I am here to show you how to install whatever UCI compatible external engine you want and run it directly into the lichess.org web site. The feature is still in alpha state (that means they guarantee nothing and have a lot more work on it), but it works pretty well.

Long story short

Here are the steps you have to follow:

• Go to fitztrev's lichess-tauri (Lichess Local Engine) GitHub project, to Releases
• Download the newest version of the app (at the moment of writing version 0.0.5) for your operating system
• Run the installer and run the application
• Log in to Lichess
• DO NOT click on the Install Stockfish 16 button
• Download the version of Stockfish (or any other UCI-compatible engine) that works best on your machine
• Only then click on the Or add your own engine → button
• Choose a descriptive title for the engine
• Click on the Select button in the Binary section
• Select the binary file for your preferred engine
• Now you can go to lichess.org and select whatever engine you configured in the Analysis/Study hamburger menu on the right side (bottom)

Short story long

Here are the steps you have to follow, with pretty pictures and extra information. Also a video at the end.

Go to the Releases of the Lichess Local Engine GitHub project

Go to this link: Releases.

Click on the title of the latest version (which should be on top).

Download the newest version of the app (at the moment of writing version 0.0.5) for your operating system

For this example, if you are on Windows, you should select the Lichess.Local.Engine_0.0.5_x64-setup.exe. 

Run the installer and run the application

Next, next, next:

Login to lichess

In order for this to work, the application needs access to the Lichess API, which functions with OAuth2 to authorize you. All you have to do is click on Log in with Lichess and follow the instructions.

DO NOT click on the Install Stockfish 16 button

Now you should be in the Add a chess engine section. While you can just click on Install Stockfish 16 and not care about things, choosing the engine that works best for your machine will save you a lot of time and resources. Besides, if you are reading this and installing Lichess External Engine, then you probably already have some chess GUI and some engines that you've installed before.

That is why I recommend you just add those or download them and then add them.

Download the version of Stockfish (or any other UCI-compatible engine) that works best on your machine

For example, the Stockfish engine download site shows this:

For me, the best verison is the AVX2 version while the one embedded with Lichess External Engine is probably the most compatible one. Note that there are specific binaries for particular CPU architectures. Just choose the best one for you.

Click on the Or add your own engine → button and set up your engine

The only important part for now is the title, so choose one that is telling you exactly what you've got. For example Stockfish 16 AVX2, because as new engine versions come up, you will perhaps have more versions of the same brand. The architecture is also relevant, as you may forget in a year or so which one was best for your machine.

Now click on Select and choose the binary file for your preferred engine.

Go to Lichess

You can use this external engine in the Analysis page or in a Study, where the same analysis control is being used, but I recommend you use it in Study because whenever you change the analysis engine the page refreshes, which in Analysis is deleting the moves you've made so far. BTW, shameless plug: if you had installed the LiChess Tools browser extension, then the PGN of the moves remains stored in the textarea under the board in the Analysis page and you can just reload it, no harm done.

The choice for engine is in the options menu of the Analysis, which can be opened with the hamburger menu button on the bottom of the move list.

  

So under the ENGINE MANAGER section you can select which engine you prefer.

Possible issues

You are now ready to do analysis with the new engines. However, since it is in alpha, there are some issues that have not been resolved and you might find them annoying.

1. the engine doesn't know when to stop for some engines
   • this works fine with Stockfish, but not with Rybka 4.1, for example. 
   • let say you open an analysis page, import a game, start analysing, then stop. You would expect the engine to stop, too, but it doesn't. Closing the window doesn't help, because it's the Lichess External Engine application that runs it and it doesn't yet have a Cancel Analysis button.
   • the same applies to selecting other moves in the Lichess move list. The engine keeps analysing the previous move and it fails to connect to refresh the current move.
   • the solution is to close and restart Lichess External Engine, then enable analysis.
2. the page gets refreshed whenever you change the engine
   • I am sure they are going to change this in the future, but at the moment this means it's better to use Studies, as they persist the moves in the list. Or LiChess Tools, of course.
3. there are some people complaining that only the main moves (moves in the mainline) are getting analysed, otherwise the engine freezes
   • this was not my experience. Yet, in some cases, when the position had a cloud cache, I had to press the + sign (that runs the local analysis anyway) twice. It may be my setup, since I am also running LiChess Tools, but it wasn't that annoying. Just press multiple times if you see it doesn't work.
4. when going deeper on cloud evaluations, there is no visible feedback
   • this affects me directly, because the engine is running, the page shows nothing and LiChess Tools is trying to go deeper all the time. But the engine is working in the background, doing who knows what.
5. the server is sometimes unavailable
   • 503 errors from the server. I am sure they are working on features and it will happen a lot. However the client code doesn't handle that very gracefully.

Conclusion

I am sure that all of these issues will be resolved in time. I am so happy to see this feature, as the normal JavaScript Stockfish 14+ engine was extremely slow compared to the version run natively on my machine. Of course, there might still be the case that you want to continue the analysis on dedicated tools, but so far I am so in love with Lichess that I want to do everything there and share stuff with others.

In order for the developers to solve these issues, feedback is VERY important, so don't be shy and leave comments of all the issues you encounter and all the features you want to see and all improvements you can think of.

I leave you with a video from US Chess: John's How-To's: Using Engines on Lichess

LiChess Tools is a Chromium-based browser extension (meaning Chrome, Brave, Edge, Kiwi - which also works on mobiles - and others) that extends the functionalities of the lichess.org web site. This page is the user manual for the extension, cataloguing all of its current features and explaining how to use them.

All of the features below can be individually turned on or off from the Preferences menu, the LiChess Tools menu entry. Note that many of the options will be hidden until you toggle Advanced Preferences - these features will be marked with Advanced in the category section.

Here are the available features in LiChess Tools v2.1.15, in the order of decreasing approximate importance:

Extended interactive lessons

category: Study
values: Play all variations/Show score - defaults to both

This feature may be the flagship of the extension, as it allows you to play an Interactive lesson chapter by going through all variations instead of just the mainline. The default lichess behavior is to only follow the mainline, considering all sidelines as bad. With the new behavior all moves in the PGN tree are good, while the ones missing are bad. You can mark the bad variations with glyphs (good move, mistake, blunder, etc.), for example, to indicate if a move is bad or good, but you can continue playing it to see why. 

There is a mechanism to choose what the computer will play next as your opponent. It uses the number of branches in 8 ply (4 chess moves for both players) to determine which is more probable. This value can be changed (see Next move probability depth feature) For example if you have something like 1. e4 (1. d4 d5 2. Nc3 (2. Nf3)) 1... e5 2. Nf3, the mechanism will see that there are two possible branches for d4 as opposed to one for e4, so it will choose d4 66% of the time. The probability can be changed manually by adding a comment in the move with the format prc:<number>, where the number is a percentage between 1 and 100. Also, if set in the Transpositions behavior feature, the moves can be picked from moves following transposing positions. 

When hints are not provided by the study creator, one will be generated to show how many possible moves are available.

There is also a system to compute accuracy when playing an interactive lesson by counting the good and the bad moves. This will be displayed as a percentage at the end of the lesson and can be turned off by option.

The lichess UI remains the same, therefore the area in which to explain why any other move is wrong only appears on mainline moves. That is why this feature also adds a context menu item for nodes in interactive lessons to enable editing that information. As usual, when a "bad" move is made, the text to be displayed to the user will be taken from the first child (next move) of the current node (move). Therefore in order to make this work you have to right-click that node and explain why bad moves are wrong. This might be a bit counterintuitive, as you may have several moves following the current position, but the explanation has to be set to the first next move.

Options:

• Play all variations - enables the Extended mode for interactive lessons, allowing you to play all variations with the computer picking random moves from the ones available in the PGN
• Show score - shows the score at the end of the lesson. One can disable this to reduce frustration or for other reasons.

These options are also available in the action menu (hamburger button) of the analysis board when in a study chapter that is of type Interactive Lesson. This allows to quickly enable/disable just these relevant settings.

