Miscellaneous Box

Computer Matters

• Browser — Firefox. For a few years I changed to Pale Moon, which is a steadily diverging Firefox ‘fork’, but ultimately had to return to FF because of various compatibility issues in PM — that return being made workable by intensive work that I did on customization of the current, Quantum, incarnation of Firefox, using configurations in its userchrome.css file, to make its appearance in most respects as clean and ergonomic as I was getting in Pale Moon, and with very thorough searching around I managed to get most, though by no means all, of the old add-ons' functionality through careful choice of the compatible new Web Extensions.

  • Was using Roboform Free. I was pretty happy with the latter, despite the odd little annoyances, and it was the best for me out of a number of password managers I'd tried. But the free version could be used only on one device. That was fine by me up till 2021 when I finally bowed to the inevitable and bought my first smartphone, and so wanted a free password manager that would run on both desktop PC and smartphone — much preferably without storing one's data online.

    MYKI turned out to fit the bill remarkably well. It synced both devices instantly, using its online servers to do that, BUT actual storage of the data is on the devices, NOT in the ‘cloud’. The free version was remarkably fully featured — the paid version really adding little that an ordinary domestic user like me would have cause to use. — But then the MYKI team got bought up and had to close MYKI, so I grudgingly switched back to Roboform, this time Roboform Everywhere — the paid-for version that syncs between one's devices. I saved on the subscription by paying upfront for 5 years.

  • British English Dictionary

  • Disable Tab Detach — Prevents a tab dragged from tab bar becoming a new window.

  • Flagfox — Toolbox for checking up on current site, and shows the country base of the site.

  • Flash Block (Plus) — Gives full control over whether any particular Flash content is played or not — all Flash content is blocked till you okay it.

  • I don't care about cookies — Suppresses those annoying cookie warnings that many sites give.

  • InFormEnter — I thought this might become redundant after I installed RoboForm, but actually I still find it useful for filling in the odd non-private form fields.

  • NoScript — a tremendous browsing security feature, making browsing very much safer than without it, as it blocks all scripts by default and only allows what you choose to let through. Clearly, though, its effectiveness does depend on the user being very careful about what scripts are allowed, and on what sites any are to be allowed at all. A single over-eager ‘Allow’ click could still result in your getting landed with malware on your PC.

  • Noise — This enables one to set up sounds for Firefox events (Firefox itself doesn't have any facility for sounds to accompany initiation of events). I generally don't want sounds for Firefox events — except that when notification bars with particular prompts appear, they're so discreet that I tend not to notice them, and so it's really handy to have a discreet owl hoot, frog croak or funny burp / fart or similar sound to alert me when any such inconspicuous notification or prompt appears.

    I even recorded for it some messages to identify particular HTTP ‘error’ status codes. However, in the current, Quantum, versions of Firefox, this extension has more limited functionality, and only a quite small range of event types can be given a sound.

  • Notification Sound — Plays a user-specified sound when a notification is displayed.

  • Open With — Enables me to open the current page in a choice of other browsers and editors. Because of functionality limitations with the ‘Web Extension’ type of add-on that the Quantum version of Firefox solely supports, I've had to use the odd workarounds to get things working properly.

  • BitDefender Traffic Light — displays security status of sites in search engine listings and the currently loaded site.

  • uBlock Origin — a particularly effective blocker of ads and various related security / privacy risks.

  • Privacy Badger — automatically learns to block invisible trackers.

  • Fixed Zoom — enables me to have a zoom level ‘permanently’ set for all web pages (needed because of my high-resolution screen).

  • Textarea Cache — Automatically saves contents of text entry fields in online forms, so if a glitch occurs during your completing or submitting a form, so losing your text, you can retrieve it from Textarea Cache. A great sanity-saver and stress avoider!

  • Undo Close Tab — Undo the last closed tab, or from a list of recently closed tabs.

  • WOT (Web of Trust) — Very much on probation; I've returned to using this, but its site ratings need to be treated with great circumspection, no matter whether positive or negative, seeing that opinion and belief rather than common sense is the driving force of most people who rate sites there.

  • WX Download Status Bar — Because of limitations in the Firefox Quantum version's Web Extensions, this is a pale shadow of the so-useful Download Status Bar, which latter cannot work in the current Firefox versions. Its functionality is much more restricted, though it's still quite useful. I can't configure it to automatically apply an antivirus scan to a file upon completion of the download, which is a nuisance, but there's no equivalent extension that has that function (i.e., for current Firefox versions). However, my security software does periodic scans and jumps into action anyway if anything unknown tries to run, so really there's no need for a separate automatic scan of each download.

• Web page editor — BlueGriffon, which has arisen from the same original source as KompoZer, which I used to use, and has a lot of similarity with it, but was being more actively developed. It does have its limitations, quirks and bugs, but this appears to be the best that I can come up with for the time being, and at least some of its issues did appear to bear more chance of being resolved than is the case with KompoZer and the effectively defunct Microsoft Expression Web, which latter I tried for a month or two before getting clobbered by some of its troublesome ‘features’.

  Frustratingly, BlueGriffon is now no longer being developed, so one just has to live with its bugs and limitations.

  Although I haven't yet come across a fully acceptable web page editor, I have NO plans at all to get involved with Dreamweaver, which, apart from being eye-wateringly expensive, is a cumbersome mass of bloatware replete with features that I don't want, and noted for creating poor quality source code, and developed / marketed by Adobe, whose upgrade / improvements policy and attitude to their customers is frankly abominable and the work of scoundrels.

• Text editor — was Notepad++. The ‘++’ in its name is no exaggeration, for this is a remarkably well featured text editor. It is much more than just a replacement for the Windows Notepad — and it's free.

  However, in 2012 I opted for still fuller functionality and changed over to the very fully featured EditPad Pro from Just Great Software, who are also the source of PowerGrep and RegexBuddy, which I also use. Programs from Just Great Software may look a little pricey, BUT they are remarkably good and well featured, and they are all being very actively developed, also with very responsive user support. Also, a long time passes (with many free ‘minor’ updates containing significant improvements) between new major versions for which latter there would be a charge for upgrading — so one does get quite a lot for one's money.

  For example, I upgraded to EditPad Pro 7 in 2012, and my next paid-for upgrade wasn't till December 2019, when EditPad Pro 8 came out, and there'd been pretty regular free updates with not only bug fixes but many small improvements in the meantime. My top favourite new feature (out of many) in v. 8 is one's now being able to save search / replace actions as ‘favorites’ and call them up quickly. They can include elaborate regular expressions, so it's all potentially very powerful but easy and intuitive to use.

