Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2009 June 4

= June 4 =

Disabling CC On Magnavox TV
I have a TV that has the Closed Captioning stuck on ON all the time. I have turned off the CC through the "CC" button on the remote and that has not had any effect. Also when I go through the on-screen menu the option to turn the CC off for the HD feed is disabled. The CC is only on when I actually watch through the cable box; if I use the DVD player the CC is properly Off. My Cable has been disconnected and reconnected since the CC started appearing everywhere so I doubt it is the cable. Has anyone heard of this problem before or does anyone have any idea how to stop the CC from appearing? The TV is a Magnavox 26MF605W brand. Thanks for reading. meshach (talk) 02:15, 4 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Since it's only happening when you watch the cable box, have you tried looking at the cable box's menu or remote control? It may have its own setting for closed captions. --Bavi H (talk) 03:34, 4 June 2009 (UTC)


 * If it's on the set top box, it may be hidden in an odd place like "help" or "settings" --203.202.43.54 (talk) 06:47, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Quick'n'Dirty CSS help
Hi,

I was commissioned (read: forced :P) to write an html page, so I did as best I could with what little I know and halfway being done, came about a small dilemma with IE compatibility... Why does this look ok in Firefox and IE8, but not in IE7 (I'm new to this whole website deal, I swear tho that eventually I'll learn to use divs + propers css instead of these horrible tables :P so please don't flame), and what can I do to fix it? (I'm assuming most people here will 'view source', but I can paste my frankenstein code here if anyone needs me to).

TIA PrinzPH (talk) 02:37, 4 June 2009 (UTC)


 * It actually looks fairly good in IE7 on my machine (IE 7.0.6001.18000 in Vista SP1). The only problem is a white bar above the text on the animated buttons.  Microsoft has made great strides towards W3C standard compliance recently, but IIRC, there are still some issues with box size calculations, i.e., whether or not the border width is included.  I'm not sure what the workaround is though.  -- Tcncv (talk) 04:50, 4 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Not bad. I notice a difference between Firefox and IE8 because I use a 120 dpi screen rather than 96dpi and when they scale that way the fonts go a little different. It means for instance the minolta tab takes two lines on the Firefox. You also have a mix of pixels and points which can scale differently, personally I use ems even for space measurement and only use pixels for pictures but many businesses tend to use pixels for everything so it's all exactly as they see it. I'm afraid you're now into the area of the difference between paper and the  web. Dmcq (talk) 07:35, 4 June 2009 (UTC)


 * @tcncv: Yeah that was what was bothering me :P Hmmm.. So might be the because i specified different measurements huh? I'll play around with it, thanks for the feedback! :). BTW, I also found this nifty site where you can get screenshots from different browsers, just thought I'd share in case someone didn't know about it. PrinzPH (talk) 17:53, 4 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Looks like they've got everything except what happens when people zoom the image or do a zoom text only or if they have a different dpi or have different fonts otherwise or are blind and use a reader or disable popups or don't have javascript or images switched on or... well it goes on :) Dmcq (talk) 21:13, 4 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Your td class=um/ul/ur/bm/bl/br elements have a space in the middle of them. This space is shown and is the height of one line of text. Even though you set the height of the row, this is ignored because the contents of the cells on the table are larger that height. The result makes a white line between the top of the box and the body of the box on my Firefox 3.0. To see this happen, do tools, options, content and set the font size to something big. The fix is to remove the whitespace or set style="font-size: 1px" or something. Setting the font very large will also break the boxes in the horizontal direction.
 * The site as it is at the moment will cause problems for those with disabilities. Videos here gives an idea on how disability aids are used.
 * Incidentally, I recommend Firebug for CSS debugging in firefox (For example, on the html tab, you can see the padding/margins by hovering the mouse over the areas on the layout tab). --h2g2bob (talk) 22:20, 4 June 2009 (UTC)


 * WOW. That was very educational! Thanks for taking the time to fully analyze h2g2bob! :) PrinzPH (talk) 19:39, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

removing a word
pl. could you tell me how to remove a word in MS word or MS excel completely? e.g. I want remove the word 'dollar' from say 'five dollars and six cents'. thank you. 124.43.40.45 (talk) 06:18, 4 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Move the cursor to the start of the word you wish to remove, press the delete key several times; or highlight the word with the mouse, then press delete. If you want to remove the word everywhere it appears, use "Replace" (which is found on the "Edit" menu). Fill the word you want to remove in the top box, leave the lower box blank, click "Replace all".
 * If the document uses "tracking" (you can tell if tracking is used because words will either be crossed out or appear in a ballon off to the side of the document) you will have to either turn off tracking before deleting, or you will have to accept the changes after you have deleted. You can use CTRL+SHIFT+E to turn tracking on or off. --203.202.43.54 (talk) 06:52, 4 June 2009 (UTC)


 * A faster way of removing a word is to double-click it and then press Delete or Backspace. Furthermore, if the caret is precisely to the right (left) of the word, you can press Ctrl + Backspace (Delete). --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 17:03, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Freeware DVD playing software?
Hi there, I want to be able to play DVDs on my laptop. It's just a standard WinXP laptop and it definitely has a DVD drive and the DVDs in question are just standard Region 2 DVDs of TV shows and so on I bought from Amazon.co.uk.

Windows Media Player won't play them because it says I am missing "codecs". Can anyone reccomend any FREE software I can download so I can watch DVDs? Nothing fancy required, as long as I can navigate the menus on the DVDs as otherwise they won't play any further than the main menu.

Thanks in advance, Gary GaryReggae (talk) 07:32, 4 June 2009 (UTC)


 * VLC is free, very popular and will play DVDs no problem. — Matt Eason (Talk &#149; Contribs) 09:05, 4 June 2009 (UTC)


 * You may still need a specific codec. Without knowing the specific codec required, I recommend the K-Lite Codec Pack, which includes codecs for most audio and video. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 12:56, 4 June 2009 (UTC)


 * No, for VLC you won't. VLC doesn't use the Windows codec framework (unlike other players like Nero or Windows Media); instead VLC ships with its own set of codecs, which will play all DVDs and lots of other media besides. 87.115.17.103 (talk) 15:33, 4 June 2009 (UTC)


 * You could also try Gom player, which finds any missing codec for you. 78.147.17.230 (talk) 15:54, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, all of those work, although I have to copy the DVD files to my hard drive, otherwise the playback is unacceptably slow but I think that must be a problem with my DVD drive. GaryReggae (talk) 13:06, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Change words color
Anyone feel like writing a simple greasmonkey script for me? All it needs to do is take any instance of a word on a webpage, say for example the word "apples", and change the color of the text to red. Thanks! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.44.54.169 (talk) 11:29, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
 * It's something you could do relatively easy - open the source for editing (in internet explorer 8) use "File" then "edit with notepad" - you should get a source listing - looks like computery nonsense if you don't know html.
 * Then select "edit", then "replace"
 * Type the word you want to change in the "find" box, and type name in the replace box. and press replace all.
 * eg if you want "apples" type

apples
 * in the replace box
 * then save the file - just use "save as" - give the file a name, and add .html to the end eg, if you want to call it "redpage" save it as "redpage.html" (ignore the quotes).
 * Thats it - when you open the file you will find the words apples in red.
 * Theres a small possibility that something could go wrong - but why not try it.77.86.10.194 (talk) 12:10, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
 * It also works in wikipedia because wikipedia also recognises this type of syntax sometimes eg apples.

hmmm, thank you for the suggestion, however I really need this to work "on the fly" so to speak, which is why I thought greasemonkey might be the way to go. Editing every single page I visit would be extremely tedious and not worth the effort. I just want a simple way to highlight certain words as I'm browsing, so that my attention is drawn without having to search for them. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.44.54.169 (talk) 13:07, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Sorry about that - I knew it would be more complex - I don't use firefox so I can't really test out greasemonkey - nevertheless if you can use it yourself the above replacement will work - try this http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/41369 and do the above replace. It might work. (It should work really - but I can't check it)16:14, 4 June 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.86.10.194 (talk)


 * It just seems to show the code and not actually change the color. But thank you, that script is great in it's own right and a nice find :) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.44.54.169 (talk) 16:38, 4 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Isn't Firefox's search-function already able to do this? Ctrl+F to search and then click "Highlight" (or similar, my Firefox is in Norwegian). -- aktsu (t / c) 14:36, 4 June 2009 (UTC)


 * * sigh* ok I get the message. Thanks anyway. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.44.54.169 (talk) 14:40, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Am I missing something? Sure, you have to click "Highlight" for each page but that's it. I've never used Greasemonkey but I can give it a try if you want. -- aktsu (t / c) 14:45, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Or was the point you want to highlight words, not just one? I'll take a look at GM now. -- aktsu (t / c) 14:47, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Did some searching and while I didn't find any scripts working exactly as desired, the SearchWP addons seems to work perfectly. You write the words you want highlighted in the top-right searchbox, press the "highlight"-button, and they'll automatically get highligthed on every page. -- aktsu (t / c) 15:47, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks but I really want this is userscript form, if possible. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.44.54.169 (talk) 20:16, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, the best I could find was this. If you add instances of hl(document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0],'word',/(\w)(word)(\b)/gim); to it, but instead of "word" you use the words you want highlighted except the first letter (e.g. hl(document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0],'ikipedia',/(\w)(ikipedia)(\b)/gim); for "Wikipdia") it'll highlight that part of them. Maybe someone with more GM experience can make it work properly. -- aktsu (t / c) 20:38, 4 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks again, but this is highlighting everything yellow. I just want it to change the text color from default black to red. I didn't think it would be such a hassle lol, sorry to keep on asking. I've had great success asking about userscripts in the past on WP:RD, hoping one of those kind people who helped me before will show up some time soon.... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.44.54.169 (talk) 20:55, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
 * If you change hiword.style['backgroundColor']='yellow'; to hiword.style['color']='red'; it'll change the text-color instead. Hopefully someone shows up, yeah. I'd be interested to see the result. -- aktsu (t / c) 21:12, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Freeware 'photocopier' software for WIA flatbed scanner using XP?
I am running a flatbed scanner using WIA, in XP. Can anyone recommend or even just find some free software to make it easier to do 'photocopies' please? Ideally OCR as well. (I do not want to use SANE Scanner Access Now Easy as it seems to be fiendishly complicated for a non-nerd to use.) Thanks. Correction: I think its using WIA rather than TWAIN as I earlier thought. 89.242.95.175 (talk) 13:25, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Changing sea level
The newer version Google Earth lets me explore under the sea to a limited extent, and that has got me thinking about the changing sea level due to global warming, as well as when it was much lower in the past (around the time of the ice ages). Is there a way of changing the sea level datum used by Google Earth to make this investigation a little easier? Astronaut (talk) 18:30, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I can't find anything - though there are methods to increase the sea level using drawn polygons ie search "google earth sea level". Maybe a more thorough search of the "google earth API" will turn something up. Otherwise I recommend an email to google requesting the feature. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.86.10.194 (talk) 12:23, 6 June 2009 (UTC)