Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2014 August 4

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August 4

Multiple coax connections into one TV

Hi all. I've recently been looking for an easy way to connect a few of my older game systems (Atari 2600 etc) to my television. They all use the same coaxial input (the one the cable is usually screwed into), and it is far more obnoxious to unscrew the cable, screw in the console, then re-screw the cable after than it is to replace the composite cables for my newer systems. What I'm looking for is something that would allow me to connect multiple coaxial cables at once to the television. I've read about coax splitters, but they seem to be for something else (?), and I have also seen expensive, seemingly shady manual "tv/game" coax switches...is there something I'm overlooking here? Thanks! 74.69.117.101 (talk) 04:49, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

What you are looking for is what is commonly called and "A/B Switch" a more specifically "Coaxial A/B Switch" (search google or bing). Many years ago, my cable company issued a fairly rugged version, which I expect has a higher degree of signal isolation that some of the cheap switches on the market. If you are switching between your roof-mounted antenna and game or between two games, any switch should do. If you are switching between a game and your cable TV feed, I'd recommend a switch that claims "high isolation" to avoid a remote possibility of interference issues with neighbors who might still be receiving analog channel 3 or 4. -- Tom N talk/contrib 05:51, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

Small business database

My brother has a small personal business. He buys products to wholesale sellers, and sell them at a higher price to common people by internet. When someone buys a product (usually, it's a pack of different products, not a single one) he takes note of the customer name, desired products, the price of each one, the method of distribution (an adress, day and hour to take the products, or if the customer will retrieve the products himself at my brother's house). He checks if he has current stock of all the required products, or if he needs to buy more to the wholesale sellers. When all the needed details are ready, the whole request is considered ready, and the product is either taken to my brother's house or to a list of adresses that bought products and await them. And, if successful, the operation is done, and the business continue with the new ones.

So far, he has been doing this with a page in Excel, but do you know of any specific software (freeware if possible) that may help to manage a business like this? For instance, it could be great if I could detail products, prices and stocks at a different location than the entry of each operation, so that the price is automatically filled, and the stock is automatically updated.

And, on a related note, a software to manage a simple family economy (work wages of each one in the household, other incomes, taxes, food, savings, leisure and other uses of money; and the balance between each one) Cambalachero (talk) 16:20, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

There's a significant amount of work to moving records to a database management system, so for that 2nd case of the household budget, I'd just stick with a spreadsheet. For running the business, a relational database management system may be in order, but if he doesn't have experience with that type of thing, then he will want one with options like query by forms, so he doesn't have to write SQL statements. The existing records can be exported from the spreadsheet as a CSV file and then imported into the database. StuRat (talk) 14:55, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

No, my brother has absolutely no experience with any programming languages of any kind. I was thinking in some software that would be already made by someone else; I think that the type of business I described must be common enough so that someone must have a program for that. There's no need to worry about moving information from excel to the new system, he would simply begin from zero, and just keep the excel files if he needs to check past operations. Cambalachero (talk) 15:50, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

He wouldn't have to write the program, but what a database management system does require is that you define lots of stuff. What fields will you have ? What type of data goes into each field ? How are they each related to one another ? This takes a fair amount of time to define, and the relationships aren't always obvious. For example, you might think "each customer has one street address", until you come across a customer with two addresses, maybe a delivery address and a billing address. Then you must rethink things. While this type of change is relatively easy to make in a spreadsheet, it's more work to fix in a database. For a business it may well be worth the effort, but probably not for a home budget.

As far as having a preset group of tables for a shipping business, that may very well exist, yes. Hopefully he could start from there and modify it as needed. Does anyone else know of such a thing ? StuRat (talk) 03:56, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

Mediawiki hosting site suggestion

We have a small Mediawiki site. Currently we are on iPage. For $25/month (temporarily only $20/month because we are still in the initial offering period), we are not getting even half of the power we could get with other VPS providers. Plus we have faced three or four long outages in last couple of months. The chief of our site is eager to change hosting service.

I have checked mw:Hosting_services. But that document has two issues. 1) that list is that it has many, many service providers, each offering something different, 2) from my Wikipedia experience and checking the page's history, I feel, content of the page is being edited or expanded by hosting service representatives.

We are now planning to move our site to Rosehosting. Our main audience are from India and United States. Our one of the biggest problem has been feeding Google, Bing and other search engines bots. It overloaded and crashed our server twice.

Now, any suggestion please? Can anyone comment on Rosehosting as MediaWiki service provider? Or any other suggestion? --Tito☸Dutta 18:48, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

I assume that you've done a WHOIS check on the user-agents: that identify as the googlebot, etc? IIRC some aggressive spiders deliberately mis-identify themselves as the googlebot. You can slow down the googlebot here, it was the first hit on https://www.google.com?q=slow%20down%20googlebot. I imagine that other major search engines also can be slowed down. CS Miller (talk) 20:20, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

USB-port diagnostics

Is there any bootable tool I can use to check which of my USB ports, including the one it runs from, are reliably accurate enough to use for OS installation and BIOS updating?

I've been having issues on this particular PC with all Linux distros either hanging up before the desktop has displayed or having an unusable GUI due to graphical artifacts. Updating my BIOS didn't help and eliminated the one exception (Linux Mint 17v2 Cinnamon), and I've checked all the "usual suspects" hardware-wise (run memtest86+, checked BIOS temps and voltages, checked fans working properly, tried disabling APU integrated graphics, tested the video card on a different PC). But while updating the BIOS, it took several tries for Q-Flash (Asus' BIOS self-update tool) to detect the flash drive and successfully read the new BIOS from the .CAP file, which leads me to suspect that the problem may ultimately be with the USB ports. NeonMerlin 21:49, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

Have you checked for "USB sag" ? That's when the weight of the USB cord and/or attached devices causes it to move out of position and only have intermittent contact. The USB cord should fit firmly in the slot. If it wiggles, this might be the issue, and we can discuss the solutions. StuRat (talk) 14:48, 5 August 2014 (UTC)