Windows has an officially supported international keyboard layout for the US with AltGr-initiated dead keys for composing characters. Unfortunately there is no equivalent for the UK; the UK international keyboard layout is completely unusable for programmers as it turns a lot of commonly-used keys into dead keys.
But there is a decent international layout for the UK available from here:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~johns/kbukint.html
Or where Micha fixes fixed flaws.
No decent SCP/SFTP client for Windows?
Ok, so I recently put my backup system back into my server only to find an issue with my mount/unmount scripts.
Namely: on unmount, luksClose fails with the device showing as busy. Which is funny because nothing should have been accessing it.
There’s plenty of posts/bugs/etc online of people having the same issue, but either no solutions are posted, or the solutions didn’t apply in my case. Well, I finally tracked it down: noflushd.
noflushd is a daemon which spins down idle disks. It probably wasn’t running on my old server which is why I didn’t have any problems before.
Long story short, shutting down noflushd finally let me close my encrypted backup disk and shut it down. Yayy.
Somehow I ended up with several EyeToy cameras for the PS2, one of which I use for my Desktop PC as a webcam. Works a treat under Linux, so I decided to try and get it working under Windows 7 64-bit as well.
There’s an archive containing drivers and a small test program here. The driver has to be installed manually using the Device Manager (it’s not signed), but seems to work. YMMV.
Years and years ago I bought a Saitek X45 Flightstick, primarily for playing “X – Beyond the Frontier”. This was all good and fine under Windows 98. Didn’t work properly under Windows XP – the throttle never worked in the game.
Anyway, the time has come for me to setup a Windows gaming PC again, and I pulled out the joystick and dusted it off. Plugged it in and wonder of wonders, after installed “jstest-gtk” it just worked. No setup, no configuration, no calibration. Mind, this is under Linux Mint 14….
So reboot into my brand spanking new Windows 7 install, and while the Device Manager detects it, Windows itself doesn’t. So, head over to the Saitek site and download the relevant drivers (link). Now I don’t know who’s to blame (Windows or Saitek), but basically the driver installer just sits there on a blank page waiting for the joystick to be plugged in (even though it is). Replugging doesn’t help either.
Finally I manually extract the files (yes, 7zip can extract files from (most) EXE archives) and use the Device Manager to manually install the driver. This works, and Windows sees the joystick.
Even the Mad Catz (Saitek) Profile Editor now sees the joystick and all appears to be well in the world..
Unfortunately the latest version of X-BtF (2.2) still doesn’t fix the throttle control 🙁
So the time has come for a re-install of Windows 7.
Base install took over an hour on reasonable hardware (X2 240, 4GB). I fail to understand why. Then there were the 101 updates plus 49 optional updates. Time for SP2? I think so..
UPDATE: So it took nearly 5 hours to install all the updates. After the obligatory 3 or 4 reboots, there were another 8 or so updates (and 2 reboots) before Windows was finally up-to-date.
Apart from normal configuration, the following are the software packages which I consider to be essential to make Windows 7 usable and safe:
Safety:
Usability:
Essential Software:
Applications:
