Category: Geek Stuff

In Windows Vista, Microsoft added the concept of “Network Profiles” to Windows. On paper, this is cool: Windows determines what type of network you’re on – your work domain, your home network, or a public network like coffee shop or airport Wi-Fi – and adjusts your security settings appropriately.

Except… it doesn’t always work.

Windows Server had a notorious bug where it would reset to a Public Network on every boot, thus disabling Active Directory, file & print sharing, DNS, DHCP, and everything else companies buy servers for. Angry IT guys eventually figured out a fix, all the while cursing Microsoft for adding the feature to Windows Server in the first place… after all, servers are likely to sit on the same rack or shelf their entire existence. No one’s taking the rack-mounted domain controller to Starbucks for a leisurely afternoon coffee.

My point is, if you’ve got a network share on your Windows 1x PC at home and it’s worked fine for years… but suddenly stops working even though everything else on your PC seems fine…. go to Settings > Network & internet and click on your network connection. Check that you’re on a “Private Network”.

Chances are, some Windows Update changed it to “Public Network” without you knowing. Change it back and your network share should start working again. If not, THEN begin the traditional troubleshooting. I can’t imagine how much time I’ve wasted in the past troubleshooting “network weirdness” only for the issue to be THIS damn thing! Now I always check this first!

If you’re using one of the “Pro” versions of Windows 10/11, you should really use Windows Sandbox. It’s a virtual machine built in to Windows. It uses Hyper-V to run its kernel in isolation, and it cannot save any changes, so it’s pristine on every boot.

I recently needed to click on a link in an email I didn’t really trust. Rather than cross my fingers and pray uBlock Origin would save me, I fired up Sandbox and pasted the link into a virtual instance of Edge. Turns out, the link was legit, but had it not been, I coulda just closed the Sandbox window and that woulda been the end of that.

It’s a great feature I think people don’t use enough. It’s kind of hidden in the “Windows Features” applet, but it’s worth digging around for.

It’s only available in Pro and Enterprise versions of Windows.

Jump Lists are one of the coolest features of Windows 10. If you pin an app to the taskbar, you can right-click on the app’s taskbar icon and see a list of your most recent documents (items), and even pin ones you use the most:

In the Spotify menu, you can see I’ve pinned Alvvays’ Blue Rev album, and have recently listened to Gorilla vs. Bears’ “Best of 2023” playlist, a couple French indietronica tunes, then my own Top 100 list. So in the future, I can just right-click the Spotify taskbar icon and choose Blue Rev and the album will play.

But while Windows offers a way to clear ALL your jump lists, it doesn’t have a way to clear them on a per-app basis.

Let’s say your boss is going to use your computer, and you don’t want her to accidentally see your Word jump list with its “UPDATED_RESUME.DOCX” and “40 Ways to Kill Your Boss.docx” entries.

Make sure the app in question is closed, then copy and paste this into the Start Menu:

%AppData%\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations

If this doesn’t work for some reason, you can just open File Explorer and go to C: > Users > [your username] > AppData > Roaming > Microsoft > Windows > Recent > AutomaticDestinations. Click “Date Modified” at the top of the column to sort them by most recently updated:

Now, right-click on the taskbar icon in question and pin a document to the list, or unpin an existing one. Doesn’t matter. Refresh the Explorer window, and the jump list you just edited should be the first one on the list (check the timestamp on the file to be sure). If you’re sure it’s the right one, delete it.

Lastly, test the Jump List: it should now be empty, and will re-populate  as you use it in the future. If something’s gone wrong, you can always restore the one from the Recycle Bin if necessary. But also, if you’re sure you’ve deleted the right file and everything is the way you wanted it, delete the file out of the Bin so that prying eyes won’t see it!

Microsoft Outlook is still a popular email app, used by companies across the world, and home users like myself.

But it seems like Microsoft 365 editions of Outlook have an annoying habit of complaining that a user’s PST file is corrupt and refusing to start. You’re directed to use the SCANPST tool, which says it fixed the errors… but Outlook soon starts complaining about it being corrupt again. But IS IT really corrupt? Is all your data just… gone?

Maybe… but probably not. One habit I picked up from an old timer somewhere along the way (and that refuses to die) is that you’re supposed to run SCANPST on a PST file repeatedly (sending the backups to the Recycle Bin, just in case), until the tool says “only minor inconsistencies were found in this file”:

In my version of SCANPST, the “Repair” button is even greyed out, so I couldn’t even run it if I wanted to. So you don’t run the tool once. You run it 3-4, maybe even 5 times, until you see the screen above.

