Recent Posts

5426

General Software Discussion / Re: DivX Pro for free

« Last post by Darwin on June 08, 2007, 12:44 AM »

 

5427

General Software Discussion / Re: Endnote XI is released...

« Last post by Darwin on June 08, 2007, 12:37 AM »

I've been envious of Australian University students free access to Endnote for years! My current university is in England and I am in Canada with an expired student card. The academic version through the University is about the same price as my last upgrade, anyway (and I am sure I'll be offered XI at a steeper discount when this promo expires on August 31). I actually sprang for the full version of Endnote 9 after having used an <clears throat and dabs nervously at forehead with a handkerchief> illegal copy of first Endnote 3 and then 4 for years. Anyway, as I stated, I'm fine with Endnote X.0.2. Of course, I was very happy with Endnote 9, too, so I'm in no rush to upgrade.

5428

General Software Discussion / Re: DivX Pro for free

« Last post by Darwin on June 08, 2007, 12:13 AM »

Born lucky, I guess.

5429

General Software Discussion / Re: DivX Pro for free

« Last post by Darwin on June 08, 2007, 12:04 AM »

Why'd you vote for DivX, lanux? Duh huh huh... Look at the pretty rabbits...

5430

Living Room / Re: 20 year Reunion ("there's nothing closer to heaven than being a grad of '87")

« Last post by Darwin on June 08, 2007, 12:00 AM »

Thanks BigJim. You've captured some of what I'm feeling in the first couple of sentences: I've kept in touch with the people that I wanted to keep in touch with and have no desire to reconnect with anyone else. I'm also glad that I'm not alone in being quite annoyed by the requests for information about what I've been up to for the last twenty years. It feels rather invasive. Maybe I'm just overly private (sensitive?) but I haven't had anything to do with something like 380 of the 383 people (OK I made those numbers up - but it was a large grad class and I have only kept in touch with three people that I can think of... and I've not even kept in regular contact with them) that I graduated with - why would I want to publish details about my life for everyone to read?

5431

General Software Discussion / Endnote XI is released...

« Last post by Darwin on June 07, 2007, 11:32 PM »

Thomson Publishing just sent me an upgrade invite for Endnote XI. They're really starting to tick me off - they pump out a new version every year and charge a fortune to upgrade, but release precious few point releases that address bugs through the year. I *think* they've released two for version X (apparently I have the final version and it's 10.0.2). Anyway, I just checked my records and I purchased the upgrade to v.X on October 26, 2006 for 2/3 the price that I'm being offered today. They're offereing one new feature that looks interesting: Groups.

Drag and drop references into groups just as you do with playlists of music.

However, there is a world of difference between interesting and forking out $90 for an upgrade... There's also a world of difference between looking interesting on paper and having any real world relevance. In my case, with over 5000 entries in my main library creating groups would probably be more bother than it's worth. I'll be sitting this one, and probably several more, out.

5432

Living Room / 20 year Reunion ("there's nothing closer to heaven than being a grad of '87")

« Last post by Darwin on June 07, 2007, 11:19 PM »

Well let's see... getting married, having two beautiful boys, sunrise over Goose Spit, the Northern Lights. I dunno, I didn't even break a sweat coming up with those...

I find myself confronting some strange emotions. I've just received an R.S.V.P. for a 20th year reunion for graduation from high school (G.P.Vanier - go Towhees!) and find myself feeling REALLY bitter about it and not wanting to go. Forget bitter, I'm feeling angry. I don't really know why. Sure, I hung out with some real pieces of work (you know, the crowd that just HAD to out do each other cutting everyone else down) but life circa 1987 wasn't really that bad, so I can't figure out why I just want to mock the whole thing and simultaneously (contradictorily - is that a word?) have nothing to do with it.

Anyone either facing a similar milestone and trying to decide what to do or willing to relate "how it went" when you returned to face the "crowd" 10 or 20 years on?

PS I didn't attend my 10 year reunion... was living an working in Korea at the time.

5433

General Software Discussion / Re: Anybody Have A Reason Why I Should NOT Purchase RegExBuddy This Week?

