Recent Posts

4176

Screenshot Captor / Re: [Request] File renaming with more comfort

« Last post by IainB on March 03, 2013, 02:39 PM »

I think this suggestion could be handy. I use it in xplorer², which gives you the option of setting the default as being either the whole filename+extension, or just the filename for renaming. Maybe the same option could be built into SSC too? That way, people could be free to choose whichever they might prefer. This could be preferable to (say) fixing it as either one or the other.
It can certainly be time-saving and mistake-avoiding to be able to fiddle with this default setting to suit your peculiar changing/needs of the moment. It's one of those little things that matter.

4177

Living Room / Re: More speed/bandwidth from an 802.11n laptop<-->WiFi Router/Modem connection?

« Last post by IainB on March 03, 2013, 06:18 AM »

^ Yes, thanks. I had been considering that option for some time, but am not sure that it will necessarily suit my peculiar needs. The technology seems quite effective, by all reports. I shall probably trial it at some stage anyway.

4178

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

« Last post by IainB on March 03, 2013, 03:19 AM »

Made me larf: Separated at Birth

4179

Living Room / Re: More speed/bandwidth from an 802.11n laptop<-->WiFi Router/Modem connection?

« Last post by IainB on March 02, 2013, 04:59 PM »

Now you will want to trade them all in for a the full spec 802.11n kit.
By the way unless you have corporate high speed broadband you won't see any speed differences at all for broadband - just large file transfer across the network.

-Carol Haynes (March 02, 2013, 12:45 PM)

Yes, absolutely! Of course, I had already been checking out the prices for a full spec 802.11n kit with dual band high-speed transmission, USB device support, shared storage, FTP capability, etc. - the objective being to have my own local "cloud" and get max speed data interchange rates between PCs and shared storage on the local/shared network - and barely a wire in sight.
However, being thrifty, pragmatic and something of a minimalist, I have to admit that I don't actually really need all that functionality/speed...but it's funny how your geek "needs" expand when the technology beckons with new possibilities...    
So it's all a "deferred need" for now.

4180

Living Room / Re: Internet freedoms restrained - SOPA/PIPA/OPEN/ACTA/CETA/PrECISE-related updates

« Last post by IainB on March 02, 2013, 09:33 AM »

From the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation):
US Trade Office Calls ACTA Back From the Dead and Canada Complies

4181

Living Room / Re: More speed/bandwidth from an 802.11n laptop<-->WiFi Router/Modem connection?

« Last post by IainB on March 02, 2013, 06:17 AM »

I have been putting a couple of useful comments/suggestions to the test:

• I have struggled with this in the past and came to the conclusion that only devices designed to work together (whether full or draft n spec) by the same manufacturer get anything like the advertised bandwidth...
  

  -Carol Haynes (February 19, 2013, 03:08 AM)

  
  

• After searching a bit, it seems to me that "802.11n Lite n" just means it's 150Mb/s as opposed to 300Mb/s - 600Mb/s, (ie. it's still full 802.11n compliant, just that because it's single antenna it's speed is limited).
  

  -4wd (February 19, 2013, 03:12 AM)

After some searching about, I found that there is a TP-Link 150Mbps Lite N USB network adapter (which would presumably match theTP-Link "Lite N" wifi router), and there is a newer version of this produced as a mini USB network adapter. I located them online at a local supplier who was selling both devices at the same, heavily-discounted unit price (NZ$20, or US$16.50). Mindful of the limited strength of soldered surface-mounted USB ports, I bought the mini one (a shorter lever, if knocked):
Here they are (not to scale):



Here are a couple of shots of the mini adapter - one showing it alongside an old tarnished US 5-cent coin my son found the other day, and the other showing a close-up and the part number:



Here is the performance that resulted: (Success!)



I am still to add the second beer can to the wifi router reflector.

4182

Living Room / Google Maps Mania - Canal Street View!

« Last post by IainB on February 28, 2013, 09:01 PM »

This looks like a promising post in Google Maps Mania.
I had become sick and tired of all the blurred images in Google Street View, and thus stopped using it unless absolutely necessary.
Solution: DIY?! --> Canal Street View

4183

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

« Last post by IainB on February 27, 2013, 09:42 AM »

When I were a lad...

4184

Living Room / Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router.

« Last post by IainB on February 27, 2013, 08:52 AM »

I was talking about this with a friend and he mentioned that he had heard of a situation in the NZ government in about 2009 where an executive in a large government department had apparently been thought to be tender-rigging an IT selection/purchasing process in favour of a preferred supplier with whom he had strong connections. The executive suddenly resigned - apparently fell on his own sword. It was unclear whether he was encouraged to do so because of the alleged tender-rigging or because of an alleged HR incident of threatened/actual violence towards an individual who challenged him over the matter of the tender-rigging.

