Month: September 2015

Solution for “Permanent ThinkLight Icon” Problem

ThinkLight Icon

Keywords: ThinkPad 420 420t 420r Windows 10 Win 10 ThinkLight OSD icon won’t go away won’t disappear on screen display hotkey permanent fucking annoying

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On my recent trip home, I bought another laptop since I use one for work every day and it’s been six years since I bought my ASUS workhorse. The following is a direct copy of the post I left on the Lenovo message boards since huge corporations disappear pretty regularly (or at least change their websites), but my blog DOES NOT.

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Anyways, my Thinkpad is a refurbished T420 I powered up with an SSD and 8 gigs of ram, recently updated to Windows 10. After the update is when this problem appeared. The Thinklight icon would appear after waking from sleep and could sometimes be coaxed to disappear either by switching the light on and off, or by using the Volume buttons. The problem is, it only worked a fraction of the time and otherwise required a restart. It was so annoying, I almost went back to Win 7. The permanent solution for me was to install the following:

Hotkey Features Integration for Windows 10 (32-bit, 64-bit), 8.1 (32-bit, 64-bit) – ThinkPad

(Plain text link for above: http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/downloads/ds029026 )

Hope this helps somebody else!

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I have a copy of this file on said ThinkPad, so if sometime in the future you cannot find this file elsewhere (because of aforementioned corporate website changes or whatever), hit me up. Hope this ThinkPad is still running then!

AVG will sell your browsing and search history to advertisers

On my trip back to the states, a few people asked me why I don’t use AVG Free antivirus software. Well, aside from the reasons I stated then (pop-ups, bugs, general clunkiness), AVG has changed their privacy policy and expressed their intent to sell the browsing and search history of their users to advertisers. Tsk, tsk. Of course, if you are reading this on Facebook (my blog auto-publishes to my FB wall), similar data of yours has been sold already.

The truth is, free antivirus programs are not free at all, and most are complete shit.

My choice of antivirus software? I do not always recommend my personal choice because it’s a bit esoteric, but it’s 360 Total Security with the optional Bitdefender and Avira AntiVir engines enabled.

Jet lag, Brain lag, everywhere a lag lag

We just got back from an epic trip back home to the states where I officiated my baby sister’s wedding, reunited with whole gaggle of relatives (some of whom I hadn’t seen for decades), and took the kids to Disneyland for their first time (thanks dad and Vangie!) the day before we left. It was basically a day and a half by planes and a bus (including a 1.5 hour stopover in Incheon and a brief respite in the Lad Prao area of Bangkok at our relatives’ place), and jet lag/exhaustion has hit all of us hard. I nearly went out of my mind for the past couple hours by accidentally enabling this setting on my phone:

Settings -> Developer Options -> Force RTL Layout direction

It will be fun to prank someone with this in the future; it’s incredibly irritating and nearly impossible to Google an answer. It basically reverses the order of everything in the Android taskbar (clock on the left, status notifications on the right) and justifies all text on screen to the right (and with that description, this page may now become the first hit for people who accidentally enable this setting).