Recent Posts

5226

General Software Discussion / Re: how can I convert swf files to avi?

« Last post by 4wd on April 28, 2009, 01:20 AM »

If I have to, I use: Pazera FLV to AVI Converter

It actually uses ffmpeg for the conversion so it'll accept almost anything for input and you have the ability to set up and save various profiles for following conversions.

5227

Living Room / Re: Hard drive cooler: I need one (badly) - recommendations?

« Last post by 4wd on April 28, 2009, 12:46 AM »

If they're getting that hot then the case is poorly ventilated and/or poorly designed and/or the HDDs are poorly positioned.

A cheap solution:
Move the HDDs towards the back as far as they'll go, (drill a couple more holes in the mount if you have to), and position an 80mm fan in front of them so that it blows air back over them.  Mount it with double-sided foam tape.

But your problem is still poor case ventilation, you'll now have a load more hot air to get rid of.

Software: SpeedFan

BTW, if the HDDs are that old and running that hot NOW is the time to backup all the data on them and replace them.

EDIT: Alternative software available for free: O&O DriveLED2

5228

General Software Discussion / Re: Tool for editing mp4 videos

« Last post by 4wd on April 23, 2009, 08:11 PM »

Avidemux can do basic cut/trim operations on MPEG4-AVC without doing re-encodes, (at least it did when I just tried it).

There are a few caveats though:
1) There's no guarantee you can open it successfully not using Safe Mode - if you use Safe Mode you may lose A/V sync.
2) Cuts should be performed on keyframes (Frame type I). More specifically set the A point on an I frame and the B point on the frame before the next I frame for the section you want to cut.
3) Make sure the video ends up starting on a keyframe.

Then just set the Video/Audio to Copy, Format to MP4, (must be the same as input format), and save.



If you want to do pasting then you may have to slice'n'dice the original video and then append the sections how you want them.

Experiment, I don't do MP4-AVC encodes because my standalone only handles MPEG4-ASP and for that Avidemux works fine.

5229

Living Room / Re: Is your online life in your will? (Backups, passwords, etc.)

« Last post by 4wd on April 23, 2009, 05:28 PM »

Well, far be it for me to encroach on some good-ole family ravings and destruction when they discover their son's perversion, but lest my collection be harmed, maybe I should consider the protection of my own software stash if he should croak. I'm sure there are many people with items stored at their friend's places that might have issues with the rels if they didn't know about them. In any case, and in particular this case, I'm thinking that his solution should be to keep a copy of his financial data on an external server, make the info relatively easy for the rels to get at, and Really tighten down the security of that collection, just in case. And possibly a living will. And a note about my collection (and maybe throw in that stand-alone William's Defender game machine .

-DDRAMbo (April 23, 2009, 03:53 PM)

Wouldn't it be a lot easier to just store the 'artistic' collection on an external encrypted HDD?

Just unplug it when people come to visit, (to avoid "what's on here?" questions), and if he snuffs it then the relatives won't be able to access it anyway.

5230

Living Room / Re: Is your online life in your will? (Backups, passwords, etc.)

« Last post by 4wd on April 21, 2009, 11:00 PM »

It was a Windows application called Dead Man's Switch.

-40hz (April 10, 2009, 10:59 PM)

The only obvious problem to that program was that it was required to be running on a PC - how many of your relatives are going to leave a PC running in your house after you snuff it?
The damn vultures will be in there and picking at your stuff before your corpse has cooled.

Unless the time out was set to a really short time, (24 hours at most I would think), it's probably not very useful.

Although I do like the idea that it'll encrypt data automatically on time out, it would probably have been better to encrypt it in the first place.

Fear not:

My Last Email
Dead Man's Switch
The Rapture Letters
The Post-Rapture Post

5231

Living Room / Re: Recommend to me the BEST USB stick to get

« Last post by 4wd on April 20, 2009, 08:07 PM »

Another thing to consider is do you want to buy it now with the USB 3.0 standard due out so soon?  It might take a while for the tech to propagate, sure, but it will be faster (that you can pretty much guarantee) and it should be backward compatible as well IIRC.  Just a thought...

