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951

General Software Discussion / Re: Redo Backup and Recovery

« Last post by ewemoa on April 30, 2013, 01:56 AM »

Tried 1.0.3 and 1.0.4 today.

1.0.3 worked pretty well, however...

1.0.4. would not restore a backup made with 1.0.3.  1.0.4 also failed to backup the same set up.  Of course, these things may be particular to the local setup.

It appears that along with the backups being made, it might be prudent to backup the iso image of Redo Backup used to create the backup (or note the version used).

Also from 1.0.3:

Restore now overwrites MBR and partition table upon completion

and this appears to be something one cannot opt out of.

Despite these gotchas, 1.0.3 appears to be a viable alternative here to using OneKey Recovery Factor Default Recovery discs.  Redo Backup probably took less than 30 minutes to perform a recovery while the OneKey discs took over an hour.  Also, with Redo Backup it is not necessary to swap among 4 optical discs during the restore.


Changelogs:

Version 1.0.3 (2012-05-10)

* Restore now overwrites MBR and partition table upon completion

Version 1.0.4 (2012-11-20)

* Base upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise)
* Percent complete now based on part sizes rather than total number of parts
* Windows now have titlebars to ease minimizing, maximizing and closing
* Time is now synced to localtime (hardware clock) after boot
* Widget theme changed to Bluebird for Gtk3 compatibility
* Now has a helpful beep to indicate when long processes are finished
* Added alsamixergui to enable mixer button on volume control
* Drive reset utility can now operate on multiple drives simultaneously
* Removed synaptic and boot-repair packages to reduce image size

952

Living Room / Re: What to do with an SSD after it fails

« Last post by ewemoa on April 25, 2013, 06:25 PM »

I found the smily at the bottom right corner of the image to be illuminating

953

Living Room / Re: What to do with an SSD after it fails

« Last post by ewemoa on April 24, 2013, 05:42 AM »

This still is a mostly unanswered question though; for sake of discussion, if the drive did have some crazy important data on it, would it just have to be destroyed in this situation? Is that really a real-world "solution"? What would a company's IT department do if they had amassed a group of failed SSDs with company data still on them?

-wreckedcarzz (April 24, 2013, 03:23 AM)

I've wondered over the years about "services" that offer to destroy such things...why would one trust them, and even if one did, would they not be a major target?

954

Developer's Corner / Re: Binary Patching for "Similar" Large Files

« Last post by ewemoa on April 23, 2013, 08:03 PM »

On a peripheral note, found the following info on the .vdi and .vmdk formats:

  .vdi - All About VDIs
  .vmdk - Virtual Disk Format 5.0

955

Developer's Corner / Re: Binary Patching for "Similar" Large Files

« Last post by ewemoa on April 23, 2013, 07:21 PM »

FWIW, I found some explanation of tweaking at:

  https://code.google.com/p/xdelta/wiki/TuningMemoryBudget

Source buffer size

The encoder uses a buffer for the source input (of size set by the command-line flag -B). To ensure the source input is read sequentially, with no backward seeks, the encoder maintains the source horizon at half the source buffer size ahead of the input position. A source copy will not be found if it lies more than half the source buffer size away from its absolute position in the input stream.

For large files, -B may need to be raised. The default is 64MB. This means data should not shift more than 32MB, that is, not more than 32MB should be added or removed from the source.

The minimum value of -B is 16KB.

The source file is not mmaped, it is read into the source buffer (Xdelta-1.x used mmap()).

Note: all flags are set in bytes, so for example to set a 512MB source buffer you must pass -B536870912.

956

Developer's Corner / Re: Binary Patching for "Similar" Large Files

« Last post by ewemoa on April 23, 2013, 02:15 AM »

Some additional bits on xdelta3 with command line tweaks:

  -B268435456 results in a patch a little under 139,000,000 bytes
  -B536870912 results in a patch a little over 103,000,000 bytes
  -B536870913 results in a patch a little over 56,000 bytes
 
So it looks like in this case, comparable sizes (to xdelta 1.x) are obtainable by tweaking the -B option.

957

Developer's Corner / Binary Patching for "Similar" Large Files

« Last post by ewemoa on April 23, 2013, 12:11 AM »

Any recommendations for patching guest OS images that may not differ by much?

I've tried xdelta, xdelta3, bsdiff, and beat so far and discovered that:

  1. xdelta (1.x series) created a very small patch (a bit over 70,000 bytes) when the difference was between a .vdi file and a .vmdk file (vdi being somewhat over 810,000,000 bytes and vmdk being somewhat less than 745,000,000 bytes) -- here the vmdk file was created via conversion from the vdi file.