Either way, it seems that the rot was removed, but if the removal was initiated by the alleged HR incident, then it could be a sad reflection on the efficacy of the aformentoned "government purchasing processes being open and rigorously audited/scrutinised".

4185

Living Room / Reminder – Register and Redeem Windows Upgrade Offer promo code by Feb. 28th

« Last post by IainB on February 26, 2013, 06:26 PM »

From Windows.com:
Reminder – Register and Redeem Windows Upgrade Offer promo code by Feb. 28th

Posted on: Feb 26, 2013 by  Brandon LeBlanc

I wanted to publish a quick reminder that you have until February 28th to register for the Windows Upgrade Offer to receive a promo code via email that can be used to upgrade your Windows 7 PC to Windows 8 Pro for just $14.99. Once you’ve registered for the Windows Upgrade Offer, you’ll need to use your promo code by February 28th as well. The promo code you received as part of registering for the Windows Upgrade Offer allows you to upgrade your Windows 7 PC to the Windows 8 Pro edition.

When you register for the Windows Upgrade Offer, you will receive a promo code via email. You then go to Windows.com to buy a Windows 8 Pro upgrade like you would normally through the Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant (I blogged about the Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant here). When you get to the point in the process where you are asked to confirm your order, you are given the opportunity to enter the promo code you were sent by registering for the Windows Upgrade Offer and the price of Windows 8 Pro will then drop to $14.99 (U.S.). Then you proceed with the rest of the process and upgrade your PC! The promo code sent to you via email by registering for the Windows Upgrade Offer is what enables you to get the great price.

Tags: Windows Upgrade Offer, Windows 8 Pro, Reminder, Windows 8

4186

Living Room / Re: Keep a roll of toilet paper in your car's trunk

« Last post by IainB on February 26, 2013, 05:58 PM »

^ Ah, you spotted that, did you?

4187

Living Room / Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router.

« Last post by IainB on February 26, 2013, 04:31 PM »

I would not have expected this sort of thing was actually still happening in this day and age. It stinks.
Some people (not me you understand) might say that this looks like it could be a combination of corruption/collaboration/waste/gross incompetence in the Library Services unit, coupled with complicit criminal greed and tender-rigging by Cisco, but I couldn't possibly comment.
Never mind. It's only the taxpayers that are presumably being ripped off, so that's OK.

Incidentally, this would be typical of the sort of corruption encountered in third-world economies - for example whilst working on consultancy assignments in the Philippines and Thailand, and on World Bank funded projects in those places.
Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

Is this kind of thing common in the US? It seems to have been pretty much stamped out in NZ, due to all government purchasing processes being open and rigorously audited/scrutinised.

4188

Living Room / Re: Keep a roll of toilet paper in your car's trunk

« Last post by IainB on February 26, 2013, 02:58 PM »

With two children now (aged 2½ and 11) and a propensity for having picnics wherever we go, essential equipment in our car includes least-cost materials:
1 lu roll in the car.
1 lu roll in the boot (trunk) as a backup supply.
1 kitchen (tissue) roll in the car.
1 kitchen (tissue) roll in the boot (trunk) as a backup supply.
2 plastic shopping bags in the car.
1 plastic bucket in the boot (trunk) as a standby.
1 compact steel-and-wood utility shovel in the boot (trunk) for when needed.

It's surprising how these things can make life so much simpler and stress-free. The lu rolls and kitchen rolls are great for cleaning-up snotty noses, and cleaning messy hands/faces after picnics in and outside the car, and for necessary roadside toilet-stops. The plastic bags are for urgent/unexpected vomits, and the bucket is for if anyone is looking like they might be about to vomit - you can't always stop the car safely in sufficient time to let them get out of the car to do it. The shovel is for burying the waste evidence with earth, so that it is tidier and decomposes faster.
So there's never any need for panic or trauma when a natural bodily function urgently kicks in.
Famous quote from our daughter after her first urgent roadside stop:

"I can't believe I did such a good poo on the grass by the roadside!"

The bonus with the bucket and spade is that they are dual-purpose - most often, they are used to make sandcastles when we stop at a beach!    

4189

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

« Last post by IainB on February 26, 2013, 12:24 AM »

..."I got a kidney shaped pool with a stone in it"

-tomos (February 25, 2013, 10:06 AM)

Heh. Very droll, that one.

4190

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: NoteFrog Pro (clipboard information manager) - Mini-Review

« Last post by IainB on February 24, 2013, 11:16 PM »

2013-02-25: I have just updated the review in the Opening Post for v2.4.0.
I have added more to the review notes, including:

The latest version has some interesting and rather nifty features (taken from the Stack menu item):

• Select and open a different Stack...
• Create a new empty Stack...
• Rename the Active Stack...
• Edit stack password...
• Reload/refresh the Active Stack list from NoteFrog Library.
• Export/Save a copy of the Active Stack...
• Import/Load contents of an external Stack into the Active Stack...
• Save Active Stack contents as a plain text file...
• Save Active Stack contents as individual items...
• Save Active Stack contents in a publishable browser-search able format...
• Save Active Stack contents as a self-decrypting HTML archive-
• Import all text items from a directory...
• Import text items from a delimited file...
• Delete all items in the Active Stack...
• Delete an entire Stack and its contents...

4191

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

« Last post by IainB on February 24, 2013, 03:14 PM »

@Fred Nerd: I had a very interesting (to me) reaction to some of those jokes you listed by Rodney Dangerfield. I like lots of jokes, but I find some of those that you quoted to be strangely disquieting/distasteful. I don't like them nor do I find them funny, though I think I can see why they might seem funny to others. Some of them are quite clever too.

When I tried to analyse this dislike, I saw that it's the ones where he makes fun of his own (suggested or real) ugliness, or of his family's dislike/hatred of him. It seems to be a negative focus on "affliction" and on "family", and I don't enjoy negative jokes about people's afflictions or their families - where the butt of the joke is the afflicted/unloved one.

For example, there was a rather clever joke in similar vein by Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise. It went something like this:

Eric:   I got home early yesterday and found a blind man upstairs in bed with my wife making love to her.
Ernie: Goodness! What did you do?
Eric:   I killed his dog and broke his stick.

I didn't find that at all funny (the butt of his joke being his wife, you see), yet I loved most of their humour - for example:

Eric and Ernie were sitting in deckchairs, chatting about the weather.
Eric: I woke up this morning and thought it looked nice out...[pause]...so I left it out.

4192

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

« Last post by IainB on February 23, 2013, 07:51 PM »

Quebec’s language watchdog "fails" a restaurant for having some wall art containing English words: (not a made-up "The Onion" joke, apparently)

Following ‘pastagate’, famous Montreal restaurant goes public about its own language police run-in
from National Post - Top Stories by Canadian Press

MONTREAL — One of Canada’s most famous restaurants has come forward with its own tale of troubles with Quebec’s language watchdog, days after a flap over the word pasta made international headlines.

Montreal’s Joe Beef, which has been featured on international cooking shows and has a best-selling book, is the latest restaurant to complain about the Office quebecois de la langue francaise.

This time it apparently came down to some wall art containing English words.

Owner David McMillan said inspectors took issue with a memento from a Prince Edward Island beach that says “exit” and an antique sign above the staff bathroom that says “please leave this gate closed.”

They thought another item, an old sign from a Tennessee butcher, was part of the restaurant’s menu, he said.

McMillan said he was shocked by the lack of understanding of the inspectors, who were young and seemed like “deer in headlights.”

He said the visit left a sour taste, but added he has no plans to move his celebrated restaurant elsewhere any time soon.

“I love Quebec… but it’s not getting any easier,” McMillan, who is completely bilingual, said in an interview Saturday.

“My wife is French, my business partner is French, my children go to French school, but I just get so sad and depressed and wonder, what’s wrong with these people?”

_____________________
Further down on the same page:

Under the Parti Quebecois government, the OQLF has received a 6% budget increase this year, to $24.7 million, in an effort to protect the French language.

Looks like Fascistic bureaucracy. Rather like single-species farming - all the others must be expunged and sod the need for PC ethnic diversity.

C'est idiot.

4193

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

« Last post by IainB on February 23, 2013, 07:23 PM »

I see the new Pope has been chosen:

4194

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

« Last post by IainB on February 23, 2013, 07:18 PM »

Does anyone know whether Windows 8 crashed in a big way too?

• Horrific Race Video Hits YouTube, NASCAR Has It Taken Down
• Toyota Racing Teams Open NASCAR Season with Windows 8

4195

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

« Last post by IainB on February 23, 2013, 07:14 PM »

@Renegade: Great set of horsemeat jokes. Good English humour. (I never did understand the British public's apparent aversion to eating horsemeat. The French have been eating it for ever, and it always tasted fine to me.)