« Last post by Darwin on June 07, 2007, 09:07 PM »

The only minor issue (and it really is minor) I have with it and all other JGSoft products is the interface. It gets the job done, but I don't like how they insist on using custom styling on tabs etc., instead of using the standard Windows widgets.

Funny how different people react to things: I LOVE the interface in the three products that I use from jgsoft (RegEx Buddy, PowerGrep, and EditPad Pro). To each his or her own...

5434

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking to do high quality video conversion "the easy way"

« Last post by Darwin on June 07, 2007, 06:59 PM »

But, to me it sounds like you've got about 2 weeks to do 6 movies. Sounds very doable!

 

Yeah, just have to get off my duff and do it, I suppose. But I still haven't decided what to rip... Decisions, decisions, decisions... I'll let DVDFab do its thing tonight with something and report back here tomorrow.

5435

General Software Discussion / Re: DivX Pro for free

« Last post by Darwin on June 07, 2007, 06:38 PM »

Interesting I got DivX for Windows Pro during their last giveaway - two years ago? Anyway, can't say that I'm particularly tied to it, but the prices was/is right!

5436

General Software Discussion / Re: teracopy: copy your files faster

« Last post by Darwin on June 07, 2007, 06:36 PM »

Cool! Between Nosh's mini-comparison and edbro's informative screenshot how can I not take a closer look at Teracopy. Actually, after reading Nosh's earlier post, I uninstalled SpeedCopier and downloaded Teracopy. Haven't installed it yet, though. Right, off to do that (because it's much more interesting than reading about a CT generated 3D model of the Nazlet Khater cranium and mandible, but maybe that's just me...?).

5437

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« Last post by Darwin on June 07, 2007, 06:33 PM »

Well... I just tried indexing pdf's with Paper Port and had a flashback to one of the reasons for my RMA'ing it back in March: it's unbelievably slow. Archivarius/X1/Copernic and others are able to index pdf's very quickly, Paper Port uses OCR to convert each one to text PAGE BY PAGE. Fortunately, I'm not particularly interested in having Paper Port index my pdf's (I'm happy to let archivarius handle that) but thought I should post back here for NoD5 and Armando. It may be my machine - who knows? I will likely index my pdf's a folder at a time and for big ones (I have a few that are close to a 1000 pages each) might just do them individually as time permits, but it's not really urgent in my case.

EDIT: just to elaborate slightly, I cancelled the indexing of one of my pdf folders (which had 33 main subfolders) after almost 5 hours.

5438

General Software Discussion / Re: Must-have apps in the System tray?

« Last post by Darwin on June 07, 2007, 06:28 PM »

Yeah; its my own, but I couldn't figure out how to make money on it, so I published it here instead...




I had to use Babylon in order to understand what you said...

-Curt (June 07, 2007, 05:43 PM)

You know what they say about teachers? Always teaching 

5439

Living Room / Re: When you make your 100'th Post

« Last post by Darwin on June 07, 2007, 06:13 PM »

Thanks Curt! - this makes 1101 

5440

General Software Discussion / Re: Must-have apps in the System tray?

« Last post by Darwin on June 07, 2007, 05:35 PM »

"Vistable" - I like it. Is that a Curt original? If it is, you should be proud - good one! I like it because it rhymes with "derisible" 

5441

General Software Discussion / Re: teracopy: copy your files faster

« Last post by Darwin on June 07, 2007, 05:31 PM »

Hmm... thanks for posting the comparison, Nosh. I'll have to give teracopy a closer look. Of course, if neither it nor SpeedCopier will work with DOpus this is all academic anyway! I still haven't been able to tell if SpeedCopier is doing anything but am indexing 15 GB of pdf's at the moment and don't want to jeopardize that, so will wait 'til it's done before throwing anything major at it (like backing up those pdf's to an external drive for a start)...

5442

General Software Discussion / Re: A closer look at ODF and MS-OOXML, one of the biggest issues of our time

« Last post by Darwin on June 07, 2007, 05:28 PM »

Thanks Zaine - your summary is interesting reading and the original posting very informative. I uninstalled Star Office 8 the day before yesterday... Maybe I should be rethinking that move!

