Another handy tip for wrangling with online life.

Situation: An online service requires verification of your new phone number. It’s a home phone, not a mobile, but they still send you an SMS message. This is delivered, great. But… your phone service has turned it into a spoken voicemail. The user only hears the vital verification number being read aloud thus…

Two hundred and ninety-five thousand two-hundred and forty-two

Problem: This is puzzling to many users, especially older people. Even if they can write it all down in time, what are they meant to input into the confirmation-box on the website? 20095000242? 295000242? 295,000,242?

Solution: None of the above. What the above read-aloud number actually translates to, in numbers is this…

295242

So write it down ‘as spoken’ first, then translate it back to (most likely) a six-digit number.

The above should also work if the same method is used by your service for ongoing two-factor verification. That’s if the same phone is also used for two-factor.

How to block the mouseover pop-ups on individual Archive.org search results, in the annoying new flickering / flashing search interface…

1. Go to the top bar of your Web browser | click on the uBlock Origin extension icon | Click on its cogwheel icon.

2. In the uBlock Origin Dashboard | go to “My Filters”.

3. In the My Filters list, add the new line…

archive.org##tile-hover-pane

… and save. Reload the results page. The item ‘preview’ popup panels will have all been blocked. You can still right-click on any result tile, and launch a new tab showing the main page for that result.

The above is for a user who uses the Grid view.

The above fix at least removes one of the main annoyances of the regressive new UI.

How to find and delete small pure silences in an audio recording?

These silences are known in the audio recording trade as “dropouts” or “RF hits”, commonly caused by tiny failures in radio microphone transmissions. But they can also be caused by having to record on a desktop PC from a huge video that’s streaming down to someone with a relatively poor Internet connection. The video playback stutters and stalls a bit. Each stall results in a perfectly silent pause in the recording.

So let’s assume you’ve either captured a field audio recording using a flaky RF mic, or have captured the audio going through your desktop sound card by using something like Total Recorder. Either way you find there are silent skips, and now you need to delete these tiny bits of silence. All 250 of them. Automatically.

The powerful audio repair suite iZotope RX 7 should help here, and do this for you in a few clicks. But rather surprisingly it doesn’t have such a thing. You instead have to have a PhD in using its complex ‘Ambience Match’ and ‘Spectral Repair’ modules. There must be an easier way for non-professionals.

There is. The quick, easy, automatic and free solution is actually (you guessed it) good old Windows desktop freeware. Here’s the workflow…

1. In this case the freeware really is a dinosaur, or rather the Wavosaur. Download and run. Admire the groovy retro 1995-style icon with the dinosaur face. Actually it’s not that old, and the Wavosaur’s current version is July 2020.

2. Load your .WAV file into the mighty mammal-munching maws of the Wavosaur. Then go: Tools | Silence Remove | Custom. It’s that simple.

3. “-90” = find real pure silence, not just lecture room ‘ambience’. “0.25” = the silence is only to be deleted if longer than 0.25 seconds. Run “OK”.

4. Wavosaur will stomp through the .WAV and find and delete silence, also close up the resulting gaps. There is no notification this has been done, but it has. When you go to see if it worked, you won’t be able to find all those former “flat bits” in the audio signal. Though the “ambient room noise” heard in the speaker’s pauses should still be there in the waveform.

That’s because they had a tiny bit of noise in them, lifting them above the -90db threshold needed for deletion.

5. Now you can save and then load the cleaned .WAV into Ocenaudio (also freeware, and a great replacement for Audacity) and from there quickly save out to an .MP3 file.

If you’re going to do this a lot, note that Wavosaur can do MP3 export, but it first needs lame_enc.dll installed correctly.

How to remove an erroneously added hyperlink, from just one cell in Excel 2007. Problem: Sometimes you paste and there’s a hyperlink formed, sometimes not. It seems a bit arbitrary, regardless of what you have set in your Autoformat settings. Once a live hyperink appears in a cell, there is no right-click | “Remove Hyperlink” in Excel 2007. Only the ability to add a hyperlink. No “remove hyperlink” on right-click.

Solution in Excel 2007:

1. Select just the hyperlinked cell.

2. Top bar | Home | go along to the far end of the bar, where the “Sort and Find” is. Next to this is “Clear” and there you select “Clear Formats”. That should do it. You now have plain text in your cell, and it’s no longer a live hyperlink. Later versions of MS Office Excel also added a “Clear Hyperlinks” option here, at the foot of the “Clear” selection options. But here we’re assuming you’re stuck with good olde 2007.

3. Save.

Task: To download and safely archive a useful but very recalcitrant user-forum, one that may be at risk of going offline.

Roadblocks:

1) The forum archives can only be accessed by drop-downs that require you to input precise from-to dates (see above). Harvesters / bots cannot get past such barriers, and cannot reach the forum’s ‘deep history’ of per-post threads.

2) Even if you had the individual URL of each and every forum thread, only a proper Web browser can get and archive each forum thread URL. Automated harvesters / bots / capture utilities are quickly blocked by the forum’s server.

3) AutoIT or the newer AutoHotKey might be a solution on Windows, by calling Internet Explorer to load the URLs and then save each as a file. But my intensive searches find only arcane code fragments, and one code function. Nothing complete or even part-way complete.

The following solution thus requires a bit of manual work, though not too much. It is for a relatively small forum or sub-forum, of technical coding advice (in this case Python for 3D software) without a great weight of images being posted. In this case there are 16 master pages of links to some 500 actual forum posts, and each post has user replies appended. Each post displays as a single scrolling page and is not paginated.

Solution:

1. Find the earliest forum thread date, then manually go through and create a per-year page that show the links to the forum threads. Save it, and also any continuation pages there may be for that year. Work through the years and, on a long-standing forum or sub-forum, you may perhaps end up with some 15-20 saved HTML pages. It should not take more than a few minutes.

