To be honest, I only used it for organizing and didn't edit much with it. I was just lazy to switch over to this that I found and downloaded...

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopalbum/starter.html

It was free, but I see that it is no longer available. Gahhh! That download was also on my hard drive that quit working. I'm sure I could find an old download of this easily enough though.

Oh, and as for the suggestion of buying for my daughter to get the student discount, that would be just as illegal. She would be the one licensed to use it, not me. It would still be against the license for me to use it.

The one thing that I didn't like about Photoshop and every other program I've tried that Lightroom did well at is cropping. In Lightroom, you crop and can move the image around within that crop. In other editors, you have to move the crop lines around and I could never figure out how to do that in Photoshop without having to completely redraw the crop box. Tis the same with Paintshop Pro, which I have a very old edition.

Last edited by mrodgers, Sun, 11 Oct 2009 18:09.

Quote from AndroidXP :

That said, if you ever need it, there is a remote control for cats. It's called a laser pointer.

LMAO, that is definitely so true.

There is more than one remote control for a dog, especially my yellow Lab. There's beef, chicken, ham, cheese, any dog food, candy, gum, plastic, anything made out of fabric material, carpet, wood chunks, wood branches, whole trees actually, mice, chipmunks, rabbits, cats although she won't bother with "Emmascattheneighborcat" (that's it's name by my youngest) because Emmascattheneighborcat took a swipe at my dog when she was a pup. Any of those things will bring her running immediately.

Cats have 1 purpose and 1 purpose only. To sit outside and keep the mice away. I have yet to meet a cat that you could call over to pet, toss a ball with, see one jump up for a frisbee, or play in any way other than boringly swirl a string around while it haphazardly swats at it while sitting lazily on its rump.

Quote from bbman :

And you might think they aren't that hard, but just try to press the pedal with your right foot for a change...

Aint that the truth. Or similarly, try braking with your left foot when you are use to driving a clutch. Weirdest thing was when I realized how easy it was to left foot brake on the computer in sim racing in comparison to left foot braking in a real car. In a real car, I would dang near split my lip open on the steering wheel if I would left foot brake.

Left foot braking in the car, completely unnatural. Left foot braking on the computer, completely natural. Perhaps its my 15 years of forktruck running at work that it seems natural on the computer because the pedals of a forktruck are quite similar to a 2 wheel computer pedal set.

I got lucky!

Hard drive crashed, then Wifey broke Windows and the computer won't boot. I was able to move all my photos off the drive onto the Windows drive before it all went completely kaput. I was able to boot to Ubuntu running off a CD, grabbed a 500 gig external drive, and get everything on C: saved to the external so I can reformat and restore Windows (OEM install, no stinkin CD to repair it with.

Unfortunately, I still had all my edited photos, many of them edited for personal use on screensavers and such, plus I had a "sort" folder that wasn't completely empty yet that I lost. I'm still trying to get the hard drive recognized on boot up one more time, but I think it's a lost cause. Maybe it will be there once more after I get windows reloaded.

But at least I didn't lose the 30 gig of originals nor did I lose my Lightroom database. Though, I did lose the program Lightroom (shhhh, I won't tell why I lost it and can't just reinstall from the CD... )

I'm not gay, so it would be dog for me....

Just about every photo editing software I've seen allows you to see the EXIF data (EXIF data is the aperture, shutter, ISO, and other data.) Photoshop has it, Paintshop Pro, I imagine Gimp. Also, the lesser programs also allow you to see it. ACDSee as Spankmeyer mentioned, ThumbsPlus and IrfanView both show it. Usually you can go under Properties in the File menu to see the EXIF data, or sometimes it is just labeled as "Camera Info" or something similar.

Opanda is a free download to allow you to view EXIF. It also allows you to right click images on the web and display EXIF unless the data is stripped. I can't see EXIF on DWB's photos, but the first photo of Taavi(EST)'s last posting was taken with a Pentax K-m in Aperture Priority at 1/100 second, f/11 aperture, ISO 100, -1/3 exposure compensation, 55 mm focal length with no flash and auto white balance. He also has his camera set up to process the JPEGs with hard contrast, low saturation, and normal sharpness.

I am just amazed at how you folks over there even survive. What, with all the perfect control you must have when driving, how do you guys not crash everywhere...

I'm glad driving physics are different over here because its nearly impossible to find a vehicle that isn't automatic. Thus, the engine sits at idle while going downhill off the throttle all the time because of the lack of direct mechanical linkage between the drivetrain and the engine.

