Windows + V will change your life

You probably know all about this Windows trick but I didn’t until today. If, like me, you live by copy and paste I think you will find it very, very useful.

I think everyone knows that it is CTRL+C to copy something and CTRl+V to paste it. They probably teach it at kindergarten these days.

But if you use the WINDOWS key instead of CTRL+V to paste (i.e. press WINDOWS+V) you get a little popup of the last few things that you have copied so that you can pick the one you want. Very useful.

Windows 11 looks rather nice but I probably won't be upgrading to it

Windows 11 looks rather nice. Lots of neat changes to make things easier to use. Not sure if I’ll ever want to install an Android app on my PC, but it is nice to know that I’d be able to if I want to I suppose. And the graphical enhancements are beautiful.

The only snag for me is that according to the testing tool that has been released alongside this announcement, none of the PCs that I own will be able to run the operating system. It’s all to do with processor versions and Trusted Platform Modules.

I was hoping to keep my existing machine, which is five years old and does exactly what I want with a minimum of fuss, for a very long time. Perhaps I’ve been lulled into a false sense of security by the way that I’ve been able to put Windows 10 onto 10 year old machines. Anyhoo, I’m not in any hurry to get rid of my present platforms and so it looks like I’ll be sitting out of this upgrade. Which is a shame because I think that some of the new features are really, really nice.

In an age when electronic waste is a huge environmental problem, forcing people to get rid of working devices so that they can have the benefits that Windows 11 offers seems a bit out of touch. I really hope that as we get closer to the release date this situation changes for the better.

Update: I’ve had a proper think about this. Find my proper thoughts here.

Pasting Edge links as plain text

I hate it when software gets too clever for its own good. The otherwise wonderful Edge browser (it is the only one installed on my PC) has developed a really annoying behaviour when pasting web links into other programs. What I want to happen when I paste a link is that the link text is pasted into the target. So I can paste:

https://www.robmiles.com

..into everything.

This used to work fine, but after a recent “upgrade” my pasted text started appearing as hyperlinks. This is a clever thing to do, but it is not what I want. If I copy a link, I want to paste a link.

At first I thought it was something that Word was doing, but it turns out to be Edge that is the culprit. Fortunately it is easy to get rid of this “Improvement”. Click the three dots at the top right hand corner of your browser window. select Settings from the menu that appears and then select Share Copy and Paste from the settings menu. Then change the share copy and paste option to Plain text as you see above. Then your urls will be pasted correctly.

The Windows 10 Volume Mixer is Awesome

You might not know this, but on Windows 10 you can use the Volume Mixer to control the sound output from individual programs running on your PC. In the screenshot above I’m using it to silence the really annoying in-game music produced by the otherwise wonderful Scythe game. I’m always a bit confused by the background music produced by these digital boardgames. It’s not as if the physical copy comes with a CD or a download code.

The first thing that I usually do when starting a game like Scythe is to find the well hidden option that turns the sound off. Tonight I forgot to do that, and so we were stuck with a loop of unwanted music while we waited in the online lobby for others to join us. No matter, just right click on the speaker at the right hand side of the task bar, select Volume Mixer form the menu that appears and we could turn the output right down. It even remembers the setting for the next time you run the same application.

Most useful.

BitLocker Recovery Keys are scary

If there’s one thing guaranteed to get my pulse racing its a screen like this. It popped up half way through some updates that my lovely Surface Go was doing. Fortunately, once I’d recovered from the shock, I remembered that I’d seen it before ages ago on some machine or other. The solution to this scary problem is not to search for your Recovery Key, it is to hold down the power button until the machine shuts down. Then reboot and, with a bit of luck, the machine will just recover and start up as normal. That’s what my machine did.

If yours doesn’t you will have to find your key. The good news is that recovery keys seem to be assigned to your Windows account, not on a per-machine basis. So you can use another machine to log into your account and get them.

Fixing Windows 10 USB problems

Ever since I got my desktop (four years ago) I’ve had a problem with my mouse and Bluetooth connections randomly disconnecting. This was very irritating, particularly if it happened as I was coming into land or under heavy fire. Or both.

Number one son reckoned that my machine was possessed in some way, but it turns out that the truth is much simpler. I was allowing Windows 10 to turn off these devices to save power. I’ve no idea why a desktop machine should turn off your mouse and keyboard connections in this way, but it does. You have to explicitly tell it not to by using the USB Input Device Properties dialog above that you can find in the Device Manager. I made the change (for all my USB devices) a while back and it has worked for me so far.

Use Quick Access to work with recent files

Now and again I fall over something so useful that I regret not having used it before. Such is the Quick Access feature of Windows 10. I found it by mistake and it is really rather nice. It lists the files that you have just been using. You might not think that is very useful, but if you remember that lots of applications, for example all the Office apps and programs like Cura, will open a file if you drag it onto them and drop it. You can also upload files to the wonderful OctoPi printer controller by just dropping them onto the browser page.

So when I want to take my saved design file from FreeCAD into Cura I just have to drag it out of the Recent files folder and drop it onto Cura. This saves a lot traipsing through file open dialogs. Now I keep the recent files folder open on the desktop just for things like these.

