A thread for boring computer questions.

I use Transmit.

gah, that html myspace thing isn't working for me, i copied and pasted it where the other body edits were, and it's still not showing up. :( And it's a very large animated gif, a series of paintings

I use Filezilla for FTP and SFTP.

a mysterious red line has appeared across the center of my computer screen. it is actually slightly off center. it is a vertical line. i tried restoring my computer to a previous state, but that has not removed it.

It's your monitor, and it's probably not fixable.

Is the line there if you turn the monitor on not attached to the PC?

It's a laptop. That's a good test, but I don't think I can carry it out.

Guys, i got the animated gif to work, thanks

how do you find and remove duplicate files ? during the past dozen years i amassed a few hard disk drives and over time a portion of that space got cluttered with dupes after making some recoveries/ backups all over the place

i tried the first hit on google for that: duplicate file finder. it's visualisation isn't too clear to me and since it froze on me a few times i would be tempted to try something else before giving it another go

anyone else having problems using zshare? (won't stream, goes back to preview page if you try to download.) google gives me some mutterings about uk isp blocking, but then also similar complaints from india and africa.

the streaming does work via a proxy (albeit not for larger files).

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=766454

bogon filters :(

How come youtube no work for me no more? Nine times out of ten the vids stall after 20% or less, often they don't even load enough to start playing. Doesn't matter what other network traffic I have. Doesn't matter what browser. No problems with other video sites or large downloads.

I ended up using libiconv for the character encoding conversion.

google gives me some mutterings about uk isp blocking

yeh, this has become INTERNET FACT! without a shred of decent supporting evidence. it may well be true, but i'm not so sure.

how do you find and remove duplicate files ?

If you have a Unix machine, this command will find identical files within a folder called folder_path. It works on machines with the GNU userland tools, and may well work on a Mac (although I haven't tried it). There is a tiny tiny tiny chance that it will match files that aren't actually identical, if there is a hash collision.

find folder_path -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum 2>/dev/null | sort | uniq -w32 -D

When I open an email from a colleague sent to my g00glem@il address (via Mail on a Mac), five (5) windows open, which all say:

A problem has been detected with the font in the font file $C. The system will attempt to disable this font, but to avoid future problems, you should quit all of your open applications and remove this font file or replace it with a new version.

I've tried to work out how to do this but can't find anything pertinent in the Help file that will let me behind the scenes anywhere to do this. Never had anything like this before, and I can't see any weirdo fonts in the email...

The easiest way to handle it is to go to Gmail and delete or reply or whatever.

If you want to get to the root of the problem, open the mail in source view if you can and look for any offending font tags.

Thanks libcrypt - don't seem to be able to get to source view, but will have another go at that later and in the meantime will go to gmail.

Hello,

My router seems to have died. While the thing is still on (there are lights at the back, where the cables plug in) the three lights on top of it, which all go green when it's working properly, resolutely refuse to turn on at all, in any colour. And the internet doesn't work.

So I guess it's died? It's quite old - at least 6 years or so. A Speedtouch 510. The question is: can I just go to Dixons and buy a new one? And if so, how easy is it to make it work? Will I need to know long-forgotten passwords and DNS addresses and stuff? I have a separate wireless doodah which plugs into to this router and makes wireless work, and that's still okay as far as I know.

I have a PC btw. Thanks in advance...

no, if its a new router it will be like a new wireless network so youll have new password etc that youll set up. Its easy peasey. Just make sure you get a router that is compatible with the same letter as your wireless card eg 802.11b or 802.11g or n etc I think most newer routers will cover all bases.

automatic updates has just offered xp service pack 3. im using a cracked copy of windows xp pro. if i d/l this sp3 will it recognise my pc is non-legit and do bad things? is sp3 really necessary?

i think it probably will.

PC Mag on SP3:

The new stuff isn't particularly noteworthy, and the rest has been available already through Windows Update. SP3 functions primarily as a collection of past fixes with a few security additions. SP3 is most certainly essential for anyone who hasn't applied SP2, and for those who haven't kept up with the Windows Update downloads, but if you've been on top of things, SP3 won't do much for you.

DO NOT DOWNLOAD.

ah phew, thanks sunny!

no problem!

My Mac claims to convert Word docs to pdfs with no loss of resolution. But it looks to me as though it does lose a bit.

Also, it seems to increase the font. I'm typing in Ari3l 10 and it seems to increase it to about 11/11.5 (I'm looking at it at 100% of normal size). I need to ensure that what appears on the printed page appears as Ari3l 12.

Am I imagining things?

GOD these questions are so fucking BORING

I aim to please

Are you using Acrobat, Word, or the built-in print-to-PDF function to convert to PDF?

Also, why are you googleproofing "Ariel"?

