Matt Refghi

Most programs let you decide whether you’d like to them to open up automatically when you start Windows. Naturally, this is typically only an option when it’s logical to do so – for example, having Spotify immediately open with Windows makes sense. Having Notepad open with Windows… not so much. But what happens when a program doesn’t offer you that option, but you’d like still it to start up with Windows?

Solution

There’s a few ways to achieve this, but one of my preferred options is using the Task Scheduler in Windows 10. 

1. Press the Start button, and search for “Task scheduler” or “Schedule tasks.”
2. In the “Actions” menu on the right, click “Create Task.”
3. On the “General” tab, specify a value for the “Name” field. I suggest picking a clear name as you may have to find this task in a list later.
4. Switch to the “Triggers” tab, and click “New…”
5. In the “New Trigger” dialog, change the “Begin the task” field to “At startup.”
6. Switch to the “Actions” tab, and click “New…”
7.  In the “New Action” dialog, confirm that the “Action” field says “Start a program,” and then click “Browse” and select to the .exe you’d like to launch on boot. Then click “Open.”
8. In the “Create Task” dialog, press OK.

That’s it. To make sure you new scheduled task is working correctly, you can:

1. In the main “Task Scheduler” window, click “Task Scheduler Library” on the left.
2. Find your task in the list, and select it.
3. Click “Run” in the list on the right.

If your executable ran correctly, a final test would be actually rebooting the machine to see if it launches as expected – just to be safe.

See Also

Task Scheduler – Microsoft 

As much as I like working on videos, I must admit that the rendering process certainly takes a toll on a machine’s performance, particularly when you’d like to use your machine to do something else while it renders. In my case, my main computer at home is by far my most powerful and versatile machine, so when it’s locked up doing rendering for a multitude of hours, I’m faced with a terrifying prospect – actually going outside or reading a book. Determined to avoid this type of cruel fate when away from home, I started to think of ways that I could do the editing on a somewhat less powerful machine, but offload the actual rendering to my beast of a machine at home. This would allow me to just plow through my editing tasks without thinking about the rendering – and gradually, the rendering would occur with no toll on my editing machine.

So when I googled for a solution, I found a post by a Kevin Snyder that proposed a simple, but brilliant idea. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before – you see, Adobe Media Encoder has a “Watch folders” feature, allowing you to identify folders on your machine where if a file appears there, Media Encoder immediately starts rendering that file according to your pre-established directions. Kevin’s article proposed a very simple idea in my mind: what if the folder was in Dropbox, Google Drive, SharePoint/OneDrive, or any other cloud sharing tool?

Of course! Brilliant! I quickly configured a “[MediaEncoder]” folder in one of my cloud sharing utilities, and was excited to do the test. Machine A was designated as my editing machine, machine B as my rendering machine. As a first attempt, I copied both the Adobe Premiere Pro project file I wanted to render, and all the media it referenced into Machine A’s copy of the “[MediaEncoder]” folder. It synchronized just fine, but then I noticed that Adobe Media Encoder started to spit out multiple rendered files, rather than only the project I wanted it to render. It was rendering the media I included as references. It didn’t work as I expected, but it taught me a lesson. I would need to supply my actual Premiere Pro project file, and see if that worked by itself. But… what about the media referenced from within the project file? Would Media Encoder be smart enough to locate them, even if the cloud sharing folders are installed to different drives across machine A to machine B?

Well, guess what, folks. It seems like Adobe Premiere Pro project files actually use relative paths when referencing media files – because despite both machines being on different different top-level drives, it rendered the file just fine on machine B.

Solution

Once again, Kevin’s idea was brilliant. You simply set up the same cloud sharing solution on both your editing machine (A) and your rendering machine (B), and then you configure Adobe Media Encoder to watch a specific folder (within your cloud solution’s synchronization area) on machine B. Then, after you’re done doing your video editing on machine A, you can just copy that tiny project file into that specific folder on machine A, it’ll synchronize with machine B, Media Encoder will see it, and after a while, machine B will finish rendering, and the rendered files will be synchronized with the cloud, and next thing you know it, machine A receives the rendered project. Amazing!

