Create Custom Shortcut Keys in Windows

Windows 8 and 8.1 has the option to add a hotkey or shortcut key to your applications. This is built directly into Windows so you don’t have to worry about another third party background program running monitoring all of your key actions to detect the hotkeys. This feature should of been added long ago, but at least it’s finally here and there is no more waiting.

Add Custom Hotkey in Windows

  • Right click on a programs Icon or executable. This can be a shortcut icon pointing to a program or the program itself.
  • Go to the tab Shortcut in the Properties window.
  • For the setting Shortcut key select the shortcut you want that beings with the keys ctrl + alt

There is some limitation where shortcuts have to start with the two keys of ctrl + alt and the final key cannot be another “action” key such as shift or other similar keys including the space bar.

MinGW Fix Permission Denied LD and Error 1

Programming Ansi C in Windows isn’t as straight forward such as doing it in linux. But some people just can’t use Linux on their PC because they require other software they need. The solution? MinGW. It’s packaged with GCC, GDB, and a few other useful programs. Along with MinGW, you can install MSYS which adds commands such as rm, ls and others.

The issue though? Whenever you compile your program on windows, you either get an error such as cannot open output file a.exe: Permission denied or an error similar to make: *** [a.exe] Error 1. All of the answers online you have tried thus far don’t work, and you believe you are out of luck. The good news, I can help you, since I finally figured it out for myself.

Windows 8 Search Tools

Although Windows 8 got a bad name since release, and even before, it has many great features. One feature I really like is the easy to use advanced search. Without having to know all of the keywords and special search terms, Windows 8 lets you use select menus and drop down menus to improve your search results.

Without having to know the the terms such as kind and size, and the many other terms, you can simply select them. When performing a search, a new tab will appear inside of your Explorer window. This tab is labeled “Search Tools” and provides all the tools you need.

Windows 8.1 Login Mouse Sensitivity Speed

When using Windows 8.1 and possibly Windows 8, on the Login screen when selecting the user to Sign In as, your mouse will be much quicker (or slower) than you have set for your Computers / users preference. This is because the mouse settings are stored on a Per User Basis and there is no normal graphical method to modify the Global Mouse Settings. Because of this, I dug through the registry for a few minutes and figured out how to modify these settings.

Add Wine Programs to Menu in Linux

While messing around in Wine inside of Linux Mint, I noticed that a good amount of programs I installed just wouldn’t appear inside of the Application Menu under “Wine”. This was a huge nuisance. I had to manually keep finding the program’s location to execute it (or make a desktop shortcut, but I like having my desktop clean). But I now have a solution I put together today, and it needs to be shared.