Recent Posts

6551

Living Room / Re: Divx 7 help requested

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 28, 2009, 07:00 PM »

I tried divx 7 a couple of times in Vista and it seemed to be disruptive so I just ended up pulling it back off.  On my Vista64 PC and W7 32 bit I've been using Shark's Codec Packs.

For mkv specific playback in W7 I just tried Splash Lite.  The one thing I did notice with Splash Lite on .mkv playback is seeking in the file via the slider doesn't hang.  It goes right to the point in the video and starts playing.

Another thing I notice about the Shark packs is they seem to work with the default settings. I think on my 64 bit PC I set some stuff about using 4 cores instead of 2, but that's about it.  Just running with the defaults and things seem to be smooth.

It is a bit touchy about install/uninstall order and how to uninstall.  You have to follow the protocol to avoid issues when updating.  Most of the time you can't just copy the new version over.  But there's a forum where he gives work-arounds and other advice.

6552

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

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 28, 2009, 06:50 PM »

many of the recommendations here are capless - has anyone had problems with that ? (visions of fluff or grit getting jammed in there if you dont check/clean it thoroughly before use...)

-tomos (November 28, 2009, 12:50 PM)

Let me repeat:  I have had ZERO problems with the Super Talent Pico-C.  It's tiny, capless, and indestructible.  I love this thing so much.  I keep it on my keychain in my pocket all day long, nothing happens.  I've never cleaned it, I've never had any issues at all.  In fact, I dropped it in my parents' driveway and it was there for three days before I found it.  Not a thing wrong with it.  It's a brilliantly designed USB drive.

-superboyac (November 28, 2009, 06:18 PM)

Can you post a link?  I've been looking at a number of these, esp. the ones that scored high on large file write tests, but I keep seeing conflicting stuff in user reviews about not being able to plug the Pico-C into some ports.

Also I would be interested if you could give a ballpark benchmark writing a 100 MB or larger file onto it.

It's tough to know who to believe on these.  I read a benchmark test on a site claiming the Patriot Exporter XT was one of the high scorers on write tests.  But then on the store site a user review claimed it only wrote at about 9 MB/sec. when copying on large files.  Not all that fast when paying a speed premium.

6553

General Software Discussion / Re: Text editor with filtering of lines

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 26, 2009, 02:11 PM »

I have gVimPortable installed, and i fired it up, loaded a file, and then i'm lost. Do you have any specific directions?

-vixay (November 26, 2009, 02:49 AM)

Sorry but I just used vi editor a bit when I used to mess around with Linux.  I'm sure it's changed a lot over the years.  But even back then you could run complex commands over the contents and move paragraphs around and do quite a bit once you got the hang of it.  I didn't like the feel of going in and out of edit/command mode, but I used it just enough to see how people who stuck with it would get very fast once into the mind set.  I try to stay away from regular expressions as it's too much mental strain to try to figure out what happens with such and such a pattern.  Command line globbing is about as far as I want to get into it.  Gave up on Perl and Ruby because that substitution stuff is too draining for me.  Like vi, I know there are adherents who love to use those type of features.  Gives me a headache though.

6554

General Software Discussion / Re: Text editor with filtering of lines

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 26, 2009, 02:27 AM »

Not sure if it's exactly what you want but you could try vim.  It has views and somebody mentioned folding.  It may be useful and there are Windows ports of it for free.  May be worth a look anyway.

6555

Living Room / Re: Apple Declares Smoking Near Apple Computers Voids Warranty

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 25, 2009, 01:05 PM »

I'm sure the line is drawn somewhere. What if they found human feces inside the computer? Just put on some gloves and a mask and go to town? Yes, I am indeed equating nicotine tar to human feces.

- Oshyan

-JavaJones (November 25, 2009, 12:39 PM)

Adds a whole 'nuther level to the "garbage in, garbage out" cliche.

6556

Living Room / Re: Apple Declares Smoking Near Apple Computers Voids Warranty

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 24, 2009, 09:56 PM »

Why stop at smoking? Why not void the warranty if there is any evidence that you may have been drinking, too. We all know that alcohol and computing doesn't mix very well and people make more stupid mistakes when they are drunk than when they are sober...so why not?

If you get drunk and screw up your computer, they shouldn't have to fix it. </sarcasm>

-app103 (November 24, 2009, 05:19 AM)

Yeah, just the other day I was stopped at a road block.  The officer told me it was determined I had published software with a known bug in the code.  Apparently Mothers Against Dumb Debugging has determined the general public has for too long been victimized by promiscuous programmers who publish new programs before the old ones they've already written are perfect.

I tried to explain that none of my software was designed for battlefield use or keeping planes in the air.  They through me in the slammer anyway. I had to post bond and sign a binding contract that any users of my free software could get double their money back if they found a bug.

6557

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

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 24, 2009, 09:47 PM »

While trawling the net looking at SSDs I happened across this flash drive:  OCZ Throttle eSATA Flash Drive

For eSATA:
90MB/s - Read
30MB/s - Write

And a USB interface if the host PC doesn't have an eSATA port.

