09:58 – I’m back to the point where I can ship kits. My Brother 3070 laser printer is set up, connected, and working. I have 50 or 60 assorted kits in inventory, packing materials, a tape dispenser, and shipping labels. Tomorrow morning, we ship our first kits from our new location.
We’ve still got boxes stacked all over the place, but we’ll get that sorted out over the coming days and weeks. One bad thing about the move. We apparently lost all of our firearms and ammunition. They must have fallen out of the Trooper when we stopped at that scenic overlook. Come to think of it, I do remember hearing a loud splash from the river, about 500 feet below the overlook. I’d go back and look for them, but I can’t remember which overlook it was. All we have left is two 550-round boxes of .22LR and a couple cans of .177 pellets. Those, and Barbara’s old slingshot.
At a commenter’s recommendation, I ordered a powerline networking kit from Amazon yesterday. It arrives tomorrow. All I have to do is plug the base unit in near the router/WAP, connect it to the router with an Ethernet cable, plug in the client unit near the upstairs TV, and run an Ethernet cable to the TV. That sure beats drilling holes and running a physical Ethernet cable.
I tried all of my backup flash drives. I’m able to copy the backup zip files to my notebook hard drive, but I get an error trying to unzip them. All is not lost. I have a fresh WD hard drive lying on my desk that has a complete uncompressed backup of my main system’s hard drive. I’m keeping that in reserve, though. The hard drive in the main system won’t boot, but it spins up and the BIOS recognizes it. I suspect I can just stick it in an external USB or e-SATA frame and pull all the data off it. If that doesn’t work, I’ll try the WD hard drive lying on the desk.
14:31 – I’ve got all my data back. I lost nothing at all, not so much as a single email.
The last time I nuked a pc during a move, I decided it must have been because I just put it in a box with packing peanuts, and static electricity got it.
Since then I’ve kept the shipping materials for repacking. Plastic bag over the pc, then into the shaped foam.
Could be pure coincidence but I haven’t lost one since.
Doesn’t help you though.
Your troubles are worrying to me, since you spend a lot more time and effort than most and you are still having difficulty recovering. My backup consists of keeping all my important stuff on a 3Tb NAS configured as RAID with 3 drives, mirrored and striped, etc for hot swap and auto rebuild if any one drive fails. At random intervals I’ll use drivecopyXML to make a complete copy of a machine to the NAS as well. I have gone back and gotten files from the drivecopyXML versions. I always make a copy of a new computer once I get it setup cleanly. The idea being I can go back to the original config. Never have though.
All in all, it’s a good reminder to do end of year backups and get them offsite.
nick
EDIT driveimageXML
For the ‘not like us’ files, this story keeps getting more horrific:
“Man, 21, who ‘shot good Samaritan in the stomach for trying to stop kidnapping’ is now accused of raping and robbing a couple at gunpoint less than 24 hours later”
“Now police say 24 hours after the shooting he held another couple at gunpoint, raped the woman, and forced the man to give him oral sex
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3353797/Man-21-shot-good-Samaritan-stomach-tried-stop-kidnapping-accused-raping-robbing-couple-gunpoint-24-hours-later.html
nick
17 yo girlfriend
this attack took place at 3am. That sounds like “don’t be there” might have helped the couple.
I’ve never had an issue moving a PC. I usually carry the tower out to the car, place it on the passenger seat, drive to its new home, carry it in, plug it in, and everything works as expected. Several PCs over several moves (some across town and some across a few states) and never a glitch. I have yet to put a tower in a box with padding or packing material. It just rides on the seat.
Having moved hundreds of PCs I have never had an issue until one last February. My client had moved it to a new office and it simply did not want to boot, actually not power up. Nothing on it was too important as most of their info is on servers. Took out the drive and installed it in a like spare PC. All good. I too usually just move them by placing them in my car on seats and floorboards.
But remember belt and suspenders. Two more belts and suspenders (another set and a NAS). Somebody else’s belt and suspenders (online backup).
Safe travels, sir.
I need to look back – instructions on posting quotes…
edit: Yep. angle brackets, not square. Too much time using other sites. No WP Mojo left.
Quotes. Most html will not work here. Others, myself included, tend to use italics which does work. I always used blockquote in past as I like the indent. Oh well.
Obummer signs ‘Every Students Succeeds’ law. Depends on your definition of succeed.
Nope
JimL
The blockquote tag in less than, greater than brackets to open, and less than, forward slash — greater than brackets to close will give a nice indented italicized format.
nick
The one I can’t ever remember is turning a word into a link, and hiding the link.
@nick,
Thanks. I’ll ‘member that when I need it, some day. Until then I’ll wind up going back & editing several times to get it right.
Any Student Proceeds
Old Dad believes in a minimum double backup of everything.
My main laptop has 2 laptops cloned be be just like it, they are synced daily using the paid version of GoodSync (http://www.goodsync.com/).
All the laptops and desktop in my house use both Carbonite (http://www.carbonite.com/) and iDrive (https://www.idrive.com/). iDrive also backups all our Android Samrtphones.
Carbonite and iDrive can also make local image backups which I duplicate on Seagate and WD portable hard drives.
I use the free version of Macrium Reflect Free (http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx) backing up to more Seagate and WD portable hard drives. IMHO Macrium is the best backup program I have ever used, and I have tried them all, free and paid. It is quick, compact, and I have never had the slightest hiccup when testing backups.
For recovering files and images I use the paid version of Recuva (https://www.piriform.com/recuva). Our Samsung Smartphones are notorious for borking SD cards so Recuva has been a lifesaver there. I also support many other “seniors” who are not tech savy. Recuva has retrieved many pictures for them.
So yes, Dad is OCD.
BTW, the rains out here in the Pacific Northwest and proving to be a problem in some areas, fortunately just an inconvenience over in our Southeast corner. Minor river flooding and streets flooding due to storm drains being plugged with leaves.
Edit: so I guess this is going to sit in the “moderator” queue because I put in too many links trying to be helpful. Also, I have no financial interest in any of the products I have linked.
Well I apparently haven’t tried it here for some time. Thanks Nick.
The entire text of the law should have been:
It was a bad idea at the time, and has not improved with age.
It’s all just total b.s. anyway; the education “system” we’ve had in this country for over a century was wrong-headed in the first place, imported via the usual suspects from Germany and France. Now even that level of schooling has been shown to be a failure; I’d guess that the majority of children don’t belong in school once they’re through elementary and junior high. Keep weeding them out through high school and only a minority fit for college and university education. This ridiculous idea that ALL kids MUST and SHOULD go to college has to end.
But first the high skool diploma and now the college degree have been the papers that a young person needs to have even a remote chance at a prolecube office job somewhere, especially now that our manufacturing industries have been gutted, blue-collar jobs lost, and LOTS of prolecube gigs offshored to virtual slave labor overseas.
Kids now should be learning the fundamental reading, writing and math skillz while also getting a solid grasp of science and genuine American history. Those capable, can move on to more advanced levels. They also ought to learn how to do things with their hands in a potential world of no electricity, and how to defend themselves and their families.
But this is just ranting and pissing in the wind; never happen.
Sunny day with blue skies here and more yard work to do.
Any comment I make with links or quotes I compose in WP “Visual”. Then switch to “html” and copy and paste. WP has little tools for formatting and hyperlinking. Free account plus free Avatar “Want some tacos, alien Gringos?”
You mean that degree I got in Modern African Cultural Advancement is useless?
Nope, that and a post doc in intersectional feminism and you can be a college dean…
n
Si Senor Atoz. Machaca muy bueno. Gracias.
“Nope, that and a post doc in intersectional feminism and you can be a college dean…”
Oh, at LEAST. If you do the grad programs while trans-gendering and have some kind of wacky new-fangled disability that was just invented the sky’s the limit, amigo!
As for messing around with italics, bold, and quotes here and in other WP blogs, I can’t be bothered; too much effort for my lazy no-count ass, and what was good for English text in previous centuries before computers and the net is good enough for ol’ OFD. As it was, it was way too much effort to get an avatar pic associated with my persona here.
