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[methylatedspirit]

Sorry for the double post.

I have this .tiff file that cannot be opened, moved, overwritten or deleted. I'm trying to delete this file. I have tried using FileASSASSIN (failed to delete), booting into Ubuntu in Live USB mode (failed to boot) and Hiren's BootCD PE (failed to delete).

How do I delete this file, short of formatting the entire drive that the file is on?

[wierd]

Run chkdsk /f first. Make sure the volume is healthy.

If you can remove the disk from the computer (and have a suitable USB adapter for it), do that, and hook it to an already booted linux machine. Delete it there.

Otherwise delete it on a windows machine after taking ownership of the file.

[Starver]

Does anybody know how to use the advanced alt codes for special symbols?  I've been looking through alt-codes.net and all of them that are listed as just plain numbers work fine, but as soon as special symbols are added to the code, I no longer understand how to input it.  Here are 2 symbols they have listed together with the codes provided:

Circled Plus ⊕
Decimal: &#8853   Hex: &#x2295

[...]

I assume the decimal code is the one to use, so I tried the following for the Circled Plus:

alt + 38 = &
alt + 35 = #
alt + 38358853 = E
alt + 8853 = ò

However, I'm now tempted to conclude that all the other symbols are not accessible via alt codes, and that the decimal / hex codes given are just for programmers to use.

Just to remove your misassumption, there is no 'translation' of "&#" to digits 3835 in the way you thought there was. Numpad codes are generally three or four digits (2-digits and singletons, typed during ALTing would be assumed to be in the non-hundreds range) with 3/2/1-digit numbers not starting with zero being taken as a wish to take from the DOS-style character list (Codepage 437, essentially the DF vanilla set) and zero-led numbers being serviced by the Windows default Codepage (different, but still limited in number).

I don't have my Windows machines in front of me, to test, but I suspect that if you put in more than the three or four digits (or just that many but stray into the 256+ range of number) it will truncate what you give it somehow, though how it gives you small-o-with-grave-accent (Alt-149 or Alt-0242, I think) from Alt-8853 I can't currently work out, and that's a higher number than I can convert to bitwise logic off the top of my head. Or Windows has radically changed its behaviour since I was most familiar with this process.
   
Once you start to see notation like "&#...;", that's probably (unless there is an 8-bit equivalen on that number or another) beyond your easy keying-in pleasure. For 'everyday' use you have to go hunting in charmap. Knowing either base of a character's number or at least part of its Unicode name should get you to it if it is present in any given font. If it isn't there[1] where you expect it then either check a different font or scroll through to see if there's a similar/identical symbol in there for a different purpose (then double check that looks Ok in other fonts, in case serif/sanserif or other distinctions only make it right in a narrow family of fonts).

([1] - Don't go looking in Wingdings for anything not a Wingding, obviously. Most 'regular' fonts extend to service Cyrillic as well as all the obvious extensions in the Latinesque alphabets, but some do not. Arabic/etc alphabets will likely be missed from more hobbyist fonts from the 'western' world.Your required Circled-Plus symbol might be trivially added by a font-artist who has already decided what their normal mathematical Plus looks like when they get into mirroring the higher bytes of a font-table, or they may ignore the extended mathematical symbol area entirely (or is it the astronomical section, or a minority alphabet area for Tagalog/whatever?) once they're happy they've covered the areas they expect their work to be applied in.)

The &#...; format itself is typically used in web page sources, &...; is a "this is a meta" thing, like &nbsp; for non-breaking space (mostly used for non-contraction of multiple required spaces, rather than the use it is named for) or &lt;&gt; for 'literal' <>s not to be interpreted as. HTML tagging. The # with decimal digits of #x with hexadecimal ones, in the "..." spot is the Unicode/Universal-codepage reference which is often also given as U+ABCD with ABCD (or more or less than four characters, according to range needed) being the hex digits.

Only if it is U+00 and two more digits (or equivalently zero-padded) are you going to be likely to translate it to Alt-code (by decimalising), otherwise you may have to be lucky and find it's an effective duplicate of a semanticly different character, as mentioned already. A very simple example is that a hyphen is technically not the same as a minus sign, neither of which is an en-dash, but all probably look like that dash character I just used, for most (visual) purposes, even if you can't use the trivial lower-ASCII character straight off the keyboard for some reason.

The U+25BA, that you mention, is officially the BLACK RIGHT-POINTING POINTER, while Alt-16 is in the Control Character set in the very lowest section of the 8-bit or perhaps even 7-bit sets (YMMV), which may or may not even print out or act as you expect in various entry modes. It may display as the arrow/triangle, or the software you are entering it into may assume you mean Shift Out or Data Link Escape, depending on age, or else beep/flash/tooltip at you for daring to try to use it, and if you actually want to use the control-code it represents you may have needed to press Ctrl-N, in software old enough to probably not be something you want to use that also doesn't trap that code as "New file..." or similar.

Obviously if you can use Alt-16 easily enough and it survives the process of arriving where you want it to be seen, then use that. But sometimes incompatible systems mess these things up. For example, here in the UK we use the £ symbol for GBP/Pounds Sterling, but due to various early localisations of the early incarnations of ASCII it might or might not render as the # symbol on other displays. (That's the "hash" symbol, to many. Or octothorn/octothorpe to others, as the eight-pointed version from the stylised "th"-digraph. Ironically also called the "pound sign" but that's from a different super-struck version of the digraph of "lb", used in pounds-weight context.). The modern HTML standard is to use &pound; to render it, though, which should solve everything. Except when you get text transferred 'safely' between systems that renders the & itself as the 'safe' version of &amp; which in turn is mishandled, then you end up with text on job vacancy aggregators (a common place to be fed by feeds fed on other feeds that have themselves harvested other feeds, all with dodgy scripting behind their scraping of other sources) such as "Position earns &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;pound;30K p.a. &amp;amp; car &amp;amp; benefit&amp;amp;rsquo;s" (Sic)...

