Valticus

As you are probably well aware, Twitter has recently been bought by none other than Elon Musk himself. I don’t know about you, but I am only noticing negative sides of this acquisition. I will try to explain why within following paragraphs and how this affects digital marketing and social media strategy for professionals who rely on these platforms for their online presence.

Firstly, I am not talking about the blue stars here, either. It goes deeper. Twitter feels less professional as a whole, since Elon bought it. There had been many lay-offs, many people leaving the company at their own will because of bad management, and so on, and so forth. At this point, Twitter just feels like it’s hanging in the air about to drop itself into a volcano and be forgotten. This instability makes it unreliable for digital marketing and personal branding efforts.

I own a mechanical keyboard for some time now, and I must say — in my opinion it is way better compared to my old membrane keyboard for both typing comfort and gaming performance, making it an excellent choice for programmers and gaming enthusiasts who spend hours at their computer.

Mechanical keyboards are gaining popularity as of late. While they were on the expensive side at first, you can buy (and assemble) one for under $100 today. Granted, you might need to get the keys and key caps to suit your needs in addition.

So, today, I ran into a problem. Well, it has been bugging me for the last few days, actually. I started getting the “COM Surrogate has stopped working” error.

While Googling did help, not every solution worked for me. What did work is reverting the video card driver (I have a built-in Intel HD graphics card). So this is the first thing I’d suggest you try.

1. To uninstall your current video card driver, first open the Run dialog by pressing Win+R:

Oftentimes, when you buy a new PC, it comes preloaded with applications. Some of them are essential, like an anti-virus, and some of them are not. Over the years I’ve come to realize that the responsiveness of your device (it doesn’t necessarily have to be a computer, it can be a mobile phone or a tablet, too) depends on how many applications you have installed. This digital minimalism approach to performance optimization is especially true for mobile devices, where applications are often started at boot and remain in the memory even if they are not used, draining battery power.

I’ve watched “The Queen’s Gambit” on Netflix, and I must admit — I love this chess-themed dramatic series! And I am not alone in enjoying this brilliant show about chess and genius, of course. According to this article in “Business Insider”, and I quote:

Netflix said last week that “The Queen’s Gambit” was its biggest limited series yet and was watched by 62 million households worldwide in its first 28 days, sparking a massive surge in chess popularity and chess set sales (a view is counted if an account watches two minutes or more).