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5926

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

« Last post by superboyac on June 08, 2006, 10:19 AM »

Black Hole Organizer:

I tried this software just now, and it's ok.  It's really nothing special.  There were some reviews on the web that give it really good ratings.  I can see that...for the average user it's a good mix of simplicity and nice power features.  However, considering the details we've been talking about here, it doesn't really offer anything particularly new or unique.

There was something very interesting about it, and that is that it is laid out very similarly to Zoot!  That's interesting because while Zoot is unquestionably outdated right now, this software is modern and has all the hip features you can want (rtf, hyperlinks, tables! [Yes! tables!], bullet lists, numbered lists, etc.).  The reason why I say it's similar to Zoot is because it lays out the panes like an email program and Zoot is the only other notetaking program that does that.  You have the categories (like email folders) on the left, the titles (email list) on the right, and the note content (email message) on the bottom.  Just like email!  I still think this is a cool way of doing these notetaking programs.  Unfortunately, it doesn't have all the powerful features of Zoot like auto-categorizing and filtering and stuff.

Anyway, check it out, it's cool.

5927

Living Room / Re: Recommendations for good external hard drive solutions?

« Last post by superboyac on June 08, 2006, 10:05 AM »

True, java, very true.

Backup is the only real solution.  Unfortunately, I didn't have a good backup solution at the time, and I still don't.  I occasionally burn cd/dvd and I've always done that, but I'll get lazy and not do it for a year.  And until now, I never thought of getting full hard drive backups.  But now, I'm going to have not only a backup hard drive, but an identical hard drive for the backup to the backup.  Unless there's some freakish circumstance, I shouldn't have problems ever again.  Especially if I keep one of the drives at a different location.

I'm going to look at esata, it's just for me, so compatibility isn't an issue.

5928

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

« Last post by superboyac on June 07, 2006, 03:44 PM »

OK, I was just doing some preparation for this summary, and I decided to try Zoot out again.  If you remember earlier, I was initially intrigued with Zoot, but then disgusted because it was so dated.  But looking at it again, it's really an innovative application that has loads of potential if it just gets with the times.

My database for notetaking would be 90% text anyway, so Zoot remains an option for me.  But I still really need that 10% of additional ability.  That's why the Big Three still remain Surfulater, Mybase, and Evernote.  But I'm telling you , as soon as that author changes the software from 16 bit to 32 bit, watch out Big Three!  Actually, Evernote is the most similar to Zoot.  Surfulater and Mybase are different enough that the comparison will seem odd.

5929

Living Room / Re: Recommendations for good external hard drive solutions?

« Last post by superboyac on June 07, 2006, 10:45 AM »

Ah!  eSATA!  external SATA...that's what it's called.  It's a SATA connection that you can connect to external devices like USB.  That's what I want!

5930

Living Room / Re: Recommendations for good external hard drive solutions?

« Last post by superboyac on June 07, 2006, 10:27 AM »

Ha, I forgot you're from England!  Yeah, Costco's great...I'm so used to it, I wouldn't move anywhere than didn't have a costco within a 1/2 hour drive of it.

But as far as hard drives, as of now, I'll get WD or Seagate, since neither of those have failed on me.  I'm more comfortable with WD because I've had more of those (and for longer) and none of the one's I've bought have failed.  My Seagate is still only a year old, so I can't be sure yet. 

5931

Living Room / Re: Recommendations for good external hard drive solutions?

« Last post by superboyac on June 07, 2006, 09:52 AM »

Interesting Carol, so from your experiences, you prefer WD drives?  I can't disagree with that since my WD drive has been going strong for a good 5 years now.

When my IBM drive died last year, I tried to do a lot of research on drives, and I don't think I found much concrete information, but the whole 5 year warranty with Seagate sold me on them.  But that doesn't mean they're more reliable than WD.  Like I said, someone once told me that the 5-year warranty is partly marketing appeal also.  What I like about WD drives is that you can get them at Costco!