Additional Tips

• On the rendering machine, you can use Windows 10’s task scheduler to make sure Adobe Media Encoder always opens on startup.
• The name of the sequence in the Premiere Pro project will determine the name of the rendered file.
• Apparently*, for Adobe Media Encoder to be able to render a project file, you can’t have any sequences placed in any bins. They have to be in the top-level root of the Adobe Premiere Pro project file.
  • *I lost my source. I’ll locate it soon and reference it here – I never tested it personally.
• This approach can result in burning a lot of bandwidth (the rendered file is uploading from machine A to the cloud, and then from the cloud to machine B). I only use this when both Internet connections I’m using have unlimited bandwidth, or I know the files aren’t going to have any meaningful impact on the monthly bandwidth limits.

Ideas for Improvement

I’ve got the following ideas in mind for improving this solution – I’ll be updating this page as I progress.

• Is there I way I can avoid manually copying the project to the watch folder? I’m not sure right now, but I’m hoping there’s something I can do in Premiere Pro to signal I want a copy of the project dumped to my watch folder. Will investigate.

See Also

Using Adobe Media Encoder as a Remote Render Farm for Adobe After Effects – School of Motion – Kevin Snyder

Transcript

“So I was asked recently to demonstrate the basics of working with images in WordPress, particularly when you’re dealing with images that are of a high resolution. So if you look at my desktop here, I have three images. I will just display them quickly – this one, this one, and this one. Now, what they have in common is they’re all the same size… if I hover over them right here, you’ll see that they are 3200 by 2400, that’s a fairly large size, and I can demonstrate that by opening one of them in Paint. So in Paint what you see is a portion of the sky, in this particular shot, and the reason is that the file is actually, the photo is actually quite large. So there’s a lot of detail here, and I have to scroll around to see it all. Now obviously this isn’t practical, and that’s the same reason that Windows will show you a smaller version of the file, like this, it will scale it to your screen size, so that it’s consumable, and like, easy for the user, rather than impractical, like Paint.

So, now that we’ve established the size of these images, we’re going to talk about uploading it to the WordPress platform, and how to use the tools in the WordPress platform to actually modify those images. Now, there’s also another option – you can modify the files before you upload them, but that’s not for this video. I’ll cover that in another video. For this video, we’re talking about using the tools that WordPress gives you. Let’s upload the first image right here.

Now that it’s finished uploading, I’ll just confirm with you that on the right-hand side, we see a resolution of 3200 by 2400… that’s a large resolution. If I wanted to incorporate that into my page or blog post, what I would do is I would want to insert it… but certainly not at the full size, because as we saw, that’s very impractical. So on the right-hand side here, we have Attachment Display Settings and we have size options. So clearly full size is impractical, forget about that.

Instead what I think we’re going to do just for demonstration’s sake is I’ll choose Medium. So I’m going to choose medium right here, that’s 300 by 225, and I will insert into the page. So what do you see? The image gets inserted.

Now, what WordPress is doing internally is interesting. I’ll go back to Add Media to demonstrate what I mean. Put simply, WordPress is keeping your image in its original form, so 3200 by 2400, it’s still visible in the Media Library, and what it is doing is internally it created another copy of the file, of the photo, that is smaller, and the reason it does this is so when people are actually viewing your blog post, it doesn’t have to force them to download the entire file, that would be very inefficient. So instead, it’s got a smaller version of the file that downloads really quickly, that gives you the exact size that you want. So that’s one way to use WordPress to make your images more practical when they’re injected into your post, or your content, anywhere.

Now, as a next step, let’s go back into Edit Page, and I’ll demonstrate how you can resize a photo using WordPress’ built-in tool. So what I’ll do is I’ll just drop the image here, which triggers an Add Media action, and once I have access to the image in the media library, I will direct your attention to the Edit Image option, on the right-hand side. So if I click Edit Image, you’ll see that on the left you have the image, you have some controls up top, which we’re not going to use right now. And you have some options on the right-hand side.

