Saturday 18 April 2020

Cortana Skills are Gone

Well, it is over.

Cortana is dead.

In February, Microsoft killed third party skills.  Though you can skill invoke the bots, the interface from Windows or Invoke is dead.

So the question is ... now what.  Relaunch the skills I have as plug ins for Teams chat? Or just wait... continue to build on Google Actions. 

Update: I spent 5 minutes and hooked the bot webchat to the Art of War and Mediations pages. So... at least you can still see the botframework part in action!

Monday 24 February 2020

How to Stop Groove from Skipping

Ugh. 2019 was a bad year for music players.

Thanks Amazon for fracturing the music player landscape. When I drank the cool-aide, I jumped onto Music Player, and then saw the death of Auto-Rip, Personal Music Subscriptions, etc.

By that time it was too late to go back to iTunes, that is now dead.

And I had moved to Groove to play from cloud, and play my library on XBox, but Microsoft killed that. 

And in Microsoft's rebirth of Windows, there are other quirks.  Ever notice Groove player skips 30-40 seconds into a song on local media?  Want to know why?  Well, the file is in-use of course - if you back your music up to One Drive.  How to listen to music without constant skipping?  Well, turn off One Drive sync of course.  Or at least pause it while you listen to music.






Wednesday 29 January 2020

Inside the Arcade1up PacMan

I received PacMan for Christmas.  I had a lot of fun, until the joystick up stopped working.

I had been thinking about moding it.  Some YouTube videos implied it could be done, that the ROMs on the board included Asteroids and Galaxian.

Sure enough, when I replaced the joystick Arcade1Up sent as replacement, the controller nest has the label saying "Galaxian, Pac Man, Space Invader" and room for a fire button P1-A.  I have not cracked the logic board connected to the display yet, but it might be tweakable if true.