Realtek audio is used in almost every cheap-assed mobo these days, and they HIDE THE DEVICE that lets you capture sound! Wow, this is apparently done to PREVENT COPYRIGHT ABUSE, when will the world get a grip? Anyway, here’s what you do:

  • Right-click the tray sound icon, and select Recording Devices…
  • SUPER TOP SECRET TIP rofl… Right-click on list of devices, and select both Show Disabled and Disconnected Devices
  • Enable and set Stereo Mix as the default
  • Fire up Audacity and get some sampling done! It will help you grab LAME to export to MP3, so you can record cool stuff like this.

Realtek TOP SECRET CLASSIFIED DRIVER ACCESS rofl

A new article describing my cross-platform development environment setup is now on the wiki

Updated with more detail on 2011/09/18…

GPT is a newer Intel-provided partition format replacement for the ancient MBR style, that only allows 4 primary partitions and, most importantly, can’t be used to boot off of drives 3TB or larger (yes you will be using one soon!). So I thought I would prepare for the future and get all set up. What a waste of time… (continued…)

Team Foundation Server (TFS) continues the long Microsoft tradition of horrible source control. It’s getting more annoying every day working with proprietary tools where some corporation decided how I should get my work done. Or in this case, not get my work done. TFS works, for the most part (which is more than you can say for Visual SourceSafe, its predecessor). But if you have a large number of shared projects under one directory, don’t even think about grabbing just one of them. Awesome. Here’s why… (continued…)

I’m the last person to praise Microsoft – with the amount of money they bleed from the human race, there is no room to give them any slack. To their credit, corporations of their magnitude almost always decay into bureaucracy and inefficiency, and they could be worse. Case in point, Visual Studio. It kicks ass. Here’s a quick rundown of what it does for me when debugging my Qt app. This is in comparison to Qt Creator, which is awesomely streamlined and elegant. But when you are debugging, every bit of comfort is gold:

  • if you set things up as i did, you can step right through the Qt source with no pain
  • the watch window takes far fewer steps to manipulate
  • the debugger can dereference pointers better
  • the debugger can dereference iterators better
  • code completion in the editor can also handle dereferenced iterators
  • debugger can show long strings much better
  • you can step over a function back up to the caller without dropping to the next line of code in the call routine (for when multiple calls take place on one line)
  • debugger doesn’t head south when often browsing out of array bounds (inevitable if you are watching variables)

I’ll add to this list as seems fit. I should probably also start a list of the advantages of Qt Creator, it is really nice to work with on linux and Mac. Including Eclipse would round out the list nicely… but for now, back to teh coding. :> Check out this recent post for instructions on getting VS set up with Qt, it’s easy.