A thread for boring computer questions.

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.

Here is an EXTREMELY STUPID computer question:

How can I stop Microsoft Word for Mac from launching a popup window asking me to convert every single file I download?

Whenever I try to download anything, for example a zip file, I first get a Firefox window asking if I want to open or save it (which is fine), and then immediately after, Microsoft Word launches and gives me a window asking me which format I want to convert the file from (Text Only, MS-DOS text, RTF, HTML Document, Web Archive, Unicode Text, AppleWorks, Excel, Recover Text from any file).

I am sure that in my infinite stupidity I must have asked Word to do this at some point, but I'd really be grateful to know if/how I can turn it off so I don't have to cancel out of that window every time I download something.

Thanks in advance for any help with this.

Does it happen when you select save?
Does it happen when you download with Safari?
When you double-click on a zip file that you have downloaded, does it open normally (w/o Word)?

Does it happen when you select save?

No it happens before I have a chance to choose save or open.

Does it happen when you download with Safari?

Yes.

When you double-click on a zip file that you have downloaded, does it open normally (w/o Word)?

No. It extracts itself eventually, but the computer also launches Word and usually I have to cancel out a bunch of windows before it will just unzip.

Thanks libcrypt.

felicity, this is honestly weirder than anything I have seen in a long time. I have no fuckin' clue.

I might have some guesses except for yr answer to the last question, which totally baffles me.

It might be that you have a "Folder action" defined: This is a bit of Applescript that activates each time a file enters a folder. That's the only halfway-reasonable thing I can think of.

Thanks for the guesses. Is there a Mac download manager somewhere where I define default settings/actions for downloads?

Epilogue: I figured it out.

When I ctrl-clicked on a zip file, and selected "Get Info" it showed that I had set "BOMArchive helper" to be the default application to open all zip files.

I fixed it to use StuffIt Expander to open zip files from now on.

Thanks again - told you it was EXTREMELY STUPID.

Thanks for the guesses. Is there a Mac download manager somewhere where I define default settings/actions for downloads?

Yes, there is.

Glad you figured it out. BOMArchive Helper is the normal archive expander, but if Stuffit works better, it's all for the best.

I can't make Youtube work. I have Javascript enabled and the latest Flash. WTF

Ad-blocking s/w?

fixed

I'm using WinXP SP2, and in the command-line prompt, I can't get the tab autocomplete to work anymore. I've already gone into my registry and changed CompletionChar and PathCompletionChar to 0x09 in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor, but that hasn't fixed it. Halp!

Are you running "cmd" or "command"? Tab complete only works in "cmd" and you should be using that anyways.

I'm running cmd.

In the Terminal in OS X, if a string of numbers appears before your command prompt (and you didn't put them there), what do they mean? i.e.:

092-242:~ charlierosenylund$

I've tried Googling, but evidently haven't figured out a good way of formulating the question.

Moments after posting that, I realized that those numbers are the last part of my IP address at the moment. Any idea why it's adding that to my prompt, or what the key condition is that's triggering it?

That's your bash prompt, it can be customized to be whatever you want. The random numbers are probably something like process ID or hostname. Mine gives the current time and hostname.

And now I've found a Metafilter thread that more or less explains it. Thank you, come again, try the rack of lamb, etc.

xpost Yeah, I was just wondering why the prompt was changing without being (ahem) prompted.

echo $PS1 will tell you what's in yr prompt string.

export PS1="\h:\u> " is all you need 8) the default here at work is to also have the full current path in the prompt but when you've got a 80 column terminal and 60 of that is `pwd`...

Current value of $prompt in tcsh:

%n@%m\ \[%\{^[\[44m%}%.3%\{^[\[49m%}%\{^[\[0m%}]\ %\{^[\[36m%}%\{^[\[37m%}%#%\{^[\[0m%}\

i find with those colour commands in your prompt bash sometimes has trouble if you're editing a command that spreads over the end of line - it doesn't distinguish between printable and non-printable characters in its counting. maybe this is a cygwin thing.

in your prompt bash sometimes has trouble

^^^ source of trouble detected

yeah, i should've stuck with DOS.

You do know that good unix shells existed before Bash, right? If tcsh isn't yr flavor, try zsh or one of the million other less-buggy shells.

not my server (cluster) unfortunately.

(can't reproduce the aforementioned problem with the colours on my laptop*, must be cygwin at work. or putty)

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot/ 8)

* fedora 9:
GNU bash, version 3.2.33(1)-release (i386-redhat-linux-gnu)
Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

today's problem at work went as follows:

network accessible storage available on a dozen different machines, two different systems. one system has the jboss user as id 1000, the other has the jboss user as id 500, both read and write to the same directory structure... 755 permissions on all the directories...

and some of those directories have 470,000 files in them. just don't ls -l in the wrong place...

That's a pretty well-known anti-csh rant, koogs, but it only applies to programming in csh. If you program in bash, expect to be bitten just as badly but in the balls.