Sometimes, it’s the little tech annoyances that sting the most
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YellowPudding64
Smack-Fu Master, in training
System Preferences > Accessibility has a checkbox to enable ctrl + scroll for screen zoom. You can also add acustom keyboard shortcut in lieu of. I love it for when I need to demonstrate software for a tutorial to a class (being able to zoom in on a portion of a crowded user interface).
Hopefully is helpful.
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I'm not completely confident what you're referring to when you say "external desktops", but do you have
System Settings -> Desktop & Dock -> Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use
turned off?
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Thank you! I've been trying to figure out why my 10 year old Macbook could do this but not my year old Macbook and Mac Mini. Going to enable this on both of them tomorrow!
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Dunno if someone's already answered. Go to the monitor you want, and put the mouse cursor at the bottom edge, and leave it there. After about 1 second, the Dock will move to where the mouse cursor is.
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My 2+7+clickable scroll wheel Razer mouse works just fine on my Mac with no 3rd party drivers. Actually, the 7 button side panel is just magnetically attached, and can be replaced with a 2-button, or a 12-button panel. (It's a Razer Naga Trinity.) It's just USB, which Apple first introduced to PCs to replace PS2 etc.
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So true. I worked around this issue on some teams I managed. One engineer was always “on call” per week per team, and not part of the scrum. So that engineer, if not dealing with some priority on-call issue (which usually they were not), could fix whatever tickets they personally felt most useful to fix. Made the engineers feel good to have that small bit of autonomy. Lots of little annoyances got fixed that way, and some cool small features got added too.
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Weird. It's never happened to me except when I had to do a full recovery from a backup when my HDD died. This is going on 25 years, now. They even survive unexpected power outages.
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I remember them and the aluminum mouse "pads" that you shouldn't lose.
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If you have a 2-monitor setup where the monitors have different resolutions, moving a window from one monitor to another is annoying in Windows. Windows can't seem to handle rescaling based on pixel size. It works fine on macOS that is dual booted on the same hardware.
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Dual screen on macOS:
I used a 42” screen with MacBook Pro. Arrange them so the external screen was placed above the laptop screen. And configured that in settings. Every time I changed the resolution macOS would reset the arrangement to side by side. WHY?
I used a 42” screen with MacBook Pro. Arrange them so the external screen was placed above the laptop screen. And configured that in settings. Every time I changed the resolution macOS would reset the arrangement to side by side. WHY?
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I (with much help from YouTubers) managed to diagnose and repair a second hand printer, and I felt AS A GOD AMONG MEN
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IIRC windows 95 bring scroll in between two button to accommodate new GUI.I'm probably just too young, but I had no idea there were actually mice with separate middle buttonsMMB has been the scroll wheel on every mouse I've ever seen. Do you know when that change happened?
Middle button actually do not support in Windows 3.xx and windows 95. Mostly mouse only have 2 buttons (even apple only have big 1 button). Logitech that popularize 3 buttons along with OS driver to support it.
Then again Logitech, combine scroll with middle button because why not? They invent mid button anyway.
And at that time Logitech are big oem that supply many pc manufacturers.
CMIIW, please
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For me, it's all about how IOS feel so archaic compare to android OS. No easy gps/location turn on off button is very annoying and this apply to wifi & bluetooth also but the latter somehow solved by shortcut, no album view in photos like why do I have to scroll all the way down to search for some screenshot lol, etc
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Skill issue
Windows has PowerShell and Set-ItemProperty, if Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc) fails you. Most settings to apply are also a Google Search away, or Microsoft has Excel spreadsheets listing the settings' names and functions.
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Windows 11 nerfing the Windows Explorer Right-Click menu. Thankfully there’s a registry workaround to show more options as the default. I use it all the time to unzip files
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I have so many stories I could share since my VIC-20! Currently though, have two to share.
One, an audio issue that upgrading to Win11 actually fixed. On my laptop, all my DAWs would never work with the headphone jack from new. Okay with everything else. To use headphones in any DAW, I had to use an external device (such as Roland MC-707 or U-phoria UMC404HD amongst others).
I used to dedicate a day each month or so to attempt solving this over a few years. I never would have expected that a Win11 upgrade could have solved it - I may have upgraded much earlier.
At the moment, my issue is my Canon printer. Randomly, wireless printing doesn’t work from any device. If I connect my laptop via USB (with three plug twists) and print, it starts working again.
Sometimes, I’m glad that I’m not working in IT anymore.
