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4126
Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Google Reader - Mini-Review
« Last post by IainB on March 15, 2013, 11:34 PM »
Outlook.com is a real alternative to Gmail these days. Thanks, Microsoft. Suck it, Google.
Yes, I reckoned that to be the case too - probably replace Gmail, Google Reader, Picasa and whatever else, right there. In fact that's where I'm walking to.
There's a good list of alternatives to Google Reader (and probably Gmail) being built in another discussion thread on DCF:
Re: Google Reader gone
I'm also looking at Omea, thanks to this suggestion:
Yet another choice: Omea

And OwnCloud looks interesting too:
OwnCloud has finally gotten to a useful state, I'm going to install that this weekend.  :)
Then google can suck it.  :P
4127
Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Google Reader - Mini-Review
« Last post by IainB on March 15, 2013, 10:36 PM »
Why would anyone want to use Gmail?

:tuxman - talk about obvious.
 flamebait anyone? :-))

OK, I'm game. Why would they?
I have never seen or compiled a list of the functional needs of Gmail users - neither mine nor anyone else's.
If we were to try to formulate a serious response to @tuxman's apparently rhetorical and provocative tongue-in-cheek question, then this could become a useful email requirements-gathering question.

Well, I started using Gmail because I was given an invite by my son, and I thought I'd give it a trial "suck-and-see".
Previously, I was a confirmed email-client user, and thought web-based email was for the birds.
I had originally started with email by POPping my email from my ISP email account, using the FREE Pegasus email client. I later migrated to InfoSelect (a very good PIM) which had an integrated email client and thus enabled me to use emails as data/information in my database - which was a primary and previously unmet requirement of mine.

However, I was initially reluctant to use Gmail - mainly because of a strong dislike of what always seemed to be deliberately crippled and/or locked-in web-based email products (e.g., Yahoo email), and my skepticism regarding email services provided or operated on a basis of demographic market data collection principles. I knew they probably "had designs" on my data and wanted to read through it all. Gmail seemed to me to be potentially like a worse-than-Hotmail product.

Yet, by the end of my trial, Gmail had turned out to be the best for my purposes - you really could use the emails more like data/information - but what won me over over and made me a Google fan as well as a Gmail fan was Google's apparent openness and the progressive additional products/services that Google kept introducing. Some of them were seriously useful, some seemed pretty useless and destined to be consigned to oblivion, but at least the seriously useful bits were great.
For example:
  • Gmail itself - seriously useful, though still a bit clunky; has been continuously improved.
  • the Gmail Labs - mostly seriously useful, but now mostly emasculated and/or shut down.
  • Google Docs/Drive - seriously useful, competitive, and farsighted, though still a bit clunky/constipated; has been continuously improved.
  • Google Reader - seriously useful; has had some improvements, but is now to be shut down.
  • Google Groups - seriously useful, though still a bit clunky; has been continuously improved.
  • Google Picasa - seriously useful Client and Web-app; has had many improvements, but now seems likely to be shut down or forced into the unwanted product g+, thus forcing users with it.

Now though, Google seem to be doing everything they can to try and drive me away from using the Google services I like and trust - and the thing is, I won't be the only user affected this way. If Google continue as they are doing, then they will discover what it means to inadvertently seriously piss off a large part of your user base. People will simply vote with their feet.
For example, for well over a year, I already no longer had much trust in Google - I can't afford to trust them - and rather than use the products/services I like more, I have for about a year had serious misgivings about Google's direction, and have been limiting my use - holding back, waiting to see what the next product/service will be that Google will decide to unilaterally kill off without a by-your-leave.
"By their fruits ye shall know them."
- actions generally really do speak louder than words.

So, speaking of actions, well, Google have just gone and killed off the Most Excellent Google Reader - which is in my list of seriously useful stuff, above. Only an idiot would wait for another sign, and I am walking away from them. Just as I would not be gullible enough to sign up for a crappy Yahoo email account and all that is implied by that, I shall not remain dependent for any services from an unreliable and untrustworthy supplier over whom I have no control. I am taking my email and other requirements with me.
Google can **** ***.
4128
Screenshot Captor / Re: Feature Request: Search text notes in screenshots
« Last post by IainB on March 14, 2013, 11:04 PM »
This is something I've been trying to work out for some time. With mouser's new new captions features it's starting to make it easier.
cmpm found & posted a solution here: https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=34092.msg320268#msg320268

Doing a search with Agent Ransack works for finding captions.
In the results will be the Screenshot with caption.
http://www.mythicsof...ansack&page=home
Thank you for this. I've read about Agent Ransack before but hadn't tried it. Just did and it found every caption search test I threw at it. And with the export to clipboard or file I can generate about any type of listing I want. Very nice.

When I started to play about with them, it surprised me how tremendously useful the data-carrying potential for JPG/JPEG files was/is.
JPG image files seem to have lots of places to insert data/text.

For example, in the IPTC info there are tabs for:
  • Description (you can put data in here)
  • Keywords/Categories (you can put data in here)
  • Credits/Origin (you can put data in here)
  • Options

Of these, Description has 8 or 9 subfields for you to insert data/text:
   1. Title
   2. Artist
   3. Byline Title.
   4. Copyright
   5. Caption
   6. Caption Writer
   7. Headline
   8. Instructions
   9. JPEG Comment (Not really an an IPTC field?)

In the EXIF info:
There are various Tag fields, not so easily changed by the User.
(Filename is a Tag, so if you change the filename, then you change that Tag's contents also.)

Google Picasa can see all these filenames and fields (all this data) and automatically indexes it all, including the file path.
So you get an instant response when you search for any of it in Picasa. You can thus sort your images/data in multifold ways using various text strings.
There is a function called "Tags" in Picasa, which enables you to use unique linear tags (i.e., not Tags in a hierarchical tree) to categorize your images.
It's really easy to use Tags from the Tags Panel. You can Tag images individually (one by one), or en masse (in large groups).
You can have multiple (different) Tags for any given image.

This is interesting and rather useful:
If you put the word (say) "Sausage" in the IPTC Keywords/Categories Keywords field for a JPG file, then it appears in Picasa with the Tag "Sausage", and vice versa if you put the Tag "Sausage" as a Picasa Tag for that image.

In the Picasa menu, if you select Tools | Experimental |Show tag as album, you can select the Tag "Sausage" and that then becomes a logical album for all the images with the Tag "Sausage". This is in addition to the usual Album category function, which is comprised of an assortment of your selected images or groups of images from your database of images.
Using Picasa you can then send all or some members of an album (whether a category or a Tag album) online to a web-based album in Picasa.

In addition to this, if you have some images with text in them - e.g., (say), a picture of a receipt) - and if you save those images as TIF/TIFF files, then Windows 7 Search/Index can be set to automatically OCR scan these images and index any text found in the image. So you can search for that text from the Start menu.
Refer: Search for TIFF documents based on text content

If you have any images in OneNote Notebooks, then OneNote can be set to automatically OCR scan these images for text, and that text gets indexed, together with ordinary text in the Notebooks, and all of it is integrated in the Windows 7 Search/Index, so it can be searched for either just from within OneNote, or from the Start menu.
4129
Living Room / NULL
« Last post by IainB on March 14, 2013, 11:00 PM »
Null.
4130
Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Google Reader - Mini-Review
« Last post by IainB on March 14, 2013, 03:17 PM »
Why would anyone want to use Gmail?

