How To on saoe: The Nifty Oddity

C++ Diagnostics and Debugging Utilities

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 09:50:05 +0100

Some tools and techniques for detecting, reporting and investigating errors and unexpected behavior in C++ code.

How to set up GCC on Windows

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 21:58:58 +0100

Here’s a short tutorial on how to set up the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) on Microsoft Windows via MSYS2 (Minimal SYStem 2).

Notes on Pico-8

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

After reading and hearing quite a bit about Pico-8 in the last weeks¹, I dipped my toes into these waters one weekend (2025-10-18/19) and made a few notes about it…

Powershell: Working with XML

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 19:33:58 +0100

A few tips and tricks for handling XML data with Powershell.

Powershell: Console Colors

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 17:46:34 +0200

A brief reminder for the topic of Console Colors and Powershell.

How to set up a SSH key pair with PuTTY on Windows

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When these steps are done, you’ll only need to enter the passphrase of the SSH key(s) once when Windows boots, instead of each time Git wants to communicate with the remote repository.

Building SDL 3

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 20:18:07 +0200

The Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) recently released its version 3 (not as 3.0, and not as 3.1, but as 3.2, for some reason).

Building wxWidgets

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 20:18:07 +0200

A short guide on how to build wxWidgets (the cross-platform GUI toolkit) from source (the recommended way), on Windows, by using CMake and Visual Studio.

How to use CMake

Fri, 30 May 2025 17:45:28 +0200

This is just a reminder for some syntax/parameter details on how to invoke CMake (i.e. the actual cmake program), mainly from the CLI, to configure/generate/build a project – it’s not a tutorial on how to write a CMakeLists.txt file!

Doxygen Cheatsheet

Tue, 13 May 2025 14:55:12 +0200

This is my personal Doxygen cheatsheet: Its initial (and primary) purpose is to be a compact help on this topic for myself.

It’s not meant as a general introduction or comprehensive reference for this tool, but it is meant to be a small knowledge base or collection of basics & “gotchas”, often-used commands, snippets, tips, and instructions on how to do certain tasks.

Mozilla Firefox: Tips on usage

Mon, 12 May 2025 17:45:13 +0200

These tips for using Mozilla Firefox were originally spread over multiple blog posts, but they are rather short and also pretty old (so maybe not valid anymore), that’s why I now collected them all on this single page…

Calling a Lua/C++ function from C++/Lua code

Sat, 03 May 2025 19:40:00 +0200

(Part 3 of my little series on “Lua”)

Another post in my series on how to use C++ with Lua; this time it’s about calling a function of one language from code of the other language.

A C++ program that calls a Lua script

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 20:27:18 +0200

(Part 2 of my little series on “Lua”)

Alright, so after preparing Lua, here are a few small first step on how to make use of this language within a C++ context.

Building Lua (on Windows, with Visual Studio)

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 21:01:40 +0200

(Part 1 of my little series on “Lua”)

Although one can get pre-built binaries of the Lua (programming language) interpreter, to me that seems to be just a semi-offical or lackluster way.
But luckily, building it yourself from source is very easy (especially with the help of this post from Dennis D. Spreen).

Powershell: Dynamic Parameters

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is an extension to my notes on parameters for scripts or (advanced) functions in Powershell:
Dynamic (or conditional) parameters are an interesting and cool feature, but also a bit tricky and cumbersome to set up.

Powershell: Working with JSON

Thu, 09 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A few tips and tricks for handling JSON data with Powershell.

Powershell: Working with the Windows Registry

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Here are some tips and trick on how to work on the Windows Registry with Powershell.

Powershell: Using Write-Information

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 15:07:36 +0200

This started out as a short entry for my Powershell Snippets page, but it quickly turned out that this cmdlet needs a longer text for explaining proper handling…

Powershell: Select Choice

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The need to prompt a user for a choice in a text menu (i.e. in the console), and a slight dissatisfaction with the commonly recommended $Host.ui.PromptForChoice() after experimenting a bit with it, triggered me to ultimately write my own function.

Powershell: Name of the current Citrix desktop

Sun, 02 Jul 2023 17:28:09 +0200

For my day job, I wanted know the name of the ‘Citrix’ desktop on which I was currently logged in, because some features are only available on certain desktops in our environment.

Windows: The fc command

Fri, 13 May 2022 21:04:53 +0200

I recently stumbled upon the fc.exe (“file compare”) utility on Windows, when I needed to quickly compare two text files.

C++ Snippets for the MS Windows platform

Wed, 30 Mar 2022 21:09:25 +0200

A collection of code snippets, small pearls of wisdom and bits of knowledge, that may come handy at times.

C++ Snippets

Sun, 20 Mar 2022 16:13:57 +0100

A collection of code snippets, general notes, small pearls of wisdom and bits of knowledge, that may come handy at times.

Python Snippets

Sun, 20 Feb 2022 19:28:43 +0100

A collection of code snippets, small pearls of wisdom and bits of knowledge, that may come handy at times.

Clear Cached Credentials from the Windows profile

Mon, 14 Feb 2022 19:49:55 +0100

I had the curious case that on my domain-joined laptop from work, two applications kept asking for usernames and credentials after a recent change of my Windows password.

Powershell: PSCustomObject

Sat, 29 Jan 2022 14:06:32 +0100

Powershell’s PSCustomObject type has been a great tool, but since I don’t use it every day, I jotted down some sample code and links for my future self (or any other interested reader 😄 ), as a reminder.

Building Qt 6 on Windows with Visual Studio

Sun, 09 May 2021 19:24:52 +0200

Time for another short guidance on how to build your own copy of the Qt framework from source.

Prepare a CMake project for find_package()

Wed, 24 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Although I’ve already published an article on how to bring an external CMake project into your own CMake project, I recently realized that I haven’t written about how one can prepare a CMake project for the use with find_package() — despite the fact that I’ve used it already for quite a while in RandFill for my own WPDLib(rary); so let me make up leeway for that oversight with this post.

Powershell: Using Regular Expressions

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 21:04:54 +0100

This is not a introduction or tutorial on what Regular Expressions (RegEx) are or can do, but on how to use them with Powershell!

How to use CMake to setup Visual Studio for using the Clang compiler

Sun, 07 Feb 2021 17:23:07 +0100

This is a brief post on how to use CMake to setup a Visual Studio 2019 solution on Windows that will use the LLVM Clang compiler instead of the orginal Visual C++ one.

Powershell Snippets

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 20:09:04 +0100

A collection of code snippets, small pearls of wisdom and bits of knowledge that may come handy at times.

Powershell: Splatting

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 19:20:29 +0100

Some notes on the method of “splatting” in Powershell code.

Powershell: Help

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 18:53:38 +0100

Some notes on where and how to get help-information for Powershell commands.

Powershell: Parameters for Scripts and (Advanced) Functions

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Some notes on parameters for scripts or (advanced) functions in Powershell.

Powershell: Transcript (Log)

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 21:09:37 +0100

A transcript logs all action of a Powershell session to a text file; good for documenting and archiving.

Powershell: Profile

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 21:05:18 +0100

A Powershell profile is a script file that is run each time a new Powershell is opened.

You can define session-specific items in it (variables, aliases, functions, etc.) or call other scripts and commands at the start of a new Powershell session.

Powershell: Handle input from the pipeline

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 20:36:13 +0100

A short description on how to make a Powershell function that can accept and process input data that it gets from the pipeline.

Get the RSS feed for a YouTube channel

Sun, 20 Dec 2020 17:34:40 +0100

I’m fan of RSS feeds: They provide me with easy and quick overviews for a lot of website updates (and after Google Reader was shut down, I set up my own Tiny Tiny RSS instance). Unfortunately, YouTube made it a bit more complicated to get the required feeds some time ago, but it’s still possible.

Notepad++: Run command

Sun, 20 Dec 2020 16:05:05 +0100

How to add custom commands to the Run menu.

Visual Studio stuck in 'Restart Required' after update

Thu, 14 May 2020 20:07:25 +0200

A while ago, my Visual Studio installation was caught in a “please-reboot-loop” after an update.