Notes:

• one can play all variations of an interactive lesson with multiple branches only with the LiChess Tools extension installed, so if you create such a lesson only people with the extension can enjoy it. It would be nice to let everybody know that in a comment if you share it.
• asking to show the next move will show a random move of the possible ones. Click on the button multiple times to go through more of them. Be warned that pressing the button is seen by the scoring system as a fail.

Ctrl-right to play random next move from list

category: Analysis/Study
values: yes/no - defaults to yes

This feature will allow you to play a random move by pressing Ctrl-right. There is a mechanism to choose what the computer will play next as your opponent. It uses the number of branches in 8 ply (4 chess moves for both players) to determine which is more probable. This value can be changed (see Next move probability depth feature) For example if you have something like 1. e4 (1. d4 d5 2. Nc3 (2. Nf3)) 1... e5 2. Nf3, the mechanism will see that there are two possible branches for d4 as opposed to one for e4, so it will choose d4 66% of the time. The probability can be changed manually by adding a comment in the move with the format prc:<number>, where the number is a percentage between 1 and 100. Also, if set in the Transpositions behavior feature, the moves can be picked from moves following transposing positions. 

Ctrl-left works almost like the left key, going to the previous position, but in this case it will go to the position you came from, not from the previous position on the line you've jumped to.

Notes:

• if set in Transpositions behavior, Ctrl-right may choose a move from another line, but made from the same position, which means that going "back" will go to the previous position in the current line, not the original one. Use Ctrl-Left to return to the position you jumped from. 
• the keyboard shortcuts will be shown in the keyboard help popup if this feature is enabled

Behavior of transpositions

category: Analysis/Study - Advanced
values: exclude if same line/don't add identical next moves/play moves from transpositions - defaults to none

This feature determines what a transposition is for other features that use transpositions. The options are:

• exclude if same line - two identical positions in the same PGN will not be considered transpositions of one another if they are in the same line of moves (one came before the other) (see Highlight moves in analysis and Show next moves from transpositions)
• don't add identical next moves - when showing next possible moves at the bottom of the move list, if adding them from transposing positions, don't add the same move twice (see Show next moves from transpositions)
• play moves from transpositions - when picking a next move to play, use transposing positions as well (see Ctrl-right to play random next move from the list and Extended Interactive Lessons)
• none - when none of the values above are selected, any two identical positions will be considered transpositions, the move list can show multiple identical moves if they are coming from different transpositions/lines and the extension will not pick next moves using transpositions.

Next move probability depth

category: Analysis/Study - Advanced
values: equal/one move/two moves/three moves/five moves - defaults to 4 moves (8 ply)

This configures the mechanism calculating the probability of a next move in the PGN (see Extended Interactive Lessons and Ctrl-right to play random next move from list). The default value goes 4 moves for each player to see how many branches follow. It will then weigh each next move in the list based on that. If you want to turn this off completely, just select equal, which means it will not look at following moves at all. 

Enhanced PGN import

category: Analysis
values: yes/no - defaults to yes

Another important feature of LiChess Tools, this one makes changes to the import mechanism in the Analysis board page. You can now import multiple PGNs at the same time and they will get merged into a single one. It is great for creating repertoires, analyzing the games of a specific player or creating Extended Interactive Lessons. From the Analysis board you can go to options and turn it into a study.

Notes:

• the import mechanism in Analysis ignores comments from the PGNs. This is a lichess limitation and to get around it I would have to rewrite the entire thing. I may do that, but it's not planned.
• the import in Analysis is different from the one in Studies. The one in Analysis is client based, while the one in Studies is on the server. That is why I can only alter the one in Analysis.
• there is no logical limit to how many PGNs to import, but the Analysis board has a limit of about 5000 moves. Also, the API to turn it into a study has a size limitation, so if you try to turn a huge analysis to a study and it fails, know that it is too big. Highlighting moves on huge PGNs also is slow. So use with care.

Friends box

category: Friends
values: Default/Menu/Open/Hidden - defaults to Menu

This has evolved a lot. Originally it was automatically opening the friends box, but then several requests came that complained about the placement of the friends box and how distracting it was. So the current version of the feature can either:

• Default - the default behavior of the friends list: stays in the bottom-right corner, only updates when opened, which requires a user click.
• Button- the friends box is removed and replaced with a friends button, similar to the Notifications one. It will update in real time with the number of friends online and will change color when any one of them is playing.
• Menu - the friends box is removed and replaced with a friends menu. It will update in real time with the number of friends online and will change color when any one of them is playing. It will also show the number of playing friends in a small blue square.
• Open - the default behavior of the friends list, but it will open automatically when loading the page
• Hidden - the friends list will disappear completely

Notes:

• clicking on the main menu item directly will open the friends page, but not on mobiles
• when the width of the page goes under 972px, menus are grouped under a hamburger menu. The Friends menu will disappear and become a button in that case.

Live friends page

category: Friends
values: yes/no - defaults to yes

This is linked to the Friends box feature. The default behavior is to load whatever list of friends you have and then leave it at that. This feature will update the friends list in real time, while also allowing filtering by who is online, who is playing and (if player voice alerts are enabled) which player is muted. 

Each player will have a TV icon as well and (if player voice alerts are enabled) a mute/unmute button to include them in the alerts. (see Sound and voice alert with friends start playing)

Sound and voice alert when friends start playing

category: Friends
values: Ultrabullet/Bullet/Blitz/Rapid/Classical/Standard only- defaults to none

This feature will beep and spell out the player name and type of game they started. The type of the game can be chosen from the values. The definition of the game type comes from lichess, which assumes a typical game will be around 40 moves.

You can also choose which specific players to have the alert for, by going to the friends page and clicking the mute buttons. (see Live friends page)

If you select Standard only, then the alerts will only be sounded for the Standard variant of the game.

Notes:

• Chromium (and other) browsers disallow sounds from page load until the user does something like click on the page. In case an alert is attempted and audio is not allowed a red icon will appear next to the top buttons, which will disappear once the audio is allowed again.
• The audio icon is part of lichess, which will also display it once sound is attempted but not allowed. At this time, the lichess icon will NOT disappear unless you click on it, different from how LiChess Tools uses it for alerts.
• If you are playing a game on another tab, the sounds will not be played if the Quiet mode on all tabs feature is enabled.

Practice against moves from Opening Explorer

category: Analysis/Study
values: yes/no - defaults to yes

This is another great feature that allows you to play against whatever is selected in the Opening Explorer. Select masters to play against the best players, select Lichess and select the range of player to train against and select specific users to test your strategies against their played games.

In order to use this feature you need to go to the Analysis board or a study, open the Explorer and click on the icon next to the Masters tab, the one that looks like an arrow hitting a target.

Notes:

• you can toggle Explorer Practice by clicking on the arrow in the target button, but also with shift-L, to make it easier to switch between computer evaluation and the practice mode
  • the keyboard help popup shows this shortcut if the feature is enabled
• the moves in the explorer window will get hidden in Analysis, but not in studies. The motivation being that one is more like a game, with no lasting effects, the other is research.
• if the Show emojis when out of moves feature is enabled in Explorer Practice options, then at the end of a run, when there are no more moves available in the Explorer for the feature to make, a quick computer analysis will be run to show you a smiley (happy or sad).

Explorer Practice options

Options for the Explorer Practice feature:

• Show emojis when out of moves - set by default - will run a short computer analysis when out of moves in Explorer Practice, then show an happy/sad emoji based on the eval.

Highlight moves in analysis

category: Analysis/Study - Advanced
values: Last move in each variation/Not commented last moves/Transpositions to current move - defaults to Last move in each variation/Not commented last moves

This feature will highlight moves in the analysis move list. Each option highlights a specific thing:

• Last move in each variation - for each branch, highlights the last move
• Not commented last moves - for each branch, highlights the last move that has no comment or is not a mate
• Transpositions to current move - highlights positions that are identical to the current one in the same PGN (see Behavior of transpositions to change what the extension considers a transposition)

Extra context menu options

category: Analysis/Study
values: Copy branch as PGN/Engine evaluation for last moves/Highlight all transpositions/Remove superfluous - defaults to Copy branch as PGN, Engine evaluation for last moves, Remove superfluous

This feature will add extra options to the analysis move list context menu. The options are:

• Copy branch as PGN - this works in Analysis and Studies and turns all the previous moves of the line you are in, plus all the branches after the move, into a PGN in your clipboard. You can use it to split large PGNs by copying variations into their own chapters, then maybe deleting them from the original one.
• Engine evaluation for last moves - this works only for Studies, because it involves move comments. It will go through all of the uncommented last moves and create a comment in the form eval:<evaluation> using the local computer engine. The evaluation will stop at the engine depth selected in Preferences (see Minimum analysis engine depth).
• Highlight all transpositions - this works for both Analysis and Studies and highlights all moves that have transpositions. You can configure what a transposition is in Preferences (see Behavior of transpositions)
• Remove superfluous - this removes the Annotate with glyphs and Comment on this move context menu entries for study moves. There are buttons for this under the board and so these entries take too much needed space.

Minimum analysis engine depth

category: Analysis/Study - Advanced
values: a number representing the depth - defaults to empty

This feature will allow you to set a depth level for the computer engine. If the current move has a smaller depth level (let's say it was cached in the cloud with that level) it will start the local computer evaluation. Once it reaches the set depth, the engine will stop.

This feature is also used as the level at which to consider evaluation done for the Engine evaluation for last moves option (see Extra context menu options)

Show next moves from transpositions

category: Analysis/Study - Advanced
values: yes/no - defaults to yes

When you get to a certain position in the PGN which has transpositions, the next moves from those transpositions will be displayed under the move list, just like for a fork into multiple variations. You can configure what a transposition is, as well as if you want multiple identical moves to be shown or not and if the moves in this list should be considered by Ctrl-right and Extended Interactive Lessons in Preferences (see Behavior of transpositions)

Extra key shortcuts

category: Analysis/Study - Advanced
values: yes/no - defaults to yes

this feature adds extra key shortcuts to analysis:

• first it changes the functionality of the i, m and b keys to work in analysis as well as studies and to use all variations, not just the main line as the original lichess behvaior. The functionality of these keys is to jump to the next inaccuracy, mistake or blunder, respectively
• it adds the same functionality to Alt-i, Alt-m and Alt-b, only for the opponent
• g and Alt-g cycle through good/brilliant/interesting moves
• it ads the ability to select any of the moves in the available moves lists:
  • press . (dot) and then a digit and it will make to the nth next move available in the PGN (see Transpositions behavior if you want to select moves from transpositions, too)
  • press Ctrl-. and then a digit and it will make to the nth next move available in the computer evaluation list
  • press Shift-. and then a digit and it will make to the nth next move available in the opening explorer list

Notes:

• the keyboard help popup now shows all of these shortcuts if the feature is enabled

Additional glyphs

category: Study - Advanced
values: yes/no - defaults to yes

This feature displays an extra # glyph on mate moves. Also it enlarges glyphs on mobile devices.

Notes:

• The lichess UI allows for multiple glyphs on the same move. The one shown on board will just be the first one in the list.
• Originally this feature was created to show annotations that lichess was not showing. From September 2013 lichess started natively showing all annotations, therefore eliminating the need for much of the functionality of the feature. Since the changes on lichess are volatile, this feature might need to go back and forth as well.

Extra analysis charting

category: Analysis/Study - Advanced
values: Material/Principled/Max tension/Max potential/Find interesting moves/Chart smoothing/on Eval gauge - defaults to Material,Principled,Max tension,Chart smoothing,on Eval gauge

This experimental feature is adding extra lines on the computer analysis chart. In the search for good/great/brilliant moves - as shown on chess.com and requested by a lot of players, the lines drawn over the normal computer eval chart are meant to give some indication of what is going on without asserting an exact significance of the values. The lines are purposefully left without explanation, in the hope that players recognize some aspects of the game in the numerical values charted and their intersection.

For example, many of the moves generally considered brilliant see a steep increase in evaluation, but a steep decrease in material and/or principled position, indicating a sacrifice or an unnatural seeming move that wins the game.

If Find interesting moves is enabled then an extra entry in the analysis summary shows the total of interesting/good/brilliant moves in the PGN. The feature will also attempt to find such moves automatically.

Options:

• Material - green dashed line shows a more classical material difference between the sides
• Principled - blue dashed line shows how principled the position is. This means stuff like square control, freedom of movement, developed centralized pieces, etc, but excepting material value.
• Max tension - red dotted vertical line shows the point of maximum tension in the game. Tension here is defined as the total material that can be captured by both sides in just one move.
• Max potential - green dotted vertical line shows the point of maximum potential (similar to tension, but it superficially looks at capture chains)
• Find interesting moves - if enabled, this will show good/brilliant/interesting moves in the analysis summary as a link that cycles through them. It will also automatically find some categories of interesting moves and mark them with !? glyphs (if not already annotated). The glyphs added by this algorithm will be temporary (not persisted on the server).
• Chart smoothing - if this is enabled, temporary spikes in the charts will be removed. Example: you take a bishop with a knight, the material jumps 3 points in your favor, but the next move the opponent takes your knight, so the material goes back to 0. The smoothing function will attempt to remove these meaningless jumps in material. 
• on Eval gauge - if this is set, two lines (one green and one blue) will appear on the evaluation gauge when it is visible, changing with the values of material and principled values, respectively.

Notes:

• I called it "interesting moves" because there is no objective good/brilliant move algorithm. I will continue to work on it in the future.

Change chapter names from PGN tags

category: Study - Advanced
values: yes/no - defaults to yes

This feature will give you the option to quickly change the name of a study chapter to either the content of its Event PGN tag or the White and Black PGN tags combines when editing the chapter. Sometimes people want to import a series of PGNs into a study, but only the first chapter gets a proper naming from the PGN tags, the rest getting the default Chapter 2, Chapter 3... etc name. With this you can go to each of them, edit them by clicking the cog button next to their names, then choosing with one click the name the chapter should have.

Study chapter navigation controls

category: Study - Advanced
values: yes/no - defaults to yes

This feature will add a set of buttons at the end of the chapter list in a study. The buttons allow to navigate to the first chapter, previous chapter, random chapter, next chapter and last chapter respectively.

Sticky study Preview mode

category: Study, Interactive Lesson chapters - Advanced
values: yes/no - defaults to yes

This feature will keep you in Preview mode as you move from one Interactive lesson chapter to another. As one trains using interactive lessons, at the end of one they are presented with the option to move to the next chapter. The default lichess behavior is to show you the chapter in edit mode (assuming you are the owner or a contributor) which requires you to press the Preview button all the time to continue training, after also having seen the move list. Now you can press Preview once and play chapter after chapter with no hassle.

Show game opening names

category: General
values: yes/no - defaults to yes

This feature will load the lichess opening name for games and display it. When watching a game or analyzing it, the opening will be shown under the player names. For mini-games (the tiny ones that appear when hovering over a game link or put somewhere on the page) it will appear at the bottom. For Analysis board, if the wiki side is empty, it will show the opening there, assuming the position is in the local cache.

Notes:

• For v2.0.29 this feature has been overhauled to use a local cache of openings, where possible, so that it queries the server as little as possible. That is why the extension doubled in size at that time.

Show player country flags

category: General
values: yes/no - defaults to yes

A very early feature of the extension, it has also evolved a lot. The latest version is much more efficient in terms of how it gets the data from the server and adds flags to almost every place where a user link is shown. I am aware that this might be distracting and I am planning some detailed values to choose how wide spread the flags will be. Also, did you notice the flags are lazily flapping in the wind?

