Windows has many methods of rendering images to the screens. Those include GDI, Direct3D, Direct2D, DirectWrite, XAML, Windows Forms, Win2D, and WinUI. Windows 10 brought support for mixing some of these rendering technologies. through XAML islands. There are other ways of mixing the rendering technologies. I was interested in mixing Direct3D with GDI and Direct2D. The rendering technologies were going to be used to generate what can be viewed as different layers of my UI.

I sometimes work on systems that control displays that run for most of the day. But there are "quiet hours" during which those screens show no content, and we would rather them be turned off. Having some downtime saves on resources, including the life of the display. The way this is handled differs from one solution to another. Sometimes we use third-party hardware to control the screens according to a schedule.

eSIMs, or embedded SIM, is integration of the SIM hardware into a phone. Instead of installing a physical SIM card a phone has similar hardware integrated into itself with rewritable memory. To update the SIM a new byte stream containing the updated program or data can be transferred to the embedded SIM hardware. Most material I come across about them characterize them as providing a way to manage phones with more ease and an overall improvement.

I don't have to build Chrome (or v8) regularly. But I've had a recent occasion to look in the source code to explain an odd behaviour that I was seeing. In doing so, I revisited the steps for how to build Chrome on Windows. The steps evolve over time. This time around I decided that I would use Visual Studio 2026 to perform the build.

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Remote Desktop tends to work well for me provided that the computer is turned on, booted up, and not locked up. If those conditions are not met, physical interaction is needed. There have been a few times when my computer is hibernating, but I realize I need to access. Today, I'm writing about one of the solutions that I'm using for this.

YouTube video by Joel Johnson (j2i.net)

Before your operating system loads, the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) runs. The code in the UEFI is responsible for getting the initial bits of your operating system loaded and then …

Google is making some changes to Android that make it more restrictive than I've previously thought of it. Age verification for apps is coming to Android, and side loading is being restricted to apps that have been "verified" by Google. This is something that is coming to conform to new laws. Apple is also making some changes to conform and…

On windows, the command line tool mklink.exe is used to create symbolic links, junctions, and hard links. But what are those? I'll first mention a couple of scenarios where they may be helpful. Let's say that you have a content-driven system. You have multiple versions of your content sets on the file system. Each complete set is in its own folder.