-steeladept (April 19, 2009, 04:28 AM)

Is that really going to be much of an issue? USB2 is 480mbit, and enve though it's hard reaching the full 60mbyte/s sustained through USB, isn't that plenty bandwidth for pendrives? How fast are the fastest now, anyway?

-f0dder (April 20, 2009, 06:11 PM)

About 30MB/s IIRC - it's the write speed that's the killer ATM, usually about half, (if you're lucky), that.

Actually, considering I've seen external USB2 HDD's hit a sustained 25MB/s reading and around 20MB/s writing, Flash Drives are pretty crap.

5232

Living Room / Re: Recommend to me the BEST USB stick to get

« Last post by 4wd on April 20, 2009, 08:20 AM »

and just for fun.....

http://usb.brando.co...il.php?prod_id=00179

http://www.itechnews...paw-usb-flash-drive/

http://www.techfresh...ail-usb-flash-drive/

-CleverCat (April 20, 2009, 01:16 AM)

Funky, Useful, Fashionable and just plain old Hard to Lose.

DealExtreme have got you covered 

5233

General Software Discussion / Re: How to subvert Big Brother's blocking of URL shorteners?

« Last post by 4wd on April 19, 2009, 05:43 PM »

It's not just spy site blocking that Zone Alarm does. It also injects code into every page in your browser (at least it did last time I used it) and the scripts that code contains can sometimes clash badly with legitimate js scripts used on a page.

-app103 (April 19, 2009, 02:03 PM)

Just one reason why I no longer use it, (even though I had two paid licenses for ZA Pro), another was how much the later versions all seemed to impact network throughput, (especially increasing my game lag - that's a NO NO!!), and just generally bog down the whole system - even when all the crap except for the basic firewall was turned off.

5234

Living Room / Re: copying files over a school network

« Last post by 4wd on April 19, 2009, 05:06 PM »

What about setting some tasks in Yadis Backup, (one for each destination) ?

Then the teacher just drops what they want copied into a folder on their desktop, Yadis sees the change and copies to all the other PCs as soon as the path is available.

It says it backs up to almost anywhere so you could try to specify \\PC\path\path\path\folder etc.

EDIT: Seems to work, files are copied almost immediately.  Just don't set it to recreate the directory structure.

NOTE: It doesn't keep the directories synced, deletions on the watched directory won't be replicated on the student machines - you didn't ask for that.

5235

Living Room / Re: GhostNet - The Facts

« Last post by 4wd on April 18, 2009, 08:25 PM »

Woohoo!!!!

I'm safe!!!!!



I have no social life!!!!!!

5236

Living Room / Re: Tech News Weekly: Edition 16-09

« Last post by 4wd on April 18, 2009, 07:55 PM »

4. The American ISPs are grabbing some ideas from Australian ISPs......COOL!!! 

You better prepare yourself for $80/month Unlimited^* ADSL2+/Cable/Fibre Optic Broadband folks.







* Subject to terms of the Fair Usage Policy, customers deemed "heavy users" will have their connection shaped to 64k/64k.  <- Reproduced actual size.

5237

General Software Discussion / Re: Recommended image backup/recovery solution for a netbook (no CD drive)

« Last post by 4wd on April 18, 2009, 05:44 AM »

Here it's just that it's still a bit unclear to me whether I have to download just "Microsoft's Windows XP Embedded SP2 Feature Pack 2007" since Microsoft webpage says it's an option of another component that I don't have ("The Windows XP Embedded Service Pack 2 Feature Pack 2007 is not a stand alone product; it requires the developer to have Windows® Embedded Studio tool suite installed").

-MerleOne (April 18, 2009, 04:28 AM)

The Gran Turing site gives you details on how to extract the necessary files from Windows XP Embedded Service Pack 2 Feature Pack 2007 - no other part of XP Embedded is required.  No installation of the Feature Pack is required - we're only interested in 10 or so files within it.

Also this component is in English, whereas I will be using a French localized XP, and sometimes it yields to strange results to mix languages.

The language it's in doesn't matter because the only parts we're interested in, (EWF and FBWF), are an underlying OS component you never get to see - they have no interface.  Just like 90+% of Windows XP itself.

Then I also have to chose between EWF and FBWF. And the software to activate them.

If your system partition is going to be NTFS format then EWF is what you need as it fully supports NTFS.  If it's going to be FAT32, then you can use either - the differences between them are listed here.