Autosave analysis for reload

category: Analysis - Advanced
values: yes/no - defaults to yes

This happened to me a lot of times: I am analyzing something and I accidentally swipe the touchpad or press some key that reloads the page. All my work is gone! This feature keeps track of the latest modifications of analysis PGN and reloads it on page load. It is your choice if you want to import it or not by going to the PGN text area and clicking the Import PGN button.

There is also a Reload PGN button added by this feature, although now that it automatically reloads the PGN, it has lost much of its utility.

Notes:

• The saved PGN as well as the analysis import text area content will be overwritten by whatever move you make, so if you fail to import the PGN and make a move, you lose the data. 

Opening explorer player features

category: Analysis/Study - Advanced
values: Me button to switch to your player/Ability to remove players from the name list - defaults to both

This feature controls the choice of the player in the Opening Explorer.

• Me button to switch to your player - adds a tab next to Masters database, Lichess and Player named Me. If you click on it the choice of the player will toggle from your user to the last selected user
• Ability to remove players from the name list - adds the ability to delete players from the list of username previously chosen in the player tab

Notes:

• The Me button will appear only if you have any another players configured for the Player tab name list

TV with the games of your friends

category: TV - Advanced
values: yes/no - defaults to yes

This feature will add a Friends tab in the Current Games page where you can see the games of all currently playing players that you follow.

Notes:

• Some games will show the default position until a players moves. That's a limitation of lichess, I think. I am working on it.

Previously viewed game menu item

category: TV - Advanced
values: yes/no - defaults to yes

This feature adds an extra menu item in the Watch menu that will take you to the previously seen chess game. Just opening any game will consider it as watched. If you go to the previously watched game, then clicking on the menu item again will take you to the game you watched before that, and so on. The total number of remembered games is 10.

Last visited study menu

category: Study - Advanced
values: yes/no - defaults to yes

This feature adds an extra menu item in the Learn menu that will take you to the previously visited study. Just opening any study will consider it as watched.

Show the previous two games in player TV

category: TV
values: yes/no - defaults to yes

In category TV (when you are watching Blitz games for example) you get a list of two previous games in that category under the main playing board. For player TV, when you go to a specific player to watch their games, this is missing. This feature will add the two previously played games by the player you are watching.

Link and bookmark for TV games

category: TV
values: Game title link/Ability to bookmark games - defaults to both

When going to a game link or in analysis mode you can click on its title (above the player names) or mouse hover to get a bookmarking star. This is not the case for TV games. Enable these options to have:

• Game title link - a link to the game page in the title
• Ability to bookmark games - a bookmarking star button when hovering over the title 

Notes:

• To bookmark the game on a mobile you have to first tap next to the title, then the star will appear. This is something lichess should fix.

Styling for study comments

category: Study
values: yes/no - defaults to yes

This feature adds the ability to style the comments in your PGNs. You can choose between a number of styles that you can place anywhere in a comment with cls:<styleName>. It also adds a new button next to the comment button in a study chapter (a quill in an inkwell) that with cycle through all of the classes at the very beginning of the comment to the current move. The usable classes are: red, orange, yellow, green, lightgreen, cyan, lightblue, blue, violet, magenta, pink, underline, strikethrough, italic, bold, cursive and nothing or clear to clear existing class.

Notes:

• the name of the class declares the intent, not the actual result of the styling. Given that there are dark and light themes on lichess, the styles have been updates to be readable in both situations, using shadows or slightly different colors.
• the style of the comment will only be visible to you and people with LiChess Tools installed. All others will see cls:blue or whatever in the comment.
• you can actually put anything as the class name and the comment will be put inside a span with the class lichessTools-<your class name>, which allows you to customize your style even more with the addition of custom styles from other extensions like Stylus. In this case all people seeing the comment would also need the custom styling.

Show the order of arrows and circles

category: Analysis/Study - Advanced
values: yes/no - defaults to no

This feature shows a number on each drawn shape, so that you can see their order. Sometimes in studies you want to convey the moves that could follow the current position using arrows and circles, but in certain situations the order of the moves is important. Set this to true in order to see which arrow comes first.

Ctrl-Space for best computer move

category: Analysis/Study - Advanced
values: yes/no - defaults to yes

The default functionality of the Space bar in analysis mode is to start the computer engine if not started or play the best move in the computer move list. Because I was often using lichess with YouTube in another tab, pressing Space accidentally was always an annoyance. This feature changes the shortcut to Ctrl-Space.

Notes:

• A previous version of the feature was using Shift-Space, but it would overlap with a lichess feature.

Clear chapter artifacts

category: Study - Advanced
values: yes/no - defaults to yes

This feature allows you to choose which artifacts to clear from only the current study chapter. To use it, click on the cog button next to the chapter name and, instead of the Clear annotations button now you get the choice of just comments, glyphs (good move, bad move, that kind of thing) and drawn shapes (circles and arrows) as well as all of the above. There is an extra option of clearing all PGN tags. This feature also adds individual delete buttons to all tags in the current study chapter.

Notes:

• this only works for the current chapter, as the site does not have access to the moves or tags in the PGNs of other chapters
  • the feature could be modified to work on all chapters, but it would have to first select the chapter, then alter it, which I think is not something that should be done automatically.
• this works on the client, which means that instead of sending one command to the lichess site, it creates delete requests for each item. If the PGN is large, this can take a long time.

Customize chat buttons

category: Play
values: yes/no - defaults to no

When playing the first few moves and after the game has ended, lichess gives you the option to click on some buttons for some standardized message like Hello, or Have fun! This feature will give you the ability to customize these buttons.

The interface may not be the most intuitive. To edit buttons you click on the little cog button, to exit edit mode you click on the same. This allows altering, adding and deleting buttons. Click on the small X button to enter delete mode, after which you click on buttons to delete them. Delete them all and you get the default buttons back.

In order to add or alter buttons you have to write in the chat text input something like <name>/<message>. Example: hi/Why, hello there, old chap!, which will create a button with the text HI which will send the chat text "Why, hello there, old chap!". In order to add the button, you click the + button. In order to alter an existing button, you click on that button.

Notes:

• the name of the button can be only 2,3 or 4 characters long.
• if you attempt to add or edit a button without a recognizably correct input text, the input box will jiggle to let you know you are doing something wrong
• to edit the end of game buttons you have to reach the end of a game. This may be inconvenient and I am thinking of solutions
• I am considering expanding this feature with buttons for the duration of the game as well as for spectators. Let me know what you think!

Timeline notifications

category: General - advanced
values: Forum post/Blog post/Lichess announcement/Stream start/Simul create/Simul join/Team create/Team join/Tournament join/Following/Study like/Blog post like - defaults to Forum post/Blog post

This feature will add a notification when there are unread items in your Timeline. The default values include comments on forum or blog posts you follow, forum or blog posts from people you follow. Basically posts that you wouldn't normally be notified about. 

Clicking on the notification will take you to the Timeline page. Opening it from here or anywhere else will consider the items read and so you will not see the notification until new ones turn up.

Mobile device features

category: General
values: Evaluation gauge/Hide the octopus mascot/Analysis arrows/Random move button/Scroll lock when playing - defaults to Evaluation gauge, Random move button

This feature alters some behavior specifically for mobile devices. There are Chromium-based mobile browsers, like Kiwi, which accept browser extensions. Enjoy LiChess Tools on mobile installing one and then the extension, then customize the experience with this feature. The options are:

• Evaluation gauge - makes the evaluation gauge visible even on small screen widths (for mobile)
• Hide the octopus mascot - hides the octopus mascot that takes a lot of space in Interactive Lessons
• Analysis arrows - adds a button next to the Explorer and Practice ones that allows for drawing arrows and circles on mobile devices in Analysis and Studies
• Random move button - adds a button between the previous and next move buttons that will randomly play a move from the move list (same functionality as Ctrl-right to play random next move from list on desktop)
• Screen lock when playing - will lock scrolling and zooming on mobiles when playing (or during puzzles). A lock icon will appear as a button on top of the screen that you can tap to temporarily lock/unlock the scrolling on that page (refreshing or going to other screens will again automatically lock the screen until you unset the value from Preferences).

Notes:

• Because both the shape drawing and random move buttons take up space, this feature also changes the style of the buttons so that they take two rows of space: the first for utility buttons (left) and the hamburger menu button (right) and the second row for PGN navigation buttons (first, previous, random, next, last move). If none of the two options mentioned are enabled, then the regular "one row for all buttons" style is used.
• Screen locking when "playing" doesn't necessarily means when playing, but when lichess is in "playing mode". For example that also means when you haven't yet started the game or when you just ended the game or when you are doing puzzles.

Mobile device game features

category: General - Advanced
values: Game arrows/Standard buttons - defaults to none

This feature alters some behavior specifically for mobile devices when in-game. This means playing, or solving puzzles or even watching running TV games. There are Chromium-based mobile browsers, like Kiwi, which accept browser extensions. Enjoy LiChess Tools on mobile installing one and then the extension, then customize the experience with this feature. The options are:

• Game arrows - adds a button next to the Analysis one that allows for drawing arrows and circles on mobile devices in games
• Standard buttons - the default behavior of lichess.org is to hide the move navigation buttons for games on small screens, instead showing one line of PGN with previous and next move buttons on either side. Set this in order to see all buttons (including the Game arrows one above). For normal play this is not necessary, but in puzzles, TV and such screens this is the only way to access the drawing arrows button.

Show evaluation of explorer moves

category: Analysis/Study - Advanced
values: From computer eval/From cloud/From winning stats - defaults to From computer eval/From cloud

This feature will show the move evaluation for Explorer moves. This information is retrieved from three different sources that can be enabled or disabled: the local computer eval, the lichess (or chessDb if lichess ever allows it) cloud and the Explorer stats themselves.

The statistics eval will only be shown if there are 100 or more games in the lichess database for that move and not all won by one side. Its faded coloring signifies that it's not a true eval, but if enabled can compare with the other values. 

Computer evaluations will have a white color, stats evaluations will have a grey faded color and the cloud evaluations will be slightly blue. If the chessDb option will ever be allowed, it will show either red, green or bright green for bad, good and best moves.

This feature also adds a warning icon on the right side of moves that have large differences between evaluation and winning stats, indicating a possible trap or gambit situation.

Notes:

• Unfortunately, the Content Security Policy (CSP) of lichess doesn't allow calls to chessdb.cn, but I am using the data from lichess' cloud-eval API. I am trying to convince developers there to allow the domain, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
• The more lines you have configured on your computer analysis, the more items in the list will be evaluated. Explorer can show 12 moves, for example, while the computer analysis is configured with Multiple lines=2, this means a maximum of 2 items in the Explorer will have an evaluation. With 5, you get 5, assuming the computer moves are in the Explorer list.
• There is an internal cache of these evaluations, so you can run the computer eval for some moves, then stop it, but when going to those moves you will still see the evaluations as done before at whatever depth was last computed.
• Take care with stats evals in positions with few games. It might tell you that you are absolutely winning, but that's just because no one played a winning move from that position. That is why eval from winning stats is disabled by default.
• The evaluations from cloud differ in depth based on how many moves you want to see. For example you could ask for just one move (the best in the position) and it might show you the eval with depth 55, but if you ask for two moves it will give you depth 44, for 20 moves you would get depth 13 or even nothing. To account for this, cloud eval combines the values from two calls: for 5 moves and for 10 moves. Since the cloud data comes from local evals, server evals and different versions of Stockfish and I am combining two different depth evals, take the evaluation as an estimation, not a given.
• Changing the options for evaluation in Preferences will reset the local cache for each move.
• Lichess' cloud eval API will return 404 when no data is available, resulting in ugly red network lines and error messages in the browser developer tools. Those are not errors, but there is no way to hide them in Chromium browsers from JavaScript. If it annoys you, you can turn them off from DevTools (see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4500741/suppress-chrome-failed-to-load-resource-messages-in-console)
• Depending on how much you do analysis and how overloaded the servers are, cloud eval might start returning 429 errors, meaning the servers report you are abusing them. A warning will appear every minute while that happens. The workaround is to disable From cloud and use just computer eval (which, of course, will also use cloud eval :-P). The configuration on lichess' side, at least for the moment, is 3000 calls per IP address per day. That's a bit low, but it might be enough.

Show explorer moves leading to gambits

category: Analysis/Study - Advanced
values: yes/no - defaults to no

This feature adds a new column to the Explorer table showing the number of gambits reachable from the current position and for each move to play.

Quiet mode on all tabs

category: Play - Advanced
values: yes/no - defaults to yes

When a game starts, lichess sets a quietMode variable to true, instructing various notifications to not be displayed. Unfortunately, that only happens on the page that one plays on. This feature makes all open lichess pages get the value for quiet mode from the same place, so they don't behave inconsistently.

There is also a button added to the lichess menu which can manually enable/disable quiet mode. Warning: once manually enabled, quiet mode will remain on until manually disabled! The normal game playing quiet mode will turn on and off automatically, as before, only it will affect all open lichess pages.

Note:

• when quiet mode is set, you don't get lichess notifications and also no voice alerts from the Sound and voice alert when friends start playing feature. Turn this feature off if that's not your desired behavior.

Colors for shapes on mobile

category: General - Advanced
values: 1/2/3/4 - defaults to 1

This is part of the Mobile Experience feature and it selects the count of colors you can use on mobile to draw arrows and circles. If you only want to turn the drawing mode on/off with a single tap, select 1.

Also save options for browser private/incognito mode

category: General - Advanced
values: yes/no - defaults to no

This was a user request to find a way to save the options outside the local browser cache, as he was playing the game from incognito/private browser mode. Since no other solution was better, this saves the options as notes in the first chess game you ever played on lichess. So be careful that this will alter those notes, although I am not aware of many people using the private notes feature.

Notes:

• be aware that it will alter the private notes of the very first game you played on lichess
• the extension will use whatever options you have in the browser local cache. Only if they are not there it will take them from the notes. That means that you can do weird stuff like enabling the feature, saving options, disabling it, changing the options and now you will have different settings in normal and incognito mode. So use with care.

Themes

category: General - Advanced
values: whatever themes are available - defaults to none

This is an experimental feature, the purpose of which is to accept user CSS themes as part of the extension.

Available themes:

• Demo - changes the font and the background of the website - it does nothing else but demo the themes feature
• Just Explorer - will hide the computer eval moves (but not the arrows, if enabled) and the move list when the Explorer is open. This will only be applied for mobile devices

Notes:

• The maintainer of the theme will be acknowledged in the Preferences page
• I have no skill to maintain CSS themes, so whoever makes the theme, if it meets with a minimum approval from me, will have to maintain it. A problematic theme with no signs of maintenance will be removed.
• Multiple themes can be applied concurrently. 

Hide score tally crosstable

category: Play - Advanced
values: yes/no - defaults to no

Another user request was to not see the crosstable, the thing that shows how many games you played with the same opponent and what the results and games were. It was intimidating. This feature will blur it out, but allow you to click on it to unblur it. It's a silly feature that may not survive long because there is also the Zen mode lichess option which overlaps this behavior, but it's here for the moment.

  There is a common task in Excel that seems should have a very simple solution. Alas, when googling for it you get all these inexplainable crappy "tutorial" sites that either show you something completely different or something that you cannot actually do because you don't have the latest version of Office. Well, enough of this!

  The task I am talking about is just selecting a range of values and concatenating them using a specified separator, what in a programming language like C# is string.Join or in JavaScript you get the array join function. I find it very useful when, for example, I copy a result from SQL and I want to generate an INSERT or UPDATE query. And the only out of the box solution is available for Office 365 alone: TEXTJOIN.

