Oh no! More boring computer problems! Oh no!

Well, that's all I can think of, anyway.

changed suffic to .doc but don't know why:

tried opening again in excel '[file name].doc: file format not valid'

obviously

In which case, I give up. I've no idea what you've done to your file.

thank god it's not my file

it opens in word

both of the files, the .xls and .doc

but copy & paste... : /

oh well thanks for the ride!

I want to be able to copy and paste a link into some sort of link search engine and find blog entries, etc. on such

I don't think google can do this can it?

When you select the spreadsheety table in Word and then try 'Paste Special' in Excel, does it give you a variety of options?

x-post. yes, Google can do this, hang on a sec.

for example.

You use the link: operator then the web address you're interested in. I always think Google is a bit stingy on results.

thanks for the help with the .xls but we've given up on it

opening it in word originally lost 90% of the original document, so any recovery work was essentially futile by then

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.freakytrigger.co.uk&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t&fl=0&x=wrt

Far more hits, perhaps because it also finds sites that link to pages deeper into FT than the level you specify too?

basically, slsk has stopping downloading/uploading anything in my queue. searches dont return anything. this started when i was on cable with NTL. I clicked the test router configuration thing in options, and it told me that the router wasnt configured properly and advised me to go to a port forwading FAQ page.

so, as far i as know, i didnt have a router really, just an external cable modem. anyway, now im on a wi-fi network, and i get the same thing, but again i dont have a router, so what is the problem? as far as i can tell, i have:

a computer (doh)

should read:
a computer (doh)

a computer (doh) < PCI network card < Apple airport base station < Webstar cable modem < hole in the wall to the rest of the magic

so, none of this is a router, right? whats not configured then? someone on one of these weird ghostly tech forums mentioned that the modem should do port forwarding automatically. someone else mentioned that it must be a software related problem, or a firewall or ISP blocking the port. but this is a situation where midway through using 1 ISP it kinda stopped working, then using another (now on telewest) it still doesnt work.

argh i feel so stupid and i know its only to evilly steal music so who gives a fuck but i want to download dj supreme and strike u sure do etc. what is happening? any port in a storm, so any help is welcome! thanx!

god i am so dumb. 5 year olds understand this shit, and 2 degrees havent equipped me with the knowhow to work this stuff out.

i have to follow the lines along flowcharts etc.

when i read, i mouth the words to myself*

*ok this is only true when reading foreign stuff.

who is the network uh 'admin'? is it someone on a mac? maybe they can access the airport and set it up according to the website

1) If I stay connected to the internet for more than five or so minutes, the whole computer crashes and locks. This occurs even if I just leave the connection sitting there ignored, but not if I'm careful to disconnect before it happens and then reconnect later each time I connect, coming to an aggregrate time of way over five minutes. I've tried it with a different ISP and the same thing happens.

2) If I try and install my soundcard, the computer locks, kaput.

Is there any hope at this point that this is anything other than a hardware problem? And if so what bit do I need to replace?

"guys, i can connect to your wireless network from my flat. do you want me to set up the security on your router?"

at least, don't say this unless you're willing to spend an hour on a sunday afternoon tooling around helplessly after you manage to FUCK THEIR ROUTER COMPLETELY so nobody can connect to it AT ALL. shit.

luckily i managed to a) fix it and b) make it secure. and c) set up an iBook and a flaky-as-fuck vaio to connect to it. given i know arse all about windows PCs, i consider this a grate triumph.

still. bah, computers, etc.

next week we're having a bring-your-own-laptop party at syxties. complete with candles.

So this weekend I'm throwing a party in a pub. I want to plug my laptop into their projector and run a PowerPoint thing we've made, on a loop all evening. So far, so simple - just buy the appropriate lead and all's well, right?

But.

The projector is bolted to the (very high) ceiling and completely non-accessible. And it's permanently plumbed into a VCR on a different floor, with all the relevant leads (just SCART, as far as I can see)actually painted into the fittings, if you see what I mean.

My question:

If I only have access to the end of a SCART lead which is currently plugged into the aforementioned VCR, can I "simply" create a lead which has a monitor plug at one end and a "male" SCART plug at the other?

Or do I absolutely have to somehow access the monitor socket on the projector?

We're fucked without the projection...

HELP!

my laptop has this socket:

http://www.fbe.unsw.edu.au/FBEguide/Computing/Projector/Copy%20of%20laptop_back_close.jpg

so i need lead with a plug that will fit in to that socket at one end, and in to this -

http://www.cybermarket.co.uk/ishop/images/923/756.378.jpg

- at the other.

yes, I mean *into* this as opposed to, er, just *being* this - as I said, i have no other way of attaching anything to the projector.

the key quesion here is of compatibility: are laptops SCART compatible, in principle?

i'm hoping there's such thing as an rgb-to-scart converter, then i'm sorted.

http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=136811&page=1&pp=15
http://www.idiots.org.uk/vga_rgb_scart/

Sorry :(

http://www.nexusuk.org/projects/vga2scart/circuit

One you can buy:

http://www.macwarehouse.co.uk/catalogue/item/STARMK10?speedtrapid=mwfroogle&lead=mwfroogle

I've not done any research, so y'know take with grain of salt kind of thing.

xpost

what's vga?

(i only need this once, for a one-off event, so i'm not splashing out over 50 quid. thanks anyway, ed)

in fact, i've discovered that a simpler solution would be to convert my ppt presentation to vhs, so that's probably what i'll do. but for that, i still need some way to connect my laptop to a vcr! gaaaah.

here's a bunch that i haven't used:
http://www.videohelp.com/convert#4;13
this looks promising:
http://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=259841
as does this:
http://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1271288#1271288

(if only because the mention libraries i recognise - tmpgenc and ffmpeg respectively).

So we send these photos to our website guy each month. He scales the pics down each time, to about 13kb so they're usable for a website.

The first time, the photos all went up fine. The second time, all fine again. The third time, we checked the pics on the site and they were real crappy. All blocky and ugly. I mailed him and asked why. He said it was because we were taking the pictures at 72dpi. Either that, or when we were taking them off the camera, the program we used was converting them to 72dpi. Thing is, we don't use a program to take them off the camera, we just drag them off. And the settings on the camera haven't been changed ever, they're all taken at the best quality.

Plus, saying that we take them at 72dpi doesn't make sense because surely this would make the jpegs much smaller than 3mb?

So, I'm confused. Is it the camera at fault? The website admin guy says that pictures can still be taken at 72dpi and be of a large file size, but this doesn't make sense. These photos can be printed on an A3 sheet of paper and still be great quality so saying they only have 72 dots per inch sounds mighty wrong.

We sent the most recent batch of photos over and he said that when he opens them, they're 72dpi again.

Here's one of the pics: http://s49.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=2BGUVE28MVREY2VZ9FOJ1DZF33

Does anyone have an explanation for what might have happened here?

> The third time, we checked the pics on the site and they were real crappy. All blocky and ugly

this sounds like either a compression problem ie they are too compressed or like he has them one size and is forcing them via img height and width in the code to be a different size.

http://home.clara.net/koogy/photos/01s.JPG = same image resized to 300x450 (75dpi, jpeg quality = 50%, filesize = 21K, done using gimp) (50% is quite low)

Thanks again for clearing that up.