Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2014 May 9

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May 9

Good note taking application?

Hi, I was wondering if anyone here could recommend a good application that can be used to take quick notes and doodles, perhaps emulating standard paper and pencil. I've searched Google quite a bit but I seem to only come up with text note apps, but missing the feature where I can draw shapes and diagrams, or maybe even drag text boxes around. I'm on Windows but a web-based application would be great too. Thanks -- penubag  (talk) 04:30, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

I use EverNote pretty heavily. The "paper and pencil" approach is one I've used a little, but don't have much practical need for. There are Moleskine notebooks designed by Evernote specifically to be easily digitized (quite expensive, though) and Skitch interfaces with it well for the kinds of graphical tasks you're talking about. It has decent OCR. You can use the web-based client, but that will quickly become cumbersome; the Windows client seems pretty reliable and is frequently updated. --— Rhododendrites ^talk |  05:59, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

I was mostly looking into free options. Free as in free lunch not necessarily GPL. One that I can use on my computer to storyboard and take notes. Can I draw on Evernote for free? I tried it and it looks like it only takes keyboard text. -- penubag  (talk) 07:13, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

I have and use Evernote as well. I'd recommend it. And to answer your question, I can't see anything that says you need a premium account to be able to draw. Though I think it might best be done in Evernote's sister application Skitch which, as Rhododendrites mentioned, works seamlessly with EN. Dismas|^(talk) 13:36, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

OneNote can do all that, and Microsoft recently made it free for everyone. It has a web version, an offline version, and phone/tablet apps. —Noiratsi (talk) 09:40, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for that! I used to use OneNote pretty extensively at university where I had free access to it. It's good to hear that it is free now. Katie R (talk) 15:51, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

Digital paper (available from various places) has some ardent aficionados. 70.36.142.114 (talk) 00:19, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

I lost my PC's screen commands

Hello Wise Ones ! I recently found in a dump a rather good-looking Medion Notebook PC, hosting an XP OS who had been asleep for some 6-7 years. As its screen had been gouged in, I plugged my new PC to a monitor, & it worked OK, though slowly; but, the image being blurry, I tried to make it more crisp, and got on my screen a very widened panorama of the Blue Mountains, with no commands at all. Figuring they were somewhere & not very far, I tried to click outside the screen, but nothing changed. How can I go back to the former screen ? At length, by switching power in & out several times I got a "failure-less boot" which did not give me back a normal screen but allowed me to surf a little, & enter WP to consult it , but not to edit...Thanks a lot beforehand for your help ( though I'm an old timer (& entered in comput. just before retirement), I can hear geeks chuckling from afar ;-). If I can get this Medion to work, it'll offer it to one of my grand-sons, & it'll learn him to keep his fortitude in front of his pals' sneers ) Arapaima (talk) 09:48, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

I have something similar happen when I plug my vintage laptop (Windows 98 !) into an external monitor. The first time I boot, it tries to come up at the laptop's native resolution, but the next time it comes up at the external monitor's default resolution. Then, if I go back to using the laptop's own screen, it's on the external monitor's res until I reboot again. Some suggestions in your case:

1) Are there screen controls that come with the monitor that allow you to change the width and height of the display ? Those were common on CRT monitors, but not on newer, flat screen LCDs. If you have those controls, you may be able to bring the "Start" button onto the screen that way and use it to adjust the resolution from there.

2) If not, try another monitor, preferably an old CRT with a big screen.

(As a thank to both, & a sample of very wild random mental associations & reminiscences )Vietnamese lady, humming a song by Boris Vian she learned many years ago from her French foreign legion lover, and turning the viands over on the spit : "Ouch, hurt me, beat me, give me pain – I love painfull hard love-making..." "Sooo, she adds to herself, cocking frog and rat (sic) together, that'll be very good, furthermore they love each-other's scent, and they were caught while gossiping on the same dump..."

3) There should be some keystrokes to get you to the control panel, from where you can pick the Display icon to change the resolution. I don't know the keystrokes to get you to the Start button in XP, but hopefully somebody else does. From there, you may have to pick Settings, then Control Panel, then the Display icon. (They removed the Settings layer some time between Windows 98 and Windows 7, but I'm not sure exactly when.) Once you get to the Start menu, if the part you need still isn't on the screen, just type in the first letter, so S, then C (or just C, if XP skips the Settings layer). One complication is if your laptop has more than one command that starts with S or C. In that case, you have to type the letter repeatedly to get to the one you want, then hit enter. Of course, if you can't see which one is highlighting, then you just have to keep trying, hitting the letter one more time at each iteration until you get what you want.

BTW, I applaud you for your thrift and Mother Earth applauds you for removing things from the dump instead of adding to it. StuRat (talk) 13:16, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

• Start button if you don't have a Windows key: [Ctrl]-[Esc].
• "Run" command: [Win]-R. Without a Win key: [Ctrl]-[Esc], [up] 3 times, [Enter]. If that doesn't work, try different amount of [up]s, e.g. twice or 4 times.
• Control panel: Use the "Run" command and type "control.exe"
• Shortcut to Display properties: right-click empty spot on the desktop, "Properties".

These should work in Windows 98, 2000, and XP. - ¡Ouch! (^{hurt me} / _{more pain}) 06:08, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

@Arapaima: Sorry, I didn't see yesterday how late my reply was. I still hope that you can put some of it to good use. - ¡Ouch! (^{hurt me} / _{more pain}) 05:26, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

What is (was) Kirk McKusick's net-connected wine cellar?

I read in the about the authors section of the book The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System for one of the co-authors Marshall Kirk McKusick the following: "In his spare time, he enjoys swimming, scuba diving, and wine collecting. The wine is stored in a specially constructed wine cellar (accessible from the net using the command 'telnet McKusick.COM 451') in the basement of the house that he shares with Eric Allman, his domestic partner of 17-and-some-odd years."

I tried the telnet command of course, but got a connection failed message. What originally happened or happens when one connects using a terminal that can connect? Did/does it give information about the current contents of the cellar? Are there commands to control robotic machinery inside the cellar? Or something else? What could be done through the connection? 20.137.2.50 (talk) 17:33, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

More recent autobiographical snippets, from stuff McKusick has done, no longer mention telnet, but instead say the info is on his website. I guess that specifically it means this page, which is mostly the status of various home automation sensors. A photo of the cellar is here; it appears entirely manual - those cables around the bottles appear to be bungee cords, to stop the bottles from bouncing off the rack during an earthquake. -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 18:23, 9 May 2014 (UTC)