:tuxman - talk about obvious.
 flamebait anyone? :-))

OK, I'm game. Why would they?
I have never seen or compiled a list of the functional needs of Gmail users - neither mine nor anyone else's.
If we were to try to formulate a serious response to @tuxman's apparently rhetorical and provocative tongue-in-cheek question, then this could become a useful email requirements-gathering question.
4131
Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Google Reader - Mini-Review
« Last post by IainB on March 14, 2013, 10:19 AM »
@40hz: Yes, that was what I was getting at by comparing Google to CDC, which had a financial implosion. Google seemed to be heading the same way, but now stands a chance of turning round, GE-style.
I don't see how one can say that GR "met its demise because it’s free". It probably died because it didn't generate sufficient indirect revenue to meet profitability targets.
4132
Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Google Reader - Mini-Review
« Last post by IainB on March 14, 2013, 08:44 AM »
On the Official Google Blog, in the post about all the changes and/or killed services (2013-03-13) A second spring of cleaning, it says:
These changes are never easy. But by focusing our efforts, we can concentrate on building great products that really help in their lives.

In Googland, in the post [G] Powering Down Google Reader, it says:
There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products.

The implications of these statements and under the current circumstances would seem to be:
  • 1. Some products were not regarded as having been entirely useful (were poorly-performing) - they did not "really help" during their product lives - so their lifespan was shortened/terminated.
  • 2. Such products were perceived to be an unprofitable real and a financial drain on resources, and turned out to be less-than-great products, so have been terminated.
  • 3. There are some arbitrary market target usage (performance) threshold criteria set for Google Reader and/or other products, and if product usage/performance falls below this performance threshold, then the relevant product will be terminated.
  • 4. Google has perceived that it has previously scattered its resources across too many poorly-performing products. and is going to focus now on putting its resources into fewer products. This situation will be arrived at by judicious pruning of poorly-performing products (so expect more product terminations).
  • 5. The Google Executive have been rethinking their marketing strategy in the light of less-than-desirable profit performance.

I have often wondered whether Google was throwing money down the drain, particularly as regards, for example, Buzz, WAVE, Google Earth and satellite imaging, Street View, and Picasa.
I had always thought Google to be "shades of CDC" in its philanthropic heyday, under its founder's rule (William Norris).
4133
Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Google Reader - Mini-Review
« Last post by IainB on March 14, 2013, 07:46 AM »
Also, yay at Nick for simply killing FeedDemon instead of doing something crazy like, you know, perhaps open-sourcing it.
^ +1 from me.
4134
Living Room / Re: MAFIAA's unintended consequences? - e.g., Pirate Box
« Last post by IainB on March 14, 2013, 07:30 AM »
You can read all about making your own PirateBox here:

But if you want it ready-rolled, then there is this superb 1Tb wifi device by Seagate: Wireless Plus    :Thmbsup:
There's good info at the link, and a great little video about it.
The data sheet is Seagate Wireless Plus Data Sheet (461 KB ) (should open in Google Viewer, if Google haven't already killed that service by the time you go to look at the document).    ;)
4135
...You got rick-rolled?
No, it was a fake vid clip of what was purportedly a true event. Was deliberately designed to make someone look bad - a fake smear. In my haste, I nearly got taken in by it. Have used the space to insert a different humour item (see above re "Giving the finger").
4136
The Brazilians give a whole new meaning to "Giving the finger" to someone:
Brazilian docs fool biometric scanners with bag full of fake fingers
4137
Absolutely brilliantly clever cover for the New Statesman front page for 15 March 2013 - "The German Problem".
Very droll. Spot-on, and full Marks.    ;)

New Statesman front page for 15 March 2013 - The German Problem.jpg
4138
@Giampy: " I will do the smoke".
Very droll.
4139
Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Google Reader - Mini-Review
« Last post by IainB on March 13, 2013, 08:35 PM »
I'm trying out @40hz's suggestion re Sage. in the discussion: Re: Suggestions for a RSS reader
I've long since given up on something that's all-in-one.

