A thread for boring computer questions.

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.

lol @ using ensure instead of insure. living overseas is killing me :|. also missing a 'have' somewhere in that third paragraph.

you may want the 15 for the bigger screen though...some of the music programs really benefit from the larger screen. I just bout the 15 with the hi-res antiglare screen. Sometimes when its on my lap I need to zoom in on txt while surfing, but when sitting at a table it's generally fine, and I like how much space I have for palates and such.

well, i've been doing a 13 screen for a while and tho i know exactly what you mean, i think i'm going to stick with it and save myself $600, seeing as ppl seem to think the core 2 is perfectly sufficient. i can also get a separate monitor later if need be. nervous . . .

PS what's the batteries being "built in" now? i know the life is supposed to be improved but that seems kind of inconvenient

Black background/white text gives me a blinding headache, but a few sites I like make use of it.

I have a Firefox plug-in that lets me reverse the colors, but I can't find anything similar for Safari (and I hate using Firefox). Is there a plug-in that will do it for me, or an easy CSS generator that would let me just specify background and text color without bothering any of the rest of the formatting?

maybe not what you're looking for, but I use this:

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

it's no good on complete pages but if you're reading a blog post, you click on the bookmarklet and you just get clean black text on white background with no ads.

Apple's been doing the built-in battery thing for sometime, I think they weighed the pros and cons, figure most people didn't carry around spare laptop batteries, and they're getting tons more battery time (and prettier design) with this.

well, i've been doing a 13 screen for a while and tho i know exactly what you mean, i think i'm going to stick with it and save myself $600, seeing as ppl seem to think the core 2 is perfectly sufficient. i can also get a separate monitor later if need be. nervous . . .

You can get a decent 24" monitor for well under $200 these days.

yes and/but if you're doing any kind of moderately color-critical graphic/photo/design work, you can look for the new eIPS monitors that are coming out in the 300 dollar range, quality generally associated with the more expensive IPS panels at a cheaper price.

http://www.pchardwarehelp.com/guides/s-ips-lcd-list.php

I have the first one, the Dell 2209WA and once calibrated, it looks fantastic, about as good as much more expensive Apple Cinema Displays.

check out the "new" ones. Good deals on IPS monitors.

http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?t=2025298

The 23" new Dell has a higher resolution but slower response time than mine. In either case, there's some thing you can do w/ Dell by signing up as a small business and getting these incredible deals.

For less than 300 dollars, these Dell monitors discussed in that thread, will destroy anything else around the same price in image quality.

i think i'm going to stick with it and save myself $600, seeing as ppl seem to think the core 2 is perfectly sufficient.

$600 is about what an iPad costs. ; )

how do you resize itunes when you had it open on a bigger screen and the resize corner is not showing?

hold down option and click the green resize button

Why does my clock (win XP) always run five minutes slow, even if I keep changing it?

have you got it synced? check the 'internet time' tab when you double-click the time

doesn't have that option?

is this at work? if it's part of a domain, it's synced to another source in the domain, which will be yr culprit

lol at fascist work making you work extra five mins

are there any easy, free web-to-sms sites?

google voice? if you are in the states.

have used http://www.cbfsms.com/ before

With a Blue Microphones Snowball Microphone and Garage Band, can I record and edit interviews on a Mac? Do I need anything else? Does anyone have recommendations for things like microphones for interviews?

So is there anything you can do about spammers spoofing your e-mail account? I have an old yahoo account that I only use for like mailing lists and for site where I don't want to put my main address out there. About a week ago I started getting about 20-30 "undeliverable failure" messages back per week. I've changed the password three times since then (using very strong 14-16 character strings, but I'm still getting about the same amount - no more, no less really. They aren't coming from or going to anyone on my contact list and I see no other signs of a virus, which is why I'm leaning towards my (admittedly generic) e-mail address just being spoofed from somewhere else.

"About two weeks ago"