Living at the (English) edge of the world

When using a USB sound card, you might encounter issues with Windows no longer being able to enter sleep mode automatically. It seems there are issues with what Windows seems to call a “Legacy Kernel Caller”, a system component that’s apparently needed for at least some of the USB sound cards. I’ve been specifically encountering these issues using a Sound Blaster Omni cards/module. The issues for me are also accentuated by using an otherwise great piece of software called Voicemeeter, basically a virtual soundboard. While without Voicemeeter, my system is still sometimes able to auto-sleep despite the Legacy Kernel Caller issues, using Voicemeeter, it is pretty much never able to auto-sleep anymore (but to be fair to Voicemeeter, it seems this happens even with other options of re-routing sound device output to another device, like when using the Windows Listen feature, so it’s not really a Voicemeeter-exclusive issue). This is possibly because it somehow keeps the sound card “active” – I’ve noticed that the Legacy Kernel Caller power request block goes away at times while using the sound card on its own, it never goes away while using Voicemeeter. Why that is I can not tell you (but as far as Voicemeeter is concerned, it seems to do this with other sound cards as well, it’s just that you can whitelist them, unlike the Legacy Kernel Caller). But what I can tell you is that the system is still definitely able to enter sleep mode normally if activated manually, it’s just that the timer for entering it automatically seems to never start, so the system just stays on all the time.

Thankfully, there seems to be a kind of workaround for this, and it took me a while to find (in fact I’ve combined several separate partial solutions into one), so I though I might share it with whoever finds it useful. I can tell you there’s quite a few people asking about a solution to exactly this issue with the Legacy Kernel Caller system component.

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Upon getting the latest installment in the WRC game series, I quickly found out a very serious downside with the game – despite supposedly having this issue solved in one of the patches for WRC 6, WRC 7 seems to have a lot of issues with input devices, especially with some of the more custom setups simracers tend to have. In my case, I’m currently using the Thrustmaster T300 wheel, the G25 pedals connected via the USB Bodnar adapter and the G25 shifter, again connected as USB device using a Bodnar adapter. When trying to bind my pedals and shifter (in sequential mode to be used as a handbrake), I’ve found out the game doesn’t seem to detect my pedals at all and I’m not able to bind them. As for the shifter, there didn’t really seem to be an issue – binding the sequential as a handbrake button worked more or less fine out of the box. But the pedals were the main issue – obviously I want to be able to use my customized modded pedals in the game.

With some experimentation, I managed to come up with a very awkward and bizzare way to at least make the game see the pedals and be able to bind them, but there were still several issues. One of them was I had go through a very specific and awkward process every single time I started the game, and also the game only responded to the second half of the pedal travel. So I tried to poke a bit more – and seems like I have found a way to add a previously unsupported controller to the game so you don’t have to do any weird things to make the game see the controller and can bind it without any problems.

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For people interested in font rendering in current browsers, which has really gone downhill due to how horrible the font rendering in Blink based browsers on Windows is, and especially given that we’ve recently lost the possibility to even disable DirectWrite in Blink browsers completely, it might be worth noting that after three years, there’s finally been a new MacType release yesterday that also introduces the possibility to tweak DirectWrite behaviour.

MacType latest release

In case you don’t know, MacType is (somewhat contrary to the name of the project) an application that basically replaces Windows ClearType with FreeType, a font rendering engine that’s mostly used in Linux (and which in my opinion is absolutely superior to ClearType/DirectWrite and is also much more tweakable). It doesn’t offer the same amount of customizability when it comes to DirectWrite as it offers for general Windows font rendering, not by a long shot, but you can still tweak it a bit.

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Edit 21.7.2011: There is now a more elegant and more correct solution available thanks to XP1 from MyOpera.com as mentioned either in the comments of this post, at MyOpera.com or in my post at my Czech blog (Czech only for now, sorry about that – English version of the post coming ASAP) here.

It seems there’s some demand for the English version of my Czech post about Google+ Opera workaround, so I’ve decided to write this up in English as well. You can also follow this thread at My Opera forums.

It’s been quite hard not to notice the phenomenal success of the Google+ social network in just a few days since its unofficial launch. As usual when dealing with all things Google, Opera users were facing another thing that was hard not to notice – the Google+ top notification bar…is sort of missing the actual notifications in Opera. Which in turn makes it kind of hard to use Google+ in Opera efficiently, since you really have no idea about the number of new comments or any other events you should be notified about. You can of course use another (=worse) browser, you can just use the mail notifications or you can get your notifications on your Android device, if you happen to have one (but although the Android G+ app is really nice, to be using it as a notification device for your desktop browser is not really that convenient). Thankfully, it seems like there’s another option to work around this problem.

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