Anyway, if you’ve run SCANPST several times, and you’re sure your hard drive\SSD isn’t failing (by running chkdksk for example, or getting S.M.A.R.T. warnings, or corrupted files in other apps) then chances are Outlook has just gotten stuck in panic mode and needs help getting out of it:

Shut down Outlook, then open REGEDIT and navigate to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\PST

You may wish to back up this key for safety. Once that’s done, delete the LastCorruptStore and PromptRepair keys. Open Outlook… and everything should be OK now.

Google Chrome, the desktop web browser, is known for its vast library of extensions, small browser add-ons that fix minor (or major) annoyances. One of the most popular types of extensions are ad blockers. I can’t imagine surfing the Internet without uBlock Origin, and neither should you.

But Google, the company, has long resisted allowing Chrome for Android to use extensions. They claim it would be a support and security nightmare. And maybe they’re not entirely wrong. But without any kind of aggressive ad blocker, using Chrome for Android is just downright painful – pop-ups, pop-unders, video ads, those ads that take up the whole screen that you have to scroll past. I’m just trying to read about my favorite band’s next tour, but Chrome is allowing the site to make my phone look like an epileptic slot machine.

Firefox for Android does support extensions. Sort of. Once upon a time, you could use *any* Firefox extension on mobile, but for the same security and stability reasons as Google, Mozilla blocked most of them. Instead, they whitelisted 16 “official” extensions for Firefox Android. But one of those is uBlock Origin, which means you can get the same high-quality ad blocking on your mobile browser as on your desktop!

But wait… there’s more! Until recently there was an extension called Bypass Firewalls Clean that, as the name suggests, allowed you to bypass the paywalls at hundreds of news sites. Mozilla recently yanked the extension from Mozilla’s extension repository. We don’t know why, although the extension’s author suggests unhappy media companies issued Mozilla DMCA notices on his work, rather than it being a security issue on his part.

The good news? You can still download the extension from the author’s github page. Even better, the author created an oft-updating set of rules that allows uBlock Origin to act exactly like Bypass Paywalls Clean! Although this “trick” works in both desktop and mobile Firefox, it’s especially interesting for mobile in that it essentially gives a bonus extension that wouldn’t have been available ordinarily.

To set it up in either desktop or mobile Firefox, just open uBlock’s settings, go to “Filter Lists” and scroll down to “Import”. Paste the following URL into the box that opens:

https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filters/-/raw/main/bpc-paywall-filter.txt

So now you have uBlock AND Bypass Paywalls Clean on your mobile browser!

There are a lot of other great features of Firefox for Android to check out – I like how easy it is to send tabs to\from my desktop to\from my phone to\from my laptop, or pull a tab from my desktop session up on the phone.

Today’s tip is a simple one, but one that I don’t think a lot of people know about.

If you have guests and want to share your Wi-Fi info with them, but it’s difficult for some reason – maybe you have a long or complex password, or maybe the person you want to share with is hard of hearing, or maybe they just got a new phone and don’t know how to add a Wi-Fi network, whatever – there’s an easier way. You need an Android phone on your end, but their phone can be Android or iOS:

Make sure your phone is connected to the Wi-Fi network you want to share and also that your screen is set to maximum brightness. Also have your guest unlock their phone and have their camera open and ready.

Open the Wi-Fi applet on your phone and tap the “Settings” (gear) icon near the top of the screen:

Click “Share”:

A QR code will now appear. Have your guest point their phone (camera) at the code. They will see a pop-up  asking if they want to join your Wi-Fi network (the exact wording differs from Android and iOS). Tap “Yes” or “OK”:

They should then be instantly connected to your network, no need to type the password manually. However, if it doesn’t work for some reason, the password will be shown under the QR code. This is also a good way to find a forgotten Wi-Fi password. And don’t forget to turn your screen’s brightness down to a reasonable level when done!

EDIT: To anticipate your next question, YES, you can print a screencap of that QR code and frame it, or tape it to a cabinet., or whatever.

Another day, another Firefox tip!

I’ve been using Firefox for years, and I’ve had one minor (but annoying) problem for a long time now: when you go to save a bookmark, there’s a handy list of previously used folders. That way you can quickly choose a folder to save the bookmark, rather than click through the entire folder hierarchy.

