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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘Microsoft Windows’
08.02.2023
I could just repeat my post from January 26. Letâs face it, Google is a notorious spammer, with a failing search engine, and an advertising business thatâs a decent negligence lawsuit away from collapsing.
It was 2011 when I showed everyone that your opt-out settings in Google Ads Preferences Manager were meaningless. Today, your email preferences are meaningless, since of course this incompetent Big Tech firm spammed me again. There must be some pretty hopeless technology behind all of this. You have to wonder when a company canât get the fundamentals right.
No wonder so many spammers choose Gmail.



Of course, Microsoft is pretty hopeless at the best of times. Today I tried to access my desktop PC’s hard drive across the network from my laptop, only to be asked again that I feed in a username and password. Except neither exists when I’m doing local stuff. I couldn’t remember how I got around it last time, but today it was buried here:

Of course this stuff changes every time, and Windows seems to change your settings without you knowing.
I wouldn’t have needed to do this file transfer if Apples worked. Last time I tried to get cellphone images on to an Imac, it was a pretty simple procedure (make sure they are both on Bluetooth and let them chat). These days it insists you upload everything on to Icloud and get it down off Icloud. Even when the Iphone and Imac are connected via USB.
I’m sure there’s a way around this, but I really couldn’t be bothered finding it. It proved quicker to plug in the Iphone to a Windows computer. Shame that my problems weren’t over after I did this, since all computer companies like to make things difficult for users.
Tags: 2023, Apple, cellphone, email, Google, Microsoft, Microsoft Windows, software, spam Posted in internet, technology | No Comments »
02.10.2022
Windows 11 22H2 arrived for me yesterday, and the first order of business, as always, was to sort out the typography. This earlier post is roughly right: make the registry hacks, then change the properties of the fonts in C:\Windows\WinSXS (namely by giving them administrator access) before deleting them. However, I needed one extra step to get them out of C:\Windows\Fonts , and that was to boot up in safe mode and delete them from 7Zip. Only then could I change the properties and say farewell to the dreaded Arial.
You still canât type most characters above ASCII 128 in Notepadâa crazy state of affairs introduced during Windows 11âs timeâthough I managed to get the pound sterling sign to work (even though there might be less need to type it now thanks to the UK government). I guess no one uses the euro symbol at Redmond, or goes to a cafĂŠ (forget about any accented characters).
Weâll see if Explorer still rotates photos by itselfâbut as Iâve replaced it with One Commander for most of my file management, it will be a while before I will find out.
The new icons look good, and the new Maps seems to work reasonably well. Mostly I just care that my usual programs are fine and Windows’ font substitutes don’t do anything silly.

Tags: 2022, bugs, computing, fonts, Microsoft, Microsoft Windows, technology, typography Posted in design, technology, typography | No Comments »
02.04.2022

Now that Microsoft wonât let us type certain characters into Notepad (anything above ASCII 127, at least on a standard US keyboard), Iâve had to look for alternatives.
This is a daft move on Microsoftâs part as I am sure I am not the only person in the world who needs to type ÂŁ or ⏠or the word cafĂŠ. I accept not everyone needs to type en and em dashes.
A number of kind souls on Twitter suggested Notepad++, which I had heard of years ago, but it was just far too complicated for me. What I really wanted was Notepad as it was before a few months ago.
The closest: EditPad Lite 8, which is like Notepad but with a more convoluted search and replace, and tabs so you can have a bunch of files in a single instance of the program.

Windows Explorer is the other one. It keeps rotating photos by itself, even images with no orientation code (such as screenshots). Thereâs no rhyme or reason to it. Sometimes itâll rotate left. Other times to the right. Or upside down.
Sadly, the timestamp changes, which is very problematic for, say, email attachments, which I file by date. Also linked files for magazine workâwe canât afford to have photos suddenly rotated in a file because Microsoft thinks so.
That proved to be a lot harder to solve, as most people who make Explorer alternatives want to do multiple windows. Others have clunky interfaces. If you donât want to pay, and even if you do, your choices seem rather limited.
Eventually trialling more than half a dozen, I settled on One Commander, which doesnât rotate photos without human intervention, and I had been happy with it till todayâwhen it changed the timestamps on a whole bunch of photos during a transfer.

