Run Classic MSPaint On a Locked Down Windows 11 PC

My workplace updated the corporate laptop I use with Windows 11.

While it has its quirks, overall it hasn't been disruptively annoying or infuriating so far, just minorly so. 

The taskbar in a distinctly Apple-esque way has the icons horizontally centered by default. The calendar opens only on your primary monitor in a multi-monitor setup (a particularly trivial habit to be forced to break).

My only real (and slight) annoyance, which I address here, is that good old MSPaint has been replaced with a more frills tool, Paint. If accustomed to the old school tool, you may as I did find yourself aggravated that the workflow is a step or few more convoluted for the kind of elementary stuff you might do. 

By elementary, I mean stuff you want to do in the second or few you're accustomed to. Yes, there's the snipping tool, yes, there's Photoshop and Paint.net and myriad others, but no, this is about MSPaint, damn it!

Complicating this is that I lack admin permissions on my work machine. That means installing Classic Paint and pretty much anything else is a no-go. However, I found a workaround.

My first attempt involved trying to use the mspaint.exe executable from a Windows 10 laptop. To make that happen, I took a copy of that file, renamed it to mspaint.txt to avoid triggering any potential email filtering, and emailed that roughly 917KB file to my corporate inbox. 

From there, I saved the file to my Windows 11 machine, then renamed it to change the file extension from TXT to EXE, and tried running it. However, that yielded "Unable to create new document." I know Windows 10's version of mspaint.exe had a few changes since the Windows 7 "era", and likely some dependencies tied to Windows 10 itself, so this wasn't surprising. 

Notably, however, despite Windows 11 being locked down by group policy and antimalware measures, it didn't balk at attempting to start up its older Microsoft-published cousin. Anyway, out of sheer laziness, I then did a google search for web servers with directory browsing enabled using the following criteria:

"Index of /" mspaint.exe

That yielded among others a site down under in Australia somewhere that hadn't bothered to lock down their folder structure hosting an earlier version of the file, this one a mere 335KB or so.

That file I poached and went ahead and uploaded here. Those wishing to verify it's safe can run it past VirusTotal, but as far as Microsoft is concerned, it ran without a hitch.

Count on Microsoft, Inc., or any other corporate entity in IT to inflict the maxim that time marches on upon its users, by periodically and irrevocably changing things up in often annoying, inconvenient, arguably unnecessary ways.

That's perhaps the one constant right behind change itself in the industry today. 

Pool Deck Drain Cleaning, Mechanical and Biological

Now for something completely different, a cobbled-together "solution" for a clogged pool deck drain!

Hurricanes Helene and now Milton have had their way and then some with my area of Florida. As a result, various compostable debris off my roof has found its way down onto my pool (or bacta tank, if you're that hardcore) deck and through the plastic drain. Similar to this one except the drain lives at the corner of the concrete deck and concrete block wall.

Heavy rain led to water intrusion into my garage underneath the back porch due to a compromised door threshold with rotting wood thanks to one and done sketchy, sloppy workmanship by a contractor who shall remain nameless (not out of compassion, it's just been so long I've forgotten, lucky them). 

So, inspired by madness and various other factors, and rather than pay some handyperson to do the job for me, I put together a selection of goods to handle things brutishly.

First, a wood augur, this one.

Next, a 1/2 inch hex socket to hold the augur in place.

Then, a couple of TEKTON 1/2 Inch Drive socket extensions, 24 inches each.

Next, a socket adapter to enable my cordless drill to hook up with this maniacal assembly. 

And, finally, OG Duck Tape to literally seal the deal. 

The idea here is to connect these pieces into basically a long, heavy drill bit that will see the auger power through what gunk and dirt lives in the deck drain and extract it. 

Here's the end result, Ryobi drill for scale.

Months prior to devising this thing, I deployed a liquid biological dethatcher, basically a concoction of beneficial bacteria and microbes to go after accumulated organic matter and start to break it downl. This is similar to the notion of  creating compost, where bulky leaves and branches and grass clippings and whatnot are deconstructed into humus, ideal for gardening among other things.

To help my new microbial friends do their job, I also every few weeks in added some compost accelerator to speed up and promote the bacteria's growth.

Before this enterprise, the rotting threshold saw water intrusion leading to small puddles of water collecting in the area indoors just behind the back door leading to the pool deck.

After a few goes over a couple weeks with this super-lengthened augur, proper drainage has been restored, and despite the inches upon inches of rainfall, water has yet to accumulate. This is buying me some time so that repairs can commence to the threshold once the nice, agonizingly brief spell of cool fall weather sets in.

Following drilling into the muck and seeing the auger capture and help me extract foul-smelling, increasingly soil-like gunk, I took a regular garden hose to the drain and did a once over with it down the length of it. As I did so, very fine organic matter with roughly the same dark hue (and odor) as the dethatching agent would bubble up through the drain as I went, suggesting the bacteria had well established itself and been gobbling up the stuff in advance nicely.

Not exactly within the purview of information technology, but at the same time a nice side project to pursue to take unclogging clogs into my own hands.

Gateway vs Router: T-Mobile 5G Home Internet and Wifi Network Contention

A couple of years ago T-Mobile 5G Home Internet finally became available in my area of Florida, enabling me to ditch longtime but miserly AT&T with their paltry "legacy" DSL (6 Mbps down / ~384 Kbps [!] up), for upwards of 170+ Mbps down / 3-6 Mbps up on 5G.

In the wake of the afterglow of comparatively fantastic speed, following hurricane Debby that blew through my area of Florida in August 2024, I experienced significantly decreased internet bandwidth with my wireless devices only.

Devices hardwired via ethernet cable, like my desktop PC, were unaffected, and speed tests for those showed around the expected bandwidth. My laptops (plural), tablets (ditto), and others though were definitely having issues. Why?

I called T-Mobile and they informed me that one 5G tower of theirs was down for repairs while at least one other was undergoing maintenance and awaiting parts. I proceeded to reach out over a dozen times by message back and forth with T-Mobile support via former Twitter and Facebook, tracking their progress and advising of changes on my end. My 5G gateway has been facing out a south-facing window of my home, and the nearest tower they recommended was E-SE, so I oriented the front face (where the 5G antennas live for this Sagemcom Fast 5688W gateway) as best I could in that general direction.

Now, here's the thing. When I first set up the gateway using the T-Life mobile app for Android, I configured it (innocently enough) with the same wifi SSID and password as that used by my TP-Link router (which supports the newer WIFI 6 standard, as does the 5G gateway). Therein lies the problem, as I found out with reasonable certainty. 

The wifi 6 standard among other benefits enables you to not have to create unique SSIDs to use around your house, say. Instead of creating one SSID for say each wifi extender you might have on every compass point of your home as you might have with wifi 5 and older, now you can use a single SSID to be smartly managed by the router in a mesh setup (as I delve into here).

However, as I discovered, that does NOT mean that separate wifi 6 gateways or routers play nice, wifi wise, with each other. Computers, tablets, even wifi extenders all cope nicely within the wifi 6 standard, but "royalty" in the form of gateways and routers that actually serve as upper management for your local wifi device community can clash.

I followed steps in the T-Life app to do the following:

1. From the Overview => My Wi-fi screen, create a new wifi network named TMobile (with SSID hidden).
   
   
2. From under My Networks, tap the current SSID I originally configured on both my gateway and router, let's call it DARTH.
   
   
3. Tap on DARTH, and on the Network Details screen, tap Delete Network, and confirm. Note also the reminder from T-Mobile, you must have at least one Wi-Fi network to be able to access the gateway from the T-Life app itself. 

In retrospect, that little warning T-Mobile provides turned out to be prophetic, and I wish I took the hint early on that hey, maybe dueling wifi networks are part of the problem, here. Indeed, by setting up the T-Mobile gateway to use the exact same wifi network as my router, I can only imagine the constant radio frequency duel going on between the two devices, each with the same valid credentials and security, each vying for control of the wifi devices on my LAN.

Now, having that TMobile network on the gateway, not only hidden but completely unique to DARTH which my router manages exclusively, and the T-Life app connecting by wifi from the former network's only connected device, my phone, I now am enjoying bandwidth much like my desktop PC from my laptop.