Problem is, this list stopped updating about 5 years ago.  The issue followed me through several versions of Firefox, on both desktop and laptop. I could save a hundred bookmarks in some other folder, but this list of recent folders has looked exactly as shown above since 2016 or 2017. And it was super annoying, since I mostly only use bookmarks as a session-saving type system these days. I save each Firefox window in a folder called “Sessions”… which I always had to manually click to, since the folders shown above never updated.

But yes, there is a way to fix this:

1) Open a new tab in Firefox and enter “about: config” (without quotes) into the address bar. Click “Accept the Risk and Continue” when prompted.

2) Type (or paste) “devtools.chrome.enabled” into the search box, and when it appears, double-click it to change the value from FALSE to TRUE. Close the tab when done.

3) Click the hamburger menu in the upper-right of the window and click More Tools > Browser Console. A small window with a bunch of techo-gobbledygook will open:

4) Type (or paste) the following at the cursor on the bottom of this window:

await PlacesUtils.metadata.set(PlacesUIUtils.LAST_USED_FOLDERS_META_KEY,[]);

5) Restart Firefox. When you try to bookmark a page, the previous locations should now be empty, and will refill over time as you save to various folders.

Have you ever been to a website that won’t let you copy text? Like this page, for example? There are a few workarounds for this, especially with Firefox.

The easiest is to just click the “Reading Mode” icon in Firefox’s address bar:

This presents a simplified page with most of the ads and graphics stripped out. You can easily copy text now:

Another option uses uBlock Origin. uBlock is one of the most popular ad blocking extensions, and it’s available for Firefox, Chrome and Edge.  If you don’t use uBlock already, you probably should. In Firefox you can install it by clicking the hamburger icon in the upper right corner of a Firefox window and then “Add-ons and themes” and type “uBlock Origin” in the search bar. Make sure you install uBlock Origin and not plain old uBlock or any other variant. For other browsers, just go to its extensions site\store and install it from there.

In any case, if you click on the uBlock icon in the Firefox toolbar, you can click the “</>” icon to disable JavaScript, then click the “Reload page” icon just above it (the arrows in a circle):

Don’t forget to re-enable JavaScript when done! uBlock disables JavaScript on a per-domain basis, so while it shouldn’t affect other websites, it might affect some other aspect of the current site.

The inability to copy text is almost always done in JavaScript. So disabling JavaScript will almost always allow you to copy text. But digging through the settings in whichever browser you use can be a chore, and may require a restart of the browser.

There are plenty of Firefox and Chrome\Edge extensions that let you toggle JavaScript off and on, and they usually work. But it’s so rare that I come across this that I usually try Reading Mode first, and it that doesn’t work, disabling JavaScript via uBlock works about 99% of the time. If this happens to you all the time – maybe copying text from “protected” pages is what you do at work all day – then maybe one of those simple JavaScript togglers would work best for you. Most of these disable JavaScript within the browser, so don’t forget to turn it back on when done!

Firefox 97+ has introduced an annoying new “feature”: when you download a file – any file – the download progress meter pops-up when the download completes, whether you want it to or not. Perhaps the pop-up is helpful if you’re downloading a large file over a slow connection… but if you’re downloading a bunch of smaller image files it’s more annoying than helpful.

It’s pretty easy to stop the pop-up window. Note that the following procedure will ONLY disable the pop-up at completion: the other behavior of the download button on the toolbar is not affected:

– In the address bar, type about:config and press ENTER. Accept the warning message (the exact text varies by Firefox version) and click “Continue”.

– Type (or paste) browser.download.alwaysOpenPanel in the search box at the top of the window.

– The value for the entry should be set to TRUE. Double-click the text and it should change to FALSE.

I honestly don’t remember if this requires a restart of Firefox, so you’ll need to figure it out for yourself (I think it doesn’t, but could be wrong). It probably won’t hurt to restart anyway.

I love Firefox, I really do. But every so often the browser’s built-in media player will turn itself on, and any video or mp3 I click on will open a new tab with the file being played by the browser’s player instead of loading the download prompt, which is what I want.

Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to fix:

– In the address bar, type about:config and press ENTER. Accept the warning message (the exact text varies by Firefox version) and click “Continue”.

– Type (or paste) media.play-stand-alone in the search box at the top of the window.

– The value for the entry will almost certainly be set to TRUE. Double-click the text and it should change to FALSE.

This change should take effect immediately, without having to restart Firefox, although it certainly won’t hurt to restart anyway.