A thread for boring computer questions.

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

Only Windows 7 and later have the free-upgrade option. (there do seem to be a few workarounds for XP or Vista users who don't want to pay for Windows 10, google "upgrade windows vista to windows 10"), as well as finding someone with a legit copy of Windows 7 or 8 they're not using to do and intermediary upgrade before upgrading again to 10.

Windows 10 can run on most computers that can run Windows 7. Microsoft has a free utility for checking in you can run Windows 7 on your Vista PC.

Right-clicking on the desktop Computer icon and selecting Properties will show how much RAM you have and other basic info.

ok thx

i upgraded to windows 10 on my laptop about a month ago. everything worked fine, my old laptop felt quicker, i was quite happy with it. yesterday, it restarted after installing a new update. it took a while, with a few screens with one sentence messages that i couldn't skip and finally it started. but something's happened: it went back to what it was like a month ago. i still have windows 10 installed but when i launched chrome it launched the tabs that were open about a month ago, when i launch utorrent it doesn't show anything i've downloaded in the past month and only has the torrents from a month ago, my main desktop screen is the same as a month back, same background image and files and it looks like anything that's happened in the month since has disappeared. i had a cracked copy of office that didn't work after i installed windows 10, but now it does. i have absolutely no clue what the hell happened and it's impossible to google for help since all i can find are tutorials on how to go back to windows 7/8 if you're unhappy about windows 10.

so uh what the hell happened? any clue on sorting it out?

The only thing I can think of is that an old restore point was restored. It shouldn't just do that by itself though.

is there a way i can disable the "upgrade to windows 10" thing that wants to schedule an appointment for an upgrade?

Upgraded my laptop to Windows 10 last month but since then my wifi keeps disconnecting. Anyone else had this problem?

Similar thing definitely happened to the family PC. Windows 10 put itself on, seemed fine for a while, got much slower within a few months.

Yeah seems like that's what happened. I'm looking to restore to a previous point to see if it works. Thanks silverfish

i see at least 3 people at week who have upgraded to windows 10 and cannot stay connected to wifi. sometimes there's a driver update for the wireless adapter which tends to help.

I've tried Windows 10 on a couple of machines and there are no bloody drivers for anything so I just had to downgrade again. But it still bugs me to upgrade back again constantly. Grumble.

http://www.myce.com/news/how-to-uninstall-kb3035583-the-windows-10-downloader-for-windows-7-and-8-1-75681/

I've not once been hassled to update to Win10 on my 8.1 machine. I can only assume this is due to my strict rule of completely disabling auto updates and reminders when I get a new PC.

Can you use curl or python to retrieve emails?

from where/what?

retrieve body of email from email account (such as a mailman account) set up to receive the emails

there are imap and pop libraries for python if you can access the server like that.

offlineimap is an example. it's python2 only fwiw.

curl is for http requests which is not email (unless you are a sadomasochist and want to scrap gmail or whatever)

soooo what is the deal with power cords? i inherited an old desktop from work but it's just a tower (everything inside but HD) so i need a replacement cord. can i just get any old cheapo cord from amazon or does it have to align with the PSU/wattage? will it blow up? i can't even figure out what the PSU is but i'm pretty sure it's dell brand.

can i just get this? https://www.amazon.com/Power-Cable-Desktop-Computer-Warranty/dp/B004RIL2WQ