Recent Posts

901

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: Plugin: AlbumDisplayer (BETA)

« Last post by Nod5 on August 12, 2008, 06:14 PM »

AlbumDisplayer v080813 v080814
-- link removed, use newer version below -- (md5 ebb905356dd7aa7e3a27ece19302de1e)
changelog:
v080814
- folders with ' in path now works
v080813
- now trims all % in input to avoid FARR crash (example: "alb abc%" previously caused crash)
- special search phrase "alb *" displays all albums (first 100 then 50 more at each scroll to page bottom)
- ctrl+click album to open its folder

Let me hear your impressions on "alb *" - does it freeze FARR too long/too often?

902

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: google dollar exchange rate plugin -- sketch

« Last post by Nod5 on August 10, 2008, 08:07 PM »

CurrencyConverterMini v1.03.01
http://nod5.dcmember...cyconvertermini.html
Changelog:
fixed error with , or . in search.
removed conversion rate cache.

I hope I did a correct plugin pack. If not, let me know.
Also, is it ok if I rename this thread to "CurrencyConverterMini (plugin)"?

903

Living Room / Re: Skimp or splurge?

« Last post by Nod5 on August 09, 2008, 01:24 PM »

40hz: point taken. But I consider 20$ for a knife at least a semi-splurge. A decent IKEA knife goes for around 5$ you know

I wish to file a friend-of-the-splurge brief for mousers tape splurge Tape, especially electrical tape, is one of the most handy things ever invented. Buy good quality stuff and buy enough to be able to have multiple rolls at various places around your house or apartment.

A general splurge rule: buy duplicates of small tools you use a lot and put in different places. That way you'll always have some close to hand and won't have to spend time searching for where you put them so often.

904

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Mini-Review of Fineprint (Virtual Printer)

« Last post by Nod5 on August 09, 2008, 01:11 PM »

  I had somehow completely missed the remove graphics feature in previous versions. But now I'm very aware of it

905

Living Room / Re: Skimp or splurge?

« Last post by Nod5 on August 04, 2008, 07:09 AM »

Nice topic!

Ergonomically fitting computer gear: SPLURGE. Let's face it, if you're reading this you probably spend a lot of time in front of a computer screen. Finding a mouse, keyboard, screen, table and chair that fits your body well is well worth investing money and time in. You don't have to get extremely specialized gear. It's a good step to just get a somewhat better version for each of the listed tool categories.

Kitchen knife: SKIMP. I see I'm going against the grain in this thread here. I use cheap knives from IKEA and an cheap knife sharpener from IKEA. If only the knives are sharp then I have never noticed a difference in performance between cheap and expensive knives.

906

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: Plugin: AlbumDisplayer (BETA)

« Last post by Nod5 on August 01, 2008, 05:20 PM »

the alb * feature has been delayed by awesome weather, plenty of swimming in lakes and other distracting outdoor activities. Sorry about that. 

I've tested it some more though. I'm unsure what the best design would be. If I let it first load 50 covers and then load 50 more each time the user scrolls to the bottom then there's a noticeable freeze for a second or more with each additional 50 cover load. This happens the first time for each cover during a session. The covers seems to be cached after that.

I tried decreasing the number of albums to display at each bottomscroll to 20. That shortened the freeze but on the other hand gave a larger number of freezes.

I think the best thing would be to incrementally inject more covers at a pace that does not cause the freezes but still does not feel slow. I'm unsure how to do that in javascript however.

Another idea is to initially let alb * display 50 covers plus empty image frames for all the rest of the albums. FARR would then incrementally keep loading the rest of the images into those frames until the user does some other FARR action.

Any thoughts?

