Category Archives: EN

Anything that does not fit into other categories …

So you have a WTL project but it’s not a COM server you’re writing?

Well, not exactly surprising if you write a GUI application like my NT Objects. Turns out that ATL forces you to have support for COM server registration, as soon as you use anything derived from CComModule. Doh. And yeah, that … Continue reading

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Delay-loading ntdll.lib and others …

In one of my pet projects, NT Objects – or ntobjx in short – I am making use of the delay loading mechanism offered by the Visual C++ toolchain, while at the same time using it on a DLL that … Continue reading

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Remove all those pesky (Metro) apps from Windows 10

If, like I, you are sure you won’t need those pesky apps, use the following PowerShell pipeline to get rid of the provisioned packages: Get-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online|Out-GridView -PassThru|Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -ErrorAction Continue -Online … to also remove those apps that are marked removable, … Continue reading

Posted in Administration, EN | Leave a comment

Dear UN Secretary General Guterres

According to the news and the WEF website you said this (emphasis mine): I think we need to understand the grievances and to understand the reasons why – the root causes of why large sectors of the population in different … Continue reading

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Illustrated guide: install Visual Studio 2005 Professional on a modern Windows

Here is a little illustrated guide on how to install Visual Studio 2005 Professional on Windows 10. This guide should actually work the same with Windows versions Vista and newer. I had to retrace the steps for a colleague, so … Continue reading

Posted in EN, Programming, Software | Leave a comment

Messy

Microsoft has done us as users and itself a disservice. At work we are using email addresses in the form of Firstname.Lastname@onedomain.tld. They’re deemed the canonical form. Nothing unusual so far. Some of us, notably those who had something to … Continue reading

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Windows 10 forced update sucks

I have written about Windows 10 before. Also about Windows 8.1, which is the predecessor in (diabolic) spirit. I was never impressed by Windows 10 and I guess it’s not going to change. Sure, Windows 10 has a very stable … Continue reading

Posted in Administration, EN, Software | Leave a comment

Performance hog extraordinaire …

So as of recently I started having issues with memory use. My machine has 32 GiB of physical RAM, so there shouldn’t usually be a problem running even several virtual machines at once. I’ve even run an XP VM from … Continue reading

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AgeKey – cheating in Age of Empires I/II and Age of Mythology

As I had already pointed out in 2010 in a German blog entry, a rather famous – in in the German speaking Delphi-sphere at the time – programmer named Nico wrote a little program about 17 years ago which could … Continue reading

Posted in /dev/null, Delphi, EN, Programming | Leave a comment

Slaughterbots

Chilling short film. Also check out autonomousweapons.org.

Posted in EN, Human Rights, Peace, Privacy, Thoughts | Tagged , | Leave a comment

WhatsApp are you serious, Facebook?

So I’ve been coerced into using WhatsApp before. While they seemingly have finally addressed the issue of running WhatsApp on multiple devices, the web app isn’t going to cut it for me, as my browser settings are going to deny … Continue reading

Posted in /dev/null, EN, Rant | Leave a comment

Now, I’m no expert on international law …

… but the belligerent rhetoric between the two vain peacocks ruling the US and North Korea respectively, seems to have already resulted in a full-fledged war according to US-American cyberwar doctrine, it seems. It’s just that the North Koreans, if … Continue reading

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As if Bernie Sanders watched this TED talk …

… to come up with the idea of a citizen-funded campaign.

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Hey Google, I fixed that for you

No need to thank me! // Oliver

Posted in EN, Opinion, Privacy | Tagged | Leave a comment

War is up to the president?

“War is up to the president, and perhaps up to Congress,” Mattis said. (quoted as per this LA Times article) Sorry to spoil your “fun” Mr. Mattis, but according to the US Constitution only Congress has the power to declare … Continue reading

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Re: bad, worse, worst, CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA

I wrote about reCAPTCHA once before. However, on that day Google made a claim. The claim was that a single click would be enough to tell whether you were a bot or a human. Well, that claim is hogwash. Similarly … Continue reading

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Very odd

As tragic as the Grenfell Tower fire in London is, it’s odd how the German media dwells on these news. A number of incidents in Bangladesh and Pakistan (such as this one) barely raised a brow whereas the precious lives … Continue reading

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Windows 10 at large again …

Well, so after a borked update of Windows 10 (the update in question was the Creators Update) where the screen just stayed black1 after the update had seemingly progressed quite far, I decided to go with a fresh installation of … Continue reading

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GnuPG

Recently I ran across a little problem with GnuPG which required some pragmatic solution. I came across a patch that looked promising and because no binaries were provided and if they had been I would not have trusted them, I … Continue reading

Posted in EN, IT Security, Privacy, Software | Leave a comment

bad, worse, worst, CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA

Think what you will of Google products. I personally try to avoid them for privacy reasons. But there’s that one Google product that is at the same time the crappiest and most ubiquitous Google product ever conceived. It’s called reCAPTCHA. … Continue reading

Posted in EN, Opinion, Thoughts | Tagged , | 23 Comments