Recent Posts

4551

Living Room / How much does the internet weigh?

« Last post by app103 on June 01, 2007, 09:05 PM »

How heavy is information? Most of us know that computers represent all types of information—e-mails, documents, video clips, Web pages, everything—as streams of binary digits, 1s and 0s. These digits are mathematical entities, but they are also tangible ones: They are embodied and manipulated as voltages in electronic circuits. Therefore, every bit of data must have some mass, albeit minuscule. This prompted DISCOVER to ask the question: How much would all the data sent through the Internet on an average day weigh?

http://discovermagaz...e_view?b_start:int=0

4552

General Software Discussion / Re: Pocket PC utility that allows price comparison for groceries/toys/gadgets?

« Last post by app103 on May 29, 2007, 11:00 AM »

Do the latest pocket pc's still come with Pocket Excel?

I would just make a spreadsheet in that with all the stores,dates, items, and prices.

You could make seperate ones for groceries, toys, etc.

You didn't specify what OS and CPU your pocket pc has. (mine has WinCE 3.0, pocket pc 2000, SH3 cpu, as an example) What would be a good solution might run on one pocket pc but not another.

4553

Delphi and C++ Builder / Re: Getting Started With Borland C++ Builder Q& A ?

« Last post by app103 on May 29, 2007, 10:46 AM »

Some of those are found in the C++ Builder 6 help file...in the text editor tutorial.

When beginning with C++ Builder, it is a good idea to start with that tutorial and do that project....then hit the rest of the help file...then google.

In case your version of C++ Builder doesn't come with the text editor tutorial, you can get a copy of the v6 help files here (have to register for free):  http://cc.codegear.com/item/24339

4554

Living Room / Re: Sony's special screw will make your everyday screws blush in shame!

« Last post by app103 on May 28, 2007, 01:34 PM »

What makes it so special is that it doesn't come with a root-kit. 

4555

Site/Forum Features / Re: ReadMe: Find out and rant about bad companies

« Last post by app103 on May 27, 2007, 07:33 PM »

Here is another good one for complaining (or complimenting) about any company, online or offline:

http://www.planetfeedback.com

 

Be sure to read their guide about how to file a good complaint:
http://www.planetfee...&topic_id=298309

4556

Living Room / Re: Why don't you pay for software?

« Last post by app103 on May 26, 2007, 04:40 PM »

The question was "Why don't you pay for software?"

That question in and of itself doesn't imply that one uses pirated software.

I interpreted that question to mean "Why would you use freeware? And why would you choose not to support the software you use?"

I love small single purpose tools. I don't like opening a swiss army knife and hunting for just the tool I need, or worse yet, having to have multiple swiss army knives with duplication of tools just to make sure I have everything I need.

Most of these single purpose tools that I use are freeware. In the cases where there is an option to choose either a freeware application or a payware application for the same purpose, I will usually go for the freeware one as long as it does its job well and it's stable.

I do try to support the software I love, but I can't always afford to do that.

This question, to me, would be very similar to asking "Why do you eat at home instead of a restaurant?" or "Why do you shop in discount stores instead of the big department stores?" "Why would you buy used items instead of new?" "Why do you keep using something old and outdated instead of replacing it with new?" or "Why would you continue to use the older version of a program rather than paying again and upgrading it?"

And I guess the real answer to all those questions would have to be this:

I am frugal, sometimes to the point where it can be considered a fault....or an art form.

Don't misunderstand. I am not stingy, not by far. I am quite generous when I have something I can be generous with.

If I could pay for software with pizza, I think there would be a lot more really fat programmers in this world. 

I could bake cookies for the developers and mail them, but it would make more sense to me to send them the money I would have spent on postage by paypal and just skip the baking. And most of the time I can't even afford the postage.

I can afford email, though...and encouraging words, and I know how much they are worth. Their value is more than the average person thinks. 

4557

General Software Discussion / Re: Magnetic by Incredimail - Dare I try it?

« Last post by app103 on May 26, 2007, 04:33 PM »

This is from their privacy policy:

OUR USE OF THE INFORMATION YOU PROVIDE
IncrediMail will only use information that is provided in order to provide Users with importantinformation about the Software (such as upgrades, modifications, etc.)and to announce new products and services available to Users.Except as necessary to perform the functions of the Software and/or Site, IncrediMail will not share, sell or lease any personally identifiable information about any Userto any unaffiliated third party for any purpose without that User's permission.