Also, MS Word's notion of "100%" really has nothing to do with anything real, so you cannot compare how it looks on-screen to how another app displays at "100%".

Also, why are you googleproofing "Ariel"?

hehe, I also wondered this, but figured ljubljana was at higher levels of 1337d0m than me.

My inner dork wanted to say that the best way to Googleproof Arial is to spell it correctly.

I'm using the built-in print-to-PDF. I found an online pdf converter, but that explicitly said to expect a loss of resolution. Would I be better off using Acrobat?

Glad the %s are all relative.

Whoops, I knew something looked funny about Ariel. God knows why I googleproofed it, I guess some part of me thinks that Aria/el is the subject of constant geek searches and I might bore them...

Part of the problem with comparing MS Word's on-screen display size to native tools is that Mac Office is still stuck in the late 80s/early 90s, when Macs had 72 ppi (pixels per inch) and PCs had 90 ppi. Hence, to get Office apps to "look the same" on both PCs and Macs, it was necessary to scale down pixel measurements on Mac. For god knows what reason, the MS MBU still thinks that Macs all operate at 72 ppi: A MacBook bought today, for instance, will have about 110 ppi. Hence, Mac Office apps at "100%" display graphics a lot smaller than they should, and in particular, display them differently than OS X's native tools do.

Loss of resolution should only be a possibility when creating a PDF when yr document contains raster graphics. If it's only text, then any self-respecting converter will lose no resolution whatsoever. This includes print-to-PDF on OS X, Acrobat, and save-as-PDF in Word. If you do have raster graphics (e.g., photos) in yr document and you are concerned about loss of resolution, then Acrobat is probably the best tool to use. You can explicitly control issues such as these in Acrobat, and in particular, you can specify that no resolution is lost in the conversion.

Ah, so that's why I always have to display docs at 125% on my Macbook.

Re resolution: great, thanks - that's very reassuring. I've got only text in there, so I think it must be my imagination that the OS X converter causes loss of resolution.

Sorry, one more question. Will margins stay the same? I have to print the little bugger with a minimum 40mm lh margin so that it can be bound. (I realise the answer is almost undoubtedly 'yes' and paranoia has taken over).

I would expect everything to stay the same, including margins. Can you not print a test sheet before you send it in?

I assumed ljubljana didnt want princess mermaid fans invading this thrilling thread.

sorry, totally missed this reply yesterday. I'm staying at a friend's, I wanted to print off tests but her printer is knackered. If I can't successfully pdf it I'll have to reformat the whole thing on a PC in the uni library - and if I have to do that, I need to know now as I'm pulling an all-nighter tonight to get it in... and that would shave an hour or two off the time available... but it sounds as if it will be ok.

Sorry, I have turned this thread into boring AND naive computer questions...thanks for bearing with me!

Two questions:

1. Why is it right after I post an ILX message in IE I get a totally blank white screen?

2. You know how some websites will have "lo-fi" and "hi-fi" versions of their websites to suit users with slow internet connections? Well, I'm always getting the "lo-fi" version whenever I use Firefox. Why is this?

Can anyone recommend me a free AVI joiner/splitter for Mac?

god I feel like a moron but humour me please

how do I make firefox 3 (by default) add RSS feeds to netnewswire and not google reader??

tools - options - applications is where you set the content type mappings. dunno if this works for rss (actually, i think it does - 'Web Feed')

Ever since I upgraded to the latest version of Firfox, all Japanese/Chinese characters and some other special characters now show as these weird squares with some number codes in them. This wasn't the case with previous versions of Firefox. Would anyone happen to know how to change this?

Set up an altar to the font trolls and wait.

JW is good with that kind of thing - give him remote access to your PC and I'm sure he'll be able to sort it out for you.

Install Chinese/Japanese fonts that contain the characters.

but he said it was working before which suggests he already has the right fonts.

This wasn't the case with previous versions of Firefox.

That's not quite "working before" to me. Perhaps Tuomas just wants the old little boxes.

I got some malware shit which is redirecting my browser whenever I click on a Google search result. It also stuck some bad DNS servers in the registry which pointed a whole lot of helpful forum and software download sites to localhost. Got rid of those but the Google hijack is more persistent. Any malware killers y'all recommend? Have tried ad-aware and cwsshredder.

what is it called? can you tell?

general stuff (basically running hijackthis and looking for oddities):
http://www.cyberwalker.com/faqs/computer-threats/how-to-fix-browser-hijack.html

oh yeah, i tried that too. ugh, and now the dns hijack is back. i think i have a serious trojan ;_;

hijack this only lists stuff, doesn't fix stuff. you have to go through the list of things and google what they are. kinda hard given the nature of the hijack though.

it removes registry entries... but i spotted something via msconfig that it missed - removing it didn't help though. however malwarebytes' anti-malware seems to have done the trick, fingers xed.