Bruce Dawson

  1. Acronis True Image Costs Performance When Not Used

    Over two years ago I installed Acronis True Image for Crucial in order to migrate my data to a new SSD I had just purchased. It worked. I then left True Image installed “just in case”, and what harm could … Continue reading →

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  2. Google Maps Doesn’t Know How Street Addresses Work

    (or actually they do, but they don’t use this knowledge effectively) Update, April 26, 2025: the address fix for W 6th Ave is live, mostly. Going forward I wish that Google Maps would make it harder to get bad data … Continue reading →

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  3. What this blog is about

    I’ve recently told a few people that I write, that I have a blog, and then I try to describe what I write about. I’m kinda proud of some of the stuff that I’ve covered here on randomascii over the … Continue reading →

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  4. Find me on bsky

    I used to really enjoy the other microblogging site but it became too much of a democracy-destroying disinformation hell site so I haven’t been there in a long time. I’ve moved to bsky – I’m https://bsky.app/profile/randomascii.bsky.social. Follow me there for … Continue reading →

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  5. Life, death, and retirement

    I haven’t been blogging much lately, and it turns out there is a very good reason. My last technical blog post was October 1st of last year. After I hit publish on that one I went to get ready for … Continue reading →

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  6. Localization Failure: Temperature is Hard

    The Guardian is one of my favorite news sources. I’m a subscriber (support news organizations!) and I read it daily. But it is not immune to errors, as this headline shows: 68 °F above average is a lot. For a … Continue reading →

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  7. 32 MiB Working Sets on a 64 GiB machine

    Memory is a relatively scarce resource on many consumer computers, so a feature to limit how much memory a process uses seems like a good idea, and Microsoft did indeed implement such a feature. However: They didn’t document this (!) … Continue reading →

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  8. When Debug Symbols Get Large

    TL;DR – upgrade your tools, including Visual Studio, windbg, and Windows Performance Toolkit, if you want to handle Chromium’s symbol files. Details: Death, taxes, and browser engines relentlessly growing – those are the three things that you can really be … Continue reading →

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  9. No Start Menu for You

    I tend to launch most programs on my Windows 10 laptop by typing the key, then a few letters of the program name, and then hitting enter. On my powerful laptop (SSD and 32 GB of RAM) this process … Continue reading →

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  10. Compiler Tricks to Avoid ABI-Induced Crashes

    Last month I wrote about an odd crash that was hitting a few Chrome users. Something was corrupting the XMM7 register and that was causing Chrome to crash. We fixed a couple of bugs in Chrome and we were able … Continue reading →

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