Windows 10.18326 should be called .000 instead

Windows 10 wanted to “update and restart” today. Actually, what it did, however, was to upgrade itself to build 18326 (taking about 1 hour). And during the process my “C:\Users\SDolha” folder contents was moved to “C:\Users\SDolha.000” (just like a plain old NT 4 that it is, underneath!) due to some old remaining Zune (!) temp files inside its AppData subfolder which apparently it had trouble with. Ouch, ouch, ouch!

That profile path change has broken OneDrive, Google Drive, and iCloud photo syncing, at first sight, but OK, I could restore them to the new paths with a few configurations.

But… I just remembered I also had some dev productivity .bat files which (wrongly, I admit) relied on that path! (Yes, still old batches, PowerShell is just a “good to have” for me.) And also some symbolic links (to avoid Visual Studio 250 char path issues, oh my!) that were using my exact username without referencing system/profile variables either.

No way… I didn’t want to “fix” all those (they were a few), nor I wanted to go to regedit and move my profile to the old path from another user account’s administrative session, breaking who-knows-what-else. What did I do then?

I realized that I could temporarily add write permissions for myself on the Users folder, delete SDolha from it, and create a new symbolic link SDolha pointing to SDolha.000 instead! It was as easy as this:

C:\Users>mklink /d SDolha SDolha.000

For now this seems to have worked perfectly, and I hope no tool that I use will actually check my surrogate profile’s folder’s nature.

(But no, in general, it seems Windows is not reliable anymore. Or has it every been?)

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3 ecrane ajung

…în launcher-ul telefonului, zic eu, pentru majoritatea utilizatorilor.

Sigur, iOS și Android prezintă diferențe (una mă enervează rău la iPhone: că nu-mi pot aranja “cu spații” icon-urile aplicațiilor dintr-un ecran și trebuie să mă chinui dacă le vreau oarecum organizate logic/vizual), dar aș postula că în principiu nu e nevoie de mai mult de 3 pagini:

1. Cele mai utilizate (inclusiv “fixe”) + un subgrup cu suplimente principale;
2. Altele importante, poate și subgrupuri secundare;
3. Diverse, majoritatea plasate în subgrupuri funcționale.

Voi ce idei/strategie folosiți pentru gruparea aplicațiilor? Poate n-am dreptate cu presupunerea de mai sus?

No [more] Waze

Da, acu’ ceva timp tot lăudam Waze. Din păcate însă, în ultima vreme mă cam bate gândul să nu-l mai folosesc decât atunci când nu am destule detalii pe Google sau Apple* Maps. Sau – pornindu-l pe moment – dacă dau de o modificare în trafic de care primele habar n-aveau. (Știu, voi pierde informații despre evenimente rutiere neprevăzute, poliții în boscheți, etc. dar asta e.)

Motivul principal este acela că tot mai des Waze mă duce cam aiurea. Rute proaste, cu ocoluri ne-necesare, sau cu final la stânga în intersecții grele: unde știam eu altfel, încercam altfel, și era mai bine. În plus, la drum lung serverele lor cam dau rateuri repetate și mă cam enervez să împart eu însumi călătoria în segmente. (Parcă ar fi anii ’90 când puteai obține rute pe desktop, cu ajutorul unor aplicații mari cât un CD!)

* De ce am zis și de Apple Maps aici: deși în România informația de-acolo e slabă, mie mi se pare că rutele lor sunt cele mai ușoare. La dreapta când întrăm pe o stradă cu mult trafic sau în lucru, apoi revenim mai încolo, pe alte străduțe mai ușoare la stânga de 3 ori. (Dar încă de acest feature nu sunt 100% sigur; mai testez: sper că nu e bug, totuși.) 🙂

Untold

[empty]

Why it’s so important to read a book or trustful documentation when you learn about any topic: some time ago, when I was just starting my iOS dev journey, I read somewhere to be careful when setting UIView layer’s properties because multiple views may combine to use the same layer to improve performance. That would be interesting indeed and could be reasonable if you didn’t know what CALayer class offers (and you’d think it behaves like in Photoshop or your favorite image editor) but for iOS it is simply and completely false: each view (and subview) has its own layer; although some layers may have independent sublayers that are not linked to any view (so actually a kind of opposite is true.)

Multiple payment methods on a single Apple ID: the improvement and the issue

Fotografie de bruce mars pe Pexels.com

Today I used Apple Pay for the first time (it has just become available in Romania): yes, it (just) works (now here too!)

But something else caught my attention while I was setting my cards up on the phone’s Wallet: it seems that with one of the recent iOS (and macOS) updates, Apple finally allows users to also add more than one payment method to any individual Apple ID. Believe it or not, this was previously (e.g. last year or so) not the case!

But there is a caveat with this (otherwise welcome) improvement: you still shouldn’t add cards from both yourself and your company (or any other person) there, assuming that it would be easy to select the appropriate one upon each later AppStore purchase:

You would instead need to ensure your payment methods are reordered as needed before purchasing business vs. personal purpose apps, for example: the first card will be attempted first, and worse, if the first doesn’t work, the second (or a following) will be debited instead. So you must be very careful to ensure the (correct) first one is working if you want the amount to be collected from there – and this is technically impossible (with 100% certainty level!)

Microsoft wants me out completely?

Fotografie de Snapwire pe Pexels.com

Last year Microsoft announced that only the Windows 10 UWP flavor of their OneNote app will eventually be receiving further updates (since 2020). It was reported (but I haven’t verified) that they already removed the classic OneNote app from 2019 installer, and while OneNote 2016 remains available indefinitely , the Windows version will be in the spotlight from now on.

For some people, this looks like a good thing: UWP is the future, right? (I hope not like Windows Phone, though.) And why maintaining duplicate apps?

Myself, however, I really liked the classic OneNote app way more than its (too) light(er) counterpart, regardless of the latter’s shinier look and “trendier” features that, by the way, I’ve never had a use case for.

On the other hand, it seems I tend to use OneNote more on the Web than on desktop. Probably since I was working more on MacBooks than PCs lately, and I didn’t want to install Office there (sometimes to just save some storage space, other times because it was not my computer.)

But analyzing myself using OneNote further, I realized that I rarely use OneNote on PC anyway, and instead it seems I use it more from iPhone or from Mac, through Web.

And then it just crossed my mind: OneNote and ToDo apps were the only ones that truly kept me “Microsofty” in the Apple’s ecosystem (besides Remote Desktop, of course.) I have recently moved from Outlook to Apple Mail on iPhone too, due to performance issues that (again) the shiny Outlook has had for months. So why not just migrate my notes to Apple Notes instead? This app is actually preinstalled on both macOS and iOS and from Windows it can also be accessed through iCloud.com (and it works well even in Edge).

I just did it manually (by copy-pasting) for the most important notes (luckily I didn’t have tons of items), and I’m happier now. (ToDo items were already visible in Reminders, so I could just move them to iCloud as well.)

This way I don’t need to care about the OneNote flavor that Microsoft decided to update in the future. (I could continue to use ToDo, but hey, now it would have been alone.)

Not a good job, Microsoft. I was one of your best friends years ago. I wish you luck with OneNote: maybe teenagers will use UWP, who knows. (Unless Instagram creates a Notes tab somewhere in their mobile app.)

Update: It seems eventually they understood UWP is not the right way. But still, I’m already partially out already. (For me, Redmond may be too late. Again.)