907

Site/Forum Features / Re: request: "latest post of"-page with only thread titles and new post indication

« Last post by Nod5 on August 01, 2008, 04:50 PM »

I mean the page titled "Latest post of: ____" where ____ is a username. A link to that page is found at the bottom of each users profile page. That link is titled "Show the last posts of this person".
For example, for you it would be this page:
https://www.donation...ile;u=2;sa=showPosts

Here's a screencap of one element on my latest post of-page ATM:


Compare that to this sketch of what I'm after:

the numbers 0, 3, 2 would indicate the number of posts made after my last post since I last read the last page of that thread while logged on. Red numbers means there's new, unread posts. So what I'm asking for is basically a page that somewhat mimics a minimal RSS reader for the last threads I've posted to. This presupposes that the SMF keeps track of what threads (and pages in threads) a user loads while logged on, which may not be the case.

edit: it would also be neat if the user could add a few other threads to always display on that page (like discussion threads for some programs or some favourite threads)

908

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Mini-Review of Fineprint (Virtual Printer)

« Last post by Nod5 on July 31, 2008, 12:17 PM »

I'm testdriving FP6 on my scrap computer. The changed GUI and the "remove graphics" options seems to be the largest changes. There's a video here where you can see some of the GUI changes:
http://www.fineprint...int/video/index.html
The other two videos doesn't seem to be available yet.

I hoped they would have added more features, especially for such a major version change. One more feature that I hope they'll add is a mode with three pages per sheet. As I think I've mentioned before, when printing many PDF text documents, like academic journal articles, placing three pages in three columns could give small but still very readable output, given heavily cropped margins. That would give us six pages per sheet of paper if double side printing is used!

909

Site/Forum Features / request: "latest post of"-page with only thread titles and new post indication

« Last post by Nod5 on July 31, 2008, 05:26 AM »

I often use the "latest post of"-page for myself to monitor the threads at DC forum that I'm currently active in. It works pretty well but could be very much enhanced if a version of the "latest post of"-pages was made that has these features:

- shows only the titles for the threads where the user has posted (to make it compact so one gets a more immediate overview)
- indicates how many new messages has been posted in each thread since (1) the users last post and (2) since last time the user read the last page of the thread while logged on.

Alternatively: is there some way to make a RSS feed for all new items in all threads listed on the latest post of-page?
If not, is there at least some way to make a RSS feed for all new items in a number of specified threads? (I'd like to make a RSS for all discussion threads for the small programs/scripts I've made for easy monitoring of them)

edit: I just read the RSS thread and then skimmed parts of the linked simplemachines thread. It seems like RSS for individual threads is not available since people are still asking for it on the last page there: http://www.simplemac....php?topic=25009.260

910

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Mini-Review of Fineprint (Virtual Printer)

« Last post by Nod5 on July 31, 2008, 05:12 AM »

Fineprint 6 is now available!

http://www.fineprint.com/fp6upgrade.html

In FinePrint 6, you will find improvements in every area of the product. Here are the highlights:
improved user interface with toolbar and larger preview
enhanced zoom with panning
customizable Layout tab and toolbar
colored stamps
rearrange pages
printer nicknames
customizable printer list
copies indicator
visible binding indicator
improved driver settings including compression, margins and resolution
delete page icon on toolbar
page preview window when scrolling
Open dialog box contains recent list and preview

FinePrint is a really good product. I still think it is a COMPLETE MYSTERY that no fairly good clones have cropped up for either windows or linux.

I also wish that the FP would have a feature that lets us delete segments of the pages (not just entire pages) before printing.

911

Find And Run Robot / Re: too many updates !!!

« Last post by Nod5 on July 29, 2008, 04:26 AM »

i think a good thing to do might be to add tags of major/minor/beta for each update, and let dcupdater be configured to ignore certain tagged updates for each program.

-mouser (July 28, 2008, 11:45 AM)

I love the many FARR updates! But I can also see the use in such a feature for some people. In general I think something like this is becoming a really important feature for update tools. Though I think the most important tag would be "vulnerability fix/security issue fix". I use filehippos updatechecker to update many programs and some are very frequently updated (notepad++ and ccleaner to mention just two) and most of the time the changes for each update are of no meaning to me. The problem is even greater with firefox add-ons. For many programs/add-ons I would ideally want to get all security fixes and all major revisions and inbetween that perhaps only every 10th update.

