I was wondering why TortoiseGit* was complaining that my commits had no message in them.
“Aborting commit due to empty commit message.”
Turns out the new version by default strips out messages starting with a # character.
As detailed in this issue report, the over-ride is in Settings / Dialogs 2.
*yeah, I’m not a hardcore Git user, though I do prefer Git Bash on Windows for some operations
I was in contact with Stan (streaming TV) support over the weekend. The iPad wouldn’t play, whether connected via an HDMI cable or the Chromecast. It would play zero to a few frames, then freeze up.
Stan is once again stuck, on HDMI or Chromecast. Presto/Netflix work fine. About to contact @StanAustralia support. pic.twitter.com/flM6htrfMl
— Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) January 17, 2016
They suggested doing a factory reset on the Chromecast and removing and re-installing the Stan app.
It sounded unlikely (it’s the real-life version of the IT Crowd’s “Have you tried turning it off then on again”), but to my surprise, it actually worked.
HDMI was still a problem though. They said it wasn’t supported.
So why doesn’t Stan support HDMI? An interesting answer came back:
“We are unlikely to support this method of streaming in the future due to DRM (Digital Rights Management) contractual agreements we have with the studios we licence our content off of. If anything changes, we will be sure to let you know.”
This is puzzling, given their main competitors Netflix and Presto seem to support it.
It’s worth noting that Stan (and I believe the others) don’t support my 2011-model Samsung smart TV either. Thank goodness for the Chromecast. It’s not as easy as being able to play directly just on the TV (with no other devices required), but at least it works — and navigating menus is far easier on a tablet than a TV remote control.
As one observer (I forget who) noted — there’s little point paying extra for a smart TV (over a dumb one) when an A$49 device like a Chromecast is less likely to become obsolete — or if it does, it can be cheaply and easily replaced.
After rebuilding my Mac Pro with Windows 7 on an SSD (more about this later), Stereo Mix went missing.
To re-enable it, I ended up changing the audio driver to the Microsoft High-Definition Audio drivers, then back to the Realtek drivers:
I assume this updates you to the drivers that came with Windows, rather than those that came with Boot Camp.
After the reboot, Stereo Mix is available. You just need to enable it under Control Panel / Sound / Recording devices, right-click, Show disabled devices, then enable it. You can set it as the default so you can record things in Audacity etc.
On my personal blog, on a post about the Melbourne public transport smartcard Myki, this comment popped into the moderation queue:
I found another very uefsul behaviour this morning.I don’t touch off when I get home at night. While, this seems weird how do they know I got off in Zone 1 (for which I have a pass) and didn’t travel into Zone 2 (for which I should be charged Money)? But, the fare manual says that if you have a MyKi Pass and you touch on in a zone for which that pass is valid (Parliament in my case) then there is no default fair.So, every morning when I touch on, it tells me deducting fare for previous trip . Which is $0.00. Cool.This morning I forgot to touch on some power issues on our line, got to chatting with the Station Hosts, just forgot. When I got to Parliament, I fully expected the gates to deny me egress and I’d have to do the silly thing where you act exasperated and they just wave you through the end gate even though you’re holding nothing but a wallet in your hand (MyKi works while in the wallet).BUT, it let me through. Seems that it’s happy enough that I started a trip (at Parliament) last night, spent 16 hours travelling and ended my trip back where I started. So it let me out basically a touch off of the trip home last night.Bizarre. But uefsul.
At first glance, it looked on-topic. But I was suspicious because the user link was to facebook.com/profile.php?id=XYZ (I’ve removed the ID) — and it came in the middle of a bunch of other (less-relevant) comments linking to similar URLs.
Googling around for key words in the comment, I found that it’s a copy of a comment from a completely different blog, with various misspellings inserted, and paragraph breaks removed. The original:
I found another very useful behaviour this morning.
I don’t touch off when I get home at night. While, this seems weird – how do they know I got off in Zone 1 (for which I have a pass) and didn’t travel into Zone 2 (for which I should be charged Money)? But, the fare manual says that if you have a MyKi Pass and you touch on in a zone for which that pass is valid (Parliament in my case) then there is no default fair.
So, every morning when I touch on, it tells me “deducting fare for previous trip”. Which is $0.00. Cool.
This morning I forgot to touch on – some power issues on our line, got to chatting with the Station Hosts, just forgot. When I got to Parliament, I fully expected the gates to deny me egress and I’d have to do the silly thing where you act exasperated and they just wave you through the end gate even though you’re holding nothing but a wallet in your hand (MyKi works while in the wallet).
BUT, it let me through. Seems that it’s happy enough that I started a trip (at Parliament) last night, spent 16 hours travelling and ended my trip back where I started. So it let me out – basically a touch off of the trip home last night.
Bizarre. But useful.
It seems the spammers are trying to get a bit more clever at sneaking their comment posts past moderators.
I still don’t know why, given WordPress has used NoFollow on their comment links for about ten years now.
Interesting read: How to Protect Yourself from NSA Attacks on 1024-bit DH
TL;DR: 1024 bit DH keys can be broken, so you should configure your browser not to support them in SSL/TLS.
(via Andrew)
Subject line: “You’ve been added as a contact on Cotap”
Email text: “Cotap is a secure texting app for teams. View the [company name] directory. [link]
“Are you using WhatsApp, GroupMe, or iMessage to text your coworkers? See why Cotap is better for work.”
Yeah, no, this is spam, and it sounds like quite a few people are getting them.
Cotap was formed by former Yammer people… there’s speculation that when they left Yammer, they took a copy of the Yammer email list with them.
