Technology

A weird combo of nostalgia, inevitability and mild exasperation: Windows 11 deprecates the Control Panel (updated)

UPDATE, August 26, 2024: Microsoft has changed the wording of the note that resulted in the Ars Technica article. The update is in the same article link below, but for the link-averse, here's the before/after:

BEFORE: "The Control Panel is in the process of being deprecated in favor of the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience."

NOW: "Many of the settings in Control Panel are in the process of being migrated to the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience."

The story on Ars Technica: Microsoft formally deprecates the 39-year-old Windows Control Panel

It’s explained in the story that the time between announcing official deprecation of the Control Panel (now) and it actually being removed from Windows could span years. The current Settings app has a few things to recommend it:

  • Generally it looks nicer and more modern
  • It features breadcrumb navigation
  • The search (which you will probably need) works reasonably well in my experience

But it also falls short:

  • Many Control Panel settings are absent, especially ones for more advanced options
  • The categories are, I think, not as straightforward
  • System seems to be a dumping ground for “Where do we put this setting?”
  • It’s a single window, so you can’t have two of them open at the same time
  • The home page is filled with information pseudo-ads for Microsoft services, such as OneDrive, Microsoft 365 and more

The comments on the article are a mix of nostalgia and the expected nerd rage against the generally considered-to-be inferior Settings app. This comment resonated with me:

The reason it resonates is that I feel that same nostalgia when I see that mid-90s Windows GUI. I feel that GUI, with higher-resolution elements and a few tweaks, would look fine today and in some ways, even better than what we have with Windows 11 (also see my post on Windows GUI: Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (Ranked)). The post also hits on an issue that has been happening since the Settings app was introduced in 2012 with Windows 8: A constant visual clash between Settings and Control Panel. Also, it’s been 12 years! Why is Microsoft still not finished moving over everything in the Control Panel to Settings1This is the mild exasperation referenced in the title? ~nerd rage intensifies~

Anyway, I actually rarely use Control Panel these days, as Windows mostly just works (and I use PowerToys, which probably helps), but the article did prompt me to pin Control Panel to the Start menu, just in case. Then I went in and looked through some of the options, pretending it was suddenly 1999 again and computers were cool. They were still tools, but they were also just kind of neat. To nerds, at least.

Blogging: On the other hand…

When I think about moving from WordPress to something perhaps simpler and easier to manage, it also occurs to me that since October 2023 I’ve not exactly struggled to post, but my output of roughly 2 posts per day has dipped to something like 1.1 posts per day. Maybe I don’t have enough to say anymore to warrant switching to another (paid) service.

Or maybe I’m just in a creative funk.

Or maybe I’m lazier than I used to be.

So many possibilities.

I will continue to ponder.

Meanwhile, here is a smart-looking cat1Yes, I’ve used this one before. Like I said, I’m lazy. I mean, I’m recycling and saving e-trees or something.:

I have made my mouse pointer lime-coloured in Windows 11

I find, especially using light mode, it can be difficult where across the vastness of my two 27 inch monitors my mouse pointer is. I do have the feature enabled where if you tap the CTRL key twice it gets a nice spotlight on its location, but I wanted something that didn’t require extra effort on my part, because I am lazy.

I went into the Accessibility options and made it look like this:

I like it! It’s sort of hideous, yet delightful. And much easier to see.

As a bonus, I also get a lime green pointy hand.

Big tech: Rated on evil

As Brad Colbow opined not long ago, there are no more tech good guys. It seems every large tech company goes bad at some point. Maybe they all start bad and it just gets worse as the companies scale up. Whatever the case, the people who now defend the likes of Google and Microsoft seem kind of weird, or they’re lawyers.

Here’s my somewhat arbitrary ranking of how evil each of the Big Tech™ companies are:

  1. MOST EVIL: Meta. First, the name change didn’t fool anyone. This is still Facebook and all it entails. Also, Zuckerberg was pretty off on the metaverse being the Next Big Thing (NBT). He’s probably looked into changing the company name again to AI. They get top spot because they’ve valued engagement over actual people’s lives. They are literally willing to let people die if it benefits the company. Anyone posting or using Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Threads would do well to remember this.
  2. FROM A TO EVIL: Amazon. Like Google and MS, Amazon has used its monopoly to crush competition and then made its own experience that much worse, because why be good when you don’t need to be? They rank so high here because of their huge reach and influence. Bonus evil points for implementing a Vader-ish “Pray I don’t alter the deal further” by adding ads to Prime video, then demanding you pay extra to remove them. Good companies that respect their customers don’t do things like this.
  3. DON’T BE EVIL: Google. Remember when web browsers started including pop-up blockers because web ads had become so pernicious and obnoxious? That was before Chrome even existed. In the early days of Google search, company stewards warned of mixing search with ads, fearing the latter would corrupt the former. Today, Google is a company that sacrifices everything to squeeze as much money as it can out of its ad/browser monopoly. They paid Apple over $20 billion in one year alone to be the default search engine in Safari. The company has no real purpose or vision except to sell ads and make profits fatter. It’s soulless, crushes competition through its monopoly muscle, and has directly contributed to making the internet a worse place.
  4. EVIL, TOO: Microsoft. Speaking of monopoly abusers, there’s Microsoft. They got their wrists slapped in the late 90s, early 2000s by the US Department of Justice for their shenanigans with Windows and Internet Explorer. That wrist slap did create an opening for Chrome, though, so oops! Today, Microsoft leans heavily on its cloud services to make money. It also actively seeks to make Windows worse by shoving ads, tracking and other cruft into it. It may have directly contributed to Linux getting 1% more popular. That’s a lot for Linux! It got me to try Linux, for Pete’s sake. MS also seems soulless in the same way as Google, with no real vision except to chase trends (currently AI) and make as much money as possible.
  5. THINK EVIL: Apple. Apple may be #4 on this list, but it’s rising fast. The first company to be valued at over $3 trillion US, Apple seems to exist now for two reasons: To make pretty good hardware that it sells at premium prices and to extract as much profit out of absolutely everything they do, and to keep extracting maximum profit, no matter what the cost to their reputation or long-term health. Apple, more than any other company here, is simply riven by greed, fostered by its long-standing culture of controlling all the things. Once services started making more money than anything but iPhone sales, Apple changed from a hardware company to “must always squeeze every dollar out of every avenue possible” company and has bitterly fought EU regulators, among others, to keep their gross profits untouched. I feel the tide is turning and Apple is determined to defy reality. We’ll see how that works for them. In the meantime, their once-beloved reputation is in tatters as they reveal themselves to be out-of-touch (see: the “Crush” ad), entitled and greedy.
  6. BONUS EVIL : The company formerly known as Twitter. X gets included because it still carries outsize influence. Journalists, or people who call themselves journalists, have demonstrated repeatedly that they are quite happy to hang out at a Nazi bar. This particular Nazi bar is so ineptly run that it’s losing a ton of money, while allowing hate, racism and everything terrible about people, to flourish. But because it’s run (so to speak) by one of the richest (on paper) people in the world, there’s no danger it will go away any time soon.

This list may be updated if I realize I’ve forgotten one evil tech company or another (the original post missed Amazon, which is kind of funny, since I put them at #2).

Why I don’t take photos on my iPhone 12 using zoom

The iPhone 12 doesn’t have any kind of optical zoom, it digitally “zooms”, which just gives you a mess of pixels vaguely in the shape of what you’re pointing the camera at.

Today, I saw a beaver resting near the Cariboo Dam. It was not especially far away, but not especially close, either. The 250mm telephoto lens on my Canon EOS M50 would have gotten a nice shot.

My iPhone 12 produced this brown ovoid blob with maximum zoom:

I should have added googly eyes.

I’m still not getting a new iPhone.

Linux Mint, Part 7: Do not touch the Mint

I’m not sure if this is really Part 7, but it feels close enough.

The other night I thought1, “Wouldn’t it be fun to replace the Cinnamon desktop of Linux Mint with the GNOME desktop used by Ubuntu?” It worked, but was a little glitchy. I decided to uninstall it. Instead, I made Mint unbootable.

After some valiant attempts at repair, I ended up fixing the issue by completely re-installing Mint. I am very good at this now. And it actually went pretty fast. I did have a backup made, but it did not work, for reasons. Probably because I made it unbootable, too.

Anyway, lesson learned! If I want to play around with GNOME, I will do so in Ubuntu, which is still installed in another partition and which I have yet to make unbootable.

Here is a picture of a mint. Or a box of mints, which is close enough.

Photo by Erik Mclean
  1. Yes, this is a weird thing to think. ↩︎

Linux shenanigans: Run all the distros (and desktop environments)

Today, after a few hiccups, I installed Ubuntu, splitting the drive that has Linux Mint installed roughly equally between the two. The GRUB1GRand Unified Bootloader bootloader was automatically recognized by Ubuntu, and it simply added the Ubuntu-related options to it. And, of course, made Ubuntu the default option.

As I’d just re-installed Mint, I didn’t spend too much time puttering around, but I puttered a bit. My initial impression is that I think I prefer the GNOME desktop to Cinnamon, but prefer the overall greater customization of Mint. Also, I think I will limit myself to four operating systems for now, because this is all quite silly (they are Windows 11, macOS 14 Sonoma, Linux Mint and Ubuntu).

Cinnamon is fine as a desktop environment. In fact, if you’re coming from Windows, it will feel extremely comfortable, but that familiarity made me realize that a Start menu with a bunch of pop-out menus of apps is maybe not the best way to present options (Cinnamon emulates the Windows XP/7 era of the Start menu, which is probably not as good as you might remember).

Anyway, I am now thinking of installing GNOME on Mint, which will likely be a bad idea, but I love a challenge, or something.

And I’m in a puttering mindset these days. I think it’s helping me to unwind. Or unravel. We’ll find out.

Also, unrelated, I love cinnamon toast and now I want some.

I have stopped updating my apps

I view this as a positive thing. Really!

On my iPhone and iPad, app updates are pretty much a daily thing. And the update notes are typically “Bug fixes and improvements”, which is so generic it tells me nothing, other than the developers are not actively trying to make the app worse.

I could run automatic updates, but that cedes too much control, and an update could go sideways. If I approve each update, I may hear about a bad one before applying it and avoid some trouble.

For a time, that red badge on the App Store icon showing me the number of updates bothered me, but something clicked in my brain that made me just not care about it anymore. So now I don’t update my apps and the badge number goes up, and I’m fine with that.

I still go in and selectively update some apps here and there, usually if the update seems useful or adds something that sounds enticing (this is rare).

Anyway, this is just one small piece in me achieving my own personal kind of Zen. More to come!

Linux misadventures, Part Whatever: Back to Mint (temporarily?)

After installing the new internal SSD, I decided to nuke my install of Pop!_OS before really giving it much chance, despite the fact that it actually ran PowerWash Simulator in Steam without any issues, something I could never get to work in Mint.

Instead, I re-installed Mint and so far it’s been working fine. I feel like Mint offers more customization, or at least makes it more obvious and visible than Pop!_OS and I likes me some customization. There were a few things I’d apparently forgotten from last time, though. A few observations on Linux Mint 22:

  • Signal has to be installed by running three separate terminal commands. I’m surprised there is no flatpack or AppImage for it. Maybe a security thing? UPDATE: I misremembered from my earlier Mint installation. There was an unofficial flatpack, but in Mint 22 only authorized flatpacks will show in the software manager by default.
  • I still don’t like the look of the app icons. It gives me Windows 8 vibes. These are not good vibes.
  • I really like desklets. I always put one up that shows the time.
  • I suspect gaming will still be iffy, as the Nvidia drivers feel a bit weird. I also had an issue with a phantom third display and I’ve already forgotten how it went away. I think I just chose an older Nvidia driver.
  • The biggest knock–which is a positive for some–is probably how closely Mint hews to Windows. You have the Start menu, the taskbar, the system tray, all of them renamed slightly, but working fundamentally the same way.
  • I installed the Grub Customizer, which allows you to set Windows (for example) as the primary boot option in the menu when you restart the PC (after 10 seconds it defaults to the default and starts loading). Unfortunately, this isn’t made specifically for Linux Mint, so it shows a bunch of Ubuntu options and I didn’t like it, so I got rid of it. At least it still has a boot launcher, unlike Pop!_OS.
  • The biggest issues remains apps:
    • No TickTick, though the web version works
    • No Diarium (I have toyed with both Joplin and RedNotebook to see if they can substitute)
    • Graphics software is interesting, possibly doable?