I know the program would love to call these photos âmodifiedâ at the time of transfer, but thatâs exceedingly unhelpful for my purposes, when I need them to show the original date and modified date exactly as they were in the originating folder.
Your suggestions are welcome. I do need to preview thumbnails, which knocks out some of the offerings. But again, you have to wonder why on earth Microsoft has introduced bugs when both these programs functioned fine under Windows 10.
PS.: Milos ParipoviÄ, the developer of One Commander, responded to my query about this. He says, ‘One Commander is using Explorer for file operations so it should behave the same way.’ And here’s the thing: I haven’t been able to replicate the bug described above since. So it looks like I’ll continue with One Commander, which has the best UI of them all. Altap Salamander did get a brief look-in, but it’s just not as nice to look at.
Tags: 2022, bugs, Microsoft, Microsoft Windows, software, technology, USA Posted in publishing, technology, USA | No Comments »
01.11.2021

The Windows 11 upgrade arrived on my desktop machine before my laptop, which was a surprise. Also surprising is how uneventful the whole process was, unlike Windows 10, which led me to become a regular on the Microsoft Answers forums.
A few tips: (a) do back everything up first; and (b) do take screenshots of the pinned items in your start menu. The former goes without saying; the latter is important since those pins wonât be preserved with the upgrade.
The download-and-install took some time and when I restarted the PC, it actually loaded Windows 10 again! Only when I restarted from there did Windows 11 do the full upgrade process, which was relatively painless.
First impressions: WordPerfect and Eudora appear to work, and MacType has loaded for the programs, including my Vivaldi browser. So thatâs the office stuff taken care of.
The taskbar is too darned tall and thereâs no way to fix it without a registry hack, something Iâm not yet willing to do. I suppose I could hide it but Windows can be flaky, and you just never know when its presence (and a right-click to the Task Manager) is going to be needed.
Muscle memory over years (decades) means that I still want to go to the bottom left-hand corner for my icons, but Iâm willing to give centred a shot as it reminds me of MacOS.
Happily, thereâs not much more to report. The icons look nicer to me and the change is positive, and the redone UI fonts have a bit more character (pun unintended). The only registry hack I intend to do is for the sake of decent typography. Hopefully thereâll be little more to report.
PS.: The removal of system fonts (viz. Arial) worked.
Tags: 2021, design, Microsoft, Microsoft Windows, office, software, technology Posted in technology, typography | No Comments »
17.09.2020
Something is crashing my PC and taking Eudora mailboxes with it.
The latest is losing my Q3 outbox table of contents, which I suppose isnât as bad as losing the inbox, outbox, and all third-quarter emails, though being at the end of the week, there was still some repairing from the weekend back-up I made.
The outbox was there but the table of contents was corrupted, and when Eudora rebuilds, for some reason the recipient isnât recorded, only the sender.
Once again I was faced with a line-by-line (or, rather, group-by-group) comparison of the back-up and the existing mailboxes, to see what changes had been made since the 11th.

Above: What remained of the third-quarter outbox. I can no longer group this âbox by recipient, since Eudora doesn’t rebuild sent email folders with the recipient in the relevant column.
There were about three dozen emails that werenât in common.
The below Windows crash appears to have happened just after the last recorded ârecipient-lessâ email in the corrupted table of contents.

