keep copies of your app's installers you'll probably want to have the most recent versions rather than what you  originally loaded. An update monitor/autodownloader called  Ketarin can help with that. It's occasionally buggy, and also isn't able to monitor everything, but it works pretty well for many things. Better than nothing at least. Find it here.

Ketarin is a small application which automatically updates setup packages. As opposed to other tools, Ketarin is not meant to keep your system up-to-date, but rather to maintain a compilation of all important setup packages which can then be burned to disc or put on a USB stick.

I'm also partial to Secunia PSI for checking on available updates for what's installed on my PCs. Find it here.

The Secunia Personal Software Inspector (PSI) is a free computer security solution that identifies vulnerabilities in non-Microsoft (third-party) programs which can leave your PC open to attacks. Simply put, it scans software on your system and identifies programs in need of security updates to safeguard your PC against cybercriminals. It then supplies your computer with the necessary software security updates to keep it safe. The Secunia PSI even automates the updates for your insecure programs, making it a lot easier for you to maintain a secure PC.

Even more important is to have backups of your drivers since they're usually the biggest hassle to hunt down and replace when redoing a machine. BooZet's Double Driver is a nice utility that will allow you to keep re-installable copies of all your drivers.

Any time I get a PC in for a full redo, I'll load this on the machine and grab all the drivers. Years ago I learned this the hard way after a spent a week hunting down a driver for a VIAO I reformatted. I was able to locate all the drivers save for one needed by the soundcard for its microphone input to work. (It wasn't a fun experience.) You can get Double Driver here.

One of the main reasons why you would want to collect installed drivers is if you don’t have the Driver CD that came with the computer or they are unavailable online. This comes in quite handy if you purchase a computer and want to backup the initial set of drivers. It can be quite difficulty for example to find drivers for hardware installed in a notebook if the operating system has to be setup again. Luckily Double Driver can now lend you a hand with that and save you a lot of time.

Double Driver is a very simple and useful tool which not only allows you to view all the drivers installed on your system but also allows you to backup, restore, save and print all chosen drivers.

Double Driver analyzes your system and lists the most important driver details such as version, date, provider, etc. All drivers that are found can easily be backed up the application and easily restored at a later point in one go.

  

3475

General Software Discussion / Re: Customizing a second (or more!) computer

« Last post by 40hz on May 25, 2013, 02:48 PM »

I suppose it would be a little too obvious to suggest keeping a list of your current favs and customizing notes someplace - like a notebook, text file, or database?   

I use Softvoile's Flashnote for this, and keep a file on each machine I use. Since it can be popped up with a hot key, it's great for impromptu jotting while still providing a standard dual-pane tree interface for whatever level of organization you feel you need to keep.