A thread for boring computer questions.

Like I can tell you from exp that ppl regularly call in to try to find missing Outlook PSTs or shit they accidentally moved to another folder and a network drive search usually takes like 5-10 minutes, it just sucks no matter what you do

the inelegant solution i've found is to use an indexer like locate32 - unfortunately this means it has to scan the network drive all the time (or every day or whatever) to stay up to date

Stevolende, when you open up a new torrent, the dialogue box will have a checkbox that you can click that preserves folders. It's easy to miss, though IIRC it should be on by default.

― Hollinger Escape Plan (Leee), Saturday, January 31, 2015 11:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thanks for that, discovered it last night after not wanting to start any new torrents until I could get it sorted out for the most part of the day. You'd think there might be something that could be sorted somewhere else in preferences.
But yeah, very easy to miss and I only saw it after i thought I'd reinstalled u-torrent. I'm surprised I hadn't stumbled on it before.
Maybe would have been easier if I could have thought of the word subfolder which that window controls.

At least in as much as I could have googled u-torrent and subfolder together and might have wound up being directed to that.

the inelegant solution i've found is to use an indexer like locate32 - unfortunately this means it has to scan the network drive all the time (or every day or whatever) to stay up to date

iirc isn't this really bad for the actual server hardware or is it mostly nbd?

it's probably bad, so i don't do the index more than once a week

you gotta make sure it doesn't do it automatically

there's probably a better server side-implementation - which would make more sense so each client doesn't have to re-index constantly - but i don't know one offhand

Stevie D otm, get a goddamn DMS.

I know, but I am the only person in the whole organization who understands what a DMS does. I had a company give a pitch to a couple partners and they were like, oh wow, this is amazing. Let's talk more about this after the holidays. They've since forgotten and now they're like, what did it do again? How is that any different from using files on the server?

They did spend $$$ on a case management program in 2008 but nobody used it (some couple people found its lingo insurmountable, e.g., calling a document a "summation," which is stupid, but they were CONSTANTLY crying "What is a 'summation'?!!!" and finally giving up). The license ran out, and now it's evidence that such programs are unnecessary.)

The REAL solution is to maintain focus on getting a new job before 2016 and just stop trying to fix anything.

Correct

yes

Are replacement laptop batteries and AC adapters something you should 100% always buy from the mfr and never ever fuck w/ 3rd party shit, or are there dependable sources for quality components that won't cost me like a bajillion dollars?

FWIW, every third party manufactured battery and AC adapter I've purchased has eaten it within 6 months of purchase. :(

fuck. that was my next question

my next next question was what're the dos and donts of WiFi extenders

v annoying problem

every few days my keyboard likes to act like my ctrl key is stuck and every link will open in a new window

i fix it by opening the on-screen keyboard and clicking the ctrl button twice (the on-screen keyboard doesn't indicate that it's already held down but this works anyway)

now when i do it the fix lasts for about a minute and then links go back to opening in new tabs (happens in all browsers)

virus scan hasn't fixed it

set yr computer on fire probably

Everything is subjective

The universe has no center and no edges; reality is arbitrary

Use your imagination and your skills.

He who thinks he is bigger than the rest must go to the cemetery. There he will see what life really is: a handful of dirt.

ignore these fools qualx

are you sure that you're not pressing ctrl by mistake and not noticing it?

laptop or desktop? Does pressing the CTRL key do anything when it's stuck?

h/o, have to get through the 99% failure rate of sufjan's hilarious yukfest extravaganza first

laptop

i ran malwarebytes and rebooted and it's gone for now so i'll probably just keep doing that and continuing to tolerate the ten million relatively harmless viruses on this thing until one of us dies

if the trackpad has double tap for ctrl+click, try disabling the trackpad to see if it goes away. If you use a usb mouse, try using another one for awhile. Do the same for any other bit of hardware. If not fixed, see if starting any programs, one by one, after restart creates the problem.

but also

I have a newish Dell 2-in-1 convertible laptop.

The following keys either stop working, or respond very slowly, at seemingly random times: 4,5,e,r,t,,f,g,c,v,b. (They're all grouped you see.) When one goes bad, they all go bad. And then next thing you know, the whole keyboard works fine. But lately it's 50/50 between functioning and non-functioning keyboard.

Things seem to go wrong when the computer gets warm. Or maybe when I have a bunch of apps/windows open and the memory is taxed.

It doesn't seem to be purely hardware because, for instance as I type this, everything's fine. But just an hour ago all the keys mentioned were messed up.

Really appreciate any guesses or help!

My old laptop did something similar when the battery went. Does it still do this if you take the battery out (but still keep it plugged in, obv)?

I'll try that when I get home and report back.

When the keyboard is malfunctioning, they keystroke will eventually register after numerous (sometimes like 50) presses. It's weird. FWIW I do not have any sticky keys or filter keys enabled.

I am going through an O'Reilly book on awk to transform JSON to a delimited format. Is awk useful or should I be spending time on something else? Thanks.

If you are on a Mac and using terminal is there a simple single line command to switch from OS X line breaks that show up as ^M in vi to Windows line breaks? I copied something from the web that uses perl but I don't know perl so I felt sort of unscrupulous about it and feel like I should learn perl. Thanks.

jq might be worth checking out, i haven't tried it but it seems like it does exactly what you're looking to do

1) You can certainly use sed/awk if you hate yourself, but i think the standard swiss army knife for json transformation is https://stedolan.github.io/jq/. see e.g. https://gist.github.com/jorin-vogel/2e43ffa981a97bc17259 for a nice usage examples with CSV output.

2) are you running homebrew? if so brew install dos2unix.

if not, this is a sed problem.

sed $'s/\r$//'     # DOS to Unix
sed $'s/$/\r/'     # Unix to DOS

first answer here pretty much covers the options http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2613800/how-to-convert-dos-windows-newline-crlf-to-unix-newline-n-in-bash-script

unix2dos / dos2unix for the command line thing, or you can do it within vim using fileformat:

http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/File_format

As for the json, awk might be able to do the job but the correct way is to parse it fully and output the elements you want. Depends on the json though.

Xp

jq is good

Another way to deal with the line-break issue is to use AppleScript with TextWrangler - it'll interoperate with the CLI too.

Thanks very much for all of the help. Would someone very kind have a moment to post step-by-step instructions for installing prebuilt jq on a Mac (if that's the easiest way to get it)? I'd prefer to do things from the command line in terminal and do not want to use Xcode. Sorry for needing such basic help. I don't have homebrew installed but will install if necessary. (I mean to return to awk in the future.)

install homebrew per instructions here

http://brew.sh/

then run `brew install jq`

homebrew installation may prompt you to install command line developer tools (which is basically the compiler and stdlib included in the big xcode package). you can say yes if asked to that without fear of accidentally install 10GB of Apple Watch library docs. it's just gcc really.

It's clang now dude

well yes

I wish I remembered how all of the pieces fit together (the make file, etc.), but I never did it for a job, only for an audited course. Maybe they will have artisan coders (again?) one day who do everything from scratch. I am experimenting with the filters now on my own data instead of using the online interface. Thank you!

I got discouraged and distracted with other projects but went back to it yesterday and made good progress today. I have all the output in delimited format now that can be opened in Excel and transformed to comply with a metadata standard. Still have to figure out how to get rid of extraneous spaces and am sure that there is a more elegant way to do it with jq only instead of iterating over a file of ids but this works and I'm happy because I'm pretty sure I'll be able to meet my self-imposed deadline next Friday, which is already an extension, but my excuse is that I had to wait for the data before reminding the owner in order to seem affable.

I've had this problem since the '90s . . .

In Windows, when you click on an email address hyperlinked on a web page, Windows will launch Outlook or whatever else email client. How do I get Windows to take me to Gmail, instead, in this circumstance? Thanks, anyone.

If you go to default programs in the control panel, you can change the protocol "mailto" so that it doesn't open Outlook, but I couldn't get it to open Gmail. But NOT launching Outlook is a big improvement!

I think you have to install a new thingy to get it to like open a web browser and load Gmail. Let me investigate.

What's yr default browser? if it's Chrome, try this:

http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/set-gmail-as-browser-default-email-client-ht

wait that link works for all browsers so there try that!

worked! thanks, Stevie.