Windows 10 upgrade issues and fixes

I've recently upgraded to Windows 10 from Windows 7, while the upgrade itself was pretty quick, some issues were found that took some time to deal with. I recommend anyone considering the upgrade to go through the following first.

General Windows 10 issues

Privacy

Windows 10 has issues and by issues I mean some major privacy issues. I recommend anyone upgrading to Windows 10 to go through this site and more or less disable everything shown there (except of course for things you actually use, Cortana for instance, if you use her). As stated, it would probably be wise to visit the site once in a while for updates.

Bloatware

Microsoft seems to have made some money from 3rd party apps in exchange for them being part of the Windows 10 environment, even though you really don't need them. That includes Grooveshark, a Minecraft/Photoshop/Flipboard store links, and a whole bunch of other useless things that I could've downloaded myself if I wanted to.

Thing is, not all of these can be removed easily, and require the use of Window's power shell.

For most apps, the instructions in here are good enough. For the Minecraft link I actually downloaded the game, entered it, and then uninstalled it. That seemed to remove the link completely. No such luck with the Photoshop Express. Although I guess it's only a link, so you could right-click and unpin it from the start panels.

Windows 10 driver/new settings issues

Slow boot

For me, the Bios boot seemed to slow considerably. I use an SSD HD, and still it would take about 20 seconds to get the Windows logo. The fix here was an update to the BIOS itself. I, having an Asus Mobo, downloaded it from Asus's own download links for my Mobo. Unfortunately, the BIOS upgrade did not go all nicely, leading to the next issue.

WOL stopped working

This, I believe has to do with both my BIOS and my Mobo's NIC driver in Windows 10. First off, the BIOS no longer had an "enable" flag in the power options for WOL. But fortunately, it looks like enabling the "Wake by PCI/E" was enough for me.

As for the network adapter's configuration, something seemed to have changed in Windows 10, and having all options enabled in the network adapter's advanced and power options as I had them in Windows 7, no longer worked. The fix seemed to be to disable these two options:

• Shutdown Wake On Lan
• Wake on pattern match

and only enabling the "Wake on magic packet" option.

In the "Power management" tab, I had all options enabled. It looked like disabling "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" would be a good idea, but for some reason, it didn't work that way.

Wrong resolution on TV screen (not necessarily an issue)

I normally have both a normal monitor and a TV screen connected directly to my PC. It seems that after the upgrade, Windows decided that on the TV screen it would be preferable to have larger text and app images. So far so good, but it seems that in order to do so, it lowered the screen size. In the display settings, my TV screen would still show 1080p as it should, but using something like the following python code, would show that the screen size is 720p:

    import ctypes

    user32 = ctypes.windll.user32

    screensize = user32.GetSystemMetrics(0), user32.GetSystemMetrics(1)

    print screensize

The best way to see it was to just create a canvas in MSPaint with a height of 720 pixels and watching it fill the TV's screen although it shouldn't have.

Moving the "change the size of text apps and other items" bar all the way to the left fixed the issue and restored the actual 1080p display I wanted to see (the 720 pixel canvas no longer filled the whole screen).
This by itself is probably not an issue as long as the apps you're using are DPI aware. But since all I'm using my TV for is to watch movies, and don't really care about DPI, I kept it as 1080p to be on the safe side.

PlexConnect (AppleTV3)

In another room, I use my AppleTV3 to watch my media with Plex by using PlexConnect on a PC. On Windows 10, PlexConnect had an issue with listening on port 80 because of Window's "World Wide Web Publishing Service" (W3SVC). This service seems to open the port for itself and doesn't allow PlexConnect to connect as it should. Since I don't host any web servers, disabling the service fixed the issue.

Another issue with PlexConnect seems to be that its service doesn't start after a system restart, even in delayed automatic state. To fix this, I added a recovery option for it to try again after 2 minutes.

League Of Legends

My favourite game also had a minor issue. When trying to start it, I received the message: "PVP.net Patcher Kernel has stopped working". To fix this issue I had LOL start with admin rights, which fixed the issue. Other workarounds can be found here.

Useful Programs for the PC

Every now and then, you want something done automatically, which can't be done natively on Windows. That's when a few Google searches find you some free programs which serve the purpose very nicely. For me, Most of these had to be found after Radeon dropped functionality from their Control center in Radeon Crimson.

MultiMonitorTool - http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/multi_monitor_tool.html
This tool allows you to control the arrangement of your displays. This was especially helpful for me since it has command line options to do what's needed. And also, something I like very much, it needs no installation.

OpenHardwareMonitor - http://openhardwaremonitor.org/
No installation free software that shows all the fan/temperature/Load/Clocks in your system. It shows it from anything connected to your pc very neatly with some filtering options.
Still in the Beta phase, but is very promising.

FolderSize - http://www.mindgems.com/products/Folder-Size/Folder-Size-Download.htm
Free software that shows you the size of any file or folder while being able to drill down each folder to find whatever it is that is taking a lot of your storage. Also has a portable, non-installation needed version.
The Pro version can even analyze network drives and has command line options.

Adding audio delay keyboard shortcuts to PLEX

I've recently learned that there is a possibility to add audio delay keyboard mappings for the Plex Home Theater on windows.

To do this, edit the file located in:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Plex Home Theater\system\keymaps\keyboard.xml

Add these entries:
<keymap>
  <global>
    <keyboard>
      <j>AudioDelayMinus</j>
      <k>AudioDelayPlus</k>
      <j mod="ctrl">SubtitleDelayMinus</j>
      <k mod="ctrl">SubtitleDelayPlus</k>
    <keyboard>
  <global>

<keymap>

to the file. That is, add he AudioDelayMinus and AudioDelayPlus under the existing "keyboard" tag if it exists, or create a new keyboard.xml file and write the above in it.

This will assign the keyboard buttons j and k to the AudioDelayMinus and AudioDelayPlus respectively.

To put this together with my Plex + Harmony + FLIRC configuration, I then assigned the channel up and channel down buttons of my "Plex" device (actually configured as a Panasonic TC-P65VT30, as mentioned in: http://programming-headbanging.blogspot.co.il/2014/08/configuring-plex-home-theater-with.html) on the harmony remote to the j and k keyboard keys to be able to change the audio delay while watching a movie through Plex.

There are other short-cuts available as well, generally, all those that were in XBMC's keymap:
http://kodi.wiki/view/keymap

Connecting to a DHCP disabled router

Recently I had a need to connect 2 routers together to create a single LAN. The main reason for me was actually laziness, since I didn't want to pull another Ethernet cable through the walls.

In order to configure them correctly I followed the instructions found in:

http://routersetup.blogspot.co.il/2007/08/connecting-two-routers-wired.html

What I didn't follow correctly, was step (3), which is to change the secondary router's IP to one in the main router's IP range.

All was working well, except when I wanted to reconfigure the secondary router, and was unable to do so.

You see, my main router was in the 10.0.0.X range, and the secondary was in the 192.168.2.X range. Since my PC was now receiving an IP in the main router's range, it couldn't connect to the secondary router's web service.

An easy solution would've been to reset the router to the factory settings where the DHCP is enabled. Unfortunately, the reset button on my router didn't work.

To get around that I had to get my PC to change to the secondary router's subnet:

1. Disconnect the secondary router from the main router
2. Go into my PC's network adapter
1. Search for Network Connections
2. Right-click the Local Area Connection
3. Click Properties
4. Click Internet Protocol Version 4 and go into its properties
5. Change to "Use the following IP address:"
6. Enter
1. IP address: an IP in the secondary router's range (for instance 192.168.2.5 in my example) which isn't the IP of the router
2. Subnet mask: in my case it was 255.255.255.0, but even doing 255.255.0.0 works
3. Default gateway: the IP of the secondary router in its domain
   
7. Press OK until you get back to the Local Area Connection
8. Right-click the Local Area Connection
9. Click Disable
10. Double-click the connection to re-enable it

Now, all that remained was to type the router's IP in my browser and I could now enter it as I should.

To not have to do this again every time I want to access my secondary router, I then changed the IP to be one in the main router's range, and rebooted the secondary router. I then undid the changes above (changing the adapter's option to "Obtain and IP address automatically"), connected the secondary router to the main one's LAN port, and connected the PC to the secondary's LAN port.

At this point, I could enter the secondary router's web service through the new IP I gave it.

AutoHotKey

A while ago I wanted to find a way to create keyboard short-cuts that weren't available out of the box for my windows PC. Looking around, I came by AutoHotKey (AHK) which seems to not only allow for keyboard short-cuts, but much more. AHK allows you to control all sorts of things on your PC, be it through keyboard inputs, or through scripts running on your machine that pick up changes on the PC to be used in any way you like. 

