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July 17

Under Android 7.1.1, how do I change the color of contacts ?

If I don't add photos, each contact gets a colored dot with their first initial in it, and when I text them, their text is also that color. I like this feature, except that two of my contacts got the same color. How do I change them to be different ? SinisterLefty (talk) 23:23, 17 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

UPDATE: I found a way to change the contact's color in the text thread, but that doesn't seem to change their color in contacts. How can I make a change and keep the two in sync ? SinisterLefty (talk) 00:26, 18 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Try deleting and re-adding the contact, or just adding a second copy of the contact. I don't use Google's software for contacts, but IME most of those colors are automatically randomly generated and can't be changed. 93.136.58.135 (talk) 05:36, 18 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

July 18

Notepad problem.

I recently got my Mom's laptop Windows 7, and she is Chinese, and so this laptop can do Chinese characters.

Problem is, when I open up my own files via Notepad, some of the characters become Chinese. Like 's becomes a Chinese character and <i becomes a ?. How do I turn this off? I don't have the same problem with Wordpad or Word. 67.175.224.138 (talk) 04:27, 18 July 2019 (UTC).[reply]

Probably someone with Chinese/Japanese/Korean locale will be able to tell you exactly what's going on. This is a mojibake problem. My guess is it's caused by the fact that you saved your original file as ASCII (aka ANSI) and Notepad working in Chinese locale presumes it's in one of the Unicode encodings despite the lack (or maybe in spite of the presence) of a byte order mark. 93.136.58.135 (talk) 05:34, 18 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Facebook notifications

Some time ago for some reason I stopped receiving Facebook notifications about friends' updates (displayed as blue dots in my list of friends), even though all such options are turned on in my settings. While I do receive updates from my FB groups, I can't see any notifications about friends' actions in my account. Did FB change something? (Running on laptop, Firefox, Windows 10). 212.180.235.46 (talk) 13:19, 18 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Could your email account be blocking them as SPAM ? SinisterLefty (talk) 14:55, 18 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Facebook doesn't show you "updates" (whatever that is) for all your friends and all their updates. In fact, I believe the more and more you view a friend's profile, the more and more Facebook will notify of you their updates. 1 such person reported that Facebook notified a man's ex on what college she was enrolled to (and if I recall, they weren't Facebook friends anymore) so Facebook was updating someone that wasn't on their friend list. 67.175.224.138 (talk) 17:03, 18 July 2019 (UTC).[reply]

You might be a victim of Facebook's A/B testing. I advise trying to get a hold of FB support and pestering them if you have some time to kill. They like to make settings hard to understand/change and different from user to user on purpose, it isn't too likely anyone else will be able to fix exactly your problem. 93.136.39.191 (talk) 22:53, 19 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Mozilla Firefox recently visited pages

I have the latest version of Mozilla Firefox (Version 68.0.1) as my browser, and I use no other browsers. On my Mozilla "Home Page", it lists the "sites that I visit most". There are 4 rows * 8 columns = 32 total sites visited most. My question: On that page, there are some sites that I have maybe visited once or twice in the past month or two. Hardly ever. And then, there are sites that I visit many, many times per day that do not get placed on the list. Does anyone know why this happens? Or how this page works? I don't believe that this is an issue of "refreshing the page" or having to wait for some "lag time" ("catch-up time"), because this has been happening for many months now. I'd like my list to work properly, as I would make better use of it. Any thoughts or ideas? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 18:03, 18 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Some web sites might use a lot of redirects, all within the same site but to different pages, and that might be miscounted as multiple visits. They might even do that on purpose to "game the system". As far as missing web sites, I found out (in Chrome) after I accidentally removed one by hitting the X when trying to click on it, that it never came back. SinisterLefty (talk) 19:29, 18 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I think if you click "X", the site gets removed ... and never comes back. Is there a way to fix that? Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 20:22, 18 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't found one. I guess we both need to just manually add Bookmarks/Favorites and stop relying on them to figure out which sites we want on the list. Although I do think they should add a "Confirm/Cancel" pop-up if they are going to remove something permanently like that when we hit the "X". SinisterLefty (talk) 20:55, 18 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@SinisterLefty: I don't know about Chrome ... but I just discovered this on Mozilla. On the page of "sites most visited", there is a menu where you can "change settings" and such. In that menu, you can manually add in any website to the list of most visited websites. I tried it and it worked (in Mozilla). Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 03:47, 19 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Nice. SinisterLefty (talk) 04:11, 19 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved

Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 18:23, 19 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

July 19

Under Android, can you force a text message to be sent as MMS instead of SMS ?

Either 7.1.1 or 8.0.0. I would like the option to send text as multi-media, and thus come out of my data bucket rather than my text bucket. It seemed to happen accidentally for a while under 8.0.0, but now they are back to being sent as SMS. Obviously I can add something which requires MMS, like a pic, but I just want to send text. SinisterLefty (talk) 02:25, 19 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

How about adding a one-pixel-picture, like some tracking methods do. Most receipiants would probably not recognize it. Only danger: that someone mistakes this as an attempt to track. Steue (talk) 10:10, 19 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

You can try looking for an SMS/MMS app that has this as an option. Sorry can't recommend any because the generic app fulfills my needs so far. 93.136.39.191 (talk) 22:56, 19 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

On my 8.0.0 Android phone, turning mobile data off seems to force texts to be SMS, with mobile data on they are MMS. This would solve my problem, except that turning mobile data on and off obviously affects other things, too. SinisterLefty (talk) 03:03, 23 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

youtube subscriptions

I use gmail and the notifications(by email) for the youtube videos which I subscribed do not shown in my gmail inbox from yesterday. What may be the reason? How can I enable them shown in my gmail inbox when the videos are uploaded? I use samsung galaxy tab 3v also at times. Thank you.2402:4000:2381:5E6:E4C0:2BFD:56E9:2B33 (talk) 08:03, 19 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

If you go to https://www.youtube.com/feed/channels and click the bell on the right so that it goes solid, then you should be notified. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 09:24, 19 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Why do I get search results from Websites in Greek writing?

I entered a search term in English (in my favourite search engine), but the URL which was offered lead to a website written in Greek. This happened several times and is a waste of my time. Why is this? I mean: when I wanted a website written in Greek, I would already write my search term in Greek. Steue (talk) 09:39, 19 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Steue: You best ask at that searching site. :) My guess: the pages found have the terms you used in their <meta name="keywords" content="..."/> or <meta name="description" content="..."/> elements inside the HTML's <head> .... </head> elements. --CiaPan (talk) 10:25, 19 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Steue: There's another feature of some searching machines: they index pages also with terms which are used at other pages to link to them. For example, one can prepare a page article.html at some site with this HTML code inside: <a href="http://..../well-known-politician-homepage.html">saviour of the nation</a>. It would make a link that looks like saviour of the nation and leads to the well-known politician home page. When the searching machine scans that article, the 'saviour of the nation' term will be associated with the politician's homepage. Of course a single incident wouldn't weigh much, but if you do it multiple times at multiple sites, an indexing algorithm may increase the value of this association and at some point the 'saviour of the nation' query will return the politician's web page among the search results. (This is one of (most primitive) ways to 'position' a page in searching machines. You may find some links on this and related topics at Search engine optimization.) So, it is well possible the terms you used do not even exist in the Greek pages you find now, but they might be there some time ago, or are just used as links to those pages – and now the pages are found as reasonable answers for your query. --CiaPan (talk) 11:02, 19 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. As for your first answer: That was my guess too. Problem: As most websites do, on their contact page they insist on the user naming his email address, but I have none.

I tried changing the search language, but this search engine (MetaGer.de) has a bug which hits when I restrict the search to one language. Steue (talk) 11:13, 19 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

July 20

How do you download videos on Youtube?

Right-clicking the video doesn't seem to do anything, but yet the browser can play it. 67.175.224.138 (talk) 06:29, 20 July 2019 (UTC).[reply]

That's because the Youtube Web site uses the Media Source Extensions API to display the video (it's merged together on the fly using client-side JavaScript from little chunks of video, rather than being a single video file).

