XBox One Controller Not Working After Anniversary Update

I've just applied the Windows 10 anniversary update and found my XBox One controller no longer worked. The controller appeared to switch on, but would then almost immediately switch itself off.

10 Top Tips for Leaving Comments on the Internet

Here I present 10 Top Tips for leaving comments on the Internet!

1. Start by calling the content creator an idiot.
2. Announce that you couldn't make it to the end of the article, video, podcast, whatever due to a pedantic reason, such as a misspelling or mispronunciation.
3. Question the political motivations behind the content and call the creator a Commie, Nazi, or traitor.
4. Find one minor fact within the content to disagree with and make sure you tell the creator that this one minor bone of contention invalidates the entire argument.
5. Introduce some irrelevant or tangential argument that bears no relation to the subject at hand.
6. Ask questions that nobody could reasonably know the answer to or, alternatively, ask questions the answer to which could easily be found out but aren't relevant.
7. Use anecdotes to prove that any statistics used are completely without merit.
8. Start arguments with other people to completely flood the comments, preferably being as rude as possible within the limits of the commenting rules.
9. Make sure to "thumbs up" your own comments and better yet have plenty of sock-puppet accounts to do likewise.
10. Finally, threaten to never darken the doorstep of the website you're on ever again/cancel subscriptions/boycott etc. 

Continental Circus was not a mistranslation

In 1987 Japanese arcade game manufacturer Taito released a racing game called Continental Circus. Internet legend states that this was a mistranslation and that the game should have been called Continental Circuits, and indeed for its US release the cabinet artwork was changed to use this name.

Was this really a mistranslation, or could it perhaps just have been a misunderstanding or a marketing strategy?

Humble Indie Bundle 8 Review

The latest pay-what-you want, charity supporting Humble Indie Bundle has been released and will be available for the next fortnight or so. Is it any good? Well here's my round-up of the games included...

I'm sorry console gaming, I'm leaving you. We've grown too far apart.

Today marked two things:

1) The reveal of Microsoft's forthcoming system, the XBox One.
2) Something I've long suspected coming true: my relationship with console gaming is at an end.

Given Sony's lackluster introduction of the PS4, concentrating as it did on 8GB of RAM!, I had hoped Microsoft's reveal of the next XBox would do something to rekindle my interest in console gaming.

Improving PlayStation 2 Picture Quality on HDTVs

Recently I decided to pull my trusty old PlayStation 2 out of the cupboard to re-play some of my favourite games from the early-to-mid 2000's. Whilst I was initially very pleased that the machine still worked after 6-7 years of inactivity, I was surprised how poor the picture quality was on-screen and started wondering whether or not all these years of HD gaming on the PC and 360 had altered my memory of how good graphics really were back then (rose-tinted glasses syndrome!).

Happily, after a bit of research and tinkering, I managed to improve the picture quality quite dramatically. So here I present some handy-dandy tips on improving your PlayStation 2 experience on an HDTV!

Why Britain Sucks: Fuel Taxes

Welcome to the first in a new series of posts, Why Britain Sucks... And What We Can Do To Fix It. In this post I'm going to tackle the question of why fuel in Britain is so expensive. 

Fuel in Britain is expensive. Very expensive. A 2012 article by This is Money placed Britain as the 7th most expensive place in the entire world to buy fuel, calculating that more than 10% of people's income is spent at the pumps.

But why should this be the case? What is it about Britain that makes fuel so expensive? What are the implications for the wider economy? Why does Britain suck? What can we do to fix it?

Problem restoring a database to a SQL Server 2012 LocalDB Instance

I encountered a bit of a weird one today, which took some creative thinking to sort out, involving restoring a database into a SQL Server 2012 LocalDB. I am still not entirely sure what the root cause of the problem really is, but I'm sharing my solution just in case it proves useful to anybody else.

Match a user's username to their SID

If you've ever poked around in the Windows Registry on a multi-user machine you may have noticed that user settings are stored against an SID such as  S-1-5-21-2827067247-3228746870-1612205067-500.

Often it's useful to be able to match an SID up to a user name and here's how:

1) Open a command prompt.
2) Type: wmic useraccount get name,sid
3) Press enter

You'll then see a list such as the following, giving you the user name and the associated SID:


Name            SID
Administrator   S-1-5-21-2827067247-3228746870-1612205067-500
Guest           S-1-5-21-2827067247-3228746870-1612205067-501
HomeGroupUser$  S-1-5-21-2827067247-3228746870-1612205067-1002
Martin          S-1-5-21-2827067247-3228746870-1612205067-1000

Simples!

Pulp-O-Mizer!

Here's a fun pulp magazine cover image creator - the Pulp-o-Mizer!

http://thrilling-tales.webomator.com/derange-o-lab/pulp-o-mizer/pulp-o-mizer.html

And here's something I knocked up...

Windows 8 is a terrible tablet OS

Regular readers of Pieces o' Eight may remember my critique of Windows 8 as a desktop operating system last year. I still stand by those criticisms, however even at the time I had thought that the OS might fare better in a tablet environment.

It turns out I was utterly, staggeringly, badly wrong.

Logitech Unifying Receiver Lag - Solved!

