Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with filtering

Help me batch print text files on the Mac

grumblebee — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:19:03 -0800

OS X: I want to batch print all the files in a source-code library. They are actionscript files, which means they are text files that all end in a .as extension. The files are in a complex directory structure (one root folder but files in multiple subfolders), and there are non .as files that I don't want printed. When the files print, I need some kind of separator ( spaces, asterisks, new page...) between each file. I can't seem to find a FILTERABLE batch printing app for OSX -- one that can print all files (of a certain type or naming scheme) in all folders and subfolders starting at a certain root.

I thought about opening Terminal and doing this:

find . -name "*.as" | xargs cat > outfile.txt

And then printing outfile.txt. That would be perfect except that I won't easily be able to tell where one file begins and another ends. I need

*****************

or some other delimiter between files.

If it matters, this is for OS X Leopard.

I need an adjustment

orville sash — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 08:07:52 -0800

I want some help applying effects and filters in Pro Tools and Reason I am sort of a newbie to home recording. I have been recording in both Reason and Pro Tools. I have the following questions:

1.) When I record a track in Reason, is there a way to go back over that track and adjust the knobs on the devices (like, for example, distortion module) so that those adjustments also occur in playback?

2.) Is there a way to "fade in" a filter or effect in pro tools, rather than processing the entire track with that effect? So it sounds as it was recorded at first and then the effect gradually fades in, modifying the track.

Bonus question:

Is there a way to do what I asked in #2 with Acid (the program, not the substance)?

Please note: I'm a total n00b, so I am going to need very specific instructions, I.E.: (click on the region button and go to ...) I don't really have the vocabulary of these programs down pat yet.

Thank you for your help.

How cool can Wordpress get?

london302 — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:43:34 -0800

What is the coolest thing you have seen/done using Wordpress. Special relevance to a corporate website. Can I get it to do cool stuff for me like IP filtering and more? I am not a web developer or a designer but am willing to read and learn and any help will be appreciated.

The site itself will be hosted as a wordpress theme and the client will use it for updating it (CMS). What I was wondering was if there are any nice plugins/tricks which would allow us to do some of the following cool things:

1. Embed Google documents which can be shared either the whole world or in a password protected section (particularly interested in presentations and spreadsheets)

2. Can we present a different set of pages to visitors from different part of the world based on their IP addresses?

3. We are planning to use Dreamhost as our web host - any good or bad experiences with Wordpress/plugins?

4. Can we backdate postings in our press release section?

No! Not my Gmail and Facebook! How to convince work not to block?

raf — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 13:33:26 -0800

Work is thinking about banning access to Gmail, Facebook, Hotmail and other third-party email and social networking sites. Help me convince them not to? My employer (a law firm) is very close to blocking access to third-party email and social networking sites, purportedly because such sites are conduits for "viruses." I would like to convince them this is a very bad idea, for a variety of reasons: (1) it's unnecessary, since there is no actual virus problem from such sites; (2) it's counterproductive, since it will block various legitimate work-related uses and will prevent people from keeping up with family and personal issues; and (3) it's insulting and childish.

Are there other arguments I should be making? Do you have citations or references that would help?

Thanks!

Turn off Instiki spam/flood protection

djgh — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 11:18:36 -0800

Is there any way to stop spam protection on Instiki? I run a local version of Instiki (0.12) on my Mac (OSX 10.4.11) which I keep notes on. This isn't an as-you-go operation - I'll take notes by hand, and then at the end of the day or week sit down and try and type them all in.

Problem is, Instiki's flood/spam protection is stopping me. Is there any way of turning it off? I'm more than happy to dive in using Terminal. I've Googled around, but there doesn't seem to be a ready-made solution yet.

How do I make my allergies combine with work?

SpecialK — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 13:54:45 -0800

Allergy meds wear off. Head asplodes. Only issue: Head's asploding at work. For whatever reason, maybe the heavy rains we had mid-summer this year, my allergies are KILLING me. It's likely to be ragweed and/or grasses, both of which I'm highly allergic to.

I'm under the care of an allergist, who has me on Allegra-D, Clarinex, Claritin, AlleRX day/night, and we're thinking hard about eyeing Zyrtec... I just hate to add another to what I'm already taking. I can't take benadryl.

Even under all that medication, if I go outside and drive down the road that leads to my house, I start thinking about what I'll do if I need to hit myself with my Epi-pen as my eyes tear up, my jaw and throat gets sore/swells, and my sinuses start dumping mountains of snot down the back of my throat. Not to mention that Histamine reactions make me all sleepy. The car's a/c is even on recirc at that point. :-P

Indoors in my house, I'm fine. I have a HEPA filter in the A/C duct, a portable HEPA filter in my room, and I vacuum with a HEPA-rated vacuum every day. Except for the swelling in my throat, my symptoms usually lessen within a few minutes of getting back in my sterile home environment.