@app103: I liked the Unicorn link. Thanks. Have passed it on to some known unicorn lovers.

@Tinman57: Sorry to be so ignorant, but could you explain that joke to me about the STAAR exams? Or is it the grammatical mistake of "high students"?

4196

Living Room / Re: Reader's Corner - The Library of Utopia

« Last post by IainB on February 23, 2013, 06:35 PM »

Oh dear. Looks rather like I may have been a bit too optimistic/naive, according to this Slashdot post:
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)

White House Tells Agencies To Increase Access to Fed-Funded Research
Posted by timothy on Saturday February 23, @10:28AM
from the taxes-and-the-commonwealth dept.

Z80xxc! writes "The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced a "policy memorandum" today requiring any federal agency with over $100 million in R&D expenditures each year to develop plans for making all research funded by that agency freely available to the public within one year of publication in any peer-reviewed scholarly journal. The full memorandum is available on the White House website. It appears that this policy would not only apply to federal agencies conducting research, but also to any university, private corporation, or other entity conducting research that arises from federal funding. For those in academia and the public at large, this is a huge step towards free open access to publicly funded research." Edward Tufte calls the move timid and unimaginative, linking to a Verge article that explains that it's not quite as sweeping as the summary above sounds.

4197

Living Room / Re: Reader's Corner - The Library of Utopia

« Last post by IainB on February 23, 2013, 05:59 PM »

I operate on the principle that the sum of human knowledge is to be made freely available to all, and especially if that knowledge has been gained from research at the public's expense. You would expect to find that knowledge easily available/accessible via your library.
Unfortunately, it is not always so. A great deal of documented knowledge/research that the public has funded seems to be secured away from public gaze, for example, by secretive and insecure researchers/custodians who are unsure of the validity of their research and who wish to protect it from the harsh light of scrutiny, or where it is controlled by expensive proprietary publishers/paywalls (Elsevier being a classic example).

I was therefore very pleased to read this just-published policy from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy:

Expanding Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research
Posted by Michael Stebbins on February 22, 2013 at 12:04 PM EST

The Obama Administration is committed to the proposition that citizens deserve easy access to the results of scientific research their tax dollars have paid for. That’s why, in a policy memorandum released today, OSTP Director John Holdren has directed Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication and requiring researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research. OSTP has been looking into this issue for some time, soliciting broad public input on multiple occasions and convening an interagency working group to develop a policy. The final policy reflects substantial inputs from scientists and scientific organizations, publishers, members of Congress, and other members of the public—over 65 thousand of whom recently signed a We the People petition asking for expanded public access to the results of taxpayer-funded research.

To see the new policy memorandum, please visit: http://www.whitehous...access_memo_2013.pdf

To see Dr. Holdren’s response to the We the People petition, please visit: https://petitions.wh...-scientific-research

Michael Stebbins is Assistant Director for Biotechnology at OSTP

Lets just hope that there aren't any weasel-words in this newfound transparency initiative which were designed to succeed in achieving the opposite effect - i.e., making such transparency impenetrable or obscured, or otherwise going backwards and frustrating the operation of the principle that the sum of human knowledge is to be made freely available to all - because we know from experience that people will try to do just that, regardless.

4198

Living Room / Re: Internet freedoms restrained - SOPA/PIPA/OPEN/ACTA/CETA/PrECISE-related updates

« Last post by IainB on February 23, 2013, 05:27 PM »

Full marks to Mozilla!
Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)

Posted by timothy on Saturday February 23, @04:30PM
from the accept-only-genuine-chocolate-chip dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer has contributed a Firefox patch that will block third-party cookies by default. It's now on track to land in version 22. Kudos to Mozilla for protecting their users and being so open to community submissions. The initial response from the online advertising industry is unsurprisingly hostile and blustering, calling the move 'a nuclear first strike.'"

4199

Living Room / Re: More speed/bandwidth from an 802.11n laptop<-->WiFi Router/Modem connection?

« Last post by IainB on February 23, 2013, 05:18 AM »

The beercan reflector worked quite well. There is still variability, mostly between about 30 to 58.5mbps, but with seemingly longer periods at the higher values. I am going use a second can to make it taller - the aerial is longer than the beer can is high.
The blue tape on the can in the photo is to protect me from the dangerously sharp edges of the cut beer can. I only got a slight cut on one finger!

4200

Living Room / Re: Chinese Cyberattacks

« Last post by IainB on February 23, 2013, 05:02 AM »

Found at Warning Signs: