Technology Tales

From convex to concave: reflections on decades of computer monitor usage

Within the last week, I changed my monitor and am without an Iiyama in my possession for the first time since 1997. The first one was a 17" CRT screen that accompanied my transition from education into work. Those old screens were not long-lasting, though, especially since it replaced a 15" Dell screen that had started to work less well than I needed; the larger size was an added attraction after I saw someone with a 21" Iiyama at the university where I was pursuing a research degree.

Work saw me using a 21" Philips screen myself for a time before Eizo flat screen displays were given to us as part of a migration to Windows 2000. That inspired me to get a 17" Iiyama counterpart to what I had at work. Collecting that sent me on an errand to a courier's depot on the outskirts of Macclesfield. The same effort may have been accompanied by my dropping my passport, which I was using for identification. That thankfully was handed into the police, so I could get it back from them, even if I was resigned to needing a new one. More care has been taken since then to avoid a repeat.

The screen worked well, though I kept the old one as a backup for perhaps far too long. It took some years to pass before I eventually hauled it to the recycling centre; these days, I might try a nearby charity shop before setting off on such a schlep. In those times, LCD screens lasted so well that they could accumulate if you were not careful. The 17" Iiyama accompanied my migration from Windows to Linux and a period of successful and ill-fated PC upgrades, especially a run of poor luck in 2009.

2010 saw me change my place of work, and a 24" Iiyama was acquired just before then. Again, its predecessor was retained in case anything went awry and eventually went to a charity shop from where I could go into a new life. There was no issue with the new acquisition, and it went on to do nearly twelve years of work for me. A 34" Iiyama replaced it a few years ago, yet I wonder if that decision was the best. Apart from more than a decade of muck on the screen, nothing else was amiss. Even a major workstation upgrade in 2021 did little to challenge it. Even so, it too went to a charity shop searching for a new home.

This year's workstation overhaul did few favours to that 34" successor. While it was always sluggish to wake, it did nothing like going into a cycle of non-responsiveness that it had on numerous occasions in the last few months. Compatibility with a Mac Mini could be better, too. The result is that I am writing these words using a Philips B346C1 instead, and it has few of the issues that beset the Iiyama, save for needing to remove and insert an HDMI cable for a Mac Mini at times.

Screen responsiveness is a big improvement, especially when switching between machines using a KVMP switch. Wake up times are noticeably shorter, and there is much better reliability. However, it did take a deal of time to optimise its settings to my liking. The OSD may be more convenient than the Iiyama, yet having Windows software that did the same thing made configuration at lot easier. While getting acceptable output across Windows, Linux and macOS has been a challenge, there is a feeling that things are nearly there.

Another matter is the fact that this is a curved screen. In some ways, that is akin to the move from a 24" screen to a 34" one when fonts and other items needing enlarging for the bigger screen. After a burst of upheaval, eventually things do settle down and acclimatisation ensues. Even though further tinkering cannot be ruled out, there is a sounder base for computing after the changeover.

Mouse configuration in macOS

Now having a new location from which I can work, I acquired an all-in-one desktop computer for use while there. While tempted by an HP option that runs Windows, I ended up choosing an iMac instead. That gained me extra disk space and more memory at a cost. Having UNIX-style command line capability was another attraction. After living with the Windows terminal for a while, its limitations were all too apparent to me.

While I started off desktop computing on a Macintosh Classic and having owned a MacBook Pro in the more recent past, there still was a learning curve. One of these related to the configuration of the mouse supplied with the system. Whatever about only having one button and needing to learn gestures, it was the speed at which the pointer goes that really got me reaching for my more usual Evoluent. Even so, the subsequent discovery of LinearMouse makes things much more bearable once all the requisite permissions were assigned.

Getting the Evoluent configured to my liking needed another third-party application: USB Overdrive. If Evoluent's own software fitted the bill, that would have done. However, they have done some finger pointing at Apple instead of updating it to work with the latest Mac technology. There may be truth in the accusations, but it is striking that another piece of software works when theirs does not. Nevertheless, the other option worked once it got the permissions to detect the hardware. Then, it was a matter of working out which button was which on the mouse, so I could have them assigned as I wished.

