TITAM - Technical issues that affected me

Problem: VLC "Vetinari"stutters / plays choppy video when older versions played just fine. Solution:  Go to Tools \ Preferences \ Input/Codecs  and set "Hardware-accelerated decoding" to "Disable".

Here are some items that are potentially useful to know when setting up a hardware key (i.e. Yubikey) for online security. 1.  Yubikey is grossly overpriced.   HyperFIDO has fully compatible keys at a quarter of the cost , and they even protect the USB plug contacts - something Yubikey does not do. (Why most key makers choose designs that expose the USB contacts, I will never understand.) They also have a mini version .  Reviews say it is not as well built, but at this price, you can afford to buy spares.  Plus it comes with a cap to keep grunge out of the USB plug. Unfortunately, they don't have a Bluetooth / NFC version.  For that you should consider a Feitian at half the cost of a Yubikey . [Update]:  I have noticed that some services work with Yubikeys, but don't work with other FIDO-compatible keys.  This is a problem on their end.  I've had good luck with companies fixing their issues once I point them out. 2.  You can't use...

Further to my previous post , I have found XWidget to have a lot of good options for information displays on old Androids. New development of XWidget has reportedly stopped , but the app still works fine.  Rainmeter is (presumably) intended to replace it, but it doesn't (yet) work on Android. The free version allows you to access a fairly good library of free widgets.  If you want the others (such as something from this massive collection by jimking ) you need to pony up a couple of bucks . Despite the developers insistence that it was possible to transfer downloaded widgets to Android, I could not make it work. XWidget would not connect to my phone (yes, I checked the driver). [Update 2019-04-06]:  The .XWP files for Xwidget are nothing more than zip/rar archives.  You can open them directly with WinRAR and extract the working files without the need to install the PC application, as described below. Original text: "My workaround was to unpack/install th...

No shortage of sites telling us we should be re-purposing old phones rather than junking them. I wanted to make a wall clock / weather station.  Easy, right? Nope. Many issues, including: -  The phone did not support a landscape home screen, meaning widgets were out. -  Most weather apps looked like crap. -  Many weather apps also did not rotate into landscape. So, several things to fix.  Very frustrating for what should have been a trivial thing, took much longer than I expected. As I wanted landscape mode, that meant an app and not a widget.  I tried out 10-12 weather apps and was not happy with any of them in landscape; most of them did a bad job of using all the available real estate. Some solutions: 1.  Install Nova Launcher .  This allows most any phone/tablet to have a landscape home screen; it also hides the status bar. (It can't hide the home/back buttons - that's part of the OS.  But it does everything else.) ...

Lots of sites tell you that you should be "re-purposing" old Android phones into something useful. I admit there are some useful things they could do.  Various kinds of clocks and weather forecasters are obvious; also a remote control for your smart thermostat or lighting. However, none of these sites deal with the main difficulty for many of these.  Which is, of course, old Androids do not rotate the home screen into landscape. This caused me no end of frustration (well - OK, several hours - but it felt endless) when I wanted to make an old phone a wall clock/weather monitor. One way to fix it:  Use Nova Launcher .  It supports landscape home screens, even on older devices. Google Launcher also did so, but is apparently discontinued.  It also populated the home screen with extra crap that Nova does not have. Nova can also get rid of the quick-access apps and the status bar.  It can't get rid of the home/back buttons, as those are part of the OS...