What do Ctrl+C and USB connectors have in common?

Nothing, except that I had a major revelation regarding each of them recently. It’s almost embarrassing to admit this, but here goes:

Ctrl+C copies the text from a dialogue box to the clipboard

This feature has been a part of Windows for a long time, but I have not known about it. Whenever a message box is displayed, pressing Ctrl+C copies the entire text from the box, with formatting, to the clipboard. What a tremendously useful feature!

USB connectors should always have the USB logo pointing up

It’s always a hassle plugging in USB devices. I always try to insert the connector the wrong way the first time, without fail. I have always been amazed that the USB group didn’t come up with a better system for this, given the popularity of USB. Turns out, they have. Every USB device is required to have the USB logo on its connector, and that logo should always be pointing up when inserting the connector. If the socket is mounted vertically, the logo should always be towards you. After learning about this I quickly discovered that a couple of my devices were non-compliant and did not feature a USB logo at all. I’m not the only one that wasn’t aware of this requirement, apparently.

So there you have it. Two incredibly useful bits of information, and I didn’t know about either of them. I’ll go and hide now…

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