Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

Did you know that Microsoft still sells Office for home computer users as a one-time purchase with perpetual license, just like they did before pushing Office 365 and Microsoft 365 into everything?

One of my customers did, and they hired me to buy and install it for them. (On their MS account, with their card, and with their close supervision every step of the way invited, of course.)

Did you know that sometimes Microsoft doesn't want your money at all? Neither of us did.

However, the linked GitHub repo is gone now, and the user has no public repos at all. This may or may not be a fork of it: https://github.com/dpajak-synaptics/on-device-ai-assistant

Such promise, already ruined by other forces within three months.

LB ( https://petewarden.com/2025/10/16/why-does-a-local-ai-voice-agent-running-on-a-super-cheap-soc-matter/ ):
The article doesn't address which LLM that local AI is using, but a comment below it does: https://petewarden.com/2025/10/16/why-does-a-local-ai-voice-agent-running-on-a-super-cheap-soc-matter/#comment-181304

The answer I'm reading is, it doesn't use one at all. Just voice recognition, pattern matching to choose a pre-approved response, and TTS for the chosen response. So no chance of a dishwasher telling a customer to check for power by sticking a fork in the wall outlet.

Mozilla Developer Network, "Realizing common layouts using grids": https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Guides/Grid_layout/Common_grid_layouts

Reading guides like that while lamenting the shortcomings of vintage Web browsing, even via RetroZilla in a Windows 98SE VM, does strange things to a girl, y'know?

Related: CSS grids are 3 years older than Chromium-based Microsoft Edge and only 2 years younger than EdgeHTML (Trident)-based Microsoft Edge Legacy.

I'm reading that the CSS "display: contents;" on TR and (implicit) TBODY elements wrecks accessibility of tables as tabular data, rendering their TH and TD cells as ordinary content with no tabular relationship instead, but since these are tables "misapplied" for layout only and never meant to be tabular data themselves (one of the only ways to control page layout in pre-CSS and CSS1 days), that seems like a perk in this specific case.

Applying the CSS "@supports (display: grid) { .wrapper > tbody, .wrapper > tbody > tr { display: contents; } }" with wild abandon in GeoCities HTML table-based layout templates optimized for Internet Explorer 3 and/or Netscape Navigator 3 to make them pleasant on sub-VGA pocket screens while still remaining optimized for those early browsers and every desktop browser since: from IE3 to Edge 125, and from NN3 to Firefox 128.

TIL there used to be a corporation called the International Steam Pump Company, but the first few times I heard the name I kept hearing "the International Steampunk Company" instead.

While it operated during the USA's Progressive Era, it was only in the half coincident with the Edwardian Era, not the Victorian Era.

While grocery shopping & passing through the frozen pizza section, I realized something:

A party pizza feeds a regular person, while a regular pizza feeds a party of people.

@mavica_again That's some admirable optimism, aye.