<Just putting this on the internet, in case it helps some poor soul. There are a lot of forum posts with the issue, none with the solution.> I was recently trying to install Adobe Reader, and had an unfortunate blue screen right near the end. When trying to install again, I got this error: Error 1328. Error applying patch to file C:\Config.Msi\PTxx.tmp. It has probably been updated by other means and can no longer be modified by this patch.

If you’ve been feeling guilty about not regularly (or ever!) backing up your computer, peace of mind is close at hand. The backup industry has been changing recently, making online backups cheaper and easier than ever. If you have moderate backup needs and some technical ability, you can now back up your data for around 25 CENTS per month. If you’ve been investigating backups, you’ve probably seen and considered a handful of options, from easy to complex:

I got a Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga just under three weeks ago. Now that I’ve had some time to put it through its paces, I thought it would make sense to post a quick update on how it’s going. In short: it’s going great, and I would buy it again if it were to disappear today :) Hardware / Guts If you’ve been drooling over the Yoga on the online store, the version you get at Best Buy isn’t any of the three you see on the Lenovo site.

I got a Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga this weekend (loving it!) but noticed an annoying quirk – the different Windows 8 edge swipe actions seemed to require two swipes. A few reviews have run into this as well, such as this one from ZDNet. Once you got it reacting to your swipes, though, everything was instantaneous. After experimentation, it turns out that not touching the screen for about 4 seconds was enough to put it into this double-swipe mode – which is evidence of some sort of sleep mode.

Or for that matter, “What’s new in PowerShell V3”? To help those interested in reviewing the juicy new bits of the PowerShell Cookbook, I’ve been able to compile a rough break-down of what’s new, along with the magnitude of the change. Both the V2 and V3 cookbooks were written in the XML-based DocBook format, which has provided mind-blowing power during the editing and creation cycle. Some notes: Some recipes were moved between chapters, and therefore look like a vast deletion from one recipe and a vast addition to another similarly-named recipe in another chapter.

With the draft of the Windows PowerShell Cookbook (3rd edition!) complete, we’re running an open beta through O’Reilly’s cutting-edge platform called the Open Feedback Publishing System: http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9781449320683/. In this system, we put the entire book online and let you read to your heart’s content. Not only is the book available online, but you can also influence its future. The Open Feedback Publishing System lets you attach comments to any paragraph as though you would comment on a blog.

[Edit 10/2/2015] - PowerShell 5.0 now includes a new and amazing PSReadLine module by default. You can also install it from here: https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine. When PowerShell first came on the scene, Unix folks were among the first to notice. They’d enjoyed a powerful shell and a vigorous heritage of automation for years – and “when I’m forced to use Windows, PowerShell rocks” was a phrase we heard many times. This natural uptake was no mistake.

The third edition of the PowerShell Cookbook is getting close! We should have an online preview ready for your perusal in the near future – stay tuned for an update. One “problem” we’re running into is its size. This is where we’d love some feedback. We could make it thinner and cheaper by not printing the scripts, but instead hosting them online. That would mean, of course, that you can’t just sit back and read through the sample code.

Recently, SMBC Comics made the comment that, “In Britain, they have whilst loops, which do not terminate until the Queen says it’s appropriate.” If you are a programming language aficionado, you may recognize this keyword chiefly from languages of P-Celtic (especially Common Brythonic) origin. One thing you may not know is that the PowerShell team has a huge Canadian contingent. There have been many Canadians responsible for PowerShell’s success, and early tab completion implementations automatically expanded “o” to “ou”.

Will Steele asked today on Twitter how we did the analysis to come up with this post on the PowerShell blog in 2009. In brief, it’s a blog post that addressed some performance issues in the .NET framework that were causing Get-ChildItem to be slow. How did we know it was the .NET APIs slowing us down? The answer came from Visual Studio by way of Software Profiling. Surprisingly, there aren’t many resources for this on the Internet – but here’s a good one: http://msdn.