rob86

Here's some advice for hosting your Windows 7 party brought to you by Microsoft. I'm not sure if this is serious, or an attempt at humor. I couldn't make it through the entire video to see if there was a punch line. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ I'd make a longer post..but *yawn* all that party talk exhausted me.

Here are two different style typing tests. http://10fastfingers.com/typing-test/english http://www.typeonline.co.uk/typingspeed.php What WPM do you get on these tests? I think something strange is going on, because I find 10fastfingers much easier (no punctuation,easy words) and I whiz through , but my WPM is less than TypeOnline. Anyway, here are my results. TypeOnlineUK: 123wpm no errors SpeedTest: 119wpm no errors. -- edit-- 125wpm I can't remember exactly what my ranking was on speedtest, but it was below 1000. I'm going to try to raise my wpm on Speedtest. It's kind of addictive.. Oh yeah, and try to make few errors when you do the test, one because it lowers your wpm (I tried typing gibberish and got a 0wpm) and two because it's a bad habit to leave errors EDIT: Well after a VERY frustrating 15min, I got 125 wpm on SpeedTest which was my goal. I hated that odd number I got last time. Let me tell you something, it's no fun at all typing that fast. It's incredibly noisy and stressful for me anyway. Even one typo that has to be corrected sets you back like 5 wpm. The weird thing is, I have to NOT concentrate to type fast. If I even stop to think about what I'm doing, my fingers start to stumble!

My friend bought a brand new computer with Vista installed. Apparently she "fried some of the hardware", with heavy video editing and had to buy new parts. She couldn't use Vista anymore because of their piracy protection (all the different hardware told Vista something was wrong) so she was forced to switch to Ubuntu. Microsoft's AntiPiracy protection lost a Genuine customer, :lol:I don't know much about Vista or it's anti piracy protection, but it seems impossible that it could be impossible to re-install. Haven't people been using pirated copies for a long time? Well, I'll take my friends word for it. lol

Hey rayzoredge, it was just the other day I was interested in learning how to type with a Dvorak layout. I was reading about it and trying it out a bit, and wasn't sure if it was worth the effort to learn. I have no real desire to type faster as I'm already fast enough and QWERTY works for me. Mostly I just wanted to try something different. It seems like a lot of work though just to type slower than I already do for a long time. The thought of slowing my typing speed that much for months or years isn't very appealing. I don't think the benefits of being different outweigh the drawbacks of the effort it takes to relearn everything.I think I can reach about 120 wpm on a paragraph-typing test if I'm really trying. This is a normal paragraph out of a book mind you, not one iwth a bunch of funny big and complicated words nobody ever uses. It slows me down trying to figure out how to spell lol. I guess I type about 90-100wpm for copying something normally, and about 80 wpm if I'm casually posting on trap depending on if I know what I'm going to say, of course. I could type 100 wpm years ago, so I don't think speed gets much higher than that. At least, I haven't improved much since then. It's been a while since I did a typing test, I'll have to try it and see. Has anyone tried typing with their eyes closed? I do it once in a while, to see how I'd manage if I was blind. I find that I don't need my vision at all to type. My hands seems to know the feel of the keyboard now.

I'm not dissing VLC really as it was my primary video player for a long time but I started to get disappointed with it after a while. I don't mean Microsoft Windows Media Player, which is way too bloated for me, and would be insane! I mean Media Player Classic, which I think is an open source video player which happens to look a lot like the old style WMP. I don't know think it runs on linux, which is bad news, and means my days of using it are probably over. I haven't found too many alternatives on Linux. Media Player Classic was really the only one I preferred over VLC. Other than that, VLC is probably the best. There are a lot of people who like MPC from what I can tell from a search on google (Media Player Classic VS VLC). I know what you're saying about getting a well encoded video, but I'm on dialup, and often download the lowest quality videos I can find that are watchable, and to make it more watchable, I sometimes shrink the height to make it a bit more clear, though dimensionally distorted, though I live with that. It's better to have everyone looking short than everyone looking pixelated. I realize it's not something most people do, I wish *I* didn't have to, but I liked the option to do it on MPC . VLC can still do it somewhat, but I like being able to adjust it manually. As for videos that can't run on VLC. One of the big ones for me is .trp files which I think is some kind of an MPEG TS. These are the files my STB (Satellite box) records. I've downloaded all the codecs I could find, I've asked for suggestions and nothing could get VLC to open it. This is the big reason that made me switch from VLC back on Windows and the big reason I'm still not using it after my switch to linux. I installed Xfmedia and they played with ease. It might not be impossible to get these videos playing on VLC, but I sure wish someone would tell me how!I'll download the new version of VLC, I just hope they have that detached video window bug fixed. I wish it'd play my .trp files too, then I could delete Xfmedia (old faithful .trp player!). My favourite MPC is out of the question on linux so I guess I'll have to move on.. .

