TITAM - Technical issues that affected me

God damn you, Mozilla.  You DO NOT do a major, massive update to people's web browsers without any warning in the middle of the work week!  This is Change Management 101, go buy a bloody book on the subject! And don't you go telling me that it's in the media/news/whatever.  If you are going to screw with people's machines this way, you tell the up front and DURING THE INSTALLATION PROCESS that big changes are coming.  You DON'T spring it on them as just another update. Anyway, if you are still reading this, possibly you are like me and not too enthused with Quantum breaking all your extensions, add-ons or whatever.  You could waste ages trying to figure out if Quantum supports everything, plus dicking with the UI.  Or you could roll back. Fortunately, rolling back is indeed simple: all you have to do is close Firefox and re-run the Firefox 56.0.2 installer again.  Yes, it really is that easy. More detailed instructions, including what to do if ...

Problem:  Tassimo machine runs the wrong cycle with the cleaning disc in.  Usually, the problem is it will not run the descaling program no matter how long the brew button is pressed. For example: -  It runs a regular cleaning cycle instead of a descale cycle; or -  It runs an "add water" cycle instead of a descale cycle; or -  It runs an "add water" cycle instead of a cleaning cycle. You can sometimes tell that this is what the machine "wants" to do because the wrong icons light up when you put in the cleaning disc.  For example, the "add water" icon may light up, which is not supposed to occur with the cleaning disc in place. Solution:  It's probably reading the wrong barcode off of the cleaning disc.  Mostly this occurs because the window that lets the machine "see" the barcode is dirty. To fix, lift up the disc holder and clean the little rectangular window underneath, then re-insert.  The machine should then be able...

VPNs are good but their connections are rarely perfect.  Usually, when they disconnect, your router fails over back to using the unencrypted WAN connection.  This is convenient but leaves your network connection exposed, which rather defeats the purposes.  Likely little point in being protected only 99% of the time, right? Worse, you don't even know if the VPN is off.  Everything just blithely continues on as usual.  You'll only know if you manually check.  Which is stupid. If you're like me, there are some devices on the network where you don't really care if they keep working or not.  Perhaps there are some where you actually want them to keep working, even if the VPN stops (Netflix?).  And there are probably a couple where you want them to stop working the second the VPN goes down. If you search you will find lots of VPN monitoring programs that purport to kill programs upon VPN disconnect.  However, not one of these will work if...

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 Sept 2026:  Setting priority to "Low" has mostly done the trick.  According to AI, the issue stems from a known bug.  Different AIs give different answers on if the bug was fixed, but none will conclude for sure that it was.  There is an August 2026 version of Macroworks; I do not know if it fixed this issue or not. There is no useful changelog. I do plan to carry my X-Keys devices over to my latest Windows 11 workstation, as they're just too useful.  95% of what I do can be handled in hardware mode, so perhaps I'll abandon Macroworks completely. Interestingly, ChatGPT identified the new Macroworks release, while Gemini didn't mention it at all.  ------------------------------- 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 minut...

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...