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351

Living Room / Re: Getting Things Done revisited

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 16, 2015, 02:58 AM »

Revisiting the revisitation, eh?

-tomos (July 16, 2015, 02:44 AM)

We're supposed to! That's the whole point!

If we think a bit, most calendars have a "square" for that day, which I am calling a grid-box. That is why I could never use regular calendars! The boxes were both too small and "amorphous" so at least for me it ended up with either text drifting off a straight line or a "stupid scribble" of three words.

These are called Desk Calendars, but unlike the "empty blank square", the daily boxes are line-ruled like a 4x4 sticky (unlike the 3x3 which is blank - same problem!).

So not only do 3-word scribbles look truly hideous, but then for me, stuff always has "pieces and followups and details". So my big calendar, about 25" by 18", each "day" box has six lines. But "day" is in quotes, because the whole point is you can take a pen and cross off the days, and then you're left with basically a paper spreadsheet.

And it's a case where by "intrinsically forced" into the whole sheet and not crappy stickies, it forces me to really go to another level in the note taking in "stage 2". (Because what I have right now is the 3 related stickies from different days stacked onto each other in an awful mini-pile.)

And then at the end of varying chunks of time, you have automatically archived notes too, rather than trying to figure out what to do with the important stickies.

352

Living Room / Re: Getting Things Done revisited

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 16, 2015, 02:46 AM »

My version might be at least half the system and I definitely agree with the spirit of it all.

One of my main changes is that the "collection / inbox" in mine more fluid. (If I do it right and learn one quick reflex), when a piece of "stuff" comes in, if it's either a silly/short-term note or a short term to-do, it can live as a sticky for a while rather than a single inbox.

Then in the review stages (which will oscillate between every few days and maybe a couple weeks), it's something like a split for the 2nd stage processing/logging.

If it looks like it's gonna be contained as about 4 related info items, I can decide to make it one of the grid columns. The other split is if it feels different and especially if it looks way bigger, it might either become a printer-paper 2nd edition to go into a folder, or else become something for my big computer note taking system.

Conceptually I  think the difference in mine is that for my style, I have a lot of short term stuff, and then when I whack at them for To-Do or else the note becomes "bad", then I just throw out the sticky, and then the passage of time perspective makes it easier to make the grid topics much more long term useful.

353

Living Room / Meta-Joke - We blew it on the "Review Later" step! : )

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 16, 2015, 01:37 AM »

Arise, NecroThread ...

(What DOES Cthulhu's Action List look like?
"11am. Devour soul. 12 noon. Support a politician hehe.)

uh ...

"And now for your monthly meta-humor..."

It's been a weird chunk of time for me, and surprisingly for me, the start of this thread heralds better days I plan to get back to!

The early comments have some nice discussions about whether you have to be quite as brutally detailed, or if sometimes a little flex is more.

But this whole theme just crossed my mind again! And then look at the time passing!

Coincidences to note:

- Anyone else's life changed dramatically in a year and a half?
- Mouser is now beginning his long-pondered overhaul of DC!

As a nod to a later book David Allen did, he talks about "Altitudes of Vision". Mouser is in one of the higher ones this month ...

Uh oh... Hehe - We just got a Task Item: "Making It All Work" and ask him whether the 30k feet, 40k feet up, or 50k feet up descriptions in the book feel like the mood he is in this month!)


Meanwhile down at the "when you're exhausted, just do something that takes about thirteen seconds to do" level, I just realized a colossal Homer D'oh moment:

Problem: The usual scattered stickies of the first part of my three part system. The problem was, the second part was missing. So they just sit there. Near mistake - making the 99-cent version of the second stage on printer paper ... and realized ...

"You Twerp! You already had this part planned. It's those Staples grid calendars, *and* you even bought a couple to use as the *calendar* half of the system (with two choices to play with to avoid the "bah I hate my first choice so I quit effect!). But you never saw that, because you they got jammed under your files and became Inefficient. (Said in 7-of-9's voice from Star Trek Voyager!)."

So then my big wall clock broke (a little) so I moved it for a while ... and BOOM! They are heavy enough to stand up against the wall of my main desk.

Exhausted-Task time: 13 seconds.
Saved disastrously Inefficient time: ... cumulatively, weeks!?

The original inspiration - On the big one, the boxes are very close to a 4x4 sticky. That you can't lose! (Or get crushed at level 2 when you need any more than four pieces of info.)

