Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

I'm simply tickled that