How to fix Snip & Sketch not working on Windows 10 (Snipping Tool shortcut issues)

I often need to take a screenshot and annotate it a bit before I paste it into a chat, Jira ticket or document. On my Windows system, I love the simplicity of the Microsoft Snip & Sketch app (also known as Snipping Tool), which is always just a shortcut (Win+Shift+S) away. 

Unfortunately, on my work laptop (still running Windows 10), I've recently run into an issue where the shortcut stops working.  When I press the shortcut or even open the app and select to take new snip, no screenshot is taken, and the toolbar doesn’t appear. Instead, I see the cursor spinner for a few seconds, but nothing else happens.

After some troubleshooting, I found a solution, so I thought I'd write it down for future reference and to help anyone else facing the same issue!

Parse Excel XML using power query in excel

I wanted to load an Excel XML file (a.k.a. Microsoft Office Excel 2002 and Excel 2003 XML Format — SpreadsheetML) in another Excel file using Power Query M formula language. It turns out that it's trickier than I expected so I decided to blog my solution.

LogonCommand doesn't execute in windows sandbox

I was trying to use Windows Sandbox to run UniFi server and I wanted to install VC140 as a logon command which seemed to not work 🤔 I was mounting the Desktop folder where I had both the executable and the startup.cmd file. Opening the sandbox and running the script worked. This means that the LogonCommand should also work, right? 

Well, no, because the scripts needs to use full paths as mentioned in this youtube video.

Running Ubiquiti UniFi Network Server on Windows 11

I was trying to run the self-hosted UniFi Network Server v8.0.26 on a newly installed Windows 11 but I was getting a cryptic message "Server taking too long to start…" followed by a "Start-up failed" error. It turns out that VC140 runtime is a hidden requirement (Visual C++ redistributable aka MSVC) and in my case it worked fine installing the latest MSVC for 2015,2017 and 2022 available in the official Microsoft site. Here is how I discovered the missing dependency.

Disabling critical battery action

 I have an old laptop with an almost dead battery, which I always use tethered to a power source, mostly as a media device connected to my TV. Occasionally, I need to move it, and if it's open, Windows realizes that the battery is very weak and decides to hibernate, as that's the default critical battery action. This can become very frustrating. The good news is that you can easily address this issue using Windows' powercfg command.

Installing Windows 11 in QEMU on Supported Hardware

When attempting to install Windows 11 in QEMU, you may encounter the "unsupported hardware" message. This occurs because QEMU does not enable TPM 2.0 support by default.

Copy contacts from outlook to gmail

To transfer your contacts from Outlook to Gmail and keep the pictures, you need to export them as vCard files (vcf) and then import them into Google Contacts. However, Outlook does not support exporting multiple contacts as vCard files at once and neither does Google Contacts support importing multiple vCard files at once. You can use a workaround to export your contacts in batches and then combine them into a single file. Here are the steps: