Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2010 December 20

= December 20 =

Converting color images to grayscale
Hello,

I have a few color images that I need to convert to grayscale and I don't currently have access to Photoshop or Photoshop elements, which are the only tools in which I know how to do that. Does anyone know of an easy tool available freely online that can do this?

Thanks, r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 03:02, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * http://www.lunapic.com 87.115.159.188 (talk) 03:14, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * GIMP APL (talk) 03:27, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks, everyone. r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 03:35, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Paint.NET is probably simpler than GIMP to use for most purposes (If you are running Windows). AndyTheGrump (talk) 03:37, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * That is almost always true, but this is an admitted Photoshop user. I have extreme difficulty explaining Paint to Photoshop users.  However, I find that they pick up on Gimp very quickly (and often complain that it isn't Photoshop). --  k a i n a w &trade; 04:19, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * IrfanView. 92.15.13.152 (talk) 10:51, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Was it specified which OS the OP is using? If it's windows then even MS Pain has this function, you don't need to download anything. Image>Attributes - Black and white. Vespine (talk) 02:51, 21 December 2010 (UTC)


 * I think that MS Paint only does black & white (pixels are all either one or the other), rather than greyscale. AndyTheGrump (talk) 03:00, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Lol, you are right! I swear I thought I'd used it before... Vespine (talk) 23:33, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Google spreadsheet help
I'm not sure how to phrase my query to Google to get a helpful answer anytime soon, so...

I'm putting together a spreadsheet of names and addresses for Christmas cards on Google Docs. I have the names and addresses on Sheet1. Then I plan on doing a separate sheet for each year to track who we received cards from and who we sent them to. To that end, I started Sheet2 and in Column A used "=Sheet1!A2" to pull in the names from Sheet1. That works fine. Then I put an X under the Sent and Received columns on Sheet2. All was fine there. Then I needed to add another name to Sheet1 in the middle of the alphabet (I'd like to keep it in alpha-order, naturally). Though, on Sheet2, that shifted the names down but not the Xs indicating Sent/Received. So, how do I tie the Xs to the names? Dismas |(talk) 03:16, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Since no-one else has suggested a clever solution, I suggest that you always add names to the end in sheet 1, then just display the names in alphabetical order in sheet 2 etc by sorting on the appropriate column. I don't use Google spreadsheet so I can't test this, but it works in other spreadsheets.    D b f i r s   07:49, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

usb hidden files
Hi, I use Linux, and have a 1gb Sandisk cruzer usb stick. One day, I was going through its filesystem, and I found a folder labelled ".Found". To my surprise, it had about 4000 files in it, which turned out to be thumbnail images of almost everything I had ever downloaded. The full stop at the start of the name (ie. " Found") clearly suggested it was a hidden folder, so I don't know what I did to make it show up on the filesystem all of a sudden, since it had never been there before. I also don't know what it was doing storing a copy of everything (or at least every image) I had ever downloaded on the Internet, but really I want to know if this is a common feature of USB flashdrives, or is it a feature of Linux, or is it (perhaps worse still) a sign that my machine is playing up? Furthermore, what can I do to stop this from happening, and are there any other threats of secret record keeping that I should be aware of? I occasionally share USB sticks, and obviously, regardless of what I download, I don't really like the thought of my browsing history being so visible to anyone I know. Thanks in advance, It&#39;s been emotional (talk) 06:23, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Thumbnails like this tend to be generated by image viewing applications.—Emil J. 13:49, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Linux (and most *NIX) OSs will use the /lost+found directory when it does a fsck (file system check) on its native file system, and finds files that don't have a directory entry. I'm not sure what Linux's behaviour is for FAT32. All *NIX OSs will hide directories and files that start with a full-stop, as they don't have the hidden attribute. CS Miller (talk) 22:58, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