  2. xdelta3 (without tweaking of parameters) for the same scenario created an enormous file (a bit under 280,000,000 bytes) by comparison

  3. bsdiff exited with a message about not being able to allocate memory...

  4. beat created a large file (I think it was over 500,000,000 bytes) in linear mode and killed my X session in delta mode...(actually, it may have been systemd that killed my X session)

(AFAICT, xdelta3 does not process patches generated with xdelta 1.x...)

958

General Software Discussion / Re: What Android Apps Do You Use?

« Last post by ewemoa on April 20, 2013, 02:38 AM »

Finally got CyanogenMod running

Here's an updated list of what I've been using these days:

Aldiko	a reader - finally it can remember the zoom settings while navigating
aLogcat	logcat viewer - only useful up through Android 4.1?
Barcode Scanner	QR and other barcode reader
Camera
EBookDroid	reader with support for PDF (and other formats), auto-crop, per-book settings, and lots more
ES File Explorer	multi-feature file explorer
F-Droid	discovering potential apps with source available
File Expert	nice for quick file-sharing
Firefox	has support for some add-ons and OpenSearch
Gallery
Hacker's Keyboard	hurray, arrow keys and friends!
Kitchen Timer
MX Player	video player
OI ShoppingList	for managing various lists (not just shopping)
Opera Mobile	helps for downloading
Quickdroid	a bit like QuickSilver and/or FARR
Settings
Terminal Emulator
TubeMate

EBookDroid "almost" has this nice feature of being able to specify a page offset so that page numbers displayed by the app can be made to match better what the document displays.  Unfortunately, negative page offsets don't seem to work yet.

The attached patch appears to be working here so far.

959

General Software Discussion / Re: Using Windows 7 as WiFi Access Point Simply

« Last post by ewemoa on April 18, 2013, 11:57 PM »

Thanks Stephen66515

May be someone can upload a patch.

960

General Software Discussion / Wine, Multiple Displays, and Black Edges/Borders/Bars...

« Last post by ewemoa on April 15, 2013, 01:31 AM »

Testing out Wine here and encountered a "visual" problem.

When I have multiple displays enabled, starting up applications via Wine can result in black edges/borders/bars (along the bottom and/or right side of an application's window (at least on the larger display):



Actually, where the black areas appear seems to match what would be the edges of the smaller display if its top-left corner were aligned with the top-left corner of the larger display.

Some work-arounds seem to be:

• Disabling displays so that only one is active
• Enable "Emulate a virtual desktop" via winecfg
• Launch an application in a virtual desktop (e.g. wine explorer /desktop=atitle,1920x1080 path-to-program.exe)

(The last two are mentioned in the WineHQ FAQ: "How do I get Wine to launch an application in a virtual desktop?")

Anyone encountered this and come up with a better fix?

961

General Software Discussion / Re: Simple File Transfer Options

« Last post by ewemoa on April 14, 2013, 08:34 PM »

I haven't used rsync in a while -- my memory of it was that it was great for synchronizing things, but that remembering the command line options was not something I succeeded at


On a related note, I found that the upload.c example for the mongoose web server provides upload-by-form-via-http.  I made a minor change (save location /tmp -> .) and compiled it using mingw.  Also includes files necessary for compilation -- see included README.txt.

See attachment.

md5:c24c2e8b3a8f540b65ca43726a87e465

962

General Software Discussion / Simple File Transfer Options

« Last post by ewemoa on April 13, 2013, 08:40 AM »

The following are some of the simpler file transfer options I've come across.

"Simpler" here is deliberately vague, but the situations under which I've thought to look for these has typically when I want to transfer a file between two machines without much set-up hassle.

• netcat, sbd, ncat, and friends -- if you don't mind the command line
• HTTP File Server (HFS) -- easy to start, uploading and downloading, even works under WINE (HTTP)
• Droopy -- uploading only(?) and needs Python (HTTP)
• Python 2: python -m SimpleHTTPServer / Python 3: python -m http.server -- downloading only and needs Python (HTTP)
• mongoose -- cross-platform, no config necessary for simple downloading (HTTP)
• osws -- one-shot file download and *nix-only(?) (HTTP)

Anyone have any favorites?

963

General Software Discussion / Re: DVCS ? (All about Git, Mercurial-Hg and the like...)

« Last post by ewemoa on April 13, 2013, 01:25 AM »

May be tagging the most recent commit before going through an interactive rebase is cheap way to make reverting easy (and upon success, deleting the tag)...

964

General Software Discussion / Re: DVCS ? (All about Git, Mercurial-Hg and the like...)

