spikespaz

Prologue

Windows 10 has many great improvements over previous versions, one of my favorites is the ability to make web searches directly from the start menu. Just one key press, and you can start typing your search. You can also use Microsoft’s voice assistant, Cortana, to make searches by talking to it.

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t without issues. One major issue is that this new feature, the Windows Search UI, doesn’t allow you to use anything other than Microsoft Edge and Bing.

If you’re like me, you might have tried to solve this issue. This feature is just too convenient to brush off!

I’ve run across programs like EdgeDeflector and SearchWithMyBrowser. They fix the problem of Microsoft Edge, but they don’t allow you to use your preferred search engine. You’re stuck with Bing. You also must use your system default browser, and I wanted to use a different browser for this specific task.

There are solutions to this like Chrometana that redirect Bing searches to Google. But browser extensions have an unfortunate side effect—latency.

A Google search (or others) should be quick and give you results instantly. Chrometana and the likes were too slow for my taste, so I set out to make my own solution.

Allow me to introduce Search Deflector.

Search Deflector is an attempt to solve these two issues. It has support for Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, Stack Overflow, GitHub, Wolfram Alpha, Ask, and Ecosia. It also allows you to add your own search engine if it isn’t already built in, though I suspect most people will use either Google or DuckDuckGo. You can also use any browser that you wish. The setup program will look on your machine for browsers, and if it can’t find it, you can just manually give it the path to your preferred browser executable.

Search Deflector is a small tool that redirects searches made from the Windows Start Menu or Cortana to whatever browser and search engine you prefer. No more Microsoft Edge and Bing!

Cool, how do I use it?

It’s pretty simple actually. Just go to the releases page and download the latest installer under the assets section named “SearchDeflector-Installer.exe”.

Run the installer. You may get a dialog from Windows Defender saying “Windows has protected your PC”. Click the small link-style button under the title that says “More info” and a button that says “Run anyway” will appear.

This warning appears because the installer is not signed with a trusted certificate, I may start signing my executables in the future.

Next, just go through the installer steps as you would with any application.

You will get to a part that opens a command prompt window (black box with white text). This is the configuration step. You will be asked a series of questions to set up with your preferred browser and search engine.

To make a selection, enter the number inside the square brackets next to the browser or search engine you would like to use, and press Enter. You will then be asked to confirm your selection (to make sure you didn’t make a typo), enter Y to confirm or anything else to repeat the question.

Once you have answered all of the prompts, you will see that the setup has been completed with the options you chose listed. Press Enter or close the window to exit. Finish the setup process by clicking the “Finish” button on the last installer page.

Search deflector should now be installed. To use it, just open your start menu by tapping the Windows key on your keyboard or clicking the icon on your taskbar. You don’t even need to click anything after that; just start typing.

If the search isn’t working for you, look at these troubleshooting tips. If your search engine or browser isn’t listed during the setup process, you can always specify your own browser path or search engine template. For more information about how to do that, look at the relevant Wiki page.

See it on GitHub

Useful references

Name Link Wiki https://github.com/spikespaz/search-deflector/wiki Download https://spikespaz.com/tools/repo-dl/?user=spikespaz&repo=search-deflector&file=SearchDeflector-Installer.exe Releases https://github.com/spikespaz/search-deflector/releases Issues https://github.com/spikespaz/search-deflector/issues License https://github.com/spikespaz/search-deflector/blob/master/LICENSE Readme https://github.com/spikespaz/search-deflector/blob/master/README.md DEV https://dev.to/spikespaz/start-menu-search-on-windows-10-with-google-46ie Kinja https://spikespaz.kinja.com/how-to-use-any-search-engine-and-browser-with-windows-1-1828842888 Email [email protected]

Please feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns. I will be glad to help. If you are looking to submit a bug report, please use the GitHub issues.

Firefox-NativeDark

Dynamic theme for Firefox Quantum that colorizes the title bar, tabs, and URL bar based on your Windows accent color.

Go to the GitHub repository for install instructions and more information. https://github.com/spikespaz/Firefox-NativeDark

The theme was originally meant to work with just dark colors, (specifically #394145, the darkest color that Windows allows) but while I was making the script to get the system accent colors, the only way to create variations was to create transparent layers of black over top. I accidentally discovered that it would work with other themes, and proceeded to put the below image together.

Below are examples of 11 different accent colors. Only the first is a custom color.

The tabs and body of the toolbar is 25% darker than the accent color, and the inside of the omni bar is 50% darker than the accent color. The text color is determined by Windows as well.

I think I fork bombed my own computer somehow accidentally, I was working on FFpython (my wrapper for FFmpeg) and ran it.

It didn't appear to do anything, so I opened the browser and started browsing their docs, but my computer kept getting slower so I opened up task manager. Then I saw this.

My thoughts occurred in this order:

What the actual hell happened to the font

Why is my memory spiked at 91%

Why did the memory just die and the disk spiked to 99%

Better screenshot this

HOLY S&*T WHY ARE THERE SO MANY CHILD PROCESSES

So then I restarted.

Tried my code again to duplicate the issue, maybe catch it in a debugger.

Recently, I took the Windows Insider Annual Survey that I recieved via email from Microsoft.

While responding to the last prompt, asking why I love and use windows in my daily life, I realised that it might make for a good blog post as well. So here it is.

