Windows Fall Update Annoyances

Yes it has several for me...

A new security section "Controlled Folder Access" stops "unfriendly apps" from changing files in certain data folders. By default, these are any non Microsoft program and everything in the User folder.
Oh dear! Some programs store data in User folders, so they need whitelisting. EVE Online was one such, and it was generating alerts as it tried to Save its chat logs. I suspect this might have been causing crashes as well.
Another was, mysteriously, a Microsoft program... msiexec.exe is the Windows installer program which I get repeated alerts about for trying to access the Desktop folder. There are only shortcuts there.

I'm not that wealthy!

According to her EVE Character Sheet, Ori is worth 82 Billion ISK. Now while as a corporation CEO she is not short of funds that is plainly untrue, so what was going wrong?

There is a Character Assets XML table that can be downloaded via the EVE API. This doesn't include some things which are on the Character Sheet such as cash and escrow but still...

The XML had a column with mixed Tables and nulls which Excel wouldn't expand, so I had to create a second table to get this flattened out, it held the contents of containers and ship fittings.
Annotating the tables revealed an accounting glitch. The corporation transports goods from the factory to the market where they sit in a warehouse before going on sale. A corporation warehouse would be absurdly expensive to rent at a trade hub so the corp uses Ori's personal storage hanger which is free, and this comes up as her assets.
So that was around 40 billion located. Where was the rest? It turned out that sales orders were also being credited to Ori, only when items were sold did the cash arrive in the corporation bank account. And there on the order sheet was another 37 billion!

Another glitch was found whilst doing all this - the API ignores personal stuff in player owned space stations. This is unlikely to be corrected as XML is being phased out.

Spacesheeting 51

'51' being the version of the EVE spreadsheet I've reached!

Following the conversion to Power Query all seemed well. There is a bug I created myself by deleting worksheets without disconnecting downloads on them, but that just requires pressing a button twice.

Meanwhile the devs have progressed from one API front end, CREST, to another, SWAGGER. Noticing that it had a useful price list I ventured into it armed only with my shaky knowledge of JSON and it was as tricky as I feared. Why is every entry called 'Record'? Much searching followed until I realised that the 'List to Table' button was the magic one.

Luncheon at Trikassi

An al fresco luncheon at Chateau Trikassi.with friends.

Some of our guests live in Aislinn castle, top left.

Dame Litta and Oriella with tomato soup:

Time to upgrade

After seven years, a new desktop PC! The previous one has served well with only one hardware failure, the power unit.
So as before something middle range for about the same price and rely on Moore's Law to make it better.
250GB SSD
GeForce GTX 1060
Intel i7
Aero Cool DS200 case+fans

It is, as advertised, silent.
I could have used a shift everything over utility, but that would have taken accumulated junk with it so I'm only moving specific files and where possible downloading and installing from scratch.
So far, no drama. If anything over enthusiasm, since Windows was grabbing settings from the old machine without asking!

And then I hit an Excel snag. Excel 2016 has integrated Power Query into the main program, it was an optional Addon for earlier versions. In doing so the old XML table downloader seems to have been broken, it fails to Save Maps correctly.
So I had to convert. Power Query is more generalised and is indeed powerful, but it's a complicated pain to learn. There is a button for everything, but where is it?
Today came the big test, running the converted sheet on Excel 2016. Success!

[added] Time to check really old programs: Webedit and WS/FTP are both Win95 vintage, mirrors of their folders have followed me faithfully and... they still work. A test edit of a website page uploaded with no complaints.

The sad demise of Daisy

My very old Email address daisy.freeserve.co.uk will be no more in a few weeks. My ISP has decided to no longer provide a mail server.
So, since I already have a Google address Google it is.

Oops

Oh dear - not been killed in EVE for a long while. I forgot that War Declarations only expire 24 hours after the clock runs out and got ambushed in my big fat freighter.
In EVE you wake up in a new clone minus your expensive implants and with a depleted bank balance, a totally unpleasant experience.

Nothing of Interest

The big change in EVE last year was a new range of player owned space stations, so my Corporation built one. It's a robot factory called "Nothing of Interest" orbiting the innermost moon of a gas giant, a pretty spot.
Editing the spreadsheet to take account of the various advantages not renting factory space provides has been tricky, but if I've got it right the green lights say we are in for a profitable year. Assuming no one decides to blow it up that is.

Administrator!

Yes, here we go again. Civilisation VI runs fine, thinks it has Saved, no error message - but doesn't. 'Run as Admin' fixed this, because presumably it was trying to save into a protected folder.

Dust in the machine

A friend was having computer power cutouts - possibly the power supply - but I suggested checking temperatures first. So we both installed Speedfan and goodness, it was my machine that was overheating!
So off with the cover and in with the vacuum cleaner. Success! The CPU fan is now speeding up properly.
Speedfan can also adjust speeds and do other geeky stuff, so I tweaked to slow speeds when not busy.
[added] ... and in my friend's case it was dog hair!

Android fun

The new phone came with standard Android, so I've so far added
Google Maps
Prime Dice, for polyhedral dice rolling during roleplaying games
Greenify, a battery saver. It does just one thing, puts apps into hibernation when the screen is dark.
SyncMe, for transferring photos to the computer
Flashlight

And yes, I had malware already despite only downloading from the Google Store. A screen asking to install 'Facebook Patch 4' was popping up after boots - and I don't have Facebook installed.
[added] Two anti-virus apps found nothing but the third - AVG - said to disable a preinstalled Google looking file and that worked.

