McGarrah Technical Blog

Posts tagged with "windows"

Windows Sandbox for Safe Testing

I’ve been doing more experimental stuff on my Windows 11 laptops lately - testing sketchy PowerShell scripts, trying out random software, and generally doing things that could completely wreck my system. While I have disk images for recovery, that’s a nuclear option that would cost me a day or two of rebuilding.

Turns out Windows has had a built-in solution for this exact problem: Windows Sandbox. It’s basically a lightweight, disposable VM that resets itself every time you close it. Perfect for testing things without the paranoia.

Start the Windows screensaver with a Shortcut

After my Windows 11 upgrade, I have a need for a quick way to start my screensaver but not lock my computer. So the Windows-L (lock) is not a desired options for this use-case. I want to quickly get back to my screen without logging back in.

I remember an old Windows NT tool and built-in MacOS feature called “Hot Corners” that let me do this by shoving my cursor to a corner of the screen. But I don’t want to load another tool for this. I’m using Power Toys “Mouse without Border” to link up a couple machines with virtual KVMs so the hot corners isn’t an option because of that.

So how do I solve this?

Sharing file systems between WSLv2 instances

I have a significant investment in my WSLv2 Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS installation. It has my Nvidia GPU setup nicely integrated and several machine learning demos and tests I’ve built and use for keeping current on machine learning. With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS released, I now want to play around in the newer version but don’t want to move or worse copy my entire set of models and repositories across. I have well over 500Gb of content and absolutely don’t want two copies of those floating around. I’m looking for a solution to this and figure others have encountered it.

Explorer WSL Filesystems