That was a while back, but I do remember another crash that slowed the computer to a crawl, with the non-closing app on restart being something to do with an AMD capturing window error.
Could AMDâs software be crashing and deleting mailboxes? If so, itâs cost me many, many hours of frustration and the knowledge that I have a corrupted table of contents for this quarterâs emails that will never be fixedâa rare imperfection among years of perfectly archived âboxes.
I was also able to trace it to when I sent a message to a friend on Facebook who is not easily reachable by other means. Since I rarely use the site it was pretty easy to pinpoint when I was last there.
Considering my phone died after installing Whatsapp what’s the bet that running Facebook on a desktop browser kills your desktop’s data?
Itâs as I always say: the newer the software doesnât mean more reliable. Just ask anyone using Facebook today.
I have updated the AMD driver so letâs see if the bug recurs. Iâm considering running Eudora back-ups on a daily basis but the weekly Windows back-up takes in many other work folders, and I donât believe thereâs a way to run a second job through the default service.
I visited a dental surgeon earlier this week and noticed his software didnât perform as he wished. He couldnât edit things in his billing software due to a bug. He had to return to the file minutes later and repeat the task before the program let him.
I dispute those who say I encounter more bugs than the average user. Watching the surgeon, he just lived with the bug, and knew that if he waited long enough, his program would allow him to make edits again. It seems to be a bug affecting the most basic of tasks. The difference, I imagine, is that he didnât document the stupidity of the software developer in preventing him from doing a fundamental task, whereas I regularly call them out, especially when it comes to common sites such as Google or Facebook where the (misplaced) expectation is that they must hire the best. Not always.
Prof Sir Geoffrey Palmer once said in one of his lectures, âThe more lawyers there are, the more poor lawyers there are.â The analogy in software is, âThe more software developers there are, the more thick software developers there are.â Like any profession, and I include law, not everyone who graduates is smart. Just look at some of our politicians who claim to have law degrees.
Tags: 2020, bugs, Eudora, law, Microsoft Windows, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, software, Victoria University of Wellington Posted in New Zealand, technology, Wellington | No Comments »
12.09.2020
Iâve used Eudora for around 25 years as my email client and in the early days, when the inbox got too big, I had it crash every now and then, necessitating the program to rebuild the table of contents. From memory Iâve lost some emails back then, too, and had to ask friends to re-send. But, by and large, itâs been largely stable, and since Windows 7 I donât recall it crashing so badly that I would be up shit creek. Till last night.
Normally, Eudora has back-ups for its in- and outboxes (which it renames with 001 and 002 suffixes) so in the case of a lost âbox, you can rename the old ones and hopefully not lose too much. But what if a crash was so severe it would take out not only the in- and outboxes, but also the content of the back-ups, as well as your third-quarter email folder? Thatâs exactly what happened.
I havenât gone back into Windows to find out what caused the series of crashes but it seems to have begun with RuntimeBroker.exe and ntdll.dll. Iâm not even going to pretend I know what all this means:

So what do you do when youâre up shit creek and renaming mailboxes (which Iâve had to do when we had a fuse blow) doesnât work?
The most recent back-up I had was from September 5, and a lot happens in email-land for me over the course of six days. But it was the most recent, and it had to be the starting-point. So, first up, I retrieved them from Windows Backup and put them into a temporary folder (you canât put them into the original folder).
The third-quarter âboxâs contents were still there, but the table of contents had been corrupted, but it had six daysâ worth of changes to it. I renamed this to Q3 In (2), closed Eudora, and placed the backed-up third-quarter mailbox and table into the Eudora folder.
Then itâs the laborious process of seeing how they differ. The best thing to doâand why Eudora remains superior to so many later programsâis to line up the mailbox windows side by side, size them the same, sort them both by date, and begin going through screen by screen. If the first email and the last email are identical, chances are the ones in the middle are identical, so youâre only looking for the emails in the corrupted table that are newer. You then have to shift them one by one into the backed up one. I deleted the identical ones from the corrupted mailbox and by the end of the exercise I had over 4,200 emails in the trash.
The status (read, replied) is gone after the transfers but itâs a tiny price to pay for completeness.

