X-Mouse Button Control is the follow up to discovering Dual Monitor Tools. The usage scenario is as follows:
With XMBC, I can map the middle button to fire ‘Win-Z’, which in turn tells DMT to ‘teleport’ the cursor to the other screen. I now can switch between screens one handed!
XMBC even has a portable version. Gold!
Windows 10 is by in large quite nice to use. Its polished and responsive enough for basic tasks even on a low power processor like the Atom X5.
Except when Windows have to do an update. Oh the amount of time it takes to calculate and download!
I guess that’s always been the case with any of the Window versions. I think that’s also an often not-considered reason to go for a Mac: the update process is much more straightforward. I take it its because MacOS supports a gazillion less hardware combinations than Windows.
Firefox has a powerhouse suite of Developer tools that comes standard. Among them is the ability to take a screenshot of the whole page!
First, enable the feature. Press ‘Ctr+Shift I‘ to display the Developer Tools. Click on the Gears icon, scroll down to tick ‘Take a screenshot of the entire page’
Then, whilst on any page, press ‘Shift+F2‘ to call up the command line interface, and type ‘screenshot –fullpage‘ then Enter.
A fullpage screenshot of the page will now appear in your Download directory!
Shout out to this free, open source project Dual Monitor Tools.
I often have my ThinkPad connected to an external monitor, and recently I’ve needed to move the mouse cursor across the two screens back and forth regularly – that is a lot of traversing!
So a search on whether I can ‘teleport’ the cursor from one screen to another using a keyboard shortcut resulted in Dual Monitor Tools. And it works brilliantly!
Don’t get scared by the amount of features; just use the DMT Cursor tool to add shortcut keys for how cursors operate. I use ‘Win + z’ as the shortcut key to ‘Move cursor to next screen’ – which is the ‘teleport’ feature I was looking for – and I also have ‘Cursor movement between screen is sticky’ as default so there’s a bit of resistance when manually traversing between screens (and hence precision at the monitor edges).
And in Chinese – which is different to word level differences since doesn’t have Chinese identifiable spaces like other European/all? languages.
WinMerge, Meld Merge and Kdiff3 can all identify character level differences, but are all unable to merge individual instances found in the same line (or even in adjacent lines for some weird reason).
Beyond Compare seems to be the only one that can, although its user interface requires a bit of getting used to, perhaps because its so feature-rich.
Cost money though.
Update: I was too quick to claim Beyond Compare has this ability. It works for the “adjacent lines” case, and I jumped the gun; multiple differences within the same line cannot be merged individually 🙁
Apple iOS is by far the best phone to travel with in China if you are a foreigner. FaceTime works. iMessage works. App Store works. On any ol’ local wifi.
Android devices, on the other hand, can’t download any apps unless you sideload/preload a local app store. And OpenVPN doesn’t work well at all 🙁
Can’t seem to find anything online about this: how do you achieve zoom of a map in a browser (but not browser zoom) using a touchscreen in Windows 10?
This particular problem presents itself with jinjianginns.com, when one tries to perform a map search (grey button on main site). The map view has no + or – to zoom out or in with, and the intuitive thing to do on a PC is to zoom with the scroll wheel on the mouse.
You can blame it on the UI. But I think this is another instance of Windows 10’s immature touch capabilities. Can’t get it to work even with Microsoft Edge.
Zoho Mail has an incredible feature that allows you to bring your own domain, create email addresses on that domain, and send & receive emails using their web client – all for free if you just have the one domain!
This is great for SOHO users who want to supplement their free web hosting with a more official looking email than the prevalent superaccountant92@gmail.com or trustyplumber75@hotmail.com
I’ve been playing around with a low-powered Windows 10 device (Atom X5-Z8300 with 4GB RAM), and noticed an interesting/annoying behaviour: ads in online TV shows really taxes the CPU. And these are shows played from major networks’ (Australia) own websites!
Whenever the actual show is playing, the CPU hovers around 50-55%. But as soon it switches to an ad, the CPU shoots up to around 95% and fluctuates wildly. Suffice to say, the ads stutters on screen and the whole browser goes unresponsive for a few moments.
It befuddles me to think why non of the major networks demand their ad suppliers to optimise this better. There are times when I give up watching the show because of the ads. And there are even times when the flash player would get stuck waiting for the ad server to respond.
You invest in all this infrastructure, optimisation and copyright deals to make the TV shows available on your website, only to be foiled by the ads that were suppose to generate the income that makes this whole thing worthwhile. That would be ironic. And idiotic.
First SQL Server for Linux from a few weeks ago, now Bash for Windows 10 from Microsft Build this morning. Really unexpected!
I’m not a developer by any stretch of the imagination, but with the little I do, I think Bash would be useful. Even though Cygwin is good, something baked into the OS just feels right. (And it befuddles me why certain really basic packages are not installed by default in Cygwin; I guess I’m not power user enough to appreciate the customisability).
To be honest, I like developing in Windows. I feel its more manageable than Linux and less restrictive than OS X for development.