Fixing Picasa3 suddenly freezing on Windows10 (July 2025)

This evening, Picasa suddenly started freezing on Windows 10 here.  (Yes, it has been officially discontinued for years now... but for my workflow, it is still much better than many of the alternatives I've tried, and so, until I manage to get my own self-built alternative up and running, I'm continuing to use it...)

After a whole bunch of sleuthing (including deleting my old DB and rebuilding it, in case of some database corruption there), it turns out that the culprit was Windows Defender!

TLDR:  To fix this, add an exclusion for the following setting (i.e. "Block Untrusted Fonts") for Picasa3.exe 

EDIT:  Posted too soon!  While doing that gets things moving a little at least, a few seconds later, after letting you scroll, it will again lock up, while it now starts another batch of CPU activity.  Doh!   (Trying again with disabling a whole lot more to see what sticks...)

EDIT 2: Tried a bunch more stuff, but annoyingly each "fix" only seems to last about 5 seconds before Windows Defender catches on and locks down even harder!

Things that didn't go down well:

* Going through disabling *every* checkbox in that infernal program-settings-override dialog.  Doing that just makes it worse it seems!

* Switching "Compatability Mode" to "Windows 8" - This worked for about 5 seconds (i.e. longer than when just doing "open + scroll" tests, but still it locked right up!

Ultimately, after an hour of testing this crap, I'm going have to call it a night on this here, and have ended up filing a bugreport with MS about this... hopefully they do resolve it!  Gah!

(PS:  The project to again try to migrate my personal workstation to Linux ahead of October just got another massive boost again tonight!)

[Firefox Tip] Useful Shortcut for Checking on What's Going Bad (Memory / CPU Usage)

Just learned of a useful tip for current versions of Firefox to bring up the "about:processes" page (that shows memory + CPU usage of various pages + extensions)

It turns out you can use the "Shift-Esc" hotkey to quickly activate it 

Noting this here so I can find it more easily for myself in the future

Thanks @carey@mastodon.nz for the tip!

Tip: Getting Threaded Conversations Working Consistently Across Your Desktop Outlook Mailbox

Here are some notes on how I've got Outlook set up to make my work mailbox a bit more manageable. Most of these things are probably officially documented "somewhere", but it's nice having a quick guide for getting a setup that seems more sane (for anyone coming from Gmail)

 

This post comes about because, while I had this working in my Inbox, I found that this was not the case for my other folders once I moved threads there. Hence my search for answers. 

Short Instructions  - For Enabling Threading on "Other" Folders (see image above):

1) Go to one of the affected folders
2) Go to "View" tab on Ribbon
3) Enable "Show as Conversations"
4) In the confirmation prompt, click "All Folders" (vs just "This Folder")

I suspect I'll have to go in and redo this for any new folders I add at some point in the future. But at least this gets all the current ones working nicely.

Bonus Tip:  Fixing the need to triple-click on the annoying little triangles to collapse threads

Make sure you've got that "Always Expand Selected Conversations" thing from that menu selected, which fixes that problem (it seems).

Oh, and you need to do that per-folder... unfortunately, this case doesn't show the handy "change for all folders" popup.

VMWare - Getting copy-paste support working

While doing some work in a VM today, I discovered, much to my chagrin that VMware was not allowing me to copy text from the VM back out into the host machine! As can be imagined, this is a massive pain if you're trying to Google a frustrating error message, or even to extract the error logs to file bug reports.

The method I'm reposting here has been tested to work with "VMware Workstation 16 Player" (16.1.0 build-17198959) on Windows 10. I'm reposting it here mainly so that I can find it again easier the next time this breaks, but also since the original post may end up going away (given that shabby state of the forum it's hosted on).

 

Original Link (by "pyhoff")

https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Workstation-Pro/Copy-paste-not-working-in-VMWare-Workstation-15-Pro-after-the-15/m-p/1841561/highlight/true#M109372

 

Steps:

1) Ensure the VM isn't running

2) Locate the "Virtual Machines" folder. It should be under your Home Directory / Documents folder.

3) Navigate to the VM in question

4) Open up the ".vmx" file in a text editor

5) Add whichever of the following defines are missing from that file  (I just added all of them):

isolation.tools.copy.disable = "FALSE"

isolation.tools.dnd.disable = "FALSE"

isolation.tools.paste.disable = "FALSE"

isolation.tools.hgfs.disable = "FALSE"

6) Save the file and start the VM again

7) Bi-directional copy and paste should now be working.

Getting rtree (0.9.7) and PyInstaller (3.4) to Work Together

This is a quick note on how to get RTree (0.9.7) and PyInstaller (3.4) to play nicely together, so that if you've got a script using RTree (e.g. for example, a script that calls trimesh.proximity.thickness()) that you need to compile into a .exe so that non-technical users can run it as a standalone binary without setting up a Python dev environment first.

These instructions are based on what worked on the project I'm working on, and are only tested with the versions listed on Windows 10. I haven't actually tested this on Linux, since most of the Linux users of this program are already doing a lot more coding work and will have dev environments set up anyway, that it doesn't matter for them.

Hopefully this helps someone else someday. 

Brave New World - Goodbye Scons + Mingw

Today, I finally had to bid farewell to the build system that's been serving me so well for the past 10 years (well, apart from that brief stint where I had to switch over to msvc for a few weeks as the build was broken). Yesterday, the scons build system was finally removed from Blender, leaving just cmake.  *sob*

GPencil - Using bpy to generate strokes programatically

In response to a question on BlenderArtists this morning, I spent a few minutes poking around with the Python API to check whether it is possible to generate GPencil strokes using a script.

Example output from my test script - It just generates a set of 5 lines in 3D space as a demo of how to use this api

For the benefit of everyone, I've included the test/demo script I wrote at the end of this post. You should be able to just copy and paste it into a text editor (fingers crossed it doesn't grab any of the HTML crap in the process) and start playing around.

Use cases for being able to create Grease Pencil strokes using Python include loading in stroke data from other apps, or for providing addon developers additional ways of adding in-viewport annotations without having to hack around with bgl and draw handlers.

DRY considered harmful

Increasingly, I've been coming to the view that the DRY (i.e. Don't Repeat Yourself) principle is something that ends up being far too easy to abuse/overuse, leaving you with piles... nay, nasty tangled rose thickets of complexity that quickly snowball out of control. In fact, I'd go so far as to argue that our "cures" for this - templating, generics, class hierarchies + networks (i.e. basically most "OO") - only make things worse most of the time, especially when everyone starts lauding them as "silver bullets" when the see them.

Another probably controversial and related view I've arrived at in the past few years is that I now consider nested/chained event callbacks as evil - it only takes one or two run-ins with these to realise that it really sucks when you have a UI which inexplicably starts running slow as molasses and has a penchant for double/triple redrawing itself with a very visible white/blue flash each time, only to find after hours and days of blood curdling debugging that this is because the callbacks start becoming unintentionally reentrant by calling each other repeatedly...

For an all too familiar take on this, see: http://www.benkuhn.net/rha

Put simply, DRY applies a LOT less than you probably think it does! In fact, it can hurt readability faster than if you'd just left all the repetition in there..

[Second Attempt] Getting Ralink RT3290 Wifi working on Linux Mint 15 (and HP Envy 17)

Last year, I posted a short tutorial about a failed attempt at getting a stable wifi connection on HP Envy 17 under Linux (Mint 15) with the crappy Ralink RT3290 card it uses. Initially, things looked promising with that fix... that is, until I was about 90% complete writing that article, and the whole machine locked up, in what I soon came to learn was known as a "kernel panic".