Windows allows me to express my creativity programmatically. It clears my head and helps me think through unrelated situations in a logical and concise manner. Windows 10 is the platform I prefer to use to do so, it is the fastest and most robust platform with my favorite style of interface. I appreciate how much of the operating system already behaves in the manner that I like, the interfaces (within the system and in applications developed in a "Windows first" mindset) are predictable and just make sense. Learning how to use new features or programs of such a familiar and fluent interface is easy, it comes naturally. I love the ability to predict where a graphical element will be before it even loads into the viewport. Expecting everything that happens is key to a speedy and productive workflow.

I would also like to add onto this by saying that I also love Linux. It can do much of the same (and more) as described above, however Windows (specifically 10) wins over any distribution I have tried so far simply because of the good work put in by the developer team.

It is a surprisingly well polished product (well, moreso than most Linux distros) that fits quite nearly every single one of my needs. Even more now that developers have access to the Ubuntu Subsystem.

I used Tumblr's custom CSS section to modify the tables a little bit. By default, they didn't have any visible styling.

/* Add margins to the table so it doesn't look funny in the post content and allow them to float side-by-side */ .body-text table { display: inline-block; border: 2px solid #979797; margin: 1em 0.5em; } /* Add padding to cell content and set the cell borders */ .body-text th, .body-text td { padding: 0.3em 1em; border: 1px solid #979797; }

First Table Header #0 A1 B1 #1 A2 B2 #2 A3 B3 #3 A4 B4 #4 A5 B5

I have asked this question quite a few times in the past. Which would be better? List comprehension, or a map function to convert every item in a list or tuple to another?

Upon Googling, you will get very different answers from different people.

Let's try it with the timeit module.

".".join([str(x) for x in range(20)]) ".".join(map(str, range(20))

As you can see, both lines use range(20) to create a generator of 20 integer values. Then, either the map function, or the list comprehensor loops through the list converting each value to a string and returning the new value.

These are the results I found:

spike@Jacob-Laptop MINGW64 ~ $ python -mtimeit "'.'.join(map(str, range(20)))" 100000 loops, best of 3: 4.27 usec per loop spike@Jacob-Laptop MINGW64 ~ $ python -mtimeit "'.'.join([str(x) for x in range(20)])" 100000 loops, best of 3: 5.64 usec per loop

So which one of these is the best method?

Turns out, using map() was slightly faster. But, after trying this, I realised there was another option. Using a tuple directly. This should save the interpreter a little memory footprint, but in larger cases this would scale.

".".join(tuple(str(x) for x in range(20)))

spike@Jacob-Laptop MINGW64 ~ $ python -mtimeit "'.'.join(tuple(str(x) for x in range(20)))" 100000 loops, best of 3: 6.21 usec per loop

Wew lenny! (╯°□°) ╯︵ ┻━┻

That is a lot slower than I would have expected. Looks like map() is still king, in terms of speed.

All tests results were taken from timeit using best of three 100,000 loop tests.

Seeing what a pain in the ass it is to create favicons for a website, I quickly made a small script to generate PNG and ICO icons used to embed favicons in a website. It is easily configurable, and can probably work with just about any SVG file thrown at it. However, the one limitation is that it only supports width as the size argument, so all of your icons should be square.

You need Inkscape and ImageMagick installed on your system and added to your PATH environment variable! Without those two, the program won't work.

You can tell if you have those two requirements (but you should already know) by running magisk and inkscape respectively. They should also be runnable in your system default shell, as that's how the script runs them.

First, the script can be run with the following command:

python Favicon.py -s favicon.svg

Or if you would like to run it by a configuration file:

python Favicon.py -c configuration.json

The configuration is stored in JSON format. All of the accepted fields are shown in the following example:

{ "svg": "../MyIcon.svg", "png_sizes": [16, 32, 48, 64, 72, 96, 128, 196], "ico_sizes": [16, 32, 64, 128, 256], "png_name": "out/MyIcon-{}.png", "ico_name": "out/favicon.ico" }

The above example configuration would create eight PNG icons named in the format MyIcon-S.png where the S is size. The input SVG would be from the parent directory of the current location. The one ICO file would be named favicon.ico, containing the sizes specified by ico_sizes. All of these outputs would be in an out/ directory, which you would have to create before running the script.

This is the help information that is shown when runing the script with the --help flag.

usage: favicon.py [-h] [-c CONFIG] [-s SVG] [-ps PNG_SIZES [PNG_SIZES ...]] [-is ICO_SIZES [ICO_SIZES ...]] [-pn PNG_NAME] [-in ICO_NAME] Generate favicons from an SVG. optional arguments: -h, --help show this help message and exit -c CONFIG, --config CONFIG Configuration file with settings to use instead of commands. -s SVG, --svg SVG Input SVG path to generate icons from. -ps PNG_SIZES [PNG_SIZES ...], --png-sizes PNG_SIZES [PNG_SIZES ...] List of sizes (by pixel width) to generate PNG icons for. -is ICO_SIZES [ICO_SIZES ...], --ico-sizes ICO_SIZES [ICO_SIZES ...] List of PNG icon sizes to embed in the ICO file. Merged with PNG sizes. -pn PNG_NAME, --png-name PNG_NAME Base filename to use for PNG files. Use '{}' as a variable placeholder for size. -in ICO_NAME, --ico-name ICO_NAME Filename for the generated ICO output file.

You can see the script and an example configuration as a Github Gist.

This is sorta pointless. I don't know what content is going to be here, but nevertheless, here exists.

I'm probably going to post general programming things or rants or some snippit of a project I'm working on. Let's see where the future takes this.

Edit: To my fellow programmers, I know, I know, I'll replace this if I end up using it later. With Jekyll or something. But for now, I'll probably never make any blog posts so I don't have time for another project.