5443

Skrommel's Software / Re: Skrommel's ScreamerMenu Util gets 5 stars on front of Freeware Genius

« Last post by Darwin on June 07, 2007, 05:08 PM »

Congratulations Skrommel  !

5444

General Software Discussion / Re: Mapping websites

« Last post by Darwin on June 07, 2007, 04:59 PM »

I've no idea (some might even say clueless) but it sounds very interesting and would be a useful addition to the software arsenal.

5445

General Software Discussion / Re: Making the switch-01: My journey from Windows to Linux

« Last post by Darwin on June 07, 2007, 04:55 PM »

Thanks Zaine. I've shied away from trying out DOpus under Wine because I want to make sure that their licensing policy will allow me to do it first and because I haven't read anything anywhere that indicates that it works! So far I've only loaded up EditPad Pro in Wine and it works, so far. The cursor has a stamp sized patch of black surrounding it until you change the colour scheme to white text on a black background. I'm tempted to try uedit as well, but none of these are priorities. As I noted in an earlier post, above, what seriously impresses me about Linux circa 2007 is that it's really pretty much load it and forget it. It's all there out of the box - e-mail, internet browser, office suite, CD/DVD authoring tools, musc and other media players and editors, graphics packages... the list goes on. DOpus or XYPlorer on Linux would be nice, but it's not a deal breaker for me. I'm sort of excited about finding Linux apps (I'm probably just feeding my software addiction!).

Anyway, I'll check out those links and will report back if and when I take a run at loading anything major under Wine. Thanks for starting the thread, Zaine - this is going to be interesting!

5446

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking to do high quality video conversion "the easy way"

« Last post by Darwin on June 07, 2007, 04:34 PM »

You're preaching to the choir, Carol! I love DVDFab - been using it and DVDIdle Pro for years. I think I was experiencing issues relating to a very small amount of free disc space (about 10GB) and too much junk installed. I've upgraded the harddrive and uninstalled all sorts of detritus and have installed the latest version of DVDFab - I'm good to go so will try ripping something and report back. I'm encouraged by your experience using it!

5447

General Software Discussion / Re: teracopy: copy your files faster

« Last post by Darwin on June 07, 2007, 04:30 PM »

I just downloaded the SuperCopier 2 beta and added "dopus.exe" to the list of handled processes in SuperCopier's configuration settings (the Handled Processes tab). Can't tell if it's working or not!

5448

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking to do high quality video conversion "the easy way"

« Last post by Darwin on June 07, 2007, 02:13 PM »

I was considering ripping some DVD's onto my harddrive so that I could watch them in compressed format while on a palaeoanthropological dig in Belgium next month (leave June 21st, so don't expect I'll be around here much after that) without having to take the media with me. Am I the only one that finds this process so sloooooowwwww and resource intensive that it's not worthwhile? I've tried DVDFab, Divx Suite, Super@ and Total Movie Converter. I haven't tried in about a month, so maybe it's time to try again - I've uninstalled a good 60 programmes any one of which could have been causing conflicts and what not... Anyway, I did manage to test the quality be ripping the opening credits and first chapter of Superman Returns into an avi file with Divx, and was very impressed with the result but am not sure I have the time or the energy to rip the five or six movies I was thinking of taking with me. Maybe I should just take the media and be done with it!

5449

Find And Run Robot / Re: Any Update on final release?

« Last post by Darwin on June 07, 2007, 02:06 PM »

Hooray! I haven't been using the alpha too much but like what I've seen and am looking forward to farr v.2 going forward! 

5450

Living Room / Re: Humorous, perhaps informative, article on forum trolls

« Last post by Darwin on June 07, 2007, 02:03 PM »

Incidentally, am I the only one who's NOT gone through a troll-ing stage? Must be an indicator of my age relative to Drew (the author of the piece that Ken pointed us to) as when I was an angry teenager the internet was years in the future and by the time I started frequenting on-line fora and newsgroups, etc. I was in my <ahem, cough> very late 20's. I was still pretty pissed off at that point, but mellowing nicely.