More various drafts again

Well it’s been a long while (pretty much over a decade) since the last similar post, so I guess I can allow myself to post this and empty my todo list from these posts I’ll never find time to properly wrap up.

Most of the links I put down there are not clickable, that’s on purpose because, as I don’t have time to compose the post properly, I don’t have time to decide what’s really relevant and what should rather be dropped. And I don’t want to end up with a ton of not-so-relevant links, thanks stupid search engines (looking at you big G) and the ridiculous SEO constraints they put on us.

—
Why iframes are kind of dead now (not sure why I had this pending, unlike other crap Firefox did this one seems to mostly make sense): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/xframe-neterror-page

—
Firefox 98 totally fucked up how downloads are saved by default: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/manage-downloads-preferences-using-downloads-menu
That one is annoying, as far as I remember now every time I set up Fx I have to manually that that for each file type I want Fx to ask where to save it, while before you had a global toggle for it. Not 100% sure they haven’t improved it since then, but still it shows they do employ moronic designers.

—

How to prevent Windows from turning off idle hard drives

This one deserves a bit of context.
On my previous computer, I was able to configure when to turn off idle hard drives right from the Windows power management settings (I won’t go into details here, it’s easy to find by yourself in the settings, and if not you can find plenty of written or video guides elsewhere, including in the 2 links I post below as they cover both methods). But on my newest one, running Windows 10 just like the other, the power management settings have somehow much much fewer options and in particular nothing about how long to wait before turning off an idle hard drive. Worse, the default settings felt incredibly short, and indeed it turned out they were like 10 to 30 seconds (I don’t remember the exact value, but that’s the order of magnitude and it was definitely NOT the 20 minutes default that I read about in one of the linked articles).
So needless to say it was hard on my external HD, and also hard on me because any time I waited a tiny bit between 2 file accesses on it, I had to waste precious seconds waiting for the HD to start spinning again.

So I had to look how to directly configure that, via console commands. I don’t remember exactly how I found the proper commands, as the links I saved don’t have them all. Maybe I just figured them myself by reading the help (with command powercfg /?).
First the links:
– https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/21454-turn-off-hard-disk-after-idle-windows-10-a.html
– https://www.top-password.com/blog/prevent-windows-from-turning-off-hard-drive-after-idle/ ⇐ this one is shown in a code tag because WordPress somehow tried to include a miniature of that post in my post… FFS when will they stop forcing stupid shit on us by default?

Then the commands:
powercfg /LIST ⇒ list power schemes
powercfg /Q 381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e ⇒ show details of the current power scheme. It can be different for you, just copy the appropriate ID from the list. You may want to do that for several power schemes if you do you several power schemes. I just use the one.
That list is quite big, but should hopefully not exceed the console history size (at least in ConEmu that was fine for me)
powercfg /Q SCHEME_CURRENT ⇒ same as above but using the alias. Should work, but in case it does not, you know how to get the GUID
powercfg /Q SCHEME_BALANCED SUB_DISK DISKIDLE ⇒ to just get the value that interests us, with aliases and supposing the active plan is balanced (you can just use SCHEME_CURRENT, I used balanced here just for variety)
powercfg /Q 381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e 0012ee47-9041-4b5d-9b77-535fba8b1442 6738e2c4-e8a5-4a42-b16a-e040e769756e ⇒ same with GUID (you can mix GUIG and aliases, too)
powercfg /SETDCVALUEINDEX SCHEME_BALANCED SUB_DISK DISKIDLE 0x8ca0 ⇒ sets the idle off timer to 10h (36000 seconds).
I noted that I used hexadecimal because, at the time I first tried, decimal values didn’t think to work, but as I’m writing this post while messing with the settings again, I realize that decimal values now work… Also worth noting, it seems that my external HD now never turns off, I’m not sure why as I realize that it should turn off after “only” 10h with those settings (before looking into this today, I believed I had set this to something much higher, given that I don’t care much about this drive staying on all the time when it’s plugged). Maybe the computer touches it more than once every 10h and thus it’s never idle that long. Or maybe I screwed up another setting.
powercfg /SETACVALUEINDEX SCHEME_BALANCED SUB_DISK DISKIDLE 36000 ⇒ sets the idle off timer to 10h, for when the computer is connected to external power (yup that’s a laptop, and the previous setting with for battery power)

Last but not least, reboot. The settings won’t apply until then (even though they show as modified if you run powercfg /Q SCHEME_CURRENT).

That’s all for now, I hope this helped