• CSS stylesheet editor — TopStyle Pro. Not just a CSS editor, but a page (code) editor and quite a ‘Swiss Army Knife’ for many web page and site functions. No longer in development, but I've not found any other CSS editor that matches this one for functions and usability. It's one of my great old friends in the computer software field.

• Wordprocessor — Microsoft Word, currently as part of Office 2019 — not the subscription-based Office 365. I did try LibreOffice (using just the Writer module) instead for perhaps a year. It was less polished and intuitive for me to use, but at least, one way or another, did the jobs that I needed it to do, and was notionally free — though definitely warranting the requested occasional donations.

  But then, in 2015, when I wanted to get reading through and preparing my novels to produce as books, I found LibreOffice Writer to be completely unusable with regard to headers, which were hopelessly dysfunctional, and so, reluctantly, I reverted to MS Word, which at least did work properly, and was still supported by Microsoft with security updates — and I've stayed with Word ever since. I do understand, though, that LibreOffice has been very actively developed since then, and it's likely that it would work quite a bit better for my in its current version.

• Search (& replace):

  • PowerGrep — the real ‘heavyweight’ search & replace program, with particularly powerful regular expression support. Searches for file contents — not actual file / folder names — and can display a marvellously informative action preview, showing in context the ‘finds’ and what they would get changed to — and a similar display of the results of a completed action.

    This program is expensive — but I couldn't find anything cheaper that got near to the functionality and usability of PowerGrep, so I don't grudge my outlay on this — and a long time, with many significant updates, passes between major versions for which one would have to pay to upgrade. You thus get a lot for your money as compared with programs from various other software firms.

    • Regex Buddy, from the PowerGrep people — a tremendous aid in creating regular expressions to use in search strings.

  • Actual Search & Replace — a very nice lighter-weight utility for search / replace, which can also search for filenames but not folders. Regular expression support, but no preview of replace results, so I almost always use PowerGrep for any replace operations using regular expressions. Very useful for the simpler S&R tasks, though, where the quite complex interface of PowerGrep would be overkill.

  • (search only) Free Commander XE (see further below) — this extremely fully featured file manager is excellent for searching for file and folder names, and also can search for contained text. Nowadays regular expressions can be used both for file / folder names and for text contained in files.

  • Agent Ransack, by Mythicsoft. This is my late 2017 replacement for DocFetcher which latter is an excellent Open Source (and thus free) desktop search utility. I was getting increasingly fidgety, though, about having DocFetcher on my system, because it requires Java in order to run, and I was reading increasingly numerous and strong warnings to clear Java off one's system altogether because of its low and decreasing security rating. Then, with the Windows 10 Creators Update DocFetcher was no longer working on my system, so my hand was forced for a change.

    Although Agent Ransack is a bit more basic in its functionality for my purposes, it suffices well for the occasional near-instant text search results through all document, text and web page formats on my system, including formats that are either not searched within (Actual Search & Replace) or not automatically comprehensively searched within (PowerGrep).

• Image viewers / managers:

  • XnViewMP — a really great open source (and thus free) image manager with comprehensive viewing / processing / conversion facilities, including batch operations.
  • (specifically for photos) — Photo Mechanic. Particularly recommended despite price, on account of its thorough and superior handling of IPTC metadata. It also has some particularly handy features for sorting through a batch of new photos and picking out the best.

• Image editor — Adobe Photoshop Elements 2021. Its earlier versions have been versatile enough for me to use it as a primitive desktop publishing program for my CD artwork and book covers. In 2020 I found that Corel Paintshop Pro, in its 2020 version, had advanced to being a genuine competitor of Photoshop Elements as an image processor with reasonably intuitive quick adjustment and tweaking features — though it lacks some of the text effects that I depend on in Photoshop Elements.

  Within a few weeks I discovered and took on Corel AfterShot Pro 3, which adds a further major step forward in image quality achieved with remarkably little faffing about. I got using this with Paintshop Pro, for they both have their particular strong and duff points.

  However, although I could often get better image quality from those two Corel programs than I did in PE 11, albeit with a little extra work, not only was I still hankering after the simplicity and efficiency of operation in the latter, but I was dissatisfied with a practical aspect of how the Corel programs operate. They insist on preserving the originals and saving the processed images in a different location — and the two do that somewhat differently from each other. This led to me getting confused about where a newly saved edited file was, and the odd photos went missing through such confusions.

  For that reason I was keeping Photoshop Elements (version 11), because it was still the only suitable program of which I was aware that enabled one to create lines of text that are curved, wavy, arched, bowed, bulging or constricted, or circular, complete with 3D-like bevel effects, and preserve them as still editable layers on top of one's image layers — important in my CD art for a start!

  But then in 2021 I found that not only does Photoshop Elements 2021 have additional functions that would enable me to get better results from processing my photos, but also, unlike most other major Adobe programs, it was still available for a once-off (i.e., non-subscription) price. I'd previously got it into my head that PE had become yet another program to gain subscription pricing (prohibitively expensive for me).

  I therefore paid out for that, of course getting an upgrade discount — and that works out at reasonable value because I wouldn't upgrade again for a few years. Actually, quite apart from its improvements since version 11, I'd get better quality from it simply through what I'd learnt through using those two Corel programs.

• Audio file editors:

  • Audacity. This free editor has an excellent feature set, but I find its whole interface an layout clunky and not fully intuitive / ergonomic to use. For most tasks, particularly regular editing, I use WavePad (see below). There are some tasks, however, that I find much easier to do (at least with acceptable results) in Audacity, and indeed certain tasks that I've never found out how to do in WavePad (maybe they aren't implemented in that program).

    Recent Audacity versions have a bug that causes program crash if one is trying to batch-process files with a function (or sequence of functions).  For that reason I still have Audacity 3.13 on my system, and use that for batch processing.

  • WavePad, from NCH Software. For most purposes I prefer this because of its very intuitive interface. I paid out for a licence for this program, so as to have full function with no ‘nags’, but I do have to say that NCH's whole attitude seems to be very money-grabbing, and the price they put on this program is quite high, AND that entitles you to only six months’ worth of program updates / upgrades.

    After six months you have to pay the full upgrade price if you want to update the program even for a relatively minor version update rather than a full new version. Although that upgrade is at a discount price, because of the high level of the claimed ‘full’ price, the ‘discount’ price is what I'd expect to pay for first time registration for such a program from a less expensive software firm.

