I use TrueCrypt at work to encrypt/protect the volume where I store source code for various customers. It generally works pretty seamlessly and I don’t even notice that I’m working on an encrypted volume.

The other day, Windows started complaining in the Action Center that my drive needed checking because errors had been discovered. At first, I thought that it was referring to my system drive—which is not encrypted—and I rebooted Windows to let it do its thing.

Windows was back up and... [More]

This article originally appeared on earthli News and has been cross-posted here.

The article Smart TVs, smart fridges, smart washing machines? Disaster waiting to happen by Peter Bright (Ars Technica) discusses the potential downsides to having a smart home[1]: namely our inability to create smart software for our mediocre hardware. And once that software is written and spread throughout dozens of devices in your home, it will function poorly and quickly be taken over by hackers because “[h]ardware companies are generally bad... [More]”

ELI5 is the “Explain LIke I’m Five” forum at Reddit. I recently answered the question “How and why do computer programs crash?” and thought the answer might be worth cross-posting (even though the post itself never gained any traction).

What is a program?

Programs comprise a limited set of instructions that tell them what they should do when they encounter certain inputs under certain conditions.

Who writes programs?

People write computer programs. Therefore, programs only do what those... [More]

Encodo Systems AG started work on its metadata framework Quino in late 2007. We’ve used it successfully in many projects, from Windows desktop applications to standalone servers, Windows services and web sites. It has grown considerably since its inception and the core concept of keeping the focus of an application on its metadata has stood the test of time quite well.

The recent article Code-first O/R mapping is actually rather silly by Frans Bouma recounts how the lead developer and architect of another... [More]

The most difficult technical problems to solve are the ones that you don’t notice. The workflow and tools to which you’ve become accustomed are terrible, but they’re so ingrained that you might actually find yourself unthinkingly defending them because that’s just how it has to be.

Why is your DVR’s fast-forwarding feature stuck in the past?

Fast-forwarding and rewinding digital movies is one of those things.

Many people have DVRs now—provided, often enough, by the cable company... [More]

Opera has officially released their first desktop browser based on the Blink engine (forked from WebKit). The vision behind Opera 15 and beyond by Sebastien Baberowski (Desktop Team) explains how Opera 15…

…is dead on arrival.[1]

Choose your market

For years, Opera has held a steady 1.7–2% of the desktop browser market. This seems small but comprises dozens of millions of users. More capitalist heads have clearly prevailed at Opera. They’ve struck out for a more lucrative market. Instead of catering to the 2% of niche, expert... [More]

The post Please share your hidden OS X features or tips and tricks (StackExchange) yielded a treasure trove of keyboard shortcuts, some of which I knew and many that I’d never heard of or had long ago forgotten.

I collected, condensed and organized the ones I found the most useful below.

Finder & Open/Save dialogs

• ⌘ + ⇧ + G shows a location bar where you can type a path (/ or ~ also works in Open/Save). This text field supports ~ for the home directory and has rudimentary tab-completion.
• ⌘... [More]

The article Surprise! Mozilla can produce near-native performance on the Web by Peter Bright (Ars Technica) takes a (very) early look at asm.js, a compilation target that the Mozilla foundation is pushing as a way to bring high-performance C++/C applications (read: games) to browsers.

The tool chain is really, really cool. The Clang compiler has really come a long way and established itself as the new, more flexible compiler back-end to use (Apple’s XCode has been using it since version 3.2 and it’s been the default since... [More]

I continue to be mystified as to how Microsoft has not managed to create a backup system as seamless and straightforward and efficient as Time Machine for OS X. The software is, however, not without its faults. As is usual with Apple software, Time Machine becomes quite frustrating and unwieldy when something goes ever so slightly wrong.

When it works, it works very well. It is unobtrusive. You have hourly backups. It is as technology should be: serving you.

At the beginning of the year, I... [More]

A friend asked me for my advice on buying a Windows developer machine. In case anyone else is thinking about doing it, here’s my $.02.

What about a desktop?

I’ve got a desktop at work. It’s easily the fastest machine in the office. The hard drive’s a bit loud though. I’m being upgraded by my vigilant crew to an SSD in the near future, though. Otherwise, if you don’t need portability, you’ll get the most bang for your buck in a desktop.

