Recent Posts

7976

LaunchBar Commander / Re: Trouble adding a Hard drive as a link

« Last post by mouser on April 01, 2014, 09:45 PM »

just change the node type to a "Command" with the command being the drive to open like "E:\"
that should do it.

7977

General Software Discussion / Re: Nice blog post on the parasitic software hosting sites bundling junkware

« Last post by mouser on April 01, 2014, 03:24 PM »

Their 'installer' could just be a middleware (cr)app that calls the original installer from the parent site

yeah, you'd want to try to check where your installer was being launched from and by what process -- that should hopefully tell you what you need to know.

But even with the new anti-wrapper safeguards, what would prevent them from continuing to distribute the version they already have?

i think you're assigning to them a level of determination and resilliance that is unrealistic.  the more likely scenario is they have an automated process and if a particular installer doesnt "wrap well" for whatever reason, they probably throw it onto the pile of installers not to wrap, and move on.

7978

Living Room / Re: Payment Services - opinions and ratings?

« Last post by mouser on April 01, 2014, 02:20 PM »

I've been reasonably happy with Amazon Payments.  One real benefit if you are on the receiving end is that people don't have the love/hate relationship with it the way they do with Paypal, and they trust Amazon to be safe, which can be a big deal.

I still prefer PayPal myself.  One thing Amazon Payments doesn't have is an option for letting the payer choose how much to pay -- they aren't nearly as friendly to different kinds of payments.

We used to accept Amazon payment "donations" on DC but one day they decided they didn't like that, closed our account, and just basically gave up on attempts to resurrect our account.  I was eventually able to create a new amazon payment account that we now use only for commercial license "purchases", which complies with amazon rules.

7979

Find And Run Robot / Re: Microsoft Sculpt Comfort Keyboard

« Last post by mouser on April 01, 2014, 02:10 PM »

The 4000 is what I use as well.

7980

General Software Discussion / Re: Nice blog post on the parasitic software hosting sites bundling junkware

« Last post by mouser on April 01, 2014, 11:24 AM »

For the respective user that would be too late though as once your installer runs, all the crap has already been installed.

Edit: Well, I guess you assume that if you do this your SW wouldn't be wrapped like this in the first place.

the first hope would be that the site would not be able to use their wrapper if my installer made the result unusable.
the second hope would be that the really lazy sites that don't check their wrapper success, would get penalized after the fact because my installer would tell the user the reason the installer has failed and blame it on where they got the download.

7981

General Software Discussion / Re: Nice blog post on the parasitic software hosting sites bundling junkware

« Last post by mouser on April 01, 2014, 09:24 AM »

i'm wondering if, rather than a legal solution, i couldn't add code to the installer to make it hard to bundle in this way -- make the installer detect if one of these adware wrappers have launched it, and instead of installing, throw up a big warning and refuse to install.

7982

DC Gamer Club / Re: 86% of Gamers Prefer Free Games With Advertisements

« Last post by mouser on April 01, 2014, 07:10 AM »

I hear you.. I hate to think where this trend is going.

7983

General Software Discussion / Nice blog post on the parasitic software hosting sites bundling junkware

« Last post by mouser on April 01, 2014, 12:52 AM »

We've discussed this before and it's still as infuriating as ever.

I recently came across this new blog article written by someone who used my Screenshot Captor tool as an example:
http://thundercloud....us-software-parasite

7984

Living Room / Re: April 1, 2014

« Last post by mouser on March 31, 2014, 11:16 PM »

See https://www.donation...ndex.php?topic=37631

7985

Dr.Windows / Dr. Windows recommended for April Fools Day Pranks

« Last post by mouser on March 31, 2014, 11:13 PM »

The excellent ILoveFreeSoftware website reviewed/recommended my DrWindows program today as a good way to play April Fool's day pranks on people:

http://www.ilovefree...-error-messages.html

Dr.Windows is apt to create real fun and play pranks on friends, as it lets you display amusing messages at regular intervals. In short, this is a fun application that lets you play harmless jokes on your friends.

If you use it to play a prank let me know how it goes  

(also mentioned today on http://www.makeuseof...nks-play-friends-pc/)

7986

Find And Run Robot / Re: Microsoft Sculpt Comfort Keyboard

« Last post by mouser on March 31, 2014, 10:10 PM »

Someone on this forum bought me an ergonomic microsoft keyboard as a gift many many years ago -- and i still use one to this day. 

7987

General Software Discussion / Re: Child board set up for discounts and deals found on the web

« Last post by mouser on March 31, 2014, 08:52 PM »

seem ok, as long as it isn't against terms of license.

7988

Living Room / Re: Cute jokes' thread

« Last post by mouser on March 31, 2014, 08:43 PM »

Great stuff.

7989

Developer's Corner / Re: How The Most Expensive Game Jam In History Crashed And Burned In A Single Day

« Last post by mouser on March 31, 2014, 08:40 PM »

Very interesting read 

7990

Find And Run Robot / Re: Microsoft Sculpt Comfort Keyboard

« Last post by mouser on March 31, 2014, 07:49 PM »

Just did a search for images of the keyboard -- seems you are right they got rid of the pause/break key -- that's too bad.  At least they still left me the PrtScr key.

Which key did you go with for activating FARR?

7991

Find And Run Robot / Re: Microsoft Sculpt Comfort Keyboard

« Last post by mouser on March 31, 2014, 06:45 PM »

You can customize what keys launch FARR from the hotkeys tab in options.  Desktop keyboards usually have a Pause/Break key, but on laptop keyboards that don't i sometimes use the ` (backtick or reverse apostrophe) key or alt+backspace.  You could also use a function key.

