Windows Rant - The tyrrany of Windows Updates

Since I've mostly been ranting about Linux configuration / migration type things here in recent months, you may be forgiven for thinking that I dislike Linux, and would love folks to be using Windows instead!

Alas, that couldn't be further from the truth! I just couldn't be bothered inflicting a medium-long form rant about the tyrannical regime of forced Windows Updates!  (Those who follow me on Mastodon will however know that I do rant about this much more frequently:  About once a month currently, as that's the frequency of the forced Windows 11 machine reboots from IT at work, while my personal machines are no longer subject to any of that anymore thankfully!).

Since I'm writing this today / now,  you're correct if you guessed that I'm ranting about it right now, as my office computer went offline about 2.5 hours ago for one such forced update, and hasn't come back online again yet!  (With luck, it hasn't bricked itself via Bitlocker, requiring the stupid recovery key to be entered on the physical machine to unlock it... hopefully I don't end up finding out tomorrow morning that that is what has transpired this time again!  While I've had a relatively good run in recent months, my colleague and I have both previously had strings of these BIOS-bricking problems before...),   

Anyway, given that such updates on our work machines typically takes them out of action for anywhere from 1 hour, up to in some cases 3-4  (while the Windows UI always cheerfully predicts "4-5 minutes" (i.e. this time was quite a bit beefier, at 8 minutes instead), I can only wonder how much "lost productivity" there has been *globally* from all these effing automatic Windows updates (as well as the impact of all that global electricity and bandwidth usage shuffling all those update patches around)?!  🙄

So yeah... to say I'm not a fan of this frequent-update-treadmill is an understatement!

 

Windows Terminal Tip - New Tab Behaviour

Saving this here to save me another mad search again next time:

 

If using "Windows Terminal", to make the "New Tab" behaviour sane, go into each relevant profile, and change the "Starting Directory" setting to "./"  (i.e. current directory that the active tab is using)

 

Notes: 

* This makes the behaviour match watch every other OS does, and what you'd naturally expect, when trying to fork up another terminal tab to work on a sub-task from the same deeply nested folder

* The stupid default value here defaults to "%USERPROFILE%, which is akin to opening a new window from the start menu, located miles away from where the files you want to work on here and now live!

Hard Earned Lessons When Doing Backups on Windows Using Robocopy

This afternoon, I tried updating the set of secondary backup drives I'd previously spent Easter weekend painstakingly (and very frustratingly) spent waiting several *DAYS* to complete...

At the time, I'd ended up doing a bunch of reading, about what may have been going wrong (especially as it seemed awfully slow + hard to predict what was going on / when the copy jobs "may" complete). Well, turns out I needed to call on those lessons today, confirming that that does seem to have been the culprit  (i.e. it had only made progress over like 2-3 folders for the past month's data, when usually each time I'd copied those using Windows Explorer onto another drive, the process was usually way quicker!)

In Short:

It seems that that combination of "robocopy /mt" and "exFAT" drives in particular is slower than a frozen snail!🤬

So yeah, don't do what I did over Easter Weekend  (contributing to over half of my tech pain that weekend):

* 1) Do NOT use "robocopy /mt" when copying to an external HDD - Apparently, the "/mt" arg only really makes sense if you're copying between local drives, and really, only when one of those is a SSD even. (If it's over USB, or to anything other than NTFS... yeah, don't bother!)

* 2) Especially do NOT use "robocopy /mt" when copying to an "exFAT" formatted external hard drive

* 3) Probably do NOT use Window's Explorer's "Format Drive" right click menu to do so either!  (With my other external exFAT HDD drive, I had to get it to do a "scan + fix errors" on it after I aborted the first round of copies!) 

* 4) Oh, and make sure you've got something like "wakepy" running when you start up your copy job, so that your machine doesn't end up going to sleep during the copy operation before it finishes (resulting in a job you thought you left unattended to run as-quick-as-possible overnight actually terminating about 2-4 hours after you left the room) - This last tip applies to both Windows AND Linux...  Both of these apparently ignore the fact that robocopy or rsync are busily chugging away:  Robocopy doesn't set the necessary flag that wakepy does, while rsync on Linux err... I can't remember the details now!   (e.g. See my "wakepy_keepalive.py" script in my "cmdutils" repo)

 

Outcome: 

I've now replaced corresponding flags for the other drive's backup script too, so hopefully that will  faster when I get there!  (There's still half a month's data to copy at time of writing this post)

 

NOTE: The problem isn't as pronounced when the drives were formatted as NTFS, hence I hadn't really bothered. But as exFAT... yeah... big mistake!  (It's too late to reformat those drives now and re-copy them from scratch again without having to waste another weekend. I'm better off making a third set of backups instead, to be able to have rotating backups instead!)

 

Computer Hardware Adventures - Resurrecting Desktop Workstation #1

For the past year, I've been forced to use my "secondary" (+ newer) workstation, as I woke up one morning to my former primary workstation (from 2018) having a severe bout of hardware-related instability. 

Granted, this secondary workstation has actually been a vastly better machine in most regards, as it has actually been more of the setup that I'd originally been going for in 2018 (see details below).  And also, this switch has helped postpone having to address a several "storage crunch" I'd been experiencing on the primary machine  (i.e. I'd gotten to the point where my Photos/Media drive had actually *run out of space*, and I had to quickly offload as much "non-critical" stuff as I could to a mix of "other drives on the machine, for "more important" stuff, and only a secondary drive for all the "not very important" stuff)

Anyway, for "reasons", I've come to finally get around to trying to resurrect this machine now at last!  (I'd actually mean to do it by this time last year... but then procrastination over finding "the right" replacement PSU and/or trying to fit that in against work/holiday schedules has meant that this has only happened now...)

This rambling post will be about the journey of trying to get this working again, and also the upcoming challenges of figuring out how this step now fits into my grand scheme for rejigging how I run all my computing setup (i.e. both the "Linux migration" project, but also the "two workstations / two locations, one big stash of data that needs backing up and syncing") 

Windows 10 EOL -> Linux Migration Attempt - Part 1

With this week's official EOL of support for Windows 10, the impetus to try to look into migrating to Linux again for my personal desktop workstations has grown stronger again. Especially as I refuse to have my personal machines associated with Microsoft Accounts that will inevitably mean that various personal info gets inadvertently leaked onto OneDrive (including various sensitive files / settings / etc.), it feels like time to give this another crack, now that I'm using actual desktop workstations instead of laptops with weird hardware...

As I documented on this blog many years ago, the last time I tried switching to Linux, things didn't go so well back then. Particularly, as I was on a HP laptop that had a bunch of very-hard-to-support crap, and I was trying to dual boot it. I'm hoping though that things go smoother this time through a number of different decisions!

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.