Non- Personally Identifiable Information
IncrediMail will use certain non-personally identifiable information provide by Users for the following purposes: To create aggregate, non-personal, demographic reports about the Users of Magentic. Provide Users with certain content that may be of interest to that User based on the information the User provides.

GENERAL USAGE PATTERNS
IncrediMail may gather information related generally to Users' use of the Software, and Site including without limitation: current wallpaper, current screensaver, Magentic manager open and close time, Magentic tray startand end time. This information, which will only be collected and maintained in aggregate, anonymous form, will be used to, among other things: Provide IncrediMail with a better understanding of how Users use the Software and the various features thereof; Help IncrediMail to create and provide new services and offerings to Users; and Conduct and publish aggregate, anonymous, market research results.

COMPUTER SETTINGS
Magentic may collect settings, technical and other information from Users' computers, such as a computer's operating system, browser versions used, various communication parameters and other information related to the operation and interaction of the Software, subject to the provisions herein. This information will neither contain nor be linked to any personally identifiable information.

CONSENT TO PROCESSING
Users, including without limitation, Users in the European Union, fully understand and unambiguously consent to the collection and processing of their non-personally identifiable information, in the United States.

The bolding of text was my doing, to emphasize certain points.


While they promise not to share or sell your personally identifiable information, they don't agree to the same with the other information they are gathering from your system. And they do admit they will be gathering information. They are also a bit vague on the limits of their gathering, mentioning only examples but also stating that they are not limited to those examples.

Sure sounds like it could be spyware to me if it phones home telling them about you and your system and what you are doing with it.

This company has a reputation of spyware...spyware you pay to use. As long as they are still distributing at least one spyware product, how can you trust any of their other products?

Have you ever noticed that their email client is never included in any serious reviews and comparisons of email software? Why is that?

It's because nobody takes their products seriously unless it's to warn people to stay away from them.

Personally, for me, I wouldn't trust anything from the company till they got serious about cleaning up their software, and their reputation, in ALL of their products.

Provide Users with certain content that may be of interest to that User based on the information the User provides.

What exactly does that mean? What kind of content? Ads maybe? And if so, where are those ads going to be presented and in what way?

Too many questions and not enough answers for a product released by a less than reputable company.

4558

Living Room / reCaptcha: Stopping spam while digitizing books

« Last post by app103 on May 26, 2007, 03:30 AM »

We have all seen captcha text...everywhere.

Carnegie Mellon University has come up with one with a bit of a twist that they call reCaptcha.

While helping to stop spam and ensuring that a human is actually submitting a response, it is also helping to digitize books. (currently helping Internet Archive)

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

The service is free, and they even have one specifically for protecting your email address on a website.

http://recaptcha.net/

4559

General Software Discussion / Re: Warning about a new software company scamming people

« Last post by app103 on May 25, 2007, 08:30 PM »

Report a Spam Result to Google

4560

Living Room / Re: How do you auto-forward all IMAP mail?

« Last post by app103 on May 25, 2007, 04:19 AM »

I have no control over the domain...can't set up any sort of forwarding there.

I have IMAP but no POP. Until Gmail supports fetching mail from IMAP accounts, it's not an option to let them handle it for me. I wish it was an option.

If there is some sort of email client that can handle IMAP, grab my mail, and forward it to another email address, and do this automatically through some sort of rules I can set up, this would be fine with me.

But I don't want to go trying a million email clients just to find out they work as ineffectively as OE. That's why I am asking here.

4561

Living Room / Re: How do you auto-forward all IMAP mail?

« Last post by app103 on May 24, 2007, 11:49 PM »

How does your mail get to the IMAP accounts (are they fixed email addresses that you must use or are they associated with you web hosting account?). If they are related to your webhosting account you could perhaps redirect the mail by changing the mail server you use.

-Carol Haynes (May 24, 2007, 07:30 PM)

Fixed email addresses. I can't change the mail server I use.

Another method would be to use Yahoo mail which includes email forwarding. You could use the web based email as your IMAP style access from anywhere and have all your mail forwarded to one central mailbox which you can collect in your mail app via POP mail.

Yahoo is not an option. These are email addresses that I have had for about 8 years. I can't just dump them in favor of something else, which is why I need to forward the mail.

Your ideas on how useful Yahoo can be, expresses my feelings towards gmail, and the reason why I want to forward this stuff to my gmail account if possible. (I use only the webmail though)

4562

Developer's Corner / Re: Why Ruby is so great and why I'll pass and wait for the next big thing..

