Please see the previous post for more info on ActionFTP, or perhaps you’d like to view a screenshot of the configuration window

Download: ActionFTP Beta 2.

Enjoy

Two Important Notes:

• This is a beta, so I’ve set it to expire in July (just to stop people from using old code that could (but hopefully won’t) contain bugs).
• You will require a license to use this, as WindowClippings doesn’t allow unregistered users to use add-ins.
• Update: The current (and newer) versions of WindowClippings no longer require licenses to use add-ins!

To save me rewriting it, I’ve taken this from the readme file I wrote earlier:

ActionFTP is a “Send To” add-in: it takes the processed clipping (after any extra “Filter” add-ins have done their stuff), saves a copy to your “temp” folder, and then opens it for editing/annotating/etc in a program of your choice (eg. Photoshop, Paint.Net, The GIMP), before automatically uploading it to any FTP server of your choice, and then copying the direct web-facing URL to the new clipping to your clipboard.

ActionFTP shares a number of features and similarities with Ari Glaizel’s “Send to FTP” add-in, which I used for months before developing ActionFTP. If you’re used to “Send to FTP”, you should find ActionFTP very familiar!

Installation instructions and some other notes are in the “README.txt” file, so it might be worth a quick read

Please feel free to suggest any changes or report any problems you encounter using the comments form below.

If you receive the following error message: “The addin failed to register”, it’s likely that the WindowClippings.exe and/or WindowClippings.dll file is an old version.

Update: By request, I’ve added a Yes/No prompt before opening the .exe you specify – very useful if you want to quickly upload a basic clipping and have no need to wait for Photoshop/etc to open

Download: ActionFTP Beta 1.

Enjoy!

Some of the basic specs:

• Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450
• OCZ 2×2GB 1066MHz DDR2
• Gigabyte X48-DQ6 Motherboard
• 4×750GB, 3×500GB, 1×250GB Samsung Spinpoint F1
• Antec Quattro 850W PSU
• Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit SP1

For the complete specs list, see the systems page. Thanks to Scan, eBuyer and CCL for selling all the components I wanted

I will be putting Fedora 9 on it (in 64bit of course) once it’s released.

So far the keyboard has been great – as with all other Apple products, it “just worked”, even in Windows! It’s much lower on the desk than any other keyboard I’ve used, and seems to be smaller without actually looking smaller, which will let me push it further out of the way when I need to use my laptop on my desk.

I haven’t yet tried it in any games or doing any serious coding, but from my experience chatting with it, writing comments on blogs, and just “using” it, I would say it’s probably the best keyboard I’ve used to date – I highly recommend buying one if you need a new keyboard

However a friend of mine let me borrow his Experts-Exchange account in our Design Workshop lecture today at Uni to search their database, and I found someone with the same problem as I had:

The solution is to copy the C:\Windows\inf folder from another fully working Vista installation over the top of the original*.

I’ve tried two other USB flash drives, and both worked within seconds of me plugging them in.

Yet another Microsoft product declared “finished” before it’s ready… Anyone else have/had this problem?

- Fr3d

* I actually renamed the original, and then copied the other computer’s inf folder, as Vista wouldn’t let me overwrite the folder

And that was a fresh start of iTunes, after it refused to play anything… Everything would work, it would even tell me it was playing… but no sound came out, and it didn’t move the progress bar.

It works well *most* of the time, but it crashes a lot more than it used to do when I had XP

I refuse to use anything else though; I’ll just wait until a patch is released

Edit: Seems to be working fine now – I think it was partially caused by a dodgy plugin.

So today, after removing 2 currently un-used and un-powered drives from the case, I swapped the cables around (and tidied them using some spare spiral wrap), so that it would stop moving the main boot drive to be third in the boot order preference list.

But of course, Windows didn’t like this, and I got an ever-so-helpful message on boot:

NTLDR is missing.
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart.

The fix was easy, I just swapped the cables back.

while ($system->has_changed()) { show_unhelpful_error_message(); }

Grub (The standard Linux boot loader) can handle you moving drives around… It barely blinked on mine; it just said “invalid path” (or something along those lines), and was very easy to correct.

But Windows? Oh no! That’s far to difficult… *sigh*.

I booted it up, went through all the Windows XP OOBE stuff and then the Acer software installation wizards, created the recovery DVD and then formatted it with an nLited XP Pro CD, which I created from an ISO provided by my University’s MSDN. It installed fine, but it took me a while to find the drivers for the hardware and then copy them over on my USB stick. After that I had to call up Microsoft as I had activated the XP code on a VMWare installation – I forget why :P Once Windows was done with all the software I like, and then put Fedora Core 6 on the 25GB free space I had left while formatting.

I copied over my Steam installation from my PC, and a couple of other games – I tried Half Life 2 at 1280×800 (Widescreen): I got over 60FPS on it… Considering this is a laptop, that’s amazing
GTI Racing was a similar story, once I’d stopped it trying to load at 1280×1024 – runs perfectly at 1024×768 (no widescreen support).
Need for Speed: Most Wanted didn’t work so well – not that I really expected it to. It runs *ok* at 800×600 and medium settings, but nothing more. I didn’t buy the laptop for gaming though – it’s for writing notes, coding on, and other stuff I need it for at University.

After doing all the above on it, it was quite late, and I went to bed, leaving it plugged in to get a really thorough first charge. However, when I woke up, and tried to turn the laptop on, it refused to even make so much as a beep or idle whirring noise!

The power LEDs under the “on” button and on the front panel flashes for a fraction of a second when I try and turn it on, but nothing else happens. So I’ve been in contact with Acer Support several times, and they asked me to send the charger back – they will then test it, and either send me a new one, or repair/replace the laptop, if it isn’t the charger that’s causing the problem.

However I borrowed a multi-laptop charger (one of those £100 iGo things with about 15 different “tips”) and tested my laptop on it, but it didn’t charge properly, nor would it turn on. So it would seem that it’s the laptop that’s broken. So I will send Acer back the laptop, not the charger… Hopefully they’ll fix or replace the broken part(s) quickly, and not send me a new laptop – I don’t want to have to reinstall all my stuff, and spend 20 minutes on the phone with Microsoft again :P

Because of this problem, I haven’t been able to test stuff like the battery life, or even how good movies look on the screen (games look great though) – I will update this post when I have a working laptop again

Apart from the lack of add-ons (extensions appear to have been renamed) compatible yet, it’s really good. The new skin is nice too, but is gonna need replacing with something that blends in better with my SoftCrystal Linux WindowBlinds theme. There’s a built-in spell checker in text boxes, and much better tab/window handling – it can now remember (or so it says) what tabs and/or windows you had open in your last session, and restore them!

So far, I haven’t noticed any memory leaks – I hope it stays that way! The feeds system is also a lot better – I never really used to use it as it was quite hard to add a new feed so it would show as a pop-up menu – it seems a lot better now

I’ll update this post with any extra stuff I find, as I find it.

Update: There is a new extensions, or rather add-ons manager. It’s a lot nicer than the old one, and it seems to check for updates when you start the browser, and offers to update them then and there, and it doesn’t need a restart (as it’s not yet fully loaded) afterwards

Get Firefox!

I ran into a couple of problems, the primary one being that I can’t use the built-in RAID controller on my motherboard, as it’s only SATA1, not SATA2, which is twice the speed. The drives do work on SATA1, but that defeats the purpose of buying fast drives! So I’m left with some left-over drives, as I can only plug in 4 at a time.

As it happens one of the four new drives has a big problem. Windows installed onto it very slowly, and it had issues… The PC would just freeze doing pretty much anything. So I’ve arranged to RMA it for a refund from eBuyer

But everything is fine now – I have a 200GB partition for Windows, my profile folder and programs, and a 30GB partition for Linux (and a 2GB swap partition for Linux too). Another 250GB drive for downloads, and the last one for Games. My other 250GB drive has my music and some old backups on it.

The next motherboard I buy will have at least 8 SATA2 (or better, if SATA3/4/5… is out by then!) ports, as well as at least 4 SATA2+ ports on a RAID controller to allow for future expansion

So the grand total of storage capacity I have here, and in my colocated server, comes to about 2.5TB*

* It would be more, but my 300GB Maxtor Onetouch died recently.