Recent Posts

6576

Living Room / Ghacks is dying and needs your help

« Last post by mouser on February 27, 2015, 03:51 PM »

Martin Brinkman, who started the Ghacks blog back in 2005, has written a post asking for some financial support from all of us who have benefited from his writing over the years.

A search of the donationcoder forum turns up HUNDREDS of posts mentioning ghacks, and few websites can match ghacks in terms of caring about independent coders.. Martin always spreads the word when he spots a new DonationCoder app he thinks is useful.

So I'd like to ask everyone who wants to show some support for ghacks to go over and read martin's post here: http://www.ghacks.ne...-and-needs-your-help

We small independent sites need to stick together and support each other! I have donated a small amount on behalf of DonationCoder folks, but if you can donate a few bucks to him, please do.  If you can't, then consider taking a minute to at least post a comment of support on this blog to let him know his work is appreciated!

And let's show Martin that we DC people do not forget our friends.

6577

Living Room / Re: Pick a number between 1 and 10

« Last post by mouser on February 27, 2015, 02:36 PM »

My guess would be that decimal based would be considered the default.  Therefore if one sees 0xFF on the page and says "two hundred and fifty five," one would be correct.

Well I was really asking if there was a logical way to speak such numbers WITHOUT converting them first to base 10 and speaking in base 10.

6578

Living Room / Re: Pick a number between 1 and 10

« Last post by mouser on February 27, 2015, 12:46 PM »

Far be it from me to inject a real question into this thread, but here is a real question:
In our normal base 10, we have a protocol for SPEAKING large numbers, so 154 is "one hundred and fifty four".
Using the same logic, what would be the generic method for similarly SPEAKING large numbers in other bases?

6579

Find And Run Robot / Re: request: Increase search text input length.

« Last post by mouser on February 27, 2015, 07:25 AM »

I'll see what I can do.

6580

Living Room / Re: False Positives OpEd from WinPatrol

« Last post by mouser on February 26, 2015, 06:12 PM »

That quote is absolutely outrageous.. Shame on google.

6581

Screenshot Captor / Re: SC inconsistent behaviour when capturing a "blank" window.

« Last post by mouser on February 26, 2015, 03:48 PM »

When you ask SC to capture the active window (Alt+PrtScr) instead of the whole screen or select a region, it tries to use an elaborate mechanism to capture semi-transparent border areas found in newer version of windows; this is how SC can nicely capture curved corners on windows.  That process causes a flash of black and white behind windows when you do such captures.

There may be some apps which for some reason don't react well to such attempts -- i can't say for sure why, though it may be because they dont respond to repaint messages.

Anyway, one fix is simply to capture the entire screen and then crop from within SC, which should have already selected the active window region so you only have to press crop button.

The other alternative is to tell SC to not try to capture transparency for windows (see Widow Capturing tabs in options).  This will have the benefit of making active window captures faster.

Let me know if that solves your problem.

6582

Developer's Corner / Re: Artificial intelligence bests humans at classic arcade games

« Last post by mouser on February 26, 2015, 01:18 PM »

I don't mean to sound harsh, and please don't take offense, but I don't think it's helpful saying things like "Q or Reinforcement Learning feels like a bit of partly complicating the obvious" without understanding the math and foundation for these algorithms.  Q-learning and other reinforcement learning techniques are elegant, efficient, and based on very sound principles.  They aren't the holy grail of human-level intelligence but they are very elegant algorithms. There are great books on this stuff for those who want to learn about it.  The now classic book on reinforcement learning is by Sutton and Barto (here), which I recommend.  

ps. Your idea to use an expert to initialize training and start as a baseline is an area of active research in current AI -- and in fact was part of the early days of AI.

6583

Living Room / Re: Destroying your hard drive is the only way to stop this super-advanced malware

« Last post by mouser on February 26, 2015, 12:57 PM »

A hardware jumper to enable any firmware flashing seems like a great idea for all devices.

6584

Developer's Corner / Artificial intelligence bests humans at classic arcade games

« Last post by mouser on February 26, 2015, 12:09 PM »

There has been some buzz recently around a few articles that demonstrate machine learning in the video game domain.

Here's one writeup:

Artificial intelligence bests humans at classic arcade games
http://news.sciencem...classic-arcade-games

For the academically inclines, I would recommend:
Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning
http://www.cs.toront.../~vmnih/docs/dqn.pdf

Which talks in detail about the methods used.

The use of the term "deep" seems to me to be as much about coming up with a catchy term that has gone viral and is being hyped like mad -- and has little innovation behind it -- but the new wave of practitioners using neural networks for large scale problems are getting undeniably impressive results.  

Again, getting back to the video game results:

There is nothing particularly novel in the approach -- the domain is wonderful, and the basic focus on using the same architecture and parameters to tackle a large collection of learning problems -- and using large dimensional raw input, is great.  And the results are impressive.  Again -- in my mind this is more a story of the new wave of practioners who are getting very good at leveraging fairly standard neural network techniques on larger and larger problems.

Having said that, this line of work offers little qualitative improvement on the hard problems in AI -- on serious multiscale hierarchical planning, scene recognition, etc.  For that we are still waiting for some paradigm shifts.

6585

General Software Discussion / Re: Why won't my laptop run Firefox?

« Last post by mouser on February 26, 2015, 08:36 AM »

Shades idea of trying a portable version of FF (if such a thing exists) is a good one.