Yesterday, in preparation for a potential repartitioning attempt sometime "soon" to resolve some upcoming disk-space availability issues (i.e. I initially set aside > 500GB of my disk for Linux, but since I'm not using it that much now, the measly 200 GB for Windows is almost exhausted now), I finally got around to uploading to Github the sources for the patched driver I've had running on Linux since my last post.



Quick Links + Instructions
* The sources can be downloaded from:
 https://github.com/Aligorith/ralink3209_drivers/tree/x64_PanicFixesPorted
(NOTE: To be clear, you need to be on the "x64_PanicFixesPorted" branch, NOT the master)

* IIRC, you should be able to just compile that straight (without any further tweaks), and then install it as per the instructions in my previous tutorial.

Windows Tip: Adding an item to the context menu for a particular filetype

This afternoon, I set up Qt5 (or rather, PyQt5) with the Python 3 interpreter so that I could have a play around with the new stuff (e.g. integrated widgets, etc.) in QML/QtQuick 2 (which ships with Qt5). By and large though, I still want to use Python 2 for the bulk of my work for the time being, so that got me thinking about adding context menu item to all the Python files so that would run these using the newer interpreted instead.

Here's what you need to do on Windows 8 to do this:
1) Start: regedit

2) Navigate to:  HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Python.File\shell

3) Right-click on shell -> New Key. Call this something like "Run with Python3" (or whatever you want that command to be called in the menu

4) Right-click on the folder/key created in step 3 -> New Key. Call this "command"

5) Double-click on the "(Default)" entry under command. Enter the command to run the Python interpreter as the new value for this entry

6) Repeat the process for HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Python.NoConFile\shell 
     (NOTE: this step only applies when dealing with Python files. If you're doing this procedure on some other file type, replace all the "Python.blah" bits with the relevant types for the filetype you've got)


I'm just writing this down here so that I know where to look next time I need to do this :)

Firefox Tip: Easier navigation when browsing the source code for pages

One of the things which has annoyed me about Firefox's "View Source" feature for a while is the lack of a back button (and perhaps an addressbar for good measure). This is most noticeable when you've jumped into one of the stylesheets or scripts linked into the page, and you now want to go back and check exactly how that gets used in the main page.

Sometime over the last year or two, I eventually stumbled across a way involving the use of the Backspace key, which apparently does do this. I suppose it's ok in a pinch, but there's got to be a nicer way (or at least some addons which do this!)

After a brief search tonight, I found the answer here. Apparently, if you just append "view-source:" in front of the URL for the page you're trying to check on, this will display the source code for that page within the browser window itself, allowing you to use all the standard controls you're used to. Sweet!

Quick Tip - Filter by Name in Animation Editors

Just a quick tip about the animation editor filtering options which you may/may not be aware of, but which came up in #blendercoders this evening.

(I can't remember whether I've documented this before, so I might as well do so now; repeating this for anyone who may have missed it the first time may do some good anyway)

The Taming and Return to Windows 8

For the past 2 months, I've been using Linux almost exclusively for all my serious computing work (not including early-morning web/news/email checkups on my Android tablet). But since yesterday, I'm now spending a bit more time in Windows again. Read on for details of how/why this came up, and what I needed to do to make this a viable option.

Firstly, some screenshots of what this now looks like :)

"File Explorer" opening without starting in one of the blasted "libraries". Note the nice theming on show everywhere. For example, check out all the window border themeing and transparency effects, scrollbars, back/forward buttons, taskbar, etc.

A start menu again - with good access provided to everything that's important. Namely, quick shutdown/sleep access, documents/downloads/pictures access, quick navigation to folders without clicking (via cascading menus on the "Computer" entry)

The "fixed" taskbar - quick launchers for apps without having the confusion that pinning them causes (i.e. pinned app launcher becomes the window indicator), and multiple instances of the same app can be opened without appearing beside each other.

Getting NVidia Optimus + Intel HD 4600 + NVidia 740M on Linux Mint 15 (64-bit) Working

I've been postponing this (fixing up the graphics drivers) step of my Linux dual-boot setup on my HP Envy 17-j007tx process for a few weeks, but today I finally got around to sorting out these issues.