The hard drive in the main system won’t boot, but it spins up and the BIOS recognizes it. I suspect I can just stick it in an external USB or e-SATA frame and pull all the data off it. If that doesn’t work, I’ll try the WD hard drive lying on the desk.
Now might be a good time to move to a Intel 480 GB SSD drive for $199:
http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Solid-State-2-5-Inch-SSDSC2BW480H601/dp/B00UL510VM/
Doesn’t windows wear out SSDs?
Doesn’t windows wear out SSDs?
Huh? I’ve got about eight of the little monsters running with zero failures to date (if I remember correctly). We reuse and repurpose around these parts. Are you thinking about this article?
http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale/
That CodingHorror article kept SSDs off my servers for a long time.
But I did put them in notebooks and anyplace where response performance was important (2 users). Everyone else used solid disks.
Then I found this:
http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead
And I talked to others in my area that have started using SSDs in their servers. I still haven’t bit the bullet yet. Price / performance and we don’t NEED that much performance yet is the only reason I haven’t filled a server with them yet.
Incidentally, my personal laptops are all Intel, though they didn’t win the contest. Samsung did. Now I would go with either, but still lean towards Intel. (Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM translates to “my business, and I’m betting Intel won’t let me down”.)
earlier versions of windows killed ssd’s. linux had TRIM long before MS added it, in Win7 iirc.
Then I found this:
http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead
And I talked to others in my area that have started using SSDs in their servers. I still haven’t bit the bullet yet. Price / performance and we don’t NEED that much performance yet is the only reason I haven’t filled a server with them yet.
That is a great article and still applicable. But, we replaced a 1 TB WD Black in one of our file servers this year with a Intel 180 GB SSD and a WD 4 TB Black. Our network W: drive became W: and X: which was disconcerting for a while but is now ok. And, I love the speed of the SSD when I am CVSing 12,000 files. I feel the NEED for speed here.
Our other file server is still a WD 2 TB Black. I would love to get a 1 TB SSD in it since our CRM database just hit 1.4 GB. In theory, it should be totally ram cached since Windows 7 x64 has 16 GB of ram to play with.
Too bad about your firearms. I seem to recall the same thing happening to all of mine. Sploosh! Our roadway infrastructure sure needs some work!
At least you still have your pet rattlesnake to keep an eye on the perimeter.
I’m copying all the data off the “failed” hard drive as I type this. The drive hadn’t literally failed; it just wouldn’t boot. My main problem at this point is that my laptop hard drive is only 500 GB.
Alas, I left both rattlesnakes down in Winston. I’ll pick up them the next trip down. Or maybe I’ll leave George there and bring Martha up to Sparta.
I’ve run a SSD in my Mac Mini for several years. Only down for OS updates. I keep all my media on a Drobo mini, but it still has to go through for streaming. No problemo, Señor.
On the libturd front:
CT Gov vows to prevent peeps on NFL from getting guns, how, TBD
Mooch de FLOTUS raps to go to college. Need more Wimmin’s Studies I guess.
New Republic “time to ban guns, ALL of them”. Issue “harsh words” to milspec I guess.
Why do libturds think can solve the worlds problems with hashtags, jingles and preaching to the dumbest peeps in the US of A?
Preaching to the choir?
How we got here:
http://takimag.com/article/sum_ting_wong_david_cole/print#axzz3tx41xLwi
Being a knuckle-dragging, white supremacist, fascist xenophobe, etc., I plead guilty: to HateThink. Which gets more hateful by the day, sad to say, in contravention of my religious beliefs.
As one of the commenters mentioned (and the comments are almost always well worth reading and lotsa fun!), the SJW types will eventually rue the day. They keep sowing the wind, and we know what that leads to.
“14:31 – I’ve got all my data back. I lost nothing at all, not so much as a single email.”
Hallelujah! Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!
Oh wait–all U got are .22LR and pellets. Never mind. Hate it when I lose firearms and ammo; all the time now. Regular hazard here on the north end of the sixth-largest lake in CONUS with constant high winds, rain, snow, ice, blizzards and B&E scum all over the place.
