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KB2670838 and the font rendering issue in Firefox

Windows   / / / / / Leave a comment

Three months after installing KB2670838 and updating my graphics drivers from Catalyst Mobility 13.12 to 14.4 the font rendering issue popped up. Except I didn’t get issues with text rendered in pages, but in Firefox’s menu /tabs / titlebar itself.

Nobody would think an update installed that long ago could be the culprit. Everyone would think the newly installed driver is (and it definitely has something do to with the issue).

Scheduled backup of your user folder to a network location

Windows   / / / Leave a comment

One can never have enough backups. Backups are important and you shouldn’t let one day pass without having them. I recommend creating system-wide backups (either the entire system partition or the entire hard disk) periodically.

But for that bit of data which is frequently changed/updated/replaced, you’ll need a more often backup schedule. This can be easily achieved with an archiver and a bit of scripting…

WD hard drives jumper settings and SATA 1.5 Gbps limit

Hardware   / / / / / Leave a comment

Hard disk jumpers where a necessary nuisance in the IDE/(P-)ATA days. Jumpers made the difference between a functional and a non-functional hard drive.
Fortunately, they disappear in the S-ATA age. Well, almost… While totally unnecessary nowadays, jumpers are still needed to fiddle modern S-ATA drives to make them compatible with some early SATA implementations motherboards.

Restoring classic toolbar mode in FoxIt Reader

Windows   / / / 16 Comments

I’m one of those maniacs who hates the Office 2007+ / Windows 8 “ribbon” interface on programs.

I consider that on a wide screen using an interface where up to a third of the height is filled up with useless huge buttons is just stupid.

Thankfully, FoxIt Reader (still) offers the option to return to the old non-“ribbon” toolbar mode…

Restarting USB subsystem in CentOS

Linux   / / / / 3 Comments

After a long uptime specific (cheap) devices or components connected to the USB ports lock up or malfunction. Unplugging and plugging them usually fixes issues, but physical access to the system (especially a remote server) is neither always possible or desirable.

In cases like this, Linux (unlike Windows) can trigger a USB subsystem restart by deactivating and reactivating the USB controller(s).

Source engine games error in shaderapidx9.dll

Windows   / / / 3 Comments

This error affects all Source engine based games, including Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 1 & 2, Team Fortress 2.

In my case the issue was caused by using LapLink PCMover to transfer stuff from a 32bit (older) Windows PC to a 64bit one. This broke part of WMI, triggering some rather weird errors later down the road.

Connect to a VPN server in Windows and Android

Linux / Technology / Windows   / / / / / / / 1 comment

A VPN connection is still mostly regarded as “business solution”, only useful to connecting employees to the company network. But this is no longer true nowadays.

VPNs can be very useful in protecting the integrity and security of data transfers, no matter who the two communicating parties are. To learn how to set up a connection and connect to a VPN server…