1) fix the PAGEFILE. Go inot the settings and change ti to fixed size - 2x-3x size of ram - both of minimum and maximum size. Do not let WInodws manage it! [ ... ]

Better still, move PAGEFILE.SYS off of C: entirely, preferably on to its own spindle if you can. That way the swapper isn't having a fight with every other application in the system for accessing system files; and PAGEFILE.SYS itself won't become fragmented.

Consider moving %TEMP% and %TMP% off of C: as well.

4) Dump the System Restore from time to time. This is just junk removal. [ ... ]

Sadly, this appears to be an all-or-nothing affair -- on XP, you can either delete all restore points or none of them. It would be nice to delete those that are, say, more than a year old.

I'd argue that this one (from your link) is patently wrong:

"6. Batch processing through automated actions is far superior in GIMP. Because photographers often need to do repeatable actions to large groups of images, this feature alone is worth its weight in gold."

I am a photographer and although I use LightRoom heavily, I use the batch rules in PS for my concert work, I can get very detailed with little trouble in PS. I did try to switch to gimp (or more accurately, tried it out) and found this to be sorely lacking. Not to mention the batch actions in PS merge/link nicely with the plug-ins (specifically the Nik software for B/W work) so if I wanted to, and on occasion I have, I can do some *serious* transformations on a shot in PS with one click of a button.

The NSA, with apparent approval from our gov't, spies on its own citizens with impunity, and let seem to be caught flat-footed by events unfolding the Middle East and Ukraine (at least from what I have heard on the radio)
The president twiddles his thumbs while our allies cry out for help.
What in three hells happened to our country?

...federal officials forced American tech companies to participate in the NSA's controversial PRISM program.

You misspelled "illegal." HTH. HAND.

In a filesystem like EXT3, if you open a file, seek to some offset, and write new data, EXT3 will write the new data to the existing disk block in place. ZFS, however, will allocate a new block for that offset (copy on write), write the modified data to it, and update the block chain. The result is that it's apparently very easy to badly fragment a ZFS file (do a Google search for "ZFS fragmentation" to see various stories and tests people have written).

You can apparently mitigate the problem by occasionally copying the entire affected file -- Oracle's own whitepaper on the subject apparently reads, "Periodically copying data files reorganizes the file location on disk and gives better full scan response time."

Bottom line: ZFS is not a panacea, nor is it simple. There are myriad options, and trade-offs to all of them.

Why is that link relevant? Because they were all made using Kdenlive.

When I first started mucking around with digital video, I tried a bunch of free/libre packages, and formed the following opinions of each:

Windows Movie Maker
Yes, $(GOD) help me, I gave it a serious try. To my utter surprise, it mostly worked and did what I wanted without crashing. However, the UI was rather inflexible, and I needed more than the handful of features it offered, so I kept looking.

Cinelerra
Every Google search for free video editing software always turns this up, so I tried it. Then, ten minutes later, I had to stop trying it because it kept crashing and/or hanging at the slightest provocation. It has an impressive-looking array of features, and the editing timeline looks quite powerful. Evidently, you can do some fairly impressive things with Cinelerra, provided you can identify and avoid all its weak spots.

Pitivi
The last time I tried this, it was unreliable, under-featured, and incredibly slow. Just loading a one hour-long video clip into the timeline took several minutes as it tried to generate thumbnails and an audio waveform for the clip.

OpenShot
Assuming I'm remembering this package correctly, all it does is assemble edits -- that is, you can tack together a bunch of clips one after the other to create a larger work. If you want to do any effects or titling, you're SOL. Perhaps the Kickstarter-funded upgrade will yield some improvements.

Lightworks
I had to learn something the hard way with this package: This is a professional package. By that, I don't mean it has a ton of features (although it certainly does). I mean it expects a certain level of media asset before it will operate on it in the manner you expect. Us mere proles are satisfied to use MP4 or MKV or ($(GOD) help us) AVI files. However, in the pro space, you have files that contain not just compressed audio and video, but also timecode. And not just timecode measured relative to when you last pressed the RECORD button, but also a master timecode from an achingly accurate central timecode generator fed to all your cameras and microphones. This not only means all your cameras and mics are in precise sync ('cause otherwise their internal clocks will drift relative to each other), but you can trivially sync all your master footage and then intercut shots without even thinking about it. Also, near as I can tell, there's no such thing as inter-frame compression in professional video. Each frame is atomic, which means you can cleanly cut anywhere, but it doesn't compress anywhere near as small as, say, H.264.