After that, I could settle into the new system and get used to its idiosyncrasies. Adding Parallels got me a Windows 11 virtual machine for business compatibility, while I got going with setting up some automation using the macOS terminal. All is becoming more settled than working out of a laptop.

Needing third-party software does have a catch, though: underlying changes to macOS could scupper things. It was the sort of thing that made me move away from GNOME Shell as my Linux desktop. The extensions on which I was depending kept getting obsoleted by every new release. It is something to watch, even if macOS evolves less dramatic than GNOME 3 in its various forms.

Opening up Kindle for PC in a maximised window on Windows 11

One irritation with the Windows app for Amazon Kindle is that it does not open in a maximised window, and it scarcely remembers your size settings from session to session. Finding a solution to this sizing issue is no easy task, so I happened on one of my own that I previously used with File Explorer folder shortcuts.

The first step is to find the actual location of the Start Menu shortcut. Trying C:\Users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Amazon\Amazon Kindle should do that.

Next, right-click on the Kindle icon and choose Properties from the context menu that appears. In the dialogue box that causes to appear on the screen, look for the "Run:" setting. By default, this appears as "Normal Window" but you can change this to "Maximised", which is what I did before clicking on Apply before doing the same for the OK button to dismiss the dialogue box.

If you have pinned the shortcut to the taskbar or elsewhere, you may need to unpin it and pin it again to carry over the change. After that, I found that the Kindle app opened up in a maximised window as I wanted.

Making the LanguageTool embedded HTTP Server work on Windows 11

My choice of Markdown editor is VS Code or VSCodium, the latter being a fork of the former with Microsoft telemetry removed. In either case, I use the LanguageTool Linter extension for the required grammar and spelling checks. Pointing that to the remote web service offered by LanguageTool could get punitive, even if I am a subscriber. Thus, I use a locally installed equivalent instead.

In my usual Linux system, that is how I work. However, I have replicated the set-up on a Windows laptop for added flexibility. The needed the JRE, so that was downloaded from the Oracle website and then installed. The next step is to download the LanguageTool embedded HTTP Server zip file and decompress it to a chosen location. To run the server, the command like the following is issued from the Windows Terminal (the single line may break over two here):

java -cp "[Chosen Location]\LanguageTool-stable\LanguageTool-6.4\languagetool-server.jar" org.languagetool.server.HTTPServer --port 8081 --allow-origin

That is enough to get things going because it fulfils the default settings of the LanguageTool Linter extension in VS Code or VSCodium. The fastText application is unavailable for Windows, so I did without it. So far, things are operating acceptably, even if there is a way to address more memory should that be required.

Getting Adobe Lightroom Classic to remember the search filters that you have set

With Windows 10 support to end in October 2025 and VirtualBox now offering full support for Windows 11, I have moved onto Windows 11 for personal use while retaining Windows 10 for professional work, at least for now. Of course, a lot could happen before 2025 with rumours of a new Windows version, the moniker Windows 12 has been mooted, but all that is speculation for now.

As part of the changeover, I moved the Adobe apps that I have in an ongoing subscription, Lightroom Classic and Photoshop are the main ones for me, to the new virtual machine. That meant that some settings from the previous one were lost and needed reinstating.

One of those was the persistence of Library Filters, so I had to find out how to get that sorted. If my memory is not fooling me, this seemed to be a default action in the past, and that meant that I was surprised by the change in behaviour.

Nevertheless, I had to go to the File menu, select Library Filters (it is near the bottom of the menu in the current version at the time of writing) and switch on Lock Filters by clicking on it to get a tick mark preceding the text. There is another setting called Remember Each Source's Filters Separately in the same place that can be set in the same manner if so desired, and I am experimenting with that at the moment, even though I have not bothered with this in the past.

Getting a Windows 11 Guest to run smoothly on VirtualBox

Recently, I have been trying to get Windows 11 to run smoothly within a VirtualBox virtual machine, and there has been a lot of experimentation along the way. This was to eradicate intermittent freezes that escalated CPU usage and necessitated hard restarts. If I were to use Windows 11 as a long-term replacement for Windows 10, these needed to go.