This had been put off several times already, given the various tight deadlines I was facing and the fact that apart from some minor inconvenient issues (i.e. heat issues + shortened battery life + a few OpenGL rendering glitches) there weren't any really pressing issues for which it was essential that I got my NVidia card working (especially considering the price of failure: a non-functioning Linux setup, potentially with a forced return to Windows 8).

Blender Tip: Disabling Path Following for Curve Parents

Recently I investigated a bug report and a similar thread on BlenderArtists about how to have greater control over how objects behave when parented to curves.

For instance, sometimes you want to parent one object to the curve object, so that the two components will be translated/rotated/scaled together. That is, when you go into edit mode on the curve and try to move the endpoints of the curve, the position of the child objects should not change, moving relative to the moved points.

To have child objects ignore changes to the curve path, simply disable the checkbox in the "Path Animation" panel header. This setting controls whether a "Path" (i.e. a tessellated representation of the first curve island within a curve datablock, with positions on this accessed using a parametric parameter - similar to the "Offset Factor" in the Follow Path constraint) is generated and used to determine the parent location that child objects see. It is enabled by default to make curve following animations easier to achieve.

Canon 7D and Linux Mint 15 64-bit (With USB 3.0 ports)

Yay! After over a week of failed attempts, this evening I finally managed to get Linux importing photos off my Canon 7D.

"Grape Flowers" - One of the images I managed to import off

Searching around on the internet, apparently this is a very common problem ([1] [2]) for 64-bit Ubuntu-based systems (12.10 onwards or so) with USB 3.0 ports (USB ports are apparently unaffected).

I managed to get this working by following the instructions here, and using digikam to import.
I can probably get this working with another application as well (e.g. gtkam - I'll try that next time, since digikam doesn't really create directories that well)

Blender Tip: Keyframe Selection Hotkeys

Yesterday while browsing the comments section the Caminades blog, I noticed a feature request relating to a feature to select all the keyframes within a channel in the DopeSheet Editor. At the time, I thought: surely this already exists! I'm sure I've implemented something like this, which was ported over from an earlier feature in the old 2.4x days... Apparently I did implement said feature, but apparently only in the Graph Editor! Grief!

While checking out the code for the mappings used, I realised that it would be handy to let animators out there know what the mappings were. I've probably posted about these in the past, and if I have, it's probably been a while since I did so and people may not have seen it (or have forgotten by now). So, a little reminder probably won't hurt.

So, without further ado, here's the logic behind the current mappings.

Linux Dual Booting Adventures: Part 3 - Installing Linux (Tutorial for HP Envy 17-jXXX)

In this post, I'm going to try to document the process I used for installing Linux Mint 15 (Cinnamon) on my HP Envy 17-j007tx alongside the preinstalled Windows 8. Hopefully this will be useful to someone out there, just like the post that I based much of this process on helped me (cheers to Larry Mulcahy!)

I'll start with a condensed version of the process I employed. Along the way, various missteps taken will be noted/numbered, and discussed at the end.

Ok, let's get started!

LaTeX Tip: How to define variable like \subtitle{...} which can be used from the preamble

Quite often when working with LaTeX, it is quite convenient to be able to define things like subtitles and/or other extra fields to be included in the title section, as per the screenshot below:

Now, before we go any further, I should mention that I am aware of the existence of ready-made custom document classes out there in the wild which often provide the necessary bits and pieces already. But, for argument sake, let's say that we want to keep things lightweight (i.e. fewer deps on external packages) or want to know how to do this in future should the need arise.

Tip: Vim Config Files on Windows

On Windows, Vim's config files appear to be stored/read from:
C:\Users\%UserName%\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Vim

Unlike on Linux, simply placing a ".vimrc", or a "_vimrc" in your "Home" directory (aka C:\Users\%UserName%\) has no effect.