These days I use the Sage extension in Firefox as my RSS reader and save what I want to keep to my Pocket (formerly ReadItLater) account or using Scrapbook depending on what it is.
None of the above have much in the way of bells & whistles.
Which is exactly the way I like it. YMMV. ;)
4141
Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Google Reader - Mini-Review
« Last post by IainB on March 13, 2013, 08:02 PM »
^ +1 from me. I feel the same (disappointment) as @alivingspirit.
Really annoyed me, as I find GR is such a useful information gathering/sifting tool.
I only knew about this when a pop-up appeared in my Google Reader a few minutes ago, saying that it would be terminated on July 1, 2013, and giving a link to a post where it says:
How can I download my Reader data?
Google Reader will be retired on July 1, 2013. If you'd like to download a copy of all your Reader data before then, you can do so through Google Takeout. You'll receive your subscription data in an XML file, and the following information will be downloaded as JSON files:

    List of people that you follow
    List of people that follow you
    Items you have starred
    Items you have liked
    Items you have shared
    Items shared by people you follow
    Notes you have created
    Items with comments

Click here to start downloading your Reader data from Takeout. Once downloaded, your subscription data should be easily transferrable to another product, where you can continue to keep up with your online reading.

    Mar 13, 2013

So, where to now?
Well, a quick search on DC Forum shows lots of discussions that have mentioned Google Reader or alternative RSS feed-readers - e.g. as follows: (not an exclusive list)

Bugger. Methinks I had better start prudently migrating/mirroring my Gmail and Google Drive elsewhere. The last thing I want is to get caught off-guard by an apparently unreliable supplier.
4142
Living Room / Re: I am so very very sick of copyright issues. (2013)
« Last post by IainB on March 13, 2013, 07:02 PM »
I revived this old thread because the subject describes pretty much how I felt on reading this article - the subject of which was news to me:
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)
How copyright makes my home stereo sounds worse
by Stephan Kinsella on March 6, 2013

The other day I had my A/V guys over to make some adjustments to one of my systems. While there were there I asked them if they could take a look at a problem I’d been having for a while with my family room media system. I have an Anthem two-zone receiver. The first zone drives the TV and the speakers in the family room. Zone 2 drives speakers around the house through a speaker selector box. I often play music via the Apple TV on both zones 1 and 2, all around the house, say, on a Saturday. But I notice an odd echo effect between the sound coming from zone 1 speakers and that coming from zone 2: there is a slight delay, giving it a disconcerting feeling, if you are standing sort of between rooms.

I asked the media guys if there was maybe a polarity problem or an adjustable delay. They said that’s not it. Instead, all the big manufacturers of receivers have gimped their own systems due to copyright enforcement pressure from content companies: zone 1 is digital, but zone 2 has to be analog. What this means is that there is a delay in zone 1 because the DSP takes some time. So the sound coming out of zone 2 is slightly ahead of that coming out of zone 1. I said can I just buy a receiver with two digital zones? Nope, they said–the copyright enforcers don’t want you to be able to just duplicate that signal. So even if I am playing my own CD’s or streaming radio or spotify perfectly legally, I can’t have a device that digitally “splits” the signal to permit me to play it simultaneously on two zones. Instead, I can tap into the inferior analog signal and play it on zone 2, but then there are timing delays between the zones.

The media guys told me there are workarounds but they are complicated and not even guaranteed to work. I could buy some kind of add-on digital delay for zone 2, but the problem is you might never make it match up exactly, and further, the delay from zone 1 DSP varies by the type of music; it’s not necessarily a fixed delay, so there is no easy way to guarantee adding a delay to zone 2 will match it up to zone 1. I suppose I could buy two separate one-zone receivers, have all kinda signal-splitters at the output of my source devices like the Apple TV, but that’s kinda stupid.