An internet search showed that others faced the same predicament, yet a range of proposed solutions did nothing for me. The suggestion of enabling 3D graphics capability did nothing but produce a black screen at startup time, so that was not a runner. It might have been the combination of underlying graphics hardware and the drivers on my Linux Mint machine that hindered me when it helped others.

In the end, a look at the bug tracker for Windows guest operating systems running on VirtualBox sent me in another direction. The Paravirtualisation interface also may have caused issues with Windows 10 virtual machines, since these were all set to KVM. Doing the same for Windows 11 seems to have stopped the freezing behaviour so far. It meant going to the virtual machine settings, navigating to System > Acceleration and changing the dropdown menu value from Default to KVM before clicking on the OK button.

Before that, I have been blaming the newness of VirtualBox 7 (it is best not to expect too much of a fresh release bringing such major changes) and even the way that I installed Windows 11 using the streamlined installation or licensing issues. Now that things are going better, it may have been a lesson from Windows 10 that I had forgotten. The EFI, Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 requirements of Windows 11 also blind sided me, especially given the long wait for VirtualBox to add such compatibility, but that is behind me at this stage.

Given that Windows 11 is not perfect, Start11 makes it usable and the October 2025 expiry for Windows 10 also focuses my mind. It is time to move over for the sake of future-proofing if nothing else. In time, we may get a better operating system as Windows 11 matures and some minds surely are thinking of a "Windows 12". Depending on how things go, we may get to a point where something vintage in the nature of Windows XP, Windows 7 or Windows 10 appears. Those older versions of Windows became like old gold during their lives.

Lessons learned on managing Windows Taskbar and Start Menu colouring in VirtualBox virtual machines

In the last few weeks, I have had a few occasions when the colouration of the Windows 10 taskbar and its Star Menu has departed from my expectations. At times, this happened in VirtualBox virtual machine installations and both the legacy 5.2.x versions and the current 6.x ones have thrown up issues.

The first one actually happened with a Windows 10 installation in VirtualBox 5.2.x when the taskbar changed colour to light grey and there was no way to get it to pick up the colour of the desktop image to become blue instead. The solution was to change the Windows from Light to Dark in order for the desired colouration to be applied, and the settings above are taken from the screen that appears on going to Settings > Personalisation > Colours.

The second issue appeared in Windows 10 Professional installation in VirtualBox 6.0.x when the taskbar and Start Menu turned transparent after an updated. This virtual machine is used to see what is coming in the slow ring of Windows Insider, so some rough edges could be expected. The solution here was to turn off 3D acceleration in the Display pane of the VM settings after shutting it down. Starting it again showed that all was back as expected.

Both resolutions took a share of time to find and there was a deal of experimentation needed too. Once identified, they addressed the issues as desired. Hence, I am recording them here for use by others as much as future reference for myself.

Quickly changing between virtual desktops in Windows 10

One of the benefits of running Linux is the availability of virtual desktops, and installing VirtuaWin was the only way to get the same functionality on Windows before the launch of Windows 10. For reasons known to Microsoft, they decided against the same sort of implementation as seen in Linux or UNIX. Instead, they put the virtual desktop functionality a click away and rather hides it from most users unless they know what clicking on the Task View button allows. The approach also made switching between desktops slower with a mouse. However, there are keyboard shortcuts that address this once multiple virtual desktops exist.

Using WIN + CTRL + LEFT or WIN + CTRL + RIGHT does this easily once you have mastered the action. Depending on your keyboard setup, WIN is the Windows, Super or Command key while CTRL is the Control key. Then, LEFT is the left arrow key and RIGHT is the right arrow key. For machines with smaller screens where multitasking causes clutter, virtual desktops are a godsend for organising how you work, and having quick key combinations for switching between them adds to their utility.

Using PowerShell to reinstall Windows Apps

Recently, I managed to use 10AppsManager to remove most of the in-built apps from a Windows 10 virtual machine that I have for testing development versions in case anything ugly were to appear in a production update. Curiosity is my excuse for letting the tool do what it did and some could do with restoration. Out of the lot, Windows Store is the main one that I have sorted so far.

