Windows

On my Windows PC I have multiple audio devices. There is a 2.1 speaker system attached via USB and an analog headphone jack on the front. When I am not alone, I attach the headphones and want it to be used. Otherweise I remove the headphones and want to use the speakers. For some reason Windows has the super obnoxious limitation that audio sinks cannot be changed after the application has launched. There is a settings menu where I can apparently set the source and sink for separately for every application. But it does not seem to have any effect when the application is already running! ...

As a software developer I think of version numbers in terms of semantic versioning. In short this means that a new major version breaks the existing API, a new minor version is compatible with the previous version. This also means that just adding new features merely is a minor version increase. ...

There are various programs that I use during the day. Most of them have somewhat consistent user interfaces, but there are still enough points of friction. ...

A thin installer is a program that will download the actual program that you install. So you download a few megabytes from a website. Then you execute that program and it will start fetching the actual program you want and installs it. I have seen this in numerous places: ...

I really like to use keyboard shortcuts for a lot of my work, I feel that I work faster and it takes less effort. Just as there are inconsistencies in the graphical user interfaces, there are a lot of inconsistencies in the keyboard shortcuts as well. ...

I have two computers which are capable of running 3D video games on Windows. The two towers are a quite a few years apart. The older tower is from 2008 and has an Intel Core 2 Duo dual-core CPU (E4400). Although it is a 64-Bit CPU and a 64-Bit Windows 10, it can only address 3.5 GB of RAM because the memory controller is only 32-Bit. I’d really like to ask the guy at HP who decided to specify this mainboard why he did that. Anyway, the GPU in that system has been exchanged a lot of times: ...

There are a lot of things that can go wrong on a LAN party. If you cannot play together, those are some of the causes that I have observed over time. Each block lists some symptoms. Sadly it is hard to have a differential diagnosis in each case. So one needs to check those things one by one. ...

Valve’s Steam ecosystem makes purchasing and installing games much easier compared to CDs. I do like that. There is one thing that is rather impractical when playing with multiple people, though: Everybody has to download the game from the internet. ...

Unter Windows ist das Mitinstallieren von Toolbars ja der gute Ton. Viele Programme installieren eine Toolbar für einen Suchdienst, einen Virenscanner oder irgendwas anders nutzloses. Der gewiefte Windows-Benutzer ist Meister des Toolbar-Umgehens. Da kann ich als Linux-Benutzer nur müde lächeln und sagen, dass hier kein Programm versucht irgendwelchen Schrott zu installieren. ...

Vor einigen Monaten habe ich mir ein neues Mainboard von ASUS gekauft. Ich hatte mir das Mainboard ausgesucht, weil es mit einem normalen AMD Prozessor ECC RAM unterstützt. Die mitgelieferte Software unter Windows erlaubt eigentlich auch das aktualisieren. Allerdings hat das nicht so sonderlich gut funktioniert. Also habe ich das von deren Webseite herunterladen und über einen USB-Stick durchführen wollen. Das Mainboard hat hinten einen extra USB-Slot, mit dem man BIOS-Updates durchführen kann. Gerade hatte ich mir auch einen neuen USB-Stick gekauft, so dass ich das sogar ohne große Bad-USB Risiken genießen konnte. ...