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WebRender in Firefox 83 in Fedora 33 (KDE 5.20, X11)
I wanted to test out WebRender in Firefox now that it’s on the brink of being turned on by default in GNOME environments. Despite enabling gfx.webrender.all, about:support showed that WebRender wasn’t working and reported errors including Failed to load EGL library: FEATURE_FAILURE_EGL_LOAD_3 and Failed GL context creation for WebRender. Fixing this in my environment (Fedora […]
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High sensitivity headphones are picky about amps
Recently I decided to upgrade a pair of long in the tooth Shure SE215 IEMs after one too many wonky cables and a disintegrating right ear piece (the drivers are working as well as ever). I settled on the Shure SE535, and even if the 4x price increase hasn’t made my music sound four times […]
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Ubuntu 16.04: heirloom-mailx is replaced by s-nail
As of Ubuntu 16.04, the heirloom-mailx package is a transitional package for s-nail. Not realising this, I was having trouble with mailx not recognising the /etc/nail.rc file I’d copied from a working Ubuntu 15.10 server. As it turns out, the global config file path for s-nail is /etc/s-nail.rc. I found this out quickly by using […]
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Beware of the MiniNT registry key
As of Windows 10 Version 1511, ReFS isn’t available by default as an option when formatting drives that aren’t part of a Storage Space. It’s easy, however, to enable this functionality by adding a DWORD named AllowRefsFormatOverNonmirrorVolume under the Registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MiniNT (an example guide can be found here). Unfortunately, the presence of MiniNT Registry […]
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RealPlayer/RealDownloader poses as Firefox running on 64-bit Linux and sends HEAD and GET requests
I recently noticed some strange HTTP logs where a resource would be requested twice with two different User-Agent headers. In one case, the first request suggested the client was running Chrome on Windows, while the second request indicated that it was coming from Firefox on Linux. This didn’t make a lot of sense, so I […]
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I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature: The 'Get Windows 10' notification area icon
As the great Raymond Chen once wrote: I often find myself saying, “I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature.” “That feature” is something aggressively user-hostile, like forcing a shortcut into the Quick Launch bar or the Favorites menu, like automatically turning on a taskbar toolbar, like adding an icon to the […]
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Windows 10 is slightly less pushy about requiring Microsoft accounts
In Windows 8, users were strongly encouraged to use a Microsoft account to sign in to their computers. For those of us who preferred local accounts, the option to ‘sign in without a Microsoft account’ was presented in faint text at the bottom of the screen. In Windows 8.1, the option to use a local […]
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Visual Studio 2015 was once named Visual Studio 2014
Visual Studio 2015 was apparently once going to be named Visual Studio 2014, based on some of the shortcuts installed with the recently released preview: Continuing the Microsoft tradition of skipping version 13, the internal version number is 14 (Visual Studio 2013 being version 12).
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Fixing error 0xC190010C when attempting to update the Windows 10 Technical Preview
My Hyper-V virtual machine running the Windows 10 Technical Preview kept displaying the error code 0xC190010C when I attempted to update to the latest build (from 9841 to 9860). I was able to resolve this issue by clearing the Windows Update cache as described here. Briefly: net stop wuauserv rmdir /s %WinDir%\SoftwareDistribution net start wuauserv
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What's up with Office 2013's context menu and tooltip shadows?
Update (2015-04-22): Somewhat surprisingly, a recent Office 2013 patch appears to have fixed this issue. Update (2015-03-04): Office 2016 fixes this. Update (2014-10-03): Office 2013 running on the Windows 10 Technical Preview (build 9841) exhibits the same issue 🙁 At some point in the not-too-distant past, Office 2013 started rendering strange shadow artefacts in the […]