A thread for boring computer questions.

Damn I could have answered that one, had that problem recently as well.

Handy to bookmark that plug in location, I can't see it in the options.

loved http://www.voidtools.com/ for years re win filesearch

be careful of having two things indexing and being a drag if ur set up's getting on

Looking for a solution to this

Somehow u-torrent seems to have reconfigured itself in such a way that instead of downloading audio files in folders thus separating the downloads into whatever live recording they came as they just come down as files stripped of the folders. I can't see what you would need to reconfigure to get it back to the way it was up until yesterday where it had the separating folders.
Subsequently I have several live sets in a larger folder all jumbled up, sorted by the numerical part of their title so I have a load of 1s from different sets, a load of 2s from different sets etc.

Looks like i somehow had automatically update u-torrent ticked on the preferences box and maybe this has the thing needing to be reconfigured since it is possibly a new version of u-torrent but I've never come across an update leading to this. I also don't think I would normally leave an automatically update box ticked if I was aware of it. So am further wondering if I did leave it unticked or bowed to continual notification previously that there were new updates which would probably bug me too, especially if they were happenning with any great frequency.

Jesse the built in search function in Win 7 is p decent esp if your drive is indexed. Are you having probs with it?

IIRC, it was not feasible to index the voluminous files on my work's networked drives, which is where I do most of my searching. Plus it doesn't do very advanced searching.

Also it arbitrarily returns "no results" sometimes but then later does find results.

Thanks, rtc. I will check that out.

I tried out some free file search tool, which worked well, but it seemed pretty shady, so I uninstalled it.

What the fuck our firm needs is a case/document management application, but without leadership they'll never spend the money (especially when the principal partner prioritizes the firm paying his country club dues, lease on his 6-series BMW, and "lending" him mortgage payments. Sorry, is this not the bitching about co-workers thread?)

Stevolende, when you open up a new torrent, the dialogue box will have a checkbox that you can click that preserves folders. It's easy to miss, though IIRC it should be on by default.

Stevolande there's also a way to change a folder display in Windows Explorer where it just shows all the files in all the subfolders jumbled together, maybe it's that? It happens when Arrange By is set to Name instead of Folder

Jesse I've always been under the impression that searching for files on a network drive is just fucked no matter what and there's really nothing to be done. Maybe tell yr company that your established IT friend says you should get a doc mgmt system

Or just put them in a SharePoint document library lol

fpd u

sry just tryin to share pointers here

u have an oversharepointing problem imo

Look dude instead of pointing fingers why don't we just try to share the burden here and leverage a deplorable solution

Stevie D otm, get a goddamn DMS.

Like I can tell you from exp that ppl regularly call in to try to find missing Outlook PSTs or shit they accidentally moved to another folder and a network drive search usually takes like 5-10 minutes, it just sucks no matter what you do

the inelegant solution i've found is to use an indexer like locate32 - unfortunately this means it has to scan the network drive all the time (or every day or whatever) to stay up to date

Stevolende, when you open up a new torrent, the dialogue box will have a checkbox that you can click that preserves folders. It's easy to miss, though IIRC it should be on by default.

― Hollinger Escape Plan (Leee), Saturday, January 31, 2015 11:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thanks for that, discovered it last night after not wanting to start any new torrents until I could get it sorted out for the most part of the day. You'd think there might be something that could be sorted somewhere else in preferences.
But yeah, very easy to miss and I only saw it after i thought I'd reinstalled u-torrent. I'm surprised I hadn't stumbled on it before.
Maybe would have been easier if I could have thought of the word subfolder which that window controls.

At least in as much as I could have googled u-torrent and subfolder together and might have wound up being directed to that.

the inelegant solution i've found is to use an indexer like locate32 - unfortunately this means it has to scan the network drive all the time (or every day or whatever) to stay up to date

iirc isn't this really bad for the actual server hardware or is it mostly nbd?

it's probably bad, so i don't do the index more than once a week

you gotta make sure it doesn't do it automatically

there's probably a better server side-implementation - which would make more sense so each client doesn't have to re-index constantly - but i don't know one offhand

Stevie D otm, get a goddamn DMS.

I know, but I am the only person in the whole organization who understands what a DMS does. I had a company give a pitch to a couple partners and they were like, oh wow, this is amazing. Let's talk more about this after the holidays. They've since forgotten and now they're like, what did it do again? How is that any different from using files on the server?

They did spend $$$ on a case management program in 2008 but nobody used it (some couple people found its lingo insurmountable, e.g., calling a document a "summation," which is stupid, but they were CONSTANTLY crying "What is a 'summation'?!!!" and finally giving up). The license ran out, and now it's evidence that such programs are unnecessary.)

The REAL solution is to maintain focus on getting a new job before 2016 and just stop trying to fix anything.

Correct

yes

Are replacement laptop batteries and AC adapters something you should 100% always buy from the mfr and never ever fuck w/ 3rd party shit, or are there dependable sources for quality components that won't cost me like a bajillion dollars?

FWIW, every third party manufactured battery and AC adapter I've purchased has eaten it within 6 months of purchase. :(

fuck. that was my next question

my next next question was what're the dos and donts of WiFi extenders

v annoying problem

every few days my keyboard likes to act like my ctrl key is stuck and every link will open in a new window

i fix it by opening the on-screen keyboard and clicking the ctrl button twice (the on-screen keyboard doesn't indicate that it's already held down but this works anyway)

now when i do it the fix lasts for about a minute and then links go back to opening in new tabs (happens in all browsers)

virus scan hasn't fixed it

set yr computer on fire probably

Everything is subjective

The universe has no center and no edges; reality is arbitrary

Use your imagination and your skills.

He who thinks he is bigger than the rest must go to the cemetery. There he will see what life really is: a handful of dirt.

ignore these fools qualx

are you sure that you're not pressing ctrl by mistake and not noticing it?

laptop or desktop? Does pressing the CTRL key do anything when it's stuck?

h/o, have to get through the 99% failure rate of sufjan's hilarious yukfest extravaganza first

laptop

i ran malwarebytes and rebooted and it's gone for now so i'll probably just keep doing that and continuing to tolerate the ten million relatively harmless viruses on this thing until one of us dies

if the trackpad has double tap for ctrl+click, try disabling the trackpad to see if it goes away. If you use a usb mouse, try using another one for awhile. Do the same for any other bit of hardware. If not fixed, see if starting any programs, one by one, after restart creates the problem.

but also

I have a newish Dell 2-in-1 convertible laptop.

The following keys either stop working, or respond very slowly, at seemingly random times: 4,5,e,r,t,,f,g,c,v,b. (They're all grouped you see.) When one goes bad, they all go bad. And then next thing you know, the whole keyboard works fine. But lately it's 50/50 between functioning and non-functioning keyboard.

Things seem to go wrong when the computer gets warm. Or maybe when I have a bunch of apps/windows open and the memory is taxed.

It doesn't seem to be purely hardware because, for instance as I type this, everything's fine. But just an hour ago all the keys mentioned were messed up.

Really appreciate any guesses or help!

My old laptop did something similar when the battery went. Does it still do this if you take the battery out (but still keep it plugged in, obv)?

I'll try that when I get home and report back.

When the keyboard is malfunctioning, they keystroke will eventually register after numerous (sometimes like 50) presses. It's weird. FWIW I do not have any sticky keys or filter keys enabled.

I am going through an O'Reilly book on awk to transform JSON to a delimited format. Is awk useful or should I be spending time on something else? Thanks.

If you are on a Mac and using terminal is there a simple single line command to switch from OS X line breaks that show up as ^M in vi to Windows line breaks? I copied something from the web that uses perl but I don't know perl so I felt sort of unscrupulous about it and feel like I should learn perl. Thanks.

jq might be worth checking out, i haven't tried it but it seems like it does exactly what you're looking to do

1) You can certainly use sed/awk if you hate yourself, but i think the standard swiss army knife for json transformation is https://stedolan.github.io/jq/. see e.g. https://gist.github.com/jorin-vogel/2e43ffa981a97bc17259 for a nice usage examples with CSV output.

2) are you running homebrew? if so brew install dos2unix.

if not, this is a sed problem.

sed $'s/\r$//'     # DOS to Unix
sed $'s/$/\r/'     # Unix to DOS

first answer here pretty much covers the options http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2613800/how-to-convert-dos-windows-newline-crlf-to-unix-newline-n-in-bash-script

unix2dos / dos2unix for the command line thing, or you can do it within vim using fileformat:

http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/File_format

As for the json, awk might be able to do the job but the correct way is to parse it fully and output the elements you want. Depends on the json though.

Xp

jq is good