I see the Chumpster is still riding high in the polls and it’s gonna be real interesting to see what the Repub ass-hat hierarchy will do. The other half of the War Party is, of course, dead set on that fugly commie pig, who will also make things interesting for us during her term, whether it’s the full eight years or not. For one thing, she’s a bloodthirsty old bat and would likely go way past any of the previous sock puppets in the WH and kick off World War IV. For another thing she’s gonna double-down and triple-down on Obummer’s attacks on the 2A and light up another civil war. Even cops and sheriffs are telling the WH to knock off that kinda talk, and that they won’t enforce any of it. (would you, if you were a deputy or street cop nowadays, be willing to go knock on doors and tell peeps to turn over their firearms?)
The late Алекса́ндр Иса́евич Солжени́цын used to say that among the zeks in the gulag it was a regular topic of conversation that if only they’d assembled in their houses and apartment blocks with shovels, pickaxes and meat cleavers to welcome the NKVD scum when they came in the night to take them away, things might have turned out differently. After a few such events, they figured, the bastards would be too scared to keep it up.
But authoritarian and totalitarian regimes DEPEND on keeping their populace scared all the time; which brings us back to the old SteveF Notebook page on ‘if that was their goal, what would they be doing differently?’
For one thing, she’s a bloodthirsty old bat and would likely go way past any of the previous sock puppets in the WH and kick off World War IV.
Given this statement, one wonders if the feddies will be purchasing tree shredders by the gross? Given the option of going in feet first or head first, I do not want to even think about it.
One of the late Saddam’s sons, I forget which, did that trick with some of their “prisoners,” and there were witnesses. This tends to scare dissidents a bit. Cankles reminds me of that vicious old bat that was a judge of some kind in the old East Germany and methodically went about getting rid of her political opponents, dissidents, and other such malcontents via the guillotine, which was in use for capital cases in Germany well before that era anyway. She used to watch them get chopped from her office window.
This sweetheart right here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilde_Benjamin#/media/File:Fotothek_df_pk_0000213_012.jpg
The Red Judge. Bloody Hilde.
She had a better mustache than I had at twelve.
Most of the news centers on Trump leading in the polls. Of course he really has about 1/3 while 2/3 are either for others or undecided. He usually leads in polls asking who the least popular as well. It does get mentioned at but not very often. Of course the libs like to try and make it sound like his views are representative of all republicans.
If they didn’t have Chumpster for that role they’d use some other boogeyman to scare the befuddled masses. I’m old enough to remember the hatchet job they did on Barry Goldwater like that, and we got that total p.o.s. LBJ for Prez instead. Barry, of course, would have started a gigantic nuclear war that would have eliminated all life on the planet, while the Dems just wanted PEACE.
They define all Repubs as fascists and racists, of course, and refer to anyone to the right of Fidel or Mao as “ultra-right” and “wingnuts.” They’re gonna end up getting that very same kind of bogeyman in their faces before long, though.
Way to go Odooshnozzle:
The lone health insurance cooperative to make money last year on the Affordable Care Act’s public insurance exchanges is now losing millions and suspending individual enrollment for 2016.
The *lone* cooperative. How can it go from profitable to “losing millions” at the drop of a hat? By design? I guess we will all just have to surrender all assets to the low life scum for health care.
What a joke. I can’t wait to see how Cankles tops this.
Oh, don’t you worry, kemosabe, Cankles will mos def top this chit as soon as she has the power…and don’t forget, she’s already got some experience trying to muck up the health care system, such as it is, in this country, previously, when she and her great big lovable lug of a fucking sex pervert husband were in the WH.
As somebody at the Western Rifle Shooters site said late last night, they want us thoroughly fleeced and then killed. We’re looking at eventual Stalinization, what he and his minions did to the kulaks and via the Gulag. What’s funnier than chit, though, is that the progs and SJWs think they’ll be in charge, when, in fact, they’ll be first against the wall.
Cankles could end becoming known as “Bloody Hill.” Or, “The Red President.”
Lock and load, amigos.
One of the late Saddam’s sons, I forget which, did that trick with some of their “prisoners,” and there were witnesses.
There is video! I saw it on Fox News one day and could not sleep for several nights. There was also video of them throwing people off the top of a four or five story building.
