new boring computer questions

need more details. operating system, disk format, file size.

i have a sneaking suspicion that the file is too large for the destination disk (either due to lack of space there or because of file system limits)

OS 10.6.4, two 500gb G-Drives bothextended Journalled. Drive 1 has 140gb being used. Drive 2 (backup drive) about 300gb used (this includes the last backup of drive 1 which should be replaced by new backup). Capture Scratch (the file that cannot be transferred is the biggest folder I am trying to move, so perhaps it is a space issue? Maybe I should erase old backup before making new one, but of course this seems risky and not clever.

is the file over 16GB? maybe it is hitting some maximum filesize barrier. compress before backup perhaps?

Compress before backup - that's a neato idea. Will try.

Is there a smarter way to backup from one drive to another other than copying all the files over once a week? Should I be creating an archive of the first disk instead maybe?

incremental backups (which is what time machine does, i believe) - saves everything the first time, saves differences from then on. (using hard links so that you can nuke early versions to free up space without losing files. am using dirvish on linux to do this (which uses rsync under the covers), takes 15 minutes a week)

i've got a frustrating problem with my pc at the moment. whenever i'm playing a processor-intensive game, like assassins creed2 or just cause 2, it'll run fine for 15 mins then BSOD on me, with various reasons. it's done this for months but i've recently worked out that it's due to my graphics card overheating. i installed SIW and flipping between the 'sensor' tab on that and the game shows how the card temperature slowly increases, and when it gets to around 78 degrees it just switches off the entire pc. i guess it's a safety precaution so it doesn't burn out the card completely.

this usually takes about 15-20 mins, so i play the game for a bit, switch back to desktop for a couple of minutes to let it cool down then begin playing again. it's a bit annoying but manageable. however i installed mafia 2 yesterday which must use up even more power than the previous games because when i play this the temperature of the graphics card rockets up much faster, so it reaches BSOD level in about 5 minutes or less. this makes the game pretty unplayable - it's like watching a film and pausing it every few minutes!

does anyone have any suggestions for how to deal with this? i'm not too clued-up on the inner workings of my pc but i'm looking for a cheap and easy way of cooling down my graphics card. would another fan help? is a water-cooling system a pain to set up?

remove the side panels and point a fan at your internals

also suck up all the dust inside with a vacuum cleaner (careful to not damage anything, I sucked off a few resistors from my MacBooks logic board)

i was wondering about that fan thing, is it safe? i wondered if it might end up firing more dust into the inner workings of the pc and screw it up. will definitely try it though, and hoover it often. cheers!

it's safe - airflow more important than dust imo

winner, i've taken the side panel off and moved it to a place with more airflow and it's already loads cooler. thanks again dayo!

best way to dust is to use a compressed air can and a vacuum cleaner, spay the dust of with the can and hoover it up as its in the air.

sounds like your case needs more airflow, what case do you have.

php/css pros:

I'm almost done with the retooling of barrylutz.com (a wordpress joint), which has taken me about 1000x longer than it should due to me having next to no knowledge about how coding actually works. I only have one nagging thing left to fix.

I've got it set up so that the main page displays a 10x10 block of thumbnail images at the bottom. By clicking on any of those thumbnails, it takes you to that image (duh). But when you get to the page for that image, I'd like for the 10x10 block to highlight the thumbnail you're currently viewing. Just a simple black border around the thumbnail.

For example, take the page for this image: http://www.barrylutz.com/2010/08/john-d-2/
What I would like is for the thumbnail of this image (4th from the left, top row) to have a black border around it, to basically let the user know "u r here in this block of thumbnails". It should be so simple, I know. Here is the php code for the "current" thumbnail:

foreach ($cur_results as $cur_result) {
		$post_title = stripslashes($cur_result->post_title);
		$permalink = get_permalink($cur_result->ID);
		$post_excerpt = ($cur_result->post_excerpt);
		$output.="<div class=\"current-thumbnail\"><a href=\"" . $permalink . "\" title=\"Permanent Link: " . $post_title . "\">" . $post_excerpt . "</a></div>\n			";
	}

I'm almost certain that I just need to throw some html tag in or around the

<A HREF>

I think you would put the border in the style part of the div, not the image link?
but if you doing that, i think there's some cooler css thing that's about as easy that lets you also do a transparency over it,
so it is slightly more shaded than the other pictures too.

