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Powertoys are huge

These free utitilies are quite nice and helpful, as they have functionality missing in stock windows since Win95. The current incarnation includes useful features like:

  • Rename multiple files with regex
  • “keep on top” setting for windows
  • prevent standby
  • quick image resize

I read a couple of mentions which stated something like “it’s only 3MB”.

After the hefty 80MB download and install, this was the result:

371MB! Thats like 100x more than the articles mentioned. A quick check on the contents revealed the reason, DLLs multiple times included:

Since I like portable programs to be small and non-portables to include DLLs just once the old smaller freeware helpers not from MS will need to stay a bit longer.

Declaring arrays with sizes unknown

Recently, while skimming through udemy C-courses I learned something which never occured to me before, and also hadn’t read about:

It’s possible to declare an array of which the final size is not known at compile time, just by using the address of the *size*. Also, same course featured “a[i] can be written as i[a]”.

#include<stdio.h>
int main(){
	int size = 0;
	printf("Size of array: ");
	scanf("%d",&size);             //dynamically set size
	int arr[size];
	printf("ints one by one confirmed by ENTER:\n");
	for(int i = 0; i < size; i++)
	{
	    scanf("%d",&arr[i]);
	}
	printf("Entered values: ");
	for(int i = 0; i < size; i++)
	{
	    printf(" %d", i[arr]);  //i[arr] same as arr[i]!
	}

}

🤯

Pluralsight technically blind

I’m blocked from all access to pluralsight, cause: unusual behaviour

What exactly? No idea.

Interesting courses I might watch from start to finish, often at 1.4-1.6x speed. Already known basics I might skip in the 10s increments the UI allows or go to 2x.

Other courses only peripherelly interesting I usually read reviews, skim through the transcript and if there is a particularly interesting point in the table of contents I might watch that.

Bad behaviour in the eyes of pluralsight.

In the previous years free-weekends I got temporarily banned for that, support mails usually include something like “yes, can confirm, you’re unbanned, but be warned: Next time…”.

Pluralsight seems to have a huge fear of people ripping off their content.

They miss the point, people not only come to their site for content but for the badges. The content is really not that deep and detailed, as most courses I encountered are 2-3 hours, and could usually be one-upped by either some excellent 20+ hours course on udemy or youtube. But I get it, the content is not just content, it’s curated, there’s quality control. You can be sure to not get some low-quality stuff, even without looking at reviews. Huge timesaver in contrast to udemy where there are literally 1000s of 33min fake courses with less content then on the matching wikipedia entry.

Pluralsights advantage of quality, albeit at the level you can get with a 3 hour overview is in my opinion the best prerequisite for the badges. With the profile stats page one can show, that there is a knowledge of that specific content.

Embarrassing for a site specialized in technical content to seem so incompetent when it comes to distinguishing fraud from “unusual behaviour”.

Stackoverflow API key

To access stackoverflow in a meaningful automated way one needs an API key, it can be requested at:

https://stackapps.com/apps/oauth/register/submit

OAuth Domain: stackoverflow.com if there is no domain/webserver available

Application Website: for example this very post, or something like github

Application Icon: not mandatory

Smarter Firefox autocomplete

When starting to type in the address bar the shown list often holds too many unrelated items. With a few shortcuts it can be a much better experience.

They’re to be typed directly in the address bar (press F6) in front of the search terms:

These I find the most useful:

  • % search only open tabs
  • ^ search only history
  • * search only bookmarks

These are probably useful for other people:

  • + search only tagged bookmarks
  • # search only in titles and tags
  • $ search only in URL
  • ? show only (search engine) suggestions

It’s also possible to remove unwanted items in the list by selecting them and then press SHIFT+DELETE although it sometimes doesn’t work for me on FF82.

More details here.