I'm a big fan of Logitech's Unifying Receiver technology - I have the Performance MX mouse and the K800 Illuminated keyboard, both of which are excellent. One problem, however, seemed to affect the mouse particularly: Intermittent lag. Every so often the mouse would stop responding, do something weird or behave in a temperamental and highly frustrating manner. Happily I have managed to find a solution to this and resolved all of my lag problems.

Activating Windows 8 Upgrade After a Clean Install

If you bought an upgrade edition of Windows 8 Pro you might, like most sensible people, prefer to do a clean install rather than doing the upgrade. Sounds straight forwards, right? Wrong!

Although the installation appears to work ok, when you try to activate your copy of Windows 8 it will flat-out refuse to acknowledge your legitimate Windows product key. I have no idea why Microsoft have put this block in, other than to cause headaches for legitimate customers.

Happily, there is a work around - posted by someone going by the handle BinaryInk on the Windows forum  and re-posted here for posterity:

1. Run the registry editor (regedit) 

2. Find the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\OOBE 

3. Change the value for 'MediaBootInstall' from 1 to 0 

4. Open an elevated command prompt (run as admin) 

5. Run the following command: slmgr -rearm 

6. Reboot

If you already entered your key, check the activation: for me it was already activated and I needed to do nothing more. If not, type in activate windows and type in the key; it should work. Also, do yourself a favor and export this key from regedit and save it somewhere if you ever are required to do another clean install. I know I did.

Darth Monolith

Introducing an exciting new range of action figures!

Click to embiggen

Doorhanger of excellence

I've decided to create a new range of free products that will, without fail, improve your life and the lives of those around you.

No. 1 in this fabulous new range: The Doorhanger of Excellence! Behold!

Click to embiggen

All that's left to do is print, cut out, use and enjoy!

Windows 8 - The enemy of creativity

Microsoft recently released a Preview (or beta) version of its upcoming operating system, Windows 8. I don't normally bother with beta versions of code, but I was intrigued enough by all the talk of the new Metro interface to download the preview and give it a test run. What follows is my experience of the OS in its beta form and why I believe Windows 8 is the enemy of creativity.

Ka-Boom!

Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle (PC Review)

Introduction

I'm a big fan of point-and-click adventures and have been ever since I first played the original Monkey Island some 20+ years ago. Sadly the genre is no longer a mainstay of video gaming, with new releases few and far between, so when I heard about Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle - a new piratically themed point-and-click adventure - I immediately rushed out to buy it.

What follows is my (admittedly amateur) review of the PC version. Read on, me hearties, to see how she fared!

Using VB6/VBScript to connect to a SQL Server 2012 LocalDB instance

In a previous post I covered how to use Python to connect to a SQL Server 2012 LocalDB instance. In this post I'll show you how to connect via VB6/VBScript. As per the Python post, you'll need to download and install the SQL Server 2012 LocalDb software, along with the SQL Server Native Client 11 database driver. 

One of the key differences - and one that took me some time to figure out - is that you need to specify a slightly different connection string: 

connectionString = "Provider=SQLNCLI11;Data Source=(localdb)\v11.0;Integrated Security=SSPI;"


One of the gotchas I encountered was with the Integrated Security parameter. If this isn't set to SSPI, you'll get Multiple-Step OLE DB Operation Errors.

Here's a complete listing you should be able to copy into a VBScript file to test:

connectionString = "Provider=SQLNCLI11;Data Source=(localdb)\v11.0;Integrated Security=SSPI;"
Set conn = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
Set com = CreateObject("ADODB.Command")
conn.Open connectionString
set com.ActiveConnection = conn
com.CommandText = "SELECT 'Hello, World!'"
set rs = com.Execute
while not rs.eof
    msgbox CStr(rs.Fields(0))
    rs.movenext()
wend
conn.close 

Using Python to connect to a SQL Server 2012 LocalDb instance

One of the new features of SQL Server 2012 Express is the LocalDB installation. This is a standalone install of SQL Server Express designed to support local databases which, importantly, requires practically no configuration . Although the documentation hints that developers were Microsoft's primary consideration behind LocalDB, there are many scenarios where having a zero configuration install of SQL Server could be very useful, such as offering offline access to a LoB application without needing to port the data to different database engine or necessitating a full blown SQL Server Express install on a user's machine.

Today I was experimenting with getting Python to talk to SQL Server LocalDB's - which proved to be very easy indeed!

First up, you'll need to install SQL Server Express 2012 LocalDB: http://www.microsoft.com/betaexperience/pd/SQLEXPCTAV2/enus/default.aspx

Next up you'll want to install the latest Native Client Drivers (SQLNCLI11): http://www.microsoft.com/Download/en/details.aspx?id=29065 (it's about halfway down this page)

Once both of those are installed, you're pretty much ready to go.

My Python environment is 2.7.2 on Windows 32-Bit. Into this I've installed pyodbc 3.03. From there, fire up IDLE and enter:

import pyodbc
con = pyodbc.connect('Driver={SQL Server Native Client 11.0};Server=(localdb)\\v11.0;integrated security = true')


And that should be you connected and ready to use a LocalDB from Python!