But the "Trick" behind it is ...You can go Vertically / Horozontally / (pick one, not both), like a mini spreadsheet, to group the small categories together.

And for those Projects, you use an entire whole page, now giving you some 4-7 subcategories, then you make your detail notes in the column or row.

My best results are definitely mid-way. I don't plan on doing his full power system to the letter. But for a long time my desk has been in a state of "Make sticky note. Make another note, stacked on top of the first one, canted at odd angles so you can almost tell which note is which."


So stay tuned for a few updates!

354

Living Room / Re: Patch your Flash! Version 18.0.0.203 (July 08, 2015)

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 12, 2015, 12:01 AM »

The prob shows up when people "wish X company's entire main revenue model goes away".

355

Finished Programs / Re: DONE: Faster boots combining hibernate and restart (Boot Snooze)

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 11, 2015, 04:08 PM »

boot snooze featured today on ILoveFreeSoftware:
http://www.ilovefree...nate-time-delay.html

-mouser (July 11, 2015, 01:34 PM)

Four years later?!

356

Living Room / Re: Patch your Flash! Version 18.0.0.203 (July 08, 2015)

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 11, 2015, 04:07 PM »

Or if you don't want to abide by Adobe's goofy insistence on trying to bundle McAfee software and want to be able to install Adobe Flash while not connected to the internet, go here:

https://www.adobe.co...r/distribution3.html

-Innuendo (July 11, 2015, 02:54 PM)

This kind of thing bothers me!



Even on your version of the page, you have to unclick "intall McAfee now". To my mind we're sorta stuck with Flash. McAfee provides no added value of any kind, except to Adobe's "partnership account".

(And why McAfee? Don't revenue-sharing guys just go for the top player? Isn't that how Facebook became essentially the "only social network"?)

357

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 11, 2015, 10:27 AM »

Gives whole new meanings to the meme of "think of the children!"

(Paraphrase of some job inteview)
"Did you ever get any misdemeanors or tickets?
"Yes. I got a parking ticket."
"How old were you?"
"I was three."
(Inteerviewer:  ??!)

358

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox and Cyberfox release 39.0 stable

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 10, 2015, 12:34 PM »

So ignoring their "info collection policies", taken straight up "innocently", Google somehow just goes all Pac-Man in biz markets.

"Oh look. Apple re-invented the phone with the iPhone. But there's room for exactly two players in that market. So we'll go become the second one."

"Hmm. People seem to like these "browser" thingies. So we'll go make our own one of those too, and beat out the other *four* existing companies with combined thirty years of experience... yeah, three years should be enough to go do that."

So rather than something as focused as MS's pulverization of Nokia, Firefox seems to be "tricking themselves" into "Let's copy Chrome!" It's a bit like hypnosis. Nowhere else in computing do you produce these huge whole-number versions. But ... Chrome did it, so let's go! Rapid updating is fine. "Version 5.37 adds experimental chat support". Yay. Not "Version 39" (??!!)

359

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox and Cyberfox release 39.0 stable

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 10, 2015, 12:25 PM »

Hmm, there's something a bit "flat" about your "4-step process" that bothers me for feeling incomplete. I feel part of the problem is that portions of the whole effect are actually "innocent", with only malicious later stage opportunistic players "poking" at it.

We're getting to a point where we can't easily "generalize" these scenarios, because they're too tied to specific companies.

So if we're talking about the Decline and Fall of Firefox, somewhere in there is this big Microsoft Internet Explorer meta-game. So Firefox started off as this big "We're SO not IE."

But even in my modest tech understanding, browsers felt like "a thing" that you can try out, or not, at basically your leisure. I think MS has actually made scads of bad business decisions, but their early brilliantly subversive strategy cemented the OS land into a Meta-Game around Windows. To me it's one of the top meta-games in all of computing. Whereas for a browser, "oh look, let's try a new one!"

The company that keeps scaring me (in a tech-amazement sense) is Google.

More in the next post.

