Software Wishlist September 2025

On that note, here's a bunch of other things I wish various software I use often would introduce

Summary:

1) Firefox - "Private Browsing Container Tab Type

2) Desktop Window Managers - Project-Based Application Window Grouping + Complete Window State Restoration on Restart  

 

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!)

Thoughts on Windows 11's "Recall" Feature

Seeing one of the latest threads this morning about Win11's Recall feature, I'm not surprised that it does what it does TBH

Some of these points overlap with comments I made earlier when news of this feature first broke. I can't easily find those now, but if/when I do, I may amend this post with those notes as well, as they better cover a bunch of other insights I don't think I've captured here as well.

 

EDIT:  Cool, according to this Ars article, they do seem to have put in place most of the reasonable safeguards I'd expect / recommend them to have.

How (Busy) Software Engineers/Scientists Use Their Computers - A Datapoint

Having spent a few years doing HCI research, I know very well the importance and value that getting data points (any data points at all) about how people set up their workspaces and organise their work/workspaces is - especially for anyone involved in Operating System UX, Personal Information Management (PIM), File Systems, or Web Browser UX work.

Today, I thought I'd make a quick post outlining my personal workflow, in the hopes that this will be a useful datapoint for anyone out there designing these systems (*wink wink* Microsoft ;).  Admittedly, the way I work is probably a bit of an outlier, but I there are many elements here that should be of general value. Hopefully this will be of use to some people out there who study this stuff :)

So, without further ado, here is an overview of my typical working environment.

Custom MSBuild Loggers for Blender Devs on Windows

Given that it was a long weekend here in NZ, I decided to take a little time off to work on a little "weekend project" I'd been wanting to work on for ages. (BTW, it wasn't the only weekend project I worked on this weekend, but it's the only one that will be of much interest to anyone else :)

Here's an obligatory screenshot showing the results of my work.

 The "cleaned up" Blender build output as a result of my project: blender_msbuild_loggers

Microsoft's Revamped "Paint"

This evening, it came to my attention that Microsoft has been working on an updated version of their classic "Paint" app, but "Windows 10-ified" and with support for basic 3D drawing/sketching...





Woah... this is an interesting move, though not completely unexpected, with the other basic 3D creation tool they bundle by default (IIRC) that's aimed more at people interested in 3D printing simple objects. Having begun my digital art journey with MsPaint in Windows 98 (I like to think I got quite skilled at drawing using a 2 button mouse on a pixel-by-pixel scale, "graduating" on to animate my first characters using MsPaint + MsAgent), it's interesting to see what the next generation of budding artists playing around with a "vanilla" PC will be able to start from.

Useful Tip: Changing command line prompt on Windows

I just came across a useful little trick this afternoon for making the Windows command line prompt (i.e. the one you get when running cmd, which shows the current directory) much shorter  (heck, you can set it to anything you like even!), so I thought I'd just note it here so that I can look it up again should I forget in future.

prompt [new_prompt_goes_here]

That's it! Just type this little command, and it will change the prompt that gets displayed.

Workspace Upgrade: New 27'' Monitor

Today, I finally went out and got myself a nice big 27 inch 4k IPS monitor for use at home. I'd been stewing and investigating move this for several weeks now (though the idea of getting a larger external monitor for use at home has probably been floating around over half a year now).

A few tips for working with Word 2013

Over the past few weeks, I've been bunkering down to write up a big chunk of work I've been doing for my thesis studies. To make it a bit easier for dealing with some of the journals that this will eventually get published in, I've been doing this work in Word again, having previous stuck to Latex for 3-4 years (with brief stints with LibreOffice).

While I do still prefer to do large docs in Latex (large docs being more manageable when you can just split them up into a collection of small files which can be accessed quite easily, not to mention the nicer reference management, and safe in the knowledge that your images won't disappear or become randomly detached from their captions after a single keypress), and waver between liking LibreOffice and then dropping it again a few weeks later after running into yet more clunkiness/incompatibilities,  it has to be said that there are some nice things about Word.

This post will cover a few things that you may/may not know about working with Word. Some of these I only really figured out recently, and found that they do improve things quite a bit.

