Recent Posts

751

Living Room / Re: PC Mag's Top 100 Web Sites - Vote for your Favorite (DonationCoder.com Love?)

« Last post by urlwolf on June 12, 2008, 06:59 AM »

done.

752

Living Room / does win XP 64-bit suck?

« Last post by urlwolf on June 12, 2008, 04:18 AM »

I'm moving to a machine with 8gb of RAM.
I'll need a 64-bit OS to address all that memory.

I think I'll stick to linux, but, just in case...
does win XP 64-bit suck?

It'll probably save some time (hundreds of hours ) to use win XP, at least at the beginning, and run linux on top of it with andlinux. Big problem: andlinux uses only one core.

753

Living Room / Re: Cedega on linux

« Last post by urlwolf on June 12, 2008, 02:26 AM »

Have you found an alternative for admuncher?
That is one important piece of software for me

754

Living Room / Re: Cedega on linux

« Last post by urlwolf on June 11, 2008, 05:37 PM »

congrat Josh on making the switch!
There are a few of us in this forum who recently converted (zridling, for example), as well as ultra-gurus like Gothi[c].

If you do it, can I encourage you to keep a log of where you found trouble and how you got out of it?

755

General Software Discussion / Re: Is there an alternative for Babylon Rightclick Translation software?

« Last post by urlwolf on June 09, 2008, 12:10 PM »

I really like ultralingua, it's really fast and efficient.
But it doesn't have pronunciation... unless I'm wrong. Does it?

And it does conjugation... nice.
I don't think babylon does that.

There's another program called gramatica by the same company. It does grammar. I wonder how good it is compared to say word grammar checking. anyone?

756

General Software Discussion / Re: Is there an alternative for Babylon Rightclick Translation software?

« Last post by urlwolf on June 08, 2008, 06:22 AM »

My problem with babylon is that the OCR doesn't work well
When I click on a word, it often gets the surrounding words, or symbols and the translation obviously fails.

Is webpro able to translate to languages other than english?

757

Site/Forum Features / Re: Nofollow tags added to all external links

« Last post by urlwolf on June 07, 2008, 08:05 PM »

I also think DC'ers should be able to spread google love. That's the currency today (attention). Sometimes you cannot donate to a great piece of software, but you can 'pay' them with recognition by recommendations here.

758

General Software Discussion / Re: Opera 9.5 — New Skin

« Last post by urlwolf on June 07, 2008, 05:58 AM »

It screwed icons for mail in the skin I use normally...

759

General Software Discussion / Re: Is there an alternative for Babylon Rightclick Translation software?

« Last post by urlwolf on June 05, 2008, 06:10 AM »

Curt, why is Babylon so much better?
Just asking. There's a discount active now (still, $40!).
And I bought it, lost the license, and they wanted to charge me $7 for retrieving it. A big no-no.

760

Living Room / Opera and fancy AJAX sites: not much luck on my side of things...

« Last post by urlwolf on June 03, 2008, 05:44 PM »

Everyday, I get to a web 2.0 site (or any site using lots of technologies that are really pushing the browser) that doesn't work on opera.
Sometimes the flaw makes the site unusable; then it's easy to detect. Sometimes it's just a bit of functionality that is lacking; you may only notice if you navigate the same site with some other browser.

At the end of the day, I have to report the site in the forums, wait for a fix (heh), and open another browser. And update my mental list of sites that I need to use a different browser.

Google apps are part of catergory 2 (mostly works, but there's always something broken... which may be a show stopper or completely ignored).

Is everything google working so-so in opera, or just bad luck? Looks like people don't test against opera all the fancy AJAX stuff, and most web 2.0 sites that really push it work ok on opera only by accident... google apps included.

If this is the case, then firefly should be the solution... if it ever gets to the mainstream.

Is Opera cursed to be ignored, no matter how technically brilliant it may be?

761

Living Room / Re: flash-card programs to learn a new (human) language. What's the best?

« Last post by urlwolf on May 30, 2008, 02:33 AM »

Yeah, thanks everybody.

I guess one other important topic is where to get flash-cards themselves.

I found:
http://www.flashcard...hange.com/tag/german

But you need to pay to download the stack. Any free alternatives?

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com is a great site, thanks for posting it.

762

Living Room / flash-card programs to learn a new (human) language. What's the best?

« Last post by urlwolf on May 29, 2008, 07:43 AM »

I'm considering using flash-card programs to learn a new (human) language, German in my case as I'm moving to Berlin.

I was very impressed by this article in Wired magazine:
Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

It talks about supermemo, a program that uses what we know about forgetting to help retention.

Do you use flash-card programs?
What's the best?

Any other hacks to learn a language?

Thanks

763

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Mouse Wheel Scroll Can Cycle Through Applications on Taskbar

« Last post by urlwolf on May 28, 2008, 03:05 AM »

Great idea.
I tried the ahk code, but it didn't work for me.
My mouse drivers are kind of funky... but the wheel does work on all other programs.
I placed the mouse on the task bar, and moved the wheel. Nothing happened.

Is there any way to debug what may be causing the problem?

Thanks

764

Living Room / Re: What annoys you to no end?

