Tag: windows

How to make Windows suck 10000 fewer times

In the same spirit of Marvin’s comment about Arthur Dent’s brain (It amazes me how you manage to live in anything that small.), it amazes me that anyone can actually get work done on a Windows box without having virtual workspaces …

But I found DESKWIN, which does all I need; four virtual desktops, with hotkeys between them. Not much else. Perfect. Well, okay, Windows has still got about seven orders of magnitude of improvement to go before it’s even mildly usable, but it’s a start.

windows annoyances: md5sum pollution

I use BitTorrent. As is common in the taper community, these recordings come with an additional MD5 checksum file. This means you can check that the contents are good without having the master copy around.

But do you ever get md5sum files that give you this output from md5sum -c?

: No such file or directory
: FAILED open or read
: No such file or directory
: FAILED open or read
 ...

Yes, it’s a windows annoyance: their ancient CRLF text files are polluting our utility. You can fix it with tr -d '\015' < md5sum.txt | md5sum -c -

I don’t mind that Windows users have finally got on the clue train about data verification. It’s just that, if you’re going to use our tools, why can’t you use them in the proper Unix way?