TOPIC: WINDOWS 11
Getting Adobe Lightroom Classic to remember the search filters that you have set
23rd April 2023With 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
23rd November 2022Recently, 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.
A new look
11th October 2021Things have been changing on here. Much of that has been behind the scenes with a move to a new VPS for extra speed and all the upheaval that brings. It also gained me a better and more responsive system for less money than the old upgrade path was costing me. Extra work has gone into securing the website too, something that has taught me a lot as that has progressed. New lessons were added to older, and sometimes forgotten, ones.
The more obvious change for those who have been here before is that the visual appearance has been refreshed. A new theme has been applied with a multitude of tweaks to make it feel unique and to iron out any rough edges that there may be. This remains a WordPress-based website, and the new theme is a variant of the Appointee child theme of the Appointment theme. Since WordPress does only support child theming but not grandchild theming, I had to make a copy of Appointee of my own so I could modify things as I see fit.
To my eyes, things do look cleaner, crisper and brighter, so I hope that it feels the same to you. Like so many designs these days, the basis is the Bootstrap framework and that is no bad thing in my mind, though the standardisation may be too much for some tastes. What has become challenging is that it is getter harder to find new spins on more traditional layouts, with everything going for a more magazine-like appearance and summaries being shown on the front page instead of complete articles. That probably reflects how things are going for websites these days, which could make the next refresh a more home-grown effort, even if that is a while away yet.
As the website heads towards its sixteenth year, there is bound to be continuing change. In some ways, I prefer that some things remain unchanged, so I use the classic editor instead of Gutenberg because that works best for me. Block-based editing is not for me, since I prefer to tinker with code anyway. Still, not all of its influences can be avoided, leaving me to figure out the new widgets interface. While it did not feel that intuitive, I suppose that I will grow accustomed to it.
My interest in technology continues, even if it saddens me at this time and some things do not impress me; the Windows 11 taskbar is one of those, so I will not be in any hurry to move away from Windows 10. Still, the pandemic has offered its own learning, with virtual conferencing allowing one to lurk and learn new things. For me, this has included R, Python, Julia and DevOps among other things. That proved worthwhile during a time with many restrictions. All that could yield more content yet, and some already is on the way.
As ever, it is my own direct working with technology that yields some real niche ideas that others have not covered. With so many technology blogs out there, they may be getting less and less easy to find, yet everyone has their own journey, so I hope to encounter more of them. There remain times when doing precedes telling, which is how it is on here. It is not all about appearances, since content matters as much as it ever did.
Changing Outlook usage habits
2nd August 2010Given that I have been using it for so long, I shouldn't be discovering new things with Outlook. However, there is one thing that I have been doing for years: leaving messages set as unread until I have dealt with them. Now that I look at it, it seems a terrible habit compared with an alternative that I recently found.
Quite why I haven't been flagging messages for follow-up instead is beyond me. Is it because I worked with Outlook 2000 at my place of work for so long, and the arrival of Outlook 2007 into my life wasn't sufficient to force a change of habits? In fact, it has taken a downgrade to Outlook 2003 to make it dawn on me; it was the sight of search folder for messages marked for follow-up that triggered the realisation.
Speaking of old habits, there is one that I'll be dropping: setting up loads of rules, allegedly for organising messages. Given that they were the cause of my missing emails quite a few times, it's one more nuisance that needed to be left behind me.