    Also, the WavePad installer behaves as malware in that it aggressively puts a mass of unwanted ‘trick’ entries in the Explorer context (right-click) menu. Also, many of the function buttons / options in WavePad's toolbar and menus are NOT native functions at all, but download separate utilities that then immediately or soon require registration / payment before one can get their full functionality — a quite disreputable sales tactic, seeing that I'm using the paid-for ‘Master's Edition’ and really shouldn't have that pretending to have functions that you can't have without paying extra for them (at least, after a trial period).

    Another improvement in recent versions is the ability to save custom equalization presets — though it's so slow in doing equalizations that I generally give that task to Audacity.

    Another function that's gained a user presets facility is Crossfade. That was broken for a couple or so years, but it now seems to be more or less fixed, except that in my experience it always does its action in a brazenly wrong position when you use a newly-loaded preset. The workaround I found was to Ctl-Z to undo that action, and then to do the action again (NOT using the Ctly-Y redo facility, which just restores the error).

    Another issue with Crossfade is that often the far end of a crossfade gives a slight click during playback. This is generally easily rectified by selecting the shortest-possible section with the annoying click in the middle of it (i.e., a tiny fraction of a second), and then deleting that. WavePad is smart enough to do an automatic crossfade when you delete a section, and with an extremely short deleted section you're usually unlikely to get any audible glitch at that point.

    A third significant issue about the Crossfade function's user presets is that they're a real pig to set up. Once I'd worked out the gap value that allowed a smooth transition without any unwanted rise or dip in volume during the crossfade, I calculated a pro-rata gap value for each crossfade taper length that I wanted to use, and set up presets for all the lengths that I expected to use. Once that was done, I could quickly call up any requisite preset — just with the aforementioned nuisance workaround, having to repeat each crossfade action that is the first using the loaded preset.

  • Voxengo CurvEQ, a reasonably priced VST plug-in, which works with WavePad and Audacity. It's the best program that I could find to graphically display the frequency spectrum of a sound being played, and to do simple and complex EQ operations. It has proved invaluable for enabling me to work out surprisingly precisely a corrective EQ profile to apply to a sound file in Audacity in order to get the most natural and life-like sound on playback.

    In particular, it has enabled me to apply such a corrective profile routinely to sound files produced by my own sound recorder (Sony PCM-M10, and more recently PCM-D100) to compensate for the furry windshield that I have to use over its internal microphones, for that somewhat attenuates higher frequencies. For me it's very much worth the reasonably modest (one-off) price.

    Actually I started off with the free cut-down version of this, called Span. That has the same viewing display, but you can't set up a curve and process the current loaded file with it. I could have saved myself a lot of time and work by paying out for CurveEQ at the outset.

  • TDR-Nova (Gentleman's Edition), a VST plugin giving a range of powerful functions involving equalization. It acts as an excellent plain (‘static’) parametric equalizer, but in addition dynamic equalization can be switched on for any frequency band(s). I've used this to tame the overdone bass drum sounds in my old recordings of MIDI renderings of my music compositions, and to reduce the impact of microphone wind noise in my natural soundscape recordings — more effective than a straight static EQ in Audacity. Well worth the price for the paid version.

    I've also used it successfully for adjusting dynamic range of the recordings I'd made of MIDI renditions of my music compositions.

  • A1StereoControl, an excellent free VST plugin for adjusting the stereo imaging of a recording. I used this to enhance my PCM-M10 recordings, which all had poor stereo imaging. However, I then found that this enhancement caused phase cancellation effects that trashed the stereo imaging of many (but not all) sea and similar sounds for listening to through speakers, although the sound appeared to be great when listened to through headphones, where phase cancellation effects couldn't happen to a really significant effect.

    However, the degree of adverse effects varies according to the exact nature of the soundscape, so A1StereoControl is by no means a write-off for enhancing PCM-M10 recordings. It's just that each recording needs test listenings with different degrees of enhancement, so you can see at what strength of processing the file the adverse effects become intrusive for the particular recording (i.e., when listened to through computer speakers and room speakers).

    In some cases avoiding a second pass of the enhancement is probably normally a good start — but then again, it appears to work fine for recordings with low susceptibility to the unwanted phase cancellation effects, and produces really excellent results.
    

    I eventually worked out that the problem is NOT A1StereoControl, but the PCM-M10's use of omnidirectional microphones. In other words, ANY stereo widening software would get those adverse effects from the PCM-M10 recordings, or indeed generally from recordings made with omnidirectional mics, at least if they lack an acoustic barrier between them. Much experimenting showed that the optimal degree of widening for PCM-M10 recordings is 160%, anything wider starting to cause the soundstage to break apart in the middle.

    Another great use for A1StereoControl is for widening recordings I've made with the Sony PCM-D100 recorder set at the narrowest angle (90°), so that a modest zooming-in of the soundstage can be effected. I found that a 135% widening is the maximum to use before one gets the beginnings of breakup of the middle of the soundstage.

• Equalizer to correct for bass resonance problems with in-room response of my computer speakers (Audioengine A2+ with S8 subwoofer) — Equalizer APO, using the very helpful fPEQGUI as a graphical front end for it. There are, of course, simpler-looking equalizers, generally 31-band graphic ones, that sort-of do the job, but my choice was for a good parametric equalizer that displays a ‘results’ graph, and which can be configured to work automatically on all sound sources within the computer. That's where Equalizer APO (plus a suitable front end) is king!

  I've set up a different profile for the USB output to my Anti-Mode 2.0 Dual Core unit, which latter does an amazingly accurate bass correction for my room hi-fi system. That profile has no equalization filters set, but simply boosts the volume, because I found that otherwise I got far too low a sound level from anything being played from the computer through my room hi-fi system.

  Unfortunately fPEQGUI isn't available any more, BUT there is currently a highly regarded successor, which I haven't yet had need to use, called Peace Equalizer, which I could use if fPEQGUI becomes incompatible with future operating system versions.

• Audio file format converter / CD ‘ripper’ — After many years of using Fre:ac for conversion, I've now settled on the Convert function in Foobar2000 (see next item). This function uses multi-threading, and so with a number of files to convert, it's much faster than other programs like Fre:ac. I can use Foobar2000 for speedy ripping of CDs, but Fre:ac has some settings for getting better results when ripping CDs that are damaged or contain digital errors.

