Skype Status in the Windows 10 App

There are only 2 explicitly available statuses in the Skype App for Windows 10 that can be manually set and they are accessible if you click on your profile picture/user profile on top.

• Do not disturb
• Do not share my presence (Invisible)
  

The old "Away" status will be set automatically 5 minutes after the application is minimized or closed. There is no manual way to change the status to Away.

Fedora 26: Configure Middle Button Emulation

I have a 3-button Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse but the middle button doesn't work. My main use is automatic copy and paste.
What you can do to do that is enable the emulation mode (press at once the left and right buttons).

Check your device ID with:

> xinput list

Virtual core pointer                        id=2    [master pointer  (3)][...]
  Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse             id=12    [slave  pointer  (2)]

then use to list its properties:

> xinput list-props 12
[...]
    libinput Scroll Method Enabled (293):    0, 0, 0

then enable it:

> xinput set-prop 12 297 1

or better (change-proof):

>xinput set-prop "Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse" "libinput Middle Emulation Enabled" 1

If you want to make this permanent, add it to your .bashrc or similar or to the configuration in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d.

References
Updated from: https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/question/47238/configure-auto-copy-paste/

java.net.SocketException: Connection reset

This exception can have many causes and tracking them down is not easy but the one I experienced was that I was trying to connect to an HTTPS port with a HTTP connection (HttpURLConnection).

Access Denied on Windows File on External Drive

Windows 10.

This is no recipe but you can try this:

1. Open: Properties -> Security -> Advanced
2. Change Owner to Everyone. How to do that depends on the type of user you are.
3. Now in the security tab, select Everyone on Group or User Names.
4. The Edit button on change permissions should be enabled.
5. Select Full Control and save.

Using Google as the Default Search Engine for Thunderbird

Since v13, Thunderbird uses Bing as its default search engine and Google is not even a choice.
If you want to use Google you can do it installing an add-on:

1. Open "Add-ons" from the "tools" menu;
2. Search for "google"
3. Install "Google Search for Thunderbird"and restart.
4. Google should have been automatically selected as the default search engine now!

Thunderbird 45 Create New Message: default style is Paragraph instead of Body Text

For some unknown reason we got this change in v45.
If you want to go back to "Body Text":
Open the Options window, go to Composition -> General and uncheck: "When using paragraph format, the Enter key creates a new paragraph".
Which is kind of obscure since no one told Thunderbird to start using paragraph format in the first place.
But that does it, so...

Persist Custom putty Settings

1. Change your settings.
2. Click once on "Default Settings" under "Load, save or delete a stored session" (in the "Session" category) to select it. 
3. Click "Save."

Thanks to Chad P

putty: Access Denied

IP/host name, username and password are correct but you get Access Denied when tyring to log in.
Try disabling this setting:

Putty has GSSAPI enabled by default.

Turn it off if you are not using Kerberos (and chances are, you are not in your environment).
Explanation:
I dealt with a few weeks back with when a new administrator could not login to any ssh host with putty - even the one that I know should be working for him. It seems that with GSSAPI Auth enabled, Putty will attempt to login with non-existent kerberos credentials, which resulted in an immediate Access Denied message.
[...]

Source: http://serverfault.com/questions/317781/putty-access-denied

Removing $Windows.~BT & $Windows.~WS Folders

$Windows.~BT & $Windows.~WS folders are created after an update to Windows 10 and are temporary directories taking a lot of space. They can safely be deleted.

1. Run a DOS (cmd) console as administrator.
2. Execute:
1. takeown /F C:\$Windows.~BT\* /R /A
2. icacls C:\$Windows.~BT\*.* /T /grant administrators:F 
3. rmdir /S /Q C:\$Windows.~BT\

Remove anything left manually from the file explorer.
Thanks to TheWindowsClub.

Mercurial Tips

1. Trashcan - [from the docs] The shelve tool is very conservative with your source and patch files. Before it modifies any file it makes a backup under .hg/Trashcan. This trashcan can be emptied by running the purge dialog from the Workbench Repository –> Purge menu option.

You don't currently have permission to access this folder

So you mount an external disk, try to go to the directory where you need to go and Windows tells you that you don't have the permission to do that.
I never understood the philosophy of Windows security, probably because I'm used to Linux. I don't want to understand it anyway unless it gets in my way.
What I tried successfully is:

1. Open the folder's Properties.
2. Go to Security and click Advanced.
3. Change Owner: Enter the object name to select and do Check Names.
4. Check Replace owner on subcontainer and objects.
5. Ignore the Windows security warning.
6. You're done!

Restoring Audio Service in Windows 10

Today I couldn't listen to anything or change the volume or do anything related to audio.
Someone suggested to:

> net stop audiosrv
> net stop AudioEndpointBuilder
> net start audiosrv
> net start AudioEndpointBuilder

After 5 minutes I'm still trying to see if the first command will ever end.

I'll never find out. I finally had to reboot. I tried the put-it-to-sleep solution but it went into eternal sleep.
That's always been Windows' solution: "reboot without  saving your changes"!

DokuWiki Hrun Alerts About Update even When Done

"Hotfix release available" alerts keep being displayed even after you do the update.
Apparently there is a bug.
In some places they explain you can manually remove the file: data/cache/messages.txt.
For me this doesn't work since the file is recreated right away.
What I did was to empty the file and leave it there and that worked.
... for a while. Now it's there again.

More info here if you want to try something.

Take Ownership and Assign Permissions to Yourself on Windows

Sometimes on mounted external drives, you are not the owner (don't ask me why, I'll never understand what's the reasoning behind Windows in general) and cannot change/view files.
Try this:

# Recursively take ownership of directory:
> takeown /f "c:\path"

# Reset permissions recursively
> icacls "c:\path" /reset /T

Dell Laptop: Plugged In, Not Charging

I recently noticed this unwanted message on my Dell Latitude E6540 with Windows 7.
Don't know exactly what prompted it but the battery would not charge above 64%, no matter how I changed the settings of the power saving mode.
Here's how I solved it:

1. Power off
2. Remove the battery
3. Restart Windows
4. Go to Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound -> Device Manager
5. Under Batteries, remove all Microsoft AC Adapter and Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery
6. Power off
7. Put the battery back in place
8. Restart Windows

Then magically the battery restarted charging and didn't stop until it reached 100%.
Thanks to nickscomputerfix!

On the contrary, a good reason not to keep it charged at 100%:

The third tip relates to when and by how much batteries should be charged. One of the more widely known aspects about battery life is the “memory effect”.
In older rechargeable battery chemistries, such as nickel cadmium, partial charging and discharging significantly decreases the energy capacity.
What is less known is that the memory effect in lithium-ion batteries, if it exists, tends to be very small. Instead, they have quite nuanced characteristics. When not in use, batteries degrade most when fully charged. So if left for several days or weeks without use, they should ideally be kept at a relatively low charging state, e.g around 20% charged.
Conversely, when being charged and discharged a lot, it is best to keep the batteries as close to the 50% mark as possible. So if you are only charging and discharging batteries a bit at a time, it is much better to do this between 45-55% than between 90-100%.

Full article.

Windows Taskbar Does Not Hide

Sometimes even if you configured the taskbar to hide itself, it won't and you tried everything you know.
Welcome to the Windows way of doing things!
There is probably a notification from some process, which you cannot easily spot.
The quick way to solve this: kill and restart the file explorer.

Go to the Task Manager --> Processes, and kill explorer.exe.
Then File --> New Task (Run) and type explorer.exe.
Done!

iReport 5.6.0 Failing Silently

Versions up to 5.6.0 (currently the last one) do not run with JDK 1.8. They will silently fail, at least on Windows 7.
If you want to keep JAVA_HOME set to a JDK 1.8 installation, you can run it launching a batch file with something like this inside:

@echo off
set JAVA_HOME=C:\opt\java\jre1.7.0_71
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Jaspersoft\iReport-5.6.0\bin\ireport.exe"

Customize as needed.

Removing commons-logging Dependency from Spring with Ivy

Let's say you want Spring to use SLF4J instead of commons-logging.

First you need to remove the dependency from spring-core:

[TODO]

In the unlikely event you are already not loading transitive dependencies:

<dependency org="org.springframework" name="spring-core" rev="3.2.8.RELEASE" transitive="false"/>

you need to to nothing.

Then add the following dependencies to specify the framework you want to use:

<dependency org="org.slf4j" name="jcl-over-slf4j" rev="1.7.7" transitive="false"/>
<dependency org="org.slf4j" name="slf4j-api" rev="1.7.7" transitive="false"/>
<dependency org="org.slf4j" name="slf4j-log4j12" rev="1.7.7" transitive="false"/>

Ant: Class not found: javac1.8

This error is known to happen with Apache Ant versions less than 1.9.0, which aren't compatible with Java 8.
Upgrade!
Worked for me.

Thanks to Kristian.

Find out which applications are using port x on Windows

Find out which applications are using port x on Windows:

> netstat -aon | findstr 0.0:8080