  You use it like =TEXTJOIN(", ", FALSE, A2:A8) or =TEXTJOIN(", ", FALSE, "The", "Lazy", "Fox"), where the parameters are:

• a delimiter
• a boolean to determine if empty cells are ignored
• a series or text values or a range of cells

  But, you can have this working in whatever version of Excel you want by just using a User Defined Function (UDF), one specified in this lovely and totally underrated Stack Overflow answer: MS Excel - Concat with a delimiter.

  Long story short:

• open the Excel sheet that you want to work on 
• press Alt-F11 which will open the VBA interface
• insert a new module
  
• paste the code from the SO answer (also copy pasted here, for good measure)
• press Alt-Q to leave
• if you want to save the Excel with the function in it, you need to save it as a format that supports macros, like .xlsm

And look at the code. I mean, it's ugly, but it's easy to understand. What other things could you implement that would just simplify your work and allow Excel files to be smarter, without having to code an entire Excel add-in? I mean, I could just create my own GenerateSqlInsert function that would handle column names, NULL values, etc. 

Here is the TEXTJOIN mimicking UDF to insert in a module:

Function TEXTJOIN(delim As String, skipblank As Boolean, arr)
    Dim d As Long
    Dim c As Long
    Dim arr2()
    Dim t As Long, y As Long
    t = -1
    y = -1
    If TypeName(arr) = "Range" Then
        arr2 = arr.Value
    Else
        arr2 = arr
    End If
    On Error Resume Next
    t = UBound(arr2, 2)
    y = UBound(arr2, 1)
    On Error GoTo 0

    If t >= 0 And y >= 0 Then
        For c = LBound(arr2, 1) To UBound(arr2, 1)
            For d = LBound(arr2, 1) To UBound(arr2, 2)
                If arr2(c, d) <> "" Or Not skipblank Then
                    TEXTJOIN = TEXTJOIN & arr2(c, d) & delim
                End If
            Next d
        Next c
    Else
        For c = LBound(arr2) To UBound(arr2)
            If arr2(c) <> "" Or Not skipblank Then
                TEXTJOIN = TEXTJOIN & arr2(c) & delim
            End If
        Next c
    End If
    TEXTJOIN = Left(TEXTJOIN, Len(TEXTJOIN) - Len(delim))
End Function

Hope it helps!

  Symptoms:

• You press the Start key (or open the Start menu) and you type something expecting to filter items
• Instead nothing happens
• You click on the Windows 11 search textbox in the Start menu, but it takes no input
• You get notifications in the tray bar, but if you click on them, like on Windows Updates, it doesn't open Windows Updates

  I searched and searched. No, it wasn't running ctfmon. No, it wasn't restarting anything. No, I didn't want to reinstall Windows all over again.

  What it was was removing/renaming the IrisService Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\IrisService registry entry and restarting the computer. I thank Tech Advisor for this, although the problem wasn't that there were no answers on the net, but that there were too many and the vast majority of them were wrong and inept.

  Searching further, with the solution in hand, I found this little link: Windows 11 bug, so it is indeed an issue coming from Microsoft itself (probably update KB5006050). That should probably teach me against installing optional updates on my computer.  

  The funny thing is that after I did this, I restored the original values of the registry entry and it didn't have any effect. What is this IrisService? No one seems to know for sure.

  Well, hope it helps!

Installing Windows 11 is a trip. Not only does it comes with its own idea on how your taskbar and start menu should look and feel without giving you even the options Windows 10 had, but it also brings so much wisdom by telling you what applications you should use most. Like every single Microsoft Office app, plus the Office loader. Meanwhile, the apps you pinned are stuck at the end of the list. You have to scroll to get to them!

Easy to fix, you might think, so you right-click on the apps expecting to get an option to unpin and you do, and you get a loading prompt and then the menu closes and... nothing happens. Like at all. Even loading the app would have been a better result.

It turns out the answer is to press the Shift key and right click the items, only then you get a reasonable menu that gives you the option to unpin. No such luck as being able to enter an edit mode by pressing long, so you have to unpin every single useless thing from there until you get to the few things you actually want to use without, you know, pressing the Start key and then typing what you want.

Ugh! Every generation of designers out there becomes more and more idiotic. In the near future I am sure they will reach the conclusion that the entire digital experience of humanity can be condensed into a tridimensional metaverse infinite scroll and remove any other option.

  A while ago I had discovered the Brave browser for mobiles, which was a Chromium fork that featured ad blocking and privacy guards out of the box, when Google stubbornly refused to enable extension support for mobile Chrome. The thing is, it was only available for mobiles. And even if it were available for the desktop, would it really have anything over Chrome with extensions like uBlock Origin installed?

  The answer is YES! Brave for PC is available and, from the limited interaction I've had so far, it is superior to Chrome. Why? Let me list the reasons:

• it cares about your privacy and not about how Google can track you best, which might not be high on your agenda or on your browser extension creator's agenda. That's a plus, because as you didn't care about it before, you don't have to care about it now, but it's taken care of.
• by removing unnecessary functionality from Chromium, it is actually faster than Chrome! Are you old enough to remember when Chrome appeared as the underdog and Internet Explorer reigned supreme and then everybody was like "IE sucks, Chrome rules because it's so fast and only cares about the user experience"? That's what Brave does now to Chrome!
• it has a "forced" dark mode flag that can turn EVERY web site dark. It's not perfect, but it's out of the box! All you have to do is go to brave://flags/#enable-force-dark and enable the feature. (admittedly, you can achieve the same effect with chrome://flags/#enable-force-dark or edge://flags/#enable-force-dark, but I only found out about it from Brave)
• the best feature yet is the Simplified View. Most of the times when you open a web site in the mobile version, you get a "Show simplified view" button. You click on that and you get:
  
  • just the text of the web site
  • whatever font you want
  • whatever theme you want (dark/bright)
  • no ads
  • no flashing things
  • no sidebars
  • no "accept cookies" and "register/subscribe" popups
    Again, this is probably a Chrome feature, but Brave made it public, visible and natural. Haven't found the way to turn it on the desktop browser, yet.

Correction: I have found that in Chrome you can enable reader mode with a flag (chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode) only it doesn't work that well. In Brave all that moved to what is called Speedreader, which also must be enabled via a flag (chrome://flags/#brave-speedreader).

  Have you ever browsed one of these "modern" web sites and you got half way through scrolling past the huge image that fills the screen only to get a big popup about registering to some bullshit service, with another popup asking you to enable cookies and then some lazy overlay hiding the content and demanding you pay for the content? Imagine you have one button to click and you get to read the actual information on that page! How can people browse on the web without Brave?!

  I know that some extensions cover most of the points above, but Brave plus uBlock Origin are amazing! I get to a web page that is automatically stripped of most ads, but there are still parts of it that are not strictly ads, like a subscribe form in the middle of the content, for example. You use the Block Element feature of the ad block extension and you get the cleanest browsing experience you can get. (BTW, Brave also has its own Block Element option, so you might not need an extension at all!)

  And there are dark clouds on the horizon. With the V3 manifest version that Google is pushing, many of the APIs available to ad blocker extensions are limited or downright broken. It's not in their interest to block ads, considering they are in the advertising business. Their biggest achievement (and mistake) was to open source Chromium, so no one can take something like Brave away from you.

  Bottom line: switch to Brave. It's like Chrome, only a lot better! And I am not really one of those "fuck the system, stick it to the man" people, so don't think I do this because I have some big agenda. I really really enjoy using this browser and I hope you will, too.

  Today I saw a Windows Update message that I can install Windows 11 on my computer. Great! I let it install and all went without a hitch. I don't see any problems with it, my software works fine, the only problem is that the taskbar icons are in the middle of the screen rather than to the left and it has that default setting of huge annoying icons instead of text, grouping all windows of the same type and so on. Simple, just go to settings, right?

  Wrong! Windows 11 now comes with a taskbar with LESS options than before. If you continue using it you will have to live with grouped apps under huge icons, with no recourse whatsoever!

