There used to be a great little Vim cheatsheet on tuxfiles.org, but that domain no longer exists and is now cybersquatted. While the Internet Archive has a cache, I figured I'd post a copy here for easy reference for myself and maybe it is useful to others too. Read more
Windows Vista and later no longer include the MIDI mapper that was used in earlier Windows versions to route MIDI output to the preferred device. Vista did away with this, supporting only the rather underwhelming "Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth". While this is adequate for most users, it simply won't do if you have a proper MIDI synth for retro gaming or for playing MIDI files through Media Player. There exist several tools on the net that can change the default MIDI output device, but it appears there are differences in registry keys used between Windows Vista and Windows 7. The tool for one simply won't work on the other, so unless you knew which one to use, you'd still be stuck with Microsoft's softsynth. Read more
This is an update to the RunExit tool I created a few years ago for Windows 3. The original tool just plain ran the program and waited for it to complete. It didn't set the working directory for the program it ran (which messed up some programs, such as the games from Microsoft's Best of Entertainment pack) and didn't pass parameters, which may limit the usefulness in some other cases. Read more
With some free time and a spare laptop on my hands, I figured I'd try out running a Linux desktop installation once more. Although I've used Linux on servers for more than a decade, all of my regular desktop machines have been Windows and Mac OS. Now, most people running Linux on the desktop seem to be using Ubuntu. I fully intend to give that a try later on, but for now I went with the distro I've been most familiar with for the past 12 years, which is openSUSE. Although I've been able to set things up to the point where it's viable as a proper workstation for me, I'm sorry to say the experience fluctuated between pleasant and dreadful. Here's some of the stuff I encountered and what I did to get things to a usable state. Read more
After being very tight-lipped about their plans for the next version of Windows, Microsoft have now officially given the first demos of the the next generation of Windows, called "Windows 8" for now. It is a mix of the live tiles from Windows Phone 7's "Metro UI" and the traditional Windows 7 UI. Everybody and their uncle will have an opinion on this. Here's mine. What I've seen leaves me with mixed feelings. As a casual tablet user, I'm loving it. As a deskop PC worker and power user, it fills me with dread. Read more
