A thread for boring computer questions.

this one :

geek check: I'm using DHTML to position stuff on a website (in divs, with position:absolute), and can't resolve some Netscape 4.x issues. I *have* to fix them, lots of users on campus here are still running the old browsers.

1) The "background-color:white" property for a center
is not understood by the browser. I don't know how to fix it! Something with tags? I have tried, and no luck. Is there a hack?
2) When there is a lot of content in the center
, the browser scrunches it all up so that it prints over itself ! What to do?

― daria g, Wednesday, 16 April 2003 00:29 Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Is it still happening?

(There was a rogue "<div>" tag in that post that was throwing off the formatting of the page.)

hmm yes i can still the effect. normally i see seperate grey boxes for each post over a darker grey background. but now i see all the post boxes against the same grey background.

i took a grab:

http://www.mullsports.com/images/ilxpage.jpg

lol there was more than one <div> in that post

is it still happening?

fixed ! you the man

yay! Now about my PDFs.

lol, sorry dude

yeah I can't help you there

Unless maybe the bit fidelity on the greyscale images is larger than the color ones? That seems far-fetched and likely entirely made up but I don't know where else to start looking.

gaaahh...

OK, went in and looked at the compression settings for PDF export, problem solved (after idly wondering about it for a couple of years).

do you want your grayscale pdfs to be 3x bigger than colour pdfs: y/n?

haha, always remember to make sure the "grayscale is hueg" option is turned off

caek -- definitely no.

This will make a portion of my job much easier.

what the fuck is the point of RAR? seriously

could be wrong but i think it's always had better self-checking / integrity features than ZIP, especially for multipart archivess

yeah, it does multipart, which used to be a big deal when stuff was distributed on usenet and/or people had slow/unstable connections.
also if you are any one part, the magic .par file does some stuff involving check digits will allow you to unrar anyway. also, i think it supported password protection before zip.

basically though, it's a completely pointless holdover from dialup days that "scene" people still like for some reason.

also if you are ~missing~ any one part

RAR manages non-Latin characters correctly, ZIP does not.

it's not pointless at all today, especially considering that every free file host has a file size limit, ahem.

and even without .par (which is an awesome thing), you can still extract individual files even if the archive is corrupted - .zip was pretty bad with this

it's not pointless at all today, especially considering that every free file host has a file size limit, ahem.

ah yes, was thinking of people who use multipart on bittorrent, which is pointless, but yeah, that makes sense.

i haven't seen a .par for years.

wth stylesheet is that ste? my eyes!

RAR manages non-Latin characters correctly, ZIP does not.

Yeah this is U+K.

what setting did you change to fix the PDF problem? I see smallest size is set to downsample color images to 100dpi and grayscale to 150dpi.

In any case, a good trick is to open PDFs in Preview (if on a Mac) and save them again, it strips the file of some extraneous Adobe bullshit that Adobe keeps in the file even when saving to "smallest size".

I set the downsampling numbers for gray to be the same as for color, and got the fix I was looking for. The files I create in "Smallest File Size" are very rough proofs for advertisers; I may set the downsampling for color and gray images even lower, but maybe not. That one change was v. helpful.

I usually change all the settings to downsample to 125 for anything over 125 when I'm making a lo-res PDF for approval purposes. I also sometimes pump up the JPG quality to make it better. And if you haven't played with it, Acrobat itself has a lot of features for lowering the resolution of a PDF, so don't have to keep making new ones.

In any case, a good trick is to open PDFs in Preview (if on a Mac) and save them again, it strips the file of some extraneous Adobe bullshit that Adobe keeps in the file even when saving to "smallest size".

there's an app for that: http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/02/shrinkit-1-0/ (10.6+ only)

yeah, I was going to mention it but I couldn't remember what it was called! I'm still on 10.5 at work though.

me too. 10.5 for all time.

I have a long history of frustration with extraneous data in adobe files, when Illustrator CS eps files would be placed in quark and bring in all kinds of color swatches that where in the file's palette but not actually used in the artwork. Very sloppy. And being the neat-freak that I am, I'd have to go digging through placed logos and art looking for what was causing these color swatches to appear in Quark.

Now there's a new problem with color swatches getting stuck in InDesign. You can even delete all placed art and these swatches stay there, you "select all unused" and InDesign correctly highlights the swatch as unused...but you can't trash it. The only solution is to create an EPS or PDF file with that color, place it into InDesign, then delete it. Fun times. It's making me less anal about making sure the swatches palette only contains actual colors actually used in the artwork.

it's not letting me password protect my airport express network wtf

anyone ever heard of this happening?

