Yahoo Messenger also censors messages

I already knew that Windows Live Messenger censors messages at the server. I thought Yahoo Messenger was better. It is not; it does the same thing and it doesn't even notify when message delivery fails. This is happening with messages sent between Trillian and Miranda IM, so it has to be sever-side.

The best solution is encryption. I recommend Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR).

Getting rid of my last name in Windows Live Messenger 2011

Windows Live Messenger 2011 tries to force people to use their real first and last name as their display name. There is no more display name option in Messenger, and the only way to change the name is via Windows Live profile settings on the web, where the web page requires a that both a first and last name is input. I went to a page showing unicode spaces and tried pasting those as my last name. Most resulted in an error, but one finally worked. I think it was U+202F narrow no-break space. It seems I don't have a space as my last name; the last name is gone.

Virtual TI 2.5 Windows 7 compatibility fix

If you run Virtual TI 2.5 beta 5 under Windows 7, it fails with an error dialog which says "Failed to set data for 'LastEmuVersion'". A simple workaround is always running Virtual TI as Administrator, but that gets annoying.

The error means that Virtual TI was unable to save settings in the registry. It attempts to save settings under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ACZ, and it is not allowed to write there. Instead, it should be saving them under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ACZ. Normally, Windows 7 registry virtualization would automatically fix this problem by redirecting writes HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\VirtualStore\MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ACZ, but something goes wrong.

To fix the problem, open regedit and grant yourself write access to KEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\VirtualStore\MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ACZ and all of its child objects. If the key doesn't exist, create it.