Windows

If you, like me, enjoy playing on your guitar to music from your PC, you will share my annoyance at the fact that bands often tune up or down a step or so for different songs. While it might be simple enough to tune your guitar up and down as and when necessary, I think that everybody will agree that it's a bit of a pain. Here's a solution for people like me who tend to have, well, an indolent approach to their guitar.

Continuing on with my workarounds for moving system files around, today, I decided to look into moving my user profile folder to a different partition. While IIRC, it used to be possible (in earlier versions of Windows) to do this by setting the home folder to an appropriate value in the user management snapshot, that did not work for me.

My windows machine is running off a bum drive and seeing as to how HDD prices are temporarily ridiculously high at the moment, I've decided to attempt a few workarounds to see if I can continue to use this erratically faulty drive for a couple of more months. The issue with the drive is in itself unknown. It just locks up suddenly with the HDD LED continuously on. Windows continues to be active for a while, but not terribly responsive. Sometimes, the issue sorts itself out after a while. Other times, the system reboots.

Today, I made quite an impression on my furniture thanks to incessant contact between it and my illustrious head. This, as usual, was due to my looking for a clean regex to solve my issue while working with text files in Vim. My task was, I initially believed, quite simple: delete all the lines that are sandwiched between two types/patterns of lines. In this case, the top slice of the sandwich consisted of a line which was entirely a number and the bottom slice was a line entirely populated with underscores.

On a new installation of GVim (in Windows 7), I ran into the following curious error whenever I tried to open a new document for editing:
Vim E303: Unable to open swap file for "[No Name]", recovery impossible

According to friendly chap on IRC, this is caused by a temporary directory bug and that it can be fixed by adding the following directive to the _vimrc file:
set directory=.,$TEMP

That's all it took to fix this issue for me - hope this helps!

I work extensively on a Windows desktop. However, I do SSH into Linux servers often and I do so using PuTTY, a free and open source client. Everything works peachy. However, I recently had occasion to work extensively with some Unicode source data and I found that there were times when I thought that there were encoding issues with the data as they were not being displayed correctly on my screen.

I'm not sure whether it was something I did, something that the Vim developers did, or an anomaly with the Windows 7 binary, but I could no longer see the line number and cursor position tracker in the bottom right of my interface. Looking at the menus, I could find nothing. I could turn on a line number prefix for each bleeding line, but this is not what I was after.

Every now and then, I find the need to shutdown my PC automatically at a specified time for some reason or the other. In my most recent case, I needed to shut my Windows 7 PC down at 8am in the morning anticipating a scheduled power shutdown in my block. While there are many GUI-based applications out there that could do this for me, I chanced upon a simpler solution detailed below:

I tried searching for something in Chrome a few minutes ago and found that my search was being handled by something sinisterly named Facemoods. Aghast, a few more checks confirmed that I had a toolbar installed on my system of the same name, the Chrome search engine was set to Facemoods by default and that I had an extension installed as well. A little more digging revealed that all this was jDownloader's fault as it installs the toolbar during its own installation process. Not good.

Removing all this junk involves the following steps:

Some people like to indent their code using TABs. I used to like doing this. I still think that it's a good idea. But circumstances have dictated for the past several years that I need to indent using spaces instead. My favourite command-line editor in Linux and text editor in Windows is VIM / Gvim (where Gvim is basically Vim with a GUI). To configure this editor to override its default and use spaces instead of TABs for indentation, perform the following steps: