Thursday, February 11, 2021

MS Windows 10 Border Width

Microsoft made super-skinny border widths on Windows 10. While there has been a couple years for this design mistake to be corrected, it appears this will not be changing in the pending release of Window 11.
It is well past a reasonable amount of time for Microsoft to fix the super-skinny window borders.

The skinny window borders make it challenging to place and align windows. It also makes it challenging for older or disabled persons to grab the side of the window.

The straight-forward method to have fat window borders is to turn on the high visibility theme. This will produce drastic visual changes, make websites look different than what you may expect, and remove backgrounds such as desktop color or picture. You may want to try this change and then decide if fat window borders are worth the other visual changes in the theme.


Standard MS Windows 10 borders look like this.












 

 

Press the Start button and type: themes

Choose the app for "Themes and related settings".

In the Settings window, scroll down and click on "High contrast settings".














 

 

Turn on the high contrast slider, then choose theme "High Contrast White" in the drop down list box.














 

 

While visually jarring at first, the High Contrast White theme does increase the window border width.



Thursday, July 16, 2020

Tweak Windows 10 Privacy Settings With Spydish

Grab a copy of Spydish and tweak your Microsoft Windows 10 privacy settings. Take control of your PC.



Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Linking Microsoft Access and DBeaver To Postgres

If your desktop is Microsoft Windows, you may have Microsoft Access already installed. With an ODBC driver, you can link it to Postrgresql running on Linux.

To download the latest ODBC driver, go to https://www.postgresql.org/ftp/odbc/versions/ and choose "msi". Choose the most recent version for your Windows machine. If you don't know if your desktop is AMD or Intel, press the Windows Start button and type Settings. Click on Settings. In the windows that opens, click on Settings --> About. Look at the "Processor" line.

Download the zip file from https://www.postgresql.org/ftp/odbc/versions/msi to your PC.
Unzip or "Extract all" on the file. In this example, the file name is psqlodbc_12_02_0000-x86.

In the new folder, run the psqlodbc file. If Windows intercepts the install, press "More info" and click the button to "Run anyway".
























The psqlODBC Setup Wizard should run.




















Press the Microsoft Windows Start button and type: ODBC
Choose program "ODBC Data Sources".



















Choose Add, then chose Postgresql and press button Finish. Set it up, press button Test, and save it.
















In Microsoft Access, create a new blank database.


After creating the database, go to External Data and press New Data Source, From Other Sources, ODBC Database.



Link to the data source.



















In the Machine Data Source tab, pick the connection that had just been set up.























Select the tables and press OK.

The table names will be on the left of Microsoft Access. Double-click to open the table data.



Another database management tool is  DBeaver. An open source version is available here.
Ubuntu users may install the snap (sudo snap install dbeaver-ce). Microsoft Windows users may install from the Windows Store.