A thread for boring computer questions.

Black background/white text gives me a blinding headache, but a few sites I like make use of it.

I have a Firefox plug-in that lets me reverse the colors, but I can't find anything similar for Safari (and I hate using Firefox). Is there a plug-in that will do it for me, or an easy CSS generator that would let me just specify background and text color without bothering any of the rest of the formatting?

maybe not what you're looking for, but I use this:

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

it's no good on complete pages but if you're reading a blog post, you click on the bookmarklet and you just get clean black text on white background with no ads.

Apple's been doing the built-in battery thing for sometime, I think they weighed the pros and cons, figure most people didn't carry around spare laptop batteries, and they're getting tons more battery time (and prettier design) with this.

well, i've been doing a 13 screen for a while and tho i know exactly what you mean, i think i'm going to stick with it and save myself $600, seeing as ppl seem to think the core 2 is perfectly sufficient. i can also get a separate monitor later if need be. nervous . . .

You can get a decent 24" monitor for well under $200 these days.

yes and/but if you're doing any kind of moderately color-critical graphic/photo/design work, you can look for the new eIPS monitors that are coming out in the 300 dollar range, quality generally associated with the more expensive IPS panels at a cheaper price.

http://www.pchardwarehelp.com/guides/s-ips-lcd-list.php

I have the first one, the Dell 2209WA and once calibrated, it looks fantastic, about as good as much more expensive Apple Cinema Displays.

check out the "new" ones. Good deals on IPS monitors.

http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?t=2025298

The 23" new Dell has a higher resolution but slower response time than mine. In either case, there's some thing you can do w/ Dell by signing up as a small business and getting these incredible deals.

For less than 300 dollars, these Dell monitors discussed in that thread, will destroy anything else around the same price in image quality.

i think i'm going to stick with it and save myself $600, seeing as ppl seem to think the core 2 is perfectly sufficient.

$600 is about what an iPad costs. ; )

how do you resize itunes when you had it open on a bigger screen and the resize corner is not showing?

hold down option and click the green resize button

Why does my clock (win XP) always run five minutes slow, even if I keep changing it?

have you got it synced? check the 'internet time' tab when you double-click the time

doesn't have that option?

is this at work? if it's part of a domain, it's synced to another source in the domain, which will be yr culprit

lol at fascist work making you work extra five mins

are there any easy, free web-to-sms sites?

google voice? if you are in the states.

have used http://www.cbfsms.com/ before

With a Blue Microphones Snowball Microphone and Garage Band, can I record and edit interviews on a Mac? Do I need anything else? Does anyone have recommendations for things like microphones for interviews?

So is there anything you can do about spammers spoofing your e-mail account? I have an old yahoo account that I only use for like mailing lists and for site where I don't want to put my main address out there. About a week ago I started getting about 20-30 "undeliverable failure" messages back per week. I've changed the password three times since then (using very strong 14-16 character strings, but I'm still getting about the same amount - no more, no less really. They aren't coming from or going to anyone on my contact list and I see no other signs of a virus, which is why I'm leaning towards my (admittedly generic) e-mail address just being spoofed from somewhere else.

"About two weeks ago"

I don't think the password makes a difference...they're not actually sending the emails from your account (you don't see them in the sent box, right>) I think there's nothing you can do but wait it out. At least that's the tech support I got from Yahoo back when I had a yahoo account and this would happen like very 2 months or so.

Oh yeah, I knew the password wouldn't have mattered once I figured out it wasn't actually a virus or something... but that is always my first instinct when I discover something weird. My research told me pretty much what you are saying, but I thought I'd check in with the ilx knowledge base. Thanks.

Lot of it around. Been getting a bunch of those for my Gmail account just recently. They go straight into spam, so not a problem, but would be nice if they moved onto spoofing someone elses address soon.

Bit of a long shot this one but anyway... The text size in my Skype chat window is ridiculously small (I'm using a high res Macbook pro).

'Command +' blows up the text just fine but in doing so kills the auto-scroll function. Incoming messages are therefore invisible until I've manually scrolled down with the mouse to view them.

Frustrating to say the least!

change the chat font size in preferences?

been havin a right old time with the old chat fonts

Anyone used freenas, clearos, or openfiler?

ok so i have this external HD, USB, seagate

it was always a biiiiit wonky... if it didnt get ejected properly sometimes it would wait a LONG time to mount,a nd need to be unplugged and sit on its own before it did. eventually, it always did.

i went away for a couple of weeks and came back and now it just won't mount at all. OSX cant see it. Disk Utility neither, DiskWarrior treither. can I do anything abotu this ish??

i have unplugged it and replugged it many times. let it set. rebooted.

'the worx'

do you need the data on there?

well... it's not 100% croosh, but i would lose a lot of my music library if it goes.

so basically, i'm willing to do a bunch of annoying shit to get it back, but not pay thousands of bucks.

yeah, my suggestion was going to be wipe and repartition. that gives you a working drive unless there's something physical wrong with the drive.

downside of course is you lose your t swift/cocorosie collection. have you tried reading the drive on another mac? do you know if it's a hfs or windows partition (if the latter then try a windows pc too).

it's a windows partition so my ps3 could read it.

i care more about the physical data than the physical drive itself - but how could i even repartition it if it won't mount at all?

if my cocorosie mp3s disappear, caek... i dont know what i'll do

ah good point. if disk utility can't see it then something is up. definitely try another machine.

p.s. let me know once you've got it up and running and i will send you an mp3 of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Exm8bKidg4Y

sweet - if i can get some bonus cocorosie mp3s out of this, that would be dope

Can your PS3 read it?

ooohh great question

don't look like it :(

Sounds borked.

:(

Try a different USB cable!

one step ahead of you buddy

:(

(seriously, USB cables can be uppity)
Also try plugging the drive into different USB ports on the Mac. The ext HDD on my PC will only play nice with one particular port.

two steps ahead of you buddy

:(

PC tech in me says the USB->(SATA/IDE) interface has probably croaked but the drive itself is still OK, so crack open the housing and plug the HDD directly into the PC - but you're using a Mac, so are outside of my area of experience.

:(

It does have an SATA (I think that's what it is) port.

Anyone done this with a Mac? Procedure with a PC is to drink coffee and swear a lot.

open the case. inside you will find almost certainly find a hard drive with a regular SATA interface. either find a desktop PC or Mac to connect it to, or find/buy a USB caddy (check size of drive first, most of these will likely do: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=enclosure&x=0&y=0)

sorry mean to link here: http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=92&name=External-Enclosures