@pvanni

If the floppy cable is inserted backwards, you'll know it: The floppy-drive read light will come on and stay on. Does no damage to the drive or the computer, though. Simply power off, turn that end of the ribbon over and reinsert it.

Hmmmm... while this is not directly connected with the problem discussed... I did have a weird problem once with my KVM switch. (I don't have any Amiga hardware connected with my KVM switch, though....)

I had switched to a new dirt-cheap multimedia keyboard from Big Lots... which worked for awhile after the systems were powered on... but then after a few hours, in Windoze XP the mouse started behaving oddly, and so did the keyboard. The scrollwheel on the mouse started causing the browser to behave as if I'd hit the back-button and front-bottom instead... steadily scrolling backward and forward between pages instead of scrolling the page up and down like it was supposed to. And the keyboard switched to all caps on its own, or something of the sort, and I couldn't get it back out, and the KVM stopped responding to the ScrollLock key.

If I powered all the systems off and powered them back on... and then left it a few hours, things went back to misbehaving again as described above.

When I powered everything off and switched back to the previous keyboard, all the problems went away. And when I later switched to a different multimedia keyboard, it also worked fine.

I'm guessing that the cheap keyboard took slightly more juice than was expected, and was drawing down the available power coming through the KVM switch meant for the keyboard and mouse... so that both devices started misbehaving after a few hours.

At that, it might have been a faulty keyboard (I haven't tried it on a KVM-less machine yet...)

Just something to bear in mind...!

@Billsey

I have had no end of spammers on my web-forum as well... I get a steady trickle of people posting messages containing links to pr0n sites, male-enhancement drug sites, Russian mail-order dating sites, and probably any number of other things...

Different web-BBS packages have different countermeasures, though... I have installed a number of them, but it hasn't completely stopped the spammers. But, then, spammers are constantly changing their tactics and rewriting their bots to get around the countermeasures.

They've made email a hellhole of uselessness with all their junk, now they've moved on to web forums. Dern their scaly hides!

@bean

Well, the reason I brought this up is... more and more users are going to be using these things in a LAN environment with multiple OSs on hand, like I do right now, and likely will be storing their music on some kind of NAS (Network Attached Storage device). Which means we'll want to interoperate with the already common schemes for storing MP3 albums.

Since Windoze is pretty dang common out there, and gadzillions of people use Media Player to rip their CDs... it makes sense to follow that album-art scheme, or at least to recognize and use the album art within TuneNet when present in this form. I.e. have an option to automatically display the picture in a little screen on the TuneNet interface.

In fact, I kinda get the impression that Media Player places the album art files there even if you didn't rip the songs with it originally and you just play them with it. Sometimes it even updates them with new art!

I'm not necessarily saying TuneNet should create the album-art files using the exact same naming scheme... but it does look like a perfectly sensible system. And I'm guessing the long string of hexadecimal numbers is probably provided by the online database (Gracenote?) that the album data comes from, and presumably the number comes from the unique code that I'm guessing goes on each CD album master-disc. Or maybe its a code created by Gracenote itself for each album. Your guess is as good as mine...

@bean

Quote:

Are you saying here that the album art will be stored in the same directory as the related MP3s, or that it will be stored in its own directory relative to the MP3s?

I have noticed that Media Player on the peecee places the album art in the same dir as the particular MP3 album.

I.e., you rip the album "Ricochet" by Tangerine Dream and wind up with the dir path [music albums]/Tangerine Dream/Ricochet/ and when you venture inside .../Ricochet/, you find:

01 - Ricochet, Pt. 1.mp3
02 - Ricochet, Pt. 2.mp3
AlbumArt_{long-string-of-hexadecimal-numbers}_Large.jpg
AlbumArt_{long-string-of-hexadecimal-numbers}_Small.jpg
AlbumArtSmall.jpg
Folder.jpg

(The above is how it appears on my dedicated file-server machine, except that I'm too lazy to hand-copy over the actual hexadecimal numbers in the filenames... )

@klesterjr

Course, the fact that Microshaft independently glommed onto the name Zune for their new soon-to-be-a-flop MP3 player might be a problem.

Any talk of a possible new name for Zune, the GUI?

Quote:

It would probably be worth it to get FreeBasic ported...

www.freebasic.net

FreeBasic is an open-source descendant of the same BASIC that AmigaBasic was a port of.

It's a compiled BASIC rather than an interpreted BASIC now, though...

Quote:

Hisoft BASIC
ACE
Pure BASIC
True BASIC

Quote:

CanDo
Arexx
Rebol

Quote:

edit: added some more BASICs

Interesting. So Powericons style icon support isn't integrated into the OS yet?

@AmigaHeretic

Well, at least on the Amiga, browsers typically add the originating URL to the file's comments field in the directory...

That's one idea I wish that Microsoft had stolen for use in Windoze... :-|

One thing that would be handy would be a way for all the rules posts to be prominantly and easily accessible from the main page.

Either create a way to "sticky" them (make them always appear at the top) or create a special link that takes you to a page containing them all. If we "sticky" them, though, they might be better off only "stickied' on the main page of a given subforum. Say, the rules post for the hardware development forum (if there is one) appears stickied on the top page of the hardware development forum, but not the tops-posts-of-all-the-forums page. In this case, then, there would need to be a link on the top-posts-of-all-the-forums page that would then take you to a page containing just the stickied posts of all the forums, that way, someone who only posts from the top-posts-of-all-the-forums page would still (be able to) see the rules posts for those forums...

edit:

Another thing that would be nice to have: On the main page, where it shows the top posts from all the threads mixed together, it should be possible to mouse over the little icon that represents the forum the post is from, and have it show a balloon-text thingy identifying the forum name. And clicking on the little icon should take you to that forum page.

edit2: typo

When I download archives from Aminet, I always download the appropriate .readme file along with it, so that the dir that contains the archives also contains a buncha readme files.

So, they're going to remove some features from the production model, eh? Which features are slated to be removed? Or do you know?

Interesting that the system was designed from a set of multimedia-machine specs... Maybe some of us can put the Panda board into a replica radio/TV case and have the Amiga answer to MythTV of *nix fame.

I gather there is a better NTFS filesystem sorta thing in the works for Linux, one that will read and write NTFS partitions reliably, but it is still very much in the testing stage... :-|

Linux still can't really write to NTFS reliably, that's why most of the time Linux boxes treat NTFS partitions as read-only by default.

Incidentally, speaking of copying stuff on a peecee from an NTFS drive to a FAT32 drive... it happens that really, really large files (say, one that's a coupla gigs or bigger) can't be moved to a FAT32 partition, even if you've got oodlie gobs of space there, due to the way the FAT32 filesystem works...

@samwel

We're all a buncha non-conformist conformists, aren't we?

Expanding by 100% each year? That means they've been doubling their employees each year! WOOHOO!!!

Done. Listed all the Amigas I have, including the boxed-up ones...