« Last post by app103 on May 24, 2007, 07:05 AM »

Coming from Delphi where I see things like this all the time:

Code: Delphi [Select]

1. begin
2.   Form1.Label1.Caption := 'Hello';
3.   Form1.Label1.Font.Color := clBlue;
4. end;

looking at something like this brings out an instinctive 'WTF?' followed by a near meltdown of my brain:

Code: Ruby [Select]

1. 20.minutes.ago

 

4563

Living Room / Re: How do you auto-forward all IMAP mail?

« Last post by app103 on May 24, 2007, 06:21 AM »

I don't need any type of webmail extensions to get my mail from my IMAP accounts, or send mail from them. They will work in any email client that can handle IMAP.

The problem I have is automatically forwarding everything that comes in to another email address. I tried it with OE and it didn't work because the stuff from the IMAP accounts don't end up in the main inbox. They end up in 4 seperate IMAP folders (1 for each account), which each have their own inbox subfolder.

OE can't apply rules to those other inbox folders, just the main one, which my email never hits. I have even tried manually dragging & dropping them to the main inbox folder, and then applying rules, but it did nothing. No mail was sent out.

Does Thunderbird handle IMAP folders differently?

4564

Living Room / Re: How do you auto-forward all IMAP mail?

« Last post by app103 on May 24, 2007, 06:07 AM »

Yes, free is all I can afford right now. 

4565

Living Room / How do you auto-forward all IMAP mail?

« Last post by app103 on May 24, 2007, 05:26 AM »

I have a group of IMAP email accounts. (4 of them to be exact)

How would I go about getting the new mail from all of them and forwarding it all to another email address so I can have everything in one inbox? (gmail)

The service I have my IMAP accounts with does not offer any type of automatic forwarding. Gmail doesn't offer automatic retrieval for IMAP, only POP.

I don't care if I have to run something to download the mail and then upload it again, as long as it can be done automatically, so I never have to go manually check those accounts ever again.

I want to be able to consolidate everything into one mailbox instead of logging into so many or using webmail + an email client to get all my mail. I would prefer to just use one gmail webmail account. I already have things set up in gmail to be able to reply and send mail as these IMAP accounts' email addresses. The only thing left is to be able to get the mail into my gmail inbox.

Does anybody have any creative ideas on how to go about doing this?

4566

Developer's Corner / Re: Why Ruby is so great and why I'll pass and wait for the next big thing..

« Last post by app103 on May 24, 2007, 03:51 AM »

Great post!

I'm afriad I'm in the same camp, and I agree 100%,...
I actually bit through the apple and spent a week exploring ruby and rails, by the end of it, the syntax was driving me crazy. I think they want code to look like plain English, but code doesn't look like plain English for a reason. Eventually, I told myself 'never again. Ruby isn't for me'.

-Gothi[c] (May 24, 2007, 03:16 AM)

If that's what they want, why aren't they programming in Plain English?

4567

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Quick Thumbnail (an online approach)

« Last post by app103 on May 23, 2007, 06:55 PM »

Well, he did learn a bit more about using GD, so it wasn't a total waste of time.

4568

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Quick Thumbnail (an online approach)

« Last post by app103 on May 23, 2007, 06:45 PM »

I spent about an hour trying to talk him into downloading irfanview.

He didn't want to install anything on his pc to do it and he couldn't figure out how to batch resize in Photoshop.

After he attempted his own script on his server and running into probs with file sizes and couldn't figure out why, he gave up and finally followed my advice. 

What he was trying to do was write a script so he would be able to upload the originals, they would be automatically resized and stored, for his mom to download later.

He had a ton of 3008x2000 photos. Resizing them to 500 pixel width with his script, he was getting internal server errors...but it worked fine with 100 pixel width.

4569

Living Room / Re: Define passive-aggressive

« Last post by app103 on May 23, 2007, 04:47 PM »

an example would be telling your roomate that you wish you had been able to get more schoolwork done but it's hard for you to concentrate when there is a lot of noise (it's *passive* aggressive because what you are really *wanting* to say to roomate is: stop playing your music so loud!).

-mouser (May 23, 2007, 03:45 PM)

That would be an example of being polite. 