The 16GB version is available at Newegg for $52.

Now we're getting to some realistic speeds  

-4wd (May 02, 2009, 06:10 AM)

But what are the speeds if you have to plug into USB?  I'm just asking because I got a WD HD player.
The usb key is convenient but the largest I have is A-Data 8GB and @4.x MB/sec. write speed it's slow slogging copying a movie on.
I don't want to spend top dollar but something reliable and a bit faster would be cool.

I have an external USB 250 GB drive that writes at about 24 MB/sec but moving the drive from the computer room to the TV room and hooking the wires will get old fast.  It's too much hassle to set up a network at this point.

6558

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

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 24, 2009, 09:36 PM »

OCZ DIESEL 16GB

-bcpaladin (April 24, 2009, 03:19 PM)

I'm looking at this since I need to buy one at least 16 GB.  Can you tell me what type of write speed you get with it?  My largest so far is A-Data 8 GB but it writes at less than 5 MB/sec.  Kinda' slow for copying movies on.  Fortunately it reads well enough to play them.

6559

Living Room / Re: Apple Declares Smoking Near Apple Computers Voids Warranty

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 23, 2009, 08:41 PM »

@MilesAhead - Thanks, love the smiley, it got me to start laughing before I went ballistic...

-Stoic Joker (November 23, 2009, 06:02 PM)

Glad you enjoyed it.  I'm on a crusade to find new good smiley sites.  I've been using this one for years:

http://www.clicksmilies.com/

and just found that smoking one here:

http://emoticonizer.info/
(there's a great "pull your hair out" one there too)

but I'd like to find someplace where I could make my own that aren't just the tiny standard ones.  I'm not artistic.  Making my own from a paint program is futile. It needs to be wizard-based.

6560

Living Room / Re: Apple Declares Smoking Near Apple Computers Voids Warranty

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 23, 2009, 05:36 PM »

Not only that but if you notice the computer smoking, then you're really in for it!!

6561

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Minimized Apps Render As Desktop Icons

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 23, 2009, 05:35 PM »

I don't know if you're a programmer at all but I think the issue here is that this is not nearly as easy as it might seem.

-skwire (November 23, 2009, 10:49 AM)

Another consideration is if a user employs a minimize control application, like WinTray or some commercial one, everything is likely to get very confused.  Explorer crashes are likely.

6562

Living Room / Re: Choosing a new PC package for a relative.. Post your recommendations

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 23, 2009, 03:07 PM »

like when your car reaches 3000 or 5000 miles,  the check engine/maintence light comes on

-Cloq (November 23, 2009, 01:06 PM)

Mine came on aamof.  I opened the hood.  Yup!! Engine was still there!

6563

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Second Taskbar On Single Monitor

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 22, 2009, 07:07 PM »

I never saw the justification for the cachet Ubuntu got from the start. I tried it because of all the hoopla.  I didn't see anything unusual.  To me Mandrake 9.1, now Mandriva, one-disc install kicks ass if you have broadband.

As I said, the uninstall mechanism was less than impressive.  I've multi-booted systems with MsDos, Windows 3.1, OS/2 and Redhat Linux all on the same boot manager.  There's often a bit more to it than deleting the partition to take things off in an orderly fashion.

Seems like the Linux bandwagon is foundering.  I haven't seen anything to make Redmond tremble.  It's nice that it's free and once the kernel got to 2.x it was rock solid, esp. if you had a UPS and a journaling file system, but I think the necessity to support Windows apps to get users to adopt it is going to be the Trojan Horse that promotes stagnation.

btw when I started messing around with Linux you didn't just pop in an install CD and come up to a window manager.  The install brought you to a command line and give you 6 virtual terminals.  You had to configure X yourself and launch it after booting to the command line with the 'startx' command.  I had it running Slackware with 1.x kernels and XWindows on a 486 with only 16 MB of main system memory.  My graphics card had 1 MB dedicated video ram.  Stuff just didn't come up on boot.  You had to configure the scripts by hand and mess with it until you got it to work.

6564

General Software Discussion / Re: If you have more than 2 optical drives would you test Tray app?

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 22, 2009, 01:51 PM »

btw looks like my server regained its sanity.  You can always download the latest Tray from this page:

http://www.favessoft.com/downloads.html

6565

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Second Taskbar On Single Monitor

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 22, 2009, 01:46 PM »

I'm aware of that in Windows XP, and I'm not sure whether it works in Windows Vista, but I know that it doesn't in Windows 7. Unless changing a registry setting would allow it?

-letmein (November 22, 2009, 12:41 AM)

You mileage may vary but I tried that approach with my folder of categorized shortcut folders.  Sometimes it took me 2 minutes clawing with the mouse to get it to sprout resizer arrows to resize the thing.

btw I did try Ubuntu but I didn't notice any dual taskbars.  Maybe I set it to use a window manager I was already familiar with.. I don't remember.  I do remember I took it off after a few days and the uninstall system really sucked. Non-intuitive partition undo utility forced me to fix up my partition table afterwards.  I didn't notice anything particularly ground breaking.

