Category Archives: Insider stuff

Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Thoughts & concerns, WED Blog, Windows 10, Windows 11

Widget Screenshot Users, Beware

2 Comments

Wow! Did I get an ugly surprise in the mail yesterday. I got two demand letters from a Canadian image rights company, seeking payment of US$1,334 for use of two thumbnails in a screen capture I made. Where and how did this happen? I was reporting about the introduction of the Windows News Bar (Beta) app, before the whole news and weather widget stuff rolled onto the Windows taskbar. That’s why I admonish fellow bloggers and Web content developers: “Widget screenshot users, beware!”

Ouching into Widget Screenshot Users Beware

The actual images the claimant asserts I’m using without a license are thumbnails. They measure 78×41 pixels. They’re included as an illustration of what the news bar looked like on the Windows desktop at the time (after I downloaded and installed the app).

Of course, news and weather info is now available from the taskbar. It comes courtesy of the so-called “Widgets” icon there, where the popped-up window that clicking on it produces is simply called Widgets. It shows both captions and images because it has more pixels to work with. This original design let users pick whether to see captions or images (images by default). Because I screen-capped two of their clients’ images on March 30, 2020, I must pay . . .  says the claimant.

Fair Use to the Rescue

“Not so fast,” is my response. I replied in writing  as follows:

  •  I make no money from my website
  • I was reporting news about a new MS Store app (News Bar Beta)
  • I used the image strip (5 or 6 of them altogether, if memory serves) purely to show what the app looked like, and made no reference to individual images
  • I reproduced the strip as thumbnails only, heavily cropped
  • I do not sell or license images to any third parties, and I make no money from the site, so it can’t impose commercial losses on the copyright holders

These are all part of the arguments through which “fair use” is proven in the US. I think I’m on solid ground, but it’s pretty disturbing nonetheless. Going forward, I’ll look more closely at exactly what’s in my screencaps. I’d advise you to do likewise for anything that goes online as well. Better to avoid trouble than to have to (de)fend it off.

Facebooklinkedin
Facebooklinkedin
Cool Tools, Insider stuff, WED Blog, Windows 11

Another Teams Iteration Hits Build 26080

Leave a comment

Yesterday, March 13, Windows 11 Canary Channel saw a new feature update hit the Insider Preview Canary Channel: 26080.1. Amidst the many changes it brought, I found an add-on of particular interest — Microsoft Teams. In an era when Teams (classic) and Teams (work or school) coexist side-by-side, a new version of the latter is available via WinGet or the Microsoft Store. You can see its icon in the lead-in graphic. If you read this blog, you can probably guess that when another Teams iteration hits Build 26080, I got it via WinGet. You can also see its traces in the next Windows Terminal screencap that follows.

Another Teams Iteration Hits Build 26080.winget

Examine this closely to see a new Teams version ending in .1505.
[Click image for full-size view.]

Why Another Teams Iteration Hits Build 26080 Matters

For the longest time I’ve had to use both Teams (classic) and the previous iteration of Teams (work or school).  Actually, I’ve often used its web-based counterpart to avoid Taskbar confusion.

No longer! This latest version lets me use the same program, define multiple accounts, and switch easily between them. Minor quibble: MS says this switching is “fast” but it does take a while. Indeed, some of my Teams logins use 2FA and require re-authorization each time I enter the environment. I guess I’m starting to grok what passwordless  authentication is about, eh? But once you’ve got multiple taskbar elements open, switching takes only a mouse click.

For the moment, though: I’m tickled. It is a lot more helpful to be able to use both AD- or Entra-managed work or school accounts alongside personal ones. Good work, MS. I wish you’d done it this way from the outset. But, as things sometime turn out in Windows-World, later is always better than never.

News Flash Added 1 Hour Later

In both 26080 announcements (it’s out in both Dev and Canary channels) MS talks about “a preview experience of the new, unified Microsoft Teams experience on Windows.” Windows Central calls it a “unified Teams client.” I like that terminology and wish I’d made it up. You’ll definitely want to read the announcement for lots of useful deets and examples. Good stuff.

Another Possibly Helpful Test/Observation

Just for grins, I made an image backup of one of my Canary Channel test PCs, then uninstalled the old version of Teams from same. With the new version installed by itself, I am still able to do what I need to do with just the one version installed. That said, I do seem to have lingering MSA issues when using only my personal account. Very interesting!

