Do you have a Messy Desktop?

Have you posted here with your iPhone yet, Kate P?

johnfás wrote:

What is the thing on the bottom right of the toolbar yokie on the right hand side? The one which looks like a speedometer. Would that help me work out my issue with whether I'm getting the best from my RAM?

Physical Memory (MB)
Total 2037
Cached 1181
Free 49

I dont know anything about it but would a higher number on "Cached" mean that I am making more use of my 2037? What is Kernel Memory?

Have a look at this product and see what you think. Check all the reviews and if there is any uninstall issues. Prior to downloading my PC was a mess, losing considerable RAM, crashes and firefox issues and so forth. My system has never has never been so stable or so fast. It worked for me, can't be sure if it will do the same for anybody else.

I downloaded the free version first and later on I found a link for a free upgrade trial of 120 days.
This is the link for the free version.

http://mcall.com.com/Advanced-SystemCare-Free/3000-2086_4-10407614.html

You should shut down any unnecessary services and change them to manual start-up rather than automatic start up.

Start - control panel - administrative tools - services

Err on the side of caution and don't shut down anything you don't recognise. Check it up on a techie website if you aren't sure.

Bow down to the cleanliness! (I wont show ye my windows setup though...)

Úbuntú go deoooo!

BuachaillBeo wrote:

Bow down to the cleanliness! (I wont show ye my windows setup though...)

Úbuntú go deoooo!

That's beautiful.

Hermes wrote:

Auditor #9 wrote:

I've 1MB and ubuntu uses about the same as yours - just over 300MB but I haven't noticed any memory or performance issues with it really. I find some websites which run some kind if script or something really hog my system - the Irish Times, the Cedar Lounge, p.ie - could be the ads on these sites although I don't see then on the CLR ...

Have you noticed anything like that ?

I have Adblock Plus as a plugin for Firefox. I don't use a premade block list, I made my own by visiting all the media sites I know and blocking stuff personally. There's an excellent feature that allows you to, once you've found an offending ad or script, block anything from ever arriving again from the offending third party site. Most scripts don't get the opportunity to mess with my system and head these days. I've not seen a single ad in the last month and rarely need to update the 'banned' list I've compiled. I've even killed most of Google's shite - took a while, but I'm dedicated.

So yup, Ads and scripts are bastards and do nothing for you but wreck your head and consume your time and resources - kill em I say. And if you don't have Adblock Plus, get it, it's an absolute essential.

I should have said this the first time:

If you really want to turbocharge your browsing with Firefox, you'll need a plugin called Fasterfox. I've been using this little beauty for some time now and can safely say it's possibly the best little speeder upper I've ever had the good fortune to find.

You can find it here.

You'll have to register with Firefox Add-ons as this particular plugin is considered to be experimental. If you encounter a hash error when you try to install it, just enable third party cookies in your preferences (you can kill this again after you've installed). I wouldn't bother allowing the prefetch option as it's a pain in the rear - but other than that, this yoke will tweak all those internal settings that your preferences don't show, like pipelining etc. It'll speed up your page load time by a factor of 3 or 4. Maybe faster even.

Enjoy.

johnfás wrote:

Have you posted here with your iPhone yet, Kate P?

I don't think so, though I have kept an eye on things here with it. I used to be able to type very quickly and accurately with the regular keypad on my old phone - I didn't even need to look and could easily text one-handed and do other things at the same time. The keyboard-type keypad on new phone is irritatingly small and requires two hands and both eyes to be on it to get things right. I have sent some emails from it though.

We're not relating very well, I'm afraid.

My bag is not the size of Dundrum, it's very neat and tidy, EVM. I used to have a far bigger one, with gazillions of knacky little pockets and spaces for pens and things but I used to put so much stuff in it (just because I could...) that I got back and shoulder pain from lugging it around.

Here is my desktop, behold!

Not tidy, not untidy.

cookiemonster wrote:

Not tidy, not untidy.

But uncharacteristically boring!

Ard-Taoiseach wrote:

cookiemonster wrote:

Not tidy, not untidy.

But uncharacteristically boring!

That's what YOU think. The two "new folders" are full of porn.

cookiemonster wrote:

Ard-Taoiseach wrote:

cookiemonster wrote:

Not tidy, not untidy.

But uncharacteristically boring!

That's what YOU think. The two "new folders" are full of porn.

Is that right? G'wan, gizza look!

I still can't find my desktop. Anyone see it anywhere ?

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

I still can't find my desktop. Anyone see it anywhere ?

Try minimising all your windows and it should be there behind them.

Ard-Taoiseach wrote:

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

I still can't find my desktop. Anyone see it anywhere ?