If you are able to log in to the account you uploaded the video(s) using, you can go to the https://takeout.google.com/ Web site, log in, and use the tool there to download the Youtube videos. This gives the best quality in some cases, returning the original video file, but sometimes doesn't work (and if you can't log in, it's not an option).

If you are unable to log in, you can use the "youtube-dl" program to retrieve the files. This also is able to get the automatically-generated captions and such. The options can be a bit overwhelming, but the documentation is good.

I use these options:

youtube-dl -i --geo-bypass --write-description --write-info-json --write-annotations --write-thumbnail --write-all-thumbnails --write-sub --write-auto-sub --all-subs -k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whatever

I don't know any good way to get the comments, sorry.

Hope this helps, good luck rescuing your videos! :) —{{u|Goldenshimmer}} (they/their)｜Talk｜Contributions 07:04, 20 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Anyways, I was gonna say, I've always downloaded videos using Realplayer. But only for IE, never for Firefox or Chrome. When viewing under IE, if I mouse over the video, a Realplayer dialog pops up, asking if I want to download. That was on my old, Windows 7 laptop at 2 GB RAM. I now use a Windows 7 laptop at 8 GB ram. Nothing happens when I mouse over. So I downloaded the latest version of Realplayer. Now when I mouse over the Youtube on Chrome, an icon pops up, but says it couldn't find a video to download on the page. If I right-click the video, and select retrieve url of the video, and post it in the Real dialog to look for the video, it still can't do it. Weird. Should also say, nothing happens when I mouse over on IE, and yet the Realplayer settings says to show dialog on IE after 7 seconds, and nothing happens after 7 seconds. So, I can only still download Youtube videos on my old laptop and yet they are both Windows 7! Strange. 67.175.224.138 (talk) 14:08, 20 July 2019 (UTC).[reply]

I pay to use YTD. Star Lord - 星爵 (talk) 10:47, 23 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

"cloud documents," "cloud pictures"

I recently restored files (using Carbonite Safe) to a new laptop (MS Surface) with Windows 10 Pro operating system. Instead of the expected Documents and Pictures folders, I found Cloud Documents and Cloud Pictures. I think (and hope), given the sizes reported, that the files reside on this computer. But I did get a couple of warnings during the restore that my OneDrive was full.

Under "This PC" (size 6.73 GB) there are Documents and Pictures folders with some, but not nearly all, of the files under the "clouds," that is under OneDrive (46.9 GB).

So where are my files, really? My cloud, which is full, is only 5GB. Is OneDrive on my computer, or in the cloud? Is my backup being copied to the cloud? Is there a setting to do that, or to turn it off?

The files in the "cloud" folders are marked with red x's and there is a persistent warning in my tray that my OneDrive is full.

--Halcatalyst (talk) 22:05, 20 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Since your OneDrive is full at 5Gb it contains only a fraction of your files. All other files have not been synchronized and remain in local folders on your computers. Ruslik_Zero 08:22, 21 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I prefer to have my files in the local folder, since I have a backup application. I don't care about OneDrive. How can I bring this about? --Halcatalyst (talk) 12:10, 21 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

What do you want to bring about? Ruslik_Zero 20:56, 22 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

1. Try accessing files when offline or

2. Download, burn and boot a Linux live CD or USB (example) and see if you can still access the files (a live CD doesn't know how to connect to the cloud) or

3. Copy the files to another disk drive or an USB stick with the internet connected.

Glad I don't have Win 10 to bang my head against teh cloud. 93.136.122.90 (talk) 03:28, 23 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

July 22

Output management

On the French wikipedia, we're wondering about Enterprise Output Management, whereas I only know Document management system. Has anyone ever heard about that ? Regards, Comte0 (talk) 14:21, 22 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Can Ethernet cables be used with video baluns to transfer TV signal?