6586

DC Gamer Club / Far Cry 4 was amazing

« Last post by mouser on February 25, 2015, 06:13 PM »

Just finished playing Far Cry 4.  Starts out slower than Far Cry 3, but every bit as good.
Incredibly impressive open world game.. The feeling of being in a living breathing world is palpable. I saw a bear attack a herd of yak's, a leopard jump on a bear, etc., etc.
And the graphics are incredible.  It's easy to see how in our lifetimes videos games are going to be built on top of full blown serious ecosystem simulations.. pretty amazing stuff.
Easy candidate for best game of the year -- as positive as the reviews were, I think this game is being underrated (perhaps because it starts a little slow).

Warning: This is a very violent game series -- one thing that sucks is that you have to hunt animals in the game.

Other reviews:
http://www.metacriti...om/game/pc/far-cry-4

Video review:

6587

Living Room / Re: "Renaming" a Windows 8.1 system that already has Office 365 installed

« Last post by mouser on February 25, 2015, 03:07 PM »

I'm with Ath, I am hard pressed to think of any reason it would mess up anything.

6588

Find And Run Robot / Re: Problem: episodic FARR error - a non-appearing active FARR window.

« Last post by mouser on February 25, 2015, 11:50 AM »

Do you have any network mapped drives? Launched any files that are on sometimes-removable hard drives?  If you open your file explorer, do you seen any drive letters that are from a scanner or similar device?

6589

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: Help creating a custom script to modify format

« Last post by mouser on February 24, 2015, 05:16 PM »

ok this is a bit convoluted, but should work in CHS:

go to the search and replace tab and you will create 3 entries in this order:

First, a regex one:
Find: ^([^\-\+]+)([\-\_])([^\-\+]+)([\-\_])([^\-\+]+)(.*)$
Replace: $1DASHSEP$3DASHSEP$5$6

Next, a regex one:
Find: [\-\_]
for Replace put a single space

Lastly, a non regex (though shouldnt matter):
Find: DASHSEP
Replace: -


What this does: Changes the first two dashes (or underscores) into the word DASHSEP
Then Replaces all remaining dashes/underscores into spaces
Then puts back the first two dash/underscores with dashes (note that if the first two were an underscore they will change to dash).


screenshot:


Note:
You might still be better off learning to use a simple scripts with CHS because that would allow you to tweak things like this and do more complicated stuff.

6590

T-Clock / Re: T-Clock 2010 (download)

« Last post by mouser on February 24, 2015, 04:14 PM »

I am a long time user and fan of t-clock.

6591

T-Clock / Re: T-Clock 2010 (download)

« Last post by mouser on February 24, 2015, 12:30 PM »

On behalf of all of us who use it, thank you for your work on it Two_toNe!!!! 

6592

Living Room / Re: Destroying your hard drive is the only way to stop this super-advanced malware

« Last post by mouser on February 23, 2015, 06:29 PM »

Long article on Wired about it:
http://www.wired.com...sa-firmware-hacking/

6593

Find And Run Robot / Re: Exclude Find and Run Hotkey from a Program?

« Last post by mouser on February 23, 2015, 02:38 PM »

There is no way to block it during certain programs, but what tomos said is the best solution.  Go to hotkeys in FARR option and simply uncheck the ctrl+space hotkey and use the default one (Break key) or any other custom one.

6594

Post New Requests Here / Re: sound to signal copying is done

« Last post by mouser on February 22, 2015, 05:56 PM »

If you're copying stuff that takes long enough for you to need this, Shades advice is good, look into a utility that is made for nicely copying large (or large numbers of) files; not only should it have an option to alert you with a sound when done, but it will be much better suited to recovering from problems and giving you some flexible options.  TeraCopy, SuperCopier, etc.

See these threads for more discussion of them: https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=13597.0 , https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=8752.0

From my experience I try to stay away from the tools that integrate into windows built-in copying procedures, and use a tool that only runs when i launch it.

6595

LaunchBar Commander / Re: Didn't I used to be able to...

« Last post by mouser on February 22, 2015, 05:44 PM »

How very strange -- I can't wait to hear what is causing it.

6596

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by mouser on February 22, 2015, 03:01 PM »

 

6597

Living Room / Re: Funny Animal Videos

« Last post by mouser on February 22, 2015, 01:03 PM »

Lazy cat drinks water:

6598

LaunchBar Commander / Re: Didn't I used to be able to...

« Last post by mouser on February 22, 2015, 10:49 AM »

Dirkmaster have you tried rebooting yet?
See here: https://answers.micr...11-8dfc-68b599b31bf5
There are some cases where the drag and drop gets fouled up system wide and a reboot or kludge like described above can be needed.

6599

LaunchBar Commander / Re: Didn't I used to be able to...

« Last post by mouser on February 22, 2015, 10:40 AM »

I remember the access error when dropping a shortcut in older versions, it's not very comforting to hear that it may still be happening in some cases even in the latest version, especially since I can't seem to reproduce the problem here...
Cyberdiva got the right dialog though, I wonder why Dirkmaster is not even seeing that..  There has to be an explanation.. Maybe it's worth testing if other apps have the same drag+drop problem?  There must be something we are overlooking..

6600

Living Room / Re: Funny Animal Videos

« Last post by mouser on February 21, 2015, 07:08 PM »

Look at how much fun this doggy is having: