I’m helping some person with some stuff over Skype and that person complains that every time he shares a screen, his mouse freezes periodically and that is very annoying. And we decided to fix it.

Initially, I simply blamed Skype. As you probably know, I really hate to see what Microsoft did to Skype. But we tried Zoom and it has exactly the same problem. Then I remembered that AMD Ryzen processors 3000 and 5000 series has that problem and it was supposed to be fixed.

A short search revealed that the first thing is to try to install the latest version of BIOS. That person has a Gigabyte board, and it has one of the worst applications for updating

Note: In this post, I will discuss only desktop computers because most of what I will say, will not apply to notebooks.

Sooner or later most of us will decide that it is time to buy a new computer. As I wrote before, if you can, it is always better to buy parts and assemble them yourself. You will get a much better, much faster PC and what is more important, you will get it much cheaper.

But what should you buy? There are multiple discussions about that, but today I would like to talk about power consumption. Imagine you decided to spoil yourself and decided to buy top of the top. Or simply the best! At the moment of

I always meant to write about that, but I forgot every single time. Basically, with the 12th generation, Intel simply cheated. Most of their gains were simply gained by increasing the frequency and as result considerably increased power consumption to quite crazy values. With good cooling and motherboard, 120900 can consume almost 250W of power.

And most people do not know this, but almost all energy in electronic components is converted to pure heat. So effectively 250W consumed power by CPU/GPU will be converted to 250W of heat.

For most people, 250W is just a number. Just to give you an idea, a long time ago I had a room with 8 degrees C (46 Fahrenheit). It is quite cold.

I will not compare all features one by one and I will only compare development with each engine.

Unreal Engine supports blueprints and C++. Let me review them in detail.

Unreal Engine Blueprints

Blueprints are really good for an inexperienced developer and allow an easy way to start doing some programming in their project. You can drag and drop nodes that do particular actions and connect them using your mouse. It looks intuitive and easy. And at the beginning it is.

But there is a reason why visual programming never worked. And there are a few reasons for that: it is much slower to write and much harder to read. It works only for very simple cases.

For example, imagine

Recently I figured out that Windows 10 has a built-in ssh application. Great! If you would like to connect to Linux PC using it, you need to use the following command:

ssh -i key.pem username@ipaddress_or_host

But if you will try to run it you will get following error:

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

@         WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE!          @

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
Permissions for 'key.pem' are too open.
It is required that your private key files are NOT accessible by others.
This private key will be ignored.

It is a very strange error message. I would say it is the typical Linux way. A smart person will figure it out and a dumb person doesn’t need it. What it trying to tell,

Recently I was asked to investigate a strange crash that happens in our application. The application calls function Test that returns HRESULT. This function is part of the interface. Let’s call it IMyIntf. The caller is located in the main.dll and the interface is implemented in the module.dll.

And this call failed. Initially, I started checking the function implementation of the Test function to see what can be possibly wrong there but after some time I found that it returns a rather strange HRESULT. In this call stack HRESULT was 0xd337fe00. I cannot find any description for such a strange HRESULT.

I’m sure many of you watching some tutorial videos on YouTube. I do. And there are different people who do the talking. Some are talking fast, and some are talking slow.  Some of them put quite condensed information and some put a lot of “water” in their talk.

For quite some time I was watching on regular speed, but a few years ago I found really nice advice to use faster speeds. I tried 1.25 initially and it was amazing. If you have a tutorial that is one hour long, you can finish watching it in 48 minutes and save 12 minutes of your life. 1.25 speed does not distort the voice much and it is almost the same as

Some time ago, I, like many of you moved to Visual Studio 2022. It works great with C# and eventually, I decided to move C++ activities to VS 2022 as well. After I installed everything, I created C++ Console Application and I try to compile it. To my surprise, it didn’t work, and got the following message:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Professional\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.32.31326\include\yvals.h(12,10): fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'crtdbg.h': No such file or directory

After some research, I found an article that helped me. For some reason, there is an invalid path to Windows SDK in the registry. To fix this issue you need to go to this registry key:

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Kits\Installed Roots

And change

For many years, when I get a new notebook, I wipe it out and install a fresh version of Windows. There are multiple reasons for that:

  • To instantly get rid of unwanted software that takes valuable disk space
  • To avoid unwanted software draining your battery and heating your notebook (especially in the summertime)
  • To remove potential conflicts with the installed software. For example, a trial version of Microsoft Office conflicts with another office package. Even removing Microsoft Office does not help
  • To avoid problems with an installed antivirus solution. The best example is McAfee. I spent weeks or even months of my life fighting with it. It is the worst antivirus on the market. Built-in Windows Defender is much better and provides better protection