360

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for Software with this feature

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 08, 2015, 04:52 PM »

IainB, you aren't the first one on this thread to not understand why file size is an issue for me.   I will explain my reason.  I have several thousands of guitar pro tab files that I've downloaded and some I've created myself.  They are tiny files less than 100kb each.   The total size of all the files is something like about 5 or 6 gb Many of them are duplicated in different folders.  I've already spent a few weeks and many, many hours on organizing them and trying different programs.   The reason why I move and replace if the file is same size is that in my opinion it highly unlikely that two files with same name and size have different content, although it's possible.  I want to organize them accurately, but I don't have the time, so I'm willing to take chances on losing some of them in the events that two or more files of the same size and name have different content.   If I created an ordinary text file at one point and gave the file a name, then a few years later created a text file and just happend to give it the exact same name, creating a duplicate but in a different folder.   The two files would most likely have different sizes but not necessarily, but their content is obviously very different.  In this case, I wouldn't want to just overwrite one of the files with the other because the odds of the two having different content is too high for my liking.  With the guitar pro files, a file name includes the name of the band and the name of the song.  In my opinion, with two guitar pro tab files with same size and same name will have the same content.   It's possible that someone might have edited the file slightly so that it still has the same size.   There might be an important difference in the content, but I'm willing to take the chance because of time.   If I were to remove all of the duplicates, the total size of all the files might be reduced to about 1gb.  One option I have with windows is I could just move all of the files and keep all files with same name by automatically renaming them.  This might not be so bad an idea.  The total size wouldn't get reduced to about 1gb and would remain the same size (5 or 6gb) and nothing would be lost.   But still, it would be nice to have a program that would give some options that I want and the ability to automate it for a hands free operation.  For me, if it took a week to do the operation automatically without me even being there, that's not a problem because finally I'd be free to work on some of the many other things I have to work on.  I hope you'll be able to understand my need for comparing file size now.  If not, then maybe it's me who's missing something?

-ednja (July 08, 2015, 02:13 PM)

Ednja, I'm starting to think sideways (and I'll let my betters fill in details!). But it's sounding like it's "just your music files" and not some dangerous regulatory compliance environment etc.

So maybe you're in the mood/market for something "ugly and fast"? Aka with "small" risks to your data, you value your own time and just want "most of an answer"?

Just as a thought experiment, try daydreaming about this for a few minutes:

1. What are the "limiting factors"? What if disk drive space isn't one? You could afford to have a process with a couple of "clunky" middle parts that isn't aesthetic at all, but if it's fast and the final output is pretty good, why not?

2. (Paraphrased) "Occasionally I'll have files with the same name but dramatically different content". This is more common than your post might suggest - people can call 8 files "test1"! (Or whatever).

3. So you make something like a 4 stage folder system.
Folder 0 is your original that you have to be kinda careful on.
Folder 1 is your first "processing folder". Your first step is "copy and force auto rename on any name duplicates". So two copies of "test1" become "test1" and "test1 ver2" or something. So folder 1 is guaranteed to have no name match hits.

4. Run (prob a diff program?) on Folder 1 to force the suspicious files to the end. A trick I used (manually) is you stick a Z in front of the file name with "threatened duplicates" then resort the file alphabetically (often just four clicks in a window). So then all the files without Z's are "clean files" and you just copy them over into Folder 2 En Masse and they should be fine. Then you copy over the "Z files" knowing you messed up the names on them and one day when you have the energy you can listen to them and give them better legit names, and then they go into Folder 2 with "legit names" rather than "Idea1" etc.

5. Your choice of other things to do with Folder 2, and whatever makes it into Folder 3 is your curated clean file list!

361

Post New Requests Here / Re: FolderUpdater

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 08, 2015, 04:25 PM »

Hi

Not sure I understand the requirement entirely, can you explain again or give some sameples as to what you will change, where, and what you would want to happen to which files where, after that change?

J.

-awopbamboo (May 27, 2015, 05:16 AM)

Just echoing (off topic) glad to see a relatively quiet member Awopamboo chiming in!

 

362

Living Room / Re: reverse smilie (:

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 08, 2015, 04:16 PM »

so when not remembering the right order, granny and me now have a fifty percent chance of ending up being cool and all modern?!

-Curt (July 08, 2015, 04:05 PM)

Heh, maybe a thread about typographic shortcuts is the place to put this!

I now talk/write in "chess annotation". Double punctuation will never be the same again!

?! roughly means "pessimistic"
!? roughly means "hopeful and interesting"

So you're pessimistic about being all cool and hip by accident?!
Awww.
(Always put exactly three W's and a period in Awww. That way a very few chat programs/modules wonder if it's a weblink in the making and highlight it differently!)

363

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 07, 2015, 04:30 PM »

Lord Byron is considered one of the greatest English poets ever. Normally, words such as "badass"
don't belong in the same sentence as "poet" - something Byron was keen to change.
...
When he went to college, he tried to take his pet dog with him. Cambridge Trinity College was having none of it
and stuck to their strict "no dogs allowed" policy, seemingly unaware that they were currently talking to Lord Fucking Byron.

After being told no. Byron pleaded with the college to make an exception, but they wouldn't budge.
Seeing an opportunity to display the subtle dignity of the poetic soul, Byron went out and purchased
a bear, then brought it to Cambridge.

It didn't take long for college officials to notice the abnormally large portion of the student body
running in the same direction while screaming . "AAAAAHHHHH BEAR!" When they confronted him
about the fact that he was essentially wagging his dick at them in front of everyone, Byron simply
asked them to show him where in the rules it said that he couldn't have a bear. Amazingly, there
wasn't a specific rule against it. Even more amazingly, Cambridge apparently operated on sitcom
logic at the time, and officials decided they had no choice but to allow the bear to stay. Presumably
they knew that if they did manage to evict the bear, Byron would have simply arrived to campus the
next day riding a sled pulled by tigers.

-Arizona Hot (July 07, 2015, 02:44 PM)

 

364

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 Announced

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 06, 2015, 09:48 PM »

Some quick links:
http://betanews.com/...date-is-build-10176/

https://buildfeed.net/build/5440

http://www.theverge....osoft-windows-10-rtm

365

Living Room / Re: The Movie and Book Writing Thread

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 06, 2015, 09:30 PM »

I broadly agree on the problems of redundancy, but it might be a little different about visual ones such as "black colored shirt", because sometimes that can give a listener a useful added second to process the visual cue.

I also wonder how you can completely remove "suddenly" if that's an aspect of the story. You're reading this post, when











BOO!!!!! I PUT A SPELL ON YOU! AND NOW YOU'RE MINE!!

Suddenly Bette Midler appears!

366

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox and Cyberfox release 39.0 stable

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 06, 2015, 08:00 PM »

Meaty rant there, Iain.

I'll poke around the edges.

1. Even if you take the "anarchy" element out of it, you could restate the case in "dry business terms" as simple as the age old "provide a better cleaner alternative to something, with more options and user experience to boot". Then you can use the second vocabulary of the biz books as your choice if you didn't care for the "revolutionary" language.

But now they're scrambling their original "biz message". Who exactly among users *favors* these machine gun updates? "While you were typing this we produced a new update, so that the version you started with is out of date before you are done!"

2. In between things being made directly illegal, is another layer of "corporation games". These include MS's sinking of Nokia via Stephen Elop, the ousting via outing at Firefox, buying up the niche players and then purposely shuttering them while swiping a useful piece of tech knowhow.

3. For all the hollering about "Ed Snowden" and Julian Assange, we have surprisingly few "tell all" sources on our side with nothing to lose who can just bust open a few of these secret agendas. So exactly who benefits in each of four time era periods with the mess going on with signed extensions is far from clear, and there's lots of fun house mirrors obscuring it all, leaving "poor tech board users" (us, and your choice of twelve other boards) to thrash out theories with no definitive tie-breaking intel.

(Aka for all the govt's luv of spying, notice we don't have very many?)

367

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 Announced

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 04, 2015, 04:41 PM »

I've always been a Day One (or before) adopter of Microsoft OSes and historically speaking, their RTM releases are rock solid out of the box.

-Innuendo (July 04, 2015, 10:01 AM)

Perhaps the difference on Vista is due to the fact I bought HP "Media Center" towers.  The HD was totally hogged by Windows Media Player running mobsync.exe to test if every file in the system was a media file.  Also if you installed from retail media I am sure you were better off than buying a machine preloaded.  Between Norton AV and mobsync trying to take over the machine it was totally useless out of the box.  Later I got another tower running Vista x64 SP1 and it was fine.

Just for grins I compared the state of the system services of the SP1 machine to the system without a service pack after I was done tweaking.  All the settings were exactly the same except 2.  They fixed the usability quotiont quite a bit with the SP.

-MilesAhead (July 04, 2015, 01:07 PM)

Could ProcessTamer have worked there?
Then you can have some cpu cycles left to fix it with?

368

Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 04, 2015, 04:40 PM »

N.C. company rolls out new Bubble Wrap that won't pop

-Arizona Hot (July 03, 2015, 04:52 AM)

-TaoPhoenix (July 03, 2015, 01:54 PM)

WHAT!!! Bubble Wrap without Bubbles?!? Travesty! Heresy! Sacrilege - Burn the Witch!!! ... Society is doomed!