« Last post by ewemoa on April 13, 2013, 12:53 AM »

As a side note, I've disabled Preferences -> Commands -> Clean Up -> Periodically invoke Git's garbage collection when idle.

May be that makes it a bit easier to recover from my own errors...

965

General Software Discussion / Re: DVCS ? (All about Git, Mercurial-Hg and the like...)

« Last post by ewemoa on April 13, 2013, 12:52 AM »

After a botched interactive rebase session, learned about the "Lost Heads" functionality of the Log window in SmartGitHg.  (Apparently, something similar was possible before via Query | Load All Commits, but this functionality seems to have been removed in the 4.x series.)

IIUC, checking the checkbox next to "Lost Heads" in the "Branches" tab of the Log window leads to showing the content of the reflog in the "Commits" tab.

Once such commits can be seen, recovery was farily straight-forward.:

• In the "Commits" tab, select the commit representing the state to "get back" to.
• Create a new branch via "Add Branch...".
• Point the original branch (e.g. master, if that's what was involved with the interactive rebase) at the newly created branch.

The Lost Heads will show all commit heads which are not accessible from a tag or branch.

via:
  http://www.syntevo.com/smartgithg/tour.html

966

Developer's Corner / Re: Android Emulator Slow? Try Android x86 via VirtualBox (or similar)

« Last post by ewemoa on April 10, 2013, 10:05 AM »

AndroVM seems to be another alternative.

Some helpful hints here.

Seems to be working well here so far


"Wi-Fi" seems to work out-of-the-box for AndroVM whereas I didn't succeed in getting that working with the particular Android x86 ISO I tried.

967

Living Room / Re: new DVD "M-Disc" perfect for archive material

« Last post by ewemoa on April 10, 2013, 04:25 AM »

I'm interested in the M-Disc. I'll probably give it another couple or three years to mature, then buy a more up to date PC that ships with a M-Disc ready DVD burner.

-kyrathaba (April 09, 2013, 07:22 AM)

IIUC, one nice thing about these newer M-DISC Blu-ray discs is that a special drive is not necessary to read or write them -- apart from being a drive that supports burning Blu-ray discs.  Don't have any idea of the price of these M-DISC Blu-ray discs though -- nor whether they will undergo testing similar to the M-DISC DVDs...

But here's a question: why can't they make flash storage more robust? Why not improve USB thumb drives' reliability/longevity? Is it just not possible? I mean, give me something like the 256 GB Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 but with 10x the expected life-span.

No idea really -- but even if it were possible, IIUC, when a thumb drive (or hard drive) fails, one often does't seem to have very long to get much of anything off of it before it becomes completely inaccessible (at least with equipment that most of us are likely to have access to).  Optical media on the other hand, seem to degrade more gradually and consequently, it seems like you don't lose as much nearly as fast once failures start (unless you shatter or something) -- and perhaps one can apply the likes of dvdisaster for some premeditated insurance.

968

Living Room / Re: new DVD "M-Disc" perfect for archive material

« Last post by ewemoa on April 08, 2013, 10:55 PM »

Regarding larger capacity discs, apparently in January of this year (2013), there was some relevant press release:

U.S.-based Millenniata (www.mdisc.com) ... announced it will offer Blu-ray M-DISCs in the second quarter of 2013, increasing both the storage capacity and the accessibility of the M-DISC.

...

The new Blu-ray M-DISCs will be writable and readable on any Blu-ray combo drive – an enormous step for Millenniata and the convenience of this permanent storage technology. The Blu-ray M-DISCs will also offer at least five times the amount of storage as the standard 4.7GB M-DISC.

via:

  http://finance.yahoo.com/news/millenniata-announces-blu-ray-optical-221400517.html (Mon, Jan 7, 2013)

969

General Software Discussion / Re: Aaron Seigo on Canonical's recent memory lapses and new corporate vision

« Last post by ewemoa on April 05, 2013, 07:33 PM »

And good ol' Debian still remains a reliable and trusted friend despite some of the distancing and Microsoft kowtowing going on in the Linux world.

-40hz (April 04, 2013, 06:11 AM)

The Arch Linux Package signing issue was what significantly increased my appreciation of Debian's clear admirable (TM) intentions.

I found and continue to find Arch really useful and helpful, but after reading up on the aforementioned issue, find it hard to convince myself of using it for longer term server things.

970

Find And Run Robot / Re: Run a program with file(s) selected in Explorer

« Last post by ewemoa on March 26, 2013, 04:23 AM »

I wish it was possible to drag and drop files onto FARR search result items in the same way you can drag a drop a file (file.txt) on a shortcut to a program (firefox) to start that program with the file as command line parameter.