I was looking at some advice on that a few minutes ago (using a style within the DIV to do fancy things), but I wasn't able to get it to work. I'm having horrible flashbacks to BASIC and PASCAL fails in 8th grade

see, I just tried this:

$output.="<div style="border: 3px coral solid; class=\"current-thumbnail\"><a href=\"" . $permalink . "\" title=\"Permanent Link: " . $post_title . "\">" . $post_excerpt . "</a></div>\n			";
	}

and got the following error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /blablabla/blablabla/etc/blablabla/functions.php on line 58

I think you have to escape the quotation mark before "border like put \"border

Also close the quote after solid;\"

phew, I think that fixed it, thx a bunch philip!

is there a program that goes through a folder or hard drive and makes a record (that can be converted to text) of the name each file on that drive? or even better, the name of the folder?

on windows?

find . -type f > files.txt

oh, windows...

dir /s ???

find . -type d > dirs.txt

on windows yeah. does that dir/s thing convert everything there into text? hm, actually it might look quite messy and confusing. is there anything that replicates the folder layouts and names of the files, but without the filesize? on a big databasing kick at the moment and trying to think of the most comprehensive and easy to navigate way

this may or may not help http://www.jam-software.com/filelist/

that looks handy for now until i find the kind of folder-layout-mirrorer i'm after, thanks very much everyone who replied

dir /b /s > filelist.txt
(from a command prompt)

/s = include subdirectories
/b = different format which includes full path but no date/size information

> filelist.txt = redirect the output to a file called filelist.txt (change this if you like)

Oh, that starts from whichever directory you happen to be in when you run it. I guess command prompt opens itself somewhere in your profile by default, which is probably not helpful. Put the folder name or drive somewhere after the "dir" and before the ">", e.g.

dir /b /s c:\ > filelist.txt

will do your entire C:\ drive

Err, there's probably some software to do it for you in a more user-friendly Windowsy manner too, I expect.

yes, man page here: http://www.computerhope.com/dirhlp.htm

couldn't live without generating lists of files and using those as inputs to other commands. dunno how windows users cope sometimes. maybe they're too busy with their spreadsheets 8)

As a Windows user who pipes text files into Perl scripts and redirects the output probably hundreds of times every work day, some of which ends up being injected into Excel spreadsheets (since the other half of my job is Excel VBA monkey), I don't know whether to be offended here or not...

there are windows users and there are windows users 8)

got given new pc at work last week (ie had new pc forced upon me), windows 7. installed cygwin within 30 minutes of booting it...

(we all develop java server code destined for linux clusters, why they make us develop on windows boxes is a bit of a mystery to me. outlook is probably the only windows-specific thing we use (toad, skype?). could've saved ourselves a shedload on licences)

I have a single monitor and will be getting a high-end graphics card. I don't need two DVI ports like most of the cards have. Is there a performance trade off when the card offers two ports vs one? Any reason not to go with the two ports, even though I will only be using one?

no, digital signals are more "all or nothing" than "half strength" on stuff like that.

you know what?, ignore that answer, I was going with gut feeling more than specific knowledge.

i think you only need the two DVI ports for dual-link DVI, very high res throughput for 30' monitors and the like, but you should double check that

is there a significant price diff. between cards w/ 1 slot vs. cards with 2?

Pretty sure modern cards are smart enough not to devote graphics memory/processing resources to an extra port that's not in use. You don't need to worry.

Dual DVI vs single DVI will make no difference to performance.
There might be a small cost saving in buying a single DVI card, but probably not enough to make it worthwhile.
Getting a dual DVI card now makes it easy to add a second monitor later.

Sure we've done this but - any easy way to convert a small PDF to Word on Windows?

Here comes another boring question:

Is there a keyboard shortcut on Safari for the Mac for Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button when using the standard google.com search page?

with firefox typing your search terms into the url bar at the top gets you the 'i'm feeling lucky' results.

Installed the new version of Skype only to discover it isn't compatible with my Mac OS. How do I get back to the old one?

I have two laptops on the same home wireless network and I need to transfer my music folder (~160GB) from one to the other, but I have no external HD. What is the easiest way to do this? Much thanks.

What operating system are you on?

also what ports do you have on the laptops (hoping you have FireWire if a Mac)

They are both Windows, one Vista, and the other XP, standard USB 2.0. Searching around it looks like I'll need to invest in an external HD?

you can definitely just send them from one to the other across the network, it's getting them to recognize each other's existence in windows that's the annoying part. and it could be slow if it's wireless.

Yeah I figured it might be kind of a mess setting it up on the network, and I only have wireless g. HDs are cheap, think I'll go that route. (I'm so naive I thought you could run a wire b/w the 2 computers haha)

if you had a mac you could run either a firewire cable or an ethernet cable between them, you sure that's not possible with your machines?

xp You can actually connect them w/one cable, using a crossover ethernet cable or special USB cable. USB's a lot easier to setup, but it'll take many hours to get all that over. I wouldn't bother w/wireless for a transfer of that size, too unreliable.

HDs are cheap, think I'll go that route

This is the easiest option, also probably a good idea to get an external HDD anyway so you can back up stuff.