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.
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.
To uninstall your current video card driver, first open the Run dialog by pressing Win+R: Windows Run Dialog Type devmgmt.
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. It 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.
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.
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).
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:
If you would like to achieve similar results, there are only a couple of steps you have to do, and they don’t require any tweaking.
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 (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.
I’ve switched to Windows entirely.
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.
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!
I present to you GNU on Windows also known as GoW).
For a long time I have been a big fan of Sarah Drasner’s theme for Visual Studio Code, and even used a port of it in Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition.
Ever since I’ve started learning .Net Framework on both Linux and Windows, I ’ve also started using the default Visual Studio 2019 theme in both the IDE, and the editor. Simply because I like unity across the developer tools I use.
