Tech & Geekery

Like many people, I've been trying to upgrade one of my laptops to Windows 10 using the Media Creation Tool and encountering the useless error "Something happened." I searched the internet, and found a lot of posts advising me to change legacy (non-UTF) language settings to "English (US)", which appears to be working for some people but did not help me. I also followed instructions to stop and start Windows Update service, clear update downloads, and none of these worked either. I was finally able to figure out a way to create a USB using the Media Creation Tool. I regularly run as a Limited User for security reasons, and I have an Administrator account that I use only for administering my system. As such, I ran the Media Creation Tool by elevating to admin permissions (for example, context menu Run as Administrator ). Normally, this should work fine, by giving the application the permissions that it needs to run. Most installers work this way, and certai...

The Problem: I've had consistent problems with GameMaker:Studio's upgrade/install process over the past couple of years. The symptoms are as follows: Install proceeds normally. GameMaker:Studio restarts. A progress dialog appears, that indicates it is "Extracting" or "Updating" or something. Dialog nears completion and then crashes.  Attempt to launch GM:S. Progress dialog appears again...  This will continue as many times as you wish to try it. I figured out a potential workaround for this. I run as a user with standard permissions on Windows (and I suggest that you do so as well). The GM:S install/update process works fine when you run it as an Admin, but fails as a standard user. My hunch if you're reading this is that you're also trying to install as a standard user.  Workaround:  Change your account to have Admin permissions.  Run the installer. Revert your account to Standard permissions. Another side effect of this is...

If you're seeing something like this in your Google Analytics dashboard... ...you're in the right place. Most importantly: your site HAS NOT been hacked. Today, I discovered these interesting links in my Google Analytics dashboard that just weren't right. They definitely weren't pages on my site. The links look like the example below. I've slightly altered the link so that nobody can accidentally follow it -- since the actual url (apparently) redirects to porn. /www.domination.ml/reply94568X So it turns out that this site is farming Google Analytics tags. They grab your Google Analytics tag and embed it on their own site. Links to their site show up in thousands of dashboards and are clicked on (or Googled) by people wondering what the heck they are. Basically, free traffic -- but really, really bad practice.  Apparently, the answer is to use Google Tag Manager . Also, don't click the links... Source: UK Business Forums

Well, here's a crazy one for you... I noticed that I was unable to install fonts that had synced via Google Drive. The fonts were in zip files, and at first I thought the problem was that they'd become corrupted -- which had me extremely concerned. After some troubleshooting, I discovered that the font will install fine so long as I move it out of the Google Drive directory structure (desktop, downloads, etc). I also md5'd the file to make sure that they were identical (they were, which alleviated my fear that GD was somehow corrupting the file). For the record, I noticed this on Windows 8.1. Quitting Google Drive didn't seem to resolve the issue, which surprised me. Incorrect Behavior: When double-clicking on a TTF file or context-clicking > install, the font viewer appears and install seems to happen successfully. The installing dialog disappears very quickly, and the entire font viewer follows it. The font is not installed. Steps to Reproduce: Att...

On a Windows machine, it's easy to set a file or folder as hidden (or show it again). On Mac, it isn't quite so obvious. There's no option for this from the UI. Like most Unix-inspired systems, OSX follows the convention that filenames are hidden if they start with a dot ( . ), but this doesn't translate well to Windows which doesn't obey this convention. A good example are the  annoying .DS_Store files that OSX leaves behind and stick out like a sore thumb on a Windows filesystem. Well, instead of (or in addition to) prefixing files with a dot, you can set the hidden flag on the file and it won't show up. The command: chflags hidden To clear the hidden flag: chflags nohidden To see all files, even the hidden ones, from the command line: ls -la To show hidden files in Finder, use this command on Mavericks: defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE Use this for earlier versions of the OS: defaults write com.appl...

If you're using Netbeans and you want to enable code folding for a particular region, use this: // <editor-fold defaultstate="collapsed" desc="Private Methods"> // Your code goes here... // </editor-fold> This will result in a code-folding region in your code.