Powershell: Starting a Script the Easy Way

Sat, 25 Apr 2020 13:32:33 +0200

Powershell scripts can be very practical tools, but they lack an easy Just Do It mode:
Even as a developer/administrator/power-user, one has to remove several obstacles before you can use it; and if you plan to deploy a script to (normal) users, you should take care of some issues before.

Using CMake with External Projects

Sat, 03 Aug 2019 12:40:23 +0200

The reason for this post is that I spent a considerable amount of time¹ the last two days to convince CMake’s External Project feature to do what I wanted. And without the help of the usual suspects (Stackoverflow, old mails, blog articles, code snippets, etc.), I might still not be done. So I thought I could pay back the general public by posting some notes on this topic 😉

Bluetooth Keyboard Pairing Problem

Thu, 09 May 2019 21:26:21 +0200

When the battery of my HTPC’s bluetooth keyboard needed replacement, it somehow lost the connection during that process (I think I pushed the connect button by accident at the wrong time, or something). Not a big deal, I thought…

MOC error message when building a small single file Qt program

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 21:56:59 +0000

Just a reminder for myself, because I will certainly stumble over it again in the future:

Always a busy signal on a smartphone when using a Multi-SIM for the same number in a notebook

Mon, 19 Jun 2017 01:36:30 +0000

Last year at work, we had the curious case that many of our notebooks, which were using a SIM for their UMTS/LTE modems, caused a smartphone with the associated Multi-SIM (same contract, i.e. same telephone number) to respond with a busy signal as soon as the notebook was powered on (didn’t even had to have a connection established via their WWAN modem at that point!).

Distributing a Python program to Windows users

Sun, 10 Jul 2016 22:31:48 +0000

I use Python for several tasks (mostly small routine jobs or one-off scripts; not to devalue the language, I just haven’t used it yet for bigger projects), but since it’s an interpreted language, you can’t easily distribute the scripts to normal users on Microsoft Windows (my main ecosystem), because that platform doesn’t come with any version of Python installed by default.

Tips for Mercurial (Hg)

Sun, 17 May 2015 21:42:18 +0000

This post will probably become a living document, i.e. will be updated sporadically with small tips, tricks and reminders on how to do certain tasks with Mercurial (Hg), because most of it will be short entries that won’t justify an article on its own.

No QtTools (lupdate/linguist/lrelease) when built as shared libraries

Tue, 12 May 2015 22:44:17 +0000

So I’ve built Qt from source and used it successfully in the last year or so.
Some time ago I turned my attention to multilanguage support and learned about Qt’s tools: linguist.exe, lupdate.exe and lrelease.exe.

Building Qt for static linking

Tue, 31 Mar 2015 02:38:17 +0000

One of the drawbacks of using such a comprehensive framework as Qt is the massively increased size of you program. When my pet project RandFill was only using the plain Win32-API, it was a single executable file of a couple of hundred kilobytes.

Now, using dynamically linked Qt, the whole package (with DLLs, MSVC redistributables, etc.) is bigger than 20 megabytes as a 64-bit build!

Namen der Xing-Profilbesucher

Thu, 15 Jan 2015 22:47:34 +0000

Als nicht-zahlendes Mitglied bei XING werden einem zwar die Fotos der Profilbesucher angezeigt, nicht aber deren Namen und auch die Links verweisen nicht zu den dazugehörigen Profilen, sondern auf die Anmeldeseite für eine Premium-Mitgliedschaft.

Map Network Drive: Remove obsolete entries from drop-down menu

Thu, 13 Nov 2014 21:57:55 +0000

If you want to get rid of obsolete entries in the folder drop-down menu of the “Map Network Drive” dialog, you’ll have to modify the Windows registry.

Open RegEdit.exe and go to the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Map Network Drive MRU.

The following screenshot was taken after I cleaned up; before, there were also entries named “b” and “c” with old paths in it.

Also, the value for MRUList read “cba” — the order in which the most recently used entries were displayed in the drop-down menu. After deleting the values “b” and “c” (and fixing a typo in the value of “a”), I then edited MRUList, so that it now only contained “a”.