You’re also more likely to be able to find something... [More]

tl;dr: If your Windows 8 is mysteriously moving your Windows and taskbar around, it might be because of your Windows Live account synchronizing settings from one machine to another.

Starting with Windows 8, you can connect your local user account to your Windows Live account, sharing your preferences and some Windows-App-Store application settings and logins.

I had this enabled for a while but recently discovered that it was responsible for mysterious issues I’d been experiencing on my... [More]

A friend asked me about the prices for refurbished Macs (Apple Store).[1] In case anyone else is thinking about doing it, here’s my $.02.

Is refurbished OK?

I can’t think of a reason why a refurbished Mac wouldn’t be a good idea. it’s good for the Earth, at any rate. My initial impression is that the price advantage is negligible—you can get last year’s model (June 2012) for only a 15% savings off of the price of a new MacBook. It’s impressive how little Macs depreciate. Still, 15% is better than nothing.

Retina... [More]

Disk Cleanup – Windows.old & Recycle BinDisk Cleanup – System FilesIf, instead of installing Windows 8 on an empty drive, you upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8, the installation process retains a copy of your old Windows 7 installation in a folder named “Windows.old”. As you can see from the screenshot, this folder can be pretty big. If your Windows 8 is running fine and you have no plans of downgrading, you can safely throw away this folder.

What’s the best way to delete this folder? It’s probably protected and deleting it manually will be rife with... [More]

Opera started a public beta-testing program a few years ago called Opera Next. Whereas the stable version naturally moved along more slowly—but always rock-solid—Opera Next often had a more up-to-date HTML/CSS renderer (code-named Presto) and Javascript engine (code-named Carakan). Opera recently anounced that future versions—Opera Next Next—would be built on the WebKit HTML/CSS renderer and Google’s open-source V8 Javascript engine instead.

Why is it good news?

This is, I think, good... [More]

There are some pictures of it in the article World trembles in confusion and/or fear at Iran’s fiberglass airplane by Lee Hutchinson (Ars Technica). There you’ll find over a dozen pictures with commentary. The commentary is, on the whole, not kind, but it’s also neither entirely information-free not unwarranted. They note in the picture below that the “canopy has ludicrously bad optical qualities—note the scratches and distortion.”

Plane with pilot

It’s also, well, it’s a lot smaller than I expected. Or, as Ars Technica put it, “[…]... [More]

Skype for the Mac is kind of a CPU hog, so I’ve been looking for another solution.

I recently used Google Voice/Chat/Hangouts, which is kind of low-fi, but worked pretty well. The browser plugin is quickly installed. Although it didn’t work in Opera, it naturally worked in Chrome. It offered the UI that we’ve all come to expect from Google: bare-bones and adequate.

When everybody involved has an Apple device, FaceTime seems like a logical alternative to Skype and Google Voice. So what kind of... [More]

The following article was originally published on the Encodo blogs and is cross-published here.

Windows 8 was made publicly available a few weeks ago. As usual, Microsoft manages to guarantee compatibility with a lot of software, but there are a few tools that will simply no longer run.

One of these is Microsoft’s own Security Essentials product, which has been completely replaced with Windows Defender, which is built right in to Windows 8. So that one’s easy.

Another is Microsoft Virtual... [More]

tl;dr: if you can’t read the BSOD message or need to examine the minidump files generated by Windows when it crashes, use the BlueScreenView utility to view them. Windows 8 kept crashing on shutdown for me because of an errant 56K modem driver. Sad—so sad—but true.

My Windows 8 installation went off with just one hitch: the machine crashed on shutdown. Every. Single. Time. This made it impossible to use the hibernation feature, which was a blocker issue for a laptop.

So, how to solve the... [More]

Your New TV Ruins Movies (Prolost) is a wonderful, eye-opening article about flat-panel TVs. If you care at all how your television looks—and whether it all matches the original intent of the director—it’s well worth your while to read the whole thing (it’s not that long).

