Windows Store in-app purchase error - your purchase couldn't be completed

Issue

Can't complete an in-app purchase in Windows Store on a Windows 8.1 tablet. The in-app purchase was for Island Tribe game (to upgrade it to the full version).

After clicking buy and entering the password, following error would show up:

Your purchase couldn't be completed
Please try again later.

Trying again later didn't really help... The whole thing was making a certain 6 year old quite upset, so a swift resolution was required!

Automatically split and straighten scanned photos

I recently had a task to scan large number of old photos using a flatbed scanner. Scanning photos one by one would be terribly inefficient as I could normally fit 4 - 5 photos on the scanner. Scanning multiple photos on one page was obviously much faster, but it left me with another task of cropping and straightening photos afterwards. Again, doing this manually would consume too much time so I looked for some sort of automated solution.

Picasa hangs while manually adding people face tags

Google Picasa started freezing while manually adding people face tags. Difficult to say when exactly it started as I wasn't using this feature for a while and Picasa by default updates automatically in the background. When I noticed the issue the version of Picasa was 3.9.137 (Built 81).

The freeze was not permanent, but I had to wait for a minute or so for the application to become responsive again. This made the manual face tagging not really practical. Task Manager wasn't showing any unusual system activity during the time when Picasa was "frozen".

Issues controlling Xbox One with Logitech Harmony

Xbox One's ability to power-on and power-off your other devices (basically TV and AVR) is a cool idea but unfortunately it's not nearly as sophisticated as what Logitech Harmony remotes can do. For example, to switch on my Panasonic TV, a remote has to send power-on signal for a few seconds. While you can easily set this up on Harmony remotes, there is no ability to adjust this on Xbox One. Another, more universal issue is that while Xbox can power-on your devices, it can't change audio source on your AVR or input on the TV, which kind of defeats the whole point - you still have to find your other remote and change to correct inputs.