Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2011 May 21

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May 21[edit]

Emoji[edit]

How can I add Emoji to my Apple MacBook pro please? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.211.157.87 (talk) 06:54, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not familiar with them, but the emoji article has something about them being encoded in the Unicode standard v6.0 at the behest of Google and Apple. Maybe you can find relevant links from the article. Astronaut (talk) 19:07, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, well, thanks thanks for that, but it is all a bit beyond this slow witted 80 year old, so perhaps I will go without!--85.211.225.59 (talk) 18:09, 22 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Printing a content list of a folder in Windows 7[edit]

I want to be able to print the list of files and folders I can see in Explorer - for example the content of "My Documents" or "My Pictures", for that matter any arbitrary folder/directory. Windows Explorer does not allow for either directly printing or creating a text document. It used to be easy to do with simple Dos command before the current crop of M$ coders were embryos! Roger (talk) 08:50, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Open a "DOS box", aka Command Prompt, navigate to the folder you want, dir > list.txt, then open list.txt in (say) Notepad and print from there. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 10:29, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks! (even though I feel a bit stupid). Now to try to explain the procedure to my 73 year old father over the phone. He's been using computers since he first bought a Comodore CBM8032 but still doesn't understand elementary terminology such as "browse". Roger (talk) 11:01, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
This page explains how to set up a batch file to do the job, which may or may not help you... AndrewWTaylor (talk) 11:08, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks again. Maybe I can set up a batch file in such a way that I can simply email it to Dad with instructions at the "click here" level of sophistication. He wants a list of all his photos in "My Pictures" so that he can delete the many (as in thousands of) duplicates. Roger (talk) 11:18, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
If you only want to do a single (or few) such listings, and you can literally see them on the screen in explorer - all at the same time (ie without scrolling):
  • Alt-PrintScreen to copy an image to the clipboard. (PrintScreen alone is the whole screen, Alt-PrintScreen is the currently active window.)
  • Ctrl-Esc Run Wordpad (this is for XP - you may need to modify for 7)
  • Paste
  • Print
There may (should!) be a simpler way to print the screen or clipboard from "out-of-the-box" Windows, but I'm not aware of one. Mitch Ames (talk) 11:21, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe there's a better way. Last month I asked about free software to find duplicates and similar files. I got some promising replies. VisPics seems to do what I wanted, though I found the user interface is not the most intuitive to use. Astronaut (talk) 19:14, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Four Anon Questions[edit]

Ii want to know that 1) how can i create a gif image that shows a picture of person slowly converts to a animals picture. please tell me. 2) i want to know that is there any way in ms excel 2007 time written in hour format converts to decimal. for example 01:15:00 min to 1.25 hour. 3) i want to create a logo/monogram for my company. please give me some idea. my company name is saturnking. how can i create one.... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 180.215.120.11 (talk) 14:17, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

i want know that is there any website/pdf/word/excel document available that can teach me tally 9. if available please provide link or send it to me on saturnking.weebly.com or to my email email address removed. please help me and god will help you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 180.215.120.11 (talk) 14:24, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

1. See the Software section in Morphing.
2. This works for me: =(TEXT(LEFT(A1,4),"####")&TEXT(MID(A1,FIND(":",A1)+1,2)/60,".##")&RIGHT(TEXT(RIGHT(A1,2)/60/60*10,".##"),2))+0
3. How about Saturn with a crown?
4. There is a lot of Tally 9 documentation at their documentation repository here. -- kainaw 14:36, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
1. Once you have the intermediate images from the morphing mentioned above, I imagine the output files would need to be a turned into an Animated GIF. Many graphics programs can do this, though the comparison of raster graphics editors doesn't say which ones do.
2. A better Excel formula would be HOUR(A1)+((MINUTE(A1)*60)+SECOND(A1))/3600 which doesn't rely on character string slicing, but instead uses Excel's time functions to turn a time into a number. Make sure you format the time in cell A1 as time and format the cell with the formula as general or number.
3. Can't think of anything better then a Saturn with a crown.
4. We also have an article on Tally Solutions which you might find useful. Astronaut (talk) 19:00, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
3) That could be either Saturn, the planet, or Saturn (god). However, the planet is probably more recognizable. StuRat (talk) 21:46, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
4) This site offers free online tutorials (which I have not tested) about Tally 9. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 23:38, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Excel stores date and time values internally as day numbers. If the time you want to convert is formatted as an Excel time value in cell A1, you can use =A1*24 and format that as a number to get the hour value. If the time is stored as text, use =VALUE(A1)*24 --Bavi H (talk) 04:15, 22 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Folder on Desktop Refuses to Move (Vista)[edit]