However, here are the main points:

Plasma > LCD

If you don’t have a flat-panel television yet, or you’re in the market for a new one, strongly consider buying a plasma screen instead of an LCD. Why? Because “plasma TVs can... [More]”

Google has recently begun more aggressively trying to get people to stop using the Opera browser. There are not many of us (less than 2% of the worldwide market), but Opera isn’t exactly so difficult to support. Google products do support the following browsers:

“Google Flight Search has not been optimized for your browser. For best results, please try Chrome, Firefox 3.5+, Internet Explorer 8+, Safari 4+.”

So, browsers that are around 3 years old—Firefox 3.5 and Internet Explorer 8—are... [More]

There exist a few gargantuan time-wasting and mind-numbing web sites that scoop up hours of attention like a whale does krill. Facebook, with its coterie of applications (like Farmville and Mafia Wars, though I fear my lack of experience here is showing), is the undisputed king, but Twitter also looms large. The carcasses of others, like MySpace or Friendster, twist far off in their wake, drifting slowly down on gentle currents that carry them deeper into obscurity. Others, like LinkedIn and... [More]

Even the official Academy Awards web site isn’t allowed to show trailers and clips from the official nominees. Score one for the studios?

Swiss Bundesrat 2011

To the joy of the technically literate everywhere—and those interested in the rights of citizens to some form of cultural commons—the Swiss Bundesrat (pictured above) have emerged as unlikely heroes for their recent confirmation that file-sharing no big deal, some downloading still OK by Timothy B. Lee (Ars Technica).

“A new report by the Swiss government argues that unauthorized file sharing is not a significant problem, and that existing Swiss law—which allows for downloading copyrighted content for personal use—is... [More]”

This article was originally published on the Encodo blogs and cross-published here.

The GenericObject in Quino had recently undergone a performance overhaul, as documented in the article, Improving performance in GenericObject…but we weren’t finished yet.

I’m going to assume that you read the overview on “How Data Objects are Implemented” and understand what the GenericObject actually is. In the other article, we optimized performance when creating objects in-memory and when loading and... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo blogs and cross-published here.

Quino is Encodo’s metadata framework, written in C#/.NET 4.0. Since its inception four years ago, we’ve used it in several products and the code base has been updated continuously.

However, it was only in a recent product that one of the central features of the framework came under scrutiny for performance issues. It turned out that reading and writing to Quino data objects was a bit slower than we needed it... [More]

1. You should check that you’re not relying on any applications that will no longer run on Lion. See the article How to Check if Applications are Incompatible with Mac OS X Lion (OS X Daily). Basically, the Rosetta Stone application is not compatible with Lion, so PowerPC-only applications no longer run. If you can’t find an update (or there is none announced) for an essential application, then you may have to stick with Snow Leopard for now. If you open the System Profiler and look at Applications, you can... [More]

When you buy something from the iTunes Store, you will often be asked to confirm new terms and conditions. In Switzerland, there are four official languages—French, German, Italian and Romansh—and English is used quite often as well (though it’s not yet an official language). Apple, seemingly unable to decide which language to use, simply chose almost all of them at once.

No that’s some well-executed localization!

More than a decade ago, the available web browsers—Internet Explorer, Netscape and Opera—differed widely in capability. Cutting-edge pages that worked in one browser either didn’t work at all in the others, or ceased to be cutting-edge. In those days, it was both common and appropriate to include a browser recommendation. “Best viewed in Internet Explorer” or “Best viewed in Netscape” flourished.

Today, however, the various browsers have standardized to a great degree. There is no longer a... [More]

It is, apparently, indefinitely delayed due to the advent of a completely new class of devices that no longer need desktops. Pity. In a recent discussion on Hates Software, one commenter noted:

“Those of us with jobs and credit cards won’t put up with that nonsense and will pay for the problem to go away.”

“That nonsense” to which he refers is any of the typical just-download-the-sources-and-compile-it-yourself claptrap peddles by those who don’t understand a good-goddamned-thing about usability.... [More]

I’d heard that Java was a memory hog, but this is ridiculous:

Java uses 16 million terabytes of virtual memory

It’s impressive that the machine was responding at all, actually. :-)