Much better! At this point the only things stifing connectivity are what you'd expect, obstacles impeding signal between the wifi extenders and the router, the relatively elderly Intel Centrino onboard adapter this particular laptop uses, etc. Not a pitched battle between gateway and router over which one serves as the official conduit for local network traffic.

Tips On Home Mesh Network Setup

Recently decided to upgrade my wifi setup. In addition to getting a high-end router in the form of a TP-Link Tri-Band BE19000, featuring the performant Wifi 7 standard, I got several mesh-capable wifi extenders.

The process wasn't as straightforward as I would've liked, which is usually what I get for not planning ahead and importantly, reading the instructions and taking notes, otherwise known as being lazy. However, being meticulous and refining my steps helped things turn out nicely.

Here are some tips for your wifi upgrade journey.

• Advise anybody at home that the network will be down for a bit.
  
  
• Bookmark support pages for the router and range extenders.
  
  
• Install the manufacturer's app or, if you prefer, note the default IP address, admin username, and password for all the devices.
  
  
• If you like, download the latest firmware for each and keep handy in a folder or on a USB stick, in case upgrading through the device interface automagically isn't an option.
  
  
  
• Set up your new router, install its latest firmware, back up settings.
  
  
• Whether swapping an old router for a new drop-in replacement, make sure you give it a static IP address via the app or web interface.
  
  
• Give your backup configuration files descriptive names. Instead of just "config.bin", try "manufacturer MODEL123 - location.bin". For example, "TPLink AX5400 - Basement.bin". 
  
  
• Ensure other settings like WPA security, date / time, DHCP server, QoS, and others are configured to your needs. 
  
  
• Of course, enable the router's mesh capability if you haven't already.
  
  
  
• Set up each range extender individually, in close proximity to the router.
  
  
• WPS can simplify extender setup, but for that you need to have the router and extender physically close, say a meter or so apart.
  
  
• In case WPS doesn't work out for whatever reason (connectivity issues, or yours is a use case a bit more complicated than just plug and play), connect the extender to one of your router LAN ports with an ethernet cable. 
  
  
• Going even further down the use case rabbit hole, consider assigning a static IP address to each extender. If you do, be sure to exclude the extenders' addresses from your DHCP server range to avoid IP conflicts.
  
  
• Especially if using identical extenders, use a Sharpie to label each unit. It could be a code you devise, the Greek alphabet (Alpha, Beta, etc.), directionality (e.g. "N" for an extender at the north side of your home). 
  
  
  
• Enable each extender's mesh capability to leverage Wifi 6+ technology.
  
  
• Prior to Wifi 6, some use cases made sense for each extender to have its own SSID, but with the newer standards, you can use the same SSID across your entire network. 
  
  
• To verify your extenders are part of the mesh once physically moved to their new homes, open the router's mesh configuration and verify your extenders appear in the list and are healthy and enabled. 
  
  
• If you like, double check to ensure each extender's MAC address, as listed, corresponds to the notes you've jotted down.
  
  
• No notes? Create a text file, Word document, Excel sheet, etc., and to it list each extender with make, model, IP address, MAC address, descriptive name, and anything else you deem important to recall later.
  
  
• One thing about wifi range extenders, most I've worked with will have two separate MAC addresses, one for its onboard ethernet port, the other for its wifi interface. This can be a bit confusing if you're tired and it's late and your trusty Advanced IP Scanner displays MAC addresses for which the last number is off by one from what you expect. 
  
  
  
• Once all is said and done, be sure to download and save backup firmware.
  
  
• Should something go haywire, you can lean on your backup configurations in case you made a change and must revert it, especially in cases where tired you has made many changes to many devices and are maybe losing touch with reality.
  
  
• While I haven't tried it, I'm reasonably certain that if you happen to replace one of your units with another identical model, you may be able to upload your previous unit's config file to the new one. Keep in mind, however, that subtle variations between models, like the hardware version, may differ from one model's revision to the next.

That about sums up my less inelegant, more refined process in this latest instance of moving up and onward with faster, better, seamless mesh wifi networking. ⚡

 

Start Menu or Taskbar "Bulge" Follows Cursor

In Windows 10, have you noticed recently that if you happen to click the Start Menu or right-click the Taskbar, then and hover left or right over any one of the listed items, a sort of "bulge" appears to be following your cursor?

This appeared to start happening by default for my otherwise ordinary display settings as of a month or few ago, and it was just one of those things that's mildly infuriating if like me you both are an acutely visual and detail-oriented person, and prefer an absolutely no-frills Windows desktop experience.

After poking around I found the solution. Settings => Color Settings reveals that Transparency effects is the offender. 

By setting this to Off, no more bulge, no more seething with apoplectic rag-- I mean, annoyance.

The only minor and to me inconsequential issue is that the background is a tad darker thanks to the now fully obscured transparency. No big deal, and far better than yet another decision casually inflicted by Microsoft upon its userbase.

Apple II Copy Protection: In-Game and Insidious

Back in the latter part of the 20th century (which for GenX me is admittedly an odd way of saying in the 1980s and 1990s) I played Sid Meier and Microprose's excellent WW2 submarine simulation game, Silent Service. 

The game was provided on a 5.25-inch floppy disk. Unlike the rigid 3.5-inch ones to come later for the Apple IIgs and early PCs, this was that same style of literally floppy disk like the 8-inch type that the U.S. once used to control its ICBM missile silos and that even today the German navy is working to finally phase out, just a bit smaller.

Copy protection in the Apple II days was interesting and in Silent Service and some other games of the period, multifaceted. 

First, the game would prompt you with a set of enemy vessels and have you pick the correct one based on the ones shown in the original instruction manual. Failing to do so would impede your ability to play.

As an aside, some games would take this a step further and print those certain manual pages such that Xerox copy machines of the day could not properly duplicate them, rather like those jackets nowadays celebrities use to deter papparazzi. For games that expected you to visually match intricate, extremely primitive precursors to QR codes, essentially, that was a roadblock.

On top of that, as this article describes, certain data the software would use to validate original media from the publisher would be encoded by special hardware. Unlike the disk drive used by the publisher, retail floppy disk drives could read, but not properly write, data from the original disk to a copy, and thus, any attempt by the computer to validate the appropriate checksum indicating the disk was authentic would fail.

Cleverly, on the part of Meier and Microprose, the fact that a disk had been pirated would not be publicized with the software locking the user out or rebooting or exiting the program, but it was a far more insidious, in-game punishment. You might be happily cruising beneath the surface, quietly stalking a large convoy of enemy cargo ships and tankers, when suddenly, the entire convoy would ALL transform into Kaibokan destroyer escorts. 

Crude mockup of a convoy turned entirely into Kaibokan destroyer escorts!

Not only that, whether submerged or not, the destroyer escorts would pinpoint your location and make a beeline for your sub and once in range begin hammering you with depth charges or gunfire as appropriate, relentlessly. 

For today's gamers playing the game on an emulator, this punishment would seem impossible to replicate, given in that case it wouldn't be running on the original Apple II hardware, just a digital, virtualized facsimile. 

Nevertheless, someone dedicated who maybe had GenX or Boomer family who were gamers of the era leave them an Apple II complete with this game gathering dust in the attic might be able to bring this insidious copy protection mechanism up for a breath of fresh air.

Reolink for Windows Download Failed

Reolink makes some pretty decent security cameras including their recently released Duo 3 PoE 16MP with night vision, visible and infrared illumination, and in particular its panoramic view, which with its two lenses can offer a full horizontal view of the street in front of your home.

While the Reolink app for Android is pretty solid, their Windows app is much less so. When trying to get recorded video via the Windows version's Playback => Download, maybe a third or more of the time you'll be met with repeated download failures. 

Before optimization. Note repeated download failures.

Whether just a few videos are queued to download or a few dozen, Reolink will variously fail one or a few along the way, slow to a crawl in terms of transfer speed, or as seen above, fail altogether. Things can be even worse if you use a resource manager like Bitsum's excellent Process Lasso (sort of like Task Manager on steroids), which manages programs' CPU, memory and I/O usage on your system, and in some cases actively restrains ornery processes trying to monopolize same. 

