Tag Archives: annoyances

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Turn Off The Dictation Hotkey

I have a habit where I’m about to type a control key (e.g. control-c), I’ll hit the control key twice. I don’t know why I do this, and I’m not sure why it’s only the control key, but on Mac, this has the unwanted side-effect of popping up a prompt to enable dictation. (If I had dictation enabled, I suspect it would start transcribing my speech, which might be even worse.)

Macintosh dialog box asking, "Do you want to enable Dictation."

To turn this off:

Go to system preferences and scroll down to “Keyboard.”

Macintosh preferences dialog with the "Keyboard" pane active.

At the bottom of the keyboard pane, is the “Shortcut” label. This shows the current hotkey for activating dictation. I really don’t want this hotkey, but there doesn’t seem to be an option to not have one, so I’ll choose the microphone and hope it doesn’t start transcribing every random conversation near the MacBook.

List of dictation hotkey options: "Press Microphone," "Press Control Key Twice," "Press Globe Twice," "Press Right Command Key Twice," "Press Left Command Key Twice," "Press Either Command Key Twice," "Customize..."

(Cover image generated by AI via bing.com/create.)

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Turn off the “finish setting up your device” screen

One of my peeves with Windows 10 is occasionally I’ll get a screen saying “Let’s finish setting up your device.” (Uh, I finished setting it up a couple years ago, why do you keep suggesting this?)

This evening, I spotted a post on Twitter from @MrTurner asking how to get rid of that prompt. Great question! And there was an equally awesome reply from @Lucas_Trz with the answer.

So, just in case that isn’t clear enough.

  1. Go into settings (click the Start button, and then the “gear” icon), click 
  2. Click “System”
  3. Click “Notifications & actions”
  4. Uncheck the box next to the text that starts off with “Show me the Windows welcome experience after updates and occasionally” (I’d like to suggest you might want to uncheck a few other things as well.)

Going forward, this is on my list of things I’ll do any time I reinstall Windows. Right next to turning off the feedback surveys.

Cover image by twitter user @MrTurnerj, used in the context of a critique of Windows.

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Turning off Windows feedback prompts

I use Windows, Linux and Mac. I hop between them several times a day and find that each has its own strengths and annoyances.

This evening, Windows presented me with a prompt, asking how hard it is to customize Windows. It took me out of my workflow, distracting me from the task I originally wanted to work on.

As a society, we get a lot of surveys. Because if asking a small sample of consumers what they think of a product will give useful information, then asking a large group will surely give the survey takers an even better idea of what’s going on.

And so, we get surveys on the receipts at restaurants and home improvement stores. We get feedback requests from apps on our phones. (We probably get surveyed on drug store receipts, but it’s hard to tell with all the coupons.) And now we’re being prompted for feedback from the computer’s operating system.

Here’s how to (hopefully) remove that one: At least, until they add another survey tool.

  1. Go to the settings app (Windows key + I
  2. In the search, type “Feedback”
  3. Select “Diagnostics & feedback settings.”
  4. Scroll down. About 2/3 of the way down the page, you’ll find a box for selecting “Feedback frequency”, labeled “Windows should as for my feedback.” By default, this will say “Automatically (Recommended).”
  5. Change the setting to suit. (I chose “Never.”)

I’ll update this post as I find other feedback prompts to disable.

(Image by Pixabay user mohamed_hassan, used under the Pixabay license.)

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Turn off Chrome notification pop-ups.

Talking to my Dad over the weekend, I learned he’d recently started seeing ads appear on his computer. These days, everyone’s used to seeing ads pop up in the web browser, but these were in the lower right corner of the screen, and would stick around if you moved the browser window.

My first thought was some sort of malware infection, but there didn’t seem to be any unusual processes running. The vital clue was when Dad mentioned that the ads only showed up when Chrome was running, and would disappear if you closed all the Chrome windows. An online search revealed a new suspect – Chrome’s browser notifications.

If you’ve used Chrome at all in the past year or two, you’ve very likely seen the browser display a message asking for permission from one site or another (or dozens) to display notifications. The idea behind notifications is that even if you aren’t actively browsing a particular site, you can still let it put up a message about an important update (e.g. event tickets going on sale). In this case, someone had decided to use notifications to display ads and Mom or Dad had accidentally given the site permission to display them.

Fortunately, once you know what’s going on, it’s pretty easy to turn notifications back off.

The steps below turn notifications off altogether; you should’t even be prompted anymore. I generally try to avoid distractions, but if you don’t want to turn them completely off, you can stop at step 6 to review and edit the list of sites where they’re allowed and/or blocked.

  1. In the upper right corner of the Chrome browser, click on the three vertical dots.
  2. Near the bottom of the menu, click settings.
  3. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Advanced.”
  4. Go to the “Privacy and Security” section and click “Site Settings”.
  5. Find the line for “Notifications” (there will be a small bell to the left).
  6. Click Notifications.
  7. At the top of the page, where it says “Ask before sending (recommended)”, click on the blue “slider” button.  It will turn gray.
  8. At the top, click on  the “Notifications” arrow.
  9. Click on the “Site Settings” arrow.

Done.