One, an audio issue that upgrading to Win11 actually fixed. On my laptop, all my DAWs would never work with the headphone jack from new. Okay with everything else. To use headphones in any DAW, I had to use an external device (such as Roland MC-707 or U-phoria UMC404HD amongst others).
I used to dedicate a day each month or so to attempt solving this over a few years. I never would have expected that a Win11 upgrade could have solved it - I may have upgraded much earlier.
At the moment, my issue is my Canon printer. Randomly, wireless printing doesn’t work from any device. If I connect my laptop via USB (with three plug twists) and print, it starts working again.
Sometimes, I’m glad that I’m not working in IT anymore.
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When microsoft changes keyboard shortcuts in their programs. I have decades of muscle memory to undo every time they do that.
Windows updates destroying my print drivers. Almost every windows update I have to go reinstall printers on everybody in the office.
Windows updates destroying my print drivers. Almost every windows update I have to go reinstall printers on everybody in the office.
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Did this a few years ago with a kit for Valentine’s Day. Red LEDs in the shape of a heart. Has a switch, a pot, caps, LEDs, IC, triac, and a bunch of resistors. It was a fun build to practice basic soldiering
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Also macOS: I recently bought a mechanical keyboard, in UK ISO layout.
It turns out, Apple’s UK laptop keyboards are not fully ISO (or at least, the one my work ordered for me isn’t), so the laptop’s built-in keyboard has a different layout from the one on my desk. Annoying, but I’m trying to deal with it.
However, the thing that truly irks me is that macOS doesn’t let me specify which keyboard has what layout - it’s just a single global setting for all keyboards across the system. So I’m constantly finding that text is mistyped not because my limited human brain is adjusting to having 2 KBs with different layouts, but because the computer apparently can’t handle 2 KBs with different layouts
Why can’t it just know that if keystrokes come in from one device, they have a certain interpretation as text, and if they come in from another device, they have a different interpretation as text?
It turns out, Apple’s UK laptop keyboards are not fully ISO (or at least, the one my work ordered for me isn’t), so the laptop’s built-in keyboard has a different layout from the one on my desk. Annoying, but I’m trying to deal with it.
However, the thing that truly irks me is that macOS doesn’t let me specify which keyboard has what layout - it’s just a single global setting for all keyboards across the system. So I’m constantly finding that text is mistyped not because my limited human brain is adjusting to having 2 KBs with different layouts, but because the computer apparently can’t handle 2 KBs with different layouts
Why can’t it just know that if keystrokes come in from one device, they have a certain interpretation as text, and if they come in from another device, they have a different interpretation as text?
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Desktop Restore. Never worry again.
http://www.midiox.com/index.htm?http://www.midiox.com/desktoprestore.htm
Been using it for at least a decade. It never fails.
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Heavens to Betsy! Are you under the impression that you can issue orders?
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Safari's 'Show All Tabs' gesture is the biggest piece of shit on the planet, and it's one of many Apple absurdities that there's no direct way to change or disable it.
1. Yes, I prefer using Safari. It's faster than Chrome and my battery life lasts much, much longer than on Chrome, Firefox or Brave.
2. Safari has a feature to show you all of your tabs. There is a dedicated button next to the address bar for activating this view. It can be helpful under the right circumstances, and there is a dedicated, discreet button for it.
3. For some moronic, god forsaken reason, Apple also decided to also include a gesture for activating this view, and the gesture is really freaking close to pinch to zoom out. So if your hand is at a slightly different angle when you pinch to zoom out or just if Safari is feeling extra spicy that day, it will accidentally activate the Show All Tabs view.
4. Doing this causes Safari to create and load previews for every. single. tab. So if you're someone who keeps a lot of tabs, suddenly Safari slows to a halt and starts chugging. Even once you exit this view, the previews are still loaded in memory so Safari is going to be slow as fuck from here on out, until you quit and re-open Safari.
The only available options for disabling this stupid feature are 1) disable pinch to zoom gestures and learn to zoom using 2 finger double tap (done, but still not as helpful or as intuitive), or 2) downloading some third party paid software that reconfigures core parts of OSX to assign new functions to gestures (dangerous!)
There's plenty of complaints about it, and Apple has recognized 0 of them. I'm only 70% sure they know Safari exists at this point, and I'm 99% sure no one at Apple knows 'Show All Tabs' exists and is hated by many.
1. Yes, I prefer using Safari. It's faster than Chrome and my battery life lasts much, much longer than on Chrome, Firefox or Brave.
2. Safari has a feature to show you all of your tabs. There is a dedicated button next to the address bar for activating this view. It can be helpful under the right circumstances, and there is a dedicated, discreet button for it.