2. Extract a big list of all the links in these locally saved HTML pages. I used Sobolsoft’s ‘Extract Links from Multiple HTML Pages’ Windows utility to do this, but there are other bulk link extractors.

3. Save the extracted one-per-line links list to a .TXT file, copy-paste that list to Excel and sort the list A-Z. From this sorted list you extract just the links that point to the forum threads. They should have a uniform path and pattern, allowing them to be easily identified and extracted. Save the new list to a further .TXT file.

4. Use the free Chrome-based Web browser extension DownThemAll! to load the new list .TXT (Web browser | start DownThemAll! | right-click anywhere | ‘Import from file’). You may also want to set DownThemAll! to only download one forum thread at a time (Web browser | start DownThemAll! | Cog icon in DownThemAll!’s lower right | Network | Concurrent downloads: 1).

Have DownThemAll! do the downloads. Very regrettably there is no way to have DownThemAll! save the pages from the browser to .MHT (.MHTML) or .PDF files. Just the same format as the target URLs point to.

5. Because you’re using your normal Web browser and only downloading one page/post at a time, use of DownThemAll! should not trigger any traffic blocking from the targeted forum.

Great, so you have the forum threads downloaded as .HTML files. Of course, there’s a problem. The .HTML pages being saved locally are not also saving the images. When you load one of these HTML forum pages locally, the Web browser is still loading the post’s images from the online forum server. That’s good, but we need a more permanent local file being saved.

6. The only solution I found for the next bit is the Pale Moon browser (very worthy, based on Firefox) and its free MozArchiver add-on. This add-on appears to be unique, in terms of being happy to save all open tabs (rather than just one). It saves each open tab as a portable .MHT file with embedded images. You will have to be brave though, and load 50-80 tabs at a time by drag-dropping the .html files onto Pale Moon. With my RAM and workstation, I find Pale Moon has no problem with 80 at a time. After drag-drop, pause to let the tabs all load. Then “save all tabs” to .MHTML files, which is quickly done.

It’s thus relatively easy to use this method to work through 500 or so locally-saved forums post-pages, provided they were not too image-heavy.

Then when done with each batch in Pale Moon, right-click on the left-most tab and “close all tabs to the right”. Repeat until finished.

That’s it. A slightly tedious workflow, but your recalcitrant and harvester-phobic user forum is now safely archived as portable .MHT files, one per forum thread. Good local indexing/search software (DocFetcher, DTSearch etc) should have no problem indexing local .MHT files, ready for you to do keyword searches across the local archive.

If you ever need to convert the .MHT (.MHTML) files back, the Windows freeware MHTML Converter 1.1 will do that and has batch processing.

Situation: You have a completed back-of-the-book index for a book, perhaps created with PDF Index Generator. You are then required to add a further page to the book, that you thought was finished. Such a change will ‘throw off’ most of the numbers in the index, but not all of them. Only the page-numbers after the point where the new page was added. Do you need to remake the index again? No.

Solution: You use the following Microsoft Word macro to do the required ‘intelligent corrections’ of the changed numbers in the Index.

Use: Copy-paste the kaput Index to a new Word document of the same page size, with retained formatting. Edit the macro’s three variable numbers for your needs and load it. Run it. Copy back the results to the book. Check the new index aligns with the book.

Change the numbers indicated. The first number is the increment, and the other is the page number above which incrementing is done.

' WORD MACRO - Increment the numbers in the back-of-a-book index by x, only if above a certain number.
Sub Demo()
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
' Change the following number 1 to the increment you need. Number of pages added = the number you need.
Const i As Long = 1
With ActiveDocument.Range
With .Find
.ClearFormatting
.Text = "<[0-9]{2,3}>"
.Replacement.Text = ""
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindStop
.MatchWildcards = True
.Execute
End With
Do While .Find.Found
' Change the next number to the page-number below which all must stay the same.
If CLng(.Text) > 77 Then
' Page number 2000 is the ending backstop number - change this only if you have a monster book.
If CLng(.Text) < 2000 Then .Text = CLng(.Text) + i End If .Collapse wdCollapseEnd .Find.Execute Loop End With Application.ScreenUpdating = True End Sub Change the numbers to suit your situation.

Here the above macro is set to increment by 1, any page-number it finds in the index. But only if it has a value between 77 and 2000. You are assumed to have added one new page at page 76. Any indexed page number for page 77 must therefore now become 78, and so on. Numbers are recognised individually, even if in the hyphenated form, e.g.: 99-100 or similar.

Your index is assumed to have no dates or street numbers used as index terms, e.g. “1066 A.D., Battle of Hastings, p. 356”, or “221B Baker Street, p. 73”.

The newly added page(s) will of course need to have their new entries indexed, if not simply illustrations, and manually added to the revised index.

So far as I can tell, there’s no way to do this with a regex.

Power-bloggers may be used to making a folder of Web browser bookmarks containing 30 or 40 on-topic sites or forums that have no RSS. Right-click on this folder, “Open All” and they all spring open in new tabs. Then you quickly flick through and close each tab, if there is nothing new to see. Only takes a few minutes. Also useful for keeping an eye out for rare used books, vintage gear, 70% sales and the like.

But it can be annoying to rapidly click through these tabs only to find that… some tabs have not loaded or only partially loaded. Not because you don’t have the bandwidth or the PC RAM, but because the site has some kind of “visitor not present, is probably a bot or a scraper” thing going on. No visitor on a current tab = no main content block loading.

In which case the following UserScripts may be of interest…

* Block Visibility Detections.

* PreventPageVisibility.

* And if those don’t work, Idle Detection Bypasser… “gives a fake active response” when the Web browser is queried by the site for tab focus/activity.