I think a more accurate example would be if you ask someone to do something, and rather than them telling you they don't want to do it, they agree to do it but then take forever to do it, so essentially, it never gets done. Or they deliberately do it badly so you'll never ask them again. They don't have the guts to tell you 'no'...but their actions are conveying their thoughts & feelings in a passive-aggressive way.

It allows them to get out of doing something they don't want to do, without being confrontational about it.

A perfect example would be the old Bill Cosby story about his wife asking him to make the kids breakfast. He doesn't want to, but she is in a bad mood so he doesn't dare tell her that. Instead, he goes downstairs and feeds them all chocolate cake. When she finds out and freaks out, his reasoning behind it was that cake contains eggs, milk, flour...all the things in pancakes...it's nutritious...and then adds that they wanted the chocolate cake...they asked for it (blaming the kids for his screw up). So she never asks him to make breakfast again, because she doesn't want him to screw it up again. 

4570

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Quick Thumbnail (an online approach)

« Last post by app103 on May 23, 2007, 02:43 PM »

Bulk upload support? Where is that and how does that work?

I have a friend that is in dire need of something to batch resize a bunch of pics from his camera. But all I can see on the page is uploading 1 file at a time.

Actually, he may be in touch with you very soon as it's a large amount of pics that need resizing...almost a gig.

4571

Living Room / Re: Calling for help - again !

« Last post by app103 on May 23, 2007, 07:26 AM »

If you can boot into a French XP, can you change the default language within Windows to US English?

In Control Panel it would be Regional and Language Options (at least that is what it is in English.)

I think the problem might be with the keyboard drivers not being loaded yet when you see that selection window. This happens sometimes with usb keyboards and mice...the drivers not being loaded till Windows loads. I don't recall it happening with laptop keyboards, at least not with my daughter's HP laptop.

Do the directional arrow keys work in the bios setup at all? Can you even access the bios setup? (I am thinking there could be a problem with that, if the keyboard won't work till you are in Windows.)

If there is a problem, is there any way to plug a ps/2 keyboard in? That might be a possible work around.

4572

Living Room / Re: Why don't you pay for software?

« Last post by app103 on May 23, 2007, 06:50 AM »

There are no linux developers, so they don't have to worry about earning a living. Don't you know that all linux software is free and comes from magical software fairies? Don't pay any attention to the PayPal button on the website. It's just there to hold the website together. It's magical. If you remove it, the whole site falls apart.</sarcasm>

4573

General Software Discussion / Re: Software for planning wood bookcases/cabinets/tables etc?

« Last post by app103 on May 23, 2007, 06:37 AM »

Personally I don't like wood glue. It's too runny and it has a very weak bond.

I prefer something called Velverette, but as far as I know, they don't make it any more and I have not found a suitable replacement for it yet.

Good thing I still have a few jars of it.  

I discovered it when I was going to school for floral design. (it was marketed as a floral adhesive...alternative to hot glue)

I use it anywhere that crazy glue, 10 ton epoxy, or duct tape is unsuitable or won't work.

It's very thick (thicker than the typical tacky glue),very tacky, dries clear, and has a slow enough drying time to allow you to adjust things properly.

It comes in a jar. You have to dip a paint brush or wooden skewer in there to get it out. Cleaning up the excess is very easy with a damp paper towel.

I have used it to glue towel racks to ceramic tile in a location where humidity and moisture are a concern. (I may have to remove them some day, since I rent, and I can do this without damaging the tiles) The towel racks have held strong for about 10 years, so far.

I have used it to hold the wood & hinge together on a closet door after it split and the hinge & a piece of the wood fell off.

It holds screws into my walls.

It is holding my desk together in many places, including the little knobs that my keyboard tray rests on.

4574

General Software Discussion / Re: Software for planning wood bookcases/cabinets/tables etc?

« Last post by app103 on May 23, 2007, 12:32 AM »

I like the idea too...but I think the 'books' need to be more personal.

my suggestions:

• Donationware for Dummies
  
• Mouser's guide to running an IRC mental hospital
  
• Coin Collecting for Birds - by Cody

4575

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Emulate a green monitor to reduce eye strain.

« Last post by app103 on May 22, 2007, 02:41 AM »

I am not too sure exactly what the problem is, except that I would have to compare reading text on a LCD to being about the same as reading a book under flourescent light. Not something I can do for any length of time without my eyes burning and feeling like I have sand in them.

And even though I have ClearType turned on, the text really isn't all that clear.

Reading on a CRT is much easier for me. The text is much cleaner, sharper. My eyes feel much more relaxed.