TITAM - Technical issues that affected me

Problem:  You have a nicely curated VLC playlist in xpsf format, and you want to copy those files (and only those files) to a new destination.  Like, your phone or portable device, for a trip or something. There is a tool called "XSPF Export Tool" out there, done by Gerald at Dragonzero.  It did not work for me. There is another tool called AmoK Playlist Copy .  It does not support .xspf playlist format. So what worked for me was: -  In VLC, save the playlist into *.m3u format, and -  Use AmoK Playlist Copy to copy the playlist files to a new directory. Worked perfect for me.

Update August 2022:  The solution below did NOT work for me, so three more years of putting up with this nonsense. Pretty much every time I ran Macroworks, it would hog the CPU to the point where the machine became almost completely unresponsive.  It took 20-25 minutes just to start Task Manager and kill it.  However, I may have found another solution:  Set Macroworks' "Priority" in Task Manager to "Low".  This seems to let it hog the CPU without actually getting in the way of anything. This is (again) a new development and I don't know if it is going to pan out, but it's worth a shot. ------------------------------- Update Oct 2019:  Per the comments below, I updated to the latest MW (as of mid-Oct) and  it seems to be completely fixed. Oddly, PI does not mention this anywhere that I could find.  Perhaps they don't want to admit they had an issue, or perhaps the issue really was confined to a few lucky users. However, you DO need to manually...

Problem:  Word stops accepting non-ASCII keys.  Everything works using mouse shortcuts, but keyboard equivalents do not work. For example, you can type "normal" text.  But arrow keys, function keys, and keyboard shortcuts such as Ctrl-X for copy, Ctrl-V for paste, do not work.  Home and End keys do not work.  Function keys like F7 for spell check do not work.  Number pad arrows do not work. Possible solution:  Using the mouse, try starting the spell checker (Review / Spelling & Grammar.).  For whatever reason, this unlocked all of my special keys again in Word.

Things to know: -  XBMC is too old to recognize the ".nomedia" file.  You'll need to upgrade to a recent build of Kodi. -  To get a proper ".nomedia" file in Windows, you have to tell Windows to name the file ".nomedia.", with a trailing period. -   advancedsettings.xml should be in "%appdata%\Kodi\userdata\". -  You don't need all the fancy regex crap you see in the examples.  <regex> somethingsimple </regex> will do. -  If you're having problems with "excludefromscan", you should know there is a separate tag for TV shows called "excludetvshowsfromscan".   So if you're having problems with "excludefromscan" not excluding TV show directories, this is probably why.  That last one killed me for bloody hours.  I suppose it makes sense to have different settings for movies and TV, but why oh why isn't the first tag "excludemoviesfromscan"? Also, Kodi 17 Krypton d...

Problem:  After weeks/months/years of trouble-free operation, various programs such as Word, Excel, Acrobat etc. start popping up their dialog boxes on the "wrong" monitor in a multi-monitor display. For example, the "Find" or "Format cells" dialog of Excel may appear on the right-hand monitor instead of the center one, or on the center one instead of the left-hand one.  Or, for dual-monitor displays, it shows on the left if Excel is on the right, or vice-versa. Possible solution:  If you are running an AMD FirePro graphics card, chances are your monitor settings recently got f^ck@d up for no apparent reason at all and completely scrambled your nice monitor setup.  God only knows why this happens at all (I sure don't) but I'll bet it happened to you. You went through all the pain of resetting monitor positions in the Windows Display settings, because your left monitor became your right, your center became the left, etc.  And (probably) re-org...

Problem:  Firefox suddenly barfs "Your connection is not secure" messages on major sites such as Mozilla, Google, Blogger, PIA, and possibly several others.  But several other major sites (news, Bing, etc.) are OK.  Phones, tablets and other PCs on the same network are not affected.  And there is nothing in recent news that Google has somehow messed up their security certificates and basically screwed the entire online population of the planet. Solution:  Chances are your PC clock is wrong, either because you just reset your BIOS or replaced the backup battery in your PC, and forgot to re-set your clock. If your PC thinks it's 2004, it will fail a lot of current security certificates. Another possibility is your antivirus is interfering with Firefox security validations.  This is not likely unless your AV and/or Firefox has changed recently, but is supposedly a known problem with Avast in particular. Similar issues can cause a "Your connection isn't...

OK, I assume you didn't deliberately change anything.  If you did, start checking the drivers for your latest hardware before doing anything else. Symptoms:  Stable Windows 7 x64 system suddenly has HDD indicator light on solid (or nearly solid).  Happened suddenly without warning, re-occurs within a few minutes after booting.  PC will freeze for at least several seconds at a time.  CPU activity is high.  Task Manager is slow, hangs frequently and tells you nothing useful.  Process Explorer seems to show System process (PID 4) taking lots of CPU, but no other details - no real indication which process is actually hogging your hard drive.  Turning off antivirus doesn't help.  Acrobat may complain about a "serious error" when started and/or freeze up.  Inability to use Disk Management tool.  Shutdown takes tens of minutes, if it happens at all; might freeze on "Logging off" or "Shutting down". Cause:  Something probably ...