Category: IT-stuff

Snip, a free screen capture tool

If you occasionally need to take a screenshot (or a screen capture of your screen), recent versions of Windows provide you with the Windows Snipping tool. It works well for simple jobs, but a recent Microsoft Garage project called Snip takes it to the next level.

snip

It offers a number of advantages:

  • it runs in the background and is always available
  • it stores your screenshots in a “library” without having to save manually to a file
  • you can annotate your screenshot with various drawing tools. Especially useful when you are using a tablet
  • you can save your annotations in a video file and add voice-over to it (very handy for describing an issue)

 

Microsoft Surface Pro 3 hangs on black “Surface” boot screen

On several occasions, I had my Surface Pro 3 freeze up on me on the boot screen. When I would turn on the surface, it would get to the black screen with the Surface logo, but it would not get any further. No spinner, no activity, nothing.

The following procedure fixes my issue every time:

  • if the Surface is turned on, turn it off by holding the power button for at least 30 seconds
  • press and hold the volume up button and the power button simultaneously for 15 seconds, then release the buttons
  • screen will flash and the Surface will shut down (sometimes it gets stuck at the bios screen, just exit then)
  • turn the device back on. Things should be ok now.

Check the following link for more troubleshooting tips.

TomTom device reboots continuously after update

If you have a built-in TomTom GPS in your car (Carminat – Renault), you might experience that the device reboots continuously after updating the SD Card with TomTom Home.

The device shows the startup screen, a black-and-white hourglass, and then the startup screen again, it continues endlessly.

Two actions might solve your issue:

  • the support site of TomTom suggest you delete the mapsettings file. That did not solve the issue for me;
  • mounting the SD card on a computer and deleting the loopdir folder in the root of the card solved the issue for me, as suggested here. Personally, deleting that folder did not delete my favorites, the only thing I had to do is set my home location again.

Edit your hosts file quickly

edit hostfileEverybody who has ever migrated to a new hosting provider, purchased a new domain name or made DNS changes has done it: adding lines to your hosts file to “hard code” the ip address of a server host name on the workstation you are working on.

On Windows, this has become a pain since the UAC feature was introduced. In order to modify,  you need elevated permissions, so you need to start your favorite text editor as administrator. On top of that, the file is buried somewhere in the deepest cave of your c-drive (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\).

There must be an easy way to do this. I managed to reduce it to two clicks via a shortcut on my desktop, with the procedure below. Who can do better? One click only?

  1. Right-click your desktop
  2. In the context menu, select New > Shortcut
  3. In Type the location of the item, enter C:\Windows\System32\notepad.exe C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
  4. Click Next
  5. In Type a name for this shortcut, type any name you want (I used Edit hosts file)
  6. Click Finish
  7. Right-click the new icon on your desktop and select Properties
  8. On the Shortcut tab, click the Advanced button
  9. Check Run as administrator and click OK
  10. Click OK

Seems to be a lot of work, but it will save you numerous clicks whenever you need to edit the file again.

iCloud shared streams not shown after upgrade to Photos

The Mac OS X 10.10.3 includes the new iPhoto replacement called Photos. My upgrade experience was not very positive: I could no longer connect to the various albums I shared on iCloud. The albums were still there, they were showing up on other devices, but in Photos they were not visible. The Shared section of Photos showed the message “Connecting to library… Retrieving latest photo sharing activity” but after that, nothing happened.

After trying various things, this is the procedure that fixed it for me:

  • Close Photos
  • Repair disk permissions via Disk Utility
  • Restart
  • Don’t start Photos, but go to System Preferences, iCloud, Photos and disable iCloud Photo Sharing
  • Enable it again
  • Start Photos. After a while, the activity stream will update and the shared photos will start coming in.