Try minimising all your windows and it should be there behind them.

Ah so it is. Along with 2 tea mugs, the TV zapper and a 1 pound coin.

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

Ard-Taoiseach wrote:

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

I still can't find my desktop. Anyone see it anywhere ?

Try minimising all your windows and it should be there behind them.

Ah so it is. Along with 2 tea mugs, the TV zapper and a 1 pound coin.

There you go. Sorted!

Part two - for those of us using Firefox or up to date internet explorer, time to show us your shortcut toolbar!

johnfás wrote:

Part two - for those of us using Firefox or up to date internet explorer, time to show us your shortcut toolbar!

Howdy johnfás. I'm afraid I don't have my shortcut toolbar activated. I note that you've a lot of newspaper shortcuts on yours. I've a tip for you. If you're well aware about this please forgive my audacity.

If you look at your picture and in particular the address bar of your browser, to the left of the little yellow star icon there's an orange icon with white lines. That icon indicates that there's an RSS feed associated with the page you're visiting. I'd not put too much stock in this particular icon or your browser's ability to deal with it.

There are plenty of freeware little gadgets out there that you'll find with a small amount of time spent on Google. They're known as RSS Feedreaders or RSS Aggregators. Most newspapers etc. have RSS feeds. Your aggregator rips these feeds at timed intervals (you decide the interval) from the net and displays all the headlines of all their stories for you. A double click on any particular headline that takes your eye and your browser is activated and it loads up the article for you. Most aggregators have the ability to display the articles themselves. I personally prefer that my browser handles this part as I've my browser set up to handle adds and spam etc.

Here's a picture of the Aggregator I use.

That looks very nifty Hermes. Think I'll get me one of them.

That is really cool, Hermes. Thanks for showing us.

Any other tricks up your sleeve?!

No problem.

I've probably loads of tricks up my sleeve, that'd be of no interest to you guys. But I've a few tips concerning the use of an aggregator.

If you set the aggregator to update very often you'll end up waiting for your turn to surf the net. I set mine to update every four hours. Also, as you've probably noticed, I'm not pulling all that many feeds. There's two reasons for this. The first one is that I've not had this particular reader all that long and have usually used the one I had in Windows. I finally exorcised Windows completely, yesterday, from my laptop, so I had to get a new reader for Ubuntu. I'm still putting feeds into it. Though I won't be putting all that many more. That brings me to the second reason. The more feeds you have the more your reader will hog the internet. I find a good methodology to employ is to get loads of Irish feeds, including local papers from around the country, but to limit myself to only a few international feeds. The international feeds I choose are based upon two points, reliability of the news and the speed at which they get it. So, if I find an international news story that I need to research, I just go to Google news or some similar engine and type in the appropriate keywords from the story I'm researching, hit find and then tell it to group the articles by date. Using this methodology allows me to find the earliest a particular story appeared, trace its genesis and see how or if it's changed from media to media and over time. I normally, at the very least, have important stories and in great detail, hours at least before the Irish media ever get a sniff of them.

That's the end of the tips for now. I'll have no mystique about me at all at this rate.

It might be worth setting up another thread regarding tips and tricks. I'll get round to it in a day or two - me schedule is going nuts presently, to put it mildly. There's some really cool ways of searching the internet by using your email as opposed to using your browser. And then porting the tens of thousands of results into a word processor and using the search features there to filter the gold. It's quite an involved process mind you and I only use it rarely for important stuff. I remember finding that the US had facilitated and used degraded water supply tactically in Iraq during the sanctions in the run up to the second Gulf war. I came across a declassified military paper on the subject and printed it on Indymedia months before the news of it appeared in any other media outlet. The moral of my tale is that there's more than one way to skin a cat and that if you're willing to devote some time to refining your methodologies, you can become adept at finding them all in a very short time.

Hermes are there websites that do that for you now too - aggregate the news ? I keep seeing Newsnow and Newsdaily on google searches and they are aggregators of newspapers all round the place. You can search by keyword and they'll find all references to that keyword in all of the papers etc. listed on their database probably.

Sounds like you half constructed one of those with your word processor.

I'm a longtime fan of Newsnow. Tis one of the oldest online aggregators. Here's a site with links to loads of online aggregators and links to software for aggregators for different operating systems. Link.

The searching of the net via email and worprocessor is quite an ordeal. I use it rarely and only when I've lots of time to spare. But it's possibly the most reliable way of searching the net.

I spose it might be possible, in our new home, to customise every member's homepage with their personal choice of newsfeeds?

It'd take a bit of work and some research, but it'd give us an edge. Might hog bandwidth too so we'd have to somewhat limit it.