Analog cameras are designed to transfer signal via coaxial cables. It is common to see people use video baluns to convert the signal back and forth to be transferred using Ethernet cables for ease of installation and cost efficiency. Now I am thinking of TV signal (from outdoor antennas), which is normally transferred using coaxial cables. Will it work if I replace the cables with balun + Ethernet ones? And is there any disadvantages? My run is less than 50 meters. -- Livy (talk) 18:39, 22 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds of little value to me. Any time you convert the signal to another form you will add noise. What you might want to do is boost the signal at the antenna using a powered amplifier. That will help to prevent the signal from degrading over the 50 meters of coax cable from the antenna. They are inexpensive. SinisterLefty (talk) 03:00, 23 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Nope it is not for saving several cents. The problem I am facing is running several cables inside a single conduit. I want to combine a TV signal, an analog camera, and a 100mbps connection into a single Cat6 cable. What I am not really sure is the difference between video balun and TV signal balun. As far as I know the video balun convert the signal from 75 to 100 ohm, and the TV balun from 450 to 75. I don't really understand what they mean. :( -- Livy (talk) 07:32, 23 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The impedance of a pair in a cat 6 cable is 100 Ohms. For the normal TV coax it is 75 Ohms, and the twinline antenna cable is 300 Ohms. However the ethernet cable is not rated for the TV signal frequencies, so it will be a bit lossy. Also if you try to send another data signals through the cable it will interfere with the TV signal, as that is much stronger. If your balun has the unbalanced part for 75 Ohms, and balanced for 100 Ohms, then it will be a match for on pair in the cable. But a "video" balun might only be rated for baseband video, less than 10 MHz, not VHF from 100-500 MHz. There are products that will do what you want eg here: https://www.radioparts.com.au/Product/00760500/cat01-4-way-rf-over-cat5-amplifier-kingray Graeme Bartlett (talk) 08:08, 23 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, this is pretty common. There's a substantial overlap in time between commercial office buildings gaining substantial Cat5 structured wiring, even these builidngs then switching largely to WiFi and producing spare cable, an increase in demand for cheap analogue security cameras and before the contemporary switch to digital video. So for those cameras, baluns over Cat5 are widespread, and still are. For one thing, Cat5 is easier to cable than co-ax – it's easier to pull into place and is more tolerant of tight bend radii.

Is it used for broadcast quality? No. Even for commercial video broadcast (conferencing etc.) you might notice a quality difference. This can depend on the cabling and jointing quality though.

Would I use it for domestic broadcast reception? Probably not. I might do it to put a small screen into a spare bedroom etc., but if I'd invested substantially in some sort of home cinema, I wouldn't compromise that by routing its video over this route. And if I were tempted to, I'd be looking at the highest quality baluns I could, not the security camera cheapies. Andy Dingley (talk) 09:17, 23 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Read a PostScript file in Windows

How can you read a PostScript file in Windows? I used to use GSView, but I just tried it and it didn't work. I found its website, which says that it has reached it end of life. I downloaded Ghostscript, but when I try to open the file, that isn't one of the options to open the file. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 22:25, 22 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

GSView requires Ghostscript. Ruslik_Zero 18:34, 24 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Computer prediction of date and time

Is there a computer program that will take a series of seemingly random dates and times, and predict what the next date and time in the series will be? I'm looking for something accessible to the public, and easily usable by a non tech savvy user. --Puzzledvegetable|💬|📧|📜 23:48, 22 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

If they are random, then there is no way to predict the next one. You could calculate the average time between the events, and add that to the last one to "predict" the next one, but that really tells you nothing. The next one could be 1 second later or a year later. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 00:41, 23 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

If it is a Poisson point process, the Poisson distribution can give you some probabilities on ranges where the next one occurs. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 05:56, 23 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Random by definition means unpredictable. However this sounds like an XY problem. 93.136.122.90 (talk) 03:29, 23 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Well the questioner did say "seemingly" random, which I take to mean there is a pattern but it's not immediately obvious. So is there a program that could crunch the numbers and find that pattern?--Shantavira|^{feed me} 09:09, 23 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Since "Puzzle" is in your name, I'm guessing this is a thought puzzle you are trying to solve. Could be difficult to do with a computer program, then, as it may involve some human activity, like dates and times of opening Olympic ceremonies, or something astronomical, like dates and times of meteor showers. The computer wouldn't know about those events, unless it's quite an impressive program and database. SinisterLefty (talk) 10:15, 23 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

