The emoji picker dialog that Windows includes (use Windows + . to access it) not only allows you to insert emoji and smileys with relative ease, but also does GIFs. I find this distracting, and on top of that these are provided by an external service that the tool connects to automatically and without my consent.

There is no option to disable ( Read more... )

If you, like me, are sometimes using R in the salt mines, and if you're stuck with a work computer that's got a localized copy of Windows installed where changing the system language is no an option, and if you're annoyed that R then translates every fucking thing including error messages …

… then set an environment variable called LANGUAGE to ( Read more... )

I noticed just now that GMail is apparently making it more difficult for people to send email to GMail accounts. Specifically, using SPF or DKIM is now mandatory.

If you don't know what this means exactly, but you're using your own domain for emails, managed by your web hoster, then chances are they've got this set up for you. If not, email sent ( Read more... )

If you dislike the default printing dialogue in Windows 11 - say, because you don't like the extra clicks necessary to select a page range to print - and would like to bring back the old one, it's possible to do this by setting a registry key.

Specifically, in the registry editor, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Print\ ( Read more... )

I usually put Ósk to sleep rather than turning her off entirely when I'm not using her for a while, and when I come back and it's been more than a few minutes, my network connection (Ethernet) is invariably gone, and takes a minute or two to come back online. That's annoying ( Read more... )

Ósk has, at times and without any obvious cause, been producing notification sounds - even though I tend to disable all such sounds in all programs. I had no idea what program might be causing this. The only thing I could think of was Rainmeter, but why would it do that?

Mark Russinovich's Process Monitor to the rescue. Since the sound is ( Read more... )

When you connect Bluetooth devices on a Windows 11 machine, you may a) want to rename them, and b) find that there is no obvious way of doing so: Settings > Bluetooth & devices > View more devices has no Rename option (anymore) in the three dots menu.

But it's still possible. Your favorite web search engine will likely give you nothing, no thanks ( Read more... )

The padding on my bike helmet (an Abus model) was getting pretty cruddy, so I ordered new padding online (mercifully this turned out to be possible).

What wasn't quite obvious was how to install it; neither the new padding nor the original helmet came with any instructions on how to do this, and neither did Abus's website have anything (in fact, ( Read more... )

If you find you're unable to use Thunderbird to access your GMail account, with error messages about your username and password not being accepted (even though neither changed, and they worked before and continue to work in a browser), then you may want to check if you're using OAuth2 authentication in Thunderbird - chances are you're not.

1. 
   Make ( Read more... )

Finally had some time to do a bit more cosmetic work on the Song of Ice and Fire RP test probability report generator script again - tables are colorized now, and the whole document produced is a nicely (well, reasonably so) organized book now, with a title page and PDF bookmarks and using a fairly pleasant font, Libertinus Serif.

Here's a sample ( Read more... )