The result is that, if you don't have equipment that generates all this metadata for you, then you need to convert it from the puny consumer format you're likely using. This means having truly monstrous amounts of disk available just to store the working set, and tons of RAM to make it all work. And hopefully your conversion script(s) didn't cough up bogus timecode.

So, yes, Lightworks is very very nice, if you have the proper resources to feed it. I don't, so I've set it aside for that glorious day when I get some proper equipment :-).

Kdenlive
Kdenlive is built on top of the MLT framework, and is about the best and most reliable thing I've found out there that doesn't cost actual money (either directly or indirectly). It has a non-linear timeline editor, it supports a wide variety of media formats, and it has a modest collection of audio and video effects (almost none of which you will use).

One of the more amazing things Kdenlive does is transparently convert sample and frame rates. Without thinking about it, my first video involved using a 44KHz WAV file, a 48KHz WAV file, and a 44KHz MP3 file, with the output audio to be 48KHz AAC. I feared I was going to have to convert all the sources to the same format, but Kdenlive quietly resampled them all when compiling the output video file, and everything came out undistorted and in sync.

Kdenlive does occasionally crash, which is annoying, but it has never destroyed my work. It has a fairly robust crash recovery mechanism, and you may lose your most recent one or two tweaks to the timelines, but you won't lose hours of work.

Kdenlive is not perfect, of course. It has limitations and annoyances that occasionally make me search for another video editor. But if, as I was, you're new to video editing, it will take you a while to find those limitations. Kdenlive has certainly served me very well in the meantime, and I think it's the most reliable, most capable, and most easily accessible Open Source video editor out there.

I quit (albeit accidentally) caffeine over 20 years ago, and I've never thought about the effects like you describe before, until you brought it up.
Yes, going to sleep quickly is a piece of cake, and instantly awake is the norm for me.
I'd like think there are health benefits from giving up caffeine as well, but overall I'm just glad to be done with the caffeine-related headaches.

I have a small photography journal, free to go to, and while I know it's hosted on Google's blogspot, I don't run any kind of revenue generating ads on it. I know Google has their own monitoring crap built in to blogspot, but I do not think there is anything I can do about that.
My main site is hosted and paid for fully by me, no ads, nothing, just content. If my hosting costs go up because of increased bandwidth, then I pay the costs. I am happy to see increased traffic, means I must be doing something right.
But ultimately I'm providing content because I want to, not because I want anything back.
This is the way it should be.

...I'm going to trust a link to install software on Android from outside of the Play store?

I think not.

Clearly you've never heard of the F-Droid project. Go read up on it.

This is a non-story. It has always been a non-story. It has already been investigated, and what turned up was a gigantic pile of nothing. But then, that's all Daryl Issa's "investigations" have ever turned up.

Yes, the IRS investigated a bunch of applications for tax-exempt status for a number of "Tea Party" groups. They also performed the same investigations on so-called liberal groups. They're supposed to do that; otherwise any moron could claim tax-exempt status. Were there problems with the investigations? Yes, because the tax law that requires them is so vague that it's basically left entirely to the discretion of the investigator.

Were any applications denied? No, not really. Did the IRS investigate more "Tea Party" groups than liberal groups? It would appear so. It would also appear that there were a hell of a lot more "Tea Party" applications flooding in during the timeframe in question (which makes sense, given that the "Tea Party" is not grassroots, but entirely the construction of FreedomWorks).

As for how "terribly convenient" it is for multiple IRS personnel under investigation to have lost the data in question, well... Considering that the IRS is underfunded (sounds weird, but it's true); and considering that they have tens of thousands of personal computers, none of them brand new, and all of them in various states of disrepair and subjected to various forms of abuse; and considering that every one of those tens of thousands of computers are running FUCKING WINDOWS , then you are provably a drooling idiot if you think the probability for unrecoverable data loss is anything less than 1.0.

The only story here is that IRS regs concerning tax-exempt political advocacy organizations are hopelessly vague. Moreover, it's not a story that belongs on a tech-oriented site. If I wanted to read about fabricated right-wing ghost stories, I'd visit RedState. Get this shit off Slashdot.

written by richard lightman [ ... ] his web site is now offline: you can get a copy of depinit however using archive.org.

Last snapshot I could find on archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/200...