Disable “Press and Hold” in Windows XP SP3 and Wacom Tablets

Press and hold behavior in Windows XP SP3

Press and hold

The “press and hold” for right click is driving me up the walls while using the Adobe Creative Suite at work, so while it’s pretty easy to find a solution for Vista/Win7, the solution for Windows XP SP3 is bit harder to find, so I’ll make it available for everybody here.

From the Wacom forums:

“What you see is an effect of the Windows ‘TabletPC Input’ or pen inking system. This is part of XP TabletPC edition, Vista and some part of it is also enabled in XP with SP3. The effect is called ‘Press and Hold to Rightclick’. In Vista you can disable this option the the ‘TabletPC Input’ control panel. For XP SP3 you can either use a registry editor and change the key
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Wisp\Pen\SysEventParameters]
“HoldMode”=dword:00000003

You can instead also disable the service ‘TabletPC Input Service’ or go to device manager and disable the WacomVirtualHID. This does not effect the normal tablet operation, but Windows will not activate the pen inking in this case.”

I hope this helps!

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Dear Facebook, please fix the duplicate names bug NOW. XOXO :-) LOL

It would be very cool, borderline awesome if Facebook decided to fix the annoying problem they have with duplicate names.

Let me clarify: there’s a guy in Italy called Luca Candela, just like me, and he’s uploading videos of his snowboard stunts all the time. While I can enjoy some snowboard videos here and there (I used to be a snowboarder when I had better knees and more time) I definitely don’t like being spammed by his friends’ comments all the time.

It’s baffling how a company of that magnitude decided to match people and accounts by using a simple string compare… really? That’s an amateurish mistake, and it’s been like that for as long as I can remember.

Do I have to change my name to get some peace?

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Fix sound volume issue on MacBook Pro running Windows XP SP3

Apple doesn’t seem to care too much about the “experience” we’re having running Windows XP on their EXPENSIVE laptops. With OSX 10.5 and 10.6 they ship a sound driver that is simply NOT WORKING PROPERLY, and again, they don’t seem to care too much.

Well, if you, like me, are annoyed as hell about this, you can do yourself a favor a download this version of the driver that a great guy hacked in order to fix the problem.

Thanks Henry!

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San Francisco and new site design coming soon!

This is a quick update just to say that San Francisco didn’t swallow me (although it’s been a very intense week since I moved here) and that so far I’m happy about how many contacts I’m establishing in the area.

The great news though is that the site redesign is almost complete, and soon all my work will find a better collocation in an on-line portfolio designed ad-hoc!

Stay tuned.

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Get the favicons back on Firefox 3.5 for OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard

I don’t know why the Mozilla team decided not to show favicons in the bookmark toolbar, but it’s a BAD idea: the toolbar becomes instantly hard to scan and a lot less useful.

Luckily there’s an extension for Firefox called Stylish and a script to install once the extension is active that can take care of the problem.

Enjoy!

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How to install Service Pack 3 for Windows XP on a MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard

This post is more of a “note to self” than anything else. I spent good part of today fighting against my MacBook Pro, trying to install Service Pack 3 for Windows XP (Bootcamp partition).

After a few hours of frustration, I found this link buried in Apple’s support site that contains a workaround.

The meat of the problem is a driver that makes HFS partitions readable in Windows, and the fact that SP3 sees them as the main partition and tries to copy SP’s files from there.

The fix is trivial, just find AppleMNT.sys, rename it to something else, restart the system, install SP3, rename the file back to the original name and the problem is solved.

Thanks Apple, now if you made the kb article a BIT easier to find, that would be awesome.

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“Generalizing Specialist” Is The Definition I Was Looking For…

I have been trying to define my professional profile a little better, and after a few hours of research, I stumbled on this incredibly clever definition of “generalizing specialist“.

Read More »

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Project Management: Having Vision

This article made me think about how the qualities of a good Project Manager are sometimes traits that team members might not like or appreciate…

Project Management: Having Vision

Enjoy!

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The Great Facebook Landrush That Wasn’t

I know what everybody will think about this matter: vanity URLs are stupid, a fad and so on. I agree, but at the same time I thought it could be convenient to have a memorable URL to improve a little bit my search engine profile, right?

Well, I expected to have to go through hell and back to register mine. I even set up a reminder on my calendar, although I missed it by more than an hour because I had to stay late at work for a change.

Well, let’s just say that I never thought I would be able to register facebook.com/luca.candela and I was ready with creative alternatives; didn’t need them, so there it goes, call me lucky on that.

I must confess, I’m a little surprised.

Could it be that the landrush that everybody and their cats was talking about on the blogosphere was a tad over-hyped?

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I won an award (and didn’t notice until now…)

The news came to me in the form of an update on a former co-worker’s LinkedIn profile: I am won a Manny award for Best Interactive Campaign for MyInnerstate.com! Read More »

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