912

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

« Last post by Nod5 on July 27, 2008, 06:10 PM »

urlwolf, as you wrote earlier Office 2007 can now run via Wine. Here's a thread specifically on Onenote 2007 under Wine in Ubuntu: http://ubuntuforums....wthread.php?t=744743 . The core seems ok, but some features do not work. I haven't tried it yet myself, but plan to do so sometime. If it runs well enough, and especially if there are no problems saving/opening Onenote content across the "OS border", then I will probably commit to Onenote as my primary notetaking tool. If you or anyone else here has by now tried it then please post your impressions here.

913

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: Plugin: AlbumDisplayer (BETA)

« Last post by Nod5 on July 19, 2008, 04:30 AM »

ok, I've got the * search working. To avoid freezing, I set the plugin to display the 100 first images and then inject 100 more each time the user scrolls to the end of the page. I can't upload the new version from where I am now but I will do that later.

When using just folder.jpg I only had to index the folder names. I can easily make an option to let the user change that from folder.jpg to whatever and leave the rest of the code intact. But supporting mixed image names on one system (some folder.jpg and some front.jpg) would require some more recoding.

914

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: Plugin: AlbumDisplayer (BETA)

« Last post by Nod5 on July 17, 2008, 04:11 PM »

Is there a way to let me display all albums? like typing "alb *" or something?

-TucknDar (July 17, 2008, 04:30 AM)

Good suggestion! I'll look into making * a catch all search term. One problem though: the plugin currently only displays up to 100 matches (the 100 first matches). I added that because when testing on more files FARR seemed to slow down/freeze while loading the images. I'll see if that can be avoided.

re: folder.jpg, yes that's some sort of standard naming scheme. Used by Windows Explorer and other programs to display album art. You can add the folder.jpg files manually or through some program/script.

Lashiec, what other naming conventions do you have in mind?

915

General Software Discussion / output audio to two devices in Win XP? (PulseAudio?)

« Last post by Nod5 on July 17, 2008, 05:32 AM »

I want to output audio in Win XP from various applications (audio players, video players, browsers) to two audio devices at the same time (two local soundcards, one internal and one external).

Switching between two devices is easy: just change the device and (re)start the application. But to output the same audio to two devices simultaneously is harder. I have searched and found many forum posts on the web stating that it is not possible. But I also found some posts claiming that PulseAudio can do it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PulseAudio

PulseAudio is a sound server, a background process accepting sound input from one or more sources (processes or capture devices) and redirecting it to one or more sinks (sound cards, remote network PulseAudio servers, or other processes).

That's what I want! It also says "OS Cross platform" and the official website http://pulseaudio.org/ says:

Supported Operating Systems
Linux (any modern distribution)
Solaris
FreeBSD
Native Win32 (no cygwin)

But here's the problem:

I went via http://pulseaudio.or...i/DownloadPulseAudio to http://www.cendio.com/pulseaudio and grabbed the binaries but can't get them to work. When I follow http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/FirstSteps and enter "pulseaudio -nC" at the command line I get this error:

pulseaudio -nC
W: pulsecore/random.c: failed to get proper entropy. Falling back to seeding with current time.
W: pulsecore/core-util.c: secure directory creation not supported on Win32.
W: pulsecore/core.c: failed to allocate shared memory pool. Falling back to a normal memory pool.
W: pulsecore/core-util.c: WARNING: Only sockets can be made non-blocking!
W: pulse/mainloop.c: WARNING: cannot monitor non-socket file descriptors.
W: pulsecore/core-util.c: WARNING: Only sockets can be made non-blocking!
W: pulse/mainloop.c: WARNING: cannot monitor non-socket file descriptors.