-Stoic Joker (July 04, 2015, 08:58 AM)

They're using the letter i in front.

Maybe they're just trolling to be bought out by Apple as iPhone packaging!

369

General Software Discussion / Re: Any ideas for an entry-level "how to use a mouse" tutorial?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 04, 2015, 04:38 PM »

This is really low-tek, but what if you start her off with just a simple graphics program where she can move the mouse around and draw lines and stuff?

That's half of what the mouse is, you move the "thingie" and the "screen other thingie" moves around.

370

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for Software with this feature

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 03, 2015, 09:03 PM »

Oh, good catch about corrupted data Iain, and I see now the themes. So checksum is fine I suppose.

371

Living Room / Re: reverse smilie (:

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 03, 2015, 07:37 PM »

And I'm finding a lot of web sites & apps that automatically transform the colon + right parenthesis into a yellow emoticon, which don't know what to do with (: and leave it in its original form, which is kind of cool (to me).

-bit (July 03, 2015, 04:09 AM)

Heh I also purposely add a space which also stays put, so I can toggle if I wanna go all-yellow or not.

( :

The reverse Birdy is harder to type than the original one I invented you can do with a slide of a finger.

Reverse
<:}

372

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 Announced

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 03, 2015, 03:01 PM »

I think it's kinda worse than that, and there could be real crocodiles in the water here!


Something like how MS does have bad habits of over-selling the marketing to generate current sales they issue "place-holder editions" of their OS, and then much later fix it up "for real". I remember vaguely how there were complicated reasons all the updates didn't line up in Win 8 and Win 8.1

This has slight tones of "get people talking about ANYTHING other than Windows 8!! Even if it's not ready!!"

Now that some of our decades-old safety habits are getting yanked away from us, I'm dreading this becomes another of MS's "haha, we didn't mean it anyway, our *real* OS is Windows ClearSky." (Because we're getting into Lucy-Charlie Brown territory, what do we think of a company that is scared to call something Windows 9?!)
PlaysForSure and Zune, I'm looking at you!

373

Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 03, 2015, 02:51 PM »

Google Made a Chatbot That Debates the Meaning of Life

-Arizona Hot (June 29, 2015, 11:47 AM)

This is more important of a discovery/result than you might think. It's a huge new step in "artificial intelligence" because unlike the typical need in early-generation scientific studies to keep muddying factors out of study parameters, there's nothing stopping a mix of iterative machine-learn/hand-code/machine-learn/hand-code.

You can build an "AI" out of modules. You might catch it twice-per-module-shift but then you would with real people too. Then once it knows "what it is talking about", that local expertise module comes into use.

And the "meaning of life" module is important because that's one of the famous categories in "Loebner 1.0" style contests to bust up the machine. But if it can almost sound like a burnt out college student, then when the questioner gets bored of his/her/(its?) "little joke", the convo goes back to the "meaty topic" and the comp just keeps right on going shifting modules again.

To me this is one of the raw fundamental fears we expressed in early scifi about machines/robots, because you just keep loading these convo engines aka "brains" at high speed en masse, and suddenly humans feel threatened because it takes us exhaustively long to gain our own experience and the comp just gets pushed a new module in minutes.

Notice how anti-AI folks keep using versions of "No True Scotsman" to hold back recognition that AI is coming. Once you have a comp mind engine that can do seventy things moderately well, what is left for a person of personhood?

374

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for Software with this feature

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 03, 2015, 02:39 PM »

I'm wondering why file size matters, because wouldn't the date be off by even a few seconds if it's two different copies of a file? Even in a high speed automated "log.txt" or something updated and then aggressively backed up, do any of the options above change context if it doesn't need to know the file size (or maybe checksum, because for ex someone opens a text file and then say MS Word adds a line break it's now different.)

375

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on July 03, 2015, 02:20 PM »

Leader of Free World Weighs in on This Whole 'Peas in Guac' Debate

-Arizona Hot (July 03, 2015, 04:45 AM)

(Obama)

But still, it's actually kinda brilliant, jokes about dirty politics aside, we always wanted our leaders to be more accessible, and twitter is so fast. So Prez can maybe get a little stress relief.
(Simulation)

3:30 PM Tell Iran to stop yelling at Kuwait
3:57 PM Post funny comment on Twitter (after being vetted by Legal and SecSvc)
4:00 PM Discuss Economic report from Fed Reserve