Recent Posts

8451

Living Room / Re: Fantastic Rant ...

« Last post by 40hz on January 08, 2011, 08:53 PM »

Banks are little more than legalized criminal institutions. They are amoral, deceitful, evil agencies.

...

Banks and financial institutions on the other hand pimp out their services under false pretenses and conceal the true nature of their business. They are deceitful and evil.

-Renegade (January 08, 2011, 07:50 PM)

@Renegade - love reading your words - and generally think the world of you - but c'mon...you've got to get the hyperbole under control a little better for 2011.  

While I've read it before, it was well worth reading it again.

-Stoic Joker (January 07, 2011, 11:30 AM)

Guess I did too. Snopes covered this "letter" previously. Link to it here.

Update: I now see the same Snopes link has begun showing up in the comments that follow the LinkedIn article starting yesterday.

Some are reporting it is apparently a fake - but nevertheless I love the sentiments  

-Carol Haynes (January 08, 2011, 09:15 AM)

Spot on! Just because it isn't real doesn't make it any less true. A subtle point that. But it's an important one.

8452

Living Room / Re: Can we stop with the diagonal screen length thing?

« Last post by 40hz on January 08, 2011, 06:47 PM »

OK. I just had to research this since it seemed too weird to be anything other than a marketing ploy.  

To my surprise, my cynical assumption turned out to be completely wrong as far as I can tell.  

Seems the "diagonal picture measurement" goes way back to when TVs first started being made in the 1930s. Due to technical limitations in the manufacturing process, only round picture tubes could initially be built.

The picture was projected in the center of the tube. And the once massive furniture-like case (often with doors) most sets were built into put a rectangular bezel around the tube to mask the area that didn't show the picture. The diameter of the tube determined maximum size of the image. The "diagonal" is the length of the diameter line as it passes through the image area.

Like so:



This was probably the most accurate way to let a customer know what the image size was since the diameter of the picture tube only set the maximum size of the image. It did not reflect the actual size being projected. A 25-inch set could easily have a picture diagonal that measured exactly the same as the one on a 23-inch set. And many did because the smaller the diagonal in relation to the diameter of the tube, the better the quality of the picture projected. This was because image convergence became a problem the further out you got from the center of the tube.

Rectangular tubes were first attempted as early as 1950.

From Popular Mechanics (March 1950) - click to enlarge.



But non-round picture tubes didn't go into real production till around 1965 when Motorola introduced the first generally available rectangular tube according to a Popular Science (Dec 1964) article. Read it here.

Other manufacturers soon introduced their own models. In 1966, the FCC issued a ruling that TV images should be measured on the diagonal just like they were when the tubes were still round to avoid possible confusion for the consumer.

So it's definitely not a conspiracy.    And it does make sense in a way.  

But that still doesn't explain why they couldn't just put the WxH measurements on the box too.  

8453

Living Room / Re: Fast/Responsive programs: An official SuperboyAC list

« Last post by 40hz on January 08, 2011, 04:55 PM »

No mayo?   I have lost all respect I once had for you.

- Oshyan

-JavaJones (January 08, 2011, 04:44 PM)

Well, if that's the case, it won't be the first time somebody has.  

Note: I used to like mayo. Got out of the habit when I was in a band. One of the roadies for a major group we had a quasi-relationship with told us one thing you never did when you were on the road was eat anything that came with mayo. Or at least you didn't if you didn't want to get very sick sooner or later. Good advice it turned out to be too - as our singer learned the hard way. Twice.

8454

Living Room / Re: Fast/Responsive programs: An official SuperboyAC list

« Last post by 40hz on January 08, 2011, 04:25 PM »

40's on a roll!!

-superboyac (January 08, 2011, 03:05 PM)

Actually, I'm best on rye toast. With a pickle. No mayo please.

8455

Living Room / Re: My 'LOL' alternative

« Last post by 40hz on January 08, 2011, 02:17 PM »

No shame. I have a godchild in college majoring in photography. She's my mentor for all things hip.  Without her input I'd still be using terms like "ripoff" and "goof."

8456

Living Room / Re: My 'LOL' alternative

« Last post by 40hz on January 08, 2011, 01:27 PM »

^ Up With That. 

8457

Living Room / Re: My 'LOL' alternative

« Last post by 40hz on January 08, 2011, 11:18 AM »

LOL if for LOLcats and that's about it.

-nudone (January 08, 2011, 03:50 AM)

Lol, srsly?

