Year: 2019

Categories
Websites Windows

Windows Media Keyboard Keys Not Working

I have a windows box I use for certain things, and on it I have a music player that plays from my local library and I use the keyboard play/pause/next/prev buttons to control it.

But recently I found these keyboard buttons were refusing to work! After much diagnoses it turns out that Chrome was over-riding the functions, Now this is actually helpful if you are using Google Music or other music players in the browser. But if you want to disable that so your other player takes control you need to go to: chrome://flags/

And search for “hardware media” and disable that! Hopefully that helps someone from music player frustration syndrome.

Categories
Websites

Google Chrome Show Full URL

One of Chrome’s recent updates hides the protocol name (HTTP/HTTPS) and the WWW prefix from the URL when the address bar is not focused.This can be confusing if you trying to test different http/https setups and need to see the designation in the URL bar.

To fix that you can visit chrome://flags/#omnibox-ui-hide-steady-state-url-scheme-and-subdomains

And do a search on “ui hide” — I personally disabled all 3 of the options that showed up, but you can pick and choose to your liking.

Categories
Coding Unix

Stopping vim8 from auto inserting on paste

After updating my linux system I found that when I went to do a mouse-paste in VIM that instead of just interpreting the characters, it went right into insert mode. This is a problem when I want to paste in a bunch of vim commands, which can be helpful if you need to re-do a series of actions multiple times.

It turns out the fix has to do with “xterm-bracketed-paste” and I had to put this in the .vimrc:

set t_BE=

I hope this helps someone who got surprised by vim version 8 functionality!

 

Categories
Coding

Having trouble accessing your Alexa skill

We have done a number of Alexa skills for clients and recently one of them would give this message to users: “Sorry, I’m having trouble accessing your {} skill right now”

Not much to go on! It turns out the problem was the content that was getting delivered for Alexa to say had some non-ASCII characters in it. The skill has dynamic content the client would update, and apparently they pasted from a Word doc which then translated a quote character into one of those annoying double wide Word characters which Alexa does not like!

So basically run your content through an ASCII-only parse before delivering it and you’re good.