OS
Is it possible to run a MAC OS on a non Apple product....and run a non Mac OS on a Apple product???Rohitbastian (talk) 06:50, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * The history of the first is a long and winding road. See Mac clone.  You can run Windows on a Mac via Boot Camp (software). And some versions of Linux have been made to run on a Mac.  Dismas |(talk) 07:07, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Yes. You can do both. It's not easy to run OS X on a PC, but it can be done. This web site contains lots of tutorials on how to do it.--Best Dog Ever (talk) 07:25, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * A good search term for this is "Frankenmac". APL (talk) 07:33, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * See also, Hackintosh. -- Kateshortforbob talk  14:53, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * The other question here is... why would you do that?  It requires that you violate Apple's software license (I think), takes a good bit of effort, and will produce something that's ultimately less stable and satisfying than the original product. Whatever satisfaction you get by doing this will not be worth it in the long run - spend a couple of hundred extra bucks, get the original product, and be happy.  -- Ludwigs 2  15:21, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
 * The price difference can be significant even if you're planing on buying new hardware. Furthermore, For all you know he may already have a PC he's not using. APL (talk) 16:37, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I've been installing Mac OS X inside VMWare Workstation for years. It's just for testing purposes. It costs me nothing and I learn a lot about the Macintosh operating system while doing it. I don't like Mac hardware or software, so I use Windows as my main operating system with custom hardware. But, yes, it is against their license, just like jailbreaking an iPhone is against their license. It's not illegal, though.--Best Dog Ever (talk) 04:19, 21 December 2010 (UTC)


 * You can also run non-Mac OSes on OS X using a virtualizer like VirtualBox. I'm a Mac user and I do this all the time whenever I need to run something that is proprietary to Windows (like Microsoft Access). It runs slower than it would if I dual-booted, but doesn't require a restart and can be done while I do all of my normal Mac things at the same time. --Mr.98 (talk) 17:16, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

visual studio for windows ce
Does it exist? t.i.a. --83.103.117.254 (talk) 10:33, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

It's obvious that there's no official Visual Studio IDE on Windows CE. The only IDE/complier I know that can work on WinCE is Basic4PPC (for WindowsMobile/CE, and support only VB.NET). GanKeyu (talk) 13:24, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Do you mean Windows CE, or its derivatives Windows Mobile and Pocket PC? The normal way to program for WinCE & derivatives is to set up Visual Studio as a cross-compiler, and then use ActiveSync to upload your program to the device, and control a remote debugger. Basically, on your desktop, install Visual Studio's CE support, and do all the development on the desktop. CS Miller (talk) 19:25, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

How to show/hide status bar automatically in IE8
I want IE8 to hide its status bar when fullscreen, and show it after restored automatically. How can I do it? GanKeyu (talk) 13:22, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Be easier with Firefox, which you can make look like IE8 if you really want to. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?atype=2&q=ie8&y=0&x=0 ¦ Reisio (talk) 16:44, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Remote access via Skype
Does anyone know of a good way to remotely control the other party's computer (with both parties knowledge, of course) via Skype? I'm looking for something that could be used for remote troubleshooting and maintenance. Thanks!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 20, 2010; 15:44 (UTC)
 * You don't need Skype for that, Windows has "Remote Assistance" and it works very good on fast internet connections. One of the methods to initiate it involves sending a small email file that Remote Assistance generates for you. I found that to be the easiest way to do it. You just open the email attachment and enter the password. Roberto75780 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 16:32, 20 December 2010 (UTC).
 * If I didn't need to do it via Skype, I wouldn't have asked the question :) I am well aware of the Remote Assistance feature, but under the circumstances using Skype would be preferrable, if that is at all possible, of course. Do you know of any such way? And yes, I should have mentioned that both computers use Windows (one has WinXP, the other Win7).—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 20, 2010; 16:46 (UTC)
 * Longshot - if both pcs have a dial up modem, could they communicate through them via Skype? Exxolon (talk) 19:02, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the idea, but neither PC has a dial-up modem; both are on a DSL connection. I was looking for something like a Skype add-on.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); December 20, 2010; 21:47 (UTC)
 * Send the Remote Assistance file using Skype maybe? 212.69.25.157 (talk) 22:40, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

iPhone
Does the iPhone 4 sold by the carrier Softbank in Japan work on any network in Canada (assuming you unlock it if necessary)? If so, which ones? Does it take the same kind of SIM card? Which 3G technology does it work on (UMTS, W-CDMA... etc)? Also, if you know these things for previous iPhone versions that would be helpful. Roberto75780 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 16:28, 20 December 2010 (UTC).
 * As far as I know all iPhone 4s are exactly the same. --71.240.162.87 (talk) 06:00, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

html
Is there any such thing as a reverse  in html? So if you had separate lines in the html file they would display as one continuous line in a browser? 82.44.55.25 (talk) 16:44, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Can you give us an example of what you mean? There are about three different ways I can imagine what you are trying to ask about, and it'll be easier if you just clarify it with an example. You can do all sorts of magical wonders with CSS which can negate hard returns. --Mr.98 (talk) 16:48, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Basically in the raw html file imagine there is the following:

