Blog
Practical articles from KomuraSoft LLC about website development, SEO, Google Ads, Windows development, legacy asset reuse, and bug investigation.
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A Windows App Developer's Primer on CPU Settings: Priority, Affinity, and P-cores/E-cores
For Windows app developers: how CPU priority, affinity, P-cores/E-cores, power-saving settings, and EcoQoS/Efficiency Mode relate to each other, and how to m...
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A Developer's Strange Love, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Windows
Windows is a hassle. But that hassle is the hassle of an OS that has carried real-world business on its back.
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Practical PowerShell Command Recipes — Growing the Small Tools You Use Every Day
A practical roundup of PowerShell commands for everyday work, covering where to use Measure-Object, Group-Object, Select-String, Compare-Object, Tee-Object, ...
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Applied PowerShell Scripting — Safely Automating Log Investigation, Archiving, and Reporting
Practical steps for safely automating log investigation, CSV reporting, archiving old logs, keeping audit trails, and Task Scheduler execution with PowerShel...
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PowerShell Command Basics — The Operations to Learn First and How to Use Them Safely
A guide for PowerShell beginners who need to get real work done: how to find cmdlets, the pipeline, file operations, CSV processing, execution policy, and th...
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Why Windows Shows "Windows protected your PC"
Why SmartScreen warns when you distribute a Windows app, organized from a practitioner's perspective: code signing, EV/OV certificates, Azure Artifact Signin...
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A Guide to Breaking Free from IE Mode Dependence
Practical steps for safely extending the life of internal web systems that depend on Microsoft Edge's IE mode while exiting that dependence. Covers centraliz...
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Why ActiveX Stops Working in Office 2024/Microsoft 365 and How to Diagnose It
When ActiveX stops working in Office 2024/Microsoft 365, work through the causes in order: default disablement, 32-bit/64-bit mismatch, COM registration, dep...
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Preparing for VBScript Deprecation: An Audit Guide for VBA and Internal Tools
Preparing for the phased deprecation of VBScript: inventorying VBA, Excel macros, and internal tools, static detection, execution logging, choosing replaceme...
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Why Contact Form Emails Don't Arrive, and How to Fix It
The causes of undelivered contact-form notification emails, organized across SPF/DKIM/DMARC, the From header, external SMTP, shared hosting, PHP mail(), and ...
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What Is GCPW? - Handling Windows Logon with Google Authentication
How Google Credential Provider for Windows (GCPW) works: combining it with Windows device management, existing profiles, first logon, offline use, 2-step ver...
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Windows Text Encodings and Line Endings - The Basics of Mojibake and CRLF/LF
Why text gets garbled on Windows and why CRLF vs LF still causes trouble. How UTF-8, UTF-16, and CP932 (Shift_JIS) differ, plus rules that prevent mojibake.
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Pseudo-Random vs. True Random Numbers - How Do You Actually Tell Them Apart?
Pseudo-random vs true random numbers (physical randomness / NRBG), compared on reproducibility, predictability, entropy sources, statistical testing, and whi...
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GS1 Barcode Standards: The Basics and Operational Pitfalls
What GS1 barcode standards actually standardize: the differences between GTIN, AIs, GS1-128, GS1 DataMatrix, and GS1 QR Code, plus the points where real-worl...
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Registration and Bitness Pitfalls in COM/OCX/ActiveX Development
A practical look at the 32bit/64bit, Visual Studio 2022, regsvr32/Regasm, administrator-rights, HKCR, and STA/MTA pitfalls that trip up COM, OCX, and ActiveX...
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Where Should catch and Logging Go in Exception Handling?
To avoid broad catches in deep helpers, duplicate logs at every layer, and result-mapping that hides root causes, we organize the responsibilities of the bou...
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What Is ClickOnce? - How It Works, How It Updates, and Where It Fits (and Doesn't) in Practice
An overview of ClickOnce, the deployment technology used for .NET Windows desktop apps - manifests, updates, the cache, signing, and which projects it suits ...
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What Is Windows Efficiency Mode? - The Green Leaf Icon and How to Turn It Off
What Efficiency mode and the green leaf icon mean in Windows 11 Task Manager, how to turn it off, how to minimize it across all processes with power mode or ...
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How to Speed Up App Validation with Windows Sandbox
How to use Windows Sandbox to isolate administrator-privilege issues, reproduce problems in a clean environment, and simulate missing privileges or resources...
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How to Place Images, Figures, and Screenshots in Word Manuals Without Breaking the Layout
To keep images, figures, and screenshots from breaking in Word manuals, we walk through in-line placement, captions, anchors, spacing, templating, and pre-di...
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Security Design for Auto-Update - Why HTTPS Alone Is Not Enough
We treat auto-update as a trust boundary and walk through signed metadata, client-side verification, key separation, rollback protection, and fail-closed des...
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A Practical Procedure for Identifying the Scheme Behind a Hash String
When identifying the scheme behind a hash string left in logs or a DB, it helps to look at the prefix, separators, character set, and length, in that order. ...
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Best Practices for Designing Chatbots That Actually Help in Business
To make a chatbot genuinely useful in business, you need to sort out its purpose, knowledge sources, permissions, handoff conditions, and evaluation method b...
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Word Manual Writing Basics - Bad Examples and How to Fix Them
When building manuals in Word, here are the basics for getting headings, numbering, the table of contents, page breaks, and review out of your hands and into...
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Why PPAP Is Bad for Email Security, and What to Do Instead
We examine why PPAP — emailing a password-protected ZIP and then sending the password in a separate email — is dangerous, and lay out the realistic alternati...
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Minimum Requirements for a Custom Logger, with an Integration Test Checklist
To make a custom app's diagnostic logs trustworthy, we lay out UTF-8 JSON Lines, the required fields, flush, rotation, and failure behavior, plus the integra...
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Designing Bulk Email for Small Businesses Without Locking Into a Specific Service
We lay out how a small business can avoid Bcc blast sending and design announcement email at the scale of dozens to hundreds of recipients, covering per-reci...
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Why Your Company Should Have a Website - Going Beyond a Brochure and Driving Profit
We lay out why a company should have a website and how it leads to profit within the flow from search to comparison, inquiry, and winning the deal. An articl...
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Where to Draw the Line Between Unit Tests and Integration Tests
We organize the boundary between unit tests and integration tests along the axes of pure logic, formats, wiring, environment differences, and time dependence...
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How to Connect Articles and Service Pages - Internal Link Design Basics
We lay out internal link design that connects articles naturally to service pages, covering search intent, anchor text, related articles, and CTA placement.