5932

Living Room / Re: Recommendations for good external hard drive solutions?

« Last post by superboyac on June 07, 2006, 02:19 AM »

xminus1, no one's gonna get chewed out here!

Really, though, I agree with you.  I've had experiences with the branded self-contained hard drives, and they've been very reliable.  I just want a more sophisticated system that I can swap, that's why I'm going the other way.

Mouser, I'll look into building my own kit also, thanks.  I wouldn't spend the extra money on their cables if they are really common cables.  What I like about their drives is that the same enclosure that you put inside the desktop bay can also be used with the usb and firewire outside it.  That's the cool part.  If I can build my own thing that does that for cheaper, I'll definitely look into it.  Also, regarding their cable, I'm not positive, but it might not be the regular cable, the end that attaches to the enclosure might be their own custon connection.  I have to check that.

Still, this is one of those things that I may not mind spending the extra money on if it is really cool.

5933

Living Room / Re: Recommendations for good external hard drive solutions?

« Last post by superboyac on June 06, 2006, 07:30 PM »

Hey!  If it meets mouser's approval, then I'm all in!  I just got a qoute from addonics on how much all this would be, not bad:

Ok so here are the parts you need to get.
 
For the inside you can use the following;
1. AESDCSISA at $89.50 each, this is for SATA hard drives and it will connect via a SATA cable to the mother board.
Now to use the enclosure externally you can use;
2. AAPAC12V-US at $19.00 power adapter.
3. AAUSBC-309 USB cable at $25.95 each.
4. AAFWC406 Firewire cable at $45.00 each.
 
You can use a SATA cable externally if you have the connection. Be careful though, you need the L shaped connection rather than the I shaped eSATA connection.
-----Original Message-----
Subject: RE: distinction between your products


Thanks for responding, let me explain in detail what I want:
 
I'd like to buy several SATA drives to swap in and out.  I want to put each of them in their own enclosures, and I'd like to be able to slide them in and out of the pc with the enclosure.  Inside the pc, hopefully I'd be able to use the actual SATA connection.  When removed from the pc, I'd like to externally connect to any computer using firewire AND USB.  Furthermore, and I don't know if this is possible, but I thought I've seen it somewhere, when one of these drives is removed and being used externally, would it be possible to still connect with SATA and not usb/firewire?  i think I've seen where a SATA is coming out of the back of the PC to connect an external drive directly to it, but I may be mistaken.  So that is basically it, I appreciate your help.

5934

Living Room / Re: Recommendations for good external hard drive solutions?

« Last post by superboyac on June 06, 2006, 07:05 PM »

Pretty slick. 

May I add, don't ever buy an external drive from the hard drive manufacturers.  Warranties on those are C-R-A-P (1-year).  Buy an internal drive and put it in your own enclosure and get the full 5-year warranty (Seagate).

-vegas (June 06, 2006, 06:29 PM)

i agree.  I like Seagate's warranty, but someone told me just because it's 5 years doesn't actually mean anything.  It's just for show or something...I don't really know what that means.  I had a Maxtor in the late 90's and it died on me, and I've never bought Maxtor again.  Last year, my IBM drive died which almost made me cry, so now I will never buy an IBM/Hitachi drive. 
https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=2870.0

I have a WD drive that hasn't had any problems.  But because of my IBM experience last year, I am paranoid and will only get Seagate because of the 5 year warranty, and a couple of people have told me that Seagate has the fewest "dying" problems of all the drives.

But back on topic, I am in the process of creating a fantastic backup system, with swappable drives and external enclosures galore.  If no one else mentions anything, I'll probably go with addonics.

5935

Living Room / Recommendations for good external hard drive solutions?

« Last post by superboyac on June 06, 2006, 03:45 PM »

I don't mean the simple Maxtor OneTouch stuff here...

There's this company, Addonics, that provides some really cool stuff as far as hard drive bays and external hard drives.  I was wondering if there were any similar alternatives that anyone has heard of.  Here's Addonics' website:

http://www.addonics.com/

What's cool about addonics is that you can get 5.25" bay that goes into your desktop pc, and then you swap hard drives in and out of it using enclosures.  But there's more!  When you slide one of the enclosures out, you can use it as a separate external hard drive using usb or firewire.  How cool is that?!  Of course they offer all the varities of connections inclduing IDE, SATA, USB, Firewire.

Anyway, if anyone knows of other similar products, please let me know!

5936

Living Room / Re: Is firewire better than USB?

« Last post by superboyac on June 05, 2006, 07:09 PM »

For some reason, I am genetically predisposed to hate USB.  I really don't have a good reason why.  Let me explain...in the past, it's been slower then I've expected, but Carol helped me get through that a while ago.

I still don't think it's as fast as it's all cracked up to be.  I never really go over 20MB/s if ever.  If firewire is consistently faster, then I'm all for it.  However, this corruption thing worries me.  But if fodder is right about the driver that fixes it, then that's fine.  Also, I'd like to be able to check the integrity of the copied files somehow.

Just yesterday, I transferred some large files to a portable hard drive using USB.  I moved them instead of copying them...before I disconnected it, I checked to see if the files had appeared in the portable drive and they did.  Then I took the drive to my laptop and the files were gone!  I took it back to my desktop and plugged it back in and it was gone, also!  And since I had moved the files instead of copying, I couldn't undo it.  So goes my story with USB.  I've never been a big fan.

5937

Living Room / Re: Do we care about HD-DVD/Blu-Ray?

« Last post by superboyac on June 05, 2006, 06:54 PM »

I'm already pissed that all those years I spent meticulously backing up my mp3s on cd's and cataloguing them, can now fit on about 30 dvd's as opposed to 200 cd's.  Now, with blu-ray or whatever, I can fit it all on like 4 of those discs.  But, actually, I'm planning on moving to a somewhat sophisticated hard drive backup system.  But that's off topic.

5938

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

« Last post by superboyac on June 05, 2006, 05:09 PM »

So, I was just recently playing with Surfulater again today...

Surfulater's tree is the best.  When you copy and paste articles around, they remain virtual copies.  So, if you rename the title of one of the copies, they all change.  Picking a icon for the article is the easiest of all the softwares, with the comic book bubble that appears.  There are 3 views for each tree, either with full expanded view, or condensed view, another view showing "no articles" but just the parent nodes, and finally the chronological view.

(One question, nevf...what's the difference between the 2nd button which shows "no articles", and the 1st button where you can turn the articles off?  I don't see a difference.)

Anyway, like I said, it's the best implementation of a tree in all the main softwares in this genre.  What would make it even more powerful is if the user can customize the tree's even more.  For example, having the option to organzie the chronological view by year and day, instead of only by month.  Also, if we could take the same database and organize it in different trees, that would be cool.  When I do my Frakenstein-visual of these softwares, the tree part will definitely be from Surfulater.

5939

Living Room / Re: June 4 Podcast

« Last post by superboyac on June 05, 2006, 05:00 PM »

well, i have to admit i was pronouncing your name as 'super-boy-yack' in my head until i heard the correct way of saying it on the podcast.

but what should i do now. i've been training myself to say 'super-boy-A-C' but maybe it's more fun when everyone has more than one way of saying their name. hey, aren't we complex enough people to have different names?

i was also in the habit of saying jgpaiva's name as 'jeg-pay-va' even though i assumed it must be 'jay-gee-pay-va'.

at least, now i know i should be 'jay-gee-pie-va'.

jgpaiva, i think your correct native pronunciation of your name it fantastic - i've not heard anything like it i have to admit.

-nudone (June 05, 2006, 04:47 PM)

HAahaha!  I never thought of that!  Too funny.  I'm going to introduce myself as that on my next podcast!