Smarter Phone

My old phone was not dumb, just old and its memory was limited. I don't use my mobile much, it's for emergencies not nattering, so this time something cheap.
Haweel H1
A Chinese Android device. It comes with everything except the expensive bits - no 4G, no hi-res screen.
No it isn't a standard SIM slot as the spec says, it's a mini. No problem, I had a spare SIM card. Which means... new mobile number and wandering through the EE website to get it registered.
The battery had clear tape stuck over its contacts that has to be removed and that's the thing the manual doesn't tell you. Fortunately Amazon does.
It came with a Europlug, but I have spare UK adaptors.
For the rest see the link page which has good reviews.

Run as administrator

So I just spend another happy time wrestling with a program that hung when run - the skin installer in Rainmeter. And yes, setting 'Run as administrator' solved it. Microsoft really don't like users changing this, so it's in the basement with the faulty light switch in the folder marked 'beware of the leopard' (© Douglas Adams).

Rainmeter is a free system that behaves rather like Gadgets, adding assorted little apps to the desktop.

Spacesheeting 2.0

The EVE spreadsheet continued to grow last year and now has graphs. This one measures the progress of my manufacturing corporation Trikassi Enterprises. Spotting bad trends that can be corrected has been a considerable help, overstocking (the orange line) for example.
The dark green line is the book value of the corporation, currently about $1,500 in RL money though unlike Second Life I can't cash it in. The Corp does pay for the game subscription, $30/month for my two accounts.

New website provider

Oh dear - my old website host who were excellent were bought out and migration is under way. So far so good - Nominet mailed me to say they'd registered the transfer and the website just came back on line.
Now I have to learn how to use a different access panel, or preferably get my elderly Win95 FTP program connected.
[added] The FTP setup was not obvious, but I just needed the existing ID/Password with a mystery address. And  WS_FTP is still working.

Auto hide Taskbar Windows 10

There is a tick box for this but sometimes it stops working, leaving the Taskbar up and hiding vital buttons in full screen windows. Go away!
The solution for me was to go to Task Manager/Processes, right click on Windows Explorer and Restart it.

The last Windows...

...installed today. From now on, continuous small updates.

It was painless, just one "this is taking longer than expected" message. Subsystems then rushed in to do this, that and the other and it's been a slow day. I'm now down to the system using about 5% CPU but a lot more memory.

Runtime broker.exe is apparently a major offender, a W8 housekeeper that looks after Metro but grabs lots of CPU. Google for it.

Microsoft depreciates Gadgets now, but there are third party clones that will display them such as Gadget Installer

Nothing has refused to run yet! My test program here is WebEdit a Win95 HTML editor and it's fine.

EVE Online FPS was dreadful, but I knew the answer to this - run as Admin to allow it to access files in protected folders. It is now running amazingly fast, even at extra shiny spaceship setting. Second Life was unaffected, just lost its password file.

Buried under the new interface is unchanged W7 stuff, Backup for example which just ran out of schedule without asking.

Where did my Libraries go? W10 doesn't display them in Explorer by default, but I managed to find them.

[added]
After several weeks memory use is back to W7 levels and background stuff is only running when I'm AFK, I suspect Microsoft are still tweaking this not quite out of Beta system.

Visible clothes

AMD graphics drivers have for some time had a bug that makes rigged mesh clothes in Second life invisible. This has been fixed in the latest 15.7 driver which is now out of beta testing, I updated today and so far all is good. Yay!

Second Life uses Open GL which AMD don't support that well, though fortunately I've never had the problems others struggle with. The biggest visual glitch is with visually overlapping alpha textures which are often displayed the wrong way round.

Android lollipop

My Sony tablet is at the back of the queue now for updates, but Android 5.0 arrived unexpectedly last night. Could I stay awake (I was in bed already) to install it? Of course!
OK it took maybe a half hour and that was mostly checking apps (>300 of them?).

Lollipop is a 'back to basics' version, gone is the 3D look which looked nice on a tablet but maybe phone users were not so enthused by it. The App icons are bigger with a row at the bottom staying on screen whilst the rest scroll. The update went back to default so I had to spend a happy time this morning putting my favorites back and removing Google things. Folders are now easier to edit.
There is now just one drop down menu, Google put the Settings button as one of the permanent ones so I'll leave it there.
The running Apps button now displays as a window cascade, not sure about this but it does have a 'Clear All' button now.
Sony as usual haven't tweaked Android much. The Camera menus have changed (again!). A new App 'TV SideView' integrates the Remote Control with a TV Guide, though I have an App for that already.

Oops! SychMe my excellent folder App lost its settings as well... but rebuilt successfully.

Spacesheeting

To make stuff in World of Warcraft you need a hammer. In EVE Online you need a spreadsheet.
This is just a corner of my currently 1.2Mb monster, which pulls down data from game databases and tells me what's worth manufacturing. It also does stock control.

I had old XML maps that weren't being used and Excel wouldn't tell me how to delete them. I was looking in the wrong place, the DATA menu and not DEVELOPER which has the XML management section. Bah.
The next step will be to compile a raw material shopping list.