Resolved

I have a folder on my desktop, and no matter what I do, I can't get it to move somewhere else, as I keep getting the 'permissions' dialogue box. When I go inside the folder and try to move individual components, I am told that these components are in use by another program (and that, in fact, it has nothing to do with permissions, admin rights, or ownership). This is wonderful to know, but our dear friend Bill doesn't seem to think I'd find it useful to know what program this is. I have admin rights on this computer, and have ownership of the folder. Now, how do I find out which program is supposedly using the contents of this folder? FWIW, I have tried using an unlocker program, and it reported that there was nothing to unlock (no 'handles', or something). --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 14:35, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't used Windows in many many years, but there used to be a program called procexp.exe (hopefully Windows still has it). Run that. Select "find" from the menu and type in part of one of the file names that claims to be in use. The process explorer will show which process is using the file. Then, you can kill that process. I assume it is the Windows indexing service. -- kainaw 14:41, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Cheers, but procexp.exe doesn't seem to exist on Vista (at least, it can't be found when I try to use it from 'Run'). --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 14:53, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Process explorer is actually a download from Sysinternals. It's not included with Vista, but it runs under it. --Sigma 7 (talk) 15:00, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed. It was a disk image that Daemon Tools Lite had been neglecting to fully unmount, while at the same time telling me it had unmounted it. Cheers. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 14:59, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

ImDisk ¦ Reisio (talk) 18:02, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Types of boot sectors[edit]

The article concerning boot sectors overlooks the fact that there are other types of boot sectors than a master boot record. I know that a GUID Partition Table is one of these. Are there any others? --Melab±1 20:49, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The definition of a boot sector is technically any sector at all that has 0xAA55 as its final two bytes. The master boot record is the normal boot sector for a hard drive. For drives that cannot be partitioned (like USB drives), you will find a volume boot record. Because the boot sector can contain code, it is common to have a multi-OS selection program in the boot sector. -- kainaw 21:05, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
But, the GPT standard was designed to supersede MBRs. If you look under gParted and select "New partition table", MBR is listed as one of the options along with GPT and BSD disklabel. Whatever category those fall under, what other types are there? --Melab±1 02:33, 22 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
So can anyone explain that? --Melab±1 19:19, 22 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I can't pick out a clear question. Are we supposed to be listing all known variants of the boot sector for PCs? Or comparing the PC boot sector to the booting procedure of other architectures? Or is it really about partition tables? The DOS MBR puts some partition information in the boot sector, but that's not universal, so if you want to know about partition table formats you shouldn't ask about boot sectors. Even in the PC world, floppies can have a boot sector but they usually aren't partitioned. 67.162.90.113 (talk) 23:22, 22 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
List of known boot sector standards/layouts that are not MBRs. --Melab±1 01:53, 23 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I know that a GUID Partition Table is one of them. And, can an MBR possibly be larger than 512 bytes if a custom BIOS was used? --Melab±1 19:04, 23 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Pick any OS that can run on PC and it probably has its own boot sector, which it will probably call an "MBR", though it may not resemble the DOS MBR. Pick any other architecture and it'll have its own boot procedure which may or may not be based on a magic sector. OpenFirmware doesn't load a boot sector; it can load an OS from a file stored in a filesystem anywhere on disk. Then there's network boot with TFTP... and El Torito... boot methods would form a pretty big list. 67.162.90.113 (talk) 22:22, 23 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Windows Command Prompt window title[edit]

Resolved

Is there a command I can issue, within the Command Prompt window, to change the title of that window (as it appears on the title bar) ? StuRat (talk) 21:41, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, just type title blah (where blah is the title you wish to use. Nanonic (talk) 22:51, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Wow, as simple as that. I was picturing embedded control characters, etc. Thanks ! StuRat (talk) 23:02, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]