The Technology Vent and Rant Thread

[Greg Anos]

Don't hold your breath. . .

[tempest@de]

I won’t but my hope is mainly because since one of my problems was fixed even though for the IT guys there was no problem, which leads me to think they fixed it accidentally, so I hope the same will happen again, hope is all got right now.

With all this I’m not so eager to work, I’m willing the day to pass quickly, shame I can’t pass the time reading a book

[Greg Anos]

or listen to a book? (with headphones.)

[tempest@de]

I usually do that when I have to go file papers in the archive, it helps because that is a boring work.
I think I will put some books in a usb pen and bring them, It's not ideal but at least I can read in the computer, it helps to pass the time.

[DiapDealer]

For your information, Android Pie, flicking a notification out of the way after I've fully considered its import is not, in fact, "frequently 'dismissing' notifications like this." Of course I want you to keep showing them. Stop asking! Do you really believe people are ignoring notifications whenever they don't explicitly open the app that the notification was generated by?

[Katsunami]

Worthless... old stuff touted as new after it was broken on purpose...

I've been reading up on the Windows 10 October Update. Some of the 'new' features...

- Make Text Bigger (Wow. This was possible since Windows 95 through to Windows 7, pared down in Windows 8, and finally removed in Windows 10. I hope this is independent from the scaling option, as it used to be.)

- More Fluent Design/Acrylic look. (Yeej. Say hi to Aero's grandchild. Slowly, Windows 10 starts to look like KDE Plasma almost 10 years ago. We HAD semi-transparency and blurs in Vista and 7, but Windows 8 flattened everything.)

- Shadows under modern menu's. (It was about time, wasn't it? The ultra-flat Windows 8 interface was unusable. Fortunately, MS restored shadows to classic/normal Windows and menu's, but they took 6 years to get around to adding shadows to modern menu's.)

- Dark Theme (This has been available on Linux since the dawn of time. Worse, MS's incarnation doesn't seem to be a dark theme, it's completely and utterly 0,0,0 BLACK. That's not usable. Why not use the very dark gray schemes of editors such as Atom and Visual Studio Code?)

- More Emoji (I was waiting for that. Really.)

- Notepad gets tabs (apparently) and some new features, including a big _performance update_ (??) and it will supports Unix line endings. (Why did this take nearly 25 years? Still, Notepad stays next to useless. Just like Wordpad, Paint, Paint3D, and Mail. I don't know ANYONE who uses those programs on a regular basis.)

Granted, there ARE some useful features in there such as "Open Linux Shell here" (I'll have to look into that; I still use MSYS2 or Git Bash for a lot of shell tasks as I REALLY don't like the verbosity of Poweshell, and I'm disinclined to learn it because I have known the Unix commandline for almost 20 years.

[Blossom]

I'm looking forward to this update once the bugs are worked out. We spent hours trying how to make the text bigger on Windows 10 for hubby when he uses his TV as a second monitor. It can't be done currently. Scaling just puts everything out of proportion.

The emojis has me excited too. I use them in my bullet journal.

I use Notepad 2 so not too excited about the Notepad update. It's a little too late.

I want a way to get rid of Cortana. They were supposed to move her to the system tray. I have her disabled.

I still hate Windows 10 and don't think that will ever change.

Sent from my XT1528 using Tapatalk

[BetterRed]

@Katsunami - I wonder if the new Notepad will to allow me to create and edit Additional Data Streams as the old one does?

I use the old Paint when I want to do simple 'cut and paste' tasks within an image, it's something IrfanView seems to lack. Using GIMP (or PS etc) for simple tasks is a PITA if you don't use it a lot.

And I occasionally use Mail (like when I click on an email address on a website), for me it's just a simple interface to my hotmail account.

@Blossom - try this:



When you want it, press Win+S.


Aside: I'm still on 1709, does any one know if 1803 has been released to the corporate world yet, I have Update set to Semi Annual (i.e. Enterprise) + 60 days. I've lost contact with corporate IT, my old mates have either retired or moved on to other things.

BR

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Worthless... old stuff touted as new after it was broken on purpose...

I've been reading up on the Windows 10 October Update. Some of the 'new' features...

<...>

- Notepad gets tabs (apparently) and some new features, including a big _performance update_ (??) and it will supports Unix line endings. (Why did this take nearly 25 years? Still, Notepad stays next to useless.

I routinely replaced notepad in the Win3.X days, and have continued to do so since.

The biggest annoyance for me was no support for Unix line ends. At one point, I was admin for company Solaris boxes. I had to implement email nightly progress reports on the status of current jobs on the system. Emailing from Solaris to the Windows network wasn't a problem. But the reports were text files that showed up as attachments to the emails in Outlook. Users would double click the attachment to read them, and Notepad would be called to do the display.

Notepad was stupid, so when it saw the line feed char Unix uses as the EOL marker, it advanced a line, but didn't home the cursor because there was no corresponding carriage return. The users saw a stair step effect in the reports. I had to add a step to the script that sent the email converting the LF characters in the file to the CRLF combo Windows used by default to provide sanity.

Having Notepad finally grok Unix line ends is Microsoft being late to the party, but that is no surprise.

What I use here is Notepad2-mod. It's a fork of Florian Balmer's Notepad2 product. It's built on the Scintilla edit control, which adds code folding and syntax highlighting (and is also under the hood in Notepad++.) It can be set using a registry hack to replace built-in notepad, and I did. It does not have tabs (a deliberate design decision on Balmer's part), but I can have more than one instance at a time, and it invokes instantly. I have Notepad++ here, but Notepad2-mod does what I normally need, and I can live without tabs. I'm normally only editing one thing at a time.

See https://xhmikosr.github.io/notepad2-mod/

Just like Wordpad, Paint, Paint3D, and Mail. I don't know ANYONE who uses those programs on a regular basis.)

I haven't used Wordpad in years, never used Paint3d or Mail, and havent used Paint in some time. My Paint substitute is the open source Paint.NET. I have minimal image processing needs, and normally just crop, resize, and do minor color correction. Paint.NET does what I need, and is free and open source.

See https://www.getpaint.net/

Granted, there ARE some useful features in there such as "Open Linux Shell here" (I'll have to look into that; I still use MSYS2 or Git Bash for a lot of shell tasks as I REALLY don't like the verbosity of Poweshell, and I'm disinclined to learn it because I have known the Unix commandline for almost 20 years.

I used to use MSYS, and currently use Git Bash, and have an Open Git Bash here entry in the right-click Explorer menu. The Open Linux Shell here is more problematic.

I've run software intended to add desirable Unix commands since the MSDOS days. I had a Unix machine at home (an AT&T 3B1) before I got an actual PC, and when I got one I went looking for ways to make it more Unix like.

The solution I clutched to my chest was a commercial product called the MKS Toolkit. The developers were a consulting engineering firm in Toronto who wrote the Toolkit for internal use. When it got mature enough, they decided to release it as a product, and it became the "tail that wagged the dog" and thier main business.

The Toolkit implemented every Unix command that made sense in a single user, single taking OS. The selling point for me was a full DOS implementation of the Unix Korn shell, with everything save asynchronous background processes because DOS didn't do that. I was delighted.

When you installed the Toolkit in fullest Unix compatibility mode, the Toolkit INIT.EXE program replaced COMMAND.COM as your boot shell. INIT was loaded, pit a Login: prompt on your screen, and waited for a userid and optional password. The ID you provided was passed to the LOGIN program, which checked the ID against a Unix compatible /etc/passwd file. If it found a match, it changed to whatever was defined as that user's home directory, and ran whatever was defined as that user's shell. Exit that shell, INIT was reloaded, and you got a Login: prompt.

I had userids defined to run the Korn shell, vanilla COMMAND.COM, the shareware 4DOS COMMAND.COM replacement, and the multitasking DesqView environment. RAMdisk, cache, and mouse drivers were all loaded from CONFIG.SYS and common to all. I could switch environments without rebooting.

When Win 3.1 joined the party, the Toolkit was still in place. The default UI for Win3.1 was Program Manager, but you could use something else by changing the SHELL definition in the SYSTEM.INI file. I defined MKS ids that ran a script that copied a modified version of SYSTEM.INI with a different SHELL specification over the real one, then ran Windows with the specified UI. Worked a treat, and gave me the option of not running Windows and using one of the defined DOS environments.

The Toolkit did take a little fiddling. DOS used \ as the directory separator character, and / as the option delimiter. The MKS shelled expect / as directory separator character and - as option delimiter. There was a DOS function that could change what the option delimiter char was, and an MKS command called SWITCH that would make the change, like "switch -". Once the option delimiter char was remapped, you could use \ or / as the directory separator. Unfortunately, some DOS programs I used were hard coded with the DOS defaults, so I had to implement wrappers that did "switch /" before running the program and "switch -" when it exited to make things work as expected.

But for the most part, I was ecstatic. The DOS PRINT command, for example, loaded a resident extension that did time slicing, and let you send a job to teh printer in the background so you weren't twiddling thumbs waiting for the print job to complete before you could do more in your word processor. I used Korn shell aliases and functions in the Toolkit to implement the Unix [ilp[/] command on top of PRINT.

Open Linux Shell here presumes you have the Windows Linux subsystem contributed by Ubuntu parent Canonical installed. This is an extra install, and not part of the other Win10 updates (though the most recent one broadened Linux compatibility beyond the Ubuntu flavor.) The issue is that when you are in that environment, you are in Linux land, not Windows, and you have the issue of somewhat incompatible environments. Staying entirely in one or the other works fine. Communications and interoperability between them are more complex.

I have the Windows Linux subsystem installed here, but the Git Bash shell isn't gong away. It's compiled to use Windows runtimes, and is more useful in a Windows terminal session.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@Katsunami - I wonder if the new Notepad will to allow me to create and edit Additional Data Streams as the old one does?

I don't see why not, but I've never needed to do that.

I use the old Paint when I want to do simple 'cut and paste' tasks within an image, it's something IrfanView seems to lack. Using GIMP (or PS etc) for simple tasks is a PITA if you don't use it a lot.

IrfanView is a viewer, not an image editor. It will let you do resize and color correction operations, then Save over the original, or Save As to a new file. But it can call a defined image editor to work on the image you are viewing. In fact, you can define up to three. As mentioned to Katsunami, I use the open source Paint.NET, specifically intended to replace Paint. The author works for Microsoft, and IIRC, MS hired him because they were impressed by Paint.NET.

And I occasionally use Mail (like when I click on an email address on a website), for me it's just a simple interface to my hotmail account.

I use Firefox, and it's configured to open mailto links in Gmail.

Aside: I'm still on 1709, does any one know if 1803 has been released to the corporate world yet, I have Update set to Semi Annual (i.e. Enterprise) + 60 days. I've lost contact with corporate IT, my old mates have either retired or moved on to other things.

I'm running 1803, but I forced it. I wanted to see the new features, and it hadn't shown as rolled out to me and available for install.
______
Dennis

[BetterRed]

IV may not be a full-on image editor in the Photoshop/Gimp league, but it has a lot of editing features. I regard most of the Image menu options as editing features, and there are plugins to add more.

The Edit menu includes cut/copy of a selected area from an image to the clipboard, and you can paste the clipboard to an image edge. What it lacks is paste as a selected 'object', that you can move around on the current image. That's my main use of Paint, I thought they were going to remove it, maybe they removed it in 8 and put it back in 10, I never used 8 or 8.1.

I can load Paint, do the cut/paste/move, save, and upload the image file to here faster than PS/Gimp/Paint.NET can load. I used Paint.NET several years ago, had a lot problems with plugins so I switched to Gimp.

For image viewing I use FastImageViewer for RAW images, Very Large Image Viewer for big NASA style TIFFS, or HoneyView for comics and solid jpeg archives.

BR

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

IV may not be a full-on image editor in the Photoshop/Gimp league, but it has a lot of editing features. I regard most of the Image menu options as editing features, and there are plugins to add more.

Fair enough, and yes, those are editing options. It depends on what sort of editing you need to do. The sort of stuff I call Paint.NET for can't be done in IrfanView.

The Edit menu includes cut/copy of a selected area from an image to the clipboard, and you can paste the clipboard to an image edge. What it lacks is paste as a selected 'object', that you can move around on the current image. That's my main use of Paint, I thought they were going to remove it, maybe they removed it in 8 and put it back in 10, I never used 8 or 8.1.

And that sort of thing is why I use Paint.NET

I can load Paint, do the cut/paste/move, save, and upload the image file to here faster than PS/Gimp/Paint.NET can load. I used Paint.NET several years ago, had a lot problems with plugins so I switched to Gimp.

I'm not surprised Paint is faster to load than PS or the Gimp, but Paint.NET loads quickly enough here that I don't feel constrained.

The one thing I miss in Paint.NET is an airbrush tool, but that's not in Paint either. (It is in the Gimp.)

For image viewing I use FastImageViewer for RAW images, Very Large Image Viewer for big NASA style TIFFS, or HoneyView for comics and solid jpeg archives.

Hmmm. I hadn't seen Very Large Image Viewer. Noted for future reference.

I have an ancient version of Photoshop available. The last time I actually used it was for a big NASA TIFF. A chap elsewhere was trying to download a raw file from the Hubble Telescope and having problems. I could get it with no problem. He wanted the TIFF file rather than the JPG NASA recommended because he wanted to slice it up into pieces that could become part of interactive wallpaper on his PC. PS here was the only thing I had that would open and display a 100MB+ TIFF file. Everything else died horribly with out of memory errors.

I don't normally have a need to view image files that large, but VLIW looks worthy should I need to.

Thanks!
______
Dennis

[trichobezoar]

I have way too many tablets/ereaders. I kind of miss the days when I read on a simple Nook Touch. Life was simpler then... And I actually enjoyed reading.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

<snip>
Aside: I'm still on 1709, does any one know if 1803 has been released to the corporate world yet, I have Update set to Semi Annual (i.e. Enterprise) + 60 days. I've lost contact with corporate IT, my old mates have either retired or moved on to other things.

MS might be snooping here - Windows 1803 just turned up, on a Sunday afternoon! :lol:

BR

[BetterRed]

That was painless, so far at least, clicked do it now, went up the street for some milk, by time I came back it was done.

Only obvious thing it meddled with was my taskbar - it reordered the icons. I have it configured to emulate the old quick launch bar; I drive it with WinKey+<digit> serquences, so the order of the icons is important to me.

BR