Awesome keyboard shortcuts

Some are old, some are new. Sum > parts. Ahh nice. 🙂

• Windows+X => Ahh all the good gooey stuff they hid!
• Windows+# => Switch to pinned app number #
• Shift+Windows+# => Run new instance of pinned app number #
• Ctrl+Shift+leftclick icon => Run as admin
• Ctrl+Shift+Windows+# => COMBO MOVE! Run new instance of pinned app number # as admin – awesome…
• Ctrl+Shift+Esc => Instant task manager
• Windows+up/left/right/down => Move current window to max/left/center/right/min – play with this one, it’s fun!
• Shift+Windows+left/right => Move current window to left/right monitor
• Alt+# => Switch to Dexpot virtual desktop number #
• Shift+Alt+# => Move current window to Dexpot virtual desktop number #
• Windows+Pause => Control Panel/System settings (then jump to device manager, adv system settings, etc., nice!)
• Alt+PrtScn => Put a snapshot of current window on clipboard

More Nice

• Another nicety, massively improved merge handling during file copying – although, c’mon, this should have been a Windows 3.1 feature… but it will compare source and destination, and let you hand-pick from a long list of file conflicts, with exact matches excluded. Pretty nice.
• I use Window’s “Extra Large Inverted” set of mouse pointers, they are fantastic to help me find my pointer in my 2 x 1080p sea of real estate.

Annoyances

And what would life be without an annoyances list…

• Sliding the pointer from one screen to another NO LONGER WORKS, doh! Win 8.1 “catches” the mouse if you are at the top or bottom edge of the screen (which you almost always are) and pops up the stupid lucky charms or whatever they call it. So you have to nervously ski the mouse through the middle of the screen as you go from monitor to monitor. THIS IS TERRIBLE BEHAVIOR. My favorite part: if you are sliding to the second monitor to click the window there and give it focus, when your mouse is caught, it will be right on the CLOSE BUTTON of the app on the first monitor… and… drumroll… you’ve now accidentally closed the app! Yay fun!
• (from Dan…) In win 8, Internet Explorer, the vertical scroll bar only appears for a few seconds. So if you put your mouse there and click to scroll down, then read and click again to scroll down more, nothing happens because the scroll bars have disappeared. You have to wiggle your mouse to get them to reappear and then click to scroll down again.
• Every. Tiley. App. Sucks. Fine, do your tiley app chooser thing. But Microsoft, you’ve had a lobotomy if you think people want apps THIS dumb!
• This is what happens when you model a desktop interface after a 3″ phone screen, DOH.
  

Annoyances

I always seem to forget how to fade the edge of an image in the gimp… so here’s a note-to-self:

select the area to preserve; IF YOU WANT THE EDGE TO FADEOUT, SELECT A BOX JUST INSIDE THE ENTIRE IMAGE; YOU CAN ALSO USE THE MAGIC WAND TO SELECT AN AREA, AND SHRINK AND GROW AS NEEDED
SELECT->FEATHER, GIVE IT ABOUT 5 PIXELS; THIS APPEARS TO DO NOTHING BUT PUT A BIT OF ROUNDED CORNERS ON YOUR SELECTION, WEIRD EH?
NOW, INVERT THE SELECTION, AND HIT DELETE – vioala, GIMP FADES OUTWARD. YEs, IT’s weird!

soRRY ABOUT THE caps, IT’S HONESTLY EXACTLY how the letters are spewing out on my macbOok prO, Now That i”ve Mananged to get it humming and then spill a full glass of water on it. AWESOmENEsS. AND that”s With another Keyboard attacheD. aPPARENTLY THE MAIN KEyboard is flicking THe shift KEy on aND OFF LIKE A CHRISTmAS TrEE. AND IT’S not EVen ThaNKSGIving Yet.

This problem turned out to be due to the very long relative paths that Visual Studio created to the gsoap-generated files. (continued…)

I’ve put off upgrading my XBMC media center forever, as it has Just Worked for years, and I was using an old hw raid box that newer kernels didn’t like.

Then a drive in my raid went bad, and I realized I’d better upgrade or die. I started by copying the system to a second drive and trying to reboot off of that. But the root was ext3 and the second drive was ext4 and it wasn’t going to work without some tweaking, which is hard on an oooold system. So it was “put up or shut up” time…

Here are the adventures of me brutalizing my old gentoo box into upgrading (let’s see you do THAT with any other three-year-old distro)… (continued…)

A new release of Hang The DJ (v 0.8.2) is available on Sourceforge.

Features:

• mobile client can stream your collection to you on all mobile platforms
• desktop client UI makes it easy to add and remove new DJs and get your songs rated fast
• multiple user and multiple server support makes sharing easy

Send me an email if you want help trying it out.