0815 Blog

I own a Yamaha AV receiver (RX-V685) and recently, spotify connect suddenly stopped working. The behavior was that all other devices in my network (Mac OS, Windows, iOS) still displayed the AV receiver in the spotify app. But when trying to connect to it, the app would simply say “Connecting to RX-V685 …” forever, without ever really connecting.

It seems to have happened first after upgrading the receiver’s firmware from 1.96 to 2.01, but I’m not sure if this was the exact time where the problem appeared.

What I tried

After reading endless problem reports mostly on spotify support forums, I tried the following solution ideas. A lot of ideas did not help me; I’m listing them here for reference. Please read to to the end to find out what helped me.

Continue reading “Spotify Connect stops working on Yamaha RX-V685 AV Receiver”

I’ve been using the Olympus OM-D E-M10 micro four thirds interchangeable lens camera for a few weeks now.

After getting over a steep learning curve, this is a really great camera. I still have a number of gripes about it that I’d like to see fixed in a future firmware update (where possible) or at least in a future camera model.

Using Wi-Fi to Transfer Images to Your Computer

This camera has a big “WiFi certified” logo on the box and a Wi-Fi button on the touch screen. So I assumed that you could transfer images to your computer using your local WLAN network.

Wrong.

Continue reading “Olympus OM-D E-M10: Need for Improvement”

If you have a German computer with a German QWERTZ keyboard layout but you actually speak Romanian, or want to use the keyboard to type in the Romanian language most of the time, you can download and install the following keyboard layout on Windows.

It contains the Romanian characters ă, î, ș as main keys (without modifier keys):

Continue reading “Romanian Keyboard Layout on German Keyboard”

With Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite), Apple decided to change the green button in the window title bar to trigger fullscreen mode (in most applications):

The behavior of this button in all versions of Mac OS X up to 10.9 (Mavericks), was to “zoom” the window, that is, make it as large as the content displayed in the window.

The new behavior of this button in Yosemite is not very useful, for several reasons explained in my post Why the New Fullscreen Button in Mac OS X Yosemite Is Bad.

So if you feel that you want to have the old Mavericks behavior back, read on.

Continue reading “Change Mac OS X Yosemite Green Fullscreen Button”

In Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite), Apple changed the window interaction buttons. This change does not improve Mac OS X usability. This post explains why this is so.

Before Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite), Mac OS usually provided three buttons for window interactions:

The green button was used to “zoom” the window, meaning that the window would enlarge to display all the window content. Because the application would decide how to handle the content, the zoom behaves a bit inconsistent: sometimes it would make the window as large as the whole screen (maximizing it), sometimes the window would only enlarge to fill a certain amount of the screen.

Mac OS X also displayed a fourth button to make the window fullscreen, for applications that supported this mode:

But in the latest version of Mac OS X, 10.10 Yosemite, the situation has become an unfortunate mess for the long term Mac OS user.

Continue reading “Why the New Fullscreen Button in Mac OS X Yosemite Is Bad”

This post describes how to set up the Dvorak keyboard layout on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.

Update: Now also available as a portable version for Windows (admin permissions not required).

Basically, the standard qwerty/qwertz keyboard layout is bad. That’s why the Dvorak layout was developed. The only problem is that not all good things make it and become a standard.

Let’s take a look at a typical German Dvorak layout:

This is a mixture of Dvorak German type 1 and typo 2 layouts, with minor other changes.

Read on for instructions how to set it up on your Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux computer.

Continue reading “Dvorak Keyboard Layout”

LaTeX is a great document description language that allows anyone to create documents and papers with a professionally looking layout.

This post describes some handy tricks how to easily type German Umlauts, how to achieve better font rendering in PDF files created by LaTeX on Linux, and more.

Continue reading “Some TeX and LaTeX Tips”