Above: The remnants of the exercise, after discarding trash and duplicate emails from the corrupted third-quarter mailbox.
Then the inbox. Same story: there was a 001 âbox that had survived the crash but none of the tables of contents were usable.
In this case, itâs fortunate we use Zoho as our email service. I went into the trash folder, where all checked emails wind up after POP3 access, and transferred everything from the 5th to the present day into the inbox. Fortunately, from there itâs not difficult to do a fresh POP3 access. Again, I closed Eudora, put the backed-up inbox into the main Eudora folder, and simply checked my emails. You do lose once more the status of the emailsâyou wonât know if youâve replied to themâbut at least you have an inbound record.
The outbox was a very sad case, and unfortunately the news is not good. Here, the table of contents was complete but the mailboxes (all of them) were blank. Therefore, clicking on the table of contentsâ entries actually deleted them because the mailbox was corrupted. Strangely, all showed the correct sizes.
Thereâs no easy way here. You canât take sent emails from Zoho and put them into your inbox expecting Eudora to be able to download them. The only solution I found was to forward each one, one by one, to myself from within Zoho. Then I placed them into either my third-quarter outbox or the active outbox. My own name appears in the recipient column, and the dates are wrong, but, again, if completeness is the aim, then itâs a small price to pay. Sadly, of the three recovered âboxes and tables of contents, itâs the least elegant.
I imagine I could edit each email as a text file within the outbox and allow the table of contents to generate new entries, then recompile them into a new table, but after youâve spent hours doing the first two âboxes, youâre not keen on such a technical solution after 3 a.m. And there’s also no guarantee that the table would generate properly anyway.
Windows was the culprit here, as Eudora has always been very stable, and crashes like this are exceedingly rare, if you keep your in- and outboxes to reasonable sizes. Iâve never seen the back-ups get wiped out as well. A good case study in favour of regular back-ups, and maybe I might need even more frequent ones.
Tags: 2020, bugs, email, Eudora, Microsoft Windows, office, software, Zoho Posted in business, New Zealand, technology | 1 Comment »
13.08.2020
My last post implied that I ego-surfed and found a Wikipedia chat entry about me, but thatâs not the case. I was searching for information on how to remove a system-protected font from Windows 10, and seeing as I often post solutions to obscure technical issues on here, I had hoped I recorded my how-to last time. The libel posted by some Australian Wikipedia editor came up during that search.
Once upon a time, Microsoft didnât care if you removed system fonts, but at some point, it began protecting Arial, whose design, for reasons Iâve gone into elsewhere, Iâve always considered compromised. There was one stage where you could replace Arial with something else called Arial, and as I had a licence for a very, very old Agfa version of Helvetica (do people remember CG Triumvirate?!), I decided to modify its file name to fool Windows into thinking all was well.
The last time Windows did an updateâversion 1909âI had to resort to a safe-mode boot and taking control of the font files as admin, but I really could not remember the specifics. The problem is that when you install the ânewâ Arial, the existing roman one is used by quite a few applications, and you donât really replace itâyour only solution is to delete it.
With version 2004, safe mode is quite different, and the command prompt and Powershell commands I knew just didnât cut it. I realize the usual solution is to go into the registry keysâIâve used this one for a long, long timeâand to remove or modify the references to the offending fonts at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts. Iâve also used the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontSubstitutes key to make sure that Helvetica does not map on to Arial (in fact, I make sure Arial maps on to Helvetica). Neither actually works in this case; they are ignored, even bypassed by certain programs. And, really, neither deletes the file; they just attempt to have Windows not load them, something which, as I discovered, doesnât prevent Windows from loading them.
By all means, use these methods, but be prepared for the exception where it doesnât work. The claim that the methods âdeleteâ the fonts is actually untrue: they remain in C:\Windows\Fonts.
The other methods that do not work are altering the equivalent keys under WOW6432node (which get intercepted and directed from the 32-bit keys anyway), using an elevated command prompt to delete the files (at least not initially), or doing the same from safe mode (which is very different now, as safe mode is in the same resolution and the Windows\Fonts folder displays as it does in the regular modeâso you cannot see the files you have to remove). You cannot take ownership of the font files through an elevated Powershell (errors result), nor can you do this from safe mode. Nothing happens if you delete FNTCACHE.DAT from the system32 directory, and nothing happens if you delete ~fontcache files from the Local directory.
What was interesting was what kept calling arial.ttf in the fontsâ directory even after âmyâ Arial was loaded up. The imposter Arial loaded in most programs, but for the Chromium-based browsers (Vivaldi, Edge), somehow these knew to avoid the font registry and access the font directly. This was confirmed by analysing the processes under Process Monitor: sure enough, something had called up and used arial.ttf.
This Wikihow article was a useful lead, getting us to delete the fonts under the Windows\WinSxS folder, and showing how to take ownership of them. I donât know if altering these ultimately affected the ones inside Windows\Fonts, but I followed the instructions, to find that the original Arial was being accessed by three programs: Vivaldi, Keybase, and Qt Qtwebengineprocess. I shut each one of these down and removed the Arial family.
Reboot: it was still there. Then it hit me, and I posted the solution in the Microsoft Answers forum (perhaps inadvertently prompting a Microsoft programmer to make things even harder in future!). Another user had told me it was impossible, but I knew that to be untrue, since it had been possible every other time.
The solution is pretty simple: since you canât see the full Windows\Fonts directory with Windows Explorer, then I needed another file manager.
Luckily, I had 7zip, which I opened as an administrator. It allowed me to go into the folder and view all its contents, not just the fonts called up under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts, which we know is not an accurate representation of the fonts being used by the system. From there I could finally delete the offending four fonts without changing the ownership (which makes me wonder if the Wikihow advice of changing the owner under Windows\WinSxS wound up affecting the Windows\Fonts files). Once again, I had to close Keybase, Vivaldi and Qt Qtwebengineprocess.
It took from c. 4 p.m., when my desktop PC updated to v. 2004 (my laptop had been on it for many weeks; soon after its release, in fact) to 2 a.m., with a break in between to cook and eat dinner. Iâm hoping those hours of having typographic OCD helps others who want to have a font menu where they determine what they should have. Also, user beware: donât delete stuff that the system really, really needs, including an icon font that Windows uses for rendering its GUI.