• CD and audio file player — Foobar2000. For many years I'd been using Winamp as my media player, because it was the fashionable thing to use that rather than the clunky and resource hogging Windows Media Player. However, really Winamp itself had much of the same problem, at least for my purposes, and was far too flashy and difficult for me to find the small number of functions that I actually wanted to use — and it was slow to start up, which was tiresome if I just wanted to play a very short WAV file, for example.

  Also, the free version didn't play FLAC files. So, in 2012 I did an Internet search and came up trumps with Foobar2000, which is free and includes FLAC files among those that it can play. Foobar2000 is small, visually basic (i.e., without distractions so that you can see just what you need to see), loads quickly, and uses minimal system resources. Foobar2000 can ‘rip’ CDs too — though I prefer to do that in Fre:ac.

  Two add-ons (described as ‘components’) that I find extremely useful are the Waveform Seekbar and Musical Spectrum. The latter I've configured to display from C0 to G10, to cover the whole audible spectrum plus a bit extra either side. As I make a lot of my own recordings, it's particularly helpful to be able to see just what's going on in them and if there are particular issues that I need to address.

  For more detailed virtually real-time examination of the frequency spectrum I use the aforementioned Voxengo CurveEQ, though that isn't so convenient because it doesn't integrate into the parent application's window.

• Extracting audio from DVDs in separate tracks — DVD Decrypter.

• Video player — VLC Media Player. I've used this too for extracting audio from DVDs — though actually it's inconvenient for this purpose because it has no facility to extract the audio as separate tracks (i.e., all in one process).

• Downloading highest available quality audio from YouTube videos — aTube Catcher. This is particularly easy. Just copy the video page's URL from the browser address bar and paste it into the appropriate field in aTube Catcher, and it will save it to your system in the file format that you've set in its configuration. It will even automatically extract a playlist from a YouTube page and then present you with that list, so you can select what in that list to download.

• Video editor — For quite some time it was Windows Live Movie Maker. I used this for making simple videos that I put on YouTube to present my music compositions, using mostly the relevant CD cover art as the visual part. At least for this purpose, Movie Maker was remarkably effective, intuitive and quick to use — but unfortunately was ditched by M$. For some time I was using Shotcut, but that was always rather unstable and inclined suddenly to disappear just when one was in the middle of something with it.

  — And then that instability, together with some obstructive perversities concerning using text elements, became too much, presumably owing to increasing incompatibility with further Windows updates, so now I'm using OpenShot. That too has long-standing known bugs, and is inclined summarily to exit when I'm adjusting clip lengths at or close to the end of the video, though in various ways is simpler and less perverse than Shotcut in its ergonomics.  Apparently OpenShot has no auto-save feature, though, so I have to be meticulous about saving the project after every adjustment or so at the end of the timeline.

• CD / DVD burning program — CD Burner XP. At different times previously I'd used WinOnCD (my first), Nero Burning, Ashampoo Burning Studio, then (though only for audio CDs) the CD-burning plug-in in Foobar 2000, then BurnAware Free, and then ImgBurn.

• File manager — Free Commander XE.

  

  This is by far the best and most intuitive file manager that I've tried, out of quite a number. I was for many years a PowerDesk devotee, but Free Commander knocks not just spots but huge blotches off it! (you get the picture?)

  And it really is free — though it's so excellent that you may be moved to donate something to the author. It's so full of features and options, however, that some users would most likely find it rather daunting, and its initial default appearance may be felt to be rather off-putting, BUT the real way to approach it is to take some time initially to methodically configure it to display just what you want, in the way that is most intuitive for you.

  Once you've got it set up like that it can look refreshingly simple and uncluttered, with little or nothing getting in your way, yet still having virtually any file management functionality that you could possibly have need for, including powerful search and quick filter capabilities, file / folder compare and synchronization, intelligent bulk rename, stored and recallable user defined layouts, user defined columns in file listings, FTP functionality, and….

• Sound file manager — Tag&Rename. Although not having the tremendous range of functionality of Free Commander, this program, as well as having a lot of functions for managing sound file tags, displays the playing time and relevant data such as bit rate of each file and the total playing time for any folder or selected block. This makes things much easier for grouping sound files into folders prior to burning them to audio CDs. It's really come into its own since I started making my own sound recordings, for it greatly facilitates the entering / editing of the various metadata fields (‘tags’) that each sound file can carry, and allows batch entering / editing operations.

• Folder synchronization with FTP for uploading large numbers of updated web pages — Beyond Compare. I use the Pro version because that enables me to use secure FTP.

  Standard FTP programs with synchronization facilities proved to be unreliable and prone to making a mess of the website on the remote server by putting lots of files in wrong folders, or simply giving up on the operation part-way through — but Beyond Compare has been rock-solid reliable and very fast in its synchronizations and FTP transfers, and is really a great piece of work, albeit not always best for standard uploading of just a few files, where a more normal FTP program may make better sense.

• FTP program for use when folder synchronization isn't required — Wise-FTP. Despite the odd small bugs and its folder synchronization option looking pretty untrustworthy (I couldn't make out, from the display, exactly what would happen if I actually let it proceed), this program has what is for me the clearest and most intuitive interface that I've found in an FTP program, and it does seem to be very fast in its uploading of multiple files simultaneously.

• Monitoring the status of my websites — UptimeRobot, an online service, so that I can get email alerts about site downtime.

• Backing up:

  • (was) Beyond Compare for daily synchronization (non-compressed) short-term data backups. However, it increasingly bugged me through not synchronizing fully effectively from my C or E drive. Eventually I found FreeFileSync, which performs perfectly for that purpose, provided that one has it set to copy locked files (an option not available in Beyond Compare) and, when a synchronization has completed, to do a second Compare on that pair of drives / folders, and then another synchronization if that Compare operation lists any files that still need synchronization.

    The problem here appears to be a Windows one, in that in some cases files' ‘modified’ dates (which generally are those seen in file listings) are wrongly changed to the current date / time when they're copied but not when they're updated.

    That means that new files being copied over in a synchronization may in some cases wrongly have the current date on the destination side, and the solution is then to repeat the compare / synchronization so that then those files get updated, and they then get the date attributes verbatim from the source files.

    A bit barmy, but, let's face it, using computer programs really effectively often requires peculiar workarounds because of the plethora of bugs and ‘undocumented features’ in even the most highly reputed software!

  • Macrium Reflect. (previously used Acronis True Image 2012, then EaseUs Todo Backup Free, then Aomei Backupper) for disk / partition image backups, including a remarkably quick weekly system partition backup. With these backups I'm much less likely to have to reinstall Windows in the event of a problem. Both backing up and restoring the system partition has proved to be an amazingly speedy and trouble-free process.

    One tiresome aspect of Macrium Reflect is that it keeps itself running in the background all the time even if you have no scheduled tasks and have disabled auto update checking and thus have no cause for any part of the program to keep running. Switch the Macrium Reflect service to Manual or Disabled, and next time you run the program, it'll have left its service set again to Automatic, so it'll load at every startup whether or not you want it.

    My workaround for that one is to have Anvir Task Manager Pro automatically remove Windows' startup entry for Macrium Reflect's executable every time it appears there. That's achieved by adding it to ATM's Startup Guard list.

    The EaseUs and Aomei programs both come from China, so both are now excluded by my progressively tightening policy of keeping clear of software from countries particularly prone to send us State-supported cyber-attacks.

  • Bitser — An additional backup program? — Yes, for my data backups! The trouble with the whole disk / partition copying programs is that they save only to proprietary formats, so you're tied to using the respective program to access / restore anything — which is really not a healthy situation at all. So, in 2013 I finally decided to break loose from the proprietary format backup programs for my personal data backups.

    After all, partition backups of my C drive don't need to be kept all that long if they're being made regularly, but the data backups do, and so they need to be saved in a universally accessible format — i.e., good old Zip! So, that's why I ended up with Bitser, which isn't made for doing partition or system backups, but is brilliant for backing up one's data into .zip files, which then can be opened by all manner of programs including straight file managers. I would advise any- and everyone not to entrust their data backups to any program that saves them in a proprietary format.

• Disk defragmentation — Generally not needed now, as it's unhelpful and indeed slightly harmful to defragment SSDs (actually, with SSDs the whole concept of defragmentation isn't particularly meaningful anyway). However, on the odd occasion when I want to defragment one of my external hard disk drives I simply use Windows 11's own optimization function, which is free and much quicker than it ever was in earlier Windows versions (i.e., even when third-party defragmenters were used).

• Security software:
  I've used an evolving sequence of combinations of programs for this purpose over the years. It's now not possible to categorize each security program neatly in the way that one used to be able to and people are commonly still doing in ignorance of the real situation nowadays. In particular, the whole notion of a distinction between ‘virus’ and other malware leads to very harmful misunderstandings. Also, there's a lot of peer as well as commercial pressure upon us to overload our systems with a surfeit of security programs, and I was falling into that trap a bit myself, and have now rationalized and slimmed down somewhat.

  Let's remember that the most important thing of all for a secure computer is genuinely safe behaviour by the user — being circumspect about all web pages and all emails (even ones from generally trustworthy sources could have been hacked).

  • Malware protection
    This has become a long saga of changes, and in November 2021 I cut out a lot of that here to restore focus a bit.
    

    • Antivirus (1) and pretty comprehensive antimalware, with ransomware and intrusion protection — Malwarebytes Premium. Many years ago now I got a lifetime licence for this (something not available anymore), so had an incentive to use it as my primary AV / antimalware. However, it rapidly became too heavy on the system, and even after various program optimizations, which did help, I found MB to slow down program launching and file access sufficiently for me to inactivate its licence to demote it to the free version, which just does on-demand scans, and then regarded the next item as my primary AV.

      However, in November 2021, after my system's Windows 11 upgrade, I noticed that program launching and file access were somewhat faster, and tried activating MB again for full operation. To my surprise, now I couldn't see any obvious slowing down at all of program launch / file access, so at last I have MB running as my primary security program.

    • Antivirus (2) — whitelisting / blocking of new programs, with multi-‘antivirus’ scanning as well — I WAS using SecureAPlus for a few years, but in early 2020 I switched over to Cyber Lock (previously known as VoodooShield), which has similar functionality but its implementation and interface seems to me to be more streamlined, and it appears to be still lighter on the system. They're both excellent AV programs, though.

      Generally it's asking for trouble to have two antivirus programs running concurrently. However, MB and CL operate in different ways, so that they won't come into conflict and indeed the protection is enormously increased by having CL's quite different means of protection as well as all that MB offers.

      Both of SecureAPlus and Cyber Lock are widely claimed by opinionated and therefore fundamentally ignorant computer buffs NOT to be AV programs at all but just ‘anti-exe’ or whitelisting programs. But if you carefully read the developers' blurb for the respective programs you'd find that they both are effectively AV programs of a very high order, which use a multi-prong approach, even though they don't directly use signature databases and don't clean up threats (apart from quarantining items that have triggered alerts, if one chooses that option).

      Their respective whitelisting systems are implemented in a way that operates effectively as an anti-exploit system, and they both additionally work as proxy meta-AV programs, in that all programs / scripts / files not recognised as safe are checked online against multiple AV engines — so you actually have the power of all those different AV engines in addition to the power of the whitelisting system. Also, CL and SAP both have their own respective AI machine-learning decision-making modules.

      I do think, though, that novices and ‘non-techies’ might be better off using one of the better-known AV programs that are less inclined to give user prompts to allow or block cryptically-named ‘child’ scripts, which tend to be picked up by these whitelisting AVs.

      Having said that, though, I find that the alert-prompts of CL do automatically check the respective unrecognised files at VirusTotal and against its own cloud whitelist and immediately show the results on the prompt dialog, so probably it's only the more extreme non-techies who need to go for something like Kaspersky instead, where almost everything happens under the bonnet.

      Another thing that needs to be borne in mind about both Cyber Lock and SecureAPlus is that they don't actually remove harmful programs / files — they just prevent them from running. So, if you do find you've got something harmful on your computer you need to use a good AV scanner / removal tool, such as Malwarebytes or the Kaspersky free virus removal tool.

    • Anti-exploit and host intrusion prevention system (HIPS) — That's covered by Malwarebytes Premium and, in a different way, by Cyber Lock (see further above).

  • Firewall — As I've long ago moved away from using a full internet security suite I'm no longer using a third-party firewall, and have the much maligned though actually potentially very effective Windows firewall operating.

    I'm using Windows Firewall Control as my primary ‘front end’ for it. This enables me easily and quickly to see what's blocked and what's allowed, and I can quickly block anything that I consider suspect or worse, or just as easily and quickly unblock anything that I do want to let through, and I can easily create or edit rules.