5940

Living Room / Re: June 4 Podcast

« Last post by superboyac on June 05, 2006, 03:11 PM »

Haha...nudone, if you don't mind, I'm going to use your pattern and change my name to "nakedone", but it's to be pronounced "nah-kee-dahn".

But I do enjoy being naked.

5941

Living Room / Re: Is firewire better than USB?

« Last post by superboyac on June 05, 2006, 12:43 PM »

The filesystem corruption manifests in "delay-write failures" right away

-f0dder (June 05, 2006, 12:07 PM)

Hmmm...I'm not sure I understand what you just said.  Once I copy some data over, how do I know if there was any corruption?  Does an error dialog pop up?  If not, how can I check to see if the data was copied properly?  I'm visualizing something like the diagnostic text you can run on a cd after you burn it.

5942

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

« Last post by superboyac on June 05, 2006, 12:37 PM »

Actually, rjbull, I meant that Evernote is NOT primarily a web-capture application (sorry! ).  Evernote is notetaking application that can capture webpages.  For pure web-capturing, I'm pretty sure things like Net Snippets, Scrapbook, Onfolio are much more suited for it.

But I don't want to get into those dedicated apps in this thread.  Here, I want to focus on notetaking apps that have web-capturing utilities as a supplement.  In this context, the three programs I have come across that do this are Evernote, Surfulater, and Mybase.  Of the 3, Evernote does it the best from my experiences.  You have to really try all 3 programs to "feel" the differences of each one, it's kind of hard to describe.  Technically, Surfulater is the better web-capturing program.  Mybase's capturing feels sluggish.  Here's why I like Evernote's capturing:  when you capture a webpage or part of one in Evernote, and then you go to that particular note in the program, it doesn't "feel" like a captured webpage; it feels like you've written a note and organized it such that it looks exactly like the actual webpage where you got it from.  I guess it all depends on if you want your notes to feel like you're in a webpage, or if you want your notes to feel like your in a text editing program.  I like my notes to feel like I'm in Notepad (or UltraEdit ), but there are a lot of people who like the web interface to be applied to all programs (as you can see more and more programs adopting a weblike interface).  If you like the web thing, you'll love Surfulater's interface.  If you're a notepad person like me, you'll love Evernote's interface.  To understand this, you just have to try the programs yourself.  It comes down to things that I almost feel embarrassed to talk about because it's so miniscule, like:
--Is the cursor the hand/arrow thing, or just a simple cursor bracket symbol?
--Can I just start typing anywhere or do I have to go in and out of "edit mode"?
--If I click once on a link, does it open the actual webpage, or do I have to double-click?

Stuff like that.

5943

Living Room / Re: Is firewire better than USB?

« Last post by superboyac on June 05, 2006, 10:25 AM »

filesystem corruption?  This is kinda off topic, but is there a software that would be able to check the integrity of data transferred once it is transferred?  I wouldn't really have a problem with the corruption if I knew right at the time that the transfer didn't succeed, because I'll just copy the stuff over again.

5944

Living Room / Re: Is firewire better than USB?

« Last post by superboyac on June 04, 2006, 12:13 AM »

Yeah Carol, I've heard firewire has better sustained throughput.  Mouser, I think the best solution would be to have a hard drive enclosure capable of supporting both usb and firewire.  Sounds good!  Thanks everyone.

5945

Living Room / Is firewire better than USB?

« Last post by superboyac on June 03, 2006, 05:56 PM »

If I'm going to transfer large amounts of information back and forth from my desktop to a portable hard drive, is firewire better than USB?  I ask because it seems like firewire is used when people transfer video from their digital camcorders instead of USB.

What are the pros/cons of each?

5946

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

« Last post by superboyac on June 02, 2006, 10:13 AM »

rjbull, when I'm talking about web-capturing in this thread, I mean web-capturing capabilities of notetaking programs, not dedicated web-capturing programs.  In this context, I think Evernote does it the best.

I'm quite certain that dedicated web-capturing programs in general are going to be better than something you'll find in these notetaking apps.

That's what makes this topic and genre of software so difficult.  It's so easy for the overall featureset to include anything and everything, and pretty soon, you end up with a program like InfoSelect.  But, I do feel web-capturing is somewhat essential to a notetaker, so it has to be incorporated to some degree.  But it doesn't necessarily have to be as powerful as Net-Snippets or something like that.


As far as what I used to summarize this thread, all I did was use the print button on this page and print the entire thread to a pdf (78 pages!).  Then I'm just going to print it out and read through it and come up with a summary.  Nothing special.  I'm not sticking this thread into a notetaking app or something like that, if that was what you meant.

5947

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

« Last post by superboyac on June 02, 2006, 02:29 AM »

thombthowolf, let me rephrase what I said.  I know that LM can be used to collect information in the form of text, and can do it in a unique way that may prove to be useful.  But from the general perspective of notetaking applications, there's no way it would catch on beyond a poweruser base.  I say that, not strictly because the program is too difficult to use (I'm sure a competant computer user could eventually figure it out), but more so because there's a certain level of familiarity that users (in general!) will want with a notetaking application.  Namely, some kind of outline or tree or something, and some kind of visual organization of the notes.  LM is just too different.  I guarantee you most people will give up on the software in the first 10 minutes, if their intention is to find a notetaking application.  I mean, just imagine, a user downloads several programs to try, say, Surfulater, Evernote, Mybase, Keynote, Onenote, Myinfo.  And then he comes across LM...how long do you think he will stick to it?

5948

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

« Last post by superboyac on June 01, 2006, 05:58 PM »

(I'm moving this topic back into the brainstorming thread, since I think it applies)

OK, I just went back and looked at Taonotes again.  It's very interesting for sure.  First of all, I agree with nevf, that the interface is extremely cluttered...at this point, I couldn't bring myself to commit to the program because it feels too awkward for me.  But let me point out some good things about it:

--I like how there's several ways to organize data.  There are lots of different schemes in the tabs on the left.  Like tags to keywords, to a seemingly normal tree structure.  Now, I have no idea how the individual items are kept track of, but having the multiple options is nice.  Surfulater does this also, in a different way.

--The filter-as-you-type feature is awesome!  I think it's a very good implementation of it, it's fast and seems to work well.  Evernote is still the king of this feature so far.  But Taonote's is better than the one that just got introduced to Mybase (v5).  The one in Mybase is a little clunky; it doesn't work as well as you'd like it to.  So Taonotes is like 2nd best here so far.  Good!

Anyway, those are my thoughts so far.  I'm definitely intrigued by the program and what it can offer.  But, please, for the sake of sanity, do something about the interface or the basic layout!  I just can't figure out what everything does.  There are tabs on the left, tabs on the right, weird buttons and symbols everywhere, it's like heiroglyphics!

5949

General Software Discussion / Re: Taonotes (weird software!)

« Last post by superboyac on June 01, 2006, 05:42 PM »

Yes, Vadim, welcome to the site.  I can see why your program works differently if you are trying to capture the Ecco feel.  I know a lot of people really loved that software and would like to see a replacement for it.

I never used Ecco, so I never got used to it, so that's probably why your Taonotes feels quirky to me.  But, innovation is always important and you never know who will catch on.  I'll keep tinkering with Taonotes...

5950

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

« Last post by superboyac on June 01, 2006, 04:12 PM »

thomthowolf, don't even go there with Literary Machine!   

Seriously, Literary Machine is a program that 90% of the users would have a hard time beginning to do even basic things.  LM is a very abstract thing, I don't think it would fit in at all as far as a general notetaking program.  It's even more difficult to grasp than Zoot.  LM is strictly a poweruser tool.

I tried LM last year, whew!  It was crazy.  I'm sure there are some features in there that may be applicable to notetaking, but, to me, this falls in the "do not try this at home" category.