The Technology Vent and Rant Thread

[Darqref]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I'm nor certain I understand the problem, and what you mean by "keeping folder open".
______
Dennis

For immediate purposes, I've found a solution, but what I meant was

1. Explorer was open, with a tree showing open to E:/Audiobooks/(authorname) for which I have one folder for each author.

2. Then I insert a flash drive. Based on what *was* in the flash drive, I add a line to my history excel sheet, to keep track of what and when Mom has listened to a book.

3. Then I go back to another text file which has all the books in order, to find what the next book should be. Many times I've already downloaded the book, other times I need to go to either kcls or the the library for the blind to obtain the next book.

4. most times I need to extract the book from it's zip file, then copy it to the flash drive. I usually do this in one standard directory, so that downloads go to the right place.


5. by this time, Explorer has sometimes closed the branches of the tree. The folder that has focus is still displayed, with it's path shown at top, but most of the time, even that tree has been closed to the drive letter.

There was a time last fall, when Mom was going through three different series, all by J.A. Jance. Almost every time, I needed to open the audiobooks tree again, then scroll through a long list to find Jance again, then open that and find the right book, or copy the book from where it had been downloaded, or whatever.

In all this time, I had not closed Explorer, it just automatically condensed the tree to not show the folders I had been looking through.

There are over 3500 entries in the list of books Mom has read over the last 20 years (many are repeats, especially when new books in the series have come out.) Habits of access get established, and it slows me down when I need to find the same place repeatedly. But just not often enough to justify making new desktop icons.

Ive been using Explorer2 Lite, as recommended above, and it has the behavior I'm seeking.

[ownedbycats]

Roller Coaster Tycoon is oddly... resistant to alt+tabbing. By which I mean after switching out of the game, everything outside of a 1024x768 area becomes unclickable until I ctrl+alt+del to open the task manager.

Windowed mode isn't much better.

It's not an issue specific to the GOG version, either -- happened with my old disc copy too (got it out of a cereal box years ago ).

[PeterT]

As is typical of me I can't get something without damaging it.

I just bought a Cubii Pro to try to get some exercise on my legs on a daily basis (yes, I *know* I could go outside and walk, but I'm always nervous about being unsteady on my feet plus I hope that my wife will use it as well).

So I plug it into the supplied USB cable and adapter to charge, and decide I might just as well do the Bluetooth connect at the same time. This however needs you to wake the device up by pedaling. I pedaled and ... the charging light went out.

DRAT. The pedal had hit the USB cable and damaged the connection (thank goodness just the female end of the cable). Now it's happily charging with a new cable

Sent from my Pixel 4a using Tapatalk

[BetterRed]

I assume this forum uses AI to decide whether a particular post should be put into moderation. Can anyone confirm whether it uses the TSP algorithm.

BR

[ownedbycats]

https://medium.com/igdb/the-wonderfu...g-13e38a2e0588

this is something I can very much attest to. Not sure what I'd do without SteamGridDB (which, contrary to its name, also has non-Steam games).

[ownedbycats]

Latest Windows update added a pesky "Search indexing was turned off" message whenever I use the start menu to search.

I google how to get rid of the message: "use services.msc to turn it back up!"

There's a reason I disabled it in the first place. Guess I'm stuck with the pesky message.

[spacequince]

Archive Manager on Ubuntu 22.04 does not extract files when dragging and dropping them. But they can be extracted in several other ways using its UI, so it's fine.

[ownedbycats]

Playing a video game, I managed to quicksave in the split-second before an elevator squashed my player (who, for some bizarre reason I can't ever imagine, was standing under it as it was descending -- nope, don't look at me, it's not my fault).

So I'd get crushed by the elevator, the quicksave would reload, I'd get crushed by the elevator, the quicksave would reload, I'd get crushed by the elevator...

I eventually reverted to my last manual save, which was an hour earlier.

[Katsunami]

I hate movies and their crappy screen standards.

Back in the 90's and earlier, we had 4:3 televisions. Sometimes a movie would be in widescreen, which rendered part of the top and bottom of the screen useless. (My father always called them "mailbox movies", because they looked as if you were looking at them through the slit of a mailbox.)

Then widescreen TV's started becoming popular. But then, the 4:3 movies showed with black bars left and rigth; to me, that is much preferable than wider movies with bars on the top and bottom.

At around 2008-ish flatscreen/widescreen TV's were the norm in The Netherlands; all 16:9, most DVD's and early blu-rays were 16:9, TV-broadcasts were 16:9; life was good. We could actually use the entire screen.

Yesterday I watched a movie on a blu-ray disc (first in a long time, because it's not on Netflix or Prime and I wanted to see it) and it is SO widescreen that it is a mailbox movie on a 16:9 TV; so much so that it renders about 1/3rd of the 55 inch TV useless.

So it is actually 16:6, or 24:9.

