TITAM - Technical issues that affected me

So your gadgets have disappeared?  It seemed to happen to me after a Windows update, though since I wasn't really paying attention I can't be sure.  It might have been installing Steam that did it, but evidently the gadgets can just disappear for no discernible reason, so who knows. In my case, UAC was still on, and desktop items were not hidden.  These are apparently the two most common reasons for gadgets to disappear. Anyway, this BAT file fixed my problem.  I did not bother going through it to see just what it does, but it seems to kill any existing process and reset the gadget settings.

(OK, so this is not technically a technical issue.  So sue me.) I had the good fortune of going to Japan recently, with somebody else paying the bills.  As a Fortune 500, it was their policy to fly business class on any flight over 6 hours, and I was not going to complain. On a whim, I upgraded myself on the outbound flight to first class.  It was about $650 for the upgrade as a last-chance, while-you-are-checking-in sort of thing.  I figured that I'd never get another chance to fly first class for 12 hours for $700, so I took it. As it happened, the flight back was full so I was demoted to "only" business class.  As the two flights were five days apart, I can now say for sure what the differences are: Not much, but some. Both flights were Boeing 777-200s, with 8 first-class seats and 40 business class.  The following probably won't apply to other types of jets, unless they are of comparable class.  Certainly not the little Skywest commuters ...

NiMH batteries are cool, but they are expensive.  If you really want to "go green"* and switch wholesale to NiMH, it's a significant investment and you want to get the best stuff you can afford. I know a lot of people out there don't know if they should go for "high-capacity" NiMH or "low-discharge" NiMH. I know it caused me a lot of consternation when I needed to replace my older cells - none of which were low-discharge type, so I had no experience to go by. Here's my take: Low-discharge, hands down. This is based on my experience - no formal tests, but the experience is so compelling I don't think it's even worthwhile testing. Many of my NiMH batteries go into my SLR flash.  Obviously I do not use my camera every day, and it sometimes sits for weeks.  I also obviously want to be able to pick it up at any time and go to it, which I often do for work purposes. Before, every third time I picked up the camera the flash batteries...

In my case, this is a conflict between BeyondTV and Windows Media Player. WMP is playing a video file.  DivX, WMV, it doesn't seem to matter. BeyondTV begins to "Showsqueeze" a file to DivX format. WMP throws "An audio device was disconnected or reconfigured" error. Once identified, the error is perfectly reproducible.  Simply set BeyondTV to auto-squeeze without any time limits, start recording any show, then stop it anytime.  Manual or automatic recording, doesn't matter.  A few seconds after stopping, Beyond will queue up the Showsqueeze and start the DivX conversion, at which exact moment WMP will stop doing what it is doing and puke the above error. I am guessing that BeyondTV and WMP both "want" the DivX codec at the same time.  But I don't know for sure.  All I know is it seems to be unique to me. The error does NOT happen if Beyond compresses shows to WMV format.  Just DivX seems to set it off.  (Of course, nobody wants a ...

Credit to "Geoff" for this post - read it for a summary of the error.  Seems I'm not the only one who runs into strange errors. Naturally, this error is a real bitch.  Windows fails to tell you WHICH audio device changed, making it a trial-and-error approach to debugging.  I hate that, as they could have easily mentioned which device was causing the offense. Plus it takes about an hour to re-create the error, making troubleshooting very slow. For my part, here is what did NOT fix the error: 1.  Disabling Windows driver signing enforcement.  My Hauppage WinTV-PVR-150 cards were listed as "Sound" devices in Device Manager, making them (possibly) "audio" devices to Windows.  They had yellow exclamation points in Device Manager only because the drivers are not signed for Windows 7.  So they worked, but they could have run into some kind of driver checking BS that caused the error sporiadically. However, turning off the driver checking using the ...