Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2008 September 3

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September 3

Backing up .wav Files on DVD-R

Hello. I have Nero 6. How can I back up .wav files onto a DVD-R? Thanks in advance. --Mayfare (talk) 00:43, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Can't you just, 1. put a DVD-R in the drive, 2. open it in Windows, 3. drag your files onto it, 4. click burn or whatever? I'm assuming you want to back them up as files rather than try to burn them in a way that is readable by a DVD or CD player. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 01:32, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Sorry for the misunderstanding. I am backing up music files on a DVD-R so that a CD or DVD player can read them. --Mayfare (talk) 01:53, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

There's no DVD equivalent to an audio CD. See this thread. If you just burn the WAV files to a DVD as 98.217.8.46 suggested, it will probably work in many modern players. MP3 or DVD-Audio would probably work in more. -- BenRG (talk) 03:04, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Hate to point this out but the above person is way way wrong. There are no CD players that will read DVDs (that I know of) as they need a different laser assembly. If your CD player specifically states it will read from a DVD then that is fine but I have never seen one. However if you use a DVD player as a CD player there is a good chance it will read wav files straight from the disc, and that would just requre you to drag them onto the DVD in nero and burn it. Also there is a small but good chance your CD player will play MP3s though, but only through a CD. If you encode at 320kbps you shouldn't notice a difference between the CD and MP3 unless you have really good speakers, but you'll be able to fit quite a lot more songs on it. Also the above person mentions DVD Audio but encoding a CD to this is pointless since it uses up almost as much space and you don't gain quality (you never do when converting audio to a higher bitrate) and may actually lose it due to the transcoding from CD audio to DVD audio 88.211.96.3 (talk) 10:03, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

You're right, I shouldn't have said "many players" since it's probably still true that few of them have a DVD pickup. DVD-Audio supports lossless audio at a variety of sampling rates including 44.1 kHz, so it's unlikely that there'd be any transcoding loss. It wouldn't save much space (it would save a little if you used MLP), but that's not the point—the point is that, unlike WAV-on-a-DVD, it's an official standard, if not an especially popular one. -- BenRG (talk) 11:00, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Back to the original question: how about converting your wav files to mp3's? There is a very good chance your DVD or CD player would be able to play them. Sandman30s (talk) 14:42, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Mobile applications and plug-ins

Where does a modern mobile phone store its applications and plug-ins - on its flash memory card (or whatever a mobile uses) or on the SIM card? I would have thought the flash card, but a colleague is wondering if they might be stored on the SIM card. We both initially thought that the limit of a SIM card's storage is a few kilobytes of contact details, but a PowerPoint we've received on some new Bluetooth technology is causing some confusion. Thanks in advance. --81.171.134.226 (talk) 09:58, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

The SIM has a very small data capacity, and it wouldn't be useful to store apps on it since any mobile phone capable of running said apps would have some sort of inbuilt flash memory at the very least. Even if you could fit an app on the SIM I doubt the phone manufacturer would have a way of executing data from it because it isn't needed. It should be noted that the SIM isn't even primarily for storing numbers but is the phones way of authenticating your credentials against the network for billing purposes and allowing you to use the network. 88.211.96.3 (talk) 10:09, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Woah hold on actually have a look at Java Card. It seems I'm wrong and you can actually run small programs off the sim but it looks to be mostly security stuff 88.211.96.3 (talk) 10:13, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

E-mail

Does deleting a message from your sentbox delete it from the inbox of the person you sent the message to (if they have not replied)? 124.181.254.143 (talk) 10:59, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

No. The recipient's copy is stored on the recipient's mail server (typically managed by their ISP or by Google/Microsoft/whatever). Unless you control that server or can log in to the recipient's account, there's nothing you can do to delete the message. -- BenRG (talk) 11:11, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Not that this will help you if you have already sent the email but if I ever need to send anything that I might need to change I send the message as a link to a .txt file (or if it needs to be visual then a .jpg) hosted on my webspace and for one I can delete the file if I need to and I can also see if the message has been viewed yet via my logs. Gunrun (talk) 12:27, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

If the mail is sent internally in your organization/company/whatever, your system may have functionality that allows you to "recall" a message. Microsoft Exchange, for example, has an option that partially allows you to recall messages (though the recipient may circumvent it if s/he really wants to). I remember eight years ago or so I worked at a place that ran a system called FirstClass and then you could completely recall any message sent to other people in the system even if they had read it (provided it was not moved from their inbox). Jørgen (talk) 19:26, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

I've never thought of that Gunrun! Very clever indeed... ;) SF007 (talk) 07:02, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

mobile phones

explain about bluetooth? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 117.197.196.130 (talk) 11:19, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Bluetooth - Jimmi Hugh (talk) 11:22, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Technology...grr...