-f0dder (January 08, 2011, 05:09 AM)

@f0dder - looks like you beat me to it. Again! wtfuwt?  

8458

Living Room / Re: Fast/Responsive programs: An official SuperboyAC list

« Last post by 40hz on January 08, 2011, 11:15 AM »

To go along with Atlantis mentioned above, here are two more excellent wordprocessors that are small in footprint and long on features:

AngelWriter by Angelic Software.

This is one of my all time favs. Slick, very familiar interface, with a surprising amount of features packed in. It has support for tables, pictures, and most everything else the average or more sophisticated user could want.



Unrestricted freeware - donations accepted. Full details and download link here.

Also nice is the Tomahawk series of wordprocessors available from Native Winds LLC.

Tomahawk ships in two versions. Tomahawk PDF+ v3.0.1 is free for personal use. It's portable and has a huge list of features - including the built-in ability to export to PDF format. That alone would make it a worthy addition to any USB software collection even if it weren't for the fact it's such an excellent WP.



Free for non-commercial use. Info and download links here.

Users who want even more can take a look at their commercial ($36 USD) product Tomahawk Gold. This edition packs so many features (including the ability to create simple PDF forms complete with editable entry fields) that it's almost scary. At $36 per license it's probably one of the biggest software bargains out there.




Try before you buy. Further info and download link here.

------------

Note: check out the Native Winds About Us page if you get a chance.

NativeWinds is located near Whitehall, Montana in the Highland Mountain Range of the Rockies. The small town of Whitehall is situated in the southwestern part of Montana in the Jefferson Valley. Lots of mountains are nearby. To the southeast of Whitehall are the Tobacco Root Mountains, Bull Mountain is directly to the north and the Highland Mountains sit to the west. This is a small farm and ranch community of around 1,200 people where kids can still stop in at the local movie theater and catch the latest release (for us anyway) for a mere $2 dollars. Adult prices are $3 dollars. Traveling through the town of Whitehall in the spring and fall can take awhile. You never know when you'll sit at a stop sign for 30 minutes waiting for a cattle drive to clear the intersection.

You have to travel a ways from here to find any large centers of population. The closest town with a population of 50,000 plus is 126 miles away in Great Falls, Montana. To reach a city with a 200,000 plus population, you'll have to travel 648 miles south to Denver, Colorado.

The home of NativeWinds Software sits at an elevation of 6,500 feet above sea level and near the top of the Continental Divide in the Highland Mountain Range. We are surrounded on all 4 sides by the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. In addition to the standard fare you'd expect to find here - multiple computers in every room, bookshelves lining the walls, thousands of backup CD's and coffee cups within arm reach no matter where you stand; if you take the time to venture outside you'll see horses in corrals or pens to the north, east and south. Deer, elk, moose, coyotes, wolves and black bear are regular visitors who are kept at bay by 2 dogs of questionable descent who also consider this home.

Sounds like a pretty cool place to work...


 

8459

Living Room / Re: Can we stop with the diagonal screen length thing?

« Last post by 40hz on January 08, 2011, 07:13 AM »

And I find that to be a pretty fine indication of physical size, really, moreso today where ratio has been pretty much stabilized on 16:9/16:10 (there's not a lot of 4:3 monitors around anymore).

-f0dder (January 08, 2011, 05:42 AM)

Still, it would be nice if they just gave you the WxH measurement instead of making you resort to plugging the screen ratio numbers along with the diagonal measurement into the Pythagorean theorem just to get an answer.  

Ever look at all the specs they print on those boxes? They'll tell you everything you could possibly want to know about the product - including several things any sane person could care less about. In short, they tell you everything BUT the freekin' width and height measurements of the screen.

What's up with that?  Is there some gentleman's agreement in the industry that you don't talk about WxH?

8460

Living Room / Re: Can we stop with the diagonal screen length thing?

« Last post by 40hz on January 08, 2011, 06:58 AM »

Next thing you know he's gonna want them to stop advertising $100 items as: Only $99.99! 

8461

Living Room / Re: Fast/Responsive programs: An official SuperboyAC list

« Last post by 40hz on January 08, 2011, 06:29 AM »

I'm frequently driven crazy by people who say things like "Why don't we get together and (fill in the blank) say...three weeks from now?"

I'm one of those people who uses specific dates for everything. I'm not comfortable with concepts like "three Fridays from now" when making plans. So a convenient calendar is a good thing to have.

Enter AMP Calendar from AMPSoft. A simple portable app that does one thing extremely well. It puts a one-year pop-up calendar in your system tray.

