Author: Dave Farquhar

How to get rid of the small keyboard on Android

Dave Farquhar Android
How to get rid of the small keyboard on Android

I was minding my own business, dictating a blog post into my phone while I took my evening walk. At some point I brushed against the screen with my sweaty hand, and next thing I knew, this sidebar showed up on my keyboard, shrinking the already small keys. I didn’t ask for a shrunken Android keyboard with a sidebar. So here’s how to get rid of the small keyboard on Android.

The small keyboard on Android is called one handed mode. To disable one handed mode in Android, tap the three dots and toggle one-handed mode. Or tap the gear, select Preferences, and toggle one-handed mode.
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A personal announcement regarding the blog

Dave Farquhar Personal

A rather large backlog of comments is requiring me to make an announcement and make some changes. Since early this summer I have been dealing with a recurrence of my carpal tunnel syndrome, and that has forced a number of changes in the way I have to blog.

For the past several months, I have been using voice recognition to produce my content. This is working much better than it did the last time I tried to use it, but we are talking c+ quality as opposed to d minus quality. There is a significant uptick in the number of mistakes, there are large numbers of words it doesn’t understand, and hyperlinks are difficult. For the majority of my audience, I hope it is better than not posting at all.

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Roku remote stopped working? Try this

Dave Farquhar Hardware
Roku remote stopped working? Try this

We hadn’t used the Roku in one of our rooms in a couple of months, and when we went to use it the other day, the remote didn’t work. Not even after changing batteries. If your Roku remote stopped working, here’s how to fix it.

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Mental health and infosec

Dave Farquhar security
Mental health and infosec

In Australia, they have a national day called R U Ok. And one of my Australian coworkers used that as an opportunity to reach out to the rest of the company. We all thanked him. Mental health is a problem in the field of computer security, and IT as a whole, and we rarely talk about it. It’s time that we start. Let’s take the taboo out of mental health and infosec.

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Why aren’t computers getting cheaper?

Dave Farquhar Hardware
Why aren’t computers getting cheaper?

When you study the history of computers, one recurring theme is that computers get smaller, cheaper, and faster over time. So why is there a floor on computer prices? Why aren’t computers getting cheaper anymore, especially at retail?

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Gluing end to end

Dave Farquhar DIY
Gluing end to end

Conventional wisdom says you should only glue wood side to side, not end to end. That said, you can indeed glue end grain and it’s not guaranteed to be a disaster. Here’s why you might want to glue end to end, and how.

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Why is it so hard to find computer parts?

Dave Farquhar Hardware
Why is it so hard to find computer parts?

Back in July, I went to Micro Center to get a video card for my son. The selection wasn’t great. They had a few $50 cards. They had three $110 cards. Not three different ones. Three GT 1030s. Total. And nothing else under $2,500. And they didn’t have a ton of those either. Other parts were less scarce, but not what I’m used to. So why is it so hard to find computer parts?

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Word line wrap not working? Here’s the fix

Dave Farquhar Office
Word line wrap not working? Here’s the fix

I ran into a problem with Word line wrap not working. Even though the text had spaces in them, Word was treating some of the spaces from my copy and pasted text like they weren’t spaces.

When line wrap doesn’t work how you expect in Word, it’s usually nonbreaking spaces or other special characters in the text. The obscure show formatting button can help you find them.

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Windows 11 on unsupported hardware

Dave Farquhar Windows
Windows 11 on unsupported hardware

When Microsoft announced Windows 11, they also announced some pretty severe hardware requirements. Windows 11 would only be supported on the three most recent CPU generations, and would require a TPM chip. At the end of August 2021, Microsoft announced a way to work around it. Then they did their best to try to talk you out of doing it. Let’s talk about running Windows 11 on unsupported hardware.
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Can a computer last 10 years? It depends

Dave Farquhar Hardware
Can a computer last 10 years? It depends

Can a computer last 10 years? People tend to have very strong opinions about that. It is a matter of perspective in some ways. And a lot of it depends on the type of hardware you buy, and what you expect it to do. And at one time, that was an absurd idea. But not so much anymore.

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