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For a long time my keyboard input language sometimes changed for no apparent reason. I have two languages installed, and windows seemed to switch between them at will. It happened almost exclusively while using SQL Server Management Studio, and I wrote it off as an annoying bug in that product. Then, last night, it happened during a presentation. While the consensus of the audience feedback seemed to be that this was a common occurence, one guy suggested it might be because of an unfortunate keyboard shortcut. ...

Haskell is fascinating, but getting started can be a bit rough - especially if you are on Windows. Here are some necessary steps to get you over these initial stumbling blocks when running the Haskell Platform (2012.4 or 2014.2) on Windows. It is quite obvioius that a lot of the users of Haskell are on other platforms, and as a Windows-user you quickly run into some problems not experienced on other platforms. This is doubly frustrating as a newbie because you haven’t had time to develop the necessary intuition about where to look for solutions yet. It also certainly does not help that Haskell error messages are known to be misleading. ...

I had been trying to get the open source instant messenger client Pidgin to connect to Lync using SIPE. However, they wouldn’t play nice. The Pidgin GUI kept saying “Web ticket request to https:// webdir0e- ext.online.lync.com:443/ CertProv/ CertProvisioningService.svc failed” while the debug log from running pidgin –debug ended with an XML containing “Web ticket request error - SIP URI mismatch” - after confirming username and password to be ok. My environment was Pidgin 2.10.7 and SIPE 1.15.0 on Win8 connecting to Office 365 (no local AD). ...

SSDs are great (except they can also be the worst of drives), but they usually have less capacity than modern conventional drives. In 2013, 128GB is still a common size, and even a 256GB drive can only hold so much. At the same time, main memory is increasing and 8GB of RAM is quite common. The increasing main memory will often reserve unnecessary space on your drive for hibernation and paging. This guide shows how to reclaim that space on Windows 7 and Windows 8 (but should work for any windows with minimal changes). ...

Sometimes it can be necessary or preferable to run software in 32bit versions, even if the OS is 64bit (i.e. running the i386-version on amd64 OS). As an example, software with deep memory structures mainly consisting of pointers, such as dictionaries of dictionaries of light-weight objects, will occupy almost twice the RAM on a 64bit OS. If multiple instances of, say, 3GB memory structures are needed, the 64bit penalty quickly adds up. ...

Hewlett-Packards Microserver is great value for money. At work we have bought the more expensive rack-mount ProLiants for ten years, and with the microserver I have transitioned to HP for my home server as well. Inexpensive, extensible, low-noise, small and with a slick black finish. Thumbscrews for case and mainboard, lots and lots of spare screws in the back of the front door together with a supplied torx-tool, and neat cable routing. Let’s open it up and have a look. ...

Several new phones, such as the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy S3, requires a smaller SIM card. Such a MicroSIM is nothing but an ordinary sim-card with some superfluous plastic removed. When you are there, in the shop with your new phone, you are eager to get started with it. Some stores know to take advantage of that and will charge you extra for the microsim. For just a few moments of their time, putting your old sim through a somewhat special hole-punch, they can charge as much as $30. ...

Mange nye telefoner, som iPhone og Samsung Galaxy S3, krever et SIM-kort som er mindre enn vanlig. Et slikt mikrosim er bare et vanlig SIM-kort med overflødig plast klippet bort. Når man står hos i butikken med den nye telefonen i hånda er man ganske ivrig på å komme i gang. Det vet Telehuset å benytte seg av. For jobben med å putte inn ditt gamle SIM i en litt spesiell hullmaskin, klemme hardt, og gi deg det samme SIM-kortet tilbake, tar de uten blygsel 199kr. For noen svært få sekunders jobb. For vilt til å være sant? Ta en tur innom et Telehus og spør. ...

Solid state drives look surprisingly simple under the cover. If it wasn’t for the 2.5" form factor they inherited from ordinary drives, they could probably be both smaller and lighter than today. Shown here is a 160GB Intel SSD. The die cast aluminium casing is surprisingly thin and light. It is held together with four small screws, some of which are covered by do not void stickers. The 10 large chips comprises the actual storage, 16GB each. The two other chips are controllers for the storage and SATA interface. ...

This post was updated in December 2015 to account for clang in FreeBSD and the updated Teeworlds 0.6.3 (which contains an important server bugfix). Teeworlds is a great game. It is free and runs on any platform, download it now. You will soon want to run your own server to host your own matches and levels. If you have a FreeBSD server without X, this is not straightforward. The FreeBSD Teeworlds package is game (client) and server bundled in one, and the Teeworlds server sources are meant for Linux. Here is how: ...