7992

Living Room / Re: Hypothetical hypothetical question

« Last post by mouser on March 31, 2014, 06:03 PM »

40hz said just about everything i believe in his first post.

The only thing worth adding that he hasn't added is that chances are that whatever great idea one has, a dozen people have come up with it decades ago in a dozen countries.  The idea itself is not the hard part -- it's developing the idea.

Do try hard to learn about prior work -- don't ignore it -- it could save you immense amounts of wasted time, and don't worry about someone else hearing about your idea and stealing it.

7993

Screenshot Captor / Re: How do I manually scroll webpage while selecting rectangle?

« Last post by mouser on March 30, 2014, 04:23 PM »

You can select manual scrolling mode from the scrolling capture page, but it's not very well developed and can be a real pain.

7994

Screenshot Captor / Re: Best way to crop an image with uneven boundarys

« Last post by mouser on March 30, 2014, 03:57 PM »

See this page for some videos showing how to make scrolling capture work well:
https://www.donation....msg277095#msg277095

7995

Screenshot Captor / Re: Best way to crop an image with uneven boundarys

« Last post by mouser on March 30, 2014, 01:21 PM »

I hope to learn how to use it in conjunction with SC..

Just go into Screenshot Captor preferences, then go to the External Tools tab near the bottom, and set the GIMP as your "Ext. Image Editor".

After that you can open any screenshot in the gimp by pressing the "Launch Graphic Editor" button on the Screenshot Captor toolbar (it's two down from the print button).

7996

Screenshot Captor / Re: "Active Window" vs "Current Screen"- Stupid Newb Question

« Last post by mouser on March 30, 2014, 10:22 AM »

Ok lastly, let's talk about capturing full screen game windows, since that's what you seem to be most interested in.

For that you would just want to hit PrtScr and configure SC to not show that post-capture dialog, and you should be all set.

However, if you find that some games always capture a fully black screen when you do so (but normal capture of applications work), then this may mean that you are dealing with a game which uses accelerated, low-level directX graphics that SC cannot capture.  This can happen for example with movie players as well.  In such cases, you may need to find a program (like Fraps) specifically designed for capturing directX, or a more extreme solution may be to disable hardware acceleration for your video card in your display preferences control panel -- but that's extreme because it can reduce game performance.

7997

Screenshot Captor / Re: "Active Window" vs "Current Screen"- Stupid Newb Question

« Last post by mouser on March 30, 2014, 10:18 AM »

You also asked about the difference between the "Active Window" option & the "Screen/Current Monitor" option? How are they different than the "Current Workspace" setting?

The difference between "Screen/Current Monitor" and "Workspace" only comes in if you have multiple monitors.  The former will only capture the current monitor, the latter will capture multiple monitors.  If you have one monitor, you should buy another so that you can use this function

Active window is when you want to capture only the contents of a non-fullscreen, non-maximized window, which is occupying only a portion of your screen.  By default Screenshot Captor will take a bit longer to capture such windows on Vista and Windows 7, as it will attempt to do capture the round corners, background transparency and shadow effects on such windows (You can disable this fancy if you want).

You can find the hotkeys for the different capture modes by right-clicking on the Screenshot Captor icon in the system tray.

7998

Screenshot Captor / Re: "Active Window" vs "Current Screen"- Stupid Newb Question

« Last post by mouser on March 30, 2014, 10:14 AM »

Welcome to the site Zirconia 

I hope Screenshot Captor suits your needs -- if not, hopefully the forum can still be useful to you -- we are a friendly bunch.

You've asked a few different questions, let's see how many we can answer.

The easy ones first:  If you want Screenshot Captor to take a picture and just shove it in a folder without any further input, then you'll want to change the option for what Screenshot Captor does after a capture.  It will always save it in a folder, but by default after a capture it pops up a window asking you what you want to do.  I'm like you I don't need that pop-up post-capture dialog.

So the next time that post-capture popup comes up after a capture, look for the option on the very bottom that says "After next capture:" and choose "Stay Minimized in Tray".  That will solve that.  Then just open the Screenshot Captor window from the system tray when you want to view your captured screenshots.

7999

Screenshot Captor / Re: Best way to crop an image with uneven boundarys

« Last post by mouser on March 30, 2014, 09:57 AM »

Well, you almost figured it out.

• Use Magic Wand to select the background white area (either Magic Wand Flood Fill or Global Magic Wand).
• This will select the background area as you point out.
• Then in the Edit menu, choose Select -> Invert Selection (or just hit Ctrl+I).  That will select the scroll itself.
• Now you can use the crop command/button to delete the background, as you want.

Having said this -- remember that SC is not meant to be a full featured paint/photo manipulation program, and you will find more powerful features in the big image editing tools (like the Gimp, Paint.net, RealWorld Paint, etc.), and remember that SC is very happy to let you configure it to invoke them to do editing on an image, and will automatically reload files after they are changed by an image editor -- so it makes it really easy to use in conjunction with such tools.  And if you do a lot of background removal, there are special tools for that too (i think there is a thread on that as well).

8000

Screenshot Captor / Re: How do I collect a bunch of small captures in one file

« Last post by mouser on March 28, 2014, 04:49 PM »

Ok so, you can use SC to capture lots of images quickly (you may want to set the option for what to do after next capture to "stay minimized" so that it stays out of your way while you do).

Then the main SC interface itself will let you view all of your capture and quickly select and annotate them.

Now the last step, combining the images all on one page, you need a separate program for that (at least for now).  However I have a good easy free one to recommend, ImageGrid, written by a member of this forum.  You can download ImageGrid here: https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=29464.0