123

456

789
 * but when displayed in a web browser is reads as "123456789", not on separate lines. I'm looking for the html way to do this, not css. 82.44.55.25 (talk) 16:53, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * if you mean you want to prevent the browser from wrapping the text to the current windows size, you can place the text inside an invisible table with explicitly specified width. this will cause the appearance of a horizontal scroll bar if that table doesn't fit the window. Roberto75780 (talk) 16:51, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * He may be looking for an in-browser solution for pre-existing HTML files.  I'm not sure if there's a ready-made solution for that, but a clever greasemonkey script would probably be possible. APL (talk) 16:58, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Well, I'm still fairly confused as to what you want. HTML ignores whitespace for the most part anyway, so a file like this:

Will render like this: 123 456 789
 * I'm not sure there's a way to make it not display the carriage returns as spaces in such an example.
 * I'm not sure there is a way to do what you want with just HTML in any case. In CSS, take a look at the "inline" option for the display property or the overflow property. --Mr.98 (talk) 17:05, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * This really doesn't make much sense... The questioner is asking for some HTML code to undo the breaks. So, the question can edit the HTML files.  What the questioner appears to want to do is take something like "Line 1&lt;br&gt;Line 2" and change it to something like "Line 1&lt;br&gt;&lt;nobr&gt;Line 2".  If the questioner can edit the file, why not just do a searc/replace and remove all instances of &lt;br&gt;?  On the other hand, it is possible that the questioned doesn't realize that if you type text onto multiple lines in an HTML file and you don't stick in any &lt;br&gt; tags, it will all show up on one line.  On yet another hand, it is possible that the questioner thinks that wiki-code is equivalent to HTML code.  In this Wikipedia's website, if you add a blank line between lines of text, a &lt;br&gt; is inserted.  That is done by Wikipedia.  It is not HTML.  Until we have a grasp of what the questioner is asking about, attempting to answer is rather fruitless. --  k a i n a w &trade; 17:53, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

I think the question makes perfect sense, but I think the answer is that handling basic html tags such as "br" is a function performed by the browser, and I don't think there is any way to alter or override them except by changing code in the browser. Looie496 (talk) 18:11, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

foo br { display: none; } ¦ Reisio (talk) 19:27, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Maybe tag?Smallman12q (talk) 22:55, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Mobile phone standards
List of mobile phone standards seems like a catastrophe to me. Why hasn't this dwindled down to 1 or 2 competing standard in use at a time, most other format wars. Roberto75780 (talk) 17:07, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * A number of standards listed on the page are obsolete standards that are not in use anymore. Another set of standards are simply enhanced versions of an other standard, so it probably should not count as "yet another" standard. 118.96.157.246 (talk) 17:40, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * (edit conflict) And yet another set of standards are standards that are simply &hellip; standards, meaning they only exist in specification documents, and have no market (supporting devices, networks, vendors, network operators, users, etc.) whatsoever. 118.96.157.246 (talk) 17:48, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * There are two standards, GSM and CDMA. Under GSM, you have some using 3GSM (aka UMTS).  Under CDMA, you have most using CDMA2000. --  k a i n a w &trade; 17:47, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Note that for 4G most mobile phone network operators and in particular the hardware companies that support them have in fact settled on one standard LTE Advanced. However other companies less traditionally involved in the mobile arena are pushing IEEE 802.16m (which arose initially more for last mile internet access). This perhaps somewhat reflects the convergence of those two fields. Nil Einne (talk) 11:32, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

ASP.NET question: Pressing Enter on a text field vs. clicking on a button
In my official work, I am developing an ASP.NET web application. One of our testers reported that whenever he presses Enter on a text field, the application toggles its language between Finnish and English. It turned out that, apparently, the web browser itself was submitting the form, and what it thought was the default submit button just happened to be an image button that was intended to toggle the language. Is there a way in ASP.NET to go around this, preferably to make the web browser somehow distinguish between pressing Enter on a text field and actually clicking on the default submit button? J I P &#124; Talk 19:07, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Without seeing the code itself, it looks like the image is inside a button and the button is defaulting to "submit". Further, the image button must be inside the form.  The easiest fix is to remove the image button from the form - placing it outside the form's HTML code.  Another option is to set the type of the button to "button".  In IE, buttons default to a type of button.  In Firedox,  they default to submit.  So, an IE developer wouldn't see this happen. --  k a i n a w &trade; 19:13, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
 * The image button is not encoded directly into the HTML, it comes from an ASP.NET  tag. Therefore, as far as I can see, changing its default type or moving it outside the form would be quite an effort, if it was supposed to retain its intended functionality. I tested this on FireFox, the tester (as far as I can remember) tested it on Internet Explorer. The bug happened in both. AFAIK ASP.NET ImageButtons even render into   tags by default.  J I P  &#124; Talk 19:26, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

