Joke’s on you, Microsoft.

First of all, I already have Game Pass, so you don’t get any new sales.
Second, if I open the settings app in Windows 11, it just straight up crashes. (Can access the other tabs, e.g. through desktop customisation. But if I go to the front page, it crashes.)

It was broken by the update that supposedly added some other ads. But I’ve not seen them! I had to disable the “recommendations” in start menu because it made the start menu not work at all (due to the aforementioned crash, same deal).

This actually really sucks, though. Windows Store apps do not update themselves, Xbox services stopped working (due to being unable to update WS games), and I don’t know if Windows Update works or not. I guess I need to reinstall when I get arsed to.

Sharing screenshots and video captures.

The only place where I tried to use it was on Xbox back when Xbox One first came out, and I didn’t like the way it worked back then, so I didn’t really use it much. It didn’t send the actual media to Twitter, it posted a link to the file, and Xbox screenshots got deleted after 30 days. If I wanted to properly post it so that the media was actually hosted on Twitter, I had to save the full res media anyway.

(In fact actually saving full resolution Xbox screenshots used to be needlessly difficult. Only much later they added a way to save screenshots to OneDrive, which occasionally worked, and only very recently they decided they don’t bother with the Xbox screenshot hosting at all and auto-upload everything to OneDrive.)

Oh last year I paid the ticket in cash, 20€, no problem. This year? 20€, plus 1+bits euros of processing fees. To “deliver” my ticket to the platform of my choice. (…Mobile app.)

So I went to the car show. They still had the cash booth. Mild failure to communicate. I just dodged the field of view of the booth guys, out of shame, and entered like normal, glad the ticket guards were accommodating.

Oh I forgot the best part! When I was trying to log on and the security interfered with CAPTCHAs, Ticketmaster reset my password several times. That’s how you know this company take security seriously. /s (Literally no site does this.)

Meanwhile, earlier this month, I had to literally disable quite a few bits of adblocks and other extensions just so that Ticketmaster’s crappy CAPTCHA thing would allow me to even log in. Literally screamed “Why are you pestering me, I’m just trying to buy a ticket to a local car show, not a fucking Madonna concert”

How come everyone is forgetting the best practices in Bitcoin backup?

You put the stuff in a container, put it in a hole in your yard, and put a birdbath on top of it.

The birdbath is a crucial security step! Standard practice! Been that way for years! I frankly can’t believe a lot more people don’t know about it.

You Chrome folks need extensions to use non-Google search engines?

Firefox uses just bog standard OpenSearch definitions. No shenanigans. Ships with both Google and Bing if you’re into that sort of things. And you can add arbitrary search URLs, no probalo.

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NOP is $EA, of course, and… um…

…sorry, I’m just a Commodore 64 scrub, I don’t know nothing about this high and mighty Intel 8086 nonsense.

[looking up]

…it’s 0x90 on IA-32? WHAT? Someone told me every processor used 0xEA because that was commonly agreed and readily apparent. …guess I was wrong

In Wikimedia projects (and MediaWiki systems in general) you actually have to pay attention to other people’s usernames (when working with histories and in article discussions), and at least in Wikipedia long long time ago there was a lot of trolling/vandalism where people impersonated other users (particularly the admins) and made bunch of sockpuppets with tiny variations in names when they got banned. So this rule makes sense.

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It wasn’t really Microsoft that killed Nokia’s cell phone division, but gave it the final blow that made the house of cards fall.

Nokia was basically getting super arrogant. “Oh, trust us, we’re the #1 phone manufacturer on the planet. We know what’s best for the market”. They got caught completely pants down when iPhone came out. Despite the fact that they had already made successful smartphones (Nokia Communicator line). Despite the fact that there was this one small Finnish company that had made a touchscreen based phone and Nokia just laughed them off when they offered to help.

Every move Nokia made after iPhone was basically playing catch-up with some really strange decisions.

I believe that Nokia could have salvaged themselves if, instead of going with Windows Phone, they had just announced they’ll be Yet Another Android Manufacturer. But Nokia had to be special about it. They had invested in Ovi (app store) and Here (map service) and they just had to be special. (And even more ironic is that HMD Global is doing just fine as a maker of Nokia-branded Android phones these days.)

I really need to go through my old files and find The Screenshot from around 1999-2000. Basically, I searched for something in AltaVista and got back a page that was super chock full of ads and “portal crud”. …and a tiny little text that you really had to squint for, somewhere in the middle, that said there were no search results, actually. I got the strong impression that this search engine was fucked.

Sometimes Google’s results are kind of starting to look like the same, except the crud is in the actual results. Which is something Google could do something about. I mean, they used to care about SEO spam.

Can we just say that Cybertruck is basically a sum of everything wrong with right wing wackos?

“Look at me, I’m a badass, driving around in a badass vehicle, unlike you filthy libruls. … Aww shucks! There’s road salt! And my accelerator pedal just fell off wtf. …OH NO! A LITTLE WATER TOO! Anything but that!”

That’s a semiaquatic turtle. They can swim. They can also climb things (in difficult conditions, slowly and carefully). And they love to bask in the sun. So yeah.

Debian, the cool guy distro in 1999. The machine overlords run on Red Hat.

In the low budget parody version, Neo ran Slackware, and the climatic battle was basically about Agent Smith somehow fucking up his libc.so.6 but then Trinity got him a copy of the file on 3.5" floppy from another system. Or something.

Scrivener!

The frustrating thing is that, at least for me, there are no perfect word processors geared for novels and other scenarios where you manage large text masses.

Scrivener is one of those cases where you have a pretty excellent software that doesn’t have a lot of problems OSS alternatives have. I have smooth time with it. But at the same time, the software always could be better.

Probably the best OSS novel writing software I’ve used is Org-Mode for Emacs. But, you know, it’s based on Emacs, so it squeaks around the edges and gives the impression that it’s a miracle it runs as brilliantly as it does.

They recently added some unlockable graphics for the widget. Nothing major.

Guess they changed the icon just for the hell of it while they were at it.

converting an autotools build recipe

Oh yes!

to a bare makefile

Oh no!

Yup. Got also added to the Jargon File, which was an influential collection of hacker slang.

If there’s one thing that Elon is really good at, it’s taking obscure beloved nerd tidbits and then pigeon-shitting all over them.

I can confidently say that CSV support is one of those problems that even the brightest computer scientists will be pondering for the decades to come.

Supporting CSVs sounds like an easy problem, but it’s not. It’s like a whole different complexity type. Time complexity, space complexity, and now, the dreaded subclass between spec complexity and organisational complexity.

You can’t just make the users agree which delimiter to use and how quotes are supposed to work. That’s nearly impossible. No no no.