    Additional Internet security — GlassWire. This uses graph and other displays to inform you really precisely and comprehensively about all Internet activity on your computer. It includes discreet, unobtrusive alerts when any process connects to the Net for the first time (i.e., in GlassWire's ‘history’), and you can then view the events in GlassWire's Alerts tab, which displays details of the process and the remote hosts (both resolved host address and numerical IP), so you're properly informed as to what's going on, and can check up on anything that looks as though it might be suspicious. You can virus-check any listed process from within GlassWire.

    On some systems, such as mine, you can use GlassWire as a simple but effective firewall, blocking particular processes. However, this latter function depends on Windows Firewall being enabled, and so isn't available if you're running a third-party firewall program. It's also very poorly implemented in various ways, so I continue to use Windows Firewall Control as my primary Windows Firewall front-end.

    GlassWire is remarkably un-technical in what it displays, keeping everything clear and easy to understand — a really great program, even though there are still quite a number of interface and functional details that need improving.

  • Additional monitoring of system changes:

    • Anvir Task Manager Pro — An amazingly fully featured manager / monitor of startup programs, services and processes, with detailed displays that enable you to do all sorts of troubleshooting and indeed sniffing out suspicious processes or activities and, hopefully, forestalling any need for extensive troubleshooting. I use this to prompt me for approval or otherwise when it detects new startup programs.

      However, some of its functions don't work very well, and really I'd like to replace it with a more ‘solid’ program — except that I cannot find any program anywhere that gives such extremely informative tray icons as Anvir Task Manager, so I have no plans to stop using it at least for the time being.

          As from 2017, the Pro version, which I use, is free for non-commercial use. However, nowadays I'm aware that the Anvir team are actually in Russia, and, as already noted, I nowadays have a policy of moving away from using major software — especially system software — from Russia, China or Ukraine because of the increasing risk of State-supported (or plain criminal) abuse of such software to get it working as an instrument of various types of cyber-attack.

      So, I'm on the lookout for an alternative, though my searches so far have shown no other program to come close to this one for the multitude of system and security features. What I expect to do at least for the time being is to continue using the program but at some point before long I may block it from Internet access.

  • Additional programs for on-demand malware scanning:

    • AdwCleaner. A particularly powerful scanner, though more limited in its scope and configurability than the other programs listed in this section. I use it for occasional on-demand scans.

  • email protection:

    • MailWasher Pro (the paid-for version, for which I have a lifetime licence). This isn't only an extremely effective anti-spam tool, but is a great first line of email security, enabling me to investigate and discard as necessary any or all emails in my mailboxes on the mail server, so that anything at all dubious never gets downloaded to my Thunderbird inbox.

      Theoretically the very occasional rogue email could slip through the net, if it happens to arrive on the server during the short period between my checking the mail in MailWasher and my downloading new mail in my email program, so vigilance is still required.

      Also, these days many extremely harmful emails don't have virus-laden attachments, but instead present one with harmful links, and often subject line and body text to encourage one to click on them. At least those are easily recognised in MailWasher, where I mark them for deletion so that only safe messages reach my main mail program.

      Another great feature of MWP is that for anything identified or marked as spam, there's an optional column in the message list for flagging the respective messages for being automatically forwarded to spam reporting services, as user-specified in Settings. All my spam (virtually all of it malicious these days) goes to report@phishing.gov.uk.

    • …And in any case email viruses more or less always haven't even been reaching MailWasher, because my email is virus-checked by my hosting company, Kualo. However, that doesn't stop emails containing harmful links from reaching MailWasher, so the latter level of protection is certainly necessary.

  • Web / Browser protection:

    • Cyber Lock (previously known as VoodooShield) — Although CL doesn't have any obvious dedicated web protection module, it treats all browsers as ‘vulnerable’ programs and thus treats anything that attempts to launch from a browser as untrusted — and indeed any unrecognised program that launches while a browser (or indeed email program) is running.
      

      That means that, assuming you have CL set to Smart or Always On mode, any program not recognised as safe would be stopped in its tracks and allowed to run only if you give it permission to do so — and CL gives excellent alert dialogues that greatly help you decide what to do. That would stop any drive-by program executions.

      Even if something nasty downloads, it would still have to run to cause any trouble, and in that event CL would prompt you to decide whether to let it run, and again help you to make the best choice.

    • KeyScrambler Personal — Because I'm no longer using HitmanPro.Alert, which included a keystroke encryption feature, I chose this neat little free utility, which encrypts keystrokes whenever you enter any text into address bars, search boxes, dialogs, and form fields in most browsers, including Firefox.

    • uBlock Origin — appears to beat Adblock Latitude, which was by far the most effective and intuitive ad blocker that I'd previously come across.

    • Flash Block (Plus) — a Firefox add-on, which enables you to have control over what, if any, Flash elements play on a page.

    • NoScript — a Firefox and Chrome add-on. An extremely effective — I'd say, essential — protection from possible malicious scripts in web pages. All web page scripts are blocked until you actually allow them.

    • Was additionally using Malwarebytes Browser Guard. A free extension for Firefox and Chrome. I found its frequency of false positives a bit of a nuisance at times, but although it does provide protection from a wide range of online threats, I came to the conclusion that at least in the vast majority of cases it was simply duplicating the functionality of uBlock Origin and maybe NoScript. I therefore decided to do without it, and no doubt have the browser run slightly faster as a result.

    • FlagFox — Useful to show the country base of the current site, and is an excellent configurable toolbox of services and facilities for checking up on that site.

    • WOT (‘Web of Trust’) — Reluctantly I've returned to use of this add-on, following some degree of cleaning up of WOT's act, and some degree of improvement in their site rating system — though it's still fundamentally flawed in being fully open to opinionated or/and malicious individuals to rate sites according to their own personal agendas rather than actually according to a site's safety / integrity.
      

      Thus my own Self-Actualization & Clear-Mindedness site, giving a rationally-based approach to healing and self-actualization, and which is regularly resulting in dramatically improved lives and indeed many actually saved lives, has only a ‘fair’ rating for supposed trustworthiness.

      On the other hand a huge number of spirituality and New-Age related sites, with fully harmful contents based on belief and ‘received wisdoms’ and with nothing rational in their basis, have glowingly high trustworthy ratings, because belief rather than common sense is still being allowed to run the show.

    • Roboform Everywhere — Not only very handy for automatic filling-in of forms, this program stores usernames and passwords securely, together with any other private / sensitive personal data (in ‘Safenotes’) and has a facility for creating really secure passwords to one's own specifications. This is the paid-for version that syncs between devices.
      

