◢◤ ◢◤ ◢◤ ⚡ sticker shock ⚡ ◢◤ ◢◤ ◢◤

Run.

I've finally finished my custom desktop, and installing all the software I need on my new laptop. So I thought I'd upload a tutorial on how I did it 🥰

I'm still not 100% happy with all the icon choices but I'll add swap ones out as I see them. Here's some tips on how I did it:

Making Windows 11 desktop shortcuts

Windows 11 makes it weirdly hard to make desktop shortcuts. Its easy with some apps, almost impossible with others. The easiest possible way which took me ages to find out is that if you go onto your windows start menu and click all apps, you can drag them onto the desktop to make a shortcut. It won't work from search, it has to be from the full list. Very annoying, but it works for pretty much every app.

Opening multiple links at once

I like having websites I frequently visit on my desktop, especially if its an online course I'm working on because it's like a reminder to do it. Sometimes there are websites that I always use together and to save time and space I've set up a way for them to open at the same time from one shortcut using python and windows batch files.

Heres how to do it:

Step 1) Make your script

Make sure you have python installed (you can find it in the windows app store)

Create a python script which opens the websites you want using the webbrowser module. This is the code you need

import webbrowser webbrowser.open_new_tab("your_url_here") webbrowser.open_new_tab("your_other_url")

Literally just copy and paste that into notepad, or an IDE (adding more lines if you need them) and save it with the extension .py to make it a python file.

Copy the path to your file location by right clicking your new file and choosing "copy as path"

2) Make a batch file

Open another tab in notepad and use the following script and copy the following template into it

Note - Please remove the slash between the @ and echo

@/echo off python "C:/your/file_path/here"

Save this file with the extention .bat which will run the code when its clicked and open all your urls. You are going to want to save this in your files somewhere , and then right click and choose create shortcut.

You are going to want to do this if you want to use a custom icon because windows doesn't let you directly change icons for batch files for security reasons.

How to make and use custom icons

Find your images

You can make your own but I saved mine from pinterest.

2) Remove the background

Use a background remover tool (I used remove.bg) to remove the background, if the image has lots of black or white it might remove this too but you can add it back in using a drawing app (I used procreate). Save it as a PNG.

3) Convert it to an ICO file

This is the type of file that can be used as icons in windows. The converter I used is convertio, but keep in mind there is a limit of 10 minutes a day for the free version.

4) Change the icons

Right click on the desktop shortcut, choose properties and then choose change icon. Find your .ICO file and click Ok.

Well, that was a very long post. But I hope it was helpful!

Can you guess the theme I decided on?