Posts (page 4)

March 2016

  1. 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…

January 2016

  1. 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…

  1. 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…

  1. 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…

  1. 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:

  1. 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…

December 2015

  1. 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,…

  1. 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.…

July 2011

  1. Welcome to the club

    It looks like iTunes can join the mega-GDI-resource-leak club: Congratulations (?)

April 2011

  1. 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…

March 2011

  1. Adobe Reader X 10.0.1: bugged

    Hi Adobe, You might want to do a better job testing your software before releasing it. I was happily reading a PDF document when I wondered why the taskbar…

February 2011

  1. Some never learn

    I downloaded the Dragon Age II PC demo, to find that mouse wheel support is broken - a familiar tale. (Specifically, support for freely rotating mouse wheels with non-120-multiple wheel rotation values). Ho-hum.

  1. Careful with SHAutoComplete

    If you call it with a NULL HWND, it will return E_INVALIDARG but leak six GDI handles (seen under Windows 7 SP1). Yes, you can blame the caller, but 'tis just something to note.

July 2010

  1. Thoughts of the day

    1. Surely a (laptop) recovery DVD that depends on the original storage drive partition layout to be (loosely) intact is a complete fail? I'm looking at …

June 2010

  1. Microsoft SAPI text-to-speech fun

    It seems to fail at resampling. I tested on Windows 7 with the stock Microsoft Anna voice; you probably won't notice unless you use an alternative output…

May 2010

  1. Letter of rage

    Dear Broadcom WIDCOMM Bluetooth Software 6.2.1.2100 installer, Thank you for deleting every file you had access to on my system volume. There's nothing like…

  1. Web host fun

    So my web host blocked my IP address from the server my web site is hosted on... and are denying it/are uninterested in doing anything about it. Seems like…

February 2010

  1. Attn: UPEK

    As I know the nice person(s) at UPEK like to take notice of things posted here, I thought I'd write about a couple of new problems I had with Protector Suite…

January 2010

  1. Failure at using COM/OLE: Part 2

    Last time we just touched on a small issue, as a precursor to the important one. Consider an application that populates an STGMEDIUM structure as follows: *…

  1. Windows 7: SATA controller in AHCI mode and standby issues

    I recently decided to switch my SATA controller into AHCI mode. With this information that was easy enough. What followed though were "BSODs"/stop errors,…