Reupen’s blog

It’s been seven weeks since I last complained about something in Windows on this blog.

I saw that there was going to be a partial lunar eclipse in the early morning on Friday, 28 August 2026.

I recently sold something on eBay UK.

Last year, I made a rudimentary attempt to capture some Perseids on video from my home in Outer London.

I’ve been to Japan twice.

I thought Microsoft had got a handle on buggy Windows updates.

I recently came across a Windows bug with popup menus.

I saw that there was going to be a Microsoft Windows Insider meetup in London.

I started up Forza Horizon 6 today.

I recently purchased1 a game on my Windows 11 PC via the Xbox app.

I bought an ASRock Rack W880D4U motherboard (along with an Intel Core Ultra 5 245K CPU) back in November to upgrade my self-built NAS.

I find it convenient to add gift1 and loyalty cards to Google Wallet on my Android phone.

I haven’t posted anything in my ‘Everyday Windows annoyances’ series of posts for a while.

A long time ago, I disabled some specific animations in Windows that I found annoying.

When I got my Pixel 8, one of the things I remember is that it was actually pleasant to use in a dark room.

Recently, I went into Device Manager in Windows to roll back a driver to the previous version.

A while ago, I noticed that emojis rendered by Direct2D on Windows 11 often have rough edges.

Windows has an old tooltip control, part of the Win32 common controls library.

I have an Asus GT-BE19000 router.

Since everyone else likes to blog about their releases, I thought I’d start getting in on the game.

Ten days ago, I received an email from EE stating that the price of my mobile phone contract would be going up by £2 a month.

If you’re programming on Windows and you use Direct2D, you’re generally also, either directly or indirectly, using DirectX Graphics Infrastructure (DXGI).

On the night of 12 August 2025, the peak of the Perseids meteor shower, I decided to sit in my garden to try and catch a glimpse of the spectacle.

A bit over two years ago, I tried taking a photo of Jupiter with a Canon EOS R mirrorless camera and RF 800mm F11 lens.

I sometimes like to take photos of the moon.

I recently noticed that the free space on my Windows drive kept shrinking.

29 October 2025 note This Windows bug has been fixed in the KB5067036 preview update released on 28 October 2025, and the fix should make its way to the next non-preview cumulative update expected on 11 November 2025.

Did you want some more photos from travelling?

A number of new Windows Imaging Component (WIC) interfaces have been added to the Windows SDK in the past year-ish.

I built an Android app for showing live London Underground train arrival times (Google Play, UK only).

I opened the Clock app on my Pixel 8 the other day and the design had completely changed.

I transferred most of my domains to Cloudflare in 2022.

I recently noticed that the ‘Tools’ part of the Google search results page had changed.

The other day, when I wanted to open the Windows Settings app, I did what I often do and pressed the Windows key and started typing ‘settings’.

At some point in the semi-recent past, this icon appeared in the Windows 11 system tray: Yes, we all want AI shoved down our throats I assumed it was an icon for Copilot.

A few weeks ago, taskbar item flyouts suddenly changed on my Windows 11 desktop.

I opened up Photoshop today, and was greeted by this about my Adobe Photography (20GB) plan1: That sounds alarming.

June 2026 note This is one of the more popular posts on this blog, so I’ve made a few small tweaks for clarity since the post was originally published.

At some point, I noticed various bits of HDR functionality popping up in Adobe Lightroom.

A few months ago, I was nosing around the Windows Game Bar and came across a section in its settings named ‘Gaming features’.

I currently have a Pixel 8 smartphone.

When I look at reviews for a particular product, I usually make an effort to look specifically at negative reviews and recent reviews.

Yes, I’ve been travelling.

Take the sequence of ❤❤︎❤️.

If you’ve looked through semi-recent Windows SDK headers, you might’ve noticed preprocessor directives such as this: #if (NTDDI_VERSION >= NTDDI_WIN10_CU) But what does NTDDI_WIN10_CU mean in this context?

I liked Civilization V.

I was debugging an odd-looking Columns odd-looking crash from a Windows 8.1 device.

September 2025 tl;dr This is still a problem on my A84L, with the latest v6.8100 software.

I updated my laptop to Windows 11 24H2 without problem (albeit using the Windows 11 Installation Assistant, as Windows Update wasn’t offering it).

I’ve been working on adding DirectWrite support to Columns UI since June.