Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2011 January 18

= January 18 =

Mac folders icons?
I've had my Macbook for years now, but something still bugs me. In Windows, it's really easy to change the icon for a folder, but on my Mac, I can't seem to find out how to do this. When I dock a folder, there's an option to display the folder as a "stack", which turns the icon into the first image in the folder; but when the folder in question is not on the dock, there's no such option. Is it possible? Thanks! 69.207.132.170 (talk) 02:14, 18 January 2011 (UTC)


 * It's easy on a Mac, too, when you know how. Let's say you have a photo in file XYZ.jpg that you really like and would like to be the icon for a folder. First, copy the photo to the clipboard. Then: 1. Select the folder in question. 2. Go to File > Get Info (Apple+I). 3. Select the icon of the folder — actually click on the little icon of the folder at the top of the Get Info window. Now, go to Edit > Paste (Apple+V). Presto, chango! The icon is now set to the photo. (You can copy and paste icons from other files that way, too — select the icon in Get Info, then go to Copy). If you want to undo it and go back to the default, just select the icon in Get Info, and click Delete. --Mr.98 (talk) 04:41, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Filters for Ted Notepad
Please could someone explain what the filers here http://jsimlo.sk/notepad/filters.php for the Ted notepad do and how they are used? I have read the filter part of the manual here http://jsimlo.sk/notepad/manual/, but I still do not understand. Thanks 92.28.254.64 (talk) 03:23, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
 * The filters remove lines and words of text from the documents being imported into Ted, arrange the formats into text only (from HTML for example), or perform other operations to allow importing of information into the text window. Ted uses these filters in a similar way to the cmd prompt. For anything more than the manual entry you have quoted you would need to get more information about learning programming to write program code for the filters.
 * For example using the dir filter you can import a list of directories on your C: drive into Ted.
 * launch.exe dir /b %2 %1
 * Chaosdruid (talk) 13:22, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

Where do I type "launch.exe....." please? And why do I type "launch.exe" in particular? Is there a program somewhere named "launch.exe"? Are there other programmes or commands apart from launch.exe? Where does the output go? How is Ted involved with this? Wouldnt I type ted.exe and not launch.exe? I don't recall seeing all that lengthy text in the manual before, but I still don't get it. Thanks. 92.15.26.222 (talk) 11:08, 24 January 2011 (UTC)


 * You don't type it - you go to Tools>textfilters>dir and then when you click on Dir the new window asks you to put in the parameters.
 * The program does not work very well on Vista as the directory listing it returns is not correct. If i put in the parameter of 1% = c/c: or c:\ it simply lists the "Directory of C:\Program Files (x86)\TED Notepad" and deos not seem to change to the root directory.
 * The output is to the text window
 * I do not know why you are using the program nor what you are trying to achieve - I use Treesize pro to get directory listings, for example, which I export as excel files
 * 23:48, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

Mac Program most similar to coffeecup?
What Mac program is most similar to coffee cup?--128.54.22.172 (talk) 04:05, 18 January 2011 (UTC)


 * If you want to be able to access remote file-systems, and especially if you want to edit files as if they are local-files, I would recommend MacFUSE, an implementation of Filesystem in Userspace and sshfs. If you only want an HTML WYSIWYG editor, there are numerous options.  Consider reading through our comparison of HTML editors, sorted by operating-system.  Nimur (talk) 04:13, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

External monitor on a netbook
While I'm sure this question has been asked, I couldn't find the answer in the archives. I have an Acer Aspire with at 10 inch screen (running XP). I picked up a 17 inch LCD monitor. While I can get both monitors working, I can't get the settings to stick. When I click "apply," everything goes back to the small monitor. When I move all of my icons over to the larger monitor and click refresh, everything reverts back to the Aspire screen. Even the bar at the bottom of the Aspire screen stays there. Any suggestions? 99.250.117.26 (talk) 04:09, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Serendipity is a wonderful thing! I just figured out my own answer. Connect the monitor, set the computer to show both screens, right click the desktop, select graphics options, select output to and then click monitor. Clever me! lol 99.250.117.26 (talk) 06:13, 19 January 2011 (UTC)


