Month: November 2020

Is there a Clipboard for Windows 10?

What are the freely available Clipboard programs, if any, for Windows 10? Are there such? I don’t want ads in it and I prefer it simple as possible. No crazy or complex features. I’m only after a simple copy-paste of the short history of what I’ve copied on my desktop. I find this useful for my productivity. I somehow always ending up in open a Notepad and copying the items in there. It works but a clipboard would be better in my opinion.

ANSWER

Windows 10 already comes with a built-in Clipboard Manager. This was from an update some time ago. However it is not enabled by default, buried somewhere in the Settings and you will have to activate it. This feature is not very well known. But it is there and it works as expected.

To activate:

Open Settings via any of the following ways:

  • You can either search for it if you have that search bar on your Windows taskbar.
  • Start typing “Settings” when you have the Windows Start Menu opened.
  • Open the Start Menu then, then click on the Gear icon on the left hand side of the menu.
  • Windows + i shortcut key combo.

Once you are in Settings, go to System. That should be the first icon entry at the top.

You will be taken to another page where there are items at the left hand side. Scroll down and find Clipboard.

Under Clipboard history, toggle the button to On.

To get to your clipboard history, simply press Windows + V shortcut key combo. It will appear as a floating box over your last active application. Otherwise, it will show up on the right side of the desktop on top of the system tray.

The clipboard can contain a max of 25 entries. It is a FIFO (first in, first out) stack so the oldest entry will go out first once that entry limit is hit.

It supports plain text, HTML and images up to 4MB size.

Your clipboard history can be synced across your Windows devices. Be warned that if you enable this it means you are allowing Windows to save the history on Microsoft servers. Make sure you don’t have sensitive information in there when the Sync functionality is enabled.

Re-publish Kafka record not setting partition number?

Well, I plan to re-publish Kafka records that my app is consuming to another Kafka topic on another host (internal only). This sort of lets other groups consume data from this topic without having to create connections outside of the private network, since the original data source is a 3rd party vendor. They can then also do their own transformations or other business logic on it as if they were consuming from the original source. Delay from source to re-publish should be minimal. Will still be close to real time.

What I normally do when producing records is not to set a partition by default. Would this be okay when re-publishing records? Will there be conflict with original record partition number to the target topic partition?

ANSWER

How many partitions does your target topic have? Do you have freedom to create as many partitions as the source?

(1) If you can create 1:1 partitions then my suggestion is to retain the original partition number of that record when you publish to the destination topic.

(2) You can also assign the partition in a round-robin way when you have lesser partitions on your target topic. Save metadata info of that record in the headers, such as original partition assignment and etc. Perhaps that will be useful down the line for your consumers.

(3) Lastly, you can NOT assign a partition number. Instead, let Kafka do the magic for you. When no partitions are set, Kafka will determine the next partition in a round robin method. You can do this with a null value instead of an int for partition number.

Bottom line is that it depends on the project requirements, I suppose, or more so on the infrastructure of your destination Kafka.