Finally!

Windows 11 no longer reboots when you tell it to update-and-shutdown. The problem affected Windows 10 as well, so it’s been busted for ten years, neatly highlighting Microsoft’s QA priorities. Which somehow seem to involve cramming more ads, AI, and privacy violations into every product.

Oh, joy, more work for me!

My parents have a Windows 10 PC that they were worried about not being able to upgrade as the OS falls out of support. Last week, I got a call asking me to come over and fix its sudden inability to print, which involved deleting and reinstalling the printer driver. Odd, but hey, it’s Windows.

Except that there were more problems, like the fact that left-clicking the Start button did nothing, the taskbar Search field did nothing, and right-clicking the start button to launch Settings popped up an error dialog. I didn’t have a lot of time, so I screenshotted everything and went off to research fixes, which included some partially successful incantations.

Then I discovered what was really going on: it had silently upgraded itself to Windows 11. Mostly. So now I need to copy a recovery image to a USB stick and head back over there soon to repair or re-run the upgrade. Sigh.

(I’ve got half a dozen Windows PCs around the house that I would be happy to upgrade to Win11, but I can’t; several are old enough that the CPUs simply aren’t supported, so even the workarounds won’t work around, and one couldn’t run Linux or BSD for blood or money, due to proprietary drivers required for major components)

Python drag-and-drop wrapper for py2app

Turns out that Automator isn’t entirely scriptable, which seems like an obvious oversight, but Apple probably couldn’t figure out how to monetize those pixels. Instead, I updated the build script for my gallery-wall app (not yet uploaded to Github) to use Platypus, not to be confused with Python Platypus.

cat > _rungallery.sh <<'EOF'
#!/bin/zsh
exec open -a "gallerywall_backend" --args "$@"
EOF
chmod +x _rungallery.sh

platypus -a "Gallery Wall" \
    --interface-type None \
    --droppable \
    --quit-after-execution \
    --bundle-identifier "org.dotclue.gallerywall" \
    --author "J Greely" \
    --app-version "1.0.0" \
    --app-icon images/GalleryWall-wrapper.icns \
    --interpreter "/bin/zsh" \
    _rungallery.sh

(the downside is that it makes apps that won’t run on a nailed-down-by-default Mac, and in fact you can’t even install Platypus on most Macs, due to code-signing errors that are supposed to be fixed in the next release)

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