I messed up an SD card by taking it out of my camera while it was accessing the card. Now it won't format on the camera or my computer. WTF? 31306D696E6E69636B6D (talk) 16:04, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Maybe PhotoRec can help. And maybe the camera is saying "humans ... grrr...". --LarryMac | Talk 16:09, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

I have formatted "lost" SD cards on my Linux box. If you know someone with Linux, ask them if they can do a mkfs.vfat for you. -- kainaw™ 16:24, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

I had a similar problem. I fixed it by booting the pc in DOS, running fdisk and deleting the existing partition then making a new one, reboot the pc, run "format E:" (replace E with your cards drive letter) and then it worked. If you don't have DOS already you can download it here and run it from the livecd. JessicaThunderbolt 17:17, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

I did a circut test and found that the card had fried. It's useless. Sorry...31306D696E6E69636B6D (talk) 13:07, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Mounted filesystem going read-only

I have an external SCSI device that periodically goes read-only on my Redhat system. Is there some way (I don't really care how) to tell it that it can never ever under any circumstances go read-only? I don't care if writing to the disk is going to cause a black hole and destroy the earth. The disk must always be read-write. -- kainaw™ 17:09, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

If the filesystem is going read-only without your intervention, something is wrong. The Linux kernel doesn't change a filesystem write-enabled status without user intervention and without reporting to dmesg. So, there must be something in your dmesg saying what happened. You probably have a filesystem corruption that was detected by the FS layer of the kernel, and it remounted it read-only to prevent further data corruption.

If you don't care for the data, just redirect your writes to /dev/null. --Juliano (T) 19:17, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

For a change of pace, I'll answer the question instead of attacking the motive. The behavior of ext2/ext3 filesystems when a disk error occurs can be altered with a mount option. Look for errors=remount-ro in your /etc/fstab and change it to errors=continue, or add -o errors=continue to your mount command line. If the option is not given in fstab or on the mount command line, it will be read from the disk superblock, which you can modify with tune2fs -e continue. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 21:01, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

I have errors=continue in fstab. I just removed the journal and restored it. Of course, I did another lengthy e2fsck fixing all problems (bad inodes) and scanning for bad sectors (none found). If it goes read-only again, I'll alter the superblock to reinforce that I want it to stay read-write. Thanks. -- kainaw™ 23:37, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

I've seen this problem in the past when using an external USB drive as my boot drive in SuSE 9.x or maybe 10,x (I think is was a Seagate drive) - the drive would autonomously decide to power-off after not being used for a while - and for some reason Linux would get really upset about that and mark it read-only...which of course screwed everything up from that point on (because stuff like /tmp and my swap space would be RO) and eventually resulted in the system locking up on me. I never did find a fix for it - it was flagged as a "known problem" by SuSE and plenty of people in my local Linux usergroup had seen something like it. But I'd be surprised if an external SCSI drive would power down like that without the OS telling it to. However, just for grins you might try getting rid of the power-save options and see what happens. SteveBaker (talk) 10:45, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Default "home page" when opening a browser?

Are there statistics that show what web pages or categories of web pages people tend to use as their "default home page" that first opens when opening their web browser? Mine, for example, is set to Google for quick searching, but I can imagine others setting it to their company's Intranet, a weather page, news page, etc.? --142.108.107.93 (talk) 19:32, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

I can't find any statistics on the web, but I'd imagine that search engines and browser default homepages would be the most common. Without conducting an extensive survey it's impossible to know for sure. JessicaThunderbolt 19:49, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Mine is set to about:blank — Shinhan < talk > 09:33, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

I once used a friends computer and started his browser, and there was a page with many scantily clad young women. I'm like "Dude, every time you start your browser? Seriously, man, that ain't healthy!" 83.250.202.36 (talk) 17:46, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

My "default home page" is the 50-70 tabs I had open the last time I closed the browser. --Carnildo (talk) 22:38, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

webcomic

I'm trying to remember a webcomic I like.

I can remember the plots of some of the individual strips, and it is done in the style of this one, which I found called Sinister Bedfellows. In the one I am thinking of, there are usually three photographs, and something like newspaper cut out words put over them. It's a poetic webcomic.

• One I remember had the words "my house burnt down yesterday, it feels better everytime"
• One involved sending his heart to someone for Christmas, but he couldn't because it was broken.

Thanks, maybe you can help :) I'm looking through all of the comics listed at List of webcomics, and have been trying to search through Google. I really need to find the site! Mac Davis (talk) 19:45, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

I found it! Sorry about that. The comic was called "a softer world." Mac Davis (talk) 19:51, 3 September 2008 (UTC)