Windows Printer Install

Friday, June 5, 2020

A few months ago I was marveling at how easy it was to install my aging HP printer on Linux. Really it even got easier with Ubuntu 20.04. Astonished. So by comparison, here are the steps required to install that same printer on Windows 10. Go to Settings and type Printers & Scanners Click the button that reads “Add a printer or scanner” Wait for it to scan for a printer.…more

Build 2020 Part 2

Sunday, May 24, 2020

Microsoft Build Conference 2020 Oh My! I totally forgot my favorite parts of Build in my last blog post. Read on to learn more. WSL2 WSL2 is part of Windows 10 v2004 that came out this month. With it comes a full fledged Linux kernel. It’s amazing and fast. In the Linux file system you’ll see speed improvements of 60%. But that’s not all. At Build they announced that GPU pass through, DirectX 12 on WSL, and most importantly Linux GUI is coming this year to WSL!…more

Build 2020

Sunday, May 24, 2020

Microsoft Build Conference 2020 The Microsoft Build conference was this week and although we are still sheltering in place from the COVID-19 virus I got to attend. The Build conference was 100% virtual this year and that didn’t detract from anything except the hallway conversations. There were session going on live for 48 hours straight from Tuesday morning at 8AM through to Thursday morning at 8AM.…more

Intel NUC 10

Sunday, May 3, 2020

I have been using an old Gigabyte Brix computer for about 7 years as a secondary computer. Mostly I use it on my Twitch stream to keep track of the chat. It does the job, but if I tried to do too many things at once with it, it would bog down and run really slow. It maxed out at 16GB of RAM and I had a 256GB mSATA drive in it.…more

Custom WSL Image

Sunday, March 8, 2020

Windows Subsystem for Linux (also known as WSL) is a system where you can run a Linux distribution inside Windows. This is great in that you can run any command line application in Windows. Version 1 of WSL did this using a translation layer between the Linux system and the Windows side. Version 2, which is part of version 2004 of Windows 10, uses an actual Linux kernel to do the work.…more

Cloning a Drive

Monday, February 24, 2020

One of the things you have to live with being a technologist is that you inevitably do tech support for family. My recent vacation to the Pacific Northwest was no exception. This time my aunt’s computer was out of disk space. We ordered a new 250GB Crucial M.2 drive to replace the existing 32GB eMMC drive that was in her computer. Easy right? Just open the computer, slap the new drive in it, copy the contents from the old drive to the new drive and then resize the partition.…more

Printer Install

Tuesday, February 18, 2020

I have been playing with a few different distributions of Linux for my secondary machine. I have been on Ubuntu for a while and yesterday I installed Arch Linux. Today, I installed Linux Mint. Overall I really like the desktop environment that it comes with. It seems as polished as Ubuntu. Tonight I thought I would try installing my network printer to see how hard it is to install. I went to System Settings and selected Printers.…more

Windows Template Studio

Saturday, February 15, 2020

I’m a little late to this party, but there’s an extension for Visual Studio that makes creating really nice UWP apps a snap. This extension is called the Windows Template Studio. The template studio is a wizard interface to create an UWP app with many different choices. Those choices include Project Type, Design Pattern, Pages, Features, Services, and Testing. Each of these has numerous choices making it possible to start just about any app you are looking to create.…more

Dual Screen What About UWP

Monday, February 10, 2020

Dual Screen preview and Microsoft 365 Developer Day is coming up tomorrow morning. I’m in Redmond for this great event and I really can’t wait ot hear what they have to say. Tonight in preparation for the event I read through the documentation found linked to the blog post linked above. It made a lot of sense. There’s the Java tools for Android that make dual screen development easier, but not in my wheel house.…more

Dual Screen or Foldable Screen

Saturday, February 8, 2020

Coming later this year is the next evolution of tablets. Windows 10X promises dual screen… er… single foldable screen… wait, both? But which do I choose? This is going to be tough. On the one hand you have the Surface Neo and on the other hand you have the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold. Ugh! Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold Let’s start with Lenovo first. I had a first generation Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon back in the day.…more