I’ll keep puttering around. In fact, I’m typing this in Mint! I may experiment by putting together my next birding gallery in Mint. We’ll see.

I might also go back to Pop!_OS because I didn’t give it much of a chance and the Cosmic GUI is coming.

Come back soon for more Linux tragedy and farce!

Now to reboot the system and see what happens, ho ho.

The fun of getting inside a PC

I forgot to take pictures, so enjoy this stock image instead! Photo by Nathan b Caldeira

Yes, the title is part sarcasm. But only part, because the worst part of adding an internal 2.5 inch SATA SSD to my PC was getting the computer to sit on the set of wheels I use to keep it off the carpet (to reduce dust ingress). I eventually gave up on the wheel and now the PC is elevated on a sturdy box.

But I missed that two opposing wheels were still locked (my bad), so I’ll probably go back to the wheels eventually.

As for the installation, I was smart enough to make sure I had all parts before proceeding, then gave the internals of the PC a good cleaning (minimal dust since the last time). Once ready for the work I gathered the needed tools and took the PC to the kitchen counter, where I could work in good light and at a sensible height. This helped so much that I did not use any colourful metaphors during the installation.

The drive was successfully installed and will now be (at least temporarily) the home for my Linux adventures. The reason for going internal is the external drive (an M2. SSD in an enclosure and connected via USB 3.0) would very occasionally lose connection to the system, which means the OS just kind of dies and could get corrupted, etc. So right now that drive is going to be more like phat temporary storage or something.

I’ll have another post about my Linux misadventures soon.™

Also, I’ve decided that when I eventually build my next PC, I’m going all out on internal connections on the motherboard, no matter the expense. What I want:

  • Probably 3 M.2 slots for SSDs. Yes, 3! I don’t want to run out of internal storage, and I don’t want to have to plug in external storage.
  • But if I do need to plug things, in I want USB-C and not just internal headers, but at least 1-2 external ports supporting a minimum of 20 GB transfer speed.
  • Maybe even Thunderbolt or USB 4 to go all the way to 40 GB.
  • And covered in RGB lighting! Just kidding. I do not want my PC to be a source of light.

On our encroaching “AI” dystopia

I put “AI” in quotes because it’s not really about intelligence at all, people just glommed to the term because it:

  • Already existed
  • Sounds futuristic
  • Sounds high-tech

Google released an ad that has been airing during the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics (as an aside, this is the first Olympics that has been known probably as much for its meme generation as the athletic competition) which showed a father helping his young daughter write a fan letter to Olympic athlete Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone–by using Google’s Gemini AI.

The ad (and Google’s defense of “it tested well”) is wildly tone-deaf and a prime example of how people don’t want AI to work. Leave the creative stuff to humans, AI can handle the drudgery. And yet a lot of the big AI push is the exact opposite.

Ars Technica story: Google pulls its terrible pro-AI “Dear Sydney” ad after backlash

In the comments to the above story is the following comment, which resonated with me:

A growing number of people expect the AI bubble to burst, it’s just a question of how soon.

I’m thinking it will be sooner rather than later. We’ll see what happens by the end of the year!

Windows 98 disk defrag simulator

Yes, it is exactly what it sounds like. I’ve seen it linked a few times and it is charming in that retro way I like, so I’m linking to it, too.

Windows 98 Disk Defrag Simulator

I’m not saying I wish I had to defrag disks again, mind you. This just recalls a simpler time and, perhaps, one where you were more directly in control with what happened on your home computer1Speaking of nostalgia, I remember when people consciously drew a distinction between a work computer and a home computer.

Ah, sweet (?) nostalgia…