You should only have one submit button per form, type="image" included. ¦ Reisio (talk) 19:30, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * A workaround might be to intercept the hard return in the text box, via Javascript, and then cancel its submission action. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:34, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
 * It would help to work around the bug, but there's two reasons why I don't like that solution:
 * There's quite a lot of those text boxes. The image button is actually on a master page that is included on several pages.
 * Some users might be accustomed to quickly submitting forms by pressing Enter and would get upset when they encounter a site which forces them to actually click on the submit button. J I P  &#124; Talk 18:52, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Would it somehow be possible to replace the image buttons with normal images, but with a JavaScript "onclick" event causing the browser to submit the form? J I P &#124; Talk 21:06, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Here's how you would capture the ENTER key to submit a form. Also included is an on-click handler for an image, in case you'd want to do it that way: --Best Dog Ever (talk) 22:04, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the examples. The example of using JavaScript to capture Enter to submit a form isn't actually necessary, because textboxes submit the form by default when pressing Enter. The problem all along was that they used the wrong submit button. The example of using JavaScript to submit the form by clicking on an image was instead very helpful. I tried it out, and it does almost exactly what I want to do. The only problem is that because it's a normal image with JavaScript added and not an actual input control, the mouse cursor doesn't turn into a hand when I move it over the image. J I P  &#124; Talk 17:47, 23 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Use css on the image, setting cursor to pointer. -- k a i n a w &trade; 17:53, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
 * That's a good idea. I also found out another solution while looking at how the MediaWiki software renders images on wiki pages: place the image inside an  tag with the   attribute set to  . This seems to work, creating an image that can be clicked on to submit the form without making the browser think it's the default submit button, and that changes the mouse cursor to a hand without the need of CSS.  J I P  &#124; Talk 18:00, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

What is QuiBids's secret about their penny auctions on high-ticket items?
I feel skeptical about this site that offers spectacular deals:

http://www.quibids.com/landing/index.php?v=15

I have a feeling that they sound too good to be true. If I try to get something on this site, will I receive far less of a deal than what it was cracked up to be? What ARE their secrets? How DO they make a profit off such low bids anyhow? A business that loses money is 1. Not worthy of staying a business, or 2. is just doing it for promotion, and will change their tactics to something more profitable real soon.

Please enlighten me about QuiBids's true nature, and how much of a deal I'd really get from sites like these. Thanks. --70.179.178.5 (talk) 23:34, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Here's a pair of nice blog posts on these "penny auction" sites. They are dubious. You pay money even if you lose the auction, for one thing, and you're spending money on the hope (without any justification behind it) that you'll be the "winner", which makes it akin to gambling (or a raffle). You could get very lucky and buy only a few bids and happen to win something wonderful. Or more likely you will not win and just end up spending the money anyway. Ergo the gambling aspect. The site just buys these things off the shelf and makes all of its money because people pay even if they lose — so they make back far more than the cost of the item in question by exploiting the fact that lots of people lost a little bit of money trying to get it. --Mr.98 (talk) 00:07, 21 December 2010 (UTC)


 * I see. How do I proxy bid on QuiBids? --70.179.178.5 (talk) 00:17, 21 December 2010 (UTC)


 * I don't know the specifics of QuiBids. Here is a Time magazine article explaining QuiBids (and urging people not to use penny auction sites); here is an article in The Economist which discusses the difficulty of the business model; and here is an article in Wired article explaining more about the business model and why sites like these highlight a few cases of really nice things selling cheaply, when they're really just hustling for more losers to skim off of. It's not a good business model for anyone involved. The bottom line is that they are not really "auctions" in the strict sense. Basically every article you can find on these things from reputable news sources (including those listed on the top of QiBid's site) say "don't do these" unless you understand that they are just gambling. --Mr.98 (talk) 00:32, 21 December 2010 (UTC)