The first step of the process was to start up PowerShell in administrator mode. On my system, this is as simple as clicking on the relevant item in the menu popped up by right-clicking on the Start Menu button and clicking on the Yes button in the dialogue box that appears afterwards. In your case, it might be a case of right-clicking on the appropriate Start Menu programs entry, selecting the administrator option and going from there.

With this PowerShell session open, the first command to issue is the following:

Get-Appxpackage -Allusers > c:\temp\appxpackage.txt

This creates a listing of Windows app information and pops it into a text file in your choice of directory. Opening the text file in Notepad allows you to search it more easily, and there is an entry for Windows Store:

Name                   : Microsoft.WindowsStore
Publisher              : CN=Microsoft Corporation, O=Microsoft Corporation, L=Redmond, S=Washington, C=US
Architecture           : X64
ResourceId             :
Version                : 11607.1001.32.0
PackageFullName        : Microsoft.WindowsStore_11607.1001.32.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe
InstallLocation        : C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\Microsoft.WindowsStore_11607.1001.32.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe
IsFramework            : False
PackageFamilyName      : Microsoft.WindowsStore_8wekyb3d8bbwe
PublisherId            : 8wekyb3d8bbwe
PackageUserInformation : {S-1-5-21-3224249330-198124288-2558179248-1001
IsResourcePackage      : False
IsBundle               : False
IsDevelopmentMode      : False
Dependencies           : {Microsoft.VCLibs.140.00_14.0.24123.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe,
Microsoft.NET.Native.Framework.1.3_1.3.24201.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe,
Microsoft.NET.Native.Runtime.1.3_1.3.23901.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe,
Microsoft.WindowsStore_11607.1001.32.0_neutral_split.scale-100_8wekyb3d8bbwe}

Using the information from the InstallLocation field, the following command can be built and executed (here, it has gone over several lines, so you need to get your version onto a single one):

Add-AppxPackage -register "C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\Microsoft.WindowsStore_11607.1001.32.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe\AppxManifest.xml" -DisableDevelopmentMode

Once the above has completed, the app was installed and ready to use again. As the mood took me, I installed other apps from the Windows Store as I saw fit.

Forcing an upgrade to Windows 10 Anniversary Update

There remain people who advise those on Windows 7 or 8.x to hold fire on upgrading to Windows 10. Now that the free upgrade no longer is available, that advice may hold more weight than it did. Even so, there are those among us who jumped ship who are open to having the latest versions of things at no monetary cost to see what is available, and I must admit to being one of those.

After all, I do have a virtual machine with a pre-release version of the next update to Windows 10 installed on there to see what might be coming our way and to get a sense of what changes that may bring so that I am ready for those. Otherwise, I am usually happy to wait, but I noticed that the Windows 10 Anniversary Update only came to my HP Pavilion dm4 laptop and not other machines with Windows 10 installed, so I started to wonder why there was a lag when it came to automatic upgrades.

So that these things do not arrive when it is least convenient, I took advantage of a manual method to choose my timing. This did not involve installation from a disk image, but was in-situ. The first part of the process is standard enough in that the Settings app was started and the Update & security item chosen. That dropped me onto the Windows Update, and I first clicked on the Check for updates button to see what would happen. When nothing came of that, the Learn more link was clicked to bring me onto part of the Microsoft support website where I found that the Windows 10 Anniversary Update installer could be downloaded, so I duly did just that.

Running it produced a screen asking whether I wanted to proceed. Since I wanted to go ahead, the appropriate button was clicked and the machine left alone until the process completed. Because the installer purely is a facilitator, the first stage is to download the rest of the files needed, and that will take a while on any connection. Once downloading was completed, the actual process of installation commenced with several restarts before a log-in screen was again on offer. On logging in to the machine, the last part of the process started.

Though the process took quite a while, it seemingly worked without a hitch. If there was anything that I needed to do, it was the re-installation of VirtualBox Guest Additions to restore access to shared folders, as well as dealing with a self-inflicted irritation. Otherwise, I have found that previously installed software worked as expected and no file has been missed. Waiting a while may have had its advantages too because initial issues with the Anniversary Update will have been addressed, though it is best not to leave it too long, or you could have the feeling of being forgotten. A happy balance needs striking.