Ok, I hope I can get some feedback either on how to get PulseAudio to work in Win XP and do what I'm after or on some other application on XP that will accomplish that.

916

General Software Discussion / Re: An Analysis of CamSpace as a Webcam Mouse and Gaming Controller

« Last post by Nod5 on July 09, 2008, 06:11 PM »

Yes, I can see the obstacles. The problem with CamSpace that you describe seem like a really tough design challenge for them to try to solve! I hope the devs come up with some smart way to at least lessen the problem.

If they used two or more webcams to record the hand/"mouse" from somewhat different angles, then that might solve much of the problem. But then they'd get the other problem with heavy system resource use.

This is off topic but the above problems got me thinking: do you know of some other promising new input tech that would be better at solving these problems? Are there some attempts at cheap 3D mice around? I've seen some devices using gyros. But how about a wireless mouse that instead uses multiple USB receivers positioned at different places in the room to somehow calculate the 3D position of the mouse? To my uninitiated ears it doesn't sound very expensive or impossible. But maybe there are large obstacles there too.

917

General Software Discussion / Re: batch create image contact sheet from videofiles?

« Last post by Nod5 on July 09, 2008, 05:37 PM »

hi majax79, welcome to DC and sorry for the very late reply! Unfortunately I do not know of any way to force MPC to use a screencap of the first frame as the first image in the contact sheet.

In general, if I had a lot more time to make a more flexible contact sheet solution that could do what you ask for, and many more things, I think I'd try to make one that uses VLC as image grabber ( http://wiki.videolan...to_create_thumbnails ) and graphicsmagick as contact sheet maker ( http://www.graphicsm...org/www/montage.html ). But the fact is that I don't have time to do that.

918

General Software Discussion / Re: An Analysis of CamSpace as a Webcam Mouse and Gaming Controller

« Last post by Nod5 on July 08, 2008, 03:30 PM »

This analysis was a great read VideoInPicture! 

In all the linked youtube videos people have their webcam in the standard position above the screen. But maybe different placement would give better results? For example, for mouse simulation a webcam could be placed in front of the regular mouse position and the hand (with some marker on the fingers) could then occupy the regular mouse position. That way one hand could have mouse control while the other is at the keyboard, like with a real mouse.

A (quirky) thought I got when reading this: will it work with multiple webcams? In a driving game one cam could register a wheel object while another camera, on the floor, registers foot movement (acceleration/brake pedals) 

919

Find And Run Robot / Re: Request for ideas for html view mode size memory

« Last post by Nod5 on July 06, 2008, 07:21 PM »

got it working, thanks!

Setsize sets the size of the entire FARR window, right? Wouldn't it be more useful to set the size of the match list area (i.e. the html page when in html view mode)? Because then a distributed alias/plugin that uses setsize would get more similar looking output for different users regardless of what FARR skin they use (the minimalistic skin slenderFARR differs from other skins in horizontal border size for example). The output could still differ due to other user system factors like scroll bar size, font size and so on, but at least one source of different output would be removed.

920

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: A minute countdown timer in PowerPoint

« Last post by Nod5 on July 06, 2008, 09:12 AM »

I like these programs - they make conferences just a little bit more efficient. So the more alternative tools the better. That said I think ZoomIt by Windows Sysinternals ( http://technet.micro...ernals/bb897434.aspx ) already works really well and has some good options:

It doesn't support a text header directly, but that can be solved through a custom background image with text.
It can't display a slideshow in the background - that would have been really nice.

921

Find And Run Robot / Re: Request for ideas for html view mode size memory

« Last post by Nod5 on July 06, 2008, 08:42 AM »

Mouser, can you give an example alias using the "setsize" special launch string? I can't get my aliases to both set a window size and display a html file.

I think three size modes would make sense:
1. a default mode that FARR reverts to at reload and restart and at each search if not overridden by 2 or 3.
2. a temporary resized mode when a alias/plugin uses "setsize", reverting back to default once the next search/alias/plugin runs
3. another temporary resized mode when the user drag resizes the FARR window, staying until the user reloads farr or an alias/plugin uses setsize. Differs from 2 in that it doesn't revert to default size at the next regular search.