Facebooklinkedin
Facebooklinkedin
Cool Tools, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Updates, WED Blog

Failed Update Shows Increasing Winget Smarts

Leave a comment

Here’s an interesting observation. Since its release in May 2020, built-in Microsoft packaging tool Winget has been a work in progress. I don’t mean this as a critique: it started out pretty good, and it’s kept on getting better and better. I was reminded of this yesterday when an update for my CyberPowerSystems UPS software failed. But that failed update shows increasing Winget smarts. You can see the whole trail of events in the lead-in graphic.

How Failed Update Shows Increasing Winget Smarts

You can see the error message about one-third the way down from the top as it reports:Installer failed with exit code: 1. But it’s the lines above that really show off Winget’s increasing smarts:

v.2.5.1 cannot be updated through the installation package. Please remove the old version of Personal first and then install v2.5.1

This remove-replace (reinstall) maneuver is a fairly frequent occurrence when using Winget to update Windows software. It’s usually the next thing one tries if an update/upgrade fails. What’s new here is that Winget itself explicitly recommends this strategy. Previously it might indicate a “change in installer technology” to make such recommendations. This seems like more general — and broadly applicable — advice. I like it!

Doing What Winget Says…

If you look at the bottom section of the lead-in graphic, you’ll see it did just that (right-click that image, and select something like “Open image in new tab” to see the whole thing). Using the package’s ID string for unambiguous identification, I first uninstall it, then I install it again (note that it picks up the desired version: v2.5.1). That works: good stuff!

Facebooklinkedin
Facebooklinkedin
Insider stuff, Networking, Recent Activity, WED Blog, Windows 10, Windows 11

Checking Wi-Fi Signal Strength

2 Comments

Here at Chez Tittel, most PCs use wired Ethernet for their network connections. That is: of the 10 PCs on various LAN segments here, 7 use GbE connections; the other 3 use Wi-Fi. But our cellphones, iPad, and other devices — including 3 thermostats — are all on Wi-Fi. It’s a mixed bag. I like to check Wi-Fi quality from time to time, so I have to thank Mauro Huculak at Windows Central. He just reminded me about what’s up with checking Wi-Fi signal strength. See his story “How to check Wi-Fi signal strength…” for a raft of potential ways in Windows 11.

Checking Wi-Fi Signal Strength: Command Line

I’m a command line junkie, so I’ll skip the various UI-based methods he describes. There’s a single command in the network shell (netsh) that will tell you what you (or I, in this case) want to know:

netsh wlan show interfaces

Mr. Huculak also provides a tasty one-liner version in his article that’s worth sharing and keeping around (cut’n’paste into a text editor like Notepad, and remove all but one space between the text on the 1st & 2nd lines, please, so it will run in Command Prompt or PowerShell):

(netsh wlan show interfaces)
-Match '^\s+Signal' -Replace '^\s+Signal\s+:\s+',''

You can see both of these at work in PowerShell on one of my Windows 11 test PCs in the lead-in graphic above. The short version produces all of the interface info for the one and only Wi-Fi interface on that machine; the long version simply shows the signal strength as a percentage (i.e. the “99%” at lower left above). You can go either way. Works the same on Windows 10, too. Very handy!

Thanks again, Mauro. Made my morning…

Facebooklinkedin
Facebooklinkedin
Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Troubleshooting, Updates, WED Glog

Office Update Hiccup Is Easily Fixed

Leave a comment

Last Friday, WingetUI informed me that Microsoft Office needed an update on my production PC. When I tried to update it, however, it failed inside the tool and running winget inside PowerShell. Then, it did nothing inside Outlook when I clicked Files > Account > Update Options > Update Now. Obviously, something was hinky about Office itself, or perhaps the update package. I got an error message that read “Installer failed with exit code: 4294967295.” Fortunately, this Office update hiccup is easily fixed.

How Office Update Hiccup Is Easily Fixed

As it happens, I wrote a story for ComputerWorld back in April 2021. It’s entitled “4 steps to repair Microsoft Office.” I only had to go to Step 1 “Run the Office Quick Repair tool.” You can see the steps to get there, and the Repair button to run it, in the following screencap:

Here’s how to get to the embedded repair info: Settings > Apps > Apps & features > click on Microsoft 365 Apps (for enterprise in my case, YMMV by version). If you click Quick Repair it uses local windows files from your PC. If that doesn’t work, you can try Online Repair and use files from the MS Office download page instead.

