Adventures in Tech

I have been using Internet Explorer ever since I switched back to Windows, and have been satisfied with it. Apart from its end of life status, and a couple of annoying bugs when I have more than 10 tabs open, it has served me well. With the latest Windows 10 update, I wanted to try the next generation browser: Edge. Going in, I knew that Edge is not a finished product, and that it has a long way until it competes with the other established browsers on the market. Nevertheless I decided to give it a try. My first experiences with it were positive: it is light weight and very fast, and when I have many tabs open it does not suffer from the same feat as IE does, where the browser hangs randomly and the abominable recover web page ribbon appears at the bottom of the screen. I was also surprised when I did not end up using the cool new features such as the readability view and web notes as much as I thought. I liked the integration with Cortana through the context menu, which I ca...

One of the great side effects of watching educational videos with my son is the wealth of seemingly innocent questions that arise afterwards, and the entertaining web searches to find the answer. One such question is for oranges which came first, the color or the name of the fruit? Turns out there are a lot of theories online, and the one that rings true is this quora thread  on the origins of the name. According to the online etymology dictionary  the name of the fruit evolved through trade from the original Sanskrit name for the orange tree (naranga). to the Persian narang, to the Arabic naranj, to the Italian arancia, to the Latin orange, to the French orange, and finally to the current form circa 1300. The name of the color came after that. Where would we be without the Internet and kids questions.

I have always wondered why most barns are painted red. It is always an aesthetic sight to see one while driving in the countryside, both during the lush green days of summer, or the yellow arid days of winter. There is of course a chance that farmers chose the color red for its aesthetics value, but I wondered if there was a more practical reason for the choice. An online search produced a bevy of results with equally reasonable choices. One of the sites argues that in the older days, one of the practical methods to seal the barn wood and protect it from the elements was to paint it with a mixture of linseed oil, and  additions of milk and line. The red color would come from adding either the blood of a recent slaughter or from ferrous oxide--rust. As the paint would dry it would turn into a dark red color. I buy the rust theory, since there is a lot of rust to be had everywhere, and the blood theory is a bit weird. The Smithsonian magazine adds a physics...

My Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop experienced some weird problems earlier in the Windows 10 preview cycle; it would crash after a couple of sleep/wakeup cycles, and reboot afterwards. I was surprised that I was the only one experiencing that problem internally, especially since all the preview flighting was going smoothly. But when the problem persisted after a couple of internal upgrades, I decided to dig deeper and figure out what was going on. When Windows crashes, it writes a memory dump to the  C:\Windows\memory.dmp file, and you can examine the contents of that file, and figure out reasons for the crash through windows kernel debugger (Windbg). Windbg is available for download either separately or as part of the WDK . Once it is downloaded, the process is easy. First run Windbg with elevated permissions (Run as Administrator), and open the memory dump file (CTRL+D). If the debugger complains about the symbols, try to fix them and reload through: .symfix; .reload You c...

When I first installed Windows 10 preview on my laptop, IE11 scrolling stopped working when using the touchpad to scroll. Interestingly scrolling worked great in all other programs: explorer, outlook, one note, and many others. For IE11, unless I click on the tab title, and avoid clicking on anything else in the tab area, scrolling did not work. It was quite an annoying behavior, but not a show stopper for trying out Windows 10. I ended up learning how to use the keyboard for scrolling through the web pages in lieu of touchpad goodness. With preview updates, the problem did not get any better, so I searched on the web to see if the issue was widespread. It turns out that it was, and it was not restricted to Windows 10 preview either. There were a lot of solutions online, that did not make much sense, like resetting IE11, going to the advanced tab and disabling smooth scrolling, and a slew of others. The one that made sense was a problem in the Synaptics driver, which for older style...

While using my preview build of windows 10, sometimes I face the dreaded "Limited Wi-Fi Internet" connectivity issues, where the Wi-Fi adapter seems to be connected to the Wi-Fi router, but full Internet access is not possible. I often attributed these issues to quirks in the preview builds, and a simple computer restart--reminiscent of the older Windows releases--seemed to fix the issue. But not yesterday, where multiple restarts did not ease the pain. Even deleting the Wi-Fi network and recreating it again did not help. The dreaded "Limited Wi-Fi" banner under the Wi-Fi network name continued to rear its ugly head. Luckily I had an Ethernet cable handy, so I hard wired the laptop and checked online to see if others have faced a similar issue. There was a considerable number of people experiencing the issue, with various solutions. The one that made sense for me was a bad wireless driver install, which was easy to fix. Before you attempt to replicate the solut...

The other day I heard a great educational segment on thunderstorms and lightening on NPR. The segment highlighted that since thunderstorms and lightening strikes were not very common on the west coast, a lot of the older buildings and houses are not equipped to handle them well like their counterparts on the east coast. And because lightening strikes are relatively rare here, when one occurs it becomes news around the area. The segment mentioned that the most famous one was when lightening struck a tree in an arboretum and caused the tree to explode. The lightening passed through the core of the tree, and generated a lot of energy that heated up the moisture within the bark, and turned it into steam. The steam expanded and turned the tree into projectile shards that flew 30 yards away from the tree and got embedded in the soil. It must have been scary to witness such an event. The segment ended by offering some practical advice on what to do if you're ...