Seriously people, operating a car is not that difficult to do. People lose control because they are flat out complete morons, not because they coasted down a hill in neutral.

I'm already on it with Ubuntu. I've gotten about 20 gb of data moved, all during which I am also sorting out and deleting a lot of stuff (I was on dialup for a long time and downloaded many videos for LFS and RC elsewhere and brought home to save on computer. Many gig I can just delete...)

I still have 30 gig of my photography stuff to move, which is going on my laptop and staying as a mostly off-site backup. All the rest are a lot of data files (photo magazine downloads and stuff along with game data.) which are going on the extra 30 gig drive that I have from another computer.

So, yeah, Ubuntu running off the CD is working great for this to where I will be able to restore XP back. Just gonna take quite some time as I don't have any way of moving large quantities of files from the desktop to the laptop. No router as the laptop stays at work 99% of the time.

The sorting of files is what is taking the most time. I'll probably be able to rid of about half my files.

Don't ask Dustin, hockey is played with a puck, not a ball. He refs 9 year old girls....

Cross check is basically like giving a 2 handed shove when you have your stick in both of your hands. You can shoulder check, hip check, I guess butt check, but don't shove a guy down or into the boards with your stick in your hands.

Quote from CSU1 :

If HDD#2 refuses to do anything I'd suggest another liveCD - Gparted, it's easy GUI lets you wipe the HDD to NTFS and start over clean and fresh.

Not looking to wipe the drive and repartition and format to reuse on the 2nd drive. I'm just looking to move files off it. Need to move files off of C: as well before doing a format and reinstall of XP.

I have another smaller drive. From within Ubuntu, can I format the drive and have XP see it after XP is reinstalled? I am going to use the smaller drive to backup some files. Or, I may end up with a new drive (don't think funds allow though right now) and will want to partition and format a new drive. Can I do that within Ubuntu or would Windows XP have a problem with drives formatted from within Ubuntu?

Quote from CSU1 :

mrodgers. Get your hands on a copy of Ubuntu, pop the disc in and choose to boot from cd. From here it's up to you in which way you want to recover the data, if you choose to run the live CD as a live user you will have access to all of your drives(unless HDD#2 is totaly screwed).

Upon further searching around on the net at *cough*work*cough, I found this as well. This is what I am going to do. Though, I have no experience with this Linux stuff.

I do have several computers I can spread my files around on for temporary backup. Unfortunately, every computer I have access to only has around 30 gig hard drives, which I have much more data than that. I also have thousands of gigabytes available by transfering to my work laptop, then transfering to the work network temporarily, hehehe.

Downloading Ubuntu as I type....

EDIT: Downloaded, burned onto disk, and it didn't work in the laptop (or I didn't wait long enough, which it seemed like I waited forever with a blank screen and no sounds from the cd drive...) Stuck the disk in the desktop and bingo! Running Ubuntu from CD and I can see everything on my c: drive. I'll give the 2nd drive a try to check if I can see it tomorrow as it's disconnected at the moment. Now I can move and backup my files and give the disk a complete restore. I've been wanting to do a restore for a long time anyways. I've never restored it since starting it up in 2005

Last edited by mrodgers, Wed, 7 Oct 2009 02:33.

Well, this is great fun.

Ok, I did get a message during boot that the drive is on its last legs. That's fine. I don't have room for everything on C:, but I at least got my photography stuff backed up on C:.

All is good, right? Nope!

I backed up some stuff onto C: as I said. That night, wifey gets on the computer, then gets me and says, "the computer rebooted and now all it does is continue to reboot over and over again..."

Now, I'm locked out of the computer all together. I have searched and found plenty of help for repairing Windows XP..... if you have the XP installation disk. Mine is a POS Compaq, no installation disk. All I can do is restore which formats and puts the computer to the way it was from the factory from a partition that holds the restore information.

Ok, no problem I thought. I have another computer that I can at least put the Compaq hard drive in and transfer the most important over to another drive. Nope again. The Compaq computer is SATA and the other computer is quite old (very old) and only has IDE.

My thoughts were I would like to get an external hard drive, but currently, I wouldn't be able to do anything as I don't think the computer at the command prompt would see USB. I was thinking about going with a hard drive enclosure that you supply an internal drive to connect to USB. That way, you could have a collection of internal drives and they would all connect through the enclosure thing. That is the way I would like to go. Unfortunately, my daughter had a bout with pneumonia and a few days in the hospital costs quite a bit, so there's no funds to purchase as I've been wanting to grab up an external drive for back up for quite some time. Gotta love paying for health care and still getting charged thousands...