Reolink for Windows strikes me as poorly written for PC, as if the developers either outsourced to some third-rate Windows team, or let their B-team or even interns loose on it. It's finicky, brittle, and inconsistent overall, whether trying simply to connect to cameras the Android app interacts flawlessly with, or as in this situation trying to download recordings.

Having Process Lasso enabled really brings Reolink's download issues to a head, but at the same time, if you configure things properly, it can help minimize those issues so that the app performs overall more smoothly and consistently. To do this, from Process Lasso, look for Reolink.exe in the list of all or active processes, right-click on it, then click Induce Performance Mode.

This ensures Reolink is both not restrained by Process Lasso itself, and seems to help the app have more resources dedicated to it, being more sensitive to changes in CPU and other resources especially for downloading as well as live viewing and even simple connectivity to your cameras.

After Induce Performance Mode. Overall smoother operation.

Certainly this does not get around Reolink being challenged in the Windows development department, but it does work arounds the app's clearly irritating deficiencies, at least most of the time.

CVS, Who Do UX Think You Are?

My longtime usual pharmacy formerly known as Eckerds up the street from me was back in 2004 bought out by CVS for some $4.5 billion (~$6.72 billion in 2022). 

Over the years I've frequently gotten prescriptions filled, COVID19 and other vaccines, and though faces have changed, service on site has remained historically excellent. Well done, good on you!

Unfortunately, CVS consistently goes on the cheap with their website, specifically their user experience, their users' perception of utility, ease of use, and efficiency. Irritating enough given we've just entered the year of somebody else's lord two thousand two hundred twenty-four.

Foremost of my trivial frustrations has to do with their customer survey, which if you opt to get an email receipt invites you to CVShealthsurvey.com and input a 17-digit Survey ID.

First issue, no custom URL with the Survey ID preloaded, meaning I must copy and paste the ID into the field, only upon hitting Next to be met with the next issue, that I'm expected to parse the pasted ID and remove a total of four (4) spaces myself. 

Oh, no big deal, right? No, unless you've completed dozens of surveys over literally decades now from their brick and mortar store and seen nothing change despite your feedback urging them to do so and get with the times, already. Also, thankfully I'm not beset with hand and other motion difficulties like someone with Parkinson's disease is, but I recently injured my primary hand, and that mild pain and irritation compounded the lazy UX this day.

To CVS' credit, they unlike too many stores today, whether restaurants or big box retailers or pharmacies, offer an email option for those of us who absolutely hate being on hold or who like me for their work sits through endless Zoom meetings.

Problem is, various areas of the CVS support site seem like red-headed step children for various reasons. In the case of their email / mobile support reach-out, one of the fields prompts me for the answer to a security question. Okay, beside the fact that anyone on the CVS side gets a peek at one of my account's security questions, and perhaps can share that with their pals to browse my Personal Health Information (PHI) at their leisure or get leaked to potential scammers, what is the security question that I'm expected to answer??

Finally, recall I accepted the default language option, English, at the beginning of this tedium.

Upon hitting Submit for the email, I was unexpectedly met with a blurb of simplified Chinese which Google translated as "is submitting..."

So, to summarize, this mildly infuriated CVS customer is:

• Stuck parsing Survey ID rather than the site doing this super trivial task.
  
  
• Asked sketchily for answer to unspecified, unknown security question.
  
  
• Having confidence uninspired by the site's SO basic miss of chosen language.

I get it, we live in a litigious world especially in the U.S., and patient care is paramount. However, given the first American touchdown in over 50 years with a probe on the Moon's surface just happened (and first by a private sector corporation), and that we're about to deploy Artemis 3 (the first crewed expedition including the first woman and first person of color to set foot on our nearest space rock) ca. 2025-6, CVS, how about you be less frugal in the interest of not embarrassing yourself and your partner in grime Medallia further and refactor these troubling site glitches away to restore my confidence in your basic ability to survey and support  your customers smartly?

It's not rocket surgery, CVS. 

Maybe hit up the experts at Interaction Design to help your code monkeys out? Far better than a conference room full of cheap pizza and this fairly frequent customer opting to not fill out one more survey and provide tasty data to sell until you make change. 🍕