-Nod5 (March 26, 2013, 03:37 AM)

I'd like this too.  IIRC, mouser said there is a technical issue with implementing this.  May be things have changed recently...

971

Find And Run Robot / Re: Run a program with file(s) selected in Explorer

« Last post by ewemoa on March 23, 2013, 09:22 AM »

AFAIK, not out-of-the-box, but with a combination of some pieces, may be.

I've come across a variety of attempts in AHK to access the current Windows Explorer selection -- the following attempted to leverage some of that:

  https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=21223.0

I don't think it was that robust, but YMMV.  If it doesn't work for you, may be someone can pull together something that does

Another piece to consider using is the Akete plugin:

  https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=16178.0

IIRC, the Experimental version and the version in the git repository provide the ability for one's customized file-extension associations to appear on the context menu for corresponding FARR results:



The following is the corresponding configuration for what I've got installed here (the git version):

[Akete]
IniPath.QDir = %APPDRIVE%\apps\Q-Dir\Q-Dir.ini
IniPath.Xenon = %APPDRIVE%\apps\XenonPortable\Data\settings\assoc.ini
Folder.* = %APPDRIVE%\apps\NirLauncher\NirSoft\HashMyFiles.exe /folder "$$1"|%APPDRIVE%\apps\SmartGit\bin\smartgit.exe --open "$$1"|%APPDRIVE%\apps\emacs\bin\runemacs.bat
* = %APPDRIVE%\apps\Notepad++\notepad++.exe|%APPDRIVE%\apps\emacs\bin\runemacs.bat|%APPDRIVE%\apps\NirLauncher\NirSoft\HashMyFiles.exe /file "$$1"
txt=%windir%\system32\notepad.exe|%APPDRIVE%\apps\Notepad++\notepad++.exe
3gp = %APPDRIVE%\apps\VLCPortable\VLCPortable.exe
mp4 = %APPDRIVE%\apps\VLCPortable\VLCPortable.exe
pdf = %APPDRIVE%\apps\SumatraPDF\SumatraPDF.exe|%APPDRIVE%\apps\PDFX_Vwr\PDFXCview.exe

972

Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

« Last post by ewemoa on March 22, 2013, 06:14 PM »

I'm just seriously interested in where you can use botcoins for non-geek types of products and services.

-40hz (March 22, 2013, 11:38 AM)

Once we all start using botnets to do things, I think you have your answer

973

Screenshot Captor / Re: Screenshot Captor 3.28 aka 4.0RC Beta Test - Mar 17, 2013 - Feedback Wanted

« Last post by ewemoa on March 22, 2013, 05:51 PM »

I've uploaded a new version in an attempt to fix the Quick Capture bar tooltips/hints so that they always show

-mouser (March 22, 2013, 11:33 AM)

Seems to be working here 

I've also added current hotkeys to the hints

Nice touch!


On a somewhat related note, any thoughts about trying to put some of the functionality provided in the likes of the following in your apps?

  http://www.mousefeed.com/
  http://plugins.jetbr....com/plugin/?id=1003

May be a good library project too

974

General Software Discussion / Re: Aaron Seigo on Canonical's recent memory lapses and new corporate vision

« Last post by ewemoa on March 22, 2013, 04:14 AM »

And Arch if you're dead serious about Linux, want to stop pretending, intend to learn how Linux works from the inside out, and don't mind getting dirty or busting your hump for about the first three months you're using it.

-40hz (March 05, 2013, 03:53 PM)

Arch has some nice docs and being able to easily tweak the package building (like the BSDs and gentoo ) is nice.

Quite wary of using it for a server for serious things though for various reasons.  For a server, more inclined to go with Debian.

975

Screenshot Captor / Re: Screenshot Captor 3.28 aka 4.0RC Beta Test - Mar 17, 2013 - Feedback Wanted

« Last post by ewemoa on March 22, 2013, 03:09 AM »

On a fresh install of the portable beta, experienced the following:

1. Click "Toggle Screenshot Captor window" in the Quick Capture Bar.
2. Close the window that appears.
3. Hover the pointing device pointer over the buttons in the Quick Capture Bar.
4. Notice that the tooltips don't show up.

FWIW, clicking the "Display Screenshot Captor options for Quick Capture Bar" button seems to restore the tooltip displaying ability.

This was with Windows 7 Pro SP1 64-bit.


Thanks to Josh's recent tip (and may be a change to SSC?), the following key sequence brings up SSC's main form:

Win+B
possibly use right arrow key some number of times
context menu (a.k.a. APPS) key
M