But I'm sure you're well beyond your initial problem now. Consider this all as just fun new information (E&amp;OE) that you might find useful on some future occasion...

[da_nang]

So I'm on Standard VGA Graphics Adapter right now due to the GPU refusing to work properly with drivers installed.

I've been wondering. Windows is allowing me to go up to a 1400x1050 resolution (and it works just fine). But I noticed under advanced settings that I can try the "hidden" resolutions, though it may not work properly and/or damage hardware.

I'm on an LCD monitor (VGA) with a max native resolution of 1920x1080. Will there in fact be any damage by going to a larger resolution below 1920x1080?

I'm asking since I might need the extra real-estate for programs with non-resizable windows and a minimum resolution above my current one. My Google-fu is only giving me answers when going above native resolution.

[wierd]

The warning is an artifact of when CRTs were a thing, and oversync could damage the flyback assembly, and or, the deflector plates.


LCD will just display a "Resolution is not valid" or "Resolution out of range" message if it cannot display the signal.

Big freaking woop.

[Eschar]

Playing Doom II in DosBox. Whenever I bring up the Windows start menu or open any other program the music skips or buzzes for a moment. Why is DosBox sound quality so dependent on what's happening everywhere else on the computer?

[Iduno]

Playing Doom II in DosBox. Whenever I bring up the Windows start menu or open any other program the music skips or buzzes for a moment. Why is DosBox sound quality so dependent on what's happening everywhere else on the computer?

Unless your computer is quite old, it's needing to pretend it's a 32-bit computer, then pretend it's a 16-bit computer. That's not really efficient, especially when the rest of your hardware is decades apart from when the game was released.

[Ziusudra]

Playing Doom II in DosBox. Whenever I bring up the Windows start menu or open any other program the music skips or buzzes for a moment. Why is DosBox sound quality so dependent on what's happening everywhere else on the computer?

DOSBox has to emulate DOS era sound hardware in software and sound emulation can be very sensitive to timing variances in memory and IO access. Opening the start menu and programs can use both of those pretty heavily for a short time.

[Lord Shonus]

Even if you're a purist, there's much better ways to play classic DooM than DosBOX. Any source port can be set up to play exactly like the original, at whatever resolution you want.

[Eschar]

Even if you're a purist, there's much better ways to play classic DooM than DosBOX. Any source port can be set up to play exactly like the original, at whatever resolution you want.

What source ports would you recommend, and is there a way to export my save files to them?

[wierd]

Doom95 is a win32 application, that uses the same wads and save format. Its very old, but the source tree became FOSS years ago.

Became the progenitor to many ports since.

[Lord Shonus]

Even if you're a purist, there's much better ways to play classic DooM than DosBOX. Any source port can be set up to play exactly like the original, at whatever resolution you want.

What source ports would you recommend, and is there a way to export my save files to them?

I use GZdoom. Unfortunately, I don't think there's a way to transfer saves, but you can (Using ZDL) easily start on any level you want, and DooM's designed around going back to a pistol start regularly so you'd rebuild your arsenal pretty quickly.  One of the really nice features is an autosave at the start of every level, and with the ZDL frontend it is trivially easy to load up one of the dozens of megawads that have been made over the years to get more DooM after you finish the Doom 2 campaign.

If you're not a purist, it also has the optional ability to disable autoaim and add free mouselook and a crosshair, making it play very similarly to modern FPS games.

[methylatedspirit]

I happen to have a bunch of surveillance footage recovered from a surveillance hard drive. They're in FLV format. The problem is that the videos switch resolutions midway, which makes it hard to re-encode with HandBrake, since it assumes that videos are at a constant resolution throughout.

What software can both work with FLV files and doesn't have problems with variable resolutions?

[wierd]

FFMPEG for the command line.

[Starver]

My first thought, too (not tried saitching resolutions, mid-file, but I've found it handles switching sample-rates on audio streams).

If you (generic 'you') don't like command-lines, there's the winff GUI wrapper (if you're on Windows, mostly but not exclusively) that helps out with a lot of the (potentially) numerous parameters that you might find you need to use, and possibly easier batching up of whole queues of input files for similar conversion.  Not used it much myself, but a friend of mine who wasn't as confident or patient with the command-line took to it like a fish to water.

(This being a decade or so ago, and he's likely still happily using it, just as I've not yet had problems with whatever version of ffmpeg/ffplay I use. Suggesting the continual explosion of new Codecs and formats has slowed from the heady old days of explosive divergence - I'm sure my version predates the .webm format, but it even handles those files, no matter what video subset it is a wrapper for. The rather more historic FLV is definitelty supported though, unless someone's been messing with it that I don't know of in your proprietry recorder.)

The link above is the developer's site, it seems, after I scanned around the search results quite a bit looking for something that wasn't a paid-for-and-up-ranked aggregator site. Various other places pop up first which seem Ok, and may even have further other OS ports and versions/dates to them that imply forked projects, perhaps improving some elements Caveat Emptor (though they're all free, at least nominally...) when following those, but the code.google and github links should be fairly verifiably honest in that regard.