Using Google as a last resortâexcept this search, which I did again as an illustration, now displays in CG Triumvirate rather than Arial. Normally, Google is a big Arial user (Arial and sans-serif are in the CSS specs) and Chromium browsers are all too happy to circumvent the registry-registered fonts and go straight into your hard drive.
Tags: 2020, Agfa, Chromium, Compugraphic, fonts, Helvetica, Microsoft, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Windows, Monotype, software, typeface, typefaces, typography, Vivaldi Posted in design, technology, typography | 9 Comments »
17.02.2020
I wonder if itâs time to return to Firefox after an absence of two years and five months. After getting the new monitor, the higher res makes Firefoxâs and Opera GXâs text rendering fairly similar (though Chrome, Vivaldi and Edge remain oddly poor, and Vivaldiâs tech people havenât been able to replicate my bug). Thereâs a part of me that gravitates toward Firefox more than anything with a Google connection, and I imagine many Kiwis like backing underdogs.
Here are some examples, bearing in mind Windows scales up to 125 per cent on QHD.
Vivaldi (Chrome renders like this, too)

Opera GX (and how Vivaldi used to render)

Firefox

Opera renders text slightly more widely than Firefox, but the subpixel rendering of both browsers is similar, though not identical. Type in Firefox arguably comes across with slightly less contrast than it should (especially for traditionally paper-based type, where I have a good idea of how itâs âsupposedâ to look) but Iâm willing to experiment to see if I enjoy the switch back.
In those 29 months, a lot has happened, with Navigational Sounds having vanished as an extension, and I had to get a new Speed Dial (FVD Speed Dial) to put on my favourite sites. FVD uninstalled itself earlier today without any intervention from me, so if that recurs, Iâll be switching to something else. I donât like computer programs having a will of their own.
A lot of my saved passwords no longer work, since I change them from time to time, and it was interesting to see what Firefox remembered from my last period of regular use. Iâll have to import some bookmarks, tooâthat file has been going between computers since Netscape.
The big problem of 2017âFirefox eating through memory like crazy (6 Gbyte in a short time)âcould be fixed now in 2020 by turning off hardware acceleration. Itâs actually using less right now than Opera GX, and thatâs another point in its favour.
I also like the Facebook Container that keeps any trackers from Zuck and co. away.
I did, however, have to get new extensions after having resided in the Vivaldi and Opera space for all that time, such as Privacy Badger.
If I make Firefox the default I know Iâll have truly switched back. But that Opera GX sure is a good looking browser. I might have to look for some skins to make common-garden Firefox look smarter.
Tags: 2020, Chromium, computing, Google, Microsoft Windows, Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, typography, user interface, web browser Posted in design, internet, typography | No Comments »
31.01.2020

