A thread for boring computer questions.

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

Another way to deal with the line-break issue is to use AppleScript with TextWrangler - it'll interoperate with the CLI too.

Thanks very much for all of the help. Would someone very kind have a moment to post step-by-step instructions for installing prebuilt jq on a Mac (if that's the easiest way to get it)? I'd prefer to do things from the command line in terminal and do not want to use Xcode. Sorry for needing such basic help. I don't have homebrew installed but will install if necessary. (I mean to return to awk in the future.)

install homebrew per instructions here

http://brew.sh/

then run `brew install jq`

homebrew installation may prompt you to install command line developer tools (which is basically the compiler and stdlib included in the big xcode package). you can say yes if asked to that without fear of accidentally install 10GB of Apple Watch library docs. it's just gcc really.

It's clang now dude

well yes

I wish I remembered how all of the pieces fit together (the make file, etc.), but I never did it for a job, only for an audited course. Maybe they will have artisan coders (again?) one day who do everything from scratch. I am experimenting with the filters now on my own data instead of using the online interface. Thank you!

I got discouraged and distracted with other projects but went back to it yesterday and made good progress today. I have all the output in delimited format now that can be opened in Excel and transformed to comply with a metadata standard. Still have to figure out how to get rid of extraneous spaces and am sure that there is a more elegant way to do it with jq only instead of iterating over a file of ids but this works and I'm happy because I'm pretty sure I'll be able to meet my self-imposed deadline next Friday, which is already an extension, but my excuse is that I had to wait for the data before reminding the owner in order to seem affable.

I've had this problem since the '90s . . .

In Windows, when you click on an email address hyperlinked on a web page, Windows will launch Outlook or whatever else email client. How do I get Windows to take me to Gmail, instead, in this circumstance? Thanks, anyone.

If you go to default programs in the control panel, you can change the protocol "mailto" so that it doesn't open Outlook, but I couldn't get it to open Gmail. But NOT launching Outlook is a big improvement!

I think you have to install a new thingy to get it to like open a web browser and load Gmail. Let me investigate.

What's yr default browser? if it's Chrome, try this:

http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/set-gmail-as-browser-default-email-client-ht

wait that link works for all browsers so there try that!

worked! thanks, Stevie.

I generally browse on Chrome on my laptop (a Compaq Presario i've had since '09). It runs Windows Vista, and i'm getting a message that it won't be supported/install updates come April. Realistically, what do i need to do? I'd rather not spend $400 on a new machine if i don't have to, but if it's inevitable...

is the "it won't be supported" chrome or windows vista?

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3004014/web-browsers/google-cuts-off-chrome-updates-on-windows-xp-and-vista.html

upgrade operating system to windows 10? if possible (some hardware won't handle it)

my laptop, this one, is in the same boat, vista, 2009 vintage. but then i use linux...

firefox is snappier than it used to be

yeah i use Firefox sometimes but never really warmed up to it.

i'm guessing i can't get Windows 10 to run on a 7-year-old laptop, tho?

as long as you have 2GB RAM it should run I'd think

so, re the above, do i have to de-install Windows Vista? and buy Windows 10 in, like, a STORE?

see, i know NOTHING

(LIKE, how do i quickly find out how much ram i gots)

Start -> Right Click on Computer -> Properties. Windows 10 is free upgrade I believe