The computing stuff rant thread

[Afasoas]

Have you installed the drivers for your wireless chipset as supplied by the laptop's manufacturer?

[Mr Larrington]

YouTube, if I frob the "Autoplay" thingy to "off" it means I do not want you to play what you think is the next video in line.  Specifically, if I have been playing a vid about the Ladies' participation at the 2005 WHPSC I do not then wish to view something about the 2010 Battle Mountain High School "football" team.  You are not psychic.  Piss off.

[David Martin]

iSlab - why can I not put an arbitrary video onto you? I do not want to wipe you completely because I haven't synced with you before. I don't want to sync, I want to download.

Whover though this was a useful tool has a very limited idea of useful.

[Gattopardo]

Have you installed the drivers for your wireless chipset as supplied by the laptop's manufacturer?

Ah yes, and you would think that it would work, but you (and I) would be wrong.  You have to download the built in network card drivers and the wireless card drivers then, using a cable downloading all the updates and restarts to win 7 then and only then the wireless works. As if by magic...

Suspect, after reading many pages on the internet, there is something in an update that helps it work.  AS without the updates the wireless card seems to want to stay connect or even powered on as the computer is no longer able to see anywireless networks.

[Gattopardo]

And it is no longer working....FFS acer.

[Chris S]

Oh FFS.

Look, you useless sack of crap. You're linux fer christ's sake - you're supposed to WORK!

I've given every fucker in the entire known universe permissions to this directory, so "operation not permitted" is a bit fucking precious. Just do what you're fucking told. Look - Windows 8.1 over there -------------> was happy about it, so should you be.

Now. Wake. The. Fuck. Up.

[tiermat]

Oh FFS.

Look, you useless sack of crap. You're linux fer christ's sake - you're supposed to WORK!

I've given every fucker in the entire known universe permissions to this directory, so "operation not permitted" is a bit fucking precious. Just do what you're fucking told. Look - Windows 8.1 over there -------------> was happy about it, so should you be.

Now. Wake. The. Fuck. Up.

NTFS partition mount? Then the mount options are wrong.

Otherwise I'd look at SELinux.

[David Martin]

Finally got videos transferred with the help of a wee app, but they are under photos, not videos.

Oh well, at least there is some progress.

[Gattopardo]

Tomorrow will go back to fixing the acer aspire one d255...wish me luck

[Gattopardo]

Tomorrow will go back to fixing the acer aspire one d255...wish me luck

Now the wifi works for a bit, then stops working.

[Zipperhead]

What channel is your wifi on? I've got an aspire and found that sometimes the wireless would work and other times it wouldn't, it turned out that the aspire won't see all the channels (it was the very high numbered ones, might have been 14)

[Mr Larrington]

Microsith, just because this trackball mousey-thing is somewhat elderly is no reason for your Mouse & Keyboard Center (sic) not even to detect its presence.  Fortunately I have been able to source the appropriate Intellipoint drivers from elsewhere.  Elsewhere, that is, on microfuckingsith.com.

Given sufficient money I could build have built a Bugatti Type 35 from all-new parts (the stable lad did this last summer) and that went out of production around 1930.

[Gattopardo]

What channel is your wifi on? I've got an aspire and found that sometimes the wireless would work and other times it wouldn't, it turned out that the aspire won't see all the channels (it was the very high numbered ones, might have been 14)

Have tried that, it was on 6 as that was the quietest channel.  Think it is something else, such as a setting in the bios power setting, as restting the adaptor doesn't seem to bring the car back to life.

[Zipperhead]

Given sufficient money I could build have built a Bugatti Type 35 from all-new parts (the stable lad did this last summer) and that went out of production around 1930.

He probably imported the parts from Argentina

[Diver300]

Microsoft Word.

That's probably said enough, but why the hell can't you print equations? Blank spaces on the paper above and below the lines just don't convey the needed information.

The work-around is to save as a .pdf and to print that, but printing as a .pdf just gets a .pdf with blank equations like the paper version. Saving as a .pdf would be easier to find if you didn't restrict the pull-down list of file types to view about 4 entries, so careful scrolling is needed. This is the 21st century, we use monitors that are bigger than 640x480, and we don't have to be restricted to menus the size of a toolbar icon if there are 20+ choices.

I can't be the only person who wants to print equations onto paper, or even as a .pdf to send to someone whose computer isn't infested with the execrable lump of bloatware that is Word, so why haven't they sorted it out?

[Feanor]

Microsoft Word.

That's probably said enough, but why the hell can't you print equations? Blank spaces on the paper above and below the lines just don't convey the needed information.

The work-around is to save as a .pdf and to print that, but printing as a .pdf just gets a .pdf with blank equations like the paper version. Saving as a .pdf would be easier to find if you didn't restrict the pull-down list of file types to view about 4 entries, so careful scrolling is needed. This is the 21st century, we use monitors that are bigger than 640x480, and we don't have to be restricted to menus the size of a toolbar icon if there are 20+ choices.

I can't be the only person who wants to print equations onto paper, or even as a .pdf to send to someone whose computer isn't infested with the execrable lump of bloatware that is Word, so why haven't they sorted it out?

Have you tried this...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/960985

I think it applies to office 2010 too.

[Pickled Onion]

Microsoft Word.

That's probably said enough, but why the hell can't you print equations? Blank spaces on the paper above and below the lines just don't convey the needed information.