      I have it installed on my desktop PC and on my new (2021) smartphone, and it syncs data between the two, while the data is stored in ‘the cloud’. I'd much prefer the storage to be on my computer, but at least it saves regular backups locally rather than online.

  • Internet activity monitoring / control:

    • Net Meter from Hoo Technologies, which I still regard as being unbeatable for the quality of its display — but it shows only overall activity, and doesn't identify the processes responsible. I caution that this program's executable file or/and its installation program may cause you false positive alerts from certain antivirus programs.

      
      

      Unfortunately there's been at least one bit of nasty malware going around with the name of Net Meter, but I can assure you that the Net Meter from Hoo Technologies is excellent and perfectly benign and clean. My only, increasing, reservation about it has been that its development seems to have stopped many years ago.

      I keep Net Meter's display normally visible in a corner of my screen, and it enables me to see when any unexpected Internet activity (green for outgoing, red for incoming and yellow for both) is occurring. When appropriate I can then get more detailed information about what is or has been going on and which process is/was responsible for the particular activity, in GlassWire.

      A mini-graph feature has more recently been added to the latter program, which, ideally, should render Net Meter redundant. However, in practice it's much less clear, precise and configurable than Net Meter, and so I continue to use the latter and not the GlassWire mini-graph.

    • GlassWire, described further above, its display and features accessible from a notification area (system tray) icon. It gives necessary information that Net Meter doesn't provide, such as what process is responsible for any particular activity shown on its graph, and details of the remote address involved in any particular activity. It's thus a great security aid.

• email software:

  • MailWasher Pro, as noted above.

  • Thunderbird. My regular email ‘client’ program. Massively configurable and versatile. As with Firefox, I've considerably enhanced its usability through use of a fair number of add-ons.

    I trialled Betterbird, an allegedly less buggy and generally better functioning ‘fork’ of Thunderbird, but reverted to TB, for I didn't like depending on the quirks, whims and life issues of one particular individual — particularly as the developer appears to be rather abrasive in manner, and rather opinionated about what would be best for the user. People like that can be almost manic in devotion on their project, and then suddenly flip and leave in the lurch anyone who'd been depending on the particular project.

• Ongoing system maintenance / optimization:
  Kerish Doctor, though in September 2017 I noticed that actually this truly excellent suite — by far the best and most comprehensive PC maintenance / optimization suite I'd ever had the good fortune to use — is sourced from Russia.

  Ouch! This really is a major system software and not at all the sort of thing that I nowadays would want to have active connection with a potentially threatening country with regard to cyber-attacks and other cyber-crime. So, as no other comparable suite comes close to it, I tried using combinations of various smaller programs to carry out between them the majority of Kerish Doctor's functions, albeit without the smoothly-running automation of Kerish Doctor.

  — But then again I found the various programs that I did use to be deficient and awkward to use, and more liable to delete things they weren't supposed to, so that I reluctantly came back to KD again for the time being.    

• Some really handy system utilities:

  • For managing CPU priority of running programs — Was Process Lasso (previously used Chameleon Task Manager). I tried Chameleon TM as a conceivable replacement for Anvir Task Manager. In fact it falls far short of ATM generally, BUT I decided to keep it because two really valuable aspects of its functioning are not supplied by ATM, at least really usefully.

    They are: (1) optional notification of new processes that have just launched (a great security check), and (2) a much more elaborate and effective system than ATM provides for setting (both manually and/or automatically) the priorities of running processes, so that background CPU-intensive processes need never again significantly slow down your foreground process and thus your work.

    I found that over time Chameleon gave me far too many ‘new program’ alerts and so I stopped using that functionality (which is redundant anyway as from Feb 2020 because Cyber Lock (originally VoodooShield) attends to that), and I finally chose to use the more dedicated process management utility Process Lasso instead.

         However, soon after I got my Quiet PC NanoQube Plus Fanless mini computer in September 2019, in view of the greater capacity and headroom of its processor, even when not in Turbo mode, I thought that Process Lasso might be redundant, and I experimentally removed it from my startup program list, particularly as I was sometimes suspecting that the intricate way that it dynamically manages all processes' CPU usage could actually be causing at least as many issues as it resolves.

    So, I found through an intensive Web search a small, lightweight program called Process Tamer and tried using that instead. It allows you to set a default CPU priority for specified individual processes (I've done that just for a small number of observed CPU hogs), without doing a lot of juggling to ‘balance’ the various running processes' CPU demands.

    That much simpler approach was really all I needed, and it seems to be serving me pretty well.

  • Hard Disk Sentinel — This must be about the best disk monitoring program available. It runs with icons in the system tray for each of the computer's drives, whether hard disk or SSD, showing each disk's temperature and also enabling one to see quickly all the various parameters of drive performance and health, and alerts when a drive is running into problems (including getting hotter than it should be). So, you get early warning so you can take any necessary action such as run an emergency backup and get a replacement. Although a commercial program, its price is for a lifetime licence, so I considered it very much worth paying for.

  • Registrar Registry Manager, from Resplendence Software. Much faster and fully featured than Regedit. The free Home Edition has served me well over a fair number of years, though in 2019 I eventually paid for the Pro edition in order particularly to have search / replace facility, including using regex searches. This facility has enabled me to remove apparently completely all the junk that each successive WavePad installation intrudes into the Registry.

  • AutoHotKey, a free, open-source utility for assigning hotkeys and macros. Not easy to find out how to achieve many of its tricks, but with some care and patience many very handy hotkey functions and command macros can be set up. For example, for some years I've been using an AutoHotKey script that loads BlueGriffon, my web page editor and sets a very annoying and inconvenient default in the Styles panel to what I want, because BG fails to store that setting.

    And, much more recently, I've added to that script a small routine to beep every few minutes while I'm focused in a page in BlueGriffon, for the latter has no native autosave function and does crash once in a while, thus having previously caused me a significant amount of wasted time and work on occasions. Using a routine within the script to send a Ctl-S to BG to make it save the open page did work at times but often ‘fluffed’ and caused problems, which is why I just rely on a beep reminder instead.

  • System Scheduler Professional, from Splinterware. Gives many more options than the Windows Task Scheduler, and I use it to give me reminders for such things as backing up, defragmenting and other maintenance tasks, as well as actually running certain programs.

  • Hot Alarm Clock, from Comfort Software. Although with some annoying small bugs and design flaws, this gives me a fair amount of flexibility in use of personal alarms on the computer, together with a configurable screen time / date display.