Now what we want is to resize this image to a more practical size. So on the right-hand side, you have the original dimensions noted, and then you can change it to something else. So let’s say I decided that 3200 was too much, and I wanted to make it less large, I could something like 1200 as the new width of the image, and then click Scale. What this will do is essentially resize the image while maintaining the proportions. Okay? That’s important, maintaining the proportions, because otherwise the image could warp and look completely wrong. So what we have here is a new dimension has been set, of 1200 by 900, right? So and then I can click Back right here, and what you’ll notice is you will have a new size listed in the media library of 1200 by 900. Now, you can still apply Attachment Display Settings in the bottom here and select different sizes, and it will still continue modifying, keeping the original and creating a separate sized version of the image to use in your post.

Another interesting thing I wanted to mention is if you click Edit Image again, you always have the option to restore the original image – just zoom in right here so you can see it, on the right-hand side, it says “Discard any changes and restore the original image. Previously edited copies of the image will not be deleted.” So if you click Restore Image and then you go back, you will notice that the size on the right-hand side is back to what it was before.

Now, for image number 3, I’m going to choose to crop it instead. I’m going to X this off, and I’m going to drag image number 3 into my post, which will trigger again an Add Media action. So now that it has uploaded successfully, I’m going to decide that I want to edit it once more and my intention this time is something very unique – I’m going to decide to crop everything but this globe in the center, that’s my focal point, I just care about this, nothing else matters, right? So that’s the task we’ll be working on.

WordPress makes this relatively easy. I just have to drag my mouse anywhere over the image on the right hand side to the exact positioning that I want, let’s say this, and then what I’ll do is I’ll click the icon up here that corresponds to the action that I want to do. In this case, this icon is the crop icon, so I will click it… and there you go, it cropped it. Now, notice that the scale is still normal here, still the regular scale, but when I click save… and then I look on the details on the right, the image is no longer as large as it was before. Instead, it’s 995 by 768 – that is, the cropped size. So now, if this size is actually reasonable enough, I could inject it outright as an original full size, right here, in the bottom-right side, or I can just continue and just change the size in the attachment display settings to something smaller, to make it more practical for my post. The interesting thing about this is that WordPress always keeps the original of the file, as we showed earlier, but it also allows you to keep the edited version around, the most recent one, and to also change the attachment display settings and have like, a copy of the image created on-the-fly that you’re going to use for a particular purpose, like a thumbnail, or a medium-sized version for example. Right? So this is a medium sized version of the image.”

It’s fascinating how you start to see people differently when you have kids. And I say that loosely, as I haven’t exactly spawned minions of my own – my experience stems from fulfilling a stepfather role, years ago, which came quicker than I expected. I mean sure, I had certainly thought of a hypothetical future that might involve kids, but there’s no way I thought that would happen in my 20s. In my mind, I wasn’t yet good enough at managing multiple aspects of my life, such as my finances, certain aspects of my business, etc. It wasn’t that I was bad at these things, but more so, I didn’t feel I was good enough. It thus felt ridiculous to even consider raising additional human beings… I wasn’t, in my opinion, even a great example for them to follow, at least not as much as I wanted.

Certainly, I can see now that perhaps my obsession with being the perfect example was a little extreme, an endless pursuit of machine-like efficiency. Over time, in other areas of my life, I calmed this aspect of my personality, and instead started believing in the idea of reasonable perfectionism.

You can drive yourself batty trying to do the absolute best job possible, or, you can do a very good job based on your experience, but not obsess to an unhealthy, unreasonable level.

This was a great milestone to reach psychologically-speaking, but it didn’t quite soothe my belief that I didn’t have the required amount of self-management prowess to take on the challenge of raising kids. But that, altogether, represented a whole lot of rational thought, and while that generally drove me quite well, emotion was another factor that couldn’t quite be controlled as easily.

And so I found myself living with a girlfriend and her two kids, a boy, 2, and a girl, 5. Not only had I not expected to take on a parental role so soon, but my background was one where I basically had a total lack of experience with children in general. While I had a bunch of family and cousins, my parents would often skip family gatherings – and as such, I would rarely see the younger generation of our family while growing up. This lack of exposure to kids made it challenging for me to feel confident in how I approached and interacted with them.

