How to change your user name in Windows 8.1

Have  you ever inadvertently mistyped your user name (also called your logon or account name) during the installation of Windows 8.1? For most people this is not a big deal, since you only see your display name at the login screen (which is not the same as the user name and can easily be changed). If you’re at another network location however, you have to type in the user name to log into the machine, and this can be a bother if you can’t remember it. This happend to me during a custom installation for a client; I needed to log into the PC to transfer files and decided to change the name. Not as easy as it should be.

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How to Insert an HTML5 Video

I was recently asked to add a film trailer to an existing website and looked around for tools that would provide a cross-browser solution. I found an actively supported open-source player at videojs.com and started to test it.

Looked good at first, but then usability issues cropped up. I wanted play/pause triggered with the space bar, no control bar at start, and at the end the movie should spool back to the beginning. I solved most of this except for the space bar, but what really bothered me with the videojs project is the way features were changed, dropped, and re-added by contributors without notice, keeping you hopping about between the rapidly incrementing versions to get a working feature set.

Isn’t there a simpler way? Turns out there is. Continue reading

Don’t touch my phone numbers, Apple!

With Mac Mavericks Mountain Lion Apple renamed the Address Book to Contacts and introduced a phone field filter that’s been annoying users and causing them to switch to third-party contact managers. An attempt to make a phone number more readable for humans by adding a dash, space, slash or brackets in the field is ignored; the ‘foreign’ characters are filtered out and an ugly unreadable string of numbers remains. I suspect this change is supposed to make the phone field machine readable, for dialing programs. But the main purpose of the phone field in my mind is to be able to dial a number and not lose your place — at least that’s what I use it for. Apple might have other ideas, but I’m not interested; I just want the text I write to stay put. Continue reading