A slick way to set the default size would be CTRL+drag resize. Regular drag resize could then still be used for 3.

Finally some unabashed praise: all the many recent FARR updates are REALLY GREAT! So many new cool features to try! 

922

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: Plugin: AlbumDisplayer (BETA)

« Last post by Nod5 on July 05, 2008, 11:40 AM »

Mouser, that sounds perfect!

Given a variable in fscript.js that reflects if enter was pressed then I just need to modify the passed parameter (from the current "album.html?phrase1 phrase2 phrase3" to for example "album.html?enter=1&search=phrase1 phrase2 phrase3") and make album.html immediately send the first match to the external player if enter=1 .

BTW, I first thought that the plugin part for this idea could be made redundant once FARR gets a built in way to load a html view mode page without pressing enter (i.e. if "dosearch htmlviewurl..." worked). But for more advanced features like different behaviour for regex match versus pressing enter a plugin seems necessary.

edit: I found a bug with my plugin: If I type "alb abc%" then the percent sign crashes FARR in a barrage of error messages, the first saying "invalid hex digit in URL". I guess I need to block certain characters in the fscript.js...

923

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: Plugin: AlbumDisplayer (BETA)

« Last post by Nod5 on July 05, 2008, 09:26 AM »

the problem is this: for search as you type to work, I need to let the FARR inputbox to keep focus. But to launch a match from the html page through enter I need that match (and the page) to have focus. But since the enter key currently has no use in the plugin when the input box has focus, maybe I can modify it so that the enter redoes the search and immediately loads the first match. Let me look into that.

In the meantime, pressing tab + enter is a pretty fast way to launch the first match.

924

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: Plugin: AlbumDisplayer (BETA)

« Last post by Nod5 on July 05, 2008, 09:20 AM »

indeed it does! Via the farr:// commands we can mix html and FARR functionality a lot. We could for example make a html menu for each match and from that menu choose from multiple things for FARR to do with the match (pass it to an audioplayer like above, or copy it to clipboard, or pass it to another FARR plugin, or...)

re: launching the first result. I'm not exactly sure how to do it. Do you see a good way?

925

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Plugin: AlbumDisplayer (BETA)

« Last post by Nod5 on July 05, 2008, 08:57 AM »

AlbumDisplayer (BETA) -- please testdrive/pick apart and give feedback! If anyone would like to post about this at some other place, please don't until there's been some more feedback confirming that it works for others (it works perfect on my system but you never know...)

-----------------------------------
AlbumDisplayer
by nod5 ( nod5.dcmembers.com )
a plugin for FARR Find and Run Robot; www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/findrun/
using FARR javascript SDK by ecaradec
using tooltip html/javascript code by dynamicdrive.com
using static index, created/updated by script made in autohotkey
-----------------------------------

Setup:
(0) Extract and copy folder "AlbumDisplayer" and all its files to FARR Plugin directory
(1) edit path in AlbumDisplayerIndexer.ini
(2) run AlbumDisplayerIndexer.exe to make index
(3) edit audioplayer path in album.html
(4) type "rplugins" in FARR and click "OK"

Tip: put link to AlbumDisplayerIndexer.exe in autorun folder to re-index at each Windows reboot

Use:
Type "alb searchphrase". Example: "alb beatles yellow sub"

Click on a match to send its folder as a parameter to the specified audio player
(confirmed working in the audioplayer XMPlay)

Note: AlbumDisplayer only works for folders that contain a folder.jpg image file.
Note: requires FARR 2.15.01 or newer

download: -- link removed use newer version below -- (md5 9e11f51b5f31f54951fee0b3b67284b6 )

short flash screencast: http://nod5.dcmembers.com/albumdisplayerbeta.htm