I had also gotten used to having total control over my environment and its associated levels of cleanliness and order. I can’t say I was a germophobe, but I was conscious of germs and was pretty careful to keep things clean and orderly, at least to a reasonable degree. As you might imagine, when I came face-to-face with the two-year-old, who often had a drool and bits of food on his face during key moments in his meal, I quickly realized that the world I knew was going to be very different. Soon enough I was sharing drinks with these kids at amusement parks and the food and drool mix during mealtime was just another element of life.

And then, there were the diapers. Can you imagine what it was like for a sort-of germophobe to change diapers? I would be lying if I said the possibility of wearing a full Hazmat suit never crossed my mind. But, ultimately, I found a procedure that worked for me.

I’d carry the child to a suitable location, mostly clear of external objects, to minimize collateral damage. I’d have two plastic bags with me (one in the other), and a container of wipes. I would then open the diaper, and use wipes to progressively clean up the waste, while depositing them in the bag as I went along. While I could have technically done this with just one bag, I knew that there was always a chance that one bag might have an undetected hole in it, potentially allowing the poop to escape. Suffice it to say that my method was in no way environmentally friendly, as I would go through a ridiculous bunch of bags and wipes cleaning up the child from his own excrement over time. But, I did it, in the end, despite having my own weird approach. His mother, on the other hand, had unquestionable diaper-changing skills –  she had the ability to change a child’s diaper in such a way that she barely needed any wipes, and ended up with this wrapped up ball of a diaper, mostly safe for handling.

Of course, there was far more to the step-father experience than learning to purge the concentrated evil that was regularly produced in a child’s diaper. For example, I learned to appreciate aspects of human life that I had ignored before. I took note of things like parks and playgrounds, and recognized their potential at helping raise the kids. I made use of restaurants where the kids could eat free, or paid, but with nice features for kids. And, in a similar but yet different way, I learned to fully appreciate the grocery store shopping carts in that had toddler seats built-in. The 5-year-old was well behaved, for the most part, but the “issue” was really the 2-3 year old, and containing his inevitable abundance of energy and semi-frequent mischief. I say issue in quotes because at that age, there’s only so much order you can expect. That said, at times, the prospect of entering a store without such a cart was too much to bear – it really depended on the day. Other times, I could pick up the two-year-old and walk around with him as I did some shopping, interacting with him as I went along. These were some of my favorite moments with him, actually – because it was a fun, cooperative kind of experience that I knew I could only have with him at that moment of his life – he would soon grow bigger, and seek more autonomy.

And that’s the thing – there were always good moments, even if for the most part things weren’t necessarily easy – and not just because of the kids. In the midst of relationship troubles with their mother, I still have very fond memories, some of which I know I will never forget. I remember, for example, one particular day when I noticed it had started hailing all of a sudden, and I immediately ran to get the daughter, to show her something I always found so fascinating, despite it being a simple aspect of our world. She shared that enthusiasm, and the resulting experience of us catching hail in our hands, will forever remain burned in my mind.

So despite my lack of exposure to children and my somewhat abrupt immersion into a parental role, I have to say that it was an extremely enriching experience. And when my relationship with their mother met its unfortunate but necessary end, the sad reality was that it also meant a severance from the two kids that I helped raise. I can imagine in the future that it might be possible to see them again, but in my mind that can only occur if I can guarantee the absence of hostility and turbulence – the last thing I’d want to do to them is inadvertently introduce another stressful moment in their lives.

Before this entire experience, I would walk around treating people as they appeared at the moment I encountered them – that is, I based myself on their current age – they were either a child, an adult, a senior, whatever the case. This was, of course, the most literal interpretation of reality – but it was Joe Rogan, of all people, who ultimately uttered words that would cause a significant shift in my perspective, via his podcast. Put simply, he explained that having kids helped him realize that the people he encountered on a day-to-day basis were babies once, and he was just meeting grown-up versions of those babies. This, he suggested, helped foster empathy and compassion right off the bat. Everyone faces their own paths and challenges in life, but they are still a version of that baby from the very beginning… innocence as an origin. What happened to that little one to make them into the person you’re seeing today? Perhaps more empathy is in order?