I think that's ridiculous. Most ultra-widescreen monitors are 21:9, except for a few super-widescreen specialized monitors aimed at replacing a two-monitor setup. These are 32:9. (So exactly the width of two widescreen monitors next to one another.) At the moment I can't even find a 21:9 TV in the Netherlands (do they actually exist?), let alone 24:9.

Crap like this is one of the reasons why I once thought of getting a beamer. Obviously it doesn't make the movie bigger, but when projecting it directly at the wall, it will at least _look like_ it doesn't waste so much screen real estate.

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Playing a video game, I managed to quicksave in the split-second before an elevator squashed my player (who, for some bizarre reason I can't ever imagine, was standing under it as it was descending -- nope, don't look at me, it's not my fault).

So I'd get crushed by the elevator, the quicksave would reload, I'd get crushed by the elevator, the quicksave would reload, I'd get crushed by the elevator...

I eventually reverted to my last manual save, which was an hour earlier.

Seems that elevator has a crush on you...

Sorry. Couldn't resist.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Seems that elevator has a crush on you...

Sorry. Couldn't resist.

Oh I walked into that one.

[John F]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

I hate movies and their crappy screen standards.

Back in the 90's and earlier, we had 4:3 televisions. Sometimes a movie would be in widescreen, which rendered part of the top and bottom of the screen useless. (My father always called them "mailbox movies", because they looked as if you were looking at them through the slit of a mailbox.)

Then widescreen TV's started becoming popular. But then, the 4:3 movies showed with black bars left and rigth; to me, that is much preferable than wider movies with bars on the top and bottom.

At around 2008-ish flatscreen/widescreen TV's were the norm in The Netherlands; all 16:9, most DVD's and early blu-rays were 16:9, TV-broadcasts were 16:9; life was good. We could actually use the entire screen.

Yesterday I watched a movie on a blu-ray disc (first in a long time, because it's not on Netflix or Prime and I wanted to see it) and it is SO widescreen that it is a mailbox movie on a 16:9 TV; so much so that it renders about 1/3rd of the 55 inch TV useless.

So it is actually 16:6, or 24:9.

...

What was the movie? I thought that most modern movies were 2.35 or 1.85.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by John F

What was the movie? I thought that most modern movies were 2.35 or 1.85.

Yeah, that was my ponderment, too.

Hitch

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Playing a video game, I managed to quicksave in the split-second before an elevator squashed my player (who, for some bizarre reason I can't ever imagine, was standing under it as it was descending -- nope, don't look at me, it's not my fault).

So I'd get crushed by the elevator, the quicksave would reload, I'd get crushed by the elevator, the quicksave would reload, I'd get crushed by the elevator...

I eventually reverted to my last manual save, which was an hour earlier.

You found a bug.

I had one like that decades ago.

I worked for a bank, and the area I was in had a couple of Digital Equipment PDP-11 mini-computers. The Small Systems Manager decided to use one to support word processing by the secretarties. (This was before word processing was a standard application on PCs just beginning to appear on desktops, and secretaries used dedicated WP systems from companie liker Wang. DEC had a WP setup for the PDP-11s, so...)

The DEC box also had an assortment of games. One of them was an old text adventure game called Dungeon, which was a clone of the original Adventure game. You started at a location, and had to get into and explore a dungeon, collecting treasure and avoiding monsters. (You learned to take notes and draw maps to keep track of where you were now and had been.)

One room had a vampire bat that would swoop down, pick you up, and carry you off to another part of the dungeon... unless you were carrying the garlic, in which case it stayed as far away from you as it could, holding its nose.

I was carrying the garlic, but I had it in the paper bag which normally held lunch. So the bat would swoop down and carry mo off, reset, swoop down and carry me off, in an endless loop till I terminated the game.

I was tech support for systems like that in my area, and secretaries discovered they could play games when not doing work assigned by superiors, so I'd get official support calls like "How do I get the bucket top rise to the top of the well?" I once answered that one in person for a secretary while the high level VP she worked for was standing beside her.

"Under what circumstances does a bucket normally rise to the top of a well?"

"When it has water in it... Oh! So I have to have the bottle with water in it, and..."

"Exactly."

(VP Ed was a good guy I liked a lot, and was not perturbed by his secretary playing games on company time. She carried out his assignments with precision and dispatch, and had spare moments to play Dungeon. Fine by him.)
______
Dennis

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by John F

What was the movie? I thought that most modern movies were 2.35 or 1.85.

IT Chapter One and Chapter Two (the remake).

2,35:1 would be 21,15:9, which is still wider than my TV. This could be the format of the movie; I guessed the percentage of unused screen. Whatever it is, I hate the fact that a large part of my TV is unused by many movies because they are even wider than a widescreen TV, and you can't get a TV that wide. I never saw a 21:9 TV anywhere in the Netherlands.

[pdurrant]

One can get 21:9 monitors. Of course, anything narrower than movies will have big black zones at left and right....