AutoHotKey can be downloaded here:

http://www.autohotkey.com/

After installation it is a simple matter of right clicking a script file and selecting “compile script” to create an executable from it.

The main reason I started using AHK was for helping me use my harmony universal remote to control my PC, and mainly, to use it to open and control my PLEX client. More on this can be found here:

http://programming-headbanging.blogspot.com/2014/08/configuring-plex-home-theater-with.html

This brings me to my first script, which was naturally, opening the PLEX home theater:

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=de479d93705aaef!179&authkey=!ABvxiRhjSLez6Dg&ithint=file%2cahk

This one uses a SHIFT+ALT+F10 key combination to open the file in:

“C:\Program Files (x86)\Plex Home Theater\Plex Home Theater.exe”, if the PLEX Home Theater executable isn't already running.

Here are the rest of the scripts I've written since then:

KeyPad-Letters: This had to do with my problem finding a way to enter letters in the PLEX search box from my remote, which had only a numpad.

So, with the help of this script, I essentially created a phone-like numpad. The script sends letters while pressing the number buttons of the remote repeatedly like you usually do on the TV or older phones with no keyboard.

So, for instance, if I want to write abg3 I'll be able to do that with the remote by: pressing 2, wait a second (or press Alt-Shift-F8), pressing 2 twice, pressing 4 once, pressing 3 four times.

the Keypad-Letters script can be found at:

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=de479d93705aaef!185&authkey=!ABcwFW3bRsvP5HQ&ithint=file%2cahk

This script also uses Alt-Shift-F8 (which I mapped through FLIRC, as explained in the other blog post I mentioned earlier) to stop the 1 second timer so that you could write other characters from the same number immediately without having to wait a second between each letter.

Close Display: By far my most used keyboard short-cut, this one uses WIN-q to close my PC’s display screen just as it would when the computer usually goes to sleep or shuts down. This is extremely useful when you've left your PC for a little while, and don’t want it to go to sleep or shut down. It saves power used by the display, and also protects it from being “burned” if your screen-saver takes a while to start. In general, it makes me feel better knowing that my display isn't sitting there waiting for someone who is not around.

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=de479d93705aaef!187&authkey=!AM3AVmnbQgVSXOQ&ithint=file%2cahk

Change Resolution: This script uses WIN-w to immediately set your current display to use a resolution of 1920 x 1200 (which is what my PC display should be using). This was useful to me when using PLEX, as it was run on my 1080p TV, and would sometimes keep my other display in this same resolution after I closed PLEX.

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=de479d93705aaef!181&authkey=!ADZrOVlI6zEbS-E&ithint=file%2cahk

Change PC volume by resolution: This script listens to a resolution change event from the windows operating system, and sets the PC’s volume accordingly. As it happened, the volume I heard on my PC’s headphones was much louder than that heard from my other audio output to my receiver, which was used when watching PLEX on my 1080p TV. Instead of always increasing the volume manually, I created this script to automatically change the volume when my resolution was set to 1080p (which automatically happens when starting PLEX in my case).

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=de479d93705aaef!184&authkey=!AGDcNyekmZV34Gk&ithint=file%2cahk

One script to include them all (and in a single executable run them):

In order to run all these scripts together, and not as separate executables, I created one other script which essentially includes all the rest. This is simply done by creating another AHK script file that has this:

#Include c:\full\path\to\ahk\script\file\to\be\included.ahk

And to finish this whole thing off, I’ll give you a small tip on how to run scripts that need admin rights. Sometimes, you want a keyboard shortcut in AHK to run a program that needs admin rights. Instead of having to authorize to use it with admin rights every time you run the keyboard shortcut for it, you could run a VBS script that would require the admin rights only once (on startup for instance). After doing it once, it will keep those rights as long as it runs. Saving you unnecessary clicks and hassles. Of course, be wary not to give your admin rights away to any third party executable you know nothing about.

Just create a file with a “vbs” extension, such as ahk_scripts.vbs and add these lines:

Set UAC = CreateObject("Shell.Application") 

UAC.ShellExecute " c:\full\path\to\ahk\executable\to\run\with\admin\rights.exe", "", "", "runas", 1

 As you can see, AHK lets you have a lot more power over your PC. Almost anything you want to do with your PC has a way to do it, and I hope the examples above will give you a few good tools to start building the scripts you need.

Plex + FLIRC + harmony

Here's my account on how I went about configuring the Plex Home Theater with FLIRC and a harmony ultimate.

I decided to have a look at PLEX since i'm going to be moving to an apartment where the PC will be connected directly to the TV. Since it will be directly connected, I won't be using my streamer, and I thought I should look into using a nice looking media player/server.

Already having a harmony ultimate remote, I looked around for various ways to get it to control the PLEX Home Theater, and i decided on FLIRC.

FLIRC is a cool piece of USB driven hardware that translates IR (Infra-Red) signals to keyboard clicks. Since it does the translating for you, it means the PC/Streamer or whatever you're using it on doesn't need to know anything about IR translation, It gets normal keyboard inputs as if from a regular keyboard.

In order to configure the harmony remote to control PLEX I used the old approach that doesn't include the FLIRC-PLEX profile in the harmony remote. Using this approach, we configure the harmony with a device that has a lot of IR codes that are different from one another. This approach lets me do all sorts of things with keyboard shortcuts, namely using AutoHotKey (AHK) to configure commands not in the PLEX command list.

Here's a word document with my mappings using the Panasonic TC-P65VT30 device in the harmony remote:

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=DE479D93705AAEF!158&authkey=!AIkAnHvZz_e4EEc&ithint=file%2cdocx

About the AHK scripts:

The script that directly affects PLEX, and is aptly named StartPlex.ahk, always runs on the PC (it is in my startup folder) and the extra keyboard shortcuts in it do this:

Alt-Shift-F10 - opens the plex client (theater)

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=DE479D93705AAEF!179&authkey=!ABvxiRhjSLez6Dg&ithint=file%2cahk

It expects the PLEX Home Theater to be in:

“C:\Program Files (x86)\Plex Home Theater\Plex Home Theater.exe”. if it is not in the same location on your PC, change the ahk file and recompile it to create the executable (literally 2 clicks once you have AHK installed).

other than this one script, i urge you to have a look at my other scripts since they may fit your particular case as they did mine (posted here: http://programming-headbanging.blogspot.co.il/2015/06/awhile-ago-i-wanted-to-find-way-to.html)
. Things such as changing the PC volume automatically when starting PLEX, or changing the PC resolution with a keyboard click.

All my scripts are updated in this post:

 Now, all that's left is to sit back, click the PLEX activity on the remote and watch TV till we drop.

Debugging Tools

Here are a few very useful tools I've run across during my time programming:

Beyond compare (also for MAC, woohoo)

I find beyond compare to be the best compare tool around, so i was ecstatic when i found they finally had a MAC version as well:

http://www.scootersoftware.com/download.php

Adding colors in XCode debug log

https://github.com/robbiehanson/XcodeColors

LogExpert. Perhaps the best freeware log tail tool around. Too bad it is only for windows

http://logexpert.codeplex.com/

Using the MAC firewall to block ports/IPs (Up to Yosemite unfortunately)

Blocking port $1:
Sudo ipfw add deny tcp from any to any src-port $1
sudo ipfw add deny tcp from any to any dst-port $1

You will see after each line the rule number. To unblock:
sudo ipfw delete 200
sudo ipfw delete 100

XCode breakpoint in nested projects

How to add breakpoints in XCode for projects included in another project:

1.     Add the breakpoint in the nested project, then go to the breakpoints tab, right click the breakpoint you want, click move to -> user. After this step, the breakpoint will be visible in all projects which are open under "User".

2.     It is also possible to add a breakpoint through the lldb:                        (lldb) b client.m:42

Getting the most out of the MAC's magic mouse

better touch tool for MAC - http://www.boastr.net/

MAC Outlook email attach through a file's context menu

http://www.officeformachelp.com/2010/11/create-a-service-to-attach-files-to-a-new-outlook-for-mac-mail-message/

github chrome plugin

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/octotree/bkhaagjahfmjljalopjnoealnfndnagc

Multiple Eclipse instances on a MAC

A plugin for eclipse on MAC that allows you to launch more than one instance:

1.       First install the eclipse marketplace:

2.       Help --> Install new Software… --> Add --> http://download.eclipse.org/mpc/indigo/

3.       Help --> Eclipse MarketPlace --> Search: OS X Eclipse Launcher