5238

General Software Discussion / Re: Recommended image backup/recovery solution for a netbook (no CD drive)

« Last post by 4wd on April 17, 2009, 06:11 PM »

It's just that EWF seems a little bit more elaborate to set up.  But I have not read yet all the links you mentioned.

-MerleOne (April 17, 2009, 10:16 AM)

For me it was, quite literally, 5 minutes work - I'm not saying I'm super smart or anything, (would be nice though ), but by the time I'd read through the instructions/limitations/etc of SteadyState, EWF was installed and running.

However, some kind soul has created a tool that takes all the hard work out of installing EWF - check out EWFTool.

NOTE: You still need to download the Windows XP Embedded SP2 mentioned in the other thread but I'm sure if you do a search¹ you'll be able to find just the necessary files.

This OCZ forum post contains a lot of info regarding doing it the manual way and using EWFTool.  (NOTE: Unless you truly understand what minlogon.exe is and does, ignore any reference to installing it.)

1. Hint: Google

5239

General Software Discussion / Re: Recommended image backup/recovery solution for a netbook (no CD drive)

« Last post by 4wd on April 17, 2009, 08:05 AM »

Thanks both.  I forgot to mention the netbook has a 160GB HDD

Regarding the Microsoft EWF, I suppose it is equivalent, more or less to SteadyState, which has been found to improve SSD usage by some ?

-MerleOne (April 17, 2009, 07:22 AM)

I had a quick look at SteadyState while I was looking for something similar but found EWF did everything I wanted and was a lot easier to set up and control afterwards.

5240

General Software Discussion / Re: Recommended image backup/recovery solution for a netbook (no CD drive)

« Last post by 4wd on April 16, 2009, 08:26 PM »

I have an Acer Aspire One, only the 8GB SSD model, (expanded with a 4GB SDHC card), not a HDD like you but maybe my solution might give you some ideas.

For drive image backup/restoration I use Partimage Is Not Ghost, (which is akin to the original Norton Ghost restore/backup bootable floppy), on a bootable 2GB Flash Drive, using compression I can store a compressed image of both my current XP Pro+SP3 install and a compressed image of the original Linpus Lite installation.

The XP Pro+SP3 installation is highly nlite'ned and with compression the image comes in at around 400MB, less than the Linpus image at ~600MB.  This still leaves with over 600MB free on a 2GB Flash Drive for any subsequent backups.

It can also backup to a network share via SAMBA, so you can save/restore from another computer and don't need to carry any more than a basic restoration image if it dies while you're on the road.

Regarding using FD-ISR or similar, I suggest having a look at either Microsoft's Enhanced Write Filter or File Based Write Filter as I mentioned over here.

Using EWF you could redirect all writes to the System drive, (C:), to a directory on the data partition or create a separate partition specifically for it.  The next time you reboot the System partition will come up sans any changes you made last time - unless you commit those changes to the drive.

As I said above, might not be suitable for what you specifically want to do but it comes in at the right price - free.   

5241

General Software Discussion / Re: A Vista printer utility that saves ink like InkSaver?

« Last post by 4wd on April 16, 2009, 06:16 AM »

How about ecoPrint2 ?



$39.99 for the Ink and Toner Saver or $59.99 for the Pro version which adds a few more bells and whistles but it does say Vista 32bit compatible.

Can always try it and see if it's worth the money.

Seriously, though, to address the OP's original question, I'm not aware of an InkSaver-type app for Vista.

-Darwin (April 15, 2009, 08:00 AM)

I thought you'd learnt¹ by now Darwin: Google. 

* Result number 6 *

EDIT: And way, way down the results was a link to a printer that was for sale, ( ....what's he on about?), which had a reference to this: 4X Ultrasaver



1. A not so obvious reference to this previous post.

5242

General Software Discussion / Re: alternatives to firstDefense ISR

« Last post by 4wd on April 13, 2009, 09:07 PM »

NOTE: Only applicable to 32bit Windows XP/Vista, which possibly means it should work on 32bit versions of Home Server, Server 2003 and Server 2008.

There is a possible free alternative to these programs which I am using at the moment on my Acer Aspire One to save it's SSD, (which is only 8GB and rather slow), but it does mean some of your RAM is no longer available for program use.

Basically, you use Microsoft's own EWF, (Enhanced Write Filter), or FBWF, (File Based Write Filter), to redirect writes away from your system partition to a section of RAM.
Both filters are part of Microsoft's Windows XP Embedded SP2 Feature Pack 2007, which is a 131MB free download.

Once you have your system set the way you want, you activate the filter, (which one is dependent on the filesystem you're using, FAT32 or NTFS), all subsequent writes from the next reboot go to RAM.  Any subsequent reboots return the system to the state it was when EWF/FBWF was enabled.

My AAO has 1.5GB of RAM, 384MB has been allocated to EWF writes and the pagefile has been turned off, of course it doesn't run any really memory hungry apps like a desktop would but because all the writes now go to RAM it sure has sped it up a hell of a lot

There is also a couple of third-party utilities, (EWF and FBWF), available that allow you to:
- Enable and Disable the filter
- Commit any changes to the physical drive
- Commit changes and Disable
- Clear the last command

These commands are executed at shutdown/reboot - so if you choose to Commit Changes, when you shutdown the system any changes to the system drive are written from RAM to the physical HDD and will appear next reboot.

The EWF fully supports FAT32/NTFS and allows you to choose to send subsequent writes to either RAM or a separate HDD partition somewhere, (if you can't afford the RAM).
More info on it can be found here.

More info on the FBWF can be found here.

Info on the differences between them can be found here.

I think both filters work with Vista, the only problem being that they are most likely 32bit only.

Attached is instructions, (from MP3Car forums), for enabling FBWF on XP Pro and over at GranTuring you can find info on where to find and how to install EWF.

With EWF you can also implement HORM, (Hibernate Once, Resume Many), which can be found a little further down the GranTuring page above.

Anyway, it might not be suitable for what you want, (or even apply to the particular Windows OS you're using), but it does implement a similar concept to what Deep Freeze, Shadow Protect, etc, do without spending a lot - so maybe it will help someone else who has the requisite OS.

EDIT: It appears EWF does work with Vista as mentioned in this post from MP3Car.com.
        More info on installing EWF.

Added big NOTE at top.

5243

Living Room / Re: Tech News Weekly: Edition 15-09

« Last post by 4wd on April 12, 2009, 08:43 PM »

OH
MY
GOD
How did I not think of that? *crawls in a hole and dies*.

Ehtyar.

-Ehtyar (April 12, 2009, 08:41 PM)

Call me paranoid and give me a tin foil hat but it was the first thing I thought of when it was announced 

5244

Living Room / Re: Tech News Weekly: Edition 15-09

« Last post by 4wd on April 12, 2009, 08:38 PM »

5. All the easier to implement the nationwide ISP mandatory censored internet access since they only have to make it a clause in the contract for any ISP who wants to use it.


Not to mention given the current state of ISP costs in this country, it'll be something like:

$50/month for 100Mb with an included 50MB of downloads..................then shaped to 64k/64k or $10/GB afterwards.

5245

Living Room / Re: XP-iso for reinstall after crash ? Dell Precision 380

« Last post by 4wd on April 12, 2009, 08:31 PM »

Important change-note.  I may well have been wrong on that.  The wording on the CD was unclear, it may well be a fresh install, so that would make the rest of the following moot for my XP.  In fact I think I did use it that way once before a year or more ago ! After a Vundo infection and some other difficulties if I remember. Although even if so the questions below may still remain for future reference on other systems.

-Steven Avery (April 12, 2009, 07:07 PM)

Just have a look at the CD structure, if it's the same as a normal XP install CD then the chances are it is.



In which case you can do a repair install over the top of the existing installation.

If the i386 directory exists on the HDD then you can recreate a install disk as shown here: Create XP Install Disc

Borrow someone else's XP Home/Pro, (depends on your version), and do a repair install - or a full install using your CD key, (usually on a sticker on the PC).

Download a XP iso and use your CD key.

5246

Living Room / Re: Some DC forum-related Greasemonkey Scripts

« Last post by 4wd on April 10, 2009, 07:12 AM »

Sorry for not responding sooner.

-ewemoa (April 10, 2009, 01:55 AM)

No problem, faster than I usually take to answer an email

The way the script currently works is by picking out portions of various pages using XPath expressions.  It turns out that the various pages on the forums are...well, varied in structure   I didn't manage to come up with a single XPath expression (or a few) to handle all cases, so at the moment, it's pretty much a matter of adding support for additional page "types" piece-meal.

I thought it was pretty much that way and looked into fiddling with it to get it to 'work across the board'......until I saw that the forum pages weren't very consistent 

5247

Living Room / Re: Should I switch from xp to vista?

« Last post by 4wd on April 08, 2009, 06:53 PM »

So right now I have xp x64 with 4 gigs of ram.
I like to play games on my computer (that is the main thing I do on my computer)
Most of the world (including microsoft themselves) don't really support xp 64 bit much anymore.
So my question here is, should I switch to windows vista, and if so, should I stick with 64 bit, or loose some of my ram and use 32 bit.
I don't know that I want to switch or not though, because my brother has vista x64 on his computer at work with 4 gigs of ram, and the computer is new and a fairly good computer, and he says it runs kind of slow. I want to be able to play games still, but I would like to have an operating system that is still supported by the world.

Bottom line: Windows vista(x64 (supported by the world, xp x64 not supported by the world)) should I switch, or just stick with my xp x64?

-nite_monkey (April 08, 2009, 06:45 PM)

Downgrade to XP 32bit?

Almost all of my LAN meeting, game playing, fellow night loving friends still use XP Pro 32bit over every other version of Windows.

Of the 2 or 3 that use a laptop that came with Vista, they've all gone back to XP Pro.

5248

Living Room / Re: OS Re-install Tips?

« Last post by 4wd on April 08, 2009, 03:26 AM »

I always back up my Firefox profile every day so it's ready to put back after reinstall! Saves hours of work...

4wd I'm having problems transferring my FF profile to the portable one - any tips? Copying it over doesn't seem to work...

-CleverCat (April 07, 2009, 02:13 AM)

In what way?

Run PortableFirefox once so it can set up the directory structure.

Copy everything in , (I'm going to get this wrong since I haven't used the normal version for well over a year), "x:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\default.???????" to "<path to>\FirefoxPortable\Data\profile".

So you end up with all the various directories and files in the profile directory as per:



Then delete the file "<path to>\FirefoxPortable\Data\settings\FirefoxPortableSettings.ini" and then run PortableFirefox again.

That should be all.

Also, from the help:

Sometimes, certain profiles will cause the launcher to fail or hang. It's best to give it a few minutes to see if it's just checking compatiblity and adjusting the locations of the extensions before giving up on it. If it fails, it is usually due to an incompatible extension.

5249

General Software Discussion / Re: Should I get my new laptop with hard drive partitioned?

« Last post by 4wd on April 05, 2009, 07:45 PM »

Hi Kartal,

  Understood.  However that is very different than partitions within XP.   To get a dual-boot or a tri-boot system is kewl.  However would you then take the XP partition and divide it up into 3, ending with 5 partitions? Likely not.

-Steven Avery (April 05, 2009, 03:09 PM)

I would, (well divide the XP into 2 at least).

Purely so my data, (My Docs, portable programs, etc, etc), doesn't reside on the system partition.

The system partition has the most writes to it, (temp files, pagefile, etc), so IMO it's the one most likely to suffer read/write errors and in that case I don't want my data on it.

5250

Living Room / Re: Some DC forum-related Greasemonkey Scripts

« Last post by 4wd on April 05, 2009, 06:44 PM »

I've put together a page with links to some DC forum-related Greasemonkey scripts.

At the moment, what's available is:

• Script to change color of dates in certain DC forum posts and topics by age

-ewemoa (April 04, 2009, 03:54 AM)

For some reason the above script only partially works here.  It's my understanding that it should work across all the forum lists but for some reason it seems to only work for the examples you have within the script and for topic replies.

For example:

https://www.donation...dex.php?board=2.3640          All topic dates are black as per image.



If I choose a topic:

https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=2063.0           The replies get the age coloured dates as they should.



It seems obvious to me that this is all mouser's fault¹, it's his forum 

EDIT: OK, it says "certain" DC forum posts/replies - what exactly does that mean?

Disclaimer: If it turns out to be my computer, then it's still mouser's fault - his forum did something to it!!!