character level diff merge in Windows

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 🙁

best mobile travel china

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 🙁

scroll zoom Windows 10 touchscreen problem

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.

shout to zoho

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

 

online video advertising

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.