HALP I have a bunch of webpages with audio and video clips embedded with JW Player, and I need to bypass this stupid flash thing and get the media onto my computer. Isn't there a greasemonkey script for this? HALP

a quick look at JW page seems to suggest that the urls for the actual content might be available in the page source.

(failing that, you must've uploaded them in the first place, just use filezilla or something and download them)

post a url, and we'll take a look.

Oh they're not MY webpages; it's for an online course I'm taking, and the instructor wants us to watch all of this shit while we're logged in, but my internet connection's wonky and I hate the interface and it'd be tons easier if I could just watch them locally. I have found urls in the source before but there's tons and tons of them on the page and I was just hoping for an easier way than trawling through tons of source code. Alas.

Have you tried using Firefox and one of those video downloader add-ons that grab FLVs and movies off YouTube and other sites?

Day and a half late, but multipart in torrents drives me nuts, especially when it is 10 .rars of 12 .zips of an iso (I have seen this! on a tracker whose rules prohibited it being shared unzipped, even)

This is kind of not relevant in the days of mp3/flac and jpeg but .rar used to be a lot better than zips at squeezing uncompressed image or audio data down.

The zip compression algorithm is pretty old now, interested to see if any better universal methods crop up, or if we've reached a sort of minimum and it's all down to format-specific tinkering now, or if people are just not interested in minute improvements in compression any more now hard disks are into the terabytes and everyone has broadband

there are mathematically superior algorithms like bzip, but, yeah, i don't think there's a crying need for a better one-size-fits-all losless compression. all the energy is going into lossy compression, esp. on video.

is it possible for half of my macbook's memory to die? i could have sworn i had more memory than 512 mhz, because that's what it came with and i added more, but it says 512. it's coming up on 4 years old and in the last couple months it's gotten so sloooooooow

Yes, def. possible.

uh i think i broke my computer now
turned it off, took out battery and took out ram, then put it back in. now i had trouble getting it to start back up and it seemed to only work without the battery in. many times i tried to start it up and heard the cd drive sound but got no apple boot screen, just black. then it started after making the sound repeatedly. so now i'm using it without the battery and probably exposing it to dust. i thought one of the rams might be loose in there but nope, and it still says only 512.

hm. did you try clearing the pvram?

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379

otherwise your RAM stick might be be corrupted? or it might really not be seated in properly - try pushing it in harder

i'm afraid to turn it off now, i'll do it some other time i guess. def possible it's not seated right, one side of the bracket was loose too. i need a better small screwdriver.

afraid to even put it to sleep! i hate computer problems.

my computer just died!

i need to buy a new computer. what should i buy? i want a MAC that is really good for making music, lots of it -- and will never die!!!! :D

i will take ur suggestions very seriously, so please give them to me <3

wasn't there a thread where dan did this recently or something? or where someone else bought a new computer?

15" macbook pro with intel core i5? never had a macbook pro before. i mean, that's good, right

how bout the 13" macbook pro with intel core 2 duo? is that like, not as good?

it's outdated tech

well, let's put it this way. the highest-spec macs (i5 and i7) will show their superior horsepower in tasks like video-encoding, graphics editing, playing computer games. in normal day-to-day operation you probably won't notice a difference.

I don't know how much processing horsepower is needed for making music. if it's not a lot, then you might be well off with just a core2duo 13".

if you don't mind buying refurbished & having tech from the previous generation, and don't an education discount/can't get someone w/ one to buy a mac for you, then you can save some money. refurbished models are usually $1-200 cheaper than their comparable current models, and still come with the 1 year apple warranty.

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals/mac?mco=OTY2ODY2NQ

in all cases, it's probably a wise decision to buy applecare, which will ensure your mac for 3 years from the date of purchase.

Don't forget to update How long have you had your computer?

If I waited for a computer to die before buying another one, it'd be a long wait. My HP Pavilion laptop is still working 6 years on - but I got an iMac coming up to 3 years ago.

ok. i mean, i don't know that i'll need the i5 for everyday processing, but i imagine it couldn't hurt to have it for the sake of the music.

music processing was a done deal for CPUs a long time ago, i5 is way overkill but processing power just keeps getting cheaper so why not.