I didn’t have to, because the first try did the trick. After the repair completed the update ran without further difficulties. Darn! It’s nice when an easy repair succeeds. Read the rest of the CW story to see what other steps might be required if the Repair tools shown above don’t work. Things can get interesting in a hurry, so I’m just as glad they did not. As Sinatra famously sang “…nice and easy does it every time!”

 

 

Facebooklinkedin
Facebooklinkedin
Insider stuff, PowerShell, Recent Activity, WED Blog, Windows 10, Windows Update

KB50001716 Is Puzzling

Leave a comment

OK, then. I was reading Martin Brinkmann’s post to gHacks this morning. It’s entitled “Microsoft’s sneaky KB5001716 Windows 10 update pushes Windows 11.” I don’t think my production PC qualifies, because its Intel SkyLake i7-6700 falls outside the range of supported CPUs. So I went looking for it, and learned some useful things. Let me share them with you…

Why KB50001716 Is Puzzling

First off I went to look at WU Update History to see if KB5001716 was present (or absent). I quickly realized that reading the whole WU history was more than a little taxing on a machine that’s been running Windows 10 since 2016.

So I turned to PowerShell where some operating on the Get-WUHistory command seemed like a good idea. When I figured out my Update History had 528 entries, that idea seemed even better. You can view the update history by creating a variable named $history, like so

$history = Get-WUHistory -last 1000

This grabs up to the last 1000 entries in the history records and assigns them to the variable $history. If you look at that output it’s kind of hard to ingest from Windows Terminal. It makes more visual sense if you look at it this way:

$history | sort date -desc | Format-Table Date,KB,@{l=’Category’;e={[string]$_.Categories[0].Name}},Title

[Note the preceding lines are a single PowerShell command string. If you want to try it, cut’n’paste into a text editor and make sure it’s a “one liner” before pasting into PowerShell. This produces output that looks like this:

KB50001716 Is Puzzling.table-output

Table format is more readable, but still too much to take in.
[Click image for full-size view.]

So I changed up the command string to write it to a file. That required appending the following string:

> i7wuhist.txt

The > symbol redirects the output, and the filename resides in folder context in which PS runs. Working with a file I was able to figure out the following:

1. I had no instances of KB5001716 in there anywhere
2. There were a total of 528 entries in that file.

I also concluded that my PC’s failure to meet Windows 11 hardware requirements probably meant that the upgrade offer (and indeed KB5001716 itself) were not forthcoming. Good to know, and I learned some interesting stuff along the way.

Facebooklinkedin
Facebooklinkedin
Hyper-V and VMs, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, WED Blog, Windows 11

Creating New Windows 11 VM Gotchas

Leave a comment

Whoa! I hit a couple of interesting snags when setting up a new Hyper-V VM, late yesterday and this morning. Indeed I came across a couple of interesting gotchas that I want to document — if only to help me to remember what to do the next I have to do this. These creating new Windows 11 VM gotchas include getting the ISO-based install to run, and then being able to log into that VM. Pretty basic but vital stuff, in other words…

Creating New Windows 11 VM Gotchas Recited & Explained

Gotcha #1: Getting the installer to run from an ISO. Turns out you can’t do this from an RDP session. I had to do this from the physical desktop, probably because of too many levels of indirection from keyboard stuff in the input path. I also had to set up the VMs with TPM to get Windows 11 install to complete (otherwise, I would get the “doesn’t meet hardware requirements” error message). This turned out to be fairly easy, if vexing from the standpoint of “Why doesn’t Hyper-V do this by default?”

Gotcha #2:  Logging into the new VM, once installed. One must log into the VM with “Enhanced session mode” disabled, then go to Settings > Accounts > Sign-in options > Additional settings, then turn off “…allow only Windows Hello sign-in…” toggle. Turns out, this doesn’t work with RDP either, as explained at MS Answers. Boy, won’t it be nice when Copilot gets smart enough to do this with a single prompt (no luck right now).

Facebooklinkedin
Facebooklinkedin
Cool Tools, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, WED Blog, Windows 11

Hotpatching Windows 11 24H2?

Leave a comment

If Zac Bowden at WindowsCentral is right — and he often is — there’s something unusual coming in the next feature update for Windows 11 (24H2). When it emerges later this year, it may include something called hotpatching. In an October 2023 Learn Story, MS defines hotpatching. It is “…a way to install OS security updates … that doesn’t require a reboot after installation.” Basically, it means that PCs can defer the mandatory reboot that follows certain monthly cumulative updates. But there’s more…

Beyond Hotpatching Windows 11 24H2

Right now, hotpatching only applies to WindowsServer VMs inside the Microsoft Azure umbrella. Bowden also asserts it’s used on Xbox systems. According to his unnamed sources they’re already experimenting with hotpatching 24H2 images in Redmond. Same sources say MS plans to push them out into the Dev and Canary channels in coming months.

