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May 26

Surreal experience with Windows 10

I have an HP Pavilion with Windows 10. I use the computer every day. I seldom turn the power off, mostly I put it to sleep. I am not interested in going to "bad" places on the Internet. I do some programming in C++ and C# for myself. I have projects. Yesterday I noticed a strange picture on the desktop. It was a black picture of a lobster about half an inch across. It was not attached to any window but could be moved slightly if I poked it with a cursor.

I decided it was a bug and started Spybot Search and Destroy - my antivirus and antimalware application. Even before the Spybot S&D finished the job the picture of the lobster disappeared and today I don't have it.

When SB S&D runs it shows you the files it is going through and I noticed one that scared me to death. It was Candy Crush Soda Saga. I've never heard of this game and have no idea how it ended up in my directory. I then checked "Install or remove programs" - this Candy Crush is not there, so I cannot remove it. It appears to be a Google application. Google is everywhere!

My only option may be to go to the register, remove some entries there and kill the directory where this gamer resides. I just checked. There are probably close to two dozen entries in the register for this malware.

What shall I do? I've been thinking for months about buying a programmable hardware router like a Sisco. I even posted here once on the subject but still my computer is wide open to Internet malware. Thanks, AboutFace 22 (talk) 16:59, 26 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It is not a malware. You can read details here. Ruslik_Zero 20:45, 26 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Anything which installs other software without telling you ought to be considered malware. :-) Try upgrading to penguin land! Martin of Sheffield (talk) 09:18, 27 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Of course it is malware. I've never played computer games and have no interest to learn how to do it. Now, I opened regedt32 but I always do it from cmd prompt and I don't know how to enter the admin password which is required for any changes in the registry. Anybody knows how to do it in the cmd prompt? It is a different story in Ubuntu OS. Thanks, - AboutFace 22 (talk) 16:53, 27 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

We should not water down the meaning of "malware" to use it to mean "software that I don't want". Our article defines malware as "software intentionally designed to cause damage to a computer, server, client, or computer network". A game that you don't want to play is not malware, nor is even a system that installs a game that you don't want to play. That doesn't mean that this practice isn't objectionable, but there's no malware involved. CodeTalker (talk) 22:55, 27 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Being serious for a moment, spyware falls into the category of malware (see lead ¶1, sentence 3 and §1 ¶2) which is why I treat the products of either Microsoft or Google with extreme suspicion. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 15:26, 28 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Have you tried the obvious? Log in using an Admin account and run regedit from right click on the windows button?--Phil Holmes (talk) 17:38, 27 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

(ec) @AboutFace 22: AFAIK you can't just enter the admin's password in cmd. You can, however, run a cmd session as administrator - right-click a link to cmd and see available options. Then all programs started from that session run on admin privileges, too. --CiaPan (talk) 17:42, 27 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
You can also use the same method on the regedit link to run it as admin without calling cmd. --CiaPan (talk) 17:44, 27 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I feel I should point out that AFAIK it's never been true that the only way to remove Candy Crush Saga has been by the suggestion outlined by the OP. See this thread [1] for extensive discussion. To some extent it does depend what you mean by remove [2] [3] but still, if you think that doing what was outlined is the only way to deal with it, you're probably wrong. (I mean even this complicated process which AFAIK would never apply to Candy Crush [4] doesn't require regediting.)

I would note that Candy Crush Saga does show up in the Add or Remove Programs function in the new "Metro"/UWP Settings app for me. AFAIK it's been like this for a long time [5]. OTOH, I think right clicking on it and choosing uninstall has also worked either for ever or a long time and achieves the same functionality. It will not show up in the "Uninstall or change a program" setting of the Control Panel because UWP apps never show up there and I'm fairly sure never will.

Now if you want to completely prevent Windows installing UWP apps without asking you which may include re-installing Candy Crush, that's a different and more complicated question that has depended on version of Windows. But even then it hasn't always generally required registry editing AFAIK.

In any case, it also wasn't what was outlined in the original post which is important because if you're going to be editing registry you should have some basic idea of what you're doing. In fact, personally while I don't think editing a registry is as big a deal as it's sometimes made things out to be, although can definitely completely screw up your Windows install if you don't know what you're doing; I'm not sure it's something you should ever be doing if you can't work out to start regedit as an admin, especially in the modern internet and search engine world.

Nil Einne (talk) 03:50, 28 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

May 30

Alternatives to Google News

Are there any better alternatives to the Google News aggregator? X-Editor (talk) 30 May 2019, 03:41 (UTC)

There has to be! :-) Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 04:51, 30 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

What are you seeking? More editorial control? Less editorial control? Different news sources?

I recommend reading several different sources, including at least a few different viewpoints, and then using the awesome power of the internet to locate primary source information.

For example, if there's a major news story about politics in my home country, I can read or watch stories from PBS News Hour; Voice of America News; and ABC News; and then I can visit the White House press office (who, for the present time, speak in an official capacity on behalf of the executive office); the website of the Speaker of the House (who, at present, represents our nation's opposition party); and the websites of my congressional representatives, who publish nearly daily updates on issues of importance.

This way, I reduce my reliance on the editorial viewpoints of commercially-interested news providers. It is hardly true that my news is "unbiased" - every author or primary source has its own bias - but at least I am very aware of whose biases are being presented at me. Put bluntly, I do not agree with many of the politicians whose statements I read - (very few of them are physicists) - but at least I have read their statements. If I need assistance to interpret these statements on a complex or unfamiliar issue, I can use directed internet search to seek out background information; or I can read editorial opinions from third-parties of various leanings.

