Windows

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.

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.

My general rule is to always ask myself if I am really going to use the app I am about to install very often or just occasionally. If the answer is: “No, I don’t really need this app.”, I don’t install it no matter how great the hype is over it.

While it is true that Google’s Chrome holds the largest number of users to date, I have recently switched to Microsoft’s Edge web browser as a superior alternative for web browsing and performance optimization.

Edge can now use all the extensions I had in Chrome, and Edge has many great features built in which Chrome doesn’t. Like Web Capture, for example. Edge is also faster and loads web pages when Chrome can’t (this was recently discovered by yours truly when my network connection speed dropped due to technical issues on my service provider’s side). This browser comparison shows why many users are switching to Edge for better performance and built-in productivity features.

Tell me something - are you happy with how ClearType, the default font renderer in Windows does its job? If you are like me and have to look at your computer screen for the most part of your day, you might prefer something better.

Let me show you something really quick. This is how the fonts are rendered on my Windows machine:

Let’s face it - as developers we look at code 90% of our time we spend in front of the monitor. While there tons of fonts available for our favorite text editors, both free and paid, I have found one font in particular to be extremely enjoyable for programming productivity and code readability (and believe me - I’ve tried a few).

That is - JetBrains Mono, a free and open source font from the very same company that brought us tools like WebStorm and PyCharm.

If you’ve been following my blog you might have noticed that I haven’t written anything in quite some time. “So, what’s up?”, you might ask.

Well, long story short - lots of things have happened March through May, 2021. Most of them unpleasant to say the least and personal, so I’d rather not disclose the details. However, I’ve also done a few things related to Information Technologies.

For a long time the only way to launch Linux commands in Windows was with Cygwin. But Cygwin is rather bulky and can take a long time to download if you are on a slower Internet connection. This cross-platform development challenge has made many programmers seek lightweight alternatives for Linux compatibility on Windows.

As I’ve mentioned before, I love Linux for its stability and reliability. So I was looking for a simpler way to execute Linux commands in Windows, and found it! This development environment setup is perfect for programmers who need system administration tools across different operating systems.