Recent Posts

4351

Living Room / Re: Ghost car!

« Last post by Darwin on October 07, 2007, 10:59 PM »

The first thing that occurred to me was that that particular type of fencing material is pretty flexible and there is clearly a post in the picture. All that would need to happen is for the material not to be secured to the post at that point - the fencing material would move out of the way like a curtain does when someone runs through it, returning to it's original position. Think about it, the driver obviously didn't care about his/her or anyone else's safety and wouldn't, to my mind, have thought twice about driving through the fence. The other thought that occurred to me is that it's not clear what is to the right of the fence post in the picture, perhaps just out of our line of sight is a gate or an opening in the fence. I'm not even convinced that there IS a fence to the right of the post, but it's not clear. Anyway, as you note, it's a highly edited video.

4352

General Software Discussion / Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!

« Last post by Darwin on October 07, 2007, 10:53 PM »

Guess what - fired up the Win2k machine after I posted above and the monitor is shot (looks like something dropped on it...). It works but there's a big, inky black spider web in the upper right hand corner extenging into the middle of the screen  I guess I'll have to keep my eyes peeled for a parts machine going cheap. Too bad - I feel like I've lost an old friend.

4353

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Announcing discountsoft.org, including thousands discount coupons

« Last post by Darwin on October 07, 2007, 10:02 PM »

Wordzilla - thanks for digging that quote up - classic!

4354

Living Room / Re: DC Unofficial Meeting #5 Took Place - Veign and Mouser meet

« Last post by Darwin on October 07, 2007, 08:59 PM »

Anyway, good to see how Veign looks too.

-Lashiec (October 07, 2007, 04:43 PM)

Who you really need to see is the person that took the picture. 

-Veign (October 07, 2007, 05:15 PM)

Tease...

4355

Living Room / Re: Do you archive/store your downloads (mainly install files)?

« Last post by Darwin on October 07, 2007, 08:58 PM »

... as the installers are deleted, i'll be relying on a disc cataloging program to index all these CDs and find out the contents in each of them..

-lanux128 (October 07, 2007, 08:50 PM)

This is exactly what I've had to resort to - I use WhereIsIt? to keep track of where the installers are... Lots of fun!

4356

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Announcing discountsoft.org, including thousands discount coupons

« Last post by Darwin on October 07, 2007, 08:52 PM »

He was last active 5 minutes ago - maybe he's writing up a bio to clear things up, but I doubt it!

4357

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Announcing discountsoft.org, including thousands discount coupons

« Last post by Darwin on October 07, 2007, 08:41 PM »

This is deja vu all over again - this is the second thread (at least) started to announce this service. SPAM ALERT!

4358

General Software Discussion / Re: alternatives to partition magic/paragon?

« Last post by Darwin on October 07, 2007, 08:36 PM »

I'm late to this discussion, but thought I'd post this link to Partition Logic, which is a free alternative to the likes of both Partition Magic and Ghost. I've not tried it, but it's been well received over at Power Tools Software. Another free alternative that has been recommended is GParted.

My only experience is with Partition Magic 8 (paid $70 for it and have had no real problems with it) and Paragon Partition Manager 2005 (free from www.vunet.co.uk) which has actually bailed me out a few times in situations that Partition Magic couldn't help me with...

4359

Best Dialog Extender / Re: Enhanced File Dialog

« Last post by Darwin on October 07, 2007, 03:25 PM »

psst, tinjaw - don't get nighted started on Direct Folders 

4360

Best Dialog Extender / Re: Enhanced File Dialog

« Last post by Darwin on October 07, 2007, 01:47 PM »

Nope. Installed it, rebooted (to activate it, despite this not being mentioned as necessary - it is!), re-excluded the exe files, rebooted and still no joy. Uninstalled and all was immediately well. Looks like I'll be with XFilesDialog for the foreseeable future...

4361

Best Dialog Extender / Re: Enhanced File Dialog

« Last post by Darwin on October 07, 2007, 12:39 PM »

I wonder is there anything else does the same job -
I'd love some thing like that (a la Darwins screenshot post #2)
I'd pay for it even

-tomos (October 07, 2007, 12:18 PM)

Yes, this is what makes having had to uninstall it so sad. However, as I noted above, I suspect strongly that if I were to reinstall it, exclude the 16 bit executable, reboot, and try again all would probably be well. The WORST thing about ED is that it's ONLY available as part of the Object Desktop suite and you can't download an installer for it (you have to use StarDock central). It's raining, I'm bored, and I've *just* created an image of my harddrive - I'm off to see if my hunch about ED is correct...

4362

Living Room / Re: Do you archive/store your downloads (mainly install files)?

« Last post by Darwin on October 07, 2007, 12:36 PM »

x rated yahoo smilies... what the..

Yeah, I noticed that as well and was wondering...

4363

General Software Discussion / Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!

« Last post by Darwin on October 07, 2007, 12:28 PM »

I bought a Toshiba notebook with Vista Home Premium on it yesterday morning and am just waiting for the store to open so that I can return it... Actually, Vista itself I quite like and the hardware is magnificent but I just keep wishing I had XP Pro on it. I have a first generation centrino notebook (1.4 Ghz, 1 GB 266Mhz RAM with 279 programmes installed) running XP Pro and the performance differences between it and the Intel Core 2 Duo machine with 2GB 667 Mhz RAM that I bought are not great enough to justify having made the purchase. That coupled with the number of times that I had to reboot the new computer and watch either a Toshiba utility or a Windows utility configure my machine has left me with a permanent tick... Seriously, it took about an hour and a half to get to the point where I was looking at the desktop - what happened to the good old days when you bought a notebook and the only thing you had to wait to "do" was run it off the battery? Note that what concerns me about the boot time with the new machine is that this is after using it with only StarOffice, Webroot Spysweeper with Antivirus, and YourUninstaller 2006 installed and surfing the web and noodling around with the StarOffice suite (wanted to get a sense of how it handled multitasking with something other than notepad and the Office 2007 demo). So, it's got fewer than 50 apps installed and runs 28 processes after booting to the desktop. My older Centrino has 279 apps installed and is running 46 processses after booting to desktop and does so in roughly the same amount of time as does Vista.

The new machine is more comfortable multi-tasking but it doesn't boot any more quickly and I might as well get my money back and wait until I *have* to upgrade my hardware before doing so. I backup my harddrive obsessively, so configuring a new machine in an emergency will be only slightly more aggravating than setting up the current one. The attraction of this is that the longer I wait, the sexier the hardware is going to be (and hopefully Vista will be that much better at utilizing the resources on offer).

Incidentally, I still have a PIIIE notebook running Win2k Sp-4 and it's still more than capable - runs Office 2003 just as quickly as the centrino does on half the RAM (512MB 100Mhz).

Sorry for the rambling and incoherent post...

4364

Living Room / Re: Do you archive/store your downloads (mainly install files)?

« Last post by Darwin on October 07, 2007, 12:07 PM »

I backup up all installers onto DVD and onto an external harddrive. This is just OCD of me at this point - I started doing this back in the days before broadband and can't kick the habit. Kind of a drag, in a way, because I could free up GB's of external disc space if I could bring myself to delete those installers that are still available via download... (but with huge harddrives available for a pittance, it really doesn't matter!).

4365

Living Room / Re: Ghost car!

« Last post by Darwin on October 07, 2007, 12:04 PM »

Kind of cool... but I can think of a range of hypotheses as to what happened at the end. I'm not going to spoil it for everybody else right now, though!

4366

General Software Discussion / Re: Is there a way to directly write notes onto the Windows desktop?

« Last post by Darwin on October 07, 2007, 12:00 PM »

I *think* masu wants something that will allow him to type text directly onto the desktop without having to open a new note. Kind of like setting off a big part of the desktop as a scratch pad? I was going to suggest Notezilla myself but for an awesome FOSS alternative look no further than Stickies.

