Recent Posts

4101

Living Room / Re: Apple admits existence of MacDefender malware - Update planned

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 25, 2011, 02:00 PM »

That crowd is so ripe for the picking it's going to be an all out slaughter.

So you want to know what Low-Hanging-Fruit feels like?

We've got an App for that!

4102

Living Room / Re: Building a home server. Please help, DC!

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 25, 2011, 01:46 PM »

@ 40hz - A little crazy?!? Zoiks! I wonder how much torque 45 HDDs spinning up at once produces? Do they guage drive activity by how voilently the rack it's mounted in is shaking?

1.5GB x 45 drives to get to 67.5GB seems like a really old design considering they have 3TB drives now.


Then again my brother does work in a metal shop, so the case would be fairly cheap...

4103

Living Room / Re: Phone scam - pretending to be Microsoft Engineer

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 24, 2011, 08:00 PM »

Owoo, I would so love to play with one of those dorks. And of course record the whole thing.

-ravenlaughs (May 24, 2011, 06:36 PM)

I had some Jehovah's witnesses or mormons over one time as they tried to convert me.

-Renegade (May 24, 2011, 07:49 PM)

Cripes those people make me nutz ... I answered the door once holding a beer, wearing nothing but a big grin, and invited them in.  (Damn'dist thing) They just ran down the driveway. *Shrug* People with standards are boaring...

I gave them a mini sermon on the infinite mercies of Khorne the Blood God. (That was my avatar here for years!) That was fun~!

-Renegade (May 24, 2011, 07:49 PM)

I'd been wondering what that was. Cool.

4104

Living Room / Re: Building a home server. Please help, DC!

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 24, 2011, 07:47 PM »

You could go bare-bones and get something from Super Micro. But

-40hz (May 24, 2011, 06:51 PM)

lol My website is hosted on a 5 year old Dual Xeon SuperMicro box.



It been a great machine, but today I'd definitely go with Dell.

4105

Living Room / Re: Phone scam - pretending to be Microsoft Engineer

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 24, 2011, 06:20 PM »

It's times like that where you kind of wish you had a nice sized bot army. Oh, what was that link? <tappity tappity click /> Oh... The site seems to be down now...

-Renegade (May 24, 2011, 06:07 PM)

[Evil Laughter] He He He He [/Evil Laughter] 

4106

General Software Discussion / Re: MS Word Spell Checker - Selective Failure

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 24, 2011, 05:03 PM »

Solution: Review -> Set Language -> Detect language automatically -> OFF

-fenixproductions (May 24, 2011, 04:33 PM)

Hm... Ya know, I do recall doing that now that you mention it. Not sure if I did it the first time, but I do recall doing it the 2nd time. So I believe you're correct in that allowing Word to guess the language is bad.

4107

General Software Discussion / Re: MS Word Spell Checker - Selective Failure

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 24, 2011, 04:08 PM »

I'm not sure if setting the language for the whole document will override a setting that's in a style applied to a paragraph or selection.

-mwb1100 (May 24, 2011, 03:55 PM)

When I tried it again (with Office 2007) at the clients location it worked fine the first time. I've got Office 2010 at the office but may have missed something the first time (Not sure). But yes the Ctrl + A (whole document at once) language correction does (or rather did) work.

4108

General Software Discussion / Re: MS Word Spell Checker - Selective Failure

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 24, 2011, 04:04 PM »

Is the language set correctly for the text? Have you tried Ctrl+A then set language (on the Review tab)?

-tranglos (May 24, 2011, 02:33 PM)

Yes, language is correct for the document. I also tried resetting it just to be sure. It had no effect.

-Stoic Joker (May 24, 2011, 02:49 PM)

Correction, It didn't have any effect, until I did it a 2nd time. So either it needed to be pounded into the documents little head... *Shrug* ...Or I did it wrong the first time (not sure).

But it is at this point resolved. Thank you.

4109

General Software Discussion / Re: MS Word Spell Checker - Selective Failure

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 24, 2011, 04:00 PM »

Where did you copy it from? Another Word document, or plain text?

-Ath (May 24, 2011, 03:09 PM)

Yes, it's from another Word document that was originally exibiting to odd behavior.

Could you reset the attributes to the default (select + Ctrl-Space) that usually works if I have issues like these, or paste it as plain text (using Notepad++ as an intermediate, but there are several tools discussed here, that I don't want to install on my work-PC, that can do that for you).

-Ath (May 24, 2011, 03:09 PM)

There's a lot of work in this perticular 20 page document, so stripping the formatting was the option the client was trying to avoid.

I'll have to play with and remember that hot key...Sounds interesting.

4110

General Software Discussion / Re: MS Word Spell Checker - Selective Failure

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 24, 2011, 02:49 PM »

Is the language set correctly for the text? Have you tried Ctrl+A then set language (on the Review tab)?

-tranglos (May 24, 2011, 02:33 PM)

Yes, language is correct for the document. I also tried resetting it just to be sure. It had no effect.

The word in question, hurricane, is the main topic of the 20 page document...And is therefore used repeatedly. If I go up or down one paragraph from this block of text, spell check will again recognize the missspelling (much like the screen shot). But on this one line it just don't matter what you put in there ... Spell Check completely ignores it.

4111

General Software Discussion / MS Word Spell Checker - Selective Failure

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 24, 2011, 02:27 PM »

Okay, so a client sends me a Word document (.docx) that has some spelling errors in it that Spell Check isn't finding. The errors are reasonably obvious and don't result in the creation of another different/shorter word. They are indeed, wrong. But completely undetected.

To eliminate anything application instance or document related I copied just the one word to a new Word document...And Spell Check ignored that one too. Here's a screen-shot to save time and typing:


Pressing F7 (force full check) still misses the same bad word. Ignore word X only lasts - or is only supposed to last - until the line it's on changes...But that is not the case here. So I added a bit more garbage text to better dramatize the issue:


...So, does anybody have any idea how the hell that happened?

4112

Living Room / Re: Building a home server. Please help, DC!

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 24, 2011, 12:41 PM »

Servers need to be rock stable, and that requires well matched components. They don't need to be constantly tweaked to maintain lightning speed...They ain't for that.

DIY desktop can be fun...DIY server = bad idea. The factory takes great care to make sure all components are matched and play well together. And they're also very well documented and easy to get parts for.

Googling an error message for a mainstream server will get you tons of spot-on info.

Googling an error message for a DIY server, will get you tons of cryptic guessing games.

4113

Living Room / Re: Strange phone problem - can anyone help?

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 24, 2011, 12:24 PM »

I replaced the cable - which makes things a lot better but not perfect. I should have thought of this before - the socket is in a really difficult place to get at so the only common feature of all 3 phone sets was the cable. It still isn't 100% but it is more like 90% working now.

-Carol Haynes (May 24, 2011, 04:19 AM)

It seems there's a lesson in this for all of us. As none of us suggested anything that basic, because we all collectively assumed you'd already tried it. - oops! - I guess it really doesn't hurt to ask...

Glad you got it working.

4114

Living Room / Re: Phone scam - pretending to be Microsoft Engineer

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 24, 2011, 06:33 AM »

Thanks for the heads up I hadn't heard about this angle yet. Be interesting to see if I get any client calls about it here in the US.

OTOH I certainly sounds like it could make for a fun afternoon if I get called ... Maybe turn them loose in a sandboxed VM to see what they do. I love playing dumb...

4115

Living Room / Re: A Virus Walks into a Bar...

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 23, 2011, 06:32 PM »

Glad I finally got around to watching this haha

-Stephen66515 (May 23, 2011, 06:13 PM)

+1 Good stuff!

4116

Living Room / Re: Strange phone problem - can anyone help?

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 23, 2011, 06:27 PM »

Maybe a silly question, but when you push the 3, can you hear the tone on the line? Does it sound any different/odd?

4117

Living Room / Re: Building a home server. Please help, DC!

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 23, 2011, 06:15 PM »

Stoic, I just spoke to Geoff from Stallard.  He's a great person to talk to, thanks for that recommendation.  Very knowledgeable and easy to understand.

-superboyac (May 23, 2011, 04:55 PM)

Yeah he's a hell of a good (real people kinda) guy. And he does know what he's doing.

So why the R710? Are you planning a rack system?

You're not going to have 500 users, so you really don't need QuadCores. So why not go back one more generation to a 2900 (tower) or 2950 (rack). You can still get ( 8 hot-swapable) 3TB drives on a 6I controller in the box with redundant power supplies.

I just picked up one of the 2900's around the first of the year. I got it with 4GB RAM, and 2 Xeon (5060) 3.2GHz CPUs. Serving the accounting db to 20 users at the office is super fast. The old HP NetServer LH3 used to take 30 - 45 minutes to do a from the application local backup. The 2900 doesn't even take a full minute to do the same thing.

Could be a lot more bang for your buck, if you don't need that close to the cutting edge.

4118

Living Room / Re: Strange phone problem - can anyone help?

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 23, 2011, 03:17 PM »

Defective 3 is way too specific for an interference issue.

The wired phone working eliminates a line issue.

Signal bleed would cause calls to drop, low call volume, or line noise. I'm with Nudone on the you need a tie-breaker type diagnostic. But it sounds like a bad batch of phones.

4119

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Keep some folders out of my "Recent places"

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 23, 2011, 03:05 PM »

Would I have to do this each time a new folder is used via Windows Explorer?

-mayurdotca (May 23, 2011, 02:02 PM)

Yes and no. Obviously the "Safe" stuff doesn't need fiddled with. But the folders that you want to hide would all need to be given the above treatment.

Assuming the stuff isn't scattered everywhere... ...There shouldn't be that many targets to hide.

Might I also suggest using slightly more discreet folder names...

[Nuns Gone Wild Donkey Porn] - Bad Idea.

[Private Vid Files] - Good Idea.

Ya know.

4120

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: [Freeware] FadeTop - a visual break reminder that fades the desktop

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 23, 2011, 11:33 AM »

Try this:

First set a low Max opacity value (say 40) via Options dialog, then click the program icon to invoke the fader. Now do anything as if the fader is not there.

-musetips (May 21, 2011, 07:54 AM)

Thanks for the suggestion.

I have been trying with mixed results.  I find that I often don't stop -- will keep trying though.

-ewemoa (May 23, 2011, 05:19 AM)

Now I haven't actually tried the program, so bear with my if I'm off base...

 But it occurs to me that you're asking for a feature that will allow you to continue the very behavior that the program is designed to break you of.

4121

Find And Run Robot / Re: Hang while "searching history"

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 23, 2011, 11:21 AM »

Hmmmm - I wonder what Alt-Space does when FARR isn't there to look for it and jump into action....

-alias (May 21, 2011, 04:36 PM)

Alt + Space by default is the system menu for the active window. Same as left clicking the icon (back when there was one) in the upper lefthand corner of the window.

4122

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Keep some folders out of my "Recent places"

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 23, 2011, 07:25 AM »

Add the folders you want to hide to the recent places list.
Go to the folder you specified earlier.
Apply the Deny Read NTFS permission to the shortcut files that you don't want to have displayed.

Now the shell can't display them in the list because you're not allowed to (read) see them.

4123

Living Room / Re: favourite hardware hacking resources

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 22, 2011, 06:23 PM »

The trick is Duct Tape and WD 40
If it moves, but shouldn't = Duct tape
If it doesn't move and should = WD 40

No other problems exist

-Fred Nerd (May 22, 2011, 06:39 AM)

He's got a point there...  

-Stoic Joker (May 22, 2011, 07:38 AM)

what about electrical/electronic 'projects'?  

one squirt of wd and you'll need either a fire extinguisher (if you got this far I suspect you probably keep one handy at all times) or a defribrillator (though you could use that coat hanger in the wall socket)

-Target (May 22, 2011, 06:08 PM)

Actually, WD40 does work quite well for displacing moisture from wet (or mildly corroded) wiring. It was frequently used back in my junkyard days on wiring harnesses that had been pulled from a parts bike. Squirt a little in each of the multi-pin plugs before assembly and all works well.

It's flammable yes, but completely non-conductive (paraffin based).

4124

Living Room / Re: So Apple really is a religious thing...

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 22, 2011, 06:03 PM »

Would this be a bad time to point out that my grandmother was killed by a Mexican lemon truck?

4125

Living Room / Re: So Apple really is a religious thing...

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 22, 2011, 07:46 AM »

It's really just history repeating itself. We're right back to 1975 as DRM has become the digital equivalent of the grenade prone 8-Track tapes.