Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
This is a huge Windows-driven LCD with which I gauge my arrival to the university every morning. It’s usually not on when I roll by the first time since I have a lot of early morning classes, but on free days I sometimes see diagnostic screens, Windows startup, and the plethora of error dialogs that the operator has to click through before getting to the day’s scheduled programming. Sometimes I dream of hijacking it for giggles.
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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!
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.
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).
Which hack is Mad Maxier?
A. This tortoise shell guitar found at an obscure ya-dong bar in Roi Et:
or
B. My old dirt-thrasher Tena (the urusai-est Honda Tena in the world)
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This review of Wilson Silver Color Mist (apparently used as the chrome inhalant in the movie) made me bust a gut.
As an anti-fraud measure, many airlines have adopted a policy of asking to see the credit card your tickets were purchased with at check in. This concerned me after buying tickets with my dad’s credit card for my family (wife and kids) to visit home later this year. We are flying Korean Air, so this information is pertinent only to them.
The Korean Air website clearly states that the credit card used to buy the tickets online needs to be shown at check in:
Documents Required
Reading online flying forums for confirmation only served to confuse the situation, as it appears that some airlines (even Korean Air in some situations) actually ask for the owner of the credit card to also be present at time of check in.
To clarify, we called Korean Air on both continents we would be flying from and they gave us the same reply: Although their website seems to say otherwise, the only time you need to show a credit card at check in is if both of the following two items are true:
In Thai, we were told “not to worry about it,” which is just about the most worrying thing you can be told in Thai when you want a straight answer, so I called KAL customer service in the states and was told the exact same thing. Since we bought the tickets from a 3rd party (discount travel site), it seems we will not be asked to produce the card at check in.
Fail to heed his warnings and pay the price.
The Keyless Keyboard? Yes, it was posted yesterday.
The updated terms and conditions for apps available at the Google Play Store dictated that I apply for a International Age Rating Coalition (IARC) rating, which I have now received: LINK
As you most probably are not aware, C. Buddha’s Blog Reader is an Android app; it’s a dedicated reader for this blog that hosts the spirit of virtual Keanu Reeves (yes, it is most excellent). You can check it out here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.warting.blogg.wis_cosmicbuddha_feed_nu
I recently experienced a very strange and vexing problem in Chrome (EN v.38, 64-bit, Windows 7) where all Thai text appeared as small boxes or squares, or squares with strange symbols inside of them. It literally appeared overnight, and no amount of tweaking encodings or font settings (you know, the normal stuff) could fix it. Only Thai language seemed affected, and it only happened in Chrome (I tested in FF, IE, Opera, and MS Office as well).
If you are experiencing the same problem, I have a solution that is working 100% (for me). It is tied to a new Microdicksoft font rendering technology recently enabled in Chrome by default called DirectWrite.
TL;WR: If you want to fix this problem with garbled foreign text display, you need to turn that shit off.
How to turn off DirectWrongWrite:
1) Open Chrome and type (or copy and paste, you lazy fucker) chrome:flags in the address bar, then hit Enter. This opens a magical gateway to a Land That Makes Chrome Bipolar:
2) Click the “Enable” link under Disable DirectWrite. That’s right, you have to click a link called Enable to turn off the Microphallussoft shit. But Bill Gates cured hemmorhoidal dysentery in the fourth world, so I forgive him.
3) Restart Chrome (remember to shut it down completely if you have it set to run in the background.)
Results for me:
I am including the bug report I filed with Google below, for posterity.
All Thai language text suddenly started appearing as boxes or squares in English version of Chrome 38.0.2125.101 m (64-bit). This was a sudden problem that appeared and persisted through various attempts at problem solving: Changing page encoding, font settings, re-installing Chrome, emptying cache, overriding CSS properties with various Extensions, etc. Although other browsers and applications were unaffected, I also tried re-installing all fonts in Windows (64-bit Windows 7), tweaking language settings, deleting FNTCACHE.DAT file, multiple restarts, etc.
I finally found a solution that is working for my system: disabling DirectWrite in chrome://flags/ and restarting Chrome. This solves all problems with Thai text rendering.
EnablingDirect write again and restarting Chrome causes the same problems again, disabling it and rebooting solves it instantly.
Keywords: Fuck Microsoft, Fuck DirectWrite, Fuck Windows 9, thank god it’s friday