Click on the tray and you get this:



Now when somebody says, "Can you come over the Friday after next?", I can pop up AMP Calender and immediately respond, "That would be the Friday that falls on the 21st of this month?"

My friends are impressed - and my enemies terrified!  

------------

Note: AMP Calendar can be customized if you want to change the default colors, number of columns, show the week number, etc.



I particularly like the number of columns option.

Normally, one-year calendars will show three columns to roughly coincide with the four seasons. But for some strange reason, my year seems to more naturally break into three "seasons" of four months each (Jan-Apr/May-Aug/Sep-Dec). Being able to select the number of columns allows me to display a calender with my seasons of the year. (FYI - the official names for the 40hz seasons are: Wet, Allergy, and Fall in case anybody's interested.)  

Setting it up to display a scrolling "on top" 1-column or 12 column layout could also be handy for somebody who is constantly booking appointments.

8462

Living Room / Re: Fast/Responsive programs: An official SuperboyAC list

« Last post by 40hz on January 07, 2011, 08:54 PM »

@rjbull - thanks for the mention of TED. I took a quick scan of the features list and was quite impressed. I've been looking for something that was small, made extensive use of key combos, and offered word completion. That would make it ideal for use as an editor for forum and blog composition IMO.

If this thing works half as well as it looks, it will become a permanent addition to my toolbox. And that's a pretty rare event these days.

8463

Living Room / Re: Fast/Responsive programs: An official SuperboyAC list

« Last post by 40hz on January 07, 2011, 06:33 PM »

whoa, this list is going to get big fast.

-superboyac (January 07, 2011, 05:36 PM)

Sure is.

Fortunately for all of us, Donation Coder is one of the places where crowdsourcing actually seems to work rather well. Good crew here. Sure glad I found DoCo. Not a day goes by without somebody posting something I can use or be entertained by.  

8464

Living Room / Re: Fast/Responsive programs: An official SuperboyAC list

« Last post by 40hz on January 07, 2011, 05:14 PM »

^ +1 on the portability. That's becoming an increasingly big plus with me when choosing apps these days.

8465

Living Room / Re: Fast/Responsive programs: An official SuperboyAC list

« Last post by 40hz on January 07, 2011, 04:42 PM »

I'd add Flashnote for the people who want a quick pop-up note taking app but prefer a more traditional dual-pane text/folder structure to the 'piano roll + tags' approach found in CintaNotes or Evernote.



Info and download here.

Note: I much prefer CintaNotes myself.

--------------

And for the techies out there, the marvelously named Angry IP Scanner.

Angry IP Scanner (or simply ipscan) is an open-source and cross-platform network scanner designed to be fast and simple to use. It scans IP addresses and ports as well as has many other features.

It is widely used by network administrators and just curious users around the world, including large and small enterprises, banks, and government agencies.

It runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, possibly supporting other platforms as well.

Grab a copy here.

8466

Living Room / Re: Fodder for history buffs

« Last post by 40hz on January 07, 2011, 04:11 PM »

I understand the Navy also has a copy of the real lyrics to Louie-Louie (Watch it now. Watch it!) 

Unfortunately, they're classified.  

8467

Living Room / Re: Fodder for history buffs

« Last post by 40hz on January 07, 2011, 03:59 PM »

Some info on related nautical monkey business can be found here courtesy of the U.S. Navy.


Nice to see some interesting info coming out of the U.S. military that didn't first have to pass through Wikileaks before we got to read it..

8468

Living Room / Re: What books are you reading?

« Last post by 40hz on January 07, 2011, 03:44 PM »

Re: Story by Robert McKee

Great recommendation SB.

What a book! One of those deep reads. High information density too. McKee packs a huge amount of thought into a small number of pages. Best sampled in chunks with adequate time to really think about what's being said and to fully grok all the nuances.

Story is also one of those rare books that grows with you. I first read it about 5 years ago. I still come back to reread sections (or the whole thing) from time to time and discover things I either missed or didn't fully appreciate on previos reads.

If you're really serious about becoming a writer (especially a movie scriptwriter) give this book a go!
 

8469

General Software Discussion / Re: What is your preferred server OS for home use? And Why?

« Last post by 40hz on January 07, 2011, 07:55 AM »

@4wd - do you know if DataSafe also backs up servers: or just workstations from the server?

8470

General Software Discussion / Re: What is your preferred server OS for home use? And Why?

