I don't recall the context of this Google, but somehow I stumbled upon a 110 year old film producer with an interesting name!

He's still alive! May he live a long time yet.

Here's to you, Gene Wang.

After Göteborg there was this! A two day trip to Halmstad.

I have no idea what Halmstad is in English - if it's called anything other than it's actual name (as Gothenburg is), so I'll just roll with that this time! Halmstad, AKA the City of Hay.

Though it's really more a town than a city.

Ever been there yourself? Ever planning to go? If so here's a bundle of restaurants we considered on the train trip there.

We ended up going to the one of those with the shortest anchor text above, and this one, and they were great!

The place? Some pictures...

Read on...

Want to see some live fish, caught by some random underwater webcams around Sweden?

Check this out.

You'd be lucky to catch one on camera though, considering only around a hundred fishes pass their cameras every day - read that as you will in regards to the danger state of our local fish population, but if you perch yourself and wait a while, then once in a blue moon you just might see something cool, like say a school like this.

Pretty cool school.

Another one. :) One copy free if you want it! This game.

I had some troubles with my Internet the other day.

I ran a podcast on YT, and that podcast kept playing, but nothing else would load. And the YT connection was slow. Occasionally other sites would work again, momentarily, but just as I was about to send an email, or save something somewhere, the connection gave up on me again...

What was the issue? DNS, yes. It seems to always be DNS.

I thought I'd try using Google's public DNS resolver, as I have in the past, but I used the wrong IP.

Theirs is 8.8.8.8. For some reason I remembered it as 666.666.666.666.

I tried 600.600.600.600 too. Didn't work. Tried 1.1.1.1 and it did! But was that really theirs? Had to check, and so I found this.

In the words of Cloudflare: 1.1.1.1 is a public DNS resolver operated by Cloudflare that offers a fast and private way to browse the Internet. Unlike most DNS resolvers, 1.1.1.1 does not sell user data to advertisers. In addition, 1.1.1.1 has been measured to be the fastest DNS resolver available.

It does not mine user data. Logs are kept for 24 hours for debugging purposes only. It's integrated into Cloudflare’s network - which spans 330 global cities, and if you're on a cellphone they even have an app for it with over a million positive reviews.

How had I not heard of this service before either?!

I've been a big fan of Cloudflare for a while now, not least since I learned that you can manage domains there at no extra cost at all, only the price they pay the domain registry. And they give you fair warning on registry price increases well in advance, so you can renew said domains for any number of years (or is it up to 10 years? Maybe there was a limit after all?) before said price increase comes into play.

They offer free DNS services with every domain you keep, not to mention free CDN services for personal sites, that by the way are used to cache and speed up some - if not most - of the biggest sites on the Internet. And unless you want priority services, and DDoS protection, or any other numbers of perks they offer, they pretty much give you all the tools you need to drastically optimize, speed-up and manage your site save for actual hosting at no cost at all.

So in my book they're pretty much one of the greatest companies out there. Making the Internet a better place one site at a time, or service and server innovation on the roadmap...

I wouldn't be surprised if they start offering a free plan for hosting too, though maybe that'd give them a problematic monopoly on website infrastructure. Maybe that wouldn't be so wise.

But this? This DNS resolver worked perfectly, everything started loading again right away, and it is fast. Faster than my ISP default on a good day.

Turns out there may actually be other benefits to using a resolver outside of the default too. It's not a security issue - unless you're with an unreliable resolver host, of course - but rather a benefit! It's kind of like a proxy really. It hides your connection. But that's a post for another day...

For now I'm surfin'! Blazing speeds. Up up and away.

I've been trying to get rid of that pesky box for so long now!!!

Gave my problem a Google again today, and this time I actually found a Reddit post with a viable answer! Their solution's surprisingly simple:

1. Download and install Windhawk.
2. Open it, and search for 'Windows 11 Notification Center Styler'.
3. Install the mod, click 'Settings', and scroll down to 'Control styles'.
4. Add this to 'Target': Windows.UI.Xaml.Controls.Grid#NotificationCenterGrid
5. Add this to 'Styles': Visibility=Collapsed

That's it! It's gone, and you don't even have to reboot your computer.

It should go from this:

To this, the next time you click it:

*immense sense of relief and gratitude*

Seems you can do pretty much all things with Windhawk that you can do with Start11 too, using whatever combination of modules you need. Which also explains why nobody's updating Classic Shell any longer. It's just no longer needed. This seems both less buggier and better, and also free, with mods that hopefully do everything the former did and more!

There is however potential for malicious mods to make their way into the database, so be cautious with what you use. Windhawk is basically just the framework to run your scripts, and the database in large part a community-driven endeavor.

Much like userscripts in a browser.

I'm just surprised I'd never heard of this before. I have a lifetime license on Start11 already, since I didn't know this was an alternative. Though that probably does allow you to do some things that this one does not, this really is comprehensive!

So far, this box removal thing is the only mod I really need.

Further Windhawk mod database exploration TBC.