4367

Best Dialog Extender / Re: Enhanced File Dialog

« Last post by Darwin on October 07, 2007, 11:55 AM »

You're right - I am in places-bar modifiication withdrawal, but am surviving so far. I no longer have either Direct Folders or File-Ex installed on any machines and might dust their installers off to take them for a spin, as well.

EFD does have an exclusion mechanism but for whatever reason excluding the exe for the 16 bit app didn't do the trick. I suspect I needed to reboot for it to work... However, having been looking for some time for an excuse to deep six all Stardock software from my system, I seized the opportunity and did so! WRT notepad - it's actually metapad that was having the problem (I've replaced notepad on my system with metapad), which I use to open txt files for quick viewing (ultraedit for editing).

4368

Best Dialog Extender / Re: Enhanced File Dialog

« Last post by Darwin on October 07, 2007, 08:30 AM »

Just an update - I uninstalled Enhanced Dialogs this morning... I'm a bit gutted about doing so BUT it has resoved two issues on my notebook, one hoped for and one entirely unexpected. I have a 16 bit program that refused to cough up any open, save or other "browse to a location" type dialogs. Ripping out Enhanced Dialogs resolved that issue nicely. Removing it ALSO got rid of a seriously annoying problem that I was having and that I had never connected to ED: whenever I tried to open or save files in Notepad (and a restricted set of other applications, the names of which escape me), I would be asked to log into first a webdav folder that I use for work and then into my MS Live account. I had to hit cancel a number of times in order be able to perform the operation that I wanted to perform. It was very annoying, not to mention disturbing, and now it's gone...

I've reverted back to XFilesDialog and it doesn't feature either of these annoyances.

4369

Living Room / Re: DC get together in Western Europe?! July 2007?

« Last post by Darwin on October 06, 2007, 02:04 PM »

Lost that hat the day after I got back home to Canada.

And Canada thanks you! 

-cranioscopical (October 06, 2007, 12:44 PM)

Cheeky. Very cheeky. Point taken, though. I actually hate "ball caps" but that one was nice because it was completely free of any branding...

4370

General Software Discussion / Re: download managers: what is the best for mass-downloading all mp3s in a site?

« Last post by Darwin on October 06, 2007, 11:35 AM »

Aaron's Web Vacuum is another in the same vein as Neodownloader. Shareware though...

4371

Living Room / Re: OK - lets get to know each other... who are you, what do you do, where from?

« Last post by Darwin on October 05, 2007, 09:08 PM »

Yes - welcome to the site Old Master Sailor 

4372

Living Room / Re: DC get together in Western Europe?! July 2007?

« Last post by Darwin on October 05, 2007, 05:06 PM »

Just to close off the "guess who is who" part of this thread - Tomos is the fellow in orange and I am the more corpulent fellow in blue on the right...



Lost that hat the day after I got back home to Canada. Bugger.

4373

Living Room / Re: DC Unofficial Meeting #5 Took Place - Veign and Mouser meet

« Last post by Darwin on October 05, 2007, 04:58 PM »

Anyway, back on topic - love the picture, mouser. Thanks for posting it. I had a beard a bit further along than yours circa 1999/2000 and at the three week point was going out of my mind because of the itchiness. Endured that for about 2 days and shaved it off. My face has been hair free ever since. Nice to see what Veign looks like, too!

João - ROFLMAO!

4374

Living Room / Re: DC Unofficial Meeting #5 Took Place - Veign and Mouser meet

« Last post by Darwin on October 05, 2007, 04:51 PM »

Well... I *DO* love Irish beer and whiskey  

Still, makes me wonder: what DOES someone Irish look like?! (Well, except for like me, of course!).

4375

Living Room / Re: DC Unofficial Meeting #5 Took Place - Veign and Mouser meet

« Last post by Darwin on October 05, 2007, 04:43 PM »

Hmmm... the consensus seems to be that I am in the orange tee and tomos is in the blue tee with hat and sunglasses. Right, there it is then (except for the annoying detail that Tom is on the left of the picture and I am on the right...)