And furthermore, if you had any kind of quarrel with a person, would you regret anything if they died the next day? I recently had to face the harsh reality of losing my father. And, given our general tendency of avoiding family gatherings, as you might imagine, there was no one else (other than my mother) that I knew quite so well and for so long. Though undeniably horrific and painful, it still brought crucial realizations to my mind – both sobering and transformative. I realized how so many things were completely not worth arguing about – because when a person is gone, none of it matters. My list of regrets surpassed anything I’d ever listed before. And yet, my rational mind knew that I had done reasonably well considering the circumstances – and that ultimately, nothing could be changed but my path forward.

If I had more deeply understood these ideas in the past, I wouldn’t have made as many mistakes in my overall interactions with other human beings. I would have had more empathy, patience, appreciation. It wouldn’t have necessarily changed the outcomes, but the overall journey would have likely been more rewarding, enjoyable. However, in the end, there’s no re-writes. There’s just an abundance of memories and a whole lot of lessons to be derived from them. And though it’s really unpleasant to affirm, it’s often after being completely destroyed that we can rebuild ourselves, and do better moving forward. And in between these so-called moments of destruction, that, is where the finest moments of life can be had, only enhanced by the knowledge that they are fleeting.

I’ve discovered I have a new passion in life, and you know what it’s all about? Helping people remove as much of the ads and sponsored content from Windows 10 as possible, assuming, of course, that that’s something they want to do to begin with. And so today, a very quick but essential tip… how do you remove the “helpful” facts and/or links that appear on the login page? Here’s an example:

These icons visually pollute the lock screen image, and in many cases, Microsoft uses them to sway consumer behavior – something they’ve clearly grown fond of doing since people accepted free Windows 10 upgrades. Solution If Windows 10 isn’t doing what you want, beat it with a rolled up newspaper until it starts behaving again*. Or, in technical terms, do the following:

1. Click the “Start” button, and search for “Settings,” then press Enter.
2. Click “Personalization.”
3. Click “Lock Screen.”

Now, here’s where you’ll have to come face-to-face with a difficult decision. Microsoft has bundled its “amazing” sponsored content with the nice random photos you see on your lock screen – they call the combination “Windows Spotlight.” Personally, I love the changing photos… but I really dislike when they’re polluted with sponsored callouts. And so my personal choice is to sacrifice the changing image for the sake of gaining a little more relaxation and peace of mind on my logon screen. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Click the “Background” dropdown, and change it from “Windows Spotlight” to either “Picture” or “Slideshow.”
2. Select the picture or picture(s) you’d like included, respectively.
3. Locate the “Get fun facts, tips, and more from Windows and Cortana on your lock screen,” and enthusiastically toggle it from “On” to “Off.”

That’s it! Now, take a deep breath, and enjoy your newfound freedom from yet another source of advertising. * Beating a computer with a rolled up newspaper won’t actually solve anything. Best left to the imagination.

Transcription

“Hi everyone. In this video, I’ll be showing you how to hide the Tools Pane from Adobe Reader DC. I’ll be showing it under Windows 10. So you know when you’re opening a PDF with Adobe Reader? On the right hand side, there’s this special section known as the Tools Pane. It’s an area that has several functions: Export PDF, Create PDF, and a bunch of other things.

Now, generally speaking, I find this section obstructive, more than anything. So it’s in the way. I would like, for example, the Adobe Reader window to utilize the full width of the window, not just a portion of it because of this sidebar. So in order to hide the sidebar, I click on the arrow here. Now that’s fine, but when you close the window and then re-open a PDF, any PDF, you’ll notice that it’s not gone, it was just temporarily hidden. And similarly, and if you go to the View menu up top and then click Show/Hide, and then un-check it from here, and then close the window, and then re-open it, you’re in the same situation, it just comes right back.

So how do you remove it permanently? Here’s how. Up top where you have File, Edit, and View, I want you to click Edit, click Preferences at the very bottom of that menu, and then here, make sure that you’re in the Documents section on the left. If you’re not, just click Documents. When you’ve clicked Documents, you’ll notice there’s a section called Open Settings visible. And in the Open Settings section, there’s an option called Remember current state of Tools Pane. That’s the one you want to check – so go ahead and check that option, and then very simply, click OK.