Bye Bye Linux... For Now :(

After postponing for several weeks to let the dust settle down on several projects/commitments, and also to get hold of some external hard drives first, I've finally purged the Linux partitions from my HP Envy 17.

That "H" partition was where my 2 Linux partitions used to be... now reclaimed for storing all my stuff instead (and maybe home to some future Linux virtual machines instead).

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 :)

Notes on Windows Hacking - Identifying File Browsers and File Dialogs

If you stumbled across this post looking for information about how to identify File Browser windows (i.e. "explorer.exe" instances) and File Dialogs (i.e. Open / Save As dialogs), here is what you need to know:
- GetClassName(hwnd, className, nameBufLen)  or  className = win32gui.GetClassName(hwnd)  in Python with PyWin32 installed  gives you a string for identifying the type of window you're dealing with.

- CabinetWClass = The identifier for File Explorer windows
   - "Rebar" is the navigation toolbar containing the back/forwards, breadcrumbs, and search box
   - "Control Host" the shortcuts pane where favourites, libraries, and the folder hierarchy are shown
   - "Shell Folder View" is the pane where all your files and folders are shown

- #32770 = The identifier for Folder Dialogs (such as Open/Save dialogs)

Gah - Stupid Windows Updates - 7+ Taskbar Tweaker Broken

To the damned bastard(s) who made the changes included in the latest round of Windows updates which ended up breaking 7+ Taskbar Tweaker (by causing it to fail with a "Could not load library (107)" error):

Arrrrrghhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!! Thanks for so thoroughly breaking my workflow... May you spend the next ten years debugging the most hideous heisenbugs known (and not yet known) to man!

Bloody effin' dimwits!

Grrr!

Blast from the Past - Reviving my first computer (Windows 98)

With the Chinese New Year looming in a few days, I got the idea to revive an old project I worked on some 12 years ago: an interactive greeting for the Chinese New Year. Just like this year, it was the year of the horse, hence the impetus to revive the old project, which I ultimately didn't manage to distribute at the time due to various technical issues - namely, having used an absolute path to the character file needed to power the entire thing! There was just one problem: all the files for this were stuck on the oldest of my computers...

My Windows 98 Desktop - As it looked for many years when I still used the machine. The layout shown here is the one I'm most familiar with. Subsequently though, the layout would end up getting trashed everytime daylight saving changes rolled through.

So, for the past few days, I've been trying to find a way to transfer the files off the machine in question, my Windows 98 computer - the first one I had at home and which I learned to program on, among other things. However, with the ways that technology has evolved since we got this machine in early 2000 IIRC, it soon became apparent that making this happen would be quite a challenge.

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.

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!

Linux Dual Booting Adventures - Part 1: Getting the LiveCD Working

Last Wednesday, I finally managed to get the Linux Mint Live CD running on my new laptop, after over a week of failed attempts and a lot of reading online. Moments later, there was a strange wind outside, and the sky looked something like below:

Thoughts on Windows 8 and a New Laptop

A few weeks ago, I finally bought a new laptop as the successor for my long serving and well loved Toshiba. As much as I love the computing setup I have on the Toshiba (including what IMO is the best keyboard around. Period.), in recent months, a number of factors have conspired to remind me that eventually, I'd have to find (and adapt) to working with a successor for it.

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.

Qt Line Rendering Differences...

For about a year now, I've been somewhat baffled about a some annoying differences between the way sub-pixel line strokes with < 100% alpha assigned and drawn using QPainter differed between Windows and Linux (i.e. "cross platform" software in my books :P)

A few minutes ago, I finally stumbled across the answer ([1], [2]), while checking out a solution to another problem (namely, how to replace the scrollbars - or better still, access their internals to figure out the position of the trough and thumb in a cross-platform way, and use that info to figure out how to map a indicators/target locations to that - in QAbstractScrollAreas/QScrollAreas and their subclasses such as all the Item-View classes). Apparently on Windows, they use a custom rasterer on Windows, while directly using X11 on Linux. No wonder just changing flags had little to no overall effect on fixing the problems I was having!

Links
[1] http://www.zestymeta.com/2013/03/qt-and-peril-of-multi-platform.html   <- the post which alerted me to this problem in the first place
[2] http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2009/12/16/qt-graphics-and-performance-an-overview/   <- confirmation from the source...