 * Congratulations? General Rommel (talk) 06:26, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Unicode assistance
Alright, so I have a PHP program that I run that I use to assist myself with deleting images marked with NowCommons, as well as a bot that does the same. However, I'm running into issues with Unicode. This is a field that has continued to baffle me; I learned about it in IT classes in college, but I don't know much about its implementation. So I'm having two issues, which are really just one issue:
 * 1) I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how the browser interprets certain characters as unicode and others as non-unicode. For example, I printed out the 8-bit characters as they came to me via stream on the Wikipedia API I use. Here is how part of the original upload log on Commons:File:MapSagaMiyaki.png appears on Commons and on my php page respectively:
 * {{市町村地図画像情報(Lincun) |都道府県=佐賀県 |都道府県Latin=Saga-ken...
 * {{å¸‚ç”ºæ‘åœ°å›³ç”»åƒæƒ…å ±(Lincun) |éƒ½é“åºœçœŒ=ä½è³€çœŒ |éƒ½é“åºœçœŒLatin=Saga-ken...
 * Now obviously the second one is incorrect, but how does my browser tell the difference? If I stream it on my API, they look the same to me (I think). I want to output the text so that it's not so ugly to me. My solution thus far has been something like what I've done below.
 * 1) I'm using a rather ugly piece of code at the moment to test for 16-bit characters; I'm not sure if it will always work; perhaps it will even throw false positives at me. It mostly goes like this:
 * Is this a bad implementation? Because it seems like guess work at this point. Magog the Ogre (talk) 09:52, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Is this a bad implementation? Because it seems like guess work at this point. Magog the Ogre (talk) 09:52, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Is this a bad implementation? Because it seems like guess work at this point. Magog the Ogre (talk) 09:52, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Is this a bad implementation? Because it seems like guess work at this point. Magog the Ogre (talk) 09:52, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Hi, Not sure if I understood the problem completely. Maybe it's got something to do with the encoding of your page. Maybe something like this:  will help. 210.50.249.143 (talk) 10:32, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
 * That did it, I'm baffled. So now let me rephrase: How did I type the Japanese code above, and have Wikipedia and our browsers distinguish between the unicode Japanese and my gibberish which is the utf-8 equivalent? And how can I get a PHP string to recognize that? Magog the Ogre (talk) 14:00, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Hope this page would be helpful. Oda Mari (talk) 16:03, 18 January 2011 (UTC)


 * Forget about Unicode. There are various incompatible ways of representing characters as bytes or sequences of bytes, such as Windows-1252, Shift-JIS, and UTF-8. If some program guesses incorrectly which encoding is being used, or is explicitly told to use the wrong encoding, then you will get gibberish. The &lt;meta ... line suggested by 210.* instructs the recipient to use UTF-8, which was the actual byte encoding you were sending in this case (whether or not the recipient knew it). Wikipedia always uses UTF-8, and correctly identifies it as such. If your software is Wikipedia-specific, you can probably just use UTF-8 everywhere and forget about everything else. -- BenRG (talk) 22:02, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
 * See mojibake for what happens when the wrong encoding is used. CS Miller (talk) 12:40, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Counteract jpg compression artifacts
What's under my control: I'm creating a simple image with only two or three different colors (the image is actually just a snip of text). I am then uploading this image to a website. What's not under my control: The website then manipulates the image and creates a (more) compressed image of the original (jpg format). The resulting image has the artifacts you would expect (fuzzy edges on the letters, uneven color). My Question: Is there a way to create the original image in a way that will result in a smooth image after the compression? I want it to look more like a gif. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.50.249.143 (talk) 10:21, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
 * FWIW, PNG format is lossless. Magog the Ogre (talk) 10:29, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. But the jpg compression is mandated by the service I'm using. My question is: can I make an image that will look nice AFTER compression.

What happens now: [Original] -jpg compression-> [fuzzy Original]

What I want to do is: [modified Original] -jpg compression-> [looks almost like Original] 210.50.249.143 (talk) 10:34, 18 January 2011 (UTC)


 * In my experience red and green colors tend to suffer from this the most, whereas black is hardly noticeable. You say the website compresses the jpg you upload, which means it actually gets compressed twice. Is there a jpg quality control on the program you use? Setting this to 100% should reduce the amount of compression taking place on your end, so that when you upload the image and the site re-compresses it, it's only compressed once from a high quality original. And you mentioned gifs; converting the jpg to 256 colors with dithering will emulate the effect of a gif and perhaps will help it survive the sites compression better. But all this is mostly just ideas from my own experience, not facts. Without knowing the site and the programs you use I can't offer any more —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.44.55.25 (talk) 10:46, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

thanks. I've tried your suggestions, but didn't get any better results. The website I'm talking about is gumtree. I want to upload a picture that stands out as a thumbnail. Black and white doesn't quite cut it for that. 210.50.249.143 (talk) 11:18, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Probably, there's no way to do it, then. It sounds like they produce jpegs with fixed, not-high, quality settings, and that's always bad for non-photographic images.  Paul (Stansifer) 17:12, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Sorry if this information is too technical; but JPEG compression is very mathematically intense and requires a bit of "unintuitive" image-processing. It is possible to design a source image that is not garbled badly, even under a high-compression (low-quality) lossy JPEG encoding.  But you must design an image with certain properties - not any image can compress gracefully.  You can switch to an image, or modify your existing image, so that it only contains low frequencies.  (For example, you can apply a blur-filter, or just pick a different image that is already more "smooth").  That should eliminate "jaggies" (actually, they're a different form of artifact related to Gibbs effect ringing).  You can also switch your image-processing program to work in YUV color-space, or (YCbCr), noting that U and V components get much more heavily compressed than Y; so select (or design) colorful images that have low dynamic-range and (most importantly) a low-variance in the U and V channels.  Through iterative trial-and-error design, you can determine which of your image creations have the most graceful output when highly compressed.  I know these "instructions" are not very helpful to most artistic image-designers (these instructions are barely even helpful to skilled numerically-trained image analysts); in practice, a more useful "instruction" would be "do not use highly-compressed JPG" - but that seems like it's not an option for the OP.  Nimur (talk) 20:35, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
 * It occurs to me that straight horizontal or vertical transitions along the edge of JPEG chunks should be fine. They will probably occur every 16 pixels in the output image.  In a quick informal test, it looks like there may be a lot of positions where a perfectly horizontal or vertical line could live without creating a mess.  But I think that any other angle will create noise.  Paul (Stansifer) 00:18, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Right. That is a special case of concentrating the energy of the 2D discrete-cosine-transform of each macroblock of your image into the first elements of the spectrum that is ordered by this zig-zag pattern, described in this section of our article.  You want to compose your image so that its Y, U, and V channels are primarily a weighted superposition of the basis functions illustrated in this image with most of the coefficients exactly zero.  If you can accomplish this, by keeping the rest of the non-zero coefficient values above those thresholds specified in the standard quantization table (or whatever non-standard QT is used by the JPEG codec implemented on the server) (and also, having zero-bit values when shifted by the QT thresholds), you will produce an input image that compresses exactly losslessly using the JPEG algorithm.  Paul Stansifer's suggestion accomplishes a special case of this technique, by using only DC elements (the first-element of the spectrum) (and also assuming a non-pathological quantization table).  The number of (parenthetical caveats) that I've had to add has become comically large here.  I really don't think these instructions are practical, but maybe somebody will find them interesting).  Nimur (talk) 01:08, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Nimur. (once my head [strike]starts[/strike] stops hurting from trying to understand all that) I'll try out your approach. It is probably overkill for what I need it for, but definitely interesting! Thanks again for taking the time to go through it. I'll let you know if I get anywhere with this within a useful timeframe : )

