• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Tech Help (Beyond This Forum)

Gloucestrian said:
... I quite like to check the forum when I am on the train, but I have found replying takes much more time on mobile than it does on my desktop where I can use my actual keyboard, accordingly I have sometimes given up on a relatively long post that I have partly composed on mobile. ...
Click to expand...

If the issues with using the mobile device are limiting or preventing your ability to reply, a change of tactics might help. Instead of replying immediately under limited circumstances, use the mobile device to somehow flag or note a thread (or even individual post) so you can come back to it when you have more time and / or are using your desktop / laptop.
 
It's not an organizational problem, I have a good memory and will usually remember to reply to a thread but time is usually a bit scarce for me and I'd like to speed up my text input a bit without sacrificing accuracy.

But thank you for your reply though, I do appreciate it.

Really the problem I have is with touchscreens. I did without a mobile for a decade when I was self-employed from home as I was too busy to leave the house much anyway, later due to the recession I was a lot less busy and took advantage of that time to travel a bit but still used an old-style mobile. Despite the fact that I work in tech and generally keep up with modern tech, I was relatively late to smartphones, finally picking one up in 2015. I used to be able to virtually touch type on my old Nokia, despite the tiny keys, but I have to hunt and peck on the on-screen touch keyboard even though it's QWERTY. Lack of tactile feedback I suppose. In all other ways I am pretty much a smartphone power-user, but I do find it challenging to enter text quickly.

I noticed a girl hammering out a text with admirable speed the other day, fingers and thumbs flying across her on-screen keyboard but I doubt I will ever get back to that kind of speed without physical keys on my phone. That said, I am really quite quick with gesture typing except for the accuracy issues mentioned in my earlier post. So I thought it might be worth asking if anyone had any useful tips on that score.
 
Last edited:
Gmail would be my suggestion too however the way they have chosen to present the inbox still baffles me. I liked it before - it was quite lke Outlook. But now it's weird. I don't want emails presented as conversations or ranked by what they think I find important.
 
Ringo said:
Gmail would be my suggestion too however the way they have chosen to present the inbox still baffles me. I liked it before - it was quite lke Outlook. But now it's weird. I don't want emails presented as conversations or ranked by what they think I find important.
Click to expand...
You can get your email in outlook from gmail if you want and still access it online as well.
 
I use Gmail but you may choose not to because you might not like having your every online movement tracked for the benefit of advertisers. Otherwise it's pretty convenient.
 
I second the earlier Protonmail suggestion. Nice easy to use interface, secure encrypted emails. You can have a free email account, or a paid account if you need more storage.

As others have said, Gmail is easy to use but I don't "trust" it for important emails.

All depends on your personal preferences at the end of the day :)
 
Schrodinger's Zebra said:
Ooh always good to know of other secure email providers :)
Click to expand...
My Brother in law recommended and set runbox up for me .. he used to write games for Atari in the late 70's as well as co creating the famous to old school gamers Ocean software 'back in the day' .. he's also got 100% remote access to my computer any time he wants, that's how much I trust him so yeah .. www.runbox.com .. he even chose my password. The man's a legend.
 
I pay about £30 a year for a Fastmail account, no adverts, tracking or passing on of information (which was a distraction with free accounts)
 
Are there any Android developers here? I'm working on my next app and while it works on my phone it doesn't on a phone that a friend uses (he downloaded it from the Play Store). I'm getting nothing useful from stack traces on the Play console and I'm tearing my hair out here.
 
DrPaulLee said:
Are there any Android developers here? I'm working on my next app and while it works on my phone it doesn't on a phone that a friend uses (he downloaded it from the Play Store). I'm getting nothing useful from stack traces on the Play console and I'm tearing my hair out here.
Click to expand...

I don't know how often you're on here, but check your PM's. I may be able to help.....
 
Here's a slightly less highbrow query than all those questions about secure email or app development, so apologies for dumbing down an interesting thread.

I've been approached to host a quiz later in the year, and as with all such things, the music round is a must. So my question is this - is there a simple method - preferably cheap/free, and I'd definitely prefer legal! - of ripping segments of a number of songs into a quiz format? You get the idea: I'd like 15-20 seconds of each song, with pauses in between, for the question part, and then a longer segment of each to demonstrate the answers at the end.

In the past, this would have been achieved with a tape deck, but I'm looking to create a file or files that could be played through my phone, tablet or laptop. For what it's worth, I have a basic (ie free) Spotify account, but don't subscribe to iTunes or similar, and would be happy not to do so.

Any thoughts? You can assume a bit of basic intelligence on my part, but not a huge amount of technical computing knowledge!
 
Peripart said:
Here's a slightly less highbrow query than all those questions about secure email or app development, so apologies for dumbing down an interesting thread.

I've been approached to host a quiz later in the year, and as with all such things, the music round is a must. So my question is this - is there a simple method - preferably cheap/free, and I'd definitely prefer legal! - of ripping segments of a number of songs into a quiz format? You get the idea: I'd like 15-20 seconds of each song, with pauses in between, for the question part, and then a longer segment of each to demonstrate the answers at the end.

In the past, this would have been achieved with a tape deck, but I'm looking to create a file or files that could be played through my phone, tablet or laptop. For what it's worth, I have a basic (ie free) Spotify account, but don't subscribe to iTunes or similar, and would be happy not to do so.

Any thoughts? You can assume a bit of basic intelligence on my part, but not a huge amount of technical computing knowledge!
Click to expand...
Get a free programme such as audacity, use it to record the tracks you want and you can then edit the tracks as you want.
 
You could use an audio recorder (like Audacity - totally free) to record streams and then chop them up. Slightly shady legally though.
 
gordonrutter said:
Get a free programme such as audacity, use it to record the tracks you want and you can then edit the tracks as you want.
Click to expand...
CarlosTheDJ said:
You could use an audio recorder (like Audacity - totally free) to record streams and then chop them up. Slightly shady legally though.
Click to expand...
Thanks, both - that's 2 very quick votes for Audacity! I'll look into it...
 
Peripart said:
Thanks, both - that's 2 very quick votes for Audacity! I'll look into it...
Click to expand...
On a much more mundane level – and I'm really not wanting to sound patronising, honest, or preach to the converted! – I've set a fair number of charity pub-type quizzes and the music is always much the hardest round to set the tone for, more so than any other topic. It sounds like you've set quizzes this before, but if possible try the music round out on a cross-section of people likely to be similar to those attending the quiz itself. Oh, and good luck and let us know how you get on! And while copyright is an issue, it was never something I worried about when setting quizzes for local charities...

When I put a 20-minute music mix together for my wedding I just used iTunes and edited it into one piece – The Beatles' 'And I Love Her' and 'Here, there and Everywhere', Glenn Gould playing Bach, the Go-Betweens' 'Spring Rain' and Philip Glass's 'The Photographer'. The last one was particularly ill-judged – it's about the Victorian photographer Eadweard Muybridge... who killed his wife!!
 
cycleboy2 said:
On a much more mundane level – and I'm really not wanting to sound patronising, honest, or preach to the converted! – I've set a fair number of charity pub-type quizzes and the music is always much the hardest round to set the tone for, more so than any other topic. It sounds like you've set quizzes this before, but if possible try the music round out on a cross-section of people likely to be similar to those attending the quiz itself.
Click to expand...
This hypothetical quiz (there's still a chance it may not happen) will involve almost solely people I know, so I have an idea of their breadth of knowledge in most cases. I've not much experience if doing this, but as I'll be among friends, I won't get into too much trouble if it slightly misses the mark! That said, if I'm going to do it, I want to do it as well as possible.
 
Peripart said:
Thanks, both - that's 2 very quick votes for Audacity! I'll look into it...
Click to expand...
I can also recommend Audacity. You will need to also download the correct CODEC for your operating system.
 
One for the spreadsheet wizards.

A problem with Open Office Calc I am having problems getting past.

Say I have a spreadsheet on which there are four columns of data.