Beware of the @CoTap spam emails. Nobody invited you. Pretty shameful way to get people to use a product… #emailspam #spam
— Andrew Hammond (@andrhamm) April 10, 2015
@andrhamm Do you use Yammer as well? I wonder if there's a connection between using Yammer and getting spam from the ex-Yammer @cotap guys.
— Klaus Silberbauer (@silberbauer) April 15, 2015
…
@andrhamm Very interesting. The email-address used by Cotap was the one I used for Yammer. And its not registered anywhere else.
— Klaus Silberbauer (@silberbauer) April 15, 2015
In any case, don’t fall for their trap. Don’t do business with spammers.
In fact, why on earth would you trust your business messaging to spammers?
I had a bit of a rant over at my personal blog:
Y2K was not a hoax. It was real, but it was (mostly) averted.
This model seems to have an issue whereby the disc tray won’t open, even if the front panel flap is correctly open. You press the Open button and nothing happens, though on the screen it’ll say Open.
Some recommend putting it into Standby mode (off) then holding down Stop and Channel Up. That didn’t work for me.
Putting it in Standby and holding down Open did work… it first started up, then after about 10 seconds, the disc tray opened.
(Possibly it needs a firmware upgrade… I’ll check that out eventually, though it’s not my unit.)
Flickr has altered its default embed HTML to include a header and footer, which includes Flickr branding and the title of the picture.
Sometimes I suppose this is okay, but sometimes I just want the picture.
Fortunately it seems to be relatively easy to get rid of. In the example above:
<a data-flickr-embed="true" data-header="true" data-footer="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/danielbowen/19038778583/in/dateposted/" title="PT in the Sense8 titles 01"><img src="https://farm1.staticflickr.com/313/19038778583_3149e7e01a.jpg" width="500" height="282" alt="PT in the Sense8 titles 01"></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
…remove the data-flickr-embed, data-header, and data-footer attributes of the a href, and remove the script tags, like this:
<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/danielbowen/19038778583/in/dateposted/" title="PT in the Sense8 titles 01"><img src="https://farm1.staticflickr.com/313/19038778583_3149e7e01a.jpg" width="500" height="282" alt="PT in the Sense8 titles 01"></a>
The result should be just the photo, with the usual linking back to Flickr.
It’d be nice if they made this a built-in option when generating the HTML code.
Of course, it also makes me ponder if I should be finding another photo host.
Update 2015-07-20: They seem to have modified their default embedding code a bit so the branding and picture details now only appear over the photo when you mouse over it. Not so objectionable.
Flickr’s modified code now excludes data-header="true" data-footer="true" which presumably added the header and footer.
I don’t know how much bandwidth Twitter’s new autoplay videos are burning up, but fortunately it can be turned off.
Twitter / Settings / Account / Video autoplay: off.
You're welcome. pic.twitter.com/BEi5LpBY7y
— Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) July 1, 2015
My old hand-me-down laptop is getting too slow under Windows.
I tried reinstalling, and it’s still slow. Perhaps it’s the patch upon patch upon patch that needs to be applied to make it safe that explains why Windows installations always slow down over time — and why reinstalling didn’t solve the problem.
So I went looking around for lightweight Windows-like Linux distros… and ended up with LXLE.
The steps were pretty simple.
The laptop seems rejuvenated. The speed is nice. I mostly use it for web and a little word processing (which Libre Office, installed with the distro, should cover).
The interface is similar enough to Windows that I’ll get by fine with it. (And unlike trying to move to OSX, no annoying differences in keyboard shortcuts.)
And if I desperately want something in Windows, I can still boot it up if I need to.
Still to investigate:
It has had some problems with waking up after sleep, and forgetting the touchpad No Click setting when rebooting.
And now, after a week…
Now it won’t boot.
The whizzes on Twitter suggest it might be a hard disk corruption… which it might be, though Windows is still booting fine.
Or it might be that grub needs reinstalling. I’m not even sure how or why I’d do that.
The other suggestion people have is to try a different (more stable?) distro, such as Lubuntu. Might be worth a look, though I’m wondering how much better it would be.
As I get time I’ll keep testing.
Update: It may have been to the partition running out of disk space. Yeah, seems like an odd way of dealing with it.
From the Things I’ve Found That Might Affect Other People But There’s Not Much Detail In Google About It department
Not that I have much to add to the sum total of published knowledge on this, but our situation is we have a COM object (legacy code) calling .Net 2 objects (not-quite-as-old legacy code).
We’re upgrading it all to .Net 4.5, but the .Net stuff is an easier change, so we’ve been doing that first, naturally in a carefully planned, staged manner.
It turns out that COM+ objects have a 1 Gb memory limit.
And it appears that when you have them calling a mix of .Net 2 and .Net 4 objects, the overhead of being able to call two different .Net Framework versions becomes an issue.
At least that’s our theory based on what we’re seeing — looking at ProcessExplorer showed about a dozen assemblies loaded for each version of .Net.
One blog post I read suggested a 600-800 Mb overhead for each .Net version. I can’t confirm that, but certainly we’ve had more Out Of Memory exceptions than we expected.
We’ve resolved it by going back to our .Net 2 code (so only one version is held within the COM+ process at once), and we’ll do the big switch all at once. Hopefully that’ll resolve it.
The COM object will also be switched too of course, and once that’s done, running everything in .Net 4, plus a move from 32-bit to 64-bit machines, apparently will lift that 1 Gb limit to 8 Tb!
Cool!