because 140 characters isn't enough

A winter hike

I’d known hail to be a momentary phenomenon. This hail, however, was fierce, and didn’t seem to be in any rush to go away. It was late February and I was at the start of a hike up Loughrigg Fell in the

tech

A short time with a Pixel 4

I pre-ordered a Pixel 4 (the non-XL model), intended as an upgrade from a Pixel 2. I received it last week – and sent it back a few days later, having not got on with it. Here’s what I found. It was difficult to

Windows

The slow programs and my sound drivers

I recently noticed that some programs on my Windows PC were taking a long time to start. I knew, for example, foobar2000 should start instantly. And yet, it was frustratingly taking several seconds. I then realised that other programs were affected: Firefox and Chrome

web

The history of a website: musicmusic’s (foobar2000) stuff

musicmusic’s foobar2000 stuff first appeared in 2003, as a website to host components I had written for the foobar2000 audio player. Hosted on free web host Lycos, it’s address was members.lycos.co.uk/musicf. The site’s design was simple and

Win32

A bit of trouble with TreeView_GetItemState

Recently, I had a bit of trouble with TreeView_GetItemState [archive] and TVM_GETITEMSTATE [archive]. The TreeView_GetItemState macro is a simple convenience wrapper around the TVM_GETITEMSTATE message. Hence, they should do the same thing: retrieve certain state values for a tree-view item.

Python

__init_subclass__ – a simpler way to implement class registries in Python

I overlooked that fact that Python 3.6 added a new class method to object called __init_subclass__. Once use case where it shines is class registries. Put simply, this is keeping track (in a global or equivalent object) of the subclasses of a

Excel

A day with CSV files and Excel

I recently tried to open a CSV file in Excel and was greeted with the mysterious error, 'The file format and extension of test.csv don't match...', followed by 'Excel has detected that test.csv is a SYLK file...'

Win32

The mystery of the Windows 10 message box icons

I noticed that, in Columns UI, the Windows 10 standard error icon as displayed by MessageBox looks like this: However, the error icon in my custom dialogue box looked like a bit of a relic in comparison: I was left scratching my head. I

C++

The beauty of a fold

I previously wrote about how the following: console::formatter() << "some text" << 15 << a_variable << and so on...; was a common pattern in and when using the foobar2000 SDK, but wasn't standards-compliant C++, as it

The death of my Nexus 5X and the uselessness of Argos

I bought a Nexus 5X in March last year and honestly it’s been the worst mobile phone I’ve owned. Despite having fairly good specs, it was incredibly slow in use and seemed to get slower with every major update. Anyway, I was

Windows 10

Windows 10: Locked in darkness

This one has been an ongoing problem for at least several months. I have been able to reproduce it on every Windows 10 PC I encountered, and there are references to the problem all over the internet. And yet the problem still exists on

FreeNAS

Migrating a VM from VirtualBox to iohyve/bhyve on FreeNAS 9.10

I have been running FreeNAS on an HP G7 N54L ProLiant MicroServer for a few years, including running an Ubuntu Server VM in VirtualBox running in a FreeBSD jail. However, VirtualBox support in FreeNAS had been deprecated, and as of FreeNAS 9.10.2

Windows 10

Windows 10: Useless links everywhere

I had repeatedly encountered useless links in Microsoft programs, and I knew Windows 10 was no exception to this. Here I was in the Display Colour Calibration applet, wondering what it exactly it does, when I saw a 'How do I calibrate my display?

Intel

Intel Management Engine software now includes an NDIS filter driver

I just installed the latest version of the Intel Management Engine software from my motherboard manufacturer's website (version 11.6.0.1032). During installation, I got multiple alerts from my software firewall that it was connecting to the internet, which seemed unusual. I looked

Google

The free coffee that almost slipped through my fingers

Google are currently running an Android Pay promotion in the UK for the festive season. Every time you use Android Pay this month (December 2016), you get a chance of winning a prize [archive]. The first five times, you also get a coin. And

Win32

The queue to nowhere

Recently, I received a report of a hang when using one of my foobar2000 components on Windows 10. I had a process dump file which showed the hang was not in my code: foobar2000 itself was stuck in a loop on the main thread

The immortal application

Recently, I launched paint.net on my laptop and it wanted to update. ‘Why not?’, I naturally thought. But, it had slipped my mind that I had tried and failed to update paint.net on that laptop at some point not too long ago.

Shortcut menu, or context menu?

When the Windows Vista UX guidelines were released, I distinctly remember it calling right-click menus shortcut menus. So, I’ve always stuck with that on the assumption it was the preferred nomenclature. Recently, though, I noticed that Microsoft had starting referring to them as

Ubuntu

The bug that bites me

I briefly mentioned that, at the end of last year, I moved my website to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). I picked Ubuntu as my OS, initially using an official Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) AMI, and recently upgrading to 16.04 LTS (Xenial

C++

Columns UI can now be compiled using Clang

After a fair bit of work, release builds of Columns UI can now be compiled with Clang[1] (and the builds produced seem to work 🙌). Clang attempts to be compatible with Visual C++ – in terms of ABI, some Microsoft language extensions and supporting the

Python

Python 3.5: Getting to grips with type hints

If you've written Python code using an IDE, you might have found that the IDE does a reasonable job at inferring types of function arguments and return values. But, you may have also run into instances when the IDE failed to deduce the type

Windows 10

Windows 10: The bugs that irk me

There are a few small bugs in Windows 10 that, despite being small bugs, manage to irritate the hell out of me.1. Desktop icon positions reset themselves during graphics card driver updateThis is a peculiar one, as it happens on my desktop, but

If you delete the WINDIR environment variable, it's (almost) game over

I came across an interesting problem recently. I was editing some environment variables on a Windows 10 PC, using some third-party software. After doing that, a few things started behaving oddly, such as some system programs would not open. Things got worse after rebooting:

The death of Google Cloud Print on my MX895 printer: a story of ineptitude

I bought a Canon PIXMA MX895 all-in-one printer in May 2012. In fact, I was one of the first owners of the printer in the UK, having pre-ordered it the previous month. The printer was on sale from then until around April 2013.One

Migrating a Windows 10 installation from MBR to GPT/UEFI

I recently updated to Windows 10 on a Z170-based motherboard, but my Windows installation was an MBR-based one rather than a modern UEFI one. I wanted to switch to a UEFI installation for the marginally fast boot time – without losing data during the switch