Might as well share my weirdest proto social media thing.

9/11.

(I’m in Finland. This happened in the afternoon.)

I was leaving work. I distinctly remember a coworker being alarmed about news.

I turned to the usual news source. Slashdot. Massive bloody thread about airplanes hitting the World Trade Center.

OK, that’s pretty bad.

I finally turn to TV news. …OK, stuff is far more in flames than I expected. I think I caught one of the towers collapsing in live TV.

But the following days, my primary news source about 9/11 was, actually, IRC! There was a channel on Freenode where a bot posted headlines about 9/11 investigations. Because the actual news websites were bloody dead under the massive traffic.

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.

I miss my SoundBlaster Live! card. Excellent sound quality. Last used with the last computer I built, in the late-mid-2000s. That was the second computer I had that had on-board audio, and I just didn’t bother with on-board audio because I just straight up assumed it was going to be shit. Unfortunately it stopped working at some point, along with the GPU (I suspect a static electricity fuck-up on my part, or something) which didn’t matter all that much because I was mostly using the system as a server at that point.

(I’m going to build a new NAS server from ground up later this year, and I’m contemplating getting an external DAC for it for use with musicpd. Wonder if there’s still SoundBlaster branded DACs, or are they gone? …Oh they’re still around!? Good.)

I mean, C is a high level language? Now, sure, C isn’t a super expressive language and every C statement compiles to very few assembly instructions comparatively speaking, but it has a whole lot of stuff that assembly doesn’t have. Like nice loops and other control structures and such, and not worry about which processor registers are used.

Oh no. You know shit is really terrible when they cannot even afford to communicate at 8 bits. It’s 5 bits Baudot code. Capital letters only. They actually had to pay extra for @, #, and $. Thankfully, by 1870s, % was part of the character set. My heart’s with anyone who can’t just blast UTF-8 out wherever they can.

(Edit: In case you’re wondering why it has a weird gif attached to it: The Memelord, Musky Elon, has decreed that you can actually attach a shitty random gif FOR FREE. So of course any cash strapped institution will do so.)

Most common mouse problem I have is that grime gets in the wheel and it acts up or seizes up. (Cleaning wheels is also a huge headache with newer mice.) Buttons rarely quit working. …except on some of my Logitech mouses, sometimes the buttons just started going funky or died. My Microsoft wireless travel mouse has kept working for years. I have an Microsoft Intellimouse Optical from early 2000s that I still use with Raspberry Pi, no problems.

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.)

To adapt an old joke: “If you see a raging dipshit driving like a lunatic in the middle of the road with their giant-ass car, you should contact the nearest police officer immediately. It’s possible they’re behind the wheel.”

You know what’s even more beautiful about capitalism?

When national (and multinational) legislation sets extremely high standards for drinking water providers. So high, in fact, that tech bros just go “you know, I have no idea how to improve on that”. So they don’t launch their shitty product here in the first place.

Until next time!

Fun thing, the last time I used LimeWire was actually in Linux. So obviously I was immediately highly suspicious about .exe results. (Wouldn’t even have been able to run them anyway. Wine was far less functional back then.)

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.

For data gathering? Pretty much anything that doesn’t fiddle with the values. Usually, bespoke apps or applications specifically designed for survey data. People actually use spreadsheet programs a lot, but those who do spend a lot of time on ensuring data gets entered correctly.

When I was taking my introductory courses in computer science over 20 years ago, they told me to not use Excel if you can avoid it, because it’s not very, you know, precise. So I’m well aware that this is an ancient joke. Excel will fuck your data up - AI is just another way to do it.

But it is a potential scifi plot point.

However, I will concede that it’s probably not a scifi plot point for too long. Worse things have already happened.

Uh huh. Interesting

(furious scribbling in the scifi worldbuilding notes) “In 2050, the names of the months got inadvertently legally changed when a megacorporation released a new version of their office suite and silently corrupted thousands of government document drafts.”

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.