3. For some moronic, god forsaken reason, Apple also decided to also include a gesture for activating this view, and the gesture is really freaking close to pinch to zoom out. So if your hand is at a slightly different angle when you pinch to zoom out or just if Safari is feeling extra spicy that day, it will accidentally activate the Show All Tabs view.
4. Doing this causes Safari to create and load previews for every. single. tab. So if you're someone who keeps a lot of tabs, suddenly Safari slows to a halt and starts chugging. Even once you exit this view, the previews are still loaded in memory so Safari is going to be slow as fuck from here on out, until you quit and re-open Safari.
The only available options for disabling this stupid feature are 1) disable pinch to zoom gestures and learn to zoom using 2 finger double tap (done, but still not as helpful or as intuitive), or 2) downloading some third party paid software that reconfigures core parts of OSX to assign new functions to gestures (dangerous!)
There's plenty of complaints about it, and Apple has recognized 0 of them. I'm only 70% sure they know Safari exists at this point, and I'm 99% sure no one at Apple knows 'Show All Tabs' exists and is hated by many.
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Do you have system updates pending? Windows will try and reboot your PC to apply updates when it thinks you're not using it, and it will start closing apps to prepare for the reboot, but if it encounters an app it can't close cleanly, it will just... stop. So, depending on when it encounters that one app that won't close cleanly, it may have closed some or most of your other apps.
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for me its the Mac's awful handling of multiple monitors and spaces. I have 2 external monitors both at home and work. Between unplugging and plugging in my MBP between the two, MacOS makes no attempt to recreate what I had setup at one location vs. the other. In fact, it always seems like it amazingly determines the most irritating, furthest-from-what-I-would-want approach when it places all my windows across the different monitors and spaces.
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Copilot/gemini/whatever, im not training your AI for you and i never will. Also, see office suite and gmail.
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Losing Subversion overlay icons because MS One Drive keeps putting its own icon overlays higher in the Registry settings list -- and only 15 are allowed.
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I can't be the only retro-tech pedant who is absolutely infuriated by the stock photo used in this article... am I? The poor Macintosh has had its Apple logo (and possibly the Garamond text reading "Macintosh Plus") airbrushed away, and the keyboard and mouse are totally wrong - at best they would require ADB plugs (which didn't exist on that style of Mac), but more likely they're USB gadgets, which definitely won't work. There's nothing plugged into the landline-phone-style keyboard socket on the front! No wonder the stock photo model is screaming - so am I! 
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Annoyed? Maybe. Infuriated? You're probably the only one.
I feel like stock photos always have to have at least one thing wrong with them. At least it's not as bad as holding the soldering iron by the hot part, which appears far too often.
Here's the source:
https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/funny-angry-1980s-office-worker-gm618210412-107503173
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I have about 600 icons on screen, geographically sorted in alphabetical order. Windows would routinely decide to alter their locations, apparently based on an RNG. DesktopOK is a piece of freeware that can instantly restore your icon locations. I was using another piece of freeware, but eventually discovered it could only handle about 500 icons. DesktopOK has worked since at least Windows 7, and it places an icon on the taskbar that allows a large number (unknown limit) of icon setups that you personally name, to be recalled with simple clicks.
https://www.intowindows.com/free-tools-to-save-restore-desktop-icon-positions-in-windows-10/
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This past month, I decided to finally tackle a nagging problem on MacOS Messages.
Scenario:
Wife travelled internationally and used a temporary SIM card. So I added it to her contact card and removed it when she returned. iPhone was cool, but the Messages app kept thinking the international number was texting me and would routinely fork/branch the text threads she was in. Sometimes Messages would try and text the international number. The app was routinely confused and would sometimes merge her back into one entity only to branch again.
There was no reference to that number anywhere in Contacts or my google contacts cloud account. The app was causing this.
Solution:
I follwed all of Apple support's phone guidance to no avail (sign out/in, break the link to my phone and then readd it, reboot, reinstall the OS, etc.) Doing my own thing, I found th solution: Directly deleting a record in the 'handle' table of the chat.db SQLite database within the Messages app data that contained the number. This was causing the havok/confusion only on my Mac. This then triggered a resync with iCloud and removed the problem there too so it wouldn't come back (as we found it was emerging after wiping and then resyncing with iCloud)
Step by step
Scenario:
Wife travelled internationally and used a temporary SIM card. So I added it to her contact card and removed it when she returned. iPhone was cool, but the Messages app kept thinking the international number was texting me and would routinely fork/branch the text threads she was in. Sometimes Messages would try and text the international number. The app was routinely confused and would sometimes merge her back into one entity only to branch again.
