Windows 8.1 update 4/8/14

I picked up the 4/8/14 Windows 8.1 update today and was pleased that the Metro apps can now appear in the ‘classic’ desktop taskbar. It still seems odd to me that Windows 8 has two distinctly different personalities – the touchscreen friendly Metro apps from the new Start screen, and the classic desktop with regular looking Windows apps. It just seems confused to me – which is it? A post-PC touchscreen OS or a classic Windows desktop? Well, now at least the two are somewhat more combined.

Rather more odd however is that this cumulative update is required if you want to continue to receive Windows Updates. Pretty sure some internal IT departments are going to be pretty annoyed with this approach – “You want updates in the future? Install every update up to this date then we’ll give you new updates”. Uhuh.

Working split in FLDIGI

Most things are easy to work out in FLDIGI, but I just tried working a station that was working RTTY split, listening 1 up. You can certainly do this via settings on your radio but FLDIGI allows you to set different rx and tx freqs too – which is easier as it’s just point and click:

  • select the tx freq and press the ‘Lck’ button – this fixes the tx
  • clicking anywhere on the waterfall after you’ve pressed Lck now sets the receive

Don’t forget to unclick Lck when you’re done.

I got this from the manual here (funnily enough).