dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

Elysium actually had some semblance of working technology, though.

I’m not going through all that BS just to reward the manufacturer with a sale. It went back, fuck 'em, and I replaced it with a normal cheap computer monitor which is what I told him to buy in the first place.

That won’t save you anymore. My boss bought a smallish smart TV in contravention of my explicit instructions for use as a CCTV monitor because it was “cheap.” It nags you on power up with a popup whining about not being able to access the internet, and if you don’t feed it your Wifi password it will subsequently display that same popup every 30 minutes or so requiring you to dismiss it again. And again. And again. Apparently the play is to just annoy you into caving and letting it access your network.

Instead I packed it up and returned it. Fuck that.

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected variable "total" on line 2

Using Rufus still works. I did it as recently as a couple of days ago.

If you sign in with a Microsoft account at all I don’t believe there’s the capability to opt out.

I only use local accounts. I have never had a Microsoft account. I never will.

They don’t have a copy of every single Bitlocker key. They do have a copy of your Bitlocker key if you are dumb enough to allow it to sync with your Microsoft account, you know, “for convenience.”

Don’t use a Microsoft account with Windows, even if you are forced to use Windows.

Debian in its GUI (at least KDE, which I’m using at the moment) demanding the root password to install the updates it’s blinking at me about in the tray all the time. In this context, demanding a password at all is rather silly (Windows doesn’t require your password to install updates in a single user environment, and it doesn’t even pop up a UAC prompt) and this is going to be yet another one of those things that prior Windows users will moan about, declaring that “Linux is complicated and hard” and drive them back to the comfort of the devil they know when they feel like their own computer is actively trying to stymie them at seemingly every turn.

My user account is a sudoer so there is absolutely no technical reason my own password shouldn’t work. And, in fact, if I run updates via apt in a terminal it does. But allowing updates to install from the desktop environment, something ostensibly ought to be a routine userspace kind of operation, requires everyone using the system who might want to do this to know the system-wide root password. This is a monumentally stupid idea.

I am well aware there are myriad ways around this but they all involve hand-editing config files and come with stern warnings about “this may break your system so proceed ‘carefully,’” as if anyone who is not already an experienced Linux nerd will know just what the hell “proceeding carefully” is supposed to look like.

The inevitable XKCD comic succinctly sums this up:

The UNIX permissions and administration model may have made great sense on glass teletypes in the '70s and when nobody knew any better, but it’s certainly long outmoded now. It’s going to make a lot of people very angry to read this, but that’s actually one of the few things that Windows does much better, at least starting from NT onwards.

Photovalic solar was invented in 1954 and has been readily available since the 1960’s. In 1963 Japan was powering a lighthouse with it. And Solar One was operational in 1982.

If we gave a rat’s ass about solar at the time we easily could have done it also.