I've thought about buying a filter mask, which wouldn't be out of the norm for the crazy group of programmer, video nerd, and ad sales guys I work with, but that's not the most comfortable thing to wear on a 90 degree day even if we are in an office.

Are there any solutions I've missed? I'm thinking of either getting a doctor's note suggesting heavily that I telecommute for the next few weeks till the allergens pass, or just taking a week of vacation.

No More V1@grA

tmcw — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 12:45:15 -0800

PHPFilter: I'm about to write part of a web application that allows visitors to submit ratings and comments for events. How can I keep spam to a minimum? I've discovered, from past efforts, that essentially anything with a textbox will get spammed on the net. There isn't going to be user registration for this, and almost I will be monitoring for certain IPs, it will not be filtered.

So, the parts are CodeIgniter, PHP, MySQL. On a PHP4 server I have virtually no control over.

Any ideas? I'd like to avoid captcha if possible.

Thanks!

Internet Parental Controls

snsranch — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 16:45:32 -0800

What free software do you use to filter the internet for kids? The kids are getting plugged in today and I will feel much better knowing that they won't be able to access stuff like goatse. At 9 and 10, they are too young to be scarred for life.

What do you use for your mini MeFites? Free is preferable, but anything functional and cheap is good. (I've scoured the internet, but I'd like YOUR opinions!

Any ideas, considerations? Thanks in advance.

School Filtering

JABof72 — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 09:09:21 -0800

I can't download torrents at school (JC in Tucson). Pages won't load. Solutions? Thanks

Who's blocking my Web site, and why?

elmwood — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 10:26:52 -0800

Is there any way I can figure out how a Web site is classified by different Web filtering services and systems? If they classify it incorrectly, is it difficult to make my case and get the classification changed? I found a Web filtering service, SmartFilter, that classifies a site that I run, dealing with a niche professional subject, as "Chat". (It's not a general interest site or something dealing with celebrities, games, partisan politics, adult subject matter, dating, or the like.) However, it classifies a very similar site, dealing with the same niche professional subject, as "General News." Unfortunately, it means that site may have an unfair advantage over my site, because it will be less likely that site will be blocked by employers.

Inhibiting fuzzy search possible?

Rash — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 16:17:16 -0800

How can I force many sites' search functions to not treat the entry in the Title: field as a keyword? For example, on Amazon, Abebooks, and my local library, if I enter a title of a book that's a single word (like Snoopy) the results are any title containing that word (and sometimes, not even). But there IS a book with that one-word title, published in 1958 -- how to restrict the results returned to what I entered? Is there perhaps some magic control character one can use, to force an exact search?

Please note that I'm not looking for Snoopy, it's just an example that demonstrates this ~~annoyance~~ feature.

Help me filter the porn!

dance — Sun, 28 May 2006 15:35:55 -0800

For my work, I've been asked to prevent a client's son from browsing porn on the family computer without spending money on NetNanny style products. I confess to encountering some difficulty. I have set Win XP to use the MVPS hosts file and tried a couple of free porn filters but have come up against a brick wall. Help me! Further info:

The free porn filter I tried was useless. It was poorly engineered and though it promised operation at the TCP/IP layer, it was only able to (poorly) filter Internet Explorer traffic. I need FireFox filtering, too.

One idea I had was routing all requests through a Squid proxy running on a dedicated server? Would that work?

Recovering background conversation from a live music recording?

cortex — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 09:02:20 -0800

Help me recover background conversation from this stereo live recording. I have a live recording—here (mp3, ~5M)—that has conversation in the background, mostly on the left side of the stereo field.

The recording is from a DV cam with builtin stereo mic heads. Sound quality is kind of sketchy to begin with.

So how can I best isolate the conversation? I don't need to erase the music so much as make the conversation clearer and more distinct.

I have access to decent consumer sound tools (using Audition as my base of operations these days). I can, in theory, do various sorts of filtering. My question is techniques. How do I do this?

die spam die.

delmoi — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 09:04:23 -0800

Help me deal with email: I have a couple domain names, and I get obscene amounts of spam and garbage email. I'd like to setup a system to help deal with all of it, but I'm not very familiar with server-side email setup beyond the basics. Basically what I'd like to do is setup rules such that if an address matches (something like *@mydomain1.com or delmoi@mydomain2.net) it could be either sent through, dropped, or sent through a sender verification step, that would require someone with the FROM address to reply, or go to a URL and type in one of those captchas. It would also be nice if someone with a particular email address would only have to authorize once.

I've given up on the idea of AI-based spam filtering, which just doesn't work when you have a 10000:1 signal to noise ratio.

Following that step, it would be nice if I could filter mail into different folders and then read everything with IMAP and keep it on the server.

Now, I know the tools to do this exist somewhere, but where, and what, are they? I have a basic Debian installed on my virtual host. and the mail server is exim (And yes, obviously I'll clear it with my hosting provider before sending out large amounts of email :P)

Websense filtering out WLUW internet radio...

TiggleTaggleTiger — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 08:26:07 -0800

Skirting the mean cop that is Websense filtering! I just want to listen to WLUW in my office! Is there an easy way? We've got Websense at our office (a big hospital in Chicago) and I tend to see the blockpage a lot... you know, lunchtime porn surfing and whatnot... normally I don't mind but I really want to listen to some WLUW. KEXP is alright but has been a bit hit-or-miss recently. Trouble is, for some reason WLUW is being blocked by Websense! WTF?
I tried pinging the site and then hitting it by IP - no dice, Websense still catches it.
So, I figure I've got three options - can someone suggest more? Perhaps easier ones?
- Go home at lunch, turn on Shoutcast, tune in to WLUW, then just hit my broadcast from work.
- Talk to the IS people and ask them to remove WLUW from the Websense props file
- Buy a small radio and tune in the old-fashioned way (oh wait, that won't work as WLUW doesn't come in well anywhere south of Belmont...)

*sigh

Filtering for text uniqueness in Excel

pmbuko — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 12:24:42 -0800

I dumped a week's worth (about 1400 rows) of successful connection data from my company's VPN concentrator logs into a .csv file containing the following columns (A through D): Date, Time, Username, Source IP. I am trying to filter the list in Excel so it only shows the most recent connection data per username, but I can't figure out how to accomplish this programmatically. I've sorted it by username, then by date, then by time. Visually, I know I only want the last row of data per username, but again, how to get Excel give me just those rows is beyond me. Since I need this done quickly, I have already begun manually deleting duplicate logon rows, keeping only the most recent entry. I know there's gotta be a better way!

Folksonomied Better Business Bureau

mecran01 — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 15:40:00 -0800

The better business bureau seems to be kinda worthless. Is there a generic website where I can go to rate local businesses that isn't awash with tons of ads or filler? I'm thinking something craigs-list-ish, but searchable, with Amazonian filtering (the website, not the large women, although that would be cool too). I think I just got ripped off by a tire store, and I'm tired of going through life a victim. Lazyweb, take me away! If such a site does not exist, would someone please monetize this idea right now and give me stock?

How can I get my site off internet filter blacklists?

BobJordan — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 06:54:49 -0800

I have a website that I maintain for my middle school soccer team. It has the usual stuff: practice schedules, game schedules, rosters, stats, etc. Sometimes I will post fun things related to soccer on the site. For some reason, the site is being blocked by internet filtering software at the school, the public library, and even in some homes. What can I do to get my site unblocked by filtering software?

Content filter for Firefox?

TheDonF — Sun, 09 Jan 2005 08:28:25 -0800

Is there a Firefox extension that filters adult content a la IE's Content Advisor? I'm doing well at converting people to FF, but one colleague needs a content filter for his kids. Unless my Google-fu is badly broken, there doesn't seem to be one and, unless I'm very blind, FF doesn't have one by default. Mozilla update also brings blanks, but I can't believe that no-one's thought of building one yet.

Gmail spam-filter wonkiness

LondonYank — Thu, 25 Nov 2004 00:03:19 -0800

GmailFilter: Is it just me, or does Gmail's spam-filtering engine occasionally (and sometimes regularly) just give up the ghost? I have a legacy personal email account dating back from the dark ages which receives over 300 emails a day, 95% of which is spam. I used to pull this mail down into Outlook and use SpamNet to filter it, but I recently set the legacy account to redirect through my Gmail account, which normally catches all but about 5% of the spam - Result! However, I find that Gmail regularly (about once a week) decides to let another 5-10% of the spam through - and in the last couple of days it seems to have fallen over completely (i.e. I am getting new spam every minute or so). Anyone else notice anything funny going on?

I'm picking up radio stations on my guitar amp, how do I correct this?

Mars Saxman — Wed, 04 Feb 2004 09:10:03 -0800

I've just moved to a new apartment and now I can hear a radio station playing through my guitar amp. How do I correct this? I'm playing an SG, which uses humbucking pickups. The amp is solid-state, not tube-driven. The apartment was built in the teens and the wiring pretty much sucks. The amp is plugged into the only grounded outlet in the unit. The signal I hear is always the same station - NPR - and changing the amplifier's level or EQ controls has no effect on the sound. The apartment is located on Capitol Hill in Seattle, and there are radio transmitters nearby.

I can't just live with it and play louder to drown it out, because I have a home studio and I record through this amp. I've looked on the web but don't really know what I'm searching for. I've gotten completely different answers from different people: everything from "buy a power conditioner" to "stick a toroidal magnet on the power cord". I'm looking for two pieces of information: a technical explanation for the phenomenon and instructions for correcting it. Thanks!