Not recommended!
I’ve got all my data back. I lost nothing at all, not so much as a single email.
Congrats. I’ve lost the boot track on a drive before, it is most disconcerting. I believe that it is the only track on a hard drive that cannot be replaced by the drive hardware.
BTW, I have been meaning to mention that my DirecTV DVR will not access the internet if you hook it up through wired ethernet and have another DVR on your LAN. But, just change it over to wireless and it works just fine. The DirecTV installer tried to explain the issue to me but he lost me.
We have two DirecTV DVRs on our house LAN and they can show each others saved shows. No interruptions even though they are hooked up using wireless ethernet.
We’ve still got boxes stacked all over the place, but we’ll get that sorted out over the coming days and weeks.
We’ve been in the new home for almost three years and have many boxes scattered around the place. I continuously open a closet, see 10 boxes and slam the door shut. I did not want to see that.
The wife and I have moved nine times in the 33 years that we have been married. Still packed boxes are the norm at this point.
We’ve been in the new home for almost three years and have many boxes scattered around the place. I continuously open a closet, see 10 boxes and slam the door shut. I did not want to see that.
We’ve been in our home for 12 years. I returned to Alaska 15 years ago. Still have unpacked boxes from then. I proposed we pick up the boxes one by one, and if we cannot recall the contents in 60 seconds, it go in a dumpster.
Husband said no.
Sigh. At least when we die it’ll be easy to clear out the garage as it is all boxed.
Hahahaha….I’ve been RUTHLESSLY tossing out stuff here for the past few months, and we’ve been in this house a little over three years. I’m badgering Mrs. OFD to get rid of even more stuff, like, for example, about two-thirds of her Imelda Marcos collection of shoes, for starters. I need room for ammo, dammit.
And things could be looking up out in Nevada and Lost Wages after all; yeah, they got that nitwit commie Harry Reid but they also got this chick:
http://freedomoutpost.com/2015/12/las-vegas-assemblywoman-michele-fiores-pro-second-amendment-christmas-card-setting-gun-grabbers-hair-fire/
Yowza!
That’s what the TLAs want you to believe.
I’ve been helping my (totally nontechnical) brother-in-law with his laptop. The hard-disk (with a Vista install) was dying, so I put in an SSD I had lying around and installed Win10. Everything went pretty smoothly, until we got to the email and contacts. Maybe one of y’all can tell me what the heck is going on there.
He used Windows Mail under Vista. This stored the mail in a halfway decent format (individual .eml files) in a particular location under the users AppData directory. Fine. Under Windows 10, there is the apparent replacement: the Mail App. Damned-if-I-know where it stores its files, because I sure couldn’t find them. There’s no import function. How the devil do you get it to take over the old mails?
Then the contacts. There’s this lovely directory called “Contacts”, and Win10 is aware of it. All of his old Vista contacts were stored in .contact files, I copied these into the Contacts folder. A program called “Windows-Contacts” would automatically display them, and even offer a menu for things you could do, like send email.
Sounds great, right? Wrong. Clicking the email button, for example, pops up a message that no application is registered for that action, and you should go set one in the control panel. But according to the control panel, the Mail App *is* registered. Playing with the Mail App, it seems to want to work with the “Contacts App”, which is different from Windows-Contacts, and is completely empty – it knows nothing about the Contacts directory, and (of course) also offers no import function.
So he has all his old stuff, but it’s completely useless. The emails are in a format that’s barely readable in Notepad, the contacts can be looked at, but not actually used. Yesterday was one, long frustrating evening…
Anyone have experience with this stuff? Since I’m almost only on Linux nowadays, I only limp with Windows. But they didn’t want a Linux install…
Last rant: All of these “Apps” are apparently designed for mobile use. You have a big laptop screen, and they display 2 or 3 text fields, with masses of whitespace (or purple space, or blue space) between them. Scroll, scroll, scroll – idiots, this is a laptop, not a smartphone – you’d think they could query the screensize and then actually make use of it…
@Brad – you may have thought of this already – dump the contacts to a .csv file (using some utility) and then import them into the mail app. I have had some success porting files for family members that way.
Or, just for giggles, use Thunderbird instead. I know – not technical. Neither is my wife, but she manages.
@Jim: I was unable to find any “import” function on the contacts app. Is there one? If so…where???
Dammit! People App. Why isn’t there an import? That might be why my wife is using Thunderbird. I hate those full-screen apps.
@Brad : Try installing Live Mail. I just did that for a customer who just upgraded from Vista to Windows 10. The data copied over via export and import through live mail. It is working fine and the customer gets to use a program similar to what he was using before.
@Ralph: Thanks for the suggestion – I’ll look into it the next time I play PC-doctor for them.
That’s what the TLAs want you to believe.
TLA = three-letter acronym ?
He used Windows Mail under Vista. This stored the mail in a halfway decent format (individual .eml files) in a particular location under the users AppData directory. Fine. Under Windows 10, there is the apparent replacement: the Mail App. Damned-if-I-know where it stores its files, because I sure couldn’t find them. There’s no import function. How the devil do you get it to take over the old mails?
Never use any Microsoft mail application. Thunderbird is the only decent app out there.
I used Windows Mail for a while. It does store the emails in EML files. But it stores the lists and indexes pointing to the EML files in a custom SQL database. Which, hoses itself occasionally. The first time it corrupted itself, I rolled back. The seond time, I moved to Thunderbird. You can drop the EML files into Thunderbird but I chose to restart the old Microsoft Outlook Express and export from it to TB which has a import filter for OE.
I have 20 GB of email in Thunderbird. Simply amazing. I have upgraded all of my employees to it. The email composer is a bit lacking for older folks (not very WYSIWYG) but it just works.
I somehow remember somebody saying that the T-Bird developers were quitting or suspending their dev ops stuff…?
We’ve still got gmail and I’ve had it almost since it first came out but I’d like to get off it and all things Google sometime soon; I have other emails but the bulk of contacts over the years for both Mrs. OFD and myself are still on gmail. I suppose I can laboriously note all the contacts I wanna keep and put them into another secure email client but that seems rather tedious and tiring.
Yes, the Thunderbird developers are “repurposing” and have been for several years. That does not mean that TB is not a great product. In fact, I use TB to download all my gmail to my office and home PCs. I have both a personal gmail account and I have my corporate domain sitting on top of gmail (google apps).
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/thunderbird-a-tax-on-firefox-development-and-mozilla-wants-to-drop-it/
That’s what I thought; and I wanna get off gmail and Google altogether; I don’t want our gmail simply dumped into T-Bird, that’s just another layer of stuff to mess with. So I’m probably tasked with weeding through my/our gmail contacts and adding them one by one or in groups to a completely new and secure email app of some kind, and I’ve looked at several so far. This would also mean notifying many, many places of the new email addresses, of course. A rainy day project, as we’re kinda wondering when we’re gonna get real snow here lately and the ski areas are also getting worried.
As far as I know Gmail contacts export to CSV files.
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/24911?hl=en
So, not being an email guru, are .csv files now the standard email format? If so, I’d have to ascertain that any new email client we hook into here uses that same format, I guess.
csv = comma sep value may or may not be good for email import great for spreadsheet import
In other words, Microsoft-centric…amirite?
I’m thinking a secure, web-based email client that will work cross-platform…maybe NeoMail, I dunno….I’ll look into it some more anon….
…hmmmm….this looks interesting:
https://www.fastmail.com/?domain=fastmail.fm
CSV is very widely supported in email and many other applications. Great for SQL export and import. I use them for export to our on-line inquiry and to Quickbooks from out custom application. Easy to write as the delimiter characters are usually TABS and DQuotes.
There are at least ten million Thunderbird users now:
https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2015/12/thunderbird-active-daily-inquiries-surpass-10-million/
I look forward to Thunderbird moving away from the Mozilla group. The FireFox people are floundering and have been actively stifling Thunderbird for several years now.
BTW, CSV is a very basic text file format for moving data back and forth between totally closed environments in one line per record of data. You do not get any formatting but you get your raw data.
Some folks use Hushmail
nick
We gave up on Chrome and IE here a while back and have been using FF for some things and I’ve mainly been on SeaMonkey, a FF derivative, which so far has worked great. I’ve got NetVideoHunter on it and that’s been good, too, and not just for Toob vids, ANY vids.
I might look further into Hushmail but so far FastMail is looking pretty good. And I also use the Tor browser, mainly with the Whonix vm’s and Tails.
No, the exact opposite. I have nothing to add to what the others have already said on the technical side, but do have quite a lot to say about those dog fellators in Redmond.
Microsoft luvs them some proprietary data formats with no convenient way to export or extract their data. Look at Outlook’s heinous one-big-file and compare to the text files used by standard mail programs. (I think Lotus Notes also uses some proprietary file, but they’re a fraction of a percent of the market so I’m ignoring them.) If you’ve built a wiki in Sharepoint and want to export your pages so you can put them into a different wiki system, well, good luck with that. It makes sense, of course. If not for data lock-in, MS would lose some sizable fraction of their customers every year.
I use TOR Browser Bundle as my main browser, with Firefox for sites where TOR just doesn’t work and I need or want to use the site. Silk on the Kindle Fire because I haven’t gotten around to installing any other browser. (By the way, Silk on the original KF is really bad, but on the latest version of the Fire (formerly known as Kindle Fire) it’s much, much better.)
I’ll keep using SeaMonkey until the inevitable slowdown or security b.s. and then will probably go to Tor for most of my stuff and use FF or whatever derivative or Midori for anything else. Silk has been pretty fast on my Kindle Fire since I’ve had it, so I don’t have a need to put another browser on there. Zipping Amazon Kindle books to it has been instantaneous.
FastMail looks like it will import all my stuff from gmail so I’ll probably go with that and pay forty bucks a year, and keep gmail around until I’m sure it’s been seamless. Better ways to organize contacts and do security stuff, too. I’m on their 30-day free trial now but will probably bite the bullet before than and start the move. Meanwhile I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for searches about 90% of the time; the Yahoo search engine sucks rocks, though. Anyone still using Bing? Or any other nifty search engine?
Eventually I’m planning on ditching M$ completely here but so long as this machine is still running 8.1 successfully I’ll hang onto it. Whenever I replace it, I’ll also replace the current drive with an SSD; are peeps still recommending a separate SSD for the o.s./boot and another drive for their data?
Did anyone EVER use Bing?
I tried it and it couldn’t even find stuff on the MS site.
I use google mostly but duckduckgo is gettting my technical searches. The ones that AltaVista used to be good at. Finding some tiny piece of data you KNOW must be out there, but google won’t find….
nick
Look at Outlook’s heinous one-big-file and compare to the text files used by standard mail programs.
This is why I moved my personal and business email (me and all my employees!) to Thunderbird. Thunderbird uses the old, tried and true, mbox file format. It is bulky and slow but it just works, and is just text. I have 20 GB of email stored in my office TB now with no problems whatsoever. There is no way I could store all that in an IMAP server without serious bandwidth issues.
BTW, there are some major issues coming with text files. I have been investigating adding support for Unicode to our software, especially since we have so many international users. I have discovered that there are major issues within the Unicode camp and there are three technologies, UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32.
Unfortunately, Microsoft settled on the UTF-16 technology. However, the HTML consortium settled on the UTF-8 technology (with UTF-16 and UTF-32 extensions to cover everyone out there). I have decided that we will eventually move our software to the UTF-8 technology since it is a sparse footprint and just about everyone is headed that way. We have file size issues and I hesitate to change to 16+ bits for each character when it is not needed.
But Microsoft’s version of Unicode is buggy even though they were an early adopter. You cannot even use Unicode in their C++ compiler as the following statement fails to compile:
double π = 3.14;
Which, is disappointing.
Anyway, back to my issue with text files. A text file should be able to store Unicode in it but can not without special identifiers. I do not know if this is a Windows specific problem but, it is disappointing. Please note that I am continuing to learn and some XXXX all XXX any of the above may be incorrect.
Did anyone EVER use Bing?
Bing is excellent at finding free porn. Just sayin’. I pay for my porn.