  Luckily, Michael Crider from PcWorld to the rescue. Just download the setup to Explorer Patcher from GitHub and run it. The Windows 10 taskbar will be back. Just right click on it and select Properties and you can customize it even better than the old one! Cheers, Michael!

  About a year and a half ago I installed DuoLingo and started going through some of the languages there. The app was advertising itself as "The world's best way to learn a language" and "Learn languages by playing a game. It's 100% free, fun, and scientifically proven to work." And in the beginning it was. You could go through simple but increasingly complex lessons and advance in level, exactly as promised.

  And then whatever happened to mobile apps everywhere happened to DuoLingo as well: incessant ads, with garish colors and loud sounds, overtly lying about what they are advertising for. They changed the internal currency of DuoLingo, started to ask for more things just to get the normal stuff needed to learn a language, like the short stories that are the only part of the app that teaches the language in context. Lately they added speed games that no one can finish without spending the currency they've amassed, but increase the points one gets, so puts pressure on everyone to either play the games or spend a lot of effort to not fall behind.

  And for what? After getting to the third level in a language, I started to take every section and finish it (take it to level 5). There is basically no difference between the lessons as the level increases. You never get to complex sentences, learn new words or gain any new knowledge. You just go through the motions in order to get a golden badge or whatever, while filling in sentences about newspapers. Yes! I don't know if you remember them, they're very important in the universe of DuoLingo.

  Also, there is a huge difference between the way lessons work for different languages. You want Spanish of French, you get different games, a lot of stories and so on. You want something more obscure like Dutch, you don't even get stories!

  So continuing to bear with obnoxious commercials just in order to use the app "100% free" is too exhausting, while the benefits are now minimal to none.

  I also doubt this is any way to learn a language. I am not able to understand speech in the language that I've spent months working on, there are very few sentence composition lessons that cover reasonable scenarios likely to meet in real life and the vocabulary is extremely limited. And limited in a stupid way: instead of learning words that one would use in everyday sentences you learn things like newspaper and apple and rabbit.

  Let's be honest here: I only went with Duolingo because it was easy. It gave me the illusion that I am doing something with my time while playing with my smartphone. If I really wanted to learn a language I would have listened and read in that language, I would have found people speaking the language and chatted with them, whether directly or in writing, I would have taken the list of the top 100 words used in that language and I would have created and written down sentences using those words until I could do it in my sleep. That requires effort and commitment and it is obvious that I wasn't going to spend it. That's on me. However, the state of DuoLingo, particularly compared to how it started, is the fault of the company.

  Conclusion: not only has DuoLingo become a cautionary tale about applications that advertise how free they are and will ever be, but it wasn't a good app to begin with and they never invested much into improving it. All development efforts in the last year have been on how to get you to pay for the app, what clothes Duo the owl wears and stupid time consuming animations to "motivate" you. Gamification has become the goal, not the means to achieve something worthwhile. So, with a heavy heart because of losing all the gems I've gathered and my 550 daily streak, I will be stopping using DuoLingo.

So I wanted to use the button on my Android headset to control the audio of the application I was currently using: a book reader or a music player or something similar like that. And instead an annoying assistant was blinging annoyingly and impotently in my headphones, while my music was still on. It is not at all obvious what does that and how to stop it. And there are two assistants on my phone: Google Assistant and Bixby. Turns out you only need to care about one.

Here is what I tried and didn't work:

• disable assistants
  • Bixby can't even be disabled
  • Google Assistant can be disabled, but by that it means it doesn't listen to your voice commands anymore, buttons are fair game
• apps to change the action for the headset button
  • they either don't work right or can't work when the screen is locked
  • the "many apps" recommended by some articles are not even in the store anymore
  • they need full control permissions on your phone

So, here is what you need to do:

1. have your headphones connected to your phone
2. open Google application
   
3. tap the three dot More button
   
4. go to Settings
   
5. select Google Assistant
   
6. go to Devices (it's a section in blue on my phone)
   
7. you should see Wired headphones (or maybe something else depending on your headset type) - tap it
   
8. uncheck the option Get help from Google
   
   
   

That's it! You don't have to disable the assistant on your headphones, but your headphones in your assistant. And this is regardless of whether the assistant is "off" or "on". Now you can listen to your music and books in peace.

"But, what about Bixby?" you will ask. As far as I can see, Bixby is something that comes over Google Assistant. I did disable some stuff in it, but I doubt it was a problem to begin with.

  I had tried to install the latest version of Windows 10 (at this time 1909, the September 2019 version), but it had failed with a blue screen. I kind of ignored it, because I thought they will probably fix it or maybe it's because my laptop is new and so on. But recently I got this warning in Settings Windows Update: "You’re currently running a version of Windows that’s nearing the end of service. We recommend you update to the most recent version of Windows 10 to get the latest features and security improvements".

  So I tried to install it again. Same thing: a blue screen with a creepy smiley telling me it has failed to boot, with a stop code of "MEMORY MANAGEMENT" at FIRST_BOOT when BOOTing. Well, no shit, Sherlock! I tried to install it using the Media Creation Tool (which I recommend when you have Windows Update issues because you can download the update and save it into an ISO, so you can try it again and again without redownloading everything) and I got a more specific error: "0xC1900101 - 0x30017". What does it mean? No one knows, but it led me down a rabbit hole of people having a lot of different issues.

  This post will not discuss every single problem out there, you can search for yourself, I only wrote this because in some obscure corner of a forum I saw one person saying he solved by uninstalling Diskcryptor, a software that I had also installed, but never used. Once I uninstalled it, the update went without a hitch.

  So, summary:

• if you have Diskcryptor, uninstall it. You can re-install it later.
• download the Media Creation Tool for your service pack
• tell it to download in an ISO file
• mount the ISO and install from there
• check what error you get
• Google for it until you find someone having had the same specific problem

I am writing this post to let people know why a particular annoying problem happens on Windows 10 with regards to notifications. Before it was called "Focus Assist" it was called "Quiet hours" and you would turn it on to make annoying notifications not show while you were working or playing. After a Windows update, Microsoft renamed it to Focus Assist and turned it into a more complex setting, rather than on/off. But then the problems appeared.

Symptoms:

• Notification traybar bubble is white (outline filled) and going over with the mouse it either says nothing or says "1 notification"
• When you click on it, it shows no notifications and the bubble remains filled
• If you right-click it, none of the options in the Focus Assist menu seem to be working and none are checked
• If you go to Settings and click on Focus Assist, Settings crashes with no error message
• You also may have Avast antivirus installed

People have been tracking the problem on this Microsoft forum: Settings app crashes accessing "Focus Assist" settings and here are our findings:

1. The problem comes from Avast (or some other source) turning off the Windows Push Notifications User Service. Turning it on, restores Focus Assist functionality.
2. Avast has something called Silent Mode, which many people use because Avast started pushing all these annoying messages lately
3. In the Avast configuration (go to Menu , Settings, Components, scroll down the page until Performance, Do Not Disturb Mode, then Customize) there is a setting called "Silence notifications from 3rd-party apps". By default it's on. Turn it off and Avast will no longer kill the service
4. If the cause of this behavior is different from Avast's silent mode, let me know. An immediate fix is to go to Services (services.msc), scroll down to Windows Push Notifications User Service (followed by underscore and some meaningless numbers and letters) and make sure it is started.

Hope this helps.

TLDR version:

0x80070643 is probably thrown when you don't have the right software version, in other words, the update is not for you. Sometimes you need to upgrade your software in order for it to apply. To fix the problem with SQL Server, try installing the SQL Server 2014 Service Pack 2 if you are still at SP1.

Now for the full version:

I thought the way Windows updates is a good thing. It keeps the computer up to date, regardless of how annoying it is to stop your work in order to perform updates. The problem, though, appears when having to perform an update that fails. Windows Update will nag at you again and again and again that you have updates. You don't have the option to ignore an update (unless you download a specific tool) so you are forced to solve any problem with the update. This is still a good thing, even if annoying. And if regular people that don't know how to solve issues like that are angered enough, it will also motivate Microsoft to test their updates better. Win, win. Unless it happens to you!

