Guides

How to shrink installed Steam games with Windows’ built-in compression (compact.exe)

Compress an installed Steam game in place with compact.exe and LZX or XPRESS: the exact commands, how to check the savings, how to undo it, and the caveats.

LZX vs XPRESS for games: which Windows compression algorithm to pick

What LZX and XPRESS4K, 8K and 16K do in Windows file compression, the CPU vs ratio trade-off, real LZX results from four Steam games, and why some games barely shrink.

How to peek messages in an Azure Service Bus dead-letter queue

Read dead-lettered Azure Service Bus messages without removing them: the portal’s 100-message peek, paging a whole DLQ from .NET, JavaScript and Python, and the reasons.

How to resubmit dead-lettered messages in Azure Service Bus without losing any

Send Azure Service Bus dead letters back safely: what the portal’s Re-send leaves behind, a send-then-complete loop in C#, duplicate detection, sessions, topics.

Azure Service Bus emulator vs the cloud: the differences that bite in tests

How the Azure Service Bus emulator differs from the cloud: quotas, one-hour TTL, no Entra ID, management on port 5300, zero counts and silent session receivers.

Gmail drops “Send mail as” for other addresses in January 2027: what you can do

From January 2027 Gmail stops sending from Yahoo, Hotmail, GMX, iCloud and own-domain addresses, and ends Gmailify and POP fetching. Every option to keep using your address, free ones first.

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How to keep sending push to your OneSignal subscribers through your own Firebase

Over OneSignal’s 1,000 MAU free limit? Export your subscribers’ FCM tokens through the OneSignal API and send to them directly with Firebase Cloud Messaging v1. No new app version, tested on Android.

How to export every version of a Vagrant box from HCP Vagrant and host it yourself

A tested bash script that downloads every version, provider and architecture of a box from HCP Vagrant (Vagrant Cloud), computes sha256 checksums and writes the metadata.json Vagrant needs to keep versions working from S3, R2 or any web server.

HCP Vagrant shuts down: where to move your Vagrant boxes, and what each option keeps

HCP Vagrant Registry (formerly Vagrant Cloud) stops on 31 December 2026. A comparison of the ways to keep hosting boxes: static metadata.json on S3 or GitLab, Artifactory, or a registry that speaks the Vagrant Cloud API.