Because MS has been doing this for a while (with Windows Server VMs and Xbox) this is less startling than it might otherwise be. The MS Learn item is particularly worth reading for the section entitled “How Hotpatch works.” It explains this technique relies on patching “the in-memory code of running processes without the need to restart the process” so that “applications are unaffected.” Good to know!

A quarterly reboot is still required to make sure that an actual CU acts as the baseline for the current running Windows image (say in January). Then, February and March can be hotpatches, with another CU to follow in April, and so on, as shown in the lead-in graphic.

Presumably, full update integration would occur on the “next reboot” for hotpatched PCs. I’ve never had a Windows desktop run for 3 months without a single reboot myself. Thus, I’m pretty sure I’ll be finding out when and as hotpatches show up inside Windows 11 Insider Preview releases — hopefully, soon!

 

Facebooklinkedin
Facebooklinkedin
Cool Tools, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Troubleshooting, WED Blog, Windows 11

Windows 11 Nears Built-in IPRI Facility

1 Comment

Here’s a nice Windows 11 milestone to ponder. Those who opted for KB5034848 (released 2/29/2024) already have it. Those who wait for the March Patch Tuesday release will get it. What is it: an IPRI, or in-place repair install capability, as depicted in the lead-in graphic from my Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Mobile Workstation. That’s the basis for the title (also above) that reads “Windows 11 nears built-in IPRI facility.” Let me explain what makes this cool…

Sussing Out Windows 11 Nears Built-in IPRI Facility

I’ve been hip to the IPRI technique — which basically involves launching setup.exe from an installer image that matches whatever version of Windows is currently running — since I joined up at TenForums.com back in November 2014. It’s my favorite technique to restore Windows to stable, normal operations when things start getting weird and normal troubleshooting techniques shed no light on things. IPRI works by re-installing all the OS files but leaving apps, applications, and the registry alone.

And now in the CU Preview for March (and thus presumably also in the March update), Windows 11 users running the latest version will get the “Reinstall now” button that lets them attempt to “Fix problems using Windows update.” While this will reduce my level of need for UUPdump.net to built an ISO for IPRI from time to time, it is incredibly convenient and generally helpful. Good stuff.

One word of warning: Having tried this tool out on a Beta release a couple of months back, I can observe it takes quite a while to do its thing. It took me 55 minutes to get through the process on that Beta image, and I assume it will do something similar with this Preview CU image should I put it to the test again. I’m pretty sure that’s because it has to build a custom image (just like the UUPdump.net batch file does) before it can start doing its repairs.

And so it often goes, here in Windows-World, where spending more time for improved convenience is a common trade-off. Cheers!

Facebooklinkedin
Facebooklinkedin
Cool Tools, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, WED Blog

Winget Solves Self-Update Issue

Leave a comment

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, Winget would hiccup when updating itself. No longer. The latest leap to 1.7.10582 solves that, and adds a bunch of cool new functionality as well (e.g. repair command, enable Windows Features as dependency, access URL instead of local file, and more). As Winget solves self-update issue, it’s becoming even more of a go-to tool for admins and power users.

How Winget Solves Self-Update Issue

It’s taking the same approach that Windows Terminal has for a while now: it’s maintaining the existing process, and instructing users to “Restart the application to complete the upgrade.” Closing, then re-opening Windows Terminal does the trick nicely. Glad to see it.

Indeed, this is by any metrics a “big update” for Winget. Take a look at the release page and you’ll see 6 entries under the “Features” heading, with dozens more under “What’s Changed.” Good stuff!

Here’s the complete –info block for this latest incarnation, for the record:

Winget Solves Self-Update Issue.--info

Winget –info for v1.7.10582
[Click image for full-size view.]

These days, I’m about as big a fan of this tool as you can find. I highly recommend it for updating apps and applications in Windows. I also recommend that you send feedback to developers whose apps and applications you use, but who don’t yet submit package manifests to make their updates installable via winget. The winget Windows Package Manager Manifest Creator toolset also got a recent and major set of enhancements designed to persuade those not already using this tool to jump on board. Let them know!

Facebooklinkedin
Facebooklinkedin