This column (A1) has one numbers from 1 to 100. (It's just to enable easy reference)

The next column (B1) has the time in ten minute increments. (Say it starts at 00:00).

Third column (C1) has 100 items of data (Temperatures)

Here is the problem.

I wish to create a new column (D) That consists of the contents of every tenth cell in column C.

So it will hold C1, C11, C21......Cn

I will finish up with column D holding ten items.

Every attempt so far has resulted in each cell of column D being added to the previous cell.

So assume each cell in C held '5', I am getting 5,10,15,20 instead of 5,5,5,5

Any ideas ?


I can do this in BASIC easily. But not in Open Office.

INT21.
 
This may be better in Tech Help.

Could a mod oblige .
 
cycleboy2 wrote: When I put a 20-minute music mix together for my wedding I just used iTunes and edited it into one piece – The Beatles' 'And I Love Her' and 'Here, there and Everywhere', Glenn Gould playing Bach, the Go-Betweens' 'Spring Rain' and Philip Glass's 'The Photographer'. The last one was particularly ill-judged – it's about the Victorian photographer Eadweard Muybridge... who killed his wife!!

:rollingw:Hopefully, that choice did not issue from some unacknowledged precognitive faculty!

You mention Glenn Gould playing Bach, and of course he is best known for his Goldberg Variations recordings. That, together with your Glass/Muybridge selection anecdote, reminds me of personal experiences of the danger of playing music with specific historical or filmic associations in public settings. I am frequently to be found listening to Bach's Goldbergs on my mobile system – which can often be heard by passersby – and I have noted some odd reactions on a few occasions. I was very puzzled by this until I realised that, for many people, their only knowledge of the opening Aria* from the Goldbergs is from Silence of the Lambs and the scene with Hannibal Lechter chewing off a prison guard's face. (Hopefully, once again, that was not another instance of unconscious precognition during your wedding music selection, cycleboy2...)

*which, btw, scholarship suggests was not actually written by Bach but by an unidentified French composer.
 
Last edited:
Ermintruder said:
Does OpenOffice Calc genuinely operate with spreadsheet formulae in the predictable ways that Microsoft Excel manages to?
Click to expand...
Sadly, I find all the open source office programs can't compete with the microsoft office suite. I'm not a fan of Windows or MS in general but I've never found any programs that do the job as well as MS office. Google sheets works fine for me but it comes with all the usual privacy concerns I have with google.
 
James_H said:
Sadly, I find all the open source office programs can't compete with the microsoft office suite. I'm not a fan of Windows or MS in general but I've never found any programs that do the job as well as MS office. Google sheets works fine for me but it comes with all the usual privacy concerns I have with google.
Click to expand...
Yes. It's possible to buy a home and student version of MS Office really quite cheaply.
 
INT21 said:
One for the spreadsheet wizards.

A problem with Open Office Calc I am having problems getting past.

Say I have a spreadsheet on which there are four columns of data.

This column (A1) has one numbers from 1 to 100. (It's just to enable easy reference)

The next column (B1) has the time in ten minute increments. (Say it starts at 00:00).

Third column (C1) has 100 items of data (Temperatures)

Here is the problem.

I wish to create a new column (D) That consists of the contents of every tenth cell in column C.

So it will hold C1, C11, C21......Cn

I will finish up with column D holding ten items.

Every attempt so far has resulted in each cell of column D being added to the previous cell.

So assume each cell in C held '5', I am getting 5,10,15,20 instead of 5,5,5,5

Any ideas ?


I can do this in BASIC easily. But not in Open Office.

INT21.
Click to expand...
All the 'normal' functions work exactly the same in Open Office as in excel. OFFSET does and I would use OFFSET. So D1 would be
=OFFSET(C$1,0,,); D2 =OFFSET(C$1,10,,) … D10 =OFFSET(C$1,100,,)

But obviously you don't want to type the offset parameter in by hand each time. I would put them in a new column say E - 0, 10, 20... 100 and have =OFFSET(C$1,E1,,) etc.
Since you have already have an index in column A you could use that instead: =OFFSET(C$1,10*(A1-1),,) but it's not as clear that way.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top