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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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:
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.
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,
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
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+
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
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
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
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
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
Today I learned... ...in the properties for devices in the Sound control panel applet, you can right-click on the volume bars and change the units to decibels:
A change of web host I shifted yuo.be to Amazon Web Services. Here's a recent screenshot of the 'Time spent downloading a page' graph from the Googlebot crawler stats displayed in the Google Search Console:Can you
The death of IMpeg2Data and the false start of IPSITables In the Windows Vista-era, I wrote a DVB-T program. Apart from letting you view TV, it read and parsed DVB-SI. With the removal of Media Centre in Windows 10, I recently tried to
Windows 10 Windows 10: 'How do you want to open this file'? dialog box It certainly feels like all the feedback I enter into the Windows Feedback app on Windows 10 ends up in free fall towards the floor of a bottomless abyss. So, perhaps inscribing my
Welcome to the club It looks like iTunes can join the mega-GDI-resource-leak club:Congratulations (?)
Broken drivers Lenovo finally posted an updated driver - version 267.21 - for the Nvidia NVS 3100M chipset in my ThinkPad T510. Unfortunately after installing it I was greeted with strange, but horrible, colour