Managing Audio in Windows 10

I’ve been recording sound effects for the new book I’m writing (I love saying that). Today I discovered that just because everything in your signal chain is supposed to be stereo, it is not guaranteed that it actually is. I was recording sounds from my my Kaossilator and it didn’t sound right. Turns out that this was because I was only hearing the left hand channel, but played on both left and right. Much confusion. Turns out that for some reason the audio on that device had become mono. I had to use the old school Control Panel fix it. First I found the sound settings, then I chose my microphone input.

Then I went to the “Advanced” tab and made sure that the default format was stereo. And then it all worked.

Screen Saver in Windows 10 is still a thing

I did a search for “Screen Saver” in Windows 10 today because I wanted to fiddle with/adjust the timeout settings. And I found this. It’s still here. I remember when it was a thing. And I love that old-school monitor. Still works too.

Windows for Free

In 2013, after a lot of effort, I bought myself a new laptop. It was a new fangled (for the time) UltraBook. I’ve used it on and off for years, lent it around the family and last week I popped a 40 quid SSD into it with the aim of speeding it up a bit. That worked a treat. Then I discovered that someone I know needs a laptop to work from home. And of course their employer won’t/can’t supply one.

So on Thursday I took the 7 year old machine from 0 to fully configured laptop in about 30 minutes. By the time I’d finished I had a newly setup machine with a new Microsoft Outlook email account. At no point did I enter any licence keys and it just worked. Just a tiny bit of fixing up because of a faulty touch screen.

The machine is well powerful enough and apparently it works a treat. Apple make a big fuss about the way they support their new smartphones for five years. Big deal. This was a seven year old laptop and it just worked. The Windows 10 installation was a breeze, I even had Cortana talking me through it.

If you have an old laptop that is not doing much, buy yourself a cheap SSD (I got a 250G one from Amazon for around forty quid) and slap a free copy of Windows Home on it. If you’re a student you can then top that off with a free copy of Microsoft Office 365.

The evil of HEIF

Picture the scene. You’ve just bought yourself an expensive Windows 10 powered computer. You’ve got it going and find the experience smooth and hassle free. You’ve put the wonderful OneDrive application on your iPhone and you decide to view some of the pictures you took with your iPhone on you shiny new computer.

And they look horrible. Finally, after a bit of searching on the internet you discover that to fix this you have to go into the Settings page for the Photos app and follow a link to install the “HEIF media extensions”.

Then you find out that the extension costs 79 pence. Just so you can view pictures that you took with your phone. At this point you’d probably be getting a bit cross with Microsoft who seem to be rather desperate for your money. I suppose it is a tiny amount of money, but that is really the point. I wonder how much Microsoft makes from this, and whether it is worth the damage to customer goodwill.

Oh well, I’ve just had to do this for my newly imaged PC. I must have installed a free solution last time. The strange thing is that I don’t remember doing it for any of my Surface devices….

Windows 10 Screen Shots in "Does exactly what you want" shock horror.

Long blog title. But it’s true. You might be surprised to learn quite a bit of my work involves cutting and and pasting. Particularly for screenshots. For a long time my weapon of choice has been the Windows Snipping Tool, which if you read the name quickly sounds a lot more exciting than it is.

Anyhoo, me and the Snipping tool have got along fine over the years and I was worried when I saw a warning message that it was being replaced. I was even more worried when I discovered that the new tool provides no easy way to capture the contents of a particular window on the screen. However, I can relax now. Because the latest Windows 10 upgrade has introduced a fantastic new way to grab, annotate and save parts of the screen. You don’t even need to start a special program. Just hit the three keys SHFT+WINDOWS+S to bring up a snipping menu, grab the thing that you want and then either paste it straight into your target using CTRL+V or open up the image editor to annotate it and save it into a file.

It works a treat. Worth knowing about.

Fixing broken Windows Services for Linux

Last week I upgraded to the latest version of Windows 10. And I rather like it. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the upgrade seemed to break my lovely Windows Services for Linux installation. When I tried to open my Ubuntu command prompt it just closed instantly. No error, no nothing. Wah. A bit of searching didn’t help, since most of the fixes were to an almost working system and mine was anything but.

After a bit of heart searching I deleted the application and re-installed it. This was rather annoying. I didn’t have any important data in the installation, but it took me a while to configure the machine with all the services I wanted. Fortunately, thanks to my habit of writing a diary when I do something like configure a computer I can retrace my steps to set everything up again, but it’s still a pain to have to do it.

Of course, the really bad news is that the reinstalled machine didn’t work either. But at least this one gave me an error code I could search for. Turns out that the fix was to turn it off and on again - in this case turn the Windows Service for Linux feature off and then back on again.

I wish I’d tried it before I deleted my original service, but at least I’m back running again.

Update: I’ve since tried WSL on other machines that have been upgraded and they all work fine. So it must be something about my particular machine.

Fixing browser problems after Windows 10 Upgrade

I finally got the latest Windows 10 feature update on my PC today. I like it. The improvements to the downloads folder are worth the price of admission alone. You now get to see your more recent downloads (the one that you actually care about) instantly, rather than having to wait for the folder contents to laboriously update.

The only problem for me was that the upgrade broke my browser, which started complaining about network problems. I did a bit of searching and in the end I fixed this by turning off the “Automatically detect settings” option in the Proxy configuration above, which you can find in the Network Settings for your machine.

Linux on Windows 10 is Awesome

I’m doing some web site work at the moment for Connected Humber. In the process I found about about Grav, which is another nice way to make static web sites that are simple to host, even on sites like GitHub.

I thought it might be nice to have Grav on my machine so I could play with it. Only problem is that it really needs to run on a Linux box. A while ago I mentioned how easy it is to get a Linux box running in the cloud with Azure. It turns out it is even easier to get Linux on a Windows 10 device using the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This procedure here is a good start, but I used this one because it also covers the installation of lots of tools that you will want to use.

Now, to be clear, the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is not the same as running Linux on your computer. It is also not the same as a virtual machine running Linux. You start it running and you instantly get a shell command prompt that you use to talk to you “Linux” installation which is really just a process on your Windows PC. There is no graphical interface (unless you are prepared to do a lot of fiddling about) and you would never use this in production. But it is fantastic for development.

You can install all your favourite Linux tools and they will just work. All your Windows drives are mapped into the WSL environment. Network connections just work. You can host websites and services locally and then hit against them from Windows programs and browsers. There is even a plugin for Visual Studio Code that lets you write the code on your PC and then deploy and test it on your WSL.

It has always annoyed me that sometimes I have to scrabble around for a Windows version of a tool that is readily available for Linux. However, with WSL I can just install and use it. In no time at all I had Apache2, PHP and all the underpinnings needed to run Grav. And after a bit of fiddling around with the apache2.conf file I had it running. The lack of a Linux windowed environment is not a problem for me at the moment. Lots of tools, such as Grav and NodeRed (which also works great) are used from the browser, which works a treat.

I’ve been using the Unix command prompt for longer than I’ve been using Windows (what with Windows not having been invented when I started). It’s really nice to be able to use those commands again on my Windows box.

If you want to learn Linux, you should install this and start playing. It’s awesome.

Blasting a new logo

I’ve added a new image to the LogoBlaster. Looks rather good.

Spotting a smile with Windows IoT

I’ve been working on my demos for the Insider Dev tour. One of the examples shows how to use Azure Cognitive Services to analyse a picture, find faces and see how happy they are. I’d like to use this in my demo, but I want to use the camera rather than a fixed image.

Anyhoo, I’ve got it working. The Raspberry Pi snaps a picture, sends it to the cloud and then gets back the location and happiness of anyone in it. I’m looking forward to showing it off next week.

I don’t intend to point the camera at the audience though……

ESP32 Bluetooth BLE to Windows 10 Universal Apps

So I’ve got this lovely little M5Stack device with an ESP32 processor on it and it is supposed to support Bluetooth BLE. So I thought I’d see if it did. So fired up the example Bluetooth BLE program in the Arduino SDK and then I fired up the Bluetooth sample from the Windows-Universal-Samples and tried to get them to connect.

And they just did. Astonishing. In no time at all I was sending messages from the PC to the M5Stack, and with a bit of fiddling I managed to get data values going the other way as well. I find this amazing and wonderful. Previous attempts to get Bluetooth working like this have always been fairly horrid and fraught. With this I just hit the pair button inside the app on Windows 10, accept a security prompt and then I’m sending packets of data backwards and forwards. I’m definitely going to build something based on this,

Windows 10 Magic Disk Space

Windows 10 is magical. Or something. At the beginning of this week I was worried that I was running out of disk space on my main hard disk. Which can be a problem. Things were turning red. Never a good thing in my experience.

This morning I discovered that I suddenly had a lot more space. Around 30 G bytes had appeared from nowhere. Now, I might have done some “sleep deletion” last night, but I don’t think so. Windows 10 must have found the space for me.

Thanks for that.

Windows 10 October Update

I installed the latest Windows 10 update over Wednesday night on two machines at the same time. I was quite amused to see my lowly Surface Go upgrade in around same time as my proper desktop. The Surface Go is really growing on me.

The installation just worked. On Thursday morning I had the new system running. I’ve not noticed much different to be honest. The biggest change for me so far is that the Snipping Tool is being phased out. This has been a mainstay of my workflow for a very long time. One of the first things I used to do after installing Windows was put a shortcut to the Snipping Tool on the task bar. It was very good at capturing the entire contents of windows. It did have its foibles though. One of the most annoying was that when you drew with a white pen on a white background the pen disappeared. I’ve wondered for a long time why this has not been fixed.

I’m talking about the Snipping Tool in the past tense because I’ve switched to the new replacement, the Snip & Sketch tool. It seems to do all the things that the Snipping Tool does. I even used it to capture the image at the top of this post. It also sets the cursor colour correctly when drawing, which is a step forwards.

I’ve not noticed any huge changes in Windows 10 so far. But I’m looking forward to doing some more exploring.