210.50.249.143 (talk) 04:53, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Resetting Default Search Engine in Firefox 3
I very often use the address bar when searching for stuff (as opposed to the little search box on the top right). Recently, after installing AVG, my default engine got changed to Yahoo. While I can tolerate Yahoo to a certain extent, after installing something else even more recently it got changed to Bing. Is there anything I can do to change it back to Google - I have some search engine plugins for Google which I got for a reason. Thanks. -- KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 14:50, 18 January 2011 (UTC)


 * Click on the little down arrow next to the search bar and select "Manage search engines". Then make sure Google is at the top of the list.--Shantavira|feed me 15:11, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks - but I am talking about searching from the address bar. -- KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 15:14, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Try these instructions. 88.112.59.31 (talk) 16:23, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Excellent! That worked, thanks! -- KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 16:41, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Slim "Information Organizer" for Windows
My friend uses this really awesome program called "NotePad" by a company called Ibrium on his Mac. Its a simple turbocharged version of wordpad and it lets you jot down and organize information and notes really easily. I do alot of research and this kind of thing would be really useful. Does anyone have any idea of a similar, slim, efficient program for Windows? --Cacofonie (talk) 19:32, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure about slim/efficient, though there is Microsoft OneNote. The old interface reminds me of early versions of Lotus Notes. There is a relevant category at Category:Notetaking software.Smallman12q (talk) 00:01, 19 January 2011 (UTC)


 * My antivirus (Avast!) blocks the NotePad link webpage above as being or having a trojan horse. 92.28.241.29 (talk) 00:17, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Its not a virus, I promise! I figured onenote would be as close as possible. Its just so bloated and clunky. thanks though,--Cacofonie (talk) 01:53, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Firefox's internal default start page
When Firefox is updated (and, I think, when non-distribution-modified versions are first started), it displays a mozilla.org page specific to the version. That page says things like "This is the latest version" or "This is old, you should update (again)". Unfortunately, I don't have a copy that needs updating at the moment; where are those pages? --Tardis (talk) 19:45, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Help/Release Notes (which gives me this page) may be what you're after. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 20:07, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks; I saw that too. But the next answer was the target (I wanted to see the welcome page rather than read about the release).  --Tardis (talk) 01:03, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.6.12/whatsnew/ 82.44.55.25 (talk) 20:39, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
 * That's precisely it. Thanks!  --Tardis (talk) 01:03, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Extra Windows 7 Installation
I've recently replaced my motherboard and went to reinstall Windows 7 and things went very smoothly during the installation. The problem is, it seemed to have ignored what I wanted without letting on that it was ignoring me and rearranged my drive letters, and it there also seems to be another installation of windows on the computer. When I boot up now, it asks me which OS I want to load, Windows 7 or Windows 7(the previous installation).

Does anybody know a method of finding out which is the active installation and how to remove the previous one? I'm not so worried about the drive letters, it's more a curiosity than anything else.

Thanks 142.244.35.91 (talk) 21:54, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Just try and see if it is the first or second one. To change the settings, type System Configuration into your start menu, then choose boot. F (talk) 00:01, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
 * You can use Control Panel>Administrative tools>Computer Management>Storage>Disk management to reassign letters to your drives.
 * (You can also type diskmgmt.msc into the search box after pressing the windows key on the toolbar.)
 * It would be difficult to remove the older installation of windows. Did you try just plugging the new board in and starting the PC or did you just assume that you would need to reinstall again ? If there were any errors it may be difficult to remove the other earlier version. Chaosdruid (talk) 13:31, 23 January 2011 (UTC)