I'm assisting someone with their newly bought laptop. I'm not real used to windows, been on Mac for a long time now. We did some manual uninstalling of things, got them setup with their existing license that they still had for office 2016. We also had to change the GPU drivers for intel ARC to the official ones from NVIDIA in order to run Premiere. I also ran the powershell script Windows 11 debloat found here https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat . Which, with no particular evidence, I do have some suspicions might be where the issues has arisen from. I mostly just wanted it to disbable telemetry but I did remove a small handful of applications and disabled some other settings with it.

Anyway, we've noticed now that opening some PDF documents resulted in inconsistent text rendering, some words had dodgy kerning, some characters were missing bits of a letter, and all letter 'a's simply didn't render at all. Worst of all, when they copied text from the PDF and pasted elsewhere, completely different text was pasted. This persisted using Firefox to open the PDF so it's not narrowed down to just Acrobat. Also in Acrobat, opening PDFs returns an error message along the lines of "the font 'KLZARO+EX_CFF_Wingdings' contains a bad /BBox" though whatever bizarre random combo of letters and numbers font name is displayed in this message varies. It looks like we have corrupted system fonts.

Is there a good way to fix this?

The confirmation page says the order is confirmed but instead of providing tracking information, it has a button that says 'Download Shop to track package'. Obviously I'm not going to do that, but I do want to track my package.

I thought I could at least click the link to see if somewhere in the chain of steps that would normally follow if one were going to download the app, I might glean the tracking number so I can track the package, but unfortunately, the shop app that I refuse to get on principal because of the shady tactics used to coerce people in to downloading it is even worse than I expected because it can't even scam people competently. The download button is supposed to generate some kind of QR code for you phone. I hoped this QR code might actually have embedded the tracking number in it, in which case I could just grab it that way, but it looks as though the QR code is failing to generate, instead I'm seeing what looks like a heavily zoomed in screencapture of a website with home search trolley and account icons and a sentence partially covered up by a swirly arrow logo. I thought it might have been my browser, but it's the same even on Chrome.

I now can't even use the shop app even if I wanted to, because whether I allow it to be installed on my phone or not, there will be no means I can think of where the tracking number can be transmitted to it so, and because the online store hasn't provided a real tracking number I can't do things the normal way either. Anyone know how to get around this? Or at least force the QR code to actually generate so maybe I can extract something useful from it?

I'm backing up my photos from a trip to my computer and have just discovered how frustratingly difficult it seems to be to use a computer to make my selection of a single still from the image sequences the Pixel sometimes takes (forget what it calls them).

I know you can you use the photos app but I want to use my computer (a mac). Preview just considers them stills, so it essentially picks one for me (I assume it's the last still in the sequence), that's usually what I want but they take up more space and if I can't choose a different still then it defeats the purpose.

EDIT: As it turns out, Top shot (the Google name for these 'image sequences' I was referring to), doesn't do what I thought it did. I thought it was just fancy burst mode where the shots in the burst are treated as one file on storage, and where the decision to use burst or not is automated with clever 'AI'. That's not totally wrong except that it isn't an 'image' sequence in the sense that I know it. It records a video and a still when you take a top shot. I'm not exactly sure, but I think basically the last frame is a still and everything you see before is a 'video'. The distinction here is that the video is a video in the sense that it isn't comprised of still images in common stills formats nor at the resolution and other capabilities of the pixel's still cameras. The video is a video file recorded in a video format, using a video codec, at a lower resolution, minus HDR and with the compression techniques of video leading basically to just drastically lower quality images. In essence if you use the photos app as intended to select a still from the sequence recorded as a top shot, you can select between 1 photo of the best available quality (depending on your stills settings) and multiple useless video stills of poor quality. This explains why all the posts I found whilst researching my query were from people who wanted to extract a video and a still, which I thought was odd because surely you would want the constituent stills comprising the video with which you could do whatever you wanted including making a video from them for some reason if it floats your boat. Now I realise it's because there is only a video and a still inside the 'MP.jpg' files and they just want to split those 2 elements apart, in fact I think a lot of those asking were trying to split them apart so they could delete the useless video and save space. Not thrilled to learn this. Definitely switching off top shot from now on as it is both useless in almost ever scenario, but also, due to the automated nature of when its used, taking up greatly increased storage space whilst delivering so much less benefit than I had presumed. Icing on the cake, Google apparently introduced this top shot feature some time ago and replaced an existing burst mode that actually worked as one would expect so now I can't invoke an actually useful burst mode on demand when I want it as one would have done in the past because the function... doesn't exist anymore, great!

Planning a trip to 2 countries. Want to buy travel insurance for the leg of the trip taking place in the second country, after the first.

As far as I understand, this should be fine, I specify the dates of the trip to the insurance company from the day I arrive in the 2nd country to the day I leave it and if need be I'll be able provide proof that I was there (boarding passes, tickets, passport stamps) if needing to make a claim. I'd also buy the insurance prior to leaving my home country, which I know is important. It all sounds theoretically fine but I'm just worried there's going to be some unexpected gotcha in doing this.

Obviously this will depend on the fine print of my specific chosen insurance and I'm reading through all 100+ pages of it, but nevertheless the ability for this to somehow contravene something in a counterintuitive or unexpected manner even if I don't see it explicitly spelled out worries me given how tricky insurance companies can be and I wondered if this was something generally known to be a problem.

UPDATE: called the insurance company I was considering. They said there was no problem with this, as long as I bought the insurance prior to leaving my home country, which was always the plan anyway. Otherwise, it doesn't matter if the 'journey' as they define it begins after departing from a different country to my home country.

Really as similar as possible but I guess the must haves for me are:

• Dark theme
• Swipe to type ability (I usually tap but definitely want swiping as well)
• Searchable emoji's
• Word suggestions

Nice to have:

• Text editing tools for moving cursor just one character at a time through button presses
• Clipboard button
• Copied text automatically becomes next suggested word the first time the keyboard is invoked after copying the text
• Suggested next word.

I want a still image layer to come on to screen by seemingly having been poured on. This is a 2d image in a 2d composition so it's all flat as if looking straight down at the surface having liquid poured on to it.

I have found a lot of liquid simulation tutorials that seem promising but they tend to look more like fairly realistic drips. What I want is for the image itself to initially become visible in a localised portion of the screen which would represent where the bottom of the stream of liquid poured off-camera from a height initially hits the solid 'surface' which in this case I guess would be the background of the composition and then for there to be disturbances like ripples radiating from this point and in their wake revealing and also displacing the image. I'd then have these ripples calm down and displace the revealed portions of the image less and less until I eventually have a fully revealed still image layer.

The exact mechanics of how this water pouring effect exactly 'reveals' the layer I haven't quite worked out, but I think if I could at least simulate the pouring liquid, ignoring the actual still image that will use this as a transition, I'll at least be part of the way there. The tricky thing is creating that kind of corona effects that you get when pouring liquid first hits a surface with a wavy little crown from which traditional circular ripples begin to radiate out.