Pistol Gun Emoji in Apple iOS and Windows

Big news today was Apple replacing the “pistol” emoji with a water gun design, apparently in an effort to make fonts less violent? The old and new emoji’s look like this:

Pistol on Apple iOS 9.3
Apple iOS original Pistol
Apple iOS Squirt Gun

But, what I didn’t see in the news is that the major “Windows 10 Anniversary Update” released today, does the exact opposite- Windows 10 (and maybe 8? 7?) has had a space-man style pew-pew gun instead of the typical revolver.. but the update today actually changed this back to a traditional revolver desgin.

Pistol on Microsoft Windows 10
Windows 10 original “space man” pistol
Pistol on Microsoft Windows 10 Anniversary Update
Windows 10 Anniversary Update pistol

I suspect this was accidental on Microsoft’s part, as they did a big overhaul of the emoji system in general and probably overlooked this. The timing of the two company’s swapping these designs is pretty funny/spooky though.

OneDrive reducing from 15gb to 5gb for free accounts

This is amazing- Microsoft sent a notice today that the free tier for their onedrive offering (basically cloud storage) will be dropping from 15gb down to 5gb. This is in a world where storage continues to get cheaper and storage offerings are continuing to grow their free tiers larger and drop their prices on non-free. Even though Microsoft claims this was a very “hard decision” for them to make, the only logical explanation for this decision would have to be something like:

-implement onedrive way back in windows 7ish (or was it 8?) and make it confusingly integrated with your local document folders
-get a gazillion people to accidently start using the service
-get a second gazillion to start using it after the forced win10 upgrade. 
-ms noticed 60jillion users with 5.623 gb in use and laments how much storage that adds up
-ms genius says “man, if we dropped the free limit to 5gb, we’d be RIIIICH(er)!”
-publish some contrived reason why the limit must be dropped, attempting deperately to not sound like a big stupid lie.

You can read the announcement here if you care to: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Microsoft-OneDrive-storage-changes-bf91132d-d0cb-4cbb-96ba-86278c5c1c2f?WT.mc_id=PART_OneDrive-Unknown_OneRM_StorageChanges_FAQ&ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

basically, tons of users will be scrambling to figure out what to do with their files if they are over the 5gb limit, and a large number will feel it necessary to shell out cash for a big ol upgrade.

(Note: my “RICH” joke above is not some bernie-esque hatred of the rich, in fact I’m quite fond of them. I just hate seeing big companies make stupid decisions… over… and over…. and over…)

searchindexer.exe windows 8 cpu

I’ve been running windows 8 for a few months now, but today suddenly the windows search indexer – windowsindexer.exe – suddenly started hogging CPU and driving my laptop nuts. I didn’t make any system changes recently, so why the heck would this just suddenly start? I found a few others online who seem to have the same issue, and didn’t find a defninitve answer to the problem… so I’ve just disabled the indexer for now until I can find some better advice. Add a comment below if you’ve run into this, and/or if you’ve found any actual causes for this problem.

Copy path to file

When I’m working with files of any kind, I usually have an explorer window open to the path(s) containing those files. So then when I want to open one of the files in another app (and one that doesnt support drag-and-drop), I’m forced to go through the whole file, open, dig through file system, dig through file list, oh there it is… click and open. I’ve often sped this up by copying the path from the open explorer window and pasting it into the file open dialog just to at least get me to the right folder, but then it’s back to digging through what might be hundreds of files.

Why can’t I just copy the path of a file (instead of copying the file itself) and then paste the path directly into the file open prompt?

Well, turns out you can, in Vista and Windows 7 (and likely 8).  

Simply: 

Hold the Shift key, right click on the file, and then select “Copy as path”

Wish I’d known that several years ago..