Levicki's Tech Spot

There's naive code, there's bad code, there's unoptimized code, and then there's Microsoft's code.

I am well aware that philosophers have thought about what consciousness means for as long as we exist, but as of late I am coming to a conclusion that both philosophers and their endless musings and consciousness as a concept are overrated.

Richard Lander, a product manager on .NET Team has recently posted a blog article titled Improving C# Memory Safety.

As you are probably aware, NVIDIA recently announced DLSS5, calling it a breaktrough in visual fidelity.

If you are one of those install manager peddlers who came here to see what this article is about or if you are a developer considering including an install manager with your application let me tell you upfront — fuck you and your install manager.

The so called 70-20-10 model (70% workplace or experiental learning, 20% social or informal learning, and 10% structured or formal learning) with which employees worldwide are being brainwashed by their corporate HR comes from a 1986 "research" conducted…

Dear Mr.

Recently I wrote about the exact same subject, so you must be wondering why I am writing about that again so soon.

Every day you read about vulnerabilities, deal with endless (and often broken) software updates, the apps you use are more and more bloated.

Supermicro is well known as a price-competitive Rack-Scale Total IT Solutions provider that designs and builds an environmentally-friendly and energy-saving portfolio of servers, storage systems, switches, and software, while also providing global support…

As if you needed more reasons not to trust CrowdStrike after that Falcon fiasco which crashed 8.5 millions of Windoows PCs worldwide due to shoddy QA processes and having a poorly written script interpreter in a Windows kernel-mode driver, right?

At the time of this writing there are 73 security vendors which are well enough known to be included in VirusTotal automated scanning.

Dear Mr.

Starting with Windows 8 Microsoft has, in their infinite wisdom, decided to remove preinstalled (inbox) games such as FreeCell and Minesweeper various versions of which were included in Windows since 1995 and 1992 respectively.

Over the years I have been using Linux distros (Slackware, RedHat, LFS, Gentoo, CentOS, Debian, Arch).

If you are using Daz Studio chances are that you have noticed that the latest couple of public beta versions have a modified New Scene dialog which now integrates notifications (read: promotions and ads), and 3D asset store directly into your new scene cr…

Daz Studio 4.21.1.26 Public Beta has been released recently and it incorporates the Iray 2022.1.0 final version which adds official support for ghostlights.

The Betteridge's law of headlines teaches us that the answer to any article title ending with a question mark is most likely "no".

Today I was setting up an FTP server on a Windows Server using IIS, and I ran into a problem with establishing the TLS connection.

This article assumes that you are already familiar with configuring DHCP, DNS, and static DNS entries on your MikroTik router.

I am writing this article with a heavy heart after exhausting all legitimate channels for complaints.

Starting with DAZ Studio Public Beta version 4.12.1.16, it is no longer possible to start multiple instances of the application.

After being forced to start using Windows 10 at work (the company I work for is licensing everything from Microsoft and paying big money for software assurance), I had plenty of time to look for proper justifications for my previously seemingly irrational…

Did you know that Viber Receive Service Messages option is enabled by default, thus enabling businesses to send you unsolicited messages?

If your computer sits on a network behind NAT it is difficult to discover your public IP address programatically without querying some web service.

Adobe Flash Player ActiveX in Windows 8.1 is being updated through Windows Update.

UPDATE (2017/01/07): Unwanted telemetry added into all executables built using Visual Studio 2015 prior to Update 3 (which I was the first to notice and write about below) has been picked up by other developers four months later on Reddit, and MSVC Dev Ma…

UPDATE (2015/07/28): What I have been saying all along is now official information in the Windows 10 FAQ — Windows 10 free upgrade will make your existing retail license non-transferable.

Because there are no other two applications in existence which have more disrespect for your personal preferences.

Not a single day goes by that I don't cringe when I see how some people write logic expressions in the code.

If you don't live under a rock you have probably seen the outrage of PC players who have been banned for using any kind of mods, even innocent cosmetic mods such as those which change field of view.

Why would you need to use RDRAND CPU instruction to generate random numbers in PHP when you can just call rand() function and be done with it?

This article does not condone piracy — the instructions provided are meant solely for making your legally purchased audio CDs available in your iTunes music collection.

I cringe every time I visit my LinkedIn profile and see the following messages: Asking people for their email password is a very bad security practice.

Well, it was about time to make it look and feel more modern, right?

Today I wanted to reinstall iTunes for Windows and after downloading the iTunes64Setup.exe from Apple website I was horrified to see that the setup wizard started up in Croatian language.

Since the release of Firefox 26.0 the about:config options useToolkitUI and useJSTransfer no longer work because old download manager UI has been removed from the code.

Ah those security questions...

If you wrote an MFC dialog-based application using CMFCEditBrowseCtrl which worked properly until you updated to Visual Studio 2012 and now one of the controls is missing its browse button here is a workaround.

So, you have a NAS, be it Synology, QNAP, NetGear, or some other device running Linux?

Sony has recently announced their plans for their next-generation PlayStation 4 game console.

After purchasing QuickOffice Pro HD for iPad I feel like I have just thrown away 20 USD.

Just like the Flash itself, I can't wait for it to end up on a broken technology graveyard, especially because Adobe has made it to be so annoying.

Update: It seems that I have given way too much credit to Adobe by assuming that they are competent enough to keep CURRENT version of their offline Flash installer in a folder named current on their download server.

It has become increasingly hard to disable certain compiler options in recent versions of Visual Studio such as 2010.

Few days ago I was installing Motorola Milestone 2 mobile phone drivers and there was an MTP USB Device that kept refusing to install properly.

It is time they get called out on this.

I have noticed that some SSD benchmark and review sites such as thessdreview.com insist on benchmarking SSD performance using compressible data, because that is how their manufacturers are benchmarking them, and that is how they can claim such high perfor…

If you are a lucky (rich?)

Do you hate that annoying "Make Facebook Your Homepage" pop-up?