« Last post by 40hz on January 07, 2011, 07:50 AM »

I don't know a Windows equivalent, but rsnapshot is very nifty. It does incremental backups, but not in the traditional sense... take a look

Had to dig into our KB for this one: There is something called cwRsync that will allow you to easily integrate the rsync daemon with various flavors of Windows. Catch is the Windows rsync port requires Cygwin. Can't vouch for how well it actually works since I've never tried it. Maybe it's because I'm not that wild about loading Cygwin on a server. (S'truth I'm not too wild about Cygwin in general, but that's probably just me.)

cwRsync is a yet another packaging of Rsync and Cygwin. You can use cwRsync for fast remote file backup and synchronization. Rsync uses the Rsync algorithm which provides a very fast method for bringing remote files into sync. It does this by sending just the differences in the files across the link, without requiring that both sets of files are present at one of the ends of the link beforehand. At first glance this may seem impossible because the calculation of diffs between two files normally requires local access to both files.
Rsync normally uses ssh for communication. It requires no special privileges for installation. You must, however, have a working ssh system.

Alternatively, rsync can run in `daemon' mode, listening on a socket. This is generally used for public file distribution, although authentication and access control are available. Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows. It consists of a DLL (cygwin1.dll), which emulates substantial Linux API functionality, and a collection of tools.

Installation

Supported platforms: Client - NT/2000/XP/2003/2008/Vista/7, Server - NT/2000/XP/2003/2008/Vista/7.

If anybody tries it please let me know?

8471

General Software Discussion / Re: What do you know about "LiveCode?"

« Last post by 40hz on January 07, 2011, 06:05 AM »

Not really a big deal, but I find it odd that the QuickTime "about" video on their homepage won't play on my iPhone. Especially since they have an iPhone dev product.  

8472

Living Room / Re: complete 180 on mouse preference - what's the best cheap mouse?

« Last post by 40hz on January 06, 2011, 05:36 PM »

I've never understood this bizarre tradition. Let's teach everyone to use a fork in their left hand if they are right handed - what lunatic decided that was the right thing to do.

So... I guess this wouldn't be the best time to ask you what you think about the "pinky in the left ear and haughty giggle" thing either. 

8473

Living Room / Re: Are You Ready to Switch to GNU/Linux?

« Last post by 40hz on January 06, 2011, 08:56 AM »

Re: free markets

FWIW, they really don't exist.  

Many economists would even argue it's doubtful a truly free market has ever existed since every market has been subject to some form of regulation or other non-economic influence throughout human history.

And that applies just as equally to black markets. In some respects, illegal businesses are regulated much more thoroughly (and severely) than their lawful cousins.

Many times, the only thing that separates a legal business activity from an illegal one is the permit that authorizes it. (e.g. In most societies, the use of physical violence is a government monopoly. That's why we have armies and police agencies. When butts need kicking, it's the exclusive perogative of the government to do it.)

Governments, on the other hand, feel no need to debate this topic. They already know there's no 'free' market because they won't allow it.

This is one reason why so much free market thinking breaks down. There are no free markets to apply it to.

Apparently it's not in our nature to let things find their own path or balance.  

8474

General Software Discussion / Re: Your most used SPECIAL programs

« Last post by 40hz on January 05, 2011, 03:53 PM »

Yeah, I was looking at Outline 4D for its outline features actually, as opposed to its writing features. I am writing scripts for small live acts and while writing the script isn't a problem (yet!) pulling everything together is. Such as props needed, whether or not I have all the needed props or need to procure them, etc. It's the overall picture that is difficult to keep together for each act rather than the writing function itself. Presently I'm using a pretty simple database program, which doesn’t quite meet the needs.

-J-Mac (January 05, 2011, 01:33 PM)

Why not borrow some old-fashioned technology from the movie people and set up a production "strip board" for yourself. It can make the difference between partial and complete insanity.

Look here for a quick rundown of how it's traditionally done. Then modify it to meet what you need to accomplish.

You could do it in Excel:



Or even just using paper and pencil. (Gone with the Wind and Ben Hur got done that way!)

There are also some moderately expensive (~$200) movie production apps (MovieMagic, Gorilla, etc.) you could use. The better ones integrate with Final Draft and other script writing/formatting apps such that any changes made to the script will automatically update the production board.

Probably overkill for your purposes. But it's nice to know they exist should you ever need them.

Luck!  

8475

General Software Discussion / Re: Your most used SPECIAL programs

« Last post by 40hz on January 05, 2011, 03:12 PM »

re: Ecco

From what I've been hearing InfoQube is a very worthy replacement plus a whole lot more.