6566

General Software Discussion / Re: Has anyone discovered any cool Windows 7 third-party utilities?

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 21, 2009, 05:48 PM »

Yeah, progress isn't always "progress" if you know what I mean.

6567

Living Room / Re: Bad technology day!

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 21, 2009, 05:41 PM »

Here on DonationCoder a similar saying declares "Let's get out of here! tranglos is coming!"  

Seriously, I think we've all had days like that.

-Innuendo (November 21, 2009, 05:38 PM)

If one or two more could be strung on you'd have a Buster Keaton movie(or at least an expression similar to his.  I hate it when it all hits the fan at once.)

6568

Living Room / Re: Bad technology day!

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 21, 2009, 12:58 PM »

One thing I will say for the old points plugs and condenser.  Often if you had a screwdriver and a nail file you could take a pitted set of points, file 'em down, then set the dwell with a matchbook cover or by eye... and get it close enough to drive home to do it right.

With the black boxes there isn't much you can do unless you are in a fully equipped repair shop.  Kinda' takes the fun out of it too.  I used to be able to set the dwell one degree high with a feeler gauge.  That way as the high side on the bumper cam wore down, it worked its way into perfect.

You do get higher performance with the computers, when they are working.

6569

General Software Discussion / Re: Has anyone discovered any cool Windows 7 third-party utilities?

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 21, 2009, 12:50 PM »

Hmmmm, I should start a company called Retro Interfaces Pc.  Could do cool stuff like replace calculator keypads with beads on rods.  Replace computer keyboard with a pad of paper.  Then you have to scan in your stuff for OCR before the PC can process it. 

6570

General Software Discussion / Re: If you have more than 2 optical drives would you test Tray app?

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 21, 2009, 12:29 PM »

Heh heh.  I should have done it sooner but I'm reluctant to try stuff I can't test myself.  btw my web server is acting up.  Since I got a "disk full" error, like an idiot I tried deleting the file, then uploading.  Of course it let me delete the file, but didn't let me upload.  While this is being resolved Softpedia has graciously allowed me to host it on their servers.  You can download from them via this page:

http://www.softpedia...ancements/Tray.shtml

It just uses AutoIt3 CDROM "open" and "close" commands.  As long as I get the index into the array of CDROM type drives it should work.

In AutoIt3 help it also says it should "work as expected" on virtual CDROM drives also.  I take this to mean an "open" would unmount but I haven't tried it.

6571

General Software Discussion / Re: Any XP users switching to Windows 7 yet?

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 21, 2009, 01:48 AM »

I'm not just talking about MS. I don't see any compilers coming along as one would expect in 64 bit flavors.

It seems like the only people trying to do it are open source programmers.  That doesn't usually imply it's gonna' happen real fast.

6572

General Software Discussion / Re: If you have more than 2 optical drives would you test Tray app?

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 20, 2009, 07:44 PM »

I uploaded the latest version.  It uses the Registry to store the screen location on close.  The uninstaller optionally deletes this key for a clean uninstall.


edit: for the time being I'm having Web server problems.  Can't upload and the Tray zip file was deleted. It's not available from my site at present.  I attached the one that I'll be uploading when possible.

6573

General Software Discussion / Re: Any XP users switching to Windows 7 yet?

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 20, 2009, 07:38 PM »

It doesn't sound appealing.  Like I say, they're a step behind.

I looked at Lazarus and even there, dialog paint routines that I used in Delphi 5 looked washed out with that IDE's gui libraries.  It just doesn't look the same. Setting up a bunch of environment variables and messing around for 2 days is old.  64 bit is here!! They need to get on the stick with one click install, drag & drop development of stand-alone executable applications.

6574

General Software Discussion / Re: Any XP users switching to Windows 7 yet?

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 20, 2009, 06:45 PM »

There isn't that much option to compile things 64 bit.  The software development environment hasn't caught up to 64 bit yet.  At least not for people who don't have $1000+ to shell out for development tools.  64 bit has been lurking in the background, then all of a sudden when Vista went SP1 it exploded.  Even $500 systems are coming with 6 GB and 64 bit OS now.  I think it took the software development makers by surprise.  Seems they are one step behind.

afa Superfetch goes, running locate32 was likely the culprit for most of the drive run-on.  I switched to Everything Search and turned as much indexing off as I could.  I don't cache or shadow network shares, don't index for faster searching, etc.. I tried Superfetch fully enabled, then with the setting I use.  I couldn't detect a difference so why keep gathering stats for no gain?  Runs fine as it is.  No annoyance no strain.

6575

General Software Discussion / Re: If you have more than 2 optical drives would you test Tray app?

« Last post by MilesAhead on November 20, 2009, 05:38 PM »

Thanks skwire.  I appreciate the info.