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

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

Having all your source code closed is really annoying and is automatically solved with this Visual Studio package addon.

Also, this is my first test of blog posts getting autoposted to Google Plus. Prepare for more geekdom and nerdiness, my g+ friends.

And keeping with the theme of including a graphic in my posts, let’s see how this gets cross-posted…

Here are quick instructions to get this done and start using TagLib in your project to manipulate tag data in your music files. I had to pull this together from about 5 different places…

NOTE: This was moved to the wiki, because persistent articles belong on wikis, not blogs! 🙂

Why is this not documented well? I don’t understand why people spend man-years creating great software and then don’t bother to document it – did I just miss it somewhere? Prolly…

I dropped my Macbook Pro laptop on the concrete sidewalk on the short walk to work a couple weeks ago. I had popped the messenger bag shoulder strap up off my shoulder to pull my coat out, and didn’t quite catch it on the way down. Blammo. Turns out that when push comes to shove, concrete retains its shape a lot better than aluminum. All the USB ports on my Macbook Pro 5.2 were instantly transformed into trapezoids, as the corner crumpled up like a soft soda can.

Those Apple folks know what they’ve got going, and do a good job of treating people with no regard for money well. $600 later I had a lot of heartburn, but also had a 50% brand new MBP that worked perfectly. Too bad the 50% included the hard drive. 🙁

Anyway… long story short -too late-… my clean hard drive emboldened me to finally install all the OSes I needed. What does it take to get my four favorite ones squeezed onto one fat-assed macbook pro? A little more pain than should really be necessary. The moral of the story is that this is the stuff you play with when you don’t really care if you blow all your data away. No, really. Back up anything you care about first. Technical details start up after the break… (continued…)