Everyone seems to love VLC Player, it's always recommended by people. I've been using it for a long time and at one time I thought it was great too, it replaced Winamp and because my primary video player, but now I think it's only average. It's support of video formats isn't so great, considering it has a reputation of being able to play everything. I found it incapable of playing at least 3 formats of video I have. On Windows, I think a much better option is media player classic. Despite the fact it has the apperance of a Microsoft product, it's much better than VLC from that I can tell. First reason, it's faster. VLC isn't slow, but MPC is faster and has a quicker response from my testing. It just feels right too, when I click on the screen, it pauses. I like that. I don't think VLC does. Two, MPC player has more options for changing the shape of the video (aspect ratio). VLC can do the job, with a few presets, but MPC seems to be easier with more presets, and the ability to resize it with arrow keys. 4:3 and 16:9 presets aren't always enough. Third reason, it's support for different formats is sub-par. I frequently go to other programs to play things that VLC won't play. On Linux, I'm not sure what would be a good alternative to VLC. My current "stable" linux version of VLC has a bug which detaches the video from VLC, and I'm waiting for it to be fixed. Yes, I could download the "unstable" version and fix it, but I could just use Totem too. It does the job. I've found the surprising Xfmedia to be the best at playing my obscure video files, though it's interface is dreadful, so I only use it when my other options failed.So anyway, I don't think VLC is undisputed king of the video players. It's not bad, but it's only a tiny bit above average in my opinion. I didn't take into account any of VLC's advance features, because if there are any I don't often use them.

I've found a few good free strategy games. Glest - Fantasy RTS, Warzone 2100- Great game, once commercial now free, and Globulation - Simplistic, but free and unique.

I don't mean to brag, but I feel I'm going to be breaking some records here. Ah, yeah, my websites worth $0. Lowest value possible. Beat that! How the heck did you get your site to be worth $150 when mine is $0 Simpleton? Has it grown lot since I last visited? :lol:It wants me to display a banner saying "site value: $0" on it. Pfft, yeah right!

I don't really remember the internet before browsers. I remember my first experience with the internet though. Slow computer, insanely slow internet (I was still using the old 2400 baud modem from my other post). It was incredibly boring as well. Aside from the fact it took literally 15 minutes to load a text webpage, there was no google to browse and you couldn't just make up links, you had to have a list of them. After a while, the Internet got a bit more interesting, I bought a young persons book called like, Guide to the Internet or something. It had a bunch of links to check out, like sites with simple games and E-Pal penpal websites where you could put your name and email on a site and hope someone emailed you. It was at that stage when the Internet was becoming something interesting. There wasn't nearly the selection of webpages there are today, and to find something as exciting as "Watch the fabulous sleeping rat cam' was about coolest thing going on that I could find, and at the time, it was thrilling to watch

Well, I don't know what an Intel Pro 100 VE Network connection adapter is, it doesn't sound like it'd work. You need some kind of a dial up modem, usually called a 56k modem. It doesn't have to be external, but an external one is probably preferred if you can find one. When I got this computer years ago, it didn't come with a dial-up modem, and I had to install it myself from my old PC. I'm really doubting most computers these days have a modem capable of dial up already installed. Depends how old it is. You didn't say what OS you use, but Dialup's relatively easy to get going, you just need a modem (that can be used with dialup), you need to know what the modem is, so you can download/install a driver for it. You need a connection to a phone line, of course. The hard part is finding the driver online if it didn't come with an installation cd . That's about it, then you use a dialer to connect to a phone #. Can you use your computer to make phone calls? If no, then you need a dial up modem. I think windows has a phone dialer, but I can't remember. It used to. When you use dial up, your computer is pretty much making a phone call. From what I hear, 56k modems are pretty cheap now if you do need one, since many people are switching to cable or dsl and selling the old modems on ebay.

I didn't read the other replies so I might repeat something that's already been said. Anyway, being on dialup, bandwidth hijacking is a major problem for me. I constantly have to monitor my usage because if my internet is being used by something in the background, then stuff will start going weird, IM's will disconnect, downloads will cancel. I don't know anything about internet being stolen and used by someone else, because with dialup, that's not possible. My skills on Ubuntu are pretty limited, but there are some things I would do. For one, have a network monitor running, like the one in Ubuntu, or on a panel, or anything. This will show you when your it's being used. For a better look at what's going on, use the resource manager in Ubuntu, or something else. For an even better (well, not visually, but statistically) idea of what's going on, I suggest making some kind of a simple script or program to record your internet usage overnight every 30 seconds or 10 seconds to a text file, whatever you feel is accurate, but log the time as well. And then either just look at it in text form, or somehow insert it into a graph. I'm not sure to get this info, but I assume it can't be too hard. I assume, anyway! Once you catch the internet being used in a strange way, you can investigate further. Firestarter firewall shows you active connections. Typing netstat in a terminal works too, though on linux it seems to be a mess and I haven't really figured out how to get rid of all the not so useful info but this command works for me: netstat | grep -v "STREAM\|DGRAM" or just netstat will be fine, but messy. You could even make a script to run that command every so often. If you're not near the computer, and have everything closed, the log shouldn't be too hard to quickly scroll through to see if anything out of the ordinary pops up. You could use a command like this, netstat | grep -v "STREAM\|DGRAM" >> mynetusagelog That would insert the output into a mynetusagelog text file. As for putting it on a timed loop, I haven't quite figured out how to do that yet It's often just some program doing something. Upgrades, for example. I often had firefox doing updates behind the scenes even though I did everything I could think of to disable auto updates. 150mb of updates seems pretty large though. Ubuntu updates are sometimes that large, but usually they at least let you know they're updating unless maybe it's set to do it in the background. If it were windows, I would have thought it might be someone using yoru computer as a proxy or zombie type of bot, but I don't think that is a problem for linux users. I think it'd be a good idea to get that Firestarter program for Ubuntu, if you don't already have it. I think you can set up your Ubuntu firewall without it, but the GUI makes it easier. Well good luck uncovering the mystery. Remember, "It's elementary, my dear Simpleton" as Sherlock Holmes would say...

I was trying to learn Vim the text editor and found it very awkward to use, which made me start to examine how I actually type. My right hand fingers are usually on the JKL; keys, with my pinky reaching the enter key with ease. I have relatively short fingers, so I think that's why I do that. My left hand, however, spreads out a lot, spanning different rows. My left pinky is always on the CTRL key,my thumb always on the space, (though my right thumb does jump in to push space once in a while). What's interesting is that my left hand and right hand share responsibility. I notice that even in a sentence, both hands handle the H key. My left hand spans more than half the keyboard (the part with the letters), and evidently handles more than half it's share of typing though my hands sort of move back and forth when I start typing. Really, they seem confused when I actually sit and think about how I type, but I type very fast so I don't know, maybe I'm on to something. I never experience tired hands or sore hands from typing. I've always found the standard way with the home row stuff very difficult and slow, plus it's a stretch to reach the enter key. I took typing classes years ago, and it seemed so strange to me to study how to use a keyboard. I always did what felt natural, and with experience, became a fast typist.

Here's some information with a few pictures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system Apparently they're still in use in some parts of the world too. It's pretty old fashioned stuff, maybe I should run a modern BBS software just for something to do. Says they use telnet and stuff now.

This is kind of inspired by Simpleton's post about the internet. I vaguely remember using BBS (Bulletin Board Systems... I think, can't remember what the S meant) when I was younger. For those who don't have any idea what they are, I think they were kind of like the internet before the internet existed for the public. I don't think they were international, more of a local thing run by someone. I remember having a phone number to connect to my modem to, which was like 2400baud* and everything was text based in a terminal. It was like browsing the internet using lynx, a text based browser, but even worse. I don't think there was colour, but I'm not sure. They'd have a little menu of things, like Games, and you could download the games. I think you could leave messages too, considering it was a bulletin board, I imagine that's right. As much as I can remember, back then, only the truly "geeky" used computers. They weren't the pop culture thing of today. You know, in a way I miss the days when computer users were a small group of people interested in technology. It wasn't about blogging or face books or stealing music and movies, it was about playing with this quickly evolving electronic gadget. At least, that's how I remember it. My memory of BBS is pretty bad though, I was only young at the time, so I'd be interested in knowing if anyone else has fond memories of this pre-internet era.. *Check out this link for more info on groundbreaking modems of the past...... http://aroundcny.com/technofile/texts/2400modem88.html

i think you just type regedit or wine regedit in the console. then a registry window pops up that looks exactly like it does on windows and you can import stuff there to get a game working sometimes. sometimes a game will say something like "_____ Not found in the registry" then you'll know you need to copy it from windows. I'm not sure if installing a game on wine installs stuff into the registry automatically or not, I haven't used it much.

I hear recently on the radio some "expert" saying that green tomatoes can cause cancer and shouldn't be eaten at all. A lot of people eat pickles with green tomatoes and sometimes fried green tomatoes. The green is teh same as the toxic green on potatoes. I wonder if that cancer causing stuff is true.

You can look in the "Add/Remove" section of Ubuntu, or the Synaptic Package manager. A lot of games in there aren't even playable, and they don't say that, some are really, really, really, old school. I downloaded a strategy game, it turned out to be in ASCII graphics. I experienced the ASCII game era, and I personally am not that nostalgic that I want to relive my game units looking lke 0's an X's , but there are some good ones. Glest, Warzone 2100 and Globulation 2, all RTS games are some of the more quality games I've found. Supertuxkart is a pretty well done Super mario kart style game. They're all free. g1-117 is a decent combat flight simulator. It's not excellent and it's pretty arcade-y, but it's got some relatively fun missions to complete.You can use WINE to play some windows only games,t hough I haven't had much luck with that. It's possible for sure, but often it takes work and googling. To get one game I had working, I had to manually edit the virtual registry and download things, and it never worked anyway.

Just discovered Conky.. it's cool software and gets it's name from a Canadian t.v. show! I didn't know anybody watched the show. Anyone use it? For people who don't know what it is, you can use it to display stuff like disk space, mp3 info and weather on your desktop. There are lots of them around, but this seems to be pretty lightweight and doesn't drain all my resources. It's a tricky thing to install and configure (I thought so anyway, every example I saw didn't work and I had to edit them myself) but it's useful and cool when you get it going. It really makes a desktop look nice! Check out some screen shots.Just seach on google for it, if you're interested, it's pretty easy to find. I think it's on source forge.

Hey Simpleton! Do you use Wordpress because you've found it has the best features or because it's the de facto blogging standard? I thought I saw another blogging software that looked good, but nobody seems to use it, so I'm just wondering if Wordpress is "King" of the blogs for a good reason. Wordpress seemed so simple out of the box.. I like my stuff confusing, bloated with useless features and hard to use!

I never even noticed the titles before reading this post. I have never really paid much attention to the left side of the forum really. I just noticed you joined the day after me and are really out doing me on the post count. I'll catch up some day! Maybe! I'll even have my own custom title as well soon! Woo woo woo woo! (-Curly Howard..nevermind!)You're probably right though, it might make members stick around if they could personalize things a bit. Even some skins to choose from would be nice for a change..

Try communicating with your mysql database by telnet or something similar and try to "use" your new word press database. It might give you a more verbose idea of what's going on, or just use your phpmyadmin to investigate the database. You could install wordpress without softaculous, it might tell you where somethings going wrong. They say you can install it in 5 minutes....

Salut Simpleton! I know English and French. I live in the only officially bilingual (french and english) province in my country and while it isn't necessary to learn french, a lot of people do study it in school. While I've always found French a rather boring language, much too similar to English to be interesting, it does make feel good to know more than one language. I would feel embarrassed to only know one when most people outside of my country know at least two or three. I remember how they used to tell us in school that English was one of the hardest languages to learn, to motivate us to learn French. Well, as far as I can tell, it seems like one of the easiest. French was much more complicated, and Hindi, Japanese, Chinese.. any language, well it's all Greek to me, as they say.I've always had an interest in other languages, and have tried to learn some, but my brain can only handle so much. It's pretty hard to learn a language unless you're totally submersed in it. I've forgotten a lot of french because I don't ever speak it. I do attempt to learn the essentials of many languages, the greetings (Hey there!), the romantic words (My, aren't you beautiful! Be still my beating heart!) , and the swear words (^#$^$!@ You!). As for Hindi, well I know how to say a few things, but I rarely hear Indians talk, so I have a feeling I pronounce everything wrong. I don't think I could ever learn the "alphabet" symbols other countries use either, that seems pretty close to impossible. I think people from countries such as yours are more adept at learning languages because it's so essential. Language learning is a skill you become good at with practice. What's really amazing is that people from foreign (to me) countries can spell better than a lot of the English people I know. "Wots the deel wif that den?". It'd be neat if in the future scientists could inject languages into your brain, I guess like they do in the Matrix :lol:Au revoir!