There are at least three different processes that lead to semi-random appearance. First, the events can be random according to some distribution. You can try to find that distribution and estimate the parameters, but the best you can get is an expected value. Secondly, the events may follow a very regular pattern, but you only observe a subset. Consider a lighthouse that you observe through a busy highway - the lighthouse is using a regular pattern, but random lorries hide some of them. In that case, you can try to find the original pattern, maybe with something like a Fourier analysis. And thirdly, there may be a complex underlying process that guides the events. In general, it will be impossible to deduce that process, but for some classes it is possible. Machine learning, in particular recurrent neural networks like LSTMs might be able to predict new events. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 11:37, 23 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently I did not give enough information in the question. It obviously needs more context. The Elia sculpture has a computer that decides when to shoot out a burst of flame. A list of dates and times of past eruptions is available on the official website. My question boils down to whether or not there is a pattern in the seemingly random numbers, and whether a computer can be used to determine when the next eruption will occur. --Puzzledvegetable|💬|📧|📜 14:49, 23 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

That would be problem number 3 (arguably combined with number 2 - the eruptions are cancelled (or delayed?) if the weather is bad or there are persons too close to the sculpture). This can be abstracted as predicting the next number from a sequence of known numbers (where each number either is seconds from an arbitrary start time, or the time from one firing to the next) - or, equivalently, to predict a computable function from an initial segment. This is a well-studied case in Computational learning theory. As I said above, in general, this is impossible (as there is an infinite number of possible functions can continue any given finite sequence). But there are, of course, infinite subsets for which this is possible (the most funny one being a function that spits out the Goedel number of its own algorithm as the first number). --Stephan Schulz (talk) 17:50, 23 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

July 24

Can connecting a PlayStation to a TV damage it?

I offer a vacation property and some guest connected a PlayStation to my TV. After this client, the TV became jumpy. Although you can still watch it, it's nerve wrecking. It's like watching a YouTube video with poor bandwidth.

I tried re-synchronizing the channels, but the problem remains. I seem to remember that as a kid, people believed video game consoles could damage TV. However, TV and video game consoles are completely different nowadays.

Could it be that the PlayStation damaged the TV? Is there something that can be done?

C est moi anton (talk) 15:55, 24 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This is unlikely. PS connects to TV through HDMI, which can not do anything to your TV. Ruslik_Zero 18:26, 24 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

However, a loose connection could cause intermittent problems. Maybe check that something didn't come partially unplugged? (Hmm, this is my second time in a few weeks here suggesting people check their connections.) --69.159.11.113 (talk) 19:22, 24 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Mobile Watchlist empty

The mobile watchlist shows the edits other people make to my watchlist, but when I click on the "list" tab, it says I have no webpages saved. Is there anything I can do to fix that? - Sir 16:42, 24 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@@ Line 166: / Line 166: @@
 [[User:C est moi anton|C est moi anton]] ([[User talk:C est moi anton|talk]]) 15:55, 24 July 2019 (UTC)
 :This is unlikely. PS connects to TV through [[HDMI]], which can not do anything to your TV. [[User:Ruslik0|Ruslik]]_[[User Talk:Ruslik0|<span style="color:red">Zero</span>]] 18:26, 24 July 2019 (UTC)
+::However, a loose connection could cause intermittent problems.  Maybe check that something didn't come partially unplugged?  (Hmm, this is my second time in a few weeks here suggesting people check their connections.) --[[Special:Contributions/69.159.11.113|69.159.11.113]] ([[User talk:69.159.11.113|talk]]) 19:22, 24 July 2019 (UTC)
 == Mobile Watchlist empty ==