Anyway, this blog post is about KB4019099 or KB4032542 - Cumulative Update 13 for SQL Server 2014 SP1 which failed with a vague error code Error 0x80070643, which is met in several situations when trying to install stuff. In order to get to the bottom of the problem, I manually downloaded the installer for the update and tried again.

This time the error was clearer: TITLE: SQL Server Setup failure.
------------------------------

SQL Server Setup has encountered the following error:

The cached MSI file 'C:\WINDOWS\Installer\1bfcbd.msi' is missing.
Its original file is 'sql_engine_core_inst.msi' and it was installed for product 'SQL Server 2014 Database Engine Services' from 'F:\x64\setup\sql_engine_core_inst_msi\', version '12.1.4100.1', language 'ENU'.
To resolve this problem, recover the missing file from the installation media and start setup again.
For more information about how to resolve this problem, see 'Steps to restore the missing Windows Installer cache files' (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=144387) in the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

Error code 0x84B20002.

For help, click: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?LinkID=20476...

Amazingly enough, the link that is supposed to solve the problem actually solves the problem. First of all the go.microsoft.com link causes too many redirects for Chrome, so you have to open it in some other browser. Once you do that, you reach this link: How to restore the missing Windows Installer cache files and resolve problems that occur during a SQL Server update and at the end you get a VBS script that seems to repair missing C:\Windows\Installer files from the original installation source.

The first thing the page says is to try setup.exe /ACTION=REPAIR /INDICATEPROGRESS=TRUE from the original installation source for SQL Server 2014, which of course you don't have anymore. But even if you do have it and you run the command, it fails near the end with a funny error: "C:\WINDOWS\Installer\1bfa87.msi" So the only possible solution is to run the VBS script. After that, the update install actually started.

... and failed with another error: The upgrade cannot be installed by the Windows Installer service because the program to be upgraded may be missing, or the upgrade may update a different version of the program. Verify that the program to be upgraded exists on your computer and that you have the correct upgrade.
Error code: 1642. Why are you asking me to upgrade something if I don't even have the version you need?! I've tried the setup repair option, just to see if anything else changed since running FindSQLInstalls.vbs, but I got the same error.

Under the assumption that the "original installation source" is actually not enough - since there was a Service Pack 2 released since I've installed SQL Server from a kit, I've downloaded the SP2 file. Maybe it has a repair option. Ran it, and it ran successfully. Could it be that I never upgraded my SQL Server instance? Yes. Then all those "different version" messages actually make some sense.

Once I did that, Windows Update presented me with different updates altogether! Note that the original update said "SQL Server 2014 SP1" when executed.

Some of the updates installed OK, some failed, mainly Security Update for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 (KB2645410) and Update for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 (KB2635973). These are updates from 2012 and are related to the standalone VS version used by SQL Server Management Studio. I tried a restart, the updates remained there to annoy me. They both failed with error code 0x80070643 and when tried to install them manually they both reported the wrong software version.

Perhaps it is from all the meddling. Installing SP2 would have probably solved all the problems.

I hope it takes you less time to figure this out, once you've read this article.

Update: How to solve the issue of obsolete Visual Studio 2010 updates:

I've downloaded the Microsoft Fixit tool for forceful uninstall of software, even if the installer is not cached in C:\Windows\Installer. Then I uninstalled "Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 ENU". At this moment SQL Server 2014 Management Studio would not work anymore due to a missing component. Then I reinstalled Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Shell (Isolated) Redistributable Package. At this moment SQL Server 2014 worked again. Then I ran Windows Update, which found several updates to download, including a Service Pack 1 and several others. Their installation went with only a hitch, a random 0x80246007 (BITS service) error that went away when I retried the update. I started Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Management Studio, just to be sure it worked, and it did. Finally.

Thus endeth the saga of the reluctant Windows Updates.

I've decided the functionality of the Bookmark Explorer extension was pretty close to final and, before I refactor it to a new form, I wanted to make sure it works for all the browsers that support the WebExtensions mechanism, mainly Chrome, Firefox and Opera. Frankly, I have no idea why anyone would use Firefox or Opera, but if you do, I've got great news for you: I have published the extension for all of them:

• Chrome
• Firefox
• Opera

Haven't tested extensively, I am going to do that in the near future, but rejoice, now you can read your news at speed and comfort, then remove them from your bookmarks once you have grown tired. There are some changes to the extension that need to be addressed:

• The most significant is changing the keyboard shortcut for "Previous Bookmark" to Ctrl-Shift-O for Firefox and Opera, because changing extension key shortcuts in Firefox is really difficult and Ctrl-Shift-K is already used by the developer tools
• The default settings have been updated. Now, when you install the extension for the first time you will get:
  • 30 second wait for the "Read Later" links to autoclose, giving the browser time to cache the title and icon
  • Preload next tab is now true by default, leading to loading the content of the next news item while you read the current one
  • When creating bookmarks - from anywhere - their URLs will be stripped of some marketing bullshit
• A lot of bug fixes and speed improvements went into this aparrently minor release

I also plan to make a video of how to use the extension, since letting users read the long description and figure out what the extension does didn't quite work :) I am considering changing the name of the extension for version 3 and I am open to suggestions. I am thinking of Bookmark Surf or something like this. Please let me know of any problems with the extension. I will fix bugs and I will write new features if I agree they are good for my users. All you have to do is ask!

Enjoy!

Update: I was so happy that Firefox for Android supports addons that I just installed it immediately and expected it to work. Unfortunately, the support for the Web Extensions API is very limited for the Android version, most importantly not having a bookmarks API, so the Bookmark Explorer doesn't work. I did make the extension more robust, though, by debugging it on the Android version.

Ever wanted to write a quick and dirty Javascript function that would get content from the web and do something with it, but you couldn't because of the pesky cross origin security limitations? Good Samaritans have created CORS proxies to help with that!

One of them is crossorigin.me, a completely free (and open source) proxy which can be used very easily. Instead of doing an AJAX request to http://someDomainYouDontOwn/somePage, you do it to https://crossorigin.me/http://someDomainYouDontOwn/somePage. And it works for any GET requests, as long as the Origin header is sent (browsers set it automatically for Ajax calls, but not for regular browser requests, so that why https://crossorigin.me/https://google.com will show Origin: header is required if you open it with a browser).

But there are other options, too. CORS Anywhere, CORS proxy and even using YQL are all valid, and that after just five minutes of googling around.

Of course, one might not want to depend on flimsy external free services for a production app, but it sounds perfect for the quick and dirty bastards like me.

I want to let you know about the latest features implemented in Bookmark Explorer.



The version number for the extension is already 2.9.3, quickly approaching the new rewrite I am planning for 3.0.0, yet every time I think I don't have anything else I could add, I find new ideas. It would be great if the users of the extension would give me more feedback about the features they use, don't use or want to have.

Here are some examples of new features:

• Skip button - moves the current page to the end of the bookmark folder and navigates to the next link. Useful for those long articles that you don't have the energy to read, but you want to.
• Custom URL comparison scheme. Useful for those sites where pages with different parameters or hash values are considered different and you get duplicate notification warnings for no good reason.
• Duplicate remover in the Manage page. This is an older feature, but now the button for it only appears where there are duplicates in the folder and with the custom URL scheme it's much more useful.
• Option to move selected bookmarks to start or end of folder, something that is cumbersome to do in the Chrome Bookmark Manager
• Automatically cleaning bookmark URLs of marketing parameters. This is in the Advanced settings section and must be enabled manually. So far it removes utm_*, wkey, wemail, _hsenc, _hsmi and hsCtaTracking, but I plan to remove much more, like those horrible hashes from Medium, for example. Please let me know of particular URL patterns you want to clean in your bookmarks and if perhaps you want the cleaning to be done automatically for all open URLs

As always, if you want to install the extension go to its Google Chrome extension page: Siderite's Bookmark Explorer