Atheism doesn't really give people happiness or comfort and I'll agree with you on the lack of fulfillment. I'm not a religious person, and I don't feel overly happy with my lack of belief, it's more of a an acceptance. Inside, I often envy the very spiritual people. They seem so happy, so comfortable with life, they always have hope in dark times. They feel they have purpose, like they were hand created with love and there's someone who cares. Me, on the other hand, find no comfort in atheism. I believe that we don't have a purpose in life, that there's no God looking over us, that when we pass away, our once meaningful and unique life becomes nothing but as irrelevant dirt we walk on. These are frankly, quite depressing beliefs, yet it's what I've come to believe. I think it would be healthy and good to become spiritual, me, or you, or anyone, but not in the sense of believing in things that are unprovable and improbable, but just ways of life that make sense. I've done some research on religions, trying to find one that fit me, but I'm always put off when the intelligent philosophies and ideas on how to live life become outrageous stories, if you know what I mean. Most religions have good points, for example, a religion will often say something like, you shouldn't hurt someone and you should be kind. I can live with that kind of thing, but when it starts getting out of this world, with a hundred stories that are impossible to believe, I lose interest in that religion. I'm a believer in science, definitely, and all the stuff about things having to be proven to make sense, but I'm also very interested in finding a more fulfilling philosophy or "religion" to live by, something a bit more rewarding to believe than being an Atheist. I want some kind of religion that doesn't give me fancy stories to suck me in, I want a religion that's nothing but facts and guidelines on ways to live life happily.I don't believe any of us can know or prove what's going on in the supernatural world, like if there's truly a Heaven, a God or a Hell, but I don't really find myself wanting to believe all of that just because there were a few stories written about it. There are a lot of great fantasy stories past and present, and they are so well written, it's hard to seperate history from fiction, but I don't think it'd be wise to believe in something just because it sounds good and it's been around for thousands of years. So I think we should find some kind of philosophy or "religion" to live by, or create your own religion, but I'm personally not going to make my own! I may be a dangerdanism follower in the future though, you never know!What about scientology? Ahhh! I'm not rich and famous enough!

Is there a website out there where you can search or browse for Linux applications? The Synaptic package manager is alright for downloading, but it's not the greatest way to browse software and it doesn't have everything. I'm looking for something like Download.com or Tucows (is that still around?) but with a focus on applications made for linux. A website with reviews and download counts or something.

I believe Psychic Phenomena could possibly exist. I can't see why it couldn't, strange and not completely understood things have already been making a lot more sense to us. The atomic bomb for example, who would have thought humans could harness and unleash such colossal power? Not me, even after seeing pictures and videos it still seems hard to believe, yet I accept it as fact. ..And the bombs not the only thing, there are even more modern phenomena that are mind moggling. Psychic powers therefore aren't that far fetched if you have an open mind and a realization that pretty much everything in the world is hard to believe / understand.I've always wondered about something, and that's is if our thoughts could influence what's happening around us. For example, if I saw someone working on top of a tall ladder, I would think something like, "Wow, that would suck if they fell off ", and then I think, "Should I be thinking this? What if we can influence the physical world around us by our thoughts?". Nothing ever happens when I think about things though, so I'm not getting too much proof of psychic phenomena there. I haven't seen too much proof of psychic abilities, though I haven't been looking too hard. I don't really believe what I see on T.V. shows (psychics finding murder victims and stuff) and there are a lot of fraudulent "psychics" around. People fake bending spoons with psychic powers and stuff.. So as it stands, I don't find myself a very strong believer in psychic phenomena, but I am open to the possibility that it exists. I don't really know what you consider psychic phenomena though, because in your other post you talked about things that were completely over my head like psi balls or something? I have no clue what that stuff is.You believe in psychic phenomena - why? What experiences have you had that make you believe in it. I'm not questioning your beliefs, merely interested in the subject. I wish I had a reason to believe in it, it's a fascinating thing to study, but I'm not finding any.