The Dell P2418D: just like the one I’m looking at as I type, but there are way more wires coming out of the thing in real life
Other than at the beginning of my personal computing experience (the early 1980s, and thatâs not counting video game consoles), Iâve tended to have a screen thatâs better than average. When 640 Ă 360 was the norm, I had 1,024 Ă 768. My first modern laptop in 2001 (a Dell Inspiron) had 1,600 pixels across, even back then. It was only in recent years that I thought my LG 23-inch LCD, which did full HD, was good enough, and I didnât bother going to the extremes of 4K. However, with Lucire and the night-time hours I often work, and because of a scratch to the LG that a friend accidentally made when we moved, I thought it was time for an upgrade.
Blue light is a problem, and I needed something that would be easier on the eyes. At the same time, an upgrade on res would be nice.
But there was one catch: I wasnât prepared to go to 27 inches. I didnât see the point. I can only focus on so much at any given time, and I didnât want a monitor so large that Iâd have to move my neck heaps to see every corner. On our work Imacs I was pretty happy to work at 24 inches, so I decided Iâd do the same for Windows, going up a single inch from where I was. IPS would be fine. I didnât need a curved screen because my livelihood is in flat media. Finally, I don’t need multiple screens as I don’t need to keep an eye on, say, emails coming in on one screen, or do coding where I need one screen for the code and the other for the preview.
Oddly, there arenât many monitor manufacturers doing QHD at 24 inches. There was a very narrow range I could choose from in New Zealand, with neither BenQ nor Viewsonic doing that size and resolution here. Asus has a beautifully designed unit but I was put off by the backlight bleed stories of four years ago that were put down to poor quality control, and it seemed to be a case of hit and miss; while Dellâs P2418D seemed just right, its negative reviews on Amazon and the Dell website largely penned by one person writing multiple entries. I placed the order late one night, and Ascent dispatched it the following day. If not for the courier missing me by an hour, Iâd be writing this review a day earlier.
I realize weâre only hours in to my ownership so there are no strange pixels or noticeable backlight bleed, and assembly and installation were a breeze, other than Windows 10 blocking the installation of one driver (necessitating the use of an elevated command prompt to open the driver executable).
With my new PC that was made roughly this time last year, I had a Radeon RX580 video card with two Displayport ports, so it was an easy farewell to DVI-D. The new cables came with the monitor. A lot of you will already be used to monitors acting as USB hubs with a downstream cable plugged in, though that is new to me. It does mean, finally, I have a more comfortable location for one of my external HDs, and I may yet relocate the cable to a third external round the back of my PC.
Windows 10 automatically sized everything to 125 per cent magnification, with a few programs needing that to be overridden (right-click on the program icon, then head into âCompatibilityâ, then âChange high DPI settingsâ).
Dellâs Display Manager lets you in to brightness, contrast and other settings without fiddling with the hardware buttons, which is very handy. I did have to dial down the brightness and contrast considerably: Iâm currently at 45 and 64 per cent respectively.
And I know itâs just me and not the devices but everything feels faster. Surely I can’t be noticing the 1 ms difference between Displayport and DVI-D?
I can foresee this being far more productive than my old set-up, and Ascentâs price made it particularly tempting. I can already see more of the in- and outbox detail in Eudora. Plantin looks great here in WordPerfect (which I often prep my long-form writing in), and if type looks good, Iâm more inclined to keep working with it. (It never looked quite right at a lower res, though it renders beautifully on my laptop.)
I feel a little more âlate 2010sâ than I did before, with the monitor now up to the tech of the desktop PC. Sure, itâs not as razor-sharp as an Imac with a Retina 4K display, but I was happy enough in work situations with the QHD of a 15-inch Macbook Pro, and having that slightly larger feels right. Besides, a 4K monitor at this sizeâand Dell makes oneâwas outside what I had budgeted, and Iâm not sure if I want to run some of my programsâthe ones that donât use Windowsâ magnificationâon a 4K screen. Some of their menus would become particularly tiny, and that wonât be great for productivity.
Maybe when 4K becomes the norm Iâll reconsider, as the programs will have advanced by then, though at this rate Iâll still be using Eudora 7.1, as I do today.
Incidentally, type on Vivaldi (and presumably Chrome) still looks worse than Opera and Firefox. Those who have followed my blogging from the earlier days know this is important to me.
Vivaldi

Opera GX

Tags: 2010s, 2020, Chromium, computing, Dell, design, Eudora, Microsoft Windows, New Zealand, Opera, retail, technology, typography, Vivaldi, web browser, WordPerfect Posted in design, internet, publishing, technology, typography | 3 Comments »
25.08.2019
The latest Universal Media Server has never worked for me. Many years ago, I downloaded what must have been v. 6, and it went well. Upon receiving notification I should upgrade, I didâonly to have no videos play any more. Only thumbnails appeared and that was the best UMS could do.
Fast forward to 2019, when I buy a new computer, expecting that, with a clean installation of Windows 10, any prior issue would be history. Not so: UMS still behaved the same, so I ran v. 6.3.2, which works about 85 per cent of the time. This is, of course, better than 0 per cent for more recent versions.
Iâm at a loss on why newer versions donât work, considering this computer shares little with its predecessor other than licences for programs that have no relation to media streaming. Yet I must be in a minority (again) since there are few entries of this in UMS forums.
Todayâs error was interesting, and this is a note to myself and anyone else who comes across it. Those who believe software runs the same every time are either unobservant or kidding themselves: while on a Mac this usually holds true, on Windows it is sheer fantasy. UMS refused to recognize my TV as a TV, loading the configuration for Microsoft Windows Media Player (WMP) instead. Naturally, nothing playedâin fact, nothing was found in any of the directories.
Fix: I edited the UMS configuration file manually, searched for selected_renderers =, and added what the program usually found: Vizio Smart TV. Quit and restart (the executable from the programâs directory).
It does mean the other configurations might not load, but since most of the time Iâm watching UMS-streamed content on my TV, then Iâm sorted. If I have other devices to load, Iâll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Tags: 2010s, Microsoft Windows, software, technology Posted in technology | No Comments »
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