What other options might I have with trying to recover stuff on the C: before reformatting? What is happening is I am telling my wife to quit with her celebrity gossip sites as she is getting hammered with viruses, but she gets home from work after I am asleep. This time, it just rebooted on her and now reboots as soon as it gets to the "Loading Windows XP" screen. Is there any programs I can run from the command prompt to scan the computer as that is the only point I can get to upon booting up.

I don't believe anyone who posts a link in this thread. Am I the only one who just clicks links instead of copy and pasting them?

Here is mine today. I rarely do copy/paste.

Quattor BF20010

Quote from MAGGOT :

There's an old (well, not THAT old) saying in Canada that goes something along the lines of "Only an American would need a blue light to see a black puck on white ice!" (In reference to an All-Star game several years ago in which the puck had a transmitter built into it so that it would glow on the TV telecast)

That was absolutely HORRIBLE! I couldn't follow the game at all with that stupid blue streak flying all over the ice. I thought it was just some stupid thing that FOX (I think it was FOX) did back then as they continued it on their televised games after the playoffs also. Didn't realize you folks from Canadia saw it as well.

Oh, and the Penguins are undefeated so far, hehehe

Do you folks not go to a dealership, test drive a car, and buy it?

Over here, it is impossible to purchase a car to come straight from the factory. If you guys can do that, I wouldn't complain too much about a few miles on the odometer.

100 different people could have driven a brand new car before it gets to the person who purchases it.

As for the 100 mile thing, they are demo cars. They are sold as new with new warranty, but are extremely reduced. I bought my wife's car "new" with 900 miles on it. I got full warranty, but it was reduced from $29,500 down to $18,000.

Buying a new car sucks over here. You can't choose exactly what you want as everything today is sold in packages and you can only choose what is on the lot unless the dealer can find something at another dealer and have it delivered (which is driven for delivery.)

Of course, the worst thing is, hardly any are available with a manual, and those that do have the option of manual transmission, it is impossible to find one.

It use to be, before my time, that you could order any option you wanted. Now everything has TC, ABS, power windows/locks, cruise control, remote entry, and AC. Options are usually "Sport package", "touring package", and stuff like that where you have a large selection of options packaged together.

An example is my first brand new car back in 1992. I wanted to make sure I had AC, which wasn't standard equipment back then, but I couldn't get AC without the $1600 audio option. I had $5000 worth of aftermarket audio equipment sitting in the garage waiting to go into the car and I was forced to pay an extra $1600 for a crappy radio and speakers made out of paper so that I could get AC.

Quote from dougie-lampkin :

The Cooper S came with 7.5" discs I could swap over, the trouble is it's at least €400 for a conversion kit, not including the new alloys or rubber, minifin drums all around aren't far behind it either I'll stick with the 8.4" discs on it, they've some hope of at least slowing me down

Drums on the front aren't that bad, the car only weighs 600kg

That's a lot of screwing around and spending money just to get cheap tires

Quote from Forbin :

How do you think a bike turns?

By countersteering

Quote from rediske :

Well, nearly a year ago I posted this: http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?p=972240#post972240

Today on my way home from work I did it! (see attachment)

I need to drive 160km per day just to get to work and back...

Not too bad, 17,000 in a year. I bought my wife's Tribute January 2007 with 900 miles on it and it now has 41000. My wife has only started working 6 months ago. So that was mostly hospital/doctor trips with the kids and grocery shopping trips and only 6 months of actual daily usage.

Every trip in the car for us is at least an 80 mile trip no matter where we are going.


That said, I have been giddy now every day in the car going to work. I just "aquired" a 94 Honda Civic with 179k on it. In the Altima I would fill up on Monday and have to fill up Friday on the way home. This week, I filled up on Monday and today I still have a good bit above half a tank! I think I was lied to when I was told the car gets around 33 mpg. I should at least be a bit below half tank. Now I think I should be able to go 2 weeks on a tank rather than 4.5 days! This is freakin awesome!

Although, the little 1.5L does make it a struggle to keep up the speed on the hills. I have gotten a few ticked off folks behind me when I hit the big hills where the car is slowing from 70 to around 50 mph.

Quote from Jakg :

Snap - this thread is not about tyre porn. The cheapest I can get is £39, whereas £2 more gets me some Toyos or Kumhos. Another £3 gets me Michelins - I was looking to spend under £50 tbh. I was just wondering which was best for what.

In the case of how cheap tires are for you guys then, get the better tires. In my case, the cheap tires were $55 and the next better tire I had available at the place of purchase was $150. That's quite a difference when for normal driving, the benefit would only be lower noise level coming from the tires.

Though the really really cheap option was the same factory Continental junk that I had, which were around $45 and the snow performance was a factor (along with they were extremely noisy.)

Quote from ajp71 :

but I only went for a premium tyre because I wanted tyres that were good near the limit in the wet for rallying.

That's the key right there. As I said, if you are using your car as a tool to get from point A to point B, you aren't going to get "near the limit" thus you don't need "good" tires.

Buy tires for a purpose, whether they be for track use, it rains a lot where you are, or will get you going in the snow when needed.

My 2nd car, when I was young and stupid in a not so fast but handled like it was on rails car, I couldn't get anything but "good" tires for it in its unusual size. Top speed of the car was 120 mph and I couldn't find a turn on the roads that I couldn't take at 120 mph. But when the snow flew, I wasn't going anywhere. I had no choice for a few years until I finally found a good all-season tire in that size.

When I say they couldn't handle snow, I meant even if it looked like it was going to snow, the car was all over the place. Could barely get it to move as if you just eased the clutch out without throttle the wheels spun, nor could I turn once it did get moving. I literally had to use the handbrake to turn if I wanted to pull off onto another road at a junction or the front end would just slide straight. Forget about stupid stops at the bottom of a hill. If I wasn't hammering down to get a run at the hill, I either was turning around halfway up because I was stuck, or in the case of being stopped at the bottom, I wasn't going to move at all.

I drove a Toyota 4x4 pickup truck for years with big off-road oriented, huge sidewalled tires. I had no problems driving around normally on those things and even a cheap passenger car tire would be better than an off-road tire. If you are going to out perform even the shittiest tires you can buy under normal driving conditions, then you are just an idiot on the road and shouldn't be there. Wet performance and snow performance are the deciding factors as I said for choosing a tire.

Ben, your findings in fantastic cheap lenses are making Pentax look better and better every time you post.

Is it that easy to find old Pentax lenses, or do my searching skills just suck? If I were to search for something for Nikon or Canon, all I would get would be barely used newer expensive lenses. Though, I'm not experienced in e-bay. I have an account, but I've never bought anything, nor looked to buy anything there.

Cheapest "decent" tire you can get (read as "decent brand".) You're not using the car at the track, you are using it as a tool to get from point A to point B. Look at ratings for "grip in the wet" and such. Dry performance, you are not going to outperform even the cheapest pieces of junk. "Wet grip" is where one tire will outshine another tire.

You have to REALLY drive like an ass to lose it due to the tires. "REALLY like an ass" would mean driving on the road like you would on a track. Even the biggest ass on the road doesn't come close to that.

I put the cheapest tires I can find on my cars. Do I wish I had better tires? Yes. Reasons are noise (biggest reason as better tires will be quieter), wet, and snow performance. Wet isn't so bad. When you stick snow in the mix, then things get "interesting".

Quote from SamH :

Open the side of your case....

So, should I put the cover back on the case before attempting to open it again?

I don't think the cover has been on in years. Actually, I don't even know where the cover is to be honest.

Funny thing is, in bios on the "power restore restart" option, it is set to "off" yet still restarts on power restore.

Haven't gotten the drive showing yet on a handful of shutdown/reboot and restarts yet. I will give the "pull the cables and reinstall" a try. Though, I can't remember if it was the original cable or one I put in when I put the drive in.

Alright, a question for the PC gurus here. As you can see in the title, my 2nd hard drive is not showing.

Info

Computer (Compaq) bought in 2005. 2nd hard drive has been installed since day 1. It has worked just fine ever since day 1 until not too long ago. No system changes have been made except pulling the overheated gfx card and going back to the onboard gfx chip.

The problem: When we have a power outage, which is pretty common with the wind and all the trees we have, the computer boots itself back up when power is restored (I thought this was disabled actually...) Upon the computer booting up, the 2nd hard drive is no longer showing anywhere in the system. I restart, completely shutdown and reboot, and do many combinations of those to get the drive back. I have to do many of these restarts or shutdown and reboots and eventually the drive finally shows and all is well. It's a pain though as it takes about 10-15 minutes for the computer to boot. That means sometimes it is well over an hour process to get the drive back with constant booting and restarting until I see it again.

Any ideas? I have to do a reboot now to try to get it back and I'll jump into bios and disable the "restart on powerloss" thing for now.

I think it is all done on purpose to piss me off. It seems that any time I want to do anything with photography, earlier that day there was a power outage and the drive is missing. I can go for weeks just fine, but the time I want to play with photography stuff, it's gone, hehe.