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. 🍕