Adventures in Tech

One of my favorite times at work is when the interns in my organization present the projects they have been working on for the past 10 or so weeks. It is amazing to see what they have accomplished during that period, and its impact on the business.   In my groups, I always make sure that everything the interns work on makes it to production and has visible business impact. The interns enjoy that quantifiable sense of accomplishment and seeing that their work lives in a launched product and improves some aspect of it.   After the interns demo their projects, I schedule follow-up 1:1 meetings with each of them. During the meeting, we go over their experiences during the internship, what they have learned in the process, and how can we make the experience better the next time around.   Their suggestions are always on point, constructive, and actionable. The conversations invariably drift to learning more about Microsoft, and what advice would I give them to have ...

I upgraded all my devices to the Windows May update, all but my new Surface 3 laptop. Whenever I checked manually for the system updates, I got nothing, apart from the occasional Windows Defender updates. For a week I checked religiously, and when I did not get any notifications, I started searching online to see if there were any issues with my device. It turns out that there were. There is an issue affecting the Surface 3 laptop, and other devices that use an always on, always connected networking. The issue blocks the update for these devices, per the Known Issues and Release Problems page since it leads to random restarts or crashes. The issue is currently under investigation, and once resolved, the surface will get the update. I will wait till then. Interestingly there are recommendations online to circumvent the block on the Surface, by using the Update Assistant Tool , or the media creation tool. I don’t recommend either, unless you enjoy bricking your laptop. Luckily the a...

I have an old Samsung ML-1210 printer  that is more than 10 years old. Despite its age, the printer is still in an excellent condition: it prints high quality PDF documents reliably albeit slowly, and satisfies my needs. But because of its age, it is hard to find a working native driver for Mac OS X, as Apple stopped supporting the printer in Lion, and Samsung stopped supporting the drivers after 2005. I could of course retire the printer, and buy a new one that is faster, and cheaper, but I tried to find another route where I continue using my old trusty printer. Luckily, one exists through CUPS on Mac OS X, by using  ghostscript, foomatic-rip, and samsung-gdi . The packages on the page are for Mac OS X Lion, but I found them to work for later versions as well. The only inconvenience of using these packages is that you have to re-install them after every Mac OS X upgrade. With the latest Yosemite upgrade,  the packages broke because of sandboxing,  where foomat...