A thread for boring computer questions.

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.

Also, Tom C is a well-known LOTR extras reject.

Sooooo I got this portable backup drive (WD My Passport Essential) to backup my parents' ever increasing horde of digital photos. The WD software kind of sucks and adds unnecessary encryption on top of it, so I'm using the freeware Syncback.

When the drive isn't accessed (which is generally always, i'm the only one who looks at it) it powers down (good) and dismounts (not good). Problem is, the only seeming way to remount it is to open My Computer manually. This is bad, because I can't use Scheduled Tasks to open it/do automated backups.

Is there some Windows shortcut/function I can use to automount the powered down drive? Scheduled Tasks won't open My Computer and remount the drive. Right now I have to do all these steps manually.

Annybody?

had similar problem with seagate drive under linux. apparently there was a windows tool available with the more expensive version that let you tune this behaviour and they made it more available when they realised people were having problems. (linux fix came later and involved echoing '1' to a /sys file)

lots of mac users are having the same problem but nobody on windows seems to be complaining.

have you tried writing a file to My Computer as a way of forcing a remount?

that bundled (rebranded) software sounds like an arse. lots of people calling it a virus as it's impossible to remove.

I'll try writing a file to My Computer, thanks for the tips. That bundled software is not very good.

Uh... How can you write a file to "My Computer". Does it actually exist as a directory?

You aren't touching my computer, period.

when i said My Computer i meant to try writing a file in the unmounted drive in order to poke it into life. this won't be My Computer but e: or whatever. it's just a bit more invasive than trying to just read the drive which you said wasn't enough to wake it.

(in linux you'd just end up with a file in the directory where the drive gets overlaid but hey...)

Ugh, this is so stupid.

To make a long story short, I got coerced into being the "leader" of a Facebook group for a graduate class I'm taking that's taught by a 86-year old man. He's a great guy, and he's trying to get in touch with the "net generation", so he's always talking about Facebook and social networking, despite not knowing how to use it properly himself. So I'm his right-hand man on Facebook issues.

He's asked me to post a draft of a chapter of his forthcoming book on Facebook. It's a Word document. Of course, on Facebook you can't upload word documents and then share them with people in the group (at least I don't think you can). I've tried to explain this to him, but again, for the third time, he has sent me an email asking me to please post the draft on Facebook.

So basically I'm asking, does anyone know of a tinypic-esque website where you can upload a word document and then have a permanent link? So I can just post the link on Facebook?

This is all so retarded. He already sent the draft to everyone by email as an attachment, he just demands that it be on Facebook as well.

Maybe an online word processor? http://writer.zoho.com/home?serviceurl=%2Findex.do

I actually came here w/ a question of my own: Why the hell does my clock (on Windows XP) keep gaining time? It's usually about 12 minutes ahead.