Now what that does is it tells Adobe that when you’ve made a selection about whether the Tools Pane should be visible or not, that it should remember that, so it should remember the state of the pane. So right now, if I were to close Adobe Reader, there’s no change, in the sense that when I re-open it, the pane is still there, it’s remembering the state. Now if I close it, the state is now closed – so if I close Adobe Reader, open it again, it’s gone. And that’s how you get rid of the Tools Pane.”

So I’ll cut right to the chase on this one. On Friday the 10th of November, at 6:15 PM EST, I received an odd Facebook message from a friend, one that I’ll call Jane for the sake of this article. At first glance, just from the thumbnail, her message seemed like a risky thing to click on. Here’s what I saw:

UPDATE December 7, 2022: I blurred the image quite a bit more.

Now, I knew Jane pretty well, so I knew that she often said and did things that weren’t particularly appropriate – but it wasn’t a constant thing, it happened from time to time. So, even though the preview to this video concerned me, I reasoned that perhaps this wasn’t what it looked like. After all, it could have been a play on the word “cock,” whereby some dude positioned a rooster in such a way that it could, ostensibly, be perceived as an appendage of sorts. Not something that I would personally find funny, especially given the probability of a misunderstanding occurring; however, I felt Jane deserved the benefit of the doubt.

Unfortunately for me, and unfortunately for the chicken, this video was 100% what it looked like. To my shock, the video depicted full-on bestiality – there’s just no other way to put it – some depraved, demented human was having sex with a chicken, and enjoying himself. I think it’s safe to assume that the chicken never gave consent.

Realizing the seriousness of what I’d been sent, I immediately sought a way to report the message as being inappropriate through Facebook, so that they could remove it from their servers, or at the very least, my message history. Reporting, of course, is part of life on the Internet – sometimes, inappropriate content gets through the filters, and it’s up individuals to raise the necessary flags. And while the definition of “inappropriate” or “offensive” may vary, I felt that an explicit video of a dude sexually violating a chicken was a pretty good candidate for deletion.

Here’s the problem. While Facebook has some tools for reporting posts, comments, pages, profiles, and conversations, it doesn’t have a great way to report a single message for being offensive/inappropriate. If you press the gear icon next to a Facebook conversation, and you press Report, it immediately returns this message without giving you a chance to intervene:

We’ve marked this message as possible spam. If you’d like to report threatening or abusive messages, please visit the Help Center.

I mean, that’s good in case you’re getting spam from a random Facebook stranger, but what if this is a friend that I normally don’t have issues with? I didn’t think it made sense to flag her as a spammer.

The only other option I found was reporting the message as a threat, which is ultimately what I went for. I didn’t feel Jane was threatening me, but I found no other way to communicate the problem to Facebook. When writing the report, I made sure to specify that it was entirely possible one of her friends got a hold of her phone, and sent it without her knowing. I provided a screenshot, and figured that they’d respond rather quickly. 

That was at around 7pm EST. The case is still open, and it only features this:

Their initial auto-response.

How long will it take for Facebook to remove something like this? Isn’t it a little bit of a concern that they can’t react faster when someone reports this type of content? I mean, to their credit, I assume that if it was an actual threat of violence against a human, they might be quicker to respond. I also imagine they’re probably pretty busy overall. But still, isn’t this still an important thing to remove? Shouldn’t Facebook be better at responding to these types of issues? I realize they might not be able to bring the guy to justice, but they could at least remove the video and prevent it from being uploaded again.

I’ll update this post when they reply to my support ticket.

UPDATE: Took them a month. Video still in my messenger history.

Photo credit

Photo by Daniel Jurena

On a particularly normal morning a few weeks ago, I was preparing to leave for work. I had a small pizza cooking in the oven, one that I planned to eat for lunch – it was not a standard small pizza, more reasonably-sized. When the timer rang, I opened the oven, took the platter out, and placed it on the top of the stove. I then tried to do my usual next step: lifting the pizza from the aluminum foil. To my surprise, on this day, the pizza was very much stuck to the aluminum foil, making for a complicated task – I had to separate the pizza from the foil without comprising the structural integrity of the crust underneath.