Another example of how paying, law-abiding users are harmed by the copyright fascists.
4143
Living Room / Optimising large scale Cloud operations (e.g., Google).
« Last post by IainB on March 13, 2013, 06:21 AM »
I was just clearing out my Google Reader, and came across this fascinating post on David Linthicum's Cloud Computing blog at InfoWorld:
Solved! How to make Google's cloud 20 percent more efficient
Seriously interesting stuff. I've done work on optimising operating system queuing processes and large batch mainframe processing streams, and even tweaking optimising compilers, but, not having been involved, I had not realised that huge Cloud IT operations were open to such large performance improvements - I mean, 20% is a heck of a lot. How did that escape notice before now?
4144
Truth stranger than fiction:
Lack of swordsmen leads Saudi Arabia to consider dropping public beheadings as method of execution.
Difficult times. I blame it on the modern generation. No "real men" any more.
But it's not as thought the Saudis have run out of sensible punishment options is it? I mean, there's presumably still hanging and stoning and lashing, right? Maybe the French guillotine or the American electric chair might look interesting too, now. Could even be a nice little export earner there.
4145
Some evidence that the great British sense of humour is alive and well.
Apparently, they had a sweepstakes on the outcome for the now-infamous British MP Chris Huhne (who is reputedly AC/DC) and his (ex?) wife Vicky Pryce.
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)
Huhne and Pryce Sentencing Sweepstakes Winner
Congratulations to @AngusCurran, who correctly guessed that both Chris and Vicky would be sentenced to 8 months. He wins a copy of Lee Rotherham’s “The EU in a Nutshell: Everything you wanted to know about the European Union but didn’t know who to ask”, and a dozen I’ve Been Kissed By Chris stickers.
Lucky Angus.
4146
Thought I'd revive this thread with an interesting (and relevant) blog post by the Dilbert creator, Scott Adams:
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)
Management/Success/Leadership: Mostly Bullshit
Mar 12, 2013

Sometimes I think the field of management/success/leadership is nothing more than a confusion of correlation for causation. For example, I blogged recently that "passion" isn't so much a cause of success as a result of success, and it grows as the success grows. Success can make anyone passionate about what they are doing. When the experts say we need passion to be successful, that's mostly bullshit. What you need is energy, talent, hard work, a reasonable plan, and lots of luck.

Company culture is another area that I think the experts get backwards. The common belief is that you need a good company culture to create success. But isn't it more likely that companies with awesome employees get both a good culture and success at the same time? A good corporate culture is a byproduct of doing everything right; it's not the cause of success as much as the outcome. Success improves culture more than a good culture can cause success.

And how about that charisma thing? That's important, right? Everyone says so. Look at Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison. Those guys have plenty of charisma so it must be important to success, we assume. But let me tell you what causes charisma: success.

I'm in a unique position to judge the success=charisma hypothesis because I slip in and out of famousness all day long. Cartoonists aren't normally recognized, and when I walk into a room as a "normal" I exhibit no charisma whatsoever. I might even be absorbing some charisma that is already in the atmosphere. But when I enter a room at an event where people are expecting me in my capacity as a semi-famous cartoonist, suddenly I appear to have some charisma. I feel like Moses in a room full of water. Trust me when I say that if Steve Jobs had not been successful so young, he'd be known as the lying asshole who needs a shower, not the guy with the reality distortion field. Charisma is bullshit.

Today I was reading an expert's opinion that companies get better results when managers learn to avoid micromanaging employees. But how do we know those non-micromanaging managers get better results? Wouldn't it also be true that wherever you have the most highly capable employees - the ones most likely to create success - you have a boss who knows he can back off the micromanaging? One would expect more micromanaging in companies with untalented employees. So how do you know what causes what?

Consider the thousands of different books on management/success/leadership. If any of this were real science, all managers would learn the same half-dozen secrets to success and go on to great things. The reality of the business world is more like infinite monkeys with typewriters. Sooner or later a monkey with an ass pimple will type something that makes sense and every management expert in the world will attribute the success to the ass pimple.

How about the idea that every hourly wage slave should "act like an entrepreneur"?  How do you think that would play out with Apple's 50,000 employees? The unsexy reality is that everyone in the company can't be creative risk-takers. Someone has to actually work. My guess is that Apple would fall apart if more than 5% of its employees acted like entrepreneurs. And maybe the tipping point is only 2%. Entrepreneurs are disruptive, rule-breaking risk-takers. A little bit of that goes a long way.

I first noticed the questionable claims of management experts back in the nineties, when it was fashionable to explain a company's success by its generous employee benefits. The quaint idea of the time was that treating employees like kings and queens would free their creative energies to create massive profits. The boring reality is that companies that are successful have the resources to be generous to employees and so they do. The best way a CEO can justify an obscene pay package is by treating employees generously. To put this in another way, have you ever seen a corporate turnaround that was caused primarily by improving employee benefits?

The fields of management/success/leadership are a lot like the finance industry in the sense that much of it is based on confusing correlation and chance with causation. We humans like to feel as if we understand and control our environments. We don't like to think of ourselves as helpless leaves blowing in the wind of chance. So we clutch at any ridiculous explanation of how things work.

My view is that success happens when you have a coincidence of talent, resources, and timing. One can explain the existence of successful serial entrepreneurs by the fact that once successful they gain resources, credibility, extra talent, contacts, and the opportunity to live someplace such as Silicon Valley where opportunities fall out of trees.  You would expect that group of people to get lucky more often than someone just starting out.

Dilbert came to fame in the nineties when the working world was experiencing an unprecedented "bubble" of management bullshit. Every time a new business book became a best seller, middle managers across the globe scurried to buy a copy and started spewing its jargon. Eventually the sale of business books dropped off when, I assume, people realized there couldn't really be 10,000 different sure-fire formulas for success.

But lately I've been feeling another bullshit bubble forming in the world. And I don't mean only the financial markets, which are sketchy for lots of reasons. It's just a feeling, but it seems to me that the management/success/leadership bullshit bubble is once again reaching full inflation.

Are you feeling the bubble too, or is it just me?
4147
Heh yeah, that's just a fairly famous lawyer joke from the net with some pic stuck onto it.
It's not just "some pic" stuck to it, it's a crack dealer's mug shot being passed off as an honest granny.  ;D
That, to me, was funner than the actual joke.

Watching two people argue about what's funny - now that's kind of amusing.    ;)
4148
I thought this was a silly made-up joke, but it's not.
Very droll.
See here:
On Wednesday, March 6, the House Science, Space and Technology Committee sent out a notice that its hearing on global warming was cancelled due to the chilly weather and a snowstorm that was about to hit the nation’s capital.

 - and the headline here:
Hill hearing on global warming cancelled by D.C. snowstorm.

I think there might be some comedians editing the headlines at The Washingtom Times though. New Zealanders would call that sort of thing "poking the borax".

We are having a rather delayed start and long overdue decent summer here in NZ.    ;D
4149
Living Room / Re: What are your favorite movies?
« Last post by IainB on March 11, 2013, 03:54 PM »
Though I have seen him in archives of old TV Western/cowboy series (I forget which ones), after watching the superb "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" I reckoned that you could be guaranteed that pretty much any Western or other flick with Clint Eastwood in it was going to be worth watching. When he started acting in them and producing them, things took a step up.
Most memorable for me are: "A Fistful of Dollars", "For a Few Dollars More", "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly", "High Plains Drifter", "Play Misty for Me", "Dirty Harry", "Magnum Force", "The Enforcer", "The Outlaw Josey Wales", "Every Which Way But Loose", "Bird", "Unforgiven" "The Bridges of Madison County", and "Gran Torino".
4150
Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Qiqqa - Reference Management System - Mini-Review
« Last post by IainB on March 11, 2013, 02:37 AM »
Update 2013-03-11 2034hrs: Opening post now includes links to some YouTube Qiqqa tutorials:

PLUS: The Qiqqa User Manual is now available.
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