« Last post by urlwolf on May 23, 2008, 08:16 PM »

Opera. So close to perfection, and so delicately screwed up by a tremendous design error or badly implemented feature.

Almost anything in opera is innovative and better than most other browsers. But then, they seem to have taken pains to make _every single user on earth_ to find a showstopper.

In my case, it's no html copy/paste, and more recently, huge bugs with M2 (it just won't retrieve mail anymore; but wait, it doesn't let me export mail either -so much for changing applications!). I'm stuck with gmail... till a dev fixes the bug I carefully reported... which could easily be never.

I'm an user since v 5. I paid for it when it was not free. The advantage: I got support. Now, you cannot get support even paying. An important difference.

765

General Software Discussion / Re: Xara Xtreme Pro and Magix Xtreme Graphic Designer.

« Last post by urlwolf on May 21, 2008, 01:12 PM »

Anyone knows how good these apps work on the linux version?
I'm sick of second class conversions. For example, Opera on linux doesn't have the nice scroll that I like so much on the windows version.

766

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

« Last post by urlwolf on May 19, 2008, 03:42 AM »

by the way, it seems that oneNote 2007 (together with the entire office 2007 suite) works under wine now (I haven't tried it).

767

General Software Discussion / Re: what we really want is a simple "plain text" organizer

« Last post by urlwolf on May 15, 2008, 03:01 PM »

emacs's org mode gives you the best plain text support ever. it even does tables (in text). Very good outliner.

Still, a bit of a learning curve...

768

General Software Discussion / any way to change font size in tree views (example:chm TOCs)

« Last post by urlwolf on May 12, 2008, 06:09 AM »

Is there any way to change font size in tree views (example:chm TOCs)?
Again, things are hard to read in my 1920 x 1200 laptop screen.

Alternatively, is there a chm reader that you can configure a bit (fonts mainly)?
I know the FF extension, but it's too slow and it has other problems.

Thanks
PS: I posted this on the ahk forums but got no answer.

769

General Software Discussion / piss off your users?make a non-redefinable shortcut that clobbers a standard one

« Last post by urlwolf on May 12, 2008, 02:04 AM »

This is exactly what iRotate has done: mapped shift + ctrl + arrows (something everyone uses to move around text, select blocks in excel etc) as their main screen rotation shortcut.

It's fun to try to select a word and see your screen rotating... several times.

The tool is incrediby useful, but it should have user-defined shortcuts, and in any case, never redefine window's system-wide shortcuts for a good reason.

770

Living Room / Re: Winamp 5.53 Release

« Last post by urlwolf on May 11, 2008, 05:05 AM »

One thing that I don't understand is why most music programs do tagging in the same thread. That is, if you change the genre of a CD, your player is blocked (you cannot press any other keys, change music, etc) till the progress bar finishes.

The only programs that do the right thing (multiple threads) are Mediamonkey, foobar (if a bit cumbersome), and Jriver.

Winamp lets you enjoy the full progress bar.

Another thing that bothers me is that folder monitoring (i.e., auto-add files to library when I move them to my music folder) plain sucks. Winamp doesn't refresh immediately. Same for ratings: and there's no easy way to do a manual refresh.

771

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

« Last post by urlwolf on May 10, 2008, 09:12 AM »

I'm interested in tobu (was going to post about it now... damn; too late).

I'm way too invested in oneNote 2007 to have an easy time switching. But onenote searches are getting extremely slow (and I have the indexing service on!).

Anyone experiencing this?

772

Living Room / Re: Winamp 5.53 Release

« Last post by urlwolf on May 09, 2008, 01:14 PM »

I used MM3 and think it's probably the most feature-complete player, but then I realized that I was allocating ~250MB of memory to play music... not nice.

Now I use a super-simple winamp 5.53 with nothing but the basics. It uses ~40Mb when minimized on tray.

-urlwolf (May 08, 2008, 02:26 PM)

o_O, what kind of music library do you have?

-Lashiec (May 09, 2008, 12:27 PM)

Just 40.000 songs. With musicIP tags, which may make it bigger. I'm reporting physical + virtual memory here. Some players release memory when in the tray (foobar, winamp), others not (MusicIP, MM).

773

Living Room / Re: Winamp 5.53 Release

« Last post by urlwolf on May 08, 2008, 02:26 PM »

I also love apps that do just one thing without hogging memory.
I used MM3 and think it's probably the most feature-complete player, but then I realized that I was allocating ~250MB of memory to play music... not nice.

Now I use a super-simple winamp 5.53 with nothing but the basics. It uses ~40Mb when minimized on tray.

774

General Software Discussion / Re: Linux Shootout: 7 Desktop Distros Compared (InformationWeek)

« Last post by urlwolf on May 08, 2008, 02:54 AM »

Wow. Gothi[c], Great post. This should be framed somewhere.
I agree on all points.

775

General Software Discussion / firebug-killer? dragonfly (opera web developer tool) released

« Last post by urlwolf on May 06, 2008, 07:36 PM »

The new Opera beta 2 has dragonfly built-in.
I couldn't find it where they say it should be, but that might be my hacked toolbar...

Has anyone tried it?