Posts by category: Techy Articles
Configuring Atom As External Editor
Unlike any other text editor, Atom (“a hackable text editor for the 21st century”) does not install itself into Program Files/ directory or anywhere near it. On Windows 10, for instance, the installer puts its binaries and auxiliaries into something like c:/Users/yeahyou/AppData/Local/atom/, which makes it difficult to configure Atom as an external editor for such […]
Useful Linux Console Commands For Casual Users
Man, all that syntax that just wouldn’t stay in memory if you’re not using it every day!.. Here’s how you do stuff on Ubuntu. Replace example values with whatever you need. If you cannot tell example values from command names and other parameters, you probably shouldn’t be trying any of it. Please keep in mind […]
Displaying Random NextGEN Gallery Images
In NextGEN Gallery plugin for WordPress prior to version 2.0, it was possible to display a limited number of random images from one specific gallery — like so: This would output eight random thumbnails from the gallery with ID 25, each time different pictures when the page is refreshed. Unfortunately (“thanks” to the company which […]
Viber Messing Up Android Contacts
One day, I’ve finally found some time to walk through my Android phone’s contacts, cleaned things up a little bit, and adjusted a couple of dozen names for better accessibility, readability and all that. After some time, however, I was surprised to notice that some of the names that had previously been changed into something […]
Coding Style: Vertical Alignment Sucks
No, it doesn’t! — another opinion That’s right, vertical alignment sucks. Big time. Call me names and throw stuff at me, but it’s like a plaque, it’s everywhere, and I really, really don’t understand why. Get ready, this is going to get emotional. I am talking about something like this: Folks who “format” their code […]
No Reboot after Update
After having installed new update(s), Windows 7 would by default reboot your computer without even bothering to ask you if you are fine with losing your unsaved data or interrupting on-going calculations. To avoid this, feed the following into the registry (create a *.reg-file with this content and double-click it): This will grant you a […]
Missing Notification Area Icons in Windows 7
Almost after every other system boot (Windows 7 on my Dell laptop), some notification area icons tend to disappear (while the corresponding processes/services are running issue-free). The “champions” are the volume and the power icons, although they are not the only ones affected. And I’m not talking about those “show icon and/or notification” modes which […]
Whimsy HTC Desire
A couple of weeks ago, my smartphone HTC Desire HD running on Android 2.3.5 started to completely freak out: ·· USB tethering ceased to start automatically when the device got connected to a computer’s USB port. ·· When making or accepting calls, the speaker started to turn on at the very beginning of the conversation. […]
Disappearing Preview in Avid Studio
After having installed Avid Studio on my Dell XPS 17 laptop (purchased in October 2011, running Windows 7 64 bit with Intel Core i7-2720QM @ 2.20 GHz, 8 GB RAM, 1 TB HDD, NVIDIA GeForce GT 555M with DirectX 11 and 1 GB dedicated RAM), I faced a pretty nasty problem: whenever I played a […]
External USB Hard Drive under Linux
“640 kilobytes ought to be enough for anybody.” — unknown source (often misattributed to Bill Gates) Yesterday, I had to replace a one-terabyte external USB hard drive attached to my home file server with a larger one… Oh, I wasn’t going to ramble about these days’ lack of disk space, I just wanted to document […]