Internet / Software / Computers / Websites

Scammer call

I just got off the phone and I'm very happy. Every now and then I get a call from an number with identity concealed. The call is always made by a person of middle-eatern or far-eastern origin. The accent sounds indigenous to India. These persons call and claim they are with Windows or MicroSoft. (Yes, I said that correctly. They allude to Windows being a separate entity.) Well I have been friends with a person that actually does work for MicroSoft in Seattle and verified that the callers are scammers. Now I do all I can to frustrate them on the phone. Today was a new personal best.

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Well, here's another challenge.

Erin and crew need bucks to keep the doors open! It can't be any more clear than that. So c'mon everyone. Break into the piggy banks and help keep Top Shelf where it belongs. On top of the 'net and the best TG fiction site out there anywhere!

It's SO easy to send even a one time gift to help out. Use this URL and your bank credit/debit card: http://bigclosetr.us/hatbox/node/26

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I feel so dumb right now

So today I planned on posting chapter 3 of Broken Phoenix. Only to find out that I was logged out. Normally that wouldn't be a problem cause I could just type in my details and everything would be fine. What doesn't help is that I cannot for the life of me remember my password. I would change my password but you need your current password to do that which I don't remember. Looks like my story is getting delayed until I can figure out how to deal with this.

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Chat issues

I'm very sorry about the current issues with our chat. Unfortunately there is an incompatibility between our providers upgraded network and the old hardware our server uses. This causes the ellesmera to disconnect from the internet.

We are trying to resolve those issues as soon as possible. Please bear with us for the time being.

Saphira

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Random solos

On the Home page is a box marked Random Solo. I find it quite useful for randomly selecting one of the solo stories. Similarly, there is another box marked 12 Random Authors, again another way of browsing the authors on this site. Refreshing the Home page will produce another random selection of one solo and 12 authors.

I was wondering whether there was any easier way of randomly browsing stories and authors. Refreshing the whole of the Home page seems a bit top heavy, particularly since on my iPhone, the listings are well down the page.

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Text-to-speech Rendering Sample

Angharad asked about the ability of text-to-speech to render British Slang. Lacking any knowledge whatsoever of said British Slang, I offer the attached rendering of the current issue of Easy As Falling Off A Bike pt 2995. The software is an old version of Text Aloud by NextUp.com (very old as software goes), and the current versions are (hopefully) better.

Will repeat for a few issues or texts of your choice.

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The Best You Tube Series Ever

Let's get a few things clear from the very beginning.

Green is not a creative colour.
The future doesn't exist.
The King of Love is called Malcolm and you must feed him gravel.
The biggest thing in the world is a mountains, a sky or a windmill.
Fancy, show-offy foods like cooked meats, fruit salad and yolk will clog up your body with unnecessary detail.
You can have a dream about riding a horse, or you can have a dream about drowning in oil.

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NBC launches new LGBTQ website

NBC has launched a new LGBTQ website: http://www.nbcout.com

They say they are the first major network to do such an endeavor.

Welcome to NBC OUT: A Letter From the Editor

http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/letter-nbc-out-s-edit...

Welcome to NBC OUT, NBC's newest digital destination, where we'll showcase enterprise reporting, original video and other unique content about and of interest to the LGBTQ community.

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REACHit to the rescue

For those of you who deign to read my blog, you may remember how I was having trouble getting to file share between my Laptop and my Desktop computers. I'm not much into cloud services so I passed on that suggestion.

However, poking around on my Lenovo Y700 I discovered a program called "REACHit" It purported give you access to files on all your devices on your local network without using the internet.

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Ebook Management Tools for the Mac?

I’ve had to restart my computer, twice, when Calibre screwed up my computer and wouldn’t let me forced quit.

I need to be able to convert drm-free azw files to epub, to be able to read them on my e-reader.

I would also like to be able to convert html files to epub, for the same reason. I can easily convert them to txt, if that helps.

I would also like to be able to strip bad formatting, correct metadata, etc.

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Playing with my new laptop -- HELP needed from techno-geeks

OK, so my wife and I are looking forward to my retirement in just over a year. We are already having computer sharing issues evenings and weekends. When I retire, this will only compound so while we can still afford it, we decided to get a laptop. Something I never envisioned I'd ever need. Wanting to get something that wouldn't be obsolete by the time I retire, I decided to go big.

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What Timezone does this site use?

A little while ago (minutes) I posted a comment to my story 'The Black Cab'. The time of the post was logged as 2016/01/24 - 7:07am
Yet it was 2016-01-24 06:47:00 (or thereabouts).

I know of some parts of the world that use the odd half hour as a TX offset (India is UTC+05:30) but this seems to be a case of clock drift.

If there a reason for the drift?

While I am on the subject of times, when does the 'day' start for the Hit counter? If there some mythical Timezone used for this? Perhaps the Sargasso Sea TZ?

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Forum Cleanout

Just an FYI, I spent most the day doing a cleanout of bogus forums. It was a lot of tedious work to delete each one. There is no streamlined way to maintain them.

Thank you to everyone that's been reminding us it needed to get done, and sorry it took us so long to do it (we try and do it every couple months). We're trying to work out a way to stop it from getting so bad in the future, so please bear with us.

N-E-Ways, visit, post, enjoy! http://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/forum

-Piper, Cat, Erin and the BigCloset Band.

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Large 0Day Joomla Exploit

Just an FYI to anybody out there. There is a large remote code execution exploit that affects all versions of Joomla since 1.5 that has been in the wild for about 3 days now. There are hotfixes/patches for old/outdated/non-supported versions of joomla, and a proper update for the latest version.

More detail here: https://blog.sucuri.net/2015/12/remote-command-execution-vul...

-Piper

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Audio BCTS stories?

I'm a regular radio, podcast and audiobook listener and my mind wandered to who I would choose to read Angharad's 'Easy As Falling Off A Bike' - British of course with maybe a slight regional accent - suggestions welcome.

Why stop there though? I remember one BC link to a short TG themed audio story but imagine readers know others which I'd like to hear about. In the meantime if anyone wants a challenge how about posting a-reading-a-day from the beginning of Bike?

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Annoying Windows 10 ads are back....

I know some of you internet gurus did it before, but in the last couple of days I've downloaded some 'new' updates (from MS) for Windows 7, and once again they've snuck in those annoying ads for Windows 10 - which I have absolutely no intention of 'upgrading' to. Can anyone ID the offending updates so I can go and delete them?

PB

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Skype is goofy today.

Well, as I expected, skype is weird today. Why did I expect things to happen to skype? Because Microcrap owns it now and has for awhile.

Now for a lot of you, you don't even use skype, this is no big deal. For me and those like me who depend on skype for outgoing calls and for conversations, it IS a big deal.

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Another tag trick

I found yet another dodge top display translations/definitions. Found this one while reading Wanda Cunningham's "Danny's Girl" chapter 4.

fake link (hover the cursor over the foreign text)

Steve looked superior. "<a title="I could do that but this clown would be able to understand me a little." rel="nofollow">Posso fare quello ma questo pagliacce puá² capirmi un piccolo.</a>"

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Another new transsexual tolerance banner

Abby has done it again. Here is the link and image of the second trans tolerance poster she has made today. Sh is amazing.

Once again it is not copyrighted so you can use it freely as much as you wish.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AbbyHughesSomething4TheJourney/...

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Random Solo not very random

In the last couple of days, I've seen the *same* stories appear on the "Random Solo" several times.

Just now, for example Giddy Up Go - The Real Story by Carla Ann showed up when I refreshed the page. It showed up about 12 hours back as well. This is the 4th or 5th time I've had a story show up again. In the last 2-3 days.

Also, some authors seem to show up rather frequently. Though this may just be because they have a lot of stories here. :-)

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Chat is down, hurray, the Chat is up!

Hi people,

I've been informed that our chat wasn't availabe from here. So I decided to reactivate an old site some people long ago maintened and make the mainroom available again.

Please go to http://narda.tor-der-traeume.de/index.php?action=chat You'll be logged in as guest but you can choose your own name by typing /nick .

Please have fun and thank your site admins. After all today is the annual Sysadmin Appreciation Day :)

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A great place for inexpensive wigs and clothes

I just found a great place on the web for really inexpensive wigs and clothes as well as jewellry. It's

http://www.sammydress.com/

The prices there are unbelievably cheap. Wigs I've been paying 30-50$ for are under 20 dollars. They also have human hair wigs from 50$!

I don't know the quality of their merchandise, but I have placed an order online and will let you all know how good their stuff is or isn't when it arrives. Check them out. They even have clothes and swimwear for plus sized gals.

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Money making idea for TG RPG

Ideas and Opportunity.
Money Making Idea ... "TG Fantasy / (Person) Maker"
Tell the Tales of the Closet in the form of a Game!
I am open to the thoughts and ideas of our community.
Who is up for an adventure in non-code, coding?
Hope the people take this idea, and run with it for a Golden Award.
Character closet.jpeg

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The transgender forum

HHmmm.

It seems I cannot log into transgender forum and there is no contact process that I can find to discover who has used my email address. My attempt to sign up was blocked because my email address has already been used by someone. I tried all my own passwords but no luck. Seems I'm not wanted on TG Forum.

Ahh well there are plenty of other sites on the internet.

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Is it just with my mobile devices?

Some weeks ago all of the non-ASCII characters on all of my mobile devices became broken. I mean umlauts, French and German accents, and German specific letters.
Just going through Maddy Bell's Nena stories once again and all of the non-ASCII characters {which are numerous as all of the action takes place outside of USA) are displayed as 2 or 3 unicode characters.

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TED video - My daughter my wife our robot and the quest for immortality

There's an interesting TED video given by Martine Rothblatt which talks partly about her transition at Ted talks click here.

However, there's a whole lot more about how she moved from being a satellite communication engineer to form a medical company to keep alive her daughter who has a life-threatening illness, and about digitally saving our minds so we can be reborn at some time in the future!

For those that don't know of them, TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, and the website contains videos of well-presented lectures on all kind of fascinating subjects.

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Calling all Spoonies/Survivors

Is anyone here a "spoonie" or afflicted with things such as fibromyalgia or other conditions that cause chronic pain? I'm going to be seeing a pain management doctor soon, and I'm wondering what to expect.

Those of you who don't know what the "spoon theory" is, here is a link www.butyoudontlooksick.com/category/the-spoon-theory

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060) Checking in...

I know. It's been a VERY long time since I've logged in here. I've been reading stories as and when I can, but my internet hasn't and still isn't particularly reliable. For about a year there I couldn't get my laptop to go on the internet at all, and my phone screen is just way too small to view this site well.

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How Things Work: BigCloset and DopplerPress Edition

So with the posting of a simple question there has been a lot of discussion lately about who is involved with BigCloset, and Doppler Press and how everything works with the new corporate structures.

Because of the confusion we thought we'd post a blog explaining how it all works, for the most part.

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Confused about Standalones

I think the word Standalone originated in the computing industry to mean capable of operating on its own without needing help from another similar thing. So when a story is described as Standalone, to me it means a story you can enjoy to its full, without having to read or refer to another story. Consequently, the episodes of a serial are not standalones, but a series would normally consist of a number of standalone stories.

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