This message really isn’t all that helpful when you show it to me after removing everything from the page as soon as I click the submit button. There is nothing but whitespace left.

Is there a name for always manually copying longer texts into the clipboard before submitting them, just so things like that don’t ruin the day? Fear of submitting form?

Something very mild compared to most things we post here. And there is solid reasoning behind it – alphabetic sorting. Still, it annoys me on an almost daily basis. Pretty much 100 percent of the time when I want to use a “thumbsup” or “thumbsdown” emoji in GitLab, what I want is the “thumbsup” – to give positive, encouraging feedback. But the default choice is the negative one, and I have to type the word “thumbs” plus the differentiating “u”. So basically I’m typing the entire emoji name, because the autocompleting list that is supposed to help me not having to type the entire word is rendered useless.

I’m not sure what a good solution could look like here. Sorting by usage frequency seems overly complex. Maybe an option to hide the (or select a default) skin tone variations in the list, so using Arrow-Down would quickly select “thumbsup”. Or removing the negative reactions, either from autocompletion or altogether? The “old man yelling at cloud” in me says that negative feedback should always use words, but that doesn’t mean there are no valid use cases for the “thumbsdown” emoji. Maybe change them to “thumbs_up” and “thumbs_down”, and implement fuzzy autocompletion on word beginnings, so that I could just type “:tup” and be done with it. At least that would still be quicker than using the native macOS dialog via Ctrl+Cmd+Space. Luckily I’m not alone in being annoyed by this, and there is plenty of ideas in GitLab issues already.

The previous post showed how to make the Finder show files, this one shows how to … not delete them? The file doesn’t exist on disk any more but Finder doesn’t know about it. Error -43, what else?

That’s one way to keep the Desktop clean and organized. Catalina decided to only refresh the view once I kill the Finder. This didn’t go away until I rebooted.

Hey Siri, show me the worst way to implement pagination!

Country selection dropdowns are the USB ports of UI components.

My internet was down, so I wanted to check my router/modem (via its local web interface), but Safari didn’t let me… because my internet was down‽

For the entirety of iOS 13 I endured the most annoying Mail.app bug I can remember: The unread mail count, both on the badge and in the app itself, was not being updated unless you force-quit the entire app. Sometimes even that didn’t help. In the above example, I do not have any new mail – easily verified in Mail.app on macOS or the Fastmail web interface. So the list of messages is correct – only showing one read mail, nothing else. It is the count that is displayed inside the app at various places and on the badge that is wrong, still reflecting a mail I read on my Mac a few minutes ago. Refreshing inside the app doesn’t do anything, the incorrect count remains like that for hours. I think it actually only clears once another “change event” is triggered, e.g. actual new mail coming in.

I can’t overstate how disruptive it is not being able to know if you really do have new mail or not from a glance at the homescreen. It is beyond my understanding how something as, frankly, embarrassing could go on not being fixed for an entire release cycle. Apparently not too many people were affected by this particular bug, as none of the iOS 13 point releases addressed the issue.

When I heard about another, equally ridiculous, iOS 13 Mail.app bug finally being fixed in iOS 14, I foolishly hoped for relief. Well, the above screenshots are all from iOS 14.

With iOS 14 Siri is not taking over your full screen any more, or at least not while you are giving commands. Even simple acknowledgements still block your whole screen.

Windows can not reliably remember your default audio output device. Whenever a “new” audio device is connected, Windows automatically switches to that device instead. Not “new” as in first time the audio device is seen on your system, but “new” as in every damn time it is “plugged in” – for example when you power off a HDMI-connected display and then turn it back on again.

There is no way to disable this “feature”, the oldest occurences of people desperately trying to find a solution are about eight years old. There is tons of threads all over the internet about this insane behavior. It even happens when updating your GPU drivers, as that makes those HDMI ports “new” to Windows as well for some fucking reason.

Especially frustrating is how even on Microsofts own support forums, the helpers can’t even understand the problem without being told multiple times, in every single thread about it.

But what can you expect from an operating system that ships the above-pictured system preferences UI mashup and thinks anything about that is even remotely acceptable or normal. (In case you are blissfully unaware: The window on the right is what you get when you click “Advanced” somewhere in the window on the left. The window on the left is the new UI, but half the system still uses the old Windows XP era style UI, because… well, no idea why. Some settings can be changed in both parts of the preferences, some only in one of them. Absolutely bonkers.)

The “solution”, in classic Windows style, is to hack something together yourself with AHK and a 3rd party tool that feels like it time travelled to my aid from the 90s. I’m glad I’ll be able to automate it somewhat, but just look at that website. Look at the first two options in the usage examples. OPEN CD-ROM DRIVE! That kind of tool is what you need for setting your default audio device reliably on Windows 10.