As a general rule, I will not read a news website - nor, generally, any other source of information - until I first read about its authors or editors. (Who owns the New York Times, and who owns the Los Angeles Times, and who owns ABC, and who owns VoA, ...and who owns Google for that matter - and so on! - because if you don't even know who's talking to you, ... maybe it becomes a problem when you need to trust what they say?)

This is a strategy that I feel has helped to innoculate me against the rash of disinformation that has recently swept so many consumers of information. It is also a resoundingly convincing argument against "news aggregators" in general - these types of presentations typically throw short headlines at the viewer, from many unnamed sources of greatly varying quality, with very minimal effort to attribute the information to its source. The medium is the message: if your news aggregator shows you headlines and does not prominently display the authors and their credentials, then your news-media is essentially telling you that authorship and attribution don't matter; and if you're seeking out such a format, you're being complicit in the ongoing erosion of news-trustworthiness and reliablility in the sourcing of information.

Nimur (talk) 13:45, 30 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

May 31

* vs ? in cron

In my previous job, I had to work with cron scheduling. It became apparent that cron supports two "wild card" characters for units of time: * meaning "all" and ? meaning "any". What is the difference between them? JIP | Talk 00:23, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Generally, "?" means: match exactly one character; whereas "*" is any string (even empty). Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 01:17, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Or you could look at man 5 crontab and see the right answer. In a crontab, "*" means "any value" for the applicable field. (For example if the minutes, hours, day-of-the-month, month, and day-of-the-week fields are "0 * * * *", then the process will execute every hour on the hour.) "?" means "some value" chosen at random. (For example, "0 ? * * *" would mean to pick one of 00:00, 01:00, 02:00, etc. up to 23:00 and then execute the process every day at that time.) The random choice for "?" is made when cron reads the crontab file.

At least, this is correct on the NetBSD system where I just read the man page. On my Linux system the corresponding man page does not mention "?". --76.69.46.228 (talk) 02:52, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

We can do even better than the man page - we can read the source!

Out of the box, NetBSD uses Vixie cron, the most popular free software implementation that is largely compatible with the ancient ISC cron. A few esoteric versions of Linux default to GNU mcron. To my knowledge, none of these support the "?" wildcard syntax.

Another program is anacron, which uses yet another syntax.

It's worth checking what version of cron you actually have installed - this is the sort of thing that can vary among common Linux and Unix distributions. Exotic versions of cron may have non-platform-portable features, so use them with caution!

On at least one BSD-like system - macOS - cron is gone, and job scheduling is now managed by launchd, which is configured in a totally different fashion using job control plist files. At least a few people say that cron is obsolete - for example, see this Google Tech Talk on launchd - and if you're running a Linux or BSD system, consider switching away from cron. launchd on FreeBSD. On pure linux, systemd is a modern replacement for cron, further documented in the systemd man page. Most of the true Linuces opted not to adopt launchd, for reasons that are interesting mostly to system-software nerds. But in any event, there are several very good reasons to stop using cron: there are a lot of subtle corner-cases that pertain to security, time-zones, cron schedule modifications, and multi-user systems, that all cause "weird" behaviors that are even weirder when you compare across implementations. Fixing up these weird corner cases, and discouraging future use of crontabs, were among the reasons motivating the creation of launchd and systemd.

Nimur (talk) 05:07, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Use of Galaxy phone while charging

A friend using a Galaxy phone has been told that she should not use the phone while it is charging. She also says she has a blank screen when charging and takes that to mean she cannot use it. Is she right? I use an iPhone and work often with the cable attached. Jmar67 (talk) 02:11, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I have a Galaxy S8 and routinely use it while charging. Samsung seems to think it's fine as well, though it is a common misconception. Matt Deres (talk) 12:55, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Need photo cropping app for Android 7.1.1

I would like to be able to trim off all the irrelevant parts of screen grabs from Google Maps I've uploaded to my phone. I could do it on the PC, using MS Paint, but that's awkward to use for cropping.I tried cropping it on my phone, but whatever app it's using is unacceptable. The first shortcoming is that the borders you manipulate to tell it where to crop are always black, which is obviously no good on a dark background. It should either use borders that reverse the color of the underlying pixels, or, if that's too CPU intensive, flashing between opposite colors would work, too, or just a dotted line with alternating colors. The even bigger shortcoming is that the cropped pic is fuzzy, even though when zoomed in on that same region on the original, it's a nice sharp pic. The image quality should not be changed in any way when I crop an image. I would also like to be able to change brightness and contrast, and invert all colors, but that's about all I need in a photo editor on my phone. For anything more, I'd edit it on PC. So, can anyone recommend an app for me ?

Also, the phone seemed to have 2 photo editing apps built-in, and it asked me which one I wanted to use, once, then never again. I'd also like to go back and try the other built-in app, but can't figure out how to do that. Phone is a ZTE ZFIVE C LTE (Z558VL). Thanks.

SinisterLefty (talk) 21:42, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

June 1

Google help

If I want to search for "E. D. Simon", I get a lot of irrelevant results on the lines of Ed Simon or ed.). Simon & Schuster. How do I stop it doing this? THanks, DuncanHill (talk) 00:26, 1 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Drawing apps

Which apps allow one to draw lines, circular/elliptical arcs, arrows and text boxes on an infinite canvas and color between the lines? 2601:646:8A00:A0B3:1C3:741A:FF1C:6A88 (talk) 06:21, 1 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Inkscape 87.112.169.204 (talk) 11:25, 1 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]