Faux's Blog

I’ve used this so many times today, I just have to share it.

Occasionally, when tabbing out of legacy games/SDL/dosbox/etc. under Vista (on my machine? New in Vista sp1 beta? With the beta nVidia drivers?), the screen will go completely black, but everything underneath will continue working, the mouse cursor will continue to move and change.

Ctrl+shift+esc (show task-manager), start+d (show desktop) and the usual set of keys don’t make the black go away, nor does Ctrl+alt+delete.

The trick is to lock the machine (start+L), the screen will remain black, it’s useful to have sound on at this point to ensure that it actually locked (ie. you aren’t about to type your password into IRC ) and log back in again. Everything will return to normal. I have no idea why this fixes it.

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It’s best to do this right first time, although, I’m sure, most people won’t read this until their machine is about to go down and they’re going to lose all their work.

1. Add all your networks to irssi, pick any random name.

   For instance:

   /network add freenode
/network add efnet


2. Add servers for the networks.

   /server add -network freenode irc.eu.freenode.net
/server add -network efnet irc.efnet.org
/server add -network efnet efnet.port80.se


3. Add channels to the networks.

   /channel add -auto #irssi freenode
/channel add -auto #defocus freenode
/channel add -auto #lulz efnet


   “-auto” here means to auto-join the channel when connecting to the specified network.

   Modified from http://irssi.org/documentation/tips, this alias will add all your current channels, and auto-join them:

   /alias addallchannels script exec foreach my \$channel (Irssi::channels()) { Irssi::command(“channel add -auto \$channel->{name} \$channel->{server}->{tag} \$channel->{key}”)\;}

4. /layout save

   This makes all the tabs re-appear in the same place when you next load irssi.

5. /save

   Commit all the work done above to disk. If you messed up, just /reload.

6. When you next load irssi…

   /connect freenode
/connect efnet

   All of the above mentioned commands have loads of extra options, go read the /help.

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