They're probably embarrassed at how horrible their equations look when printed, they're bad enough on the screen!

[Mr Larrington]

Ye Dogs, Microsith, how fucking hard can it be to stop the "Touch Keyboard" wossname from spontaneously appearing in the System Tray?

"Very", is the answer.  Lots of mucking about with file permissions.  Does your webshite help in any way comprehensible to someone who has always had Advanced God access to everything?  Why, no!  No, it does not!

Anyway, TipBand.dll has been renamed to TitWank.dll and it's only taken 75 minutes.  And why would installing a different mouse cause the ball-achingly annoying thing to appear in the first place?

Holibob plans to visit Pacific northwest now amended to include the words "Redmond", "screaming" and "spears sticking out of their backs".

[pcolbeck]

Microsoft Word.

That's probably said enough, but why the hell can't you print equations? Blank spaces on the paper above and below the lines just don't convey the needed information.

The work-around is to save as a .pdf and to print that, but printing as a .pdf just gets a .pdf with blank equations like the paper version. Saving as a .pdf would be easier to find if you didn't restrict the pull-down list of file types to view about 4 entries, so careful scrolling is needed. This is the 21st century, we use monitors that are bigger than 640x480, and we don't have to be restricted to menus the size of a toolbar icon if there are 20+ choices.

I can't be the only person who wants to print equations onto paper, or even as a .pdf to send to someone whose computer isn't infested with the execrable lump of bloatware that is Word, so why haven't they sorted it out?

Try LyX. Its free and uses LaTeX as its backend but hides it from you (unless you want to get your hands dirty and tweak it). Produces lovely PDFs with equations rendered properly and will embed the fonts in the PDF so anyone can view them.

http://www.lyx.org/

and here is an example PDF with equations both in line with the text and on their own. Its from 2001 which shows how long LyX has been around.

http://minnie.tuhs.org/Seminars/Bond/LyX_Thesis/seminar.pdf

[ian]

Ah, mothership, am I sitting comfortably in my command chair on subdeck 8945795-B? Why, thanks for asking on this fine Monday morning. Apparently not, it seems my 'posture assessment failed' and furthermore 'hostscan CSD prelogin verification failed.' I'm sorry, I didn't realise this was a test.

What's that, dear simian lifeforms on IT subdeck P8954-X? We need new certificates on 8th March? Have Mssrs Goldblum and Smith been testing our defences again (the LA thing was so embarrassing)? And your communication plan for this? Oh, I see, you didn't bother telling anyone direct, you put a small 40 pixel icon on our intranet homepage. Could this be why our global support desk is receiving an unprecedented volume of calls at the present time. I could request a new certificate online, couldn't I? If the request page didn't require a VPN connection to access.

Oh and after three hours, when I get the certificate I have to go to a Symantec PKI website that doesn't work with new versions of any browser.

Every fucking time they mess this up. Corporate IT monkey, you have just the one job and that's to enable the rest of us do ours.

Edit: as a bonus level, they send the certificate retrieval PIN and link via to our corporate email address which is – you guessed – only accessible via VPN.

[Diver300]

Microsoft Word.

That's probably said enough, but why the hell can't you print equations? Blank spaces on the paper above and below the lines just don't convey the needed information.

The work-around is to save as a .pdf and to print that, but printing as a .pdf just gets a .pdf with blank equations like the paper version. Saving as a .pdf would be easier to find if you didn't restrict the pull-down list of file types to view about 4 entries, so careful scrolling is needed. This is the 21st century, we use monitors that are bigger than 640x480, and we don't have to be restricted to menus the size of a toolbar icon if there are 20+ choices.

I can't be the only person who wants to print equations onto paper, or even as a .pdf to send to someone whose computer isn't infested with the execrable lump of bloatware that is Word, so why haven't they sorted it out?

Try LyX. Its free and uses LaTeX as its backend but hides it from you (unless you want to get your hands dirty and tweak it). Produces lovely PDFs with equations rendered properly and will embed the fonts in the PDF so anyone can view them.

http://www.lyx.org/

and here is an example PDF with equations both in line with the text and on their own. Its from 2001 which shows how long LyX has been around.

http://minnie.tuhs.org/Seminars/Bond/LyX_Thesis/seminar.pdf

Getting some free software installed on the locked-down work machines is a form of torture. MS Word is the approved software.

[Kim]

I had a dream about LyX the other night.  I wonder if it's got good in the 12 years or so since I last used it?

[tiermat]

I had a dream about LyX the other night.  I wonder if it's got good in the 12 years or so since I last used it?

Along similar lines, listening to the radio this morning one guy mentioned he had written his book in MathType* as there was 11 pages of equations and it was easier to do the layout for the rest of the book in that than try and sort the equations in Word**.

*I believe he said MAthType, it may have been another one
** May be cross posting with other computer threads

[hubner]

It seems each newer version of Android gets less and less usable. Eg, no mass storage, cannot export contacts to SD card.

[tiermat]

It seems each newer version of Android gets less and less usable. Eg, no mass storage, cannot export contacts to SD card.

Mass storage, as in can't use it as a mass storage device? that has been gone a long time.

Why would you want to export contacts to an SD card? by backing them up to Google's servers they are always there, makes transferring to a new phone much less painful.

This might help, if the contacts are synced to the cloud:

http://support.fullcontact.com/knowledgebase/articles/155374-how-can-i-export-my-google-contacts-prior-to-using