Now, what’s important to know here is that I very rarely put oil on the aluminum foil to ensure it doesn’t stick to whichever pizza I’m cooking. That’s because in 99% of cases, I never have trouble with the pizza sticking to the foil – and if I do, it’s usually stuck at one specific contact point, maybe two. (Something I could very easily resolve.) But this particular pizza was hanging on for dear life – clearly, it had been given a glimpse of its future, and had no interest in being consumed. We’re talking 5 or 6 contact points… it was putting up a fight. Even though I’d cooked hundreds of frozen pizzas in my life, I had never seen a case this bad. Thus began a delicate, complicated operation.

Unfortunately, the pizza didn’t survive. By the end, I had a mangled mess of a pizza, a shattered image of its wonderful, tasty self. While not catastrophic on a cosmic scale, the loss of my pizza served as a bit of foreshadowing for the day that awaited me. See, up until that point, it had been a great morning – I was in a good mood for no particular reason (other than being alive), and was looking forward to going to work. The pizza incident kind of took me by surprise, a random frustration that I didn’t expect.

And so I went to work, and within an hour or so, a co-worker called me to her desk to show me something on her computer. While I sat next to her watching her screen, she casually mentioned that something had gone well for my ex-girlfriend, in terms of her education, and that she would finally receive a certificate she had long since wanted to receive. My colleague mentioned this because it was related to our employer, and she knew I was aware of the issue from the past, while we were still a couple. Now, while I was glad to hear that this particular thing had gone well for my ex, I don’t think my colleague realized that mentioning my ex-girlfriend was probably not the best thing to do – we hadn’t been in a contact for months, and there were reasons for that.

As an after-thought, a few moments later, my co-worker decided to flat-out ask me if my ex and I were still talking. I responded quite honestly, but bluntly, that I could only see that happening in a matter of years, not anytime soon. I wasn’t happy with how this came out, but I did recognize the complicated nature of the situation, and that my reflex was at least pure in its honesty. I had reasons for having this stance, reasons that I didn’t necessarily want to share at that moment. And yet, there I was, faced with this topic at my place of work.

And that’s the thing. This happened at work. In the past, I was strict when it came to keeping my personal and work lives apart. I only revealed very limited details to carefully selected individuals, and that method worked well. And then, somewhere along the way, I tried to be more open about what was going on in my life. I would say that this likely had a lot to do with the fact that I worked with lots of women, though it’s not strictly a gender thing. In any case, I started sharing more, as my colleagues did, and I must say, there were a few times in the past couple years where doing so made me really uncomfortable. I should have paid more attention to the signs – it was clear that I wasn’t truly comfortable with the change – and I’m a big believer that above all, one’s comfort is the key. My old method rarely made me feel discomfort, and when it did, it was incredibly low impact.

But this particular encounter quickly devolved into jokes from multiple colleagues within earshot, and a further question about my personal life. The jokes were surely said with the goal of lightening the mood, hopefully lessening the discomfort of what had just happened. I could certainly appreciate that, if that was actually the case, but despite the effort, I was still quite simply not comfortable with what had happened. Though brief, I felt that my private life had been invaded, more than I felt comfortable. As bad as the day had become, however, it led me to a very good conclusion – that I should return to my previous policy. Personal life and work are two completely different worlds, and that’s how they should stay – for me, anyway. Perhaps others are comfortable with mixing the two together, but in my own mind, given my own experiences over the past two years, I discovered that by allowing myself to be more open about my private life, I’m opening myself to pointless discomfort, with very little positive return for doing so. If talking about my private life was a hugely positive experience for me, and it enriched my life, then perhaps the negative aspects could be overlooked. But this was not the case. Only one method truly worked, and it involved being more selective in what I said, and who I chose to say it to.

And so despite how horrible of a day it had become, comfort-wise, I had to cherish it for its positive attributes – finally, I experienced enough discomfort to make a change for the better. No longer would I allow my personal life to mix with my professional life. In fact, just the idea of restoring that policy outright relaxed me, made me feel better, and that is how I know that it’s the right decision – the compass I’ve come to trust.

So there I was, browsing the web with Chrome as I always did, when I noticed a new pop-up in Windows 10. Take a look at this:

Now, as much as I like Windows for its simplicity, I have to express my total and utter disgust at this type of tactic. This is basically the corporate equivalent of a kindergardener pointing to another child and boasting how much better they are than them, in an attempt to increase their own popularity amongst the rest. And you just know that they’re using the fact that their dad is the principal to more easily get away with it.

See, that’s the thing… if Microsoft actually had any ounce of fairness in their use of this tactic, I might be more tolerant. For example, if they routinely referenced impartial external studies that they didn’t finance in any way, and then used the findings to suggest superior apps, then great. That sounds a good feature for Windows, a good way to help raise security and performance across the entire Windows userbase.

But you just know that they’re just doing whatever they can to get you to use their products – it’s not about the greater good, it’s about their greater good. There’s no way they’ll put a pop-up above a non-Microsoft app and say “X runs 35% faster than Edge.” And, let’s face it – they kind of need that extra boost – most of the time, Microsoft products forever play catch-up to far more innovative companies.

This whole situation sounds familiar, though, doesn’t it? Haven’t we seen unfair tactics before? Oh right, the 1998 antitrust case, United States v. Microsoft Corporation.

On May 18, 1998, the Department of Justice filed antitrust charges against Microsoft. The charges were brought to determine whether Microsoft’s bundling of other programs into its operating system constituted monopolistic actions. The suit was brought following the browser wars that led to the collapse of Microsoft’s top competitor, Netscape, which occurred when Microsoft began giving away its browser software for free.

Ultimately, Microsoft lost this case, and ended up having to settle.

[T]he Court concludes that Microsoft maintained its monopoly power by anticompetitive means and attempted to monopolize the Web browser market, both in violation of § 2. Microsoft also violated § 1 of the Sherman Act by unlawfully tying its Web browser to its operating system.

Naturally, this is not exactly what Microsoft is doing right now. But, if you ask me, it’s getting pretty damn close to it. After all, it’s leveraging its own operating system to try and pull people away from third party apps – something third parties can’t do as easily, if at all. So anyway, in the spirit in denying this type of unfair tactic, here’s how you can stop it from appearing on your machine:

1. Click Start.
2. Click “Settings,” the small gear icon.
3. Click “System,” the top left option.
4. On the left, select “Notifications & actions.”
5. Scroll down until you find the “Get tips, tricks, and suggestions as you use Windows,” and turn it Off.

Recently, I finished writing a new page for my blog, and was looking to add it to the main menu. So I proceeded as I normally would – in the WordPress dashboard, I selected “Appearance,” then “Menus.” In that editor, I added the new page, and pressed “Save Menu.” Then, to my surprise, I got this error, which prevented me from saving my changes:

Granted, after reading the error message completely, I realized that I was at least somewhat to blame. After all, the size and complexity of my menus were beyond anything I’d seen before in a WordPress site.

I make heavy use of sub-menus. This screenshot only scratches the surface. Then again, was it my fault? Shouldn’t software like this just work? With that in mind, I took to Google to find a solution to my problem. What followed was a quest that lead to me trying many different things: changing PHP variables, checking error logs, restarting services, my server, etc. Ultimately, none of these steps worked for me. However, thanks to the articles I had encountered, I managed to find a way around the error, without actually modifying my server in any way.

Solution/Workaround

One of the articles I found lead me to the official entry in WordPress’ bug database, for the issue itself: #14134 Menus item are limited to 16 item and will not save more than that. Once I found this page, I started reading the conversation as it progressed across time, between developers. Eventually, I spotted this particular comment by “helgatheviking” (emphasis added):

“Trevor, if I understand it is only solved in the Customizer. If you edit and save your menu on the admin side you are still at risk of getting the menu cut off.”

Ah, yes, the customizer. I had totally forgotten that WordPress had another way of managing menus. And yet, it was right in front of me the whole time:

A big “Manage with Live Preview” button. How did I miss that? Sure enough, if I modified my menus using this “Live Preview” mode, the error no longer occurred. While not an actual solution, it successfully allowed me to save my menu, without any issues. I certainly learned from the situation, however, and decided that I’d reduce the complexity of my menus in the future. The world, after all, is more focused on search, these days – there’s no reason for me to build a directory. If someone’s looking for something, they’ll search for it, and that’s how they’ll find it. But until then, thanks to “helgatheviking,” and the great articles that lead me to solve my problem.