  • Startup Delayer Premium. Because of various issues that arose from using Anvir Task Manager or/and WinPatrol to delay (as necessary) the launching of the ‘auto-start’ programs, i.e., those that start up automatically with Windows, I finally chose this dedicated program to take over that task, and I'm glad I did. There is also a free version, which lacks a few functions.

  • Core Temp. This gives a ‘live’ read-out of the CPU core temperature(s) and other useful real-time data about one's CPU performance. I have it configured to show the highest of the six core temperatures in its notification area (system tray) icon, as that's the basic information that's really useful in everyday operation.

  • Wallpaper Cycler from Nuonsoft. It has the functionality that I need, plus a lot more, though I found it a bit difficult and unintuitive to configure properly. I use it to cycle through a very large collection of wallpaper images, with an automatic change at every startup of the program.

  • Unlocker. A small utility whose installation puts an entry into the context (right-click) menu for files or folders in Explorer and other file managers, enabling you to carry out basic file / folder actions when the selected file or folder is locked or Windows in its superior wisdom tells you (as owner of your PC and working as administrator) that you don't have permission to carry out the particular action.

    So, with Unlocker at last you don't have to reboot into Safe Mode to move, delete or rename that file or folder, and can do it right on the spot (and sod Windows!) or at least have an action performed automatically upon the next reboot.

    Kerish Doctor has an ‘unlocker’ function, but I have that disabled because I found it slow and inefficient to use.

  •  True Launchbar, from Tordex.

    

    I'd already got the stand-alone version of this set up in Windows Vista to take away the clutter on my Windows desktop and even keep the Quick Launch bar clear so that the taskbar was as uncluttered as possible. I configured TLB to give me access to the vast majority of my programs, through an intuitive arrangement of menus and submenus, and found that for me the most convenient and intuitive place for the bar to be was NOT in the standard taskbar position but on the left-hand side of the screen, set to auto-hide so that the desktop (with nice background) was beautifully clear of anything except what I was working with.
    

    Subsequently the autohiding became vexatious for me because of the launchbar and its menus popping up and interfering whenever I moved my mouse pointer about close to the left edge of the screen during the course of my working in various applications. What I did then is what you see in the picture. I resumed use of the Windows Quick Launch bar version of True Launchbar, but with the top-level launchbar menu being reduced to just one button next to the Start button (i.e., like a second Start button), so that its main menu (actually top level submenu) popped up every time I moved my mouse pointer over it.

  • StartKiller, from Tordex, the True Launchbar people. A very small free utility that reduces taskbar clutter by eliminating the Windows Start button. This is particularly handy if for most purposes you are using True Launchbar or an equivalent program as your de facto Start button, as I am nowadays. You can still access the Windows Start Menu by pressing the Windows key (or Shift-Windows if you're using Open Shell — see next item), so absolutely no Windows functionality is lost; you simply have just that bit more space on your taskbar.

  • Open Shell, developed from Classic Start and Classic Shell, following Classic Start Menu's original developer stopping developing it and making it open source for others to work on. This includes a significant enhanced and highly customizable replacement of the Windows Start menu. I'm using just the Start Menu component of this mini-suite, and even in Windows 10 it still won greatly over the horrible and confusing Windows Start Menu.

    In Windows 11 the native Start Menu is improved and simplified, but for me the Classic Shell one is still better. I can read lists much more easily and quickly than the vast arrays of ‘tiles’ that the native Windows start menu gives! It also enables me to set the taskbar colour independently of window title bar colour.

    At the moment, however, the hacks that are necessary for Classic Shell to operate properly cause the Windows Start Menu not to display at all. However, as far as I could tell, that didn't matter because the Win11 Start Menu simply doesn't display anything important that isn't or can't be displayed in the Open Shell Start Menu.

  • Hot Copy Paste, previously called Comfort Clipboard Pro, from Comfort Software. The best clipboard history manager that I could find (at least, at a reasonable price), out of quite a number that I tried (there are probably better ones available nowadays). This program saves to disk all Windows clipboard ‘clips’ and enables you to retrieve any of them, with search and filter facilities for speedy finding of what you're after. You can set the maximum number of clips to be stored on the hard disk before the oldest start getting automatically deleted.

    There's also a Favorites feature, so you can have a small collection of regularly used items that you may want to keep pasting into files that you're working on. There's a very cheap ‘Lite’ version, but I considered the very modest extra cost of the Pro version well worth it — all the more so because this entitles you to all future major upgrades as well as any intermediate program updates.

  • PopChar, an extremely useful replacement for the Windows Character Map. I've found it to make searching for particular symbol or dingbat characters MUCH easier than hitherto, and indeed it enabled me to quickly discover many symbols, dingbats and other special characters that are hidden away in Unicode fonts. Although a little pricey for what one might consider to be a distinctly peripheral utility, for me it has definitely been worth paying out for — though I'm not bothering to upgrade to new major versions, so avoiding further expenditure on it.

  • Bulk Crap Uninstaller — for my purposes a great improvement upon my previous uninstaller utilities Revo Uninstaller and then Iobit Uninstaller, which I'd been using previously. BC Uninstaller's interface may not look as slick as that of the latter two, but for me it's proved unprecedentedly comprehensive in programs listing, which latter includes portable and ‘orphaned’ programs (ones that haven't been installed or are otherwise without registry entries) — and it's particularly powerful and speedy in its removal of programs and finding left-over files and registry entries.

  • Desktop Lighter — For quickly adjusting the monitor brightness, and maintaining any level one sets as the default for future sessions. I installed this after a few years' use of f.lux to render the overall colour temperature of the display a little redder (‘warmer’). Early in 2020 I came to the conclusion that the current fashion for using lower colour temperature computer screen colour and domestic lighting, especially in the evening in order to make it easier to sleep at night wasn't all that soundly based. My suspicion was that what was really needed wasn't a lower amount of blue wavelengths in the lighting but simply a rather lower level of illumination.
    

    Because f.lux had no facility for me to use it for automatic adjustment of brightness rather than colour temperature, I replaced it with Desktop Lighter. This tiny program doesn't automatically adjust screen brightness, but at least it enables me to do a very quick manual adjustment. Doing the same using the monitor's own control buttons is a horribly tedious and fiddly process, so this little utility is a real boon.

    And because standard average daylight colour (6500K colour temperature) appears subjectively brighter than the same illumination level from a ‘warmer’-coloured light, it proved workable to use a distinctly lower level of screen brightness and room lighting of that colour without any issues.

Music

Some 20th Century composers and specific works that are in my view more important  than many that are much more widely recognised and performed…