There was no reference to that number anywhere in Contacts or my google contacts cloud account. The app was causing this.
Solution:
I follwed all of Apple support's phone guidance to no avail (sign out/in, break the link to my phone and then readd it, reboot, reinstall the OS, etc.) Doing my own thing, I found th solution: Directly deleting a record in the 'handle' table of the chat.db SQLite database within the Messages app data that contained the number. This was causing the havok/confusion only on my Mac. This then triggered a resync with iCloud and removed the problem there too so it wouldn't come back (as we found it was emerging after wiping and then resyncing with iCloud)
Step by step
- Deleted my wife’s thread on Messages, iPhone, and iPad.
- Put everything on airplane mode.
- Quit Messages
- Made a copy of ~/Library/Messages to my Desktop.
- Ran the following SQL query on chats.db located in the Messages directory copy on the Desktop:
- SELECT * FROM handle WHERE id LIKE '%+xxxxxxxxxxxx%’; (where x is the international SIM phone number)
- This returned a single record that showed my chat database had a memory of this phone number being a valid endpoint to chat with.
- Deleted the record
- DELETE FROM handle WHERE id LIKE '%+xxxxxxxxxxxx%’; (where x is the international SIM phone number)
- Running the query shows that the handle record has been deleted.
- Deleted ~/Library/Messages.
- Emptied Trash.
- Moved the Messages folder on my Desktop back into ~/LIbrary/Messages.
- Reboot
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I'm annoyed when there's a tech forum where someone's posted a problem, and (years later) I've solved their exact issue, but the forum won't let me post the solution.
Corollary is the Microsoft Community where the OP is not permitted to post the answer and mark it as a solution. You can only mark someone else's post as the solution.
Corollary is the Microsoft Community where the OP is not permitted to post the answer and mark it as a solution. You can only mark someone else's post as the solution.
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My favorite is when they fix the thing, and you don't notice it's fixed 'cause you are so used to doing the work around. For the longest time every time I did an OS update on MacOS I would have to go back in and re-edit the /etc/pam.d/sudo file to re-enable touchid for sudo, 'cause the OS update would overwrite that file.
Recently discovered that they fixed that nearly two years ago and added support for a sudo_local file that doesn't get overwritten. At this point it's just automatic to
Recently discovered that they fixed that nearly two years ago and added support for a sudo_local file that doesn't get overwritten. At this point it's just automatic to
sudo cp /etc/pam.d/sudo.bak /etc/pam.d/sudo after every update, and I didn't even know it had been fixed.
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Where is the "I have this problem too" checkbox? (Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, etc...)
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I use AirPods Pro a lot when I'm commuting. I have the control on left one set up to cycle through the three sound modes -- Transparency, full Noise Cancellation and Adaptive (which is a middle ground between the other two). I use Adaptive a lot because of the way it ramps up ANC when noise increases.
Anyway, every week or so, Adaptive just falls out of the rotation: pressing the earbud control only cycles through Transprency and Noise Cancellation, and I have to bo back into Settings to re-enable the control for Adaptive. It takes about 20 seconds to fix it each time, but it drives me apeshit because it always stops me in my tracks, inevitably as I'm navigating a busy subway station or something.
This has been going on for probably a year now, and the bug has survived quite a few software updates major and minor, and also my replacing of the AirPods Pro themselves when I lost them.
Again, it's like 20-30 seconds to fix the toggle each time, but it is disproportionately disruptive because it happens over and over and over.
Anyway, every week or so, Adaptive just falls out of the rotation: pressing the earbud control only cycles through Transprency and Noise Cancellation, and I have to bo back into Settings to re-enable the control for Adaptive. It takes about 20 seconds to fix it each time, but it drives me apeshit because it always stops me in my tracks, inevitably as I'm navigating a busy subway station or something.
This has been going on for probably a year now, and the bug has survived quite a few software updates major and minor, and also my replacing of the AirPods Pro themselves when I lost them.
Again, it's like 20-30 seconds to fix the toggle each time, but it is disproportionately disruptive because it happens over and over and over.
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Do you have a link to a/can you write a detailed writeup for doing that? I've recently begun to experiment with my Raspberry Pi more and if I can make it take Touch ID rather than having to fatfinger through a password that doesn't show on screen would be a delight.
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Ohmygawd... THIS! I bought Stardock's Fences ages ago just to deal with this crap. I literally use it just to reset my desktop icons when Windows decides it doesn't like my layout.
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