Troubleshooting

I was pushing some old data through an API at work when I received a weird error message. The API coughed up a hairball. It responded that I had u200b at position 154, and if I needed that character, I’d have to encode it. But I looked at position 154 and it was a number. Nothing weird. So what’s u200b, why does a problematic character exist, and how do you clean it up?

U200b is a Unicode non-printing space. It’s meant to assist typographers in doing page layouts, and it’s extremely useful in certain languages that don’t use the Roman alphabet. But those of us who use the Roman alphabet may go a lifetime without needing it.

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The term root cause is used in engineering and related disciplines. It simply means identifying the source of a bigger issue. Finding the root cause helps to keep the problem from happening again.

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I picked up a cool-looking old tube radio the other day. Unfortunately it doesn’t work. When you turn it on, instead of a signal, you hear loud buzzing. Here’s what causes tube radio buzz and how to get it fixed.

Of course we assume any problem with a tube radio is the vacuum tubes. But loud buzzing is usually caused by bad capacitors, not tubes.

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What does No Internet Secured mean? It’s potentially the least helpful error message in all of Windows 10. And it doesn’t help that it doesn’t look at all like an error message either. So let’s talk about what it means when Windows 10 says No Internet, Secured, and more importantly, how to fix it.

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