Excel: X, Y -> Y X

Thu, 14 Aug 2014 21:17:51 +0000

In bin kein großer Excel-Nutzer, aber hin und wieder muß auch ich beruflich eine Tabelle bearbeiten. Leider kann ich mir die meisten Tricks und Tipps dafür nicht merken, weil ich sie halt so selten benötige (das mit dem S-Verweis verinnerliche in diesem Leben wohl nicht mehr); also schreibe ich mir hier jetzt mal was dazu auf.

CMake, Visual Studio and Qt 5 with MOC...

Sun, 15 Jun 2014 14:22:12 +0000

After building a 64-bit version of Qt with/for Microsoft Visual Studio, building a simple Qt test program and doing first steps with the CMake build system, the next hurdle appeared on the horizon in the form of support for Qt and its Q_OBJECT features (I am currently fighting more with the changes I made to my build environment than improving the actual program code…).

Generating 64-bit projects for Visual Studio with CMake

Sat, 31 May 2014 15:18:42 +0000

Describes a few tips on how to generate a 64-bit project for Visual Studio with CMake.

Windows: The tree command

Sun, 04 May 2014 11:12:08 +0000

The tree command graphically displays the directory structure of a drive or path on the command line prompt — nice gimmick; haven’t used this in ages and completely forgot about it, but came in handy recently.

Building a simple Qt application on Windows with Visual Studio

Sat, 12 Apr 2014 17:59:06 +0000

After preparing the Qt framework, I needed to check if everything works; therefore I built a very simple Qt (5.2.1) application, the GUI-equivalent of a “Hello-World” program.

Building Qt 5 on Windows with Visual Studio

Sat, 12 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Short guides on how to build your own copy of the Qt 5 framework from source.

These were originally separate blog posts, but since they are now pretty outdated (since they are for old versions of Qt, Windows and Visual Studio), I combined them here on a single page, for archival purposes (with many dead links…), and edited them a bit.

Windows 7: Customize Logon Screen Wallpaper

Thu, 10 Apr 2014 18:10:11 +0000

Customize Logon Screen Wallpaper:

Windows 7: Cannot delete/rename/move MKV files

Thu, 10 Apr 2014 08:00:47 +0000

The Problem: When you try to delete, rename or move a Matroska/*.mkv file, you get an error message that the file is currently in use — even if you just started the computer and haven’t opened that file.

Windows 7: (Elevated) Command Prompt Anywhere

Wed, 09 Apr 2014 20:00:03 +0000

(Elevated) Command Prompt Anywhere:

Windows: Process-Explorer mit vollen Rechten starten

Wed, 09 Apr 2014 14:00:06 +0000

Process-Explorer mit vollen Rechten starten:

Windows 7: Programm-Icons verschwunden

Wed, 09 Apr 2014 08:00:13 +0000

Programm-Icons verschwunden:

Windows: Find string in cmd

Tue, 08 Apr 2014 10:00:46 +0000

Not much to write about:

Windows: Adding a font to the console

Tue, 08 Apr 2014 08:00:38 +0000

Adding a font to the console:

How to set up Notepad++

Mon, 07 Apr 2014 08:00:13 +0000

How to set up Notepad++:

How to use Notepad++ to create a log file

Sun, 18 Aug 2013 01:11:05 +0000

The original Notepad of Microsoft Windows has a nice feature to create log files: Save a new file with the text .LOG as its first characters and a timestamp will be appended on subsequent openings.

Installing Sphinx on Windows

Mon, 29 Jul 2013 08:30:47 +0000

In my previous post I mentioned that I would ponder about maybe switching from a Wiki to a Sphinx solution. I started with that by setting up Sphinx on my Windows-PC; let’s see how this will turn out in the next weeks…

In search of a replacement for Google Reader

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 21:43:36 +0000

Well, only two more weeks until Google shuts down Reader. It’s about time for me to plan my escape — but where to flee?

How to get the .htaccess file again

Sun, 26 May 2013 16:42:44 +0000

So, you want to modify the .htaccess file you created a while ago. Trouble is, “dot” files are hidden by default and your FTP client and/or webhoster don’t make them visible, but you need the file, because you don’t want to overwrite/lose the current settings.

How to use GeSHi for syntax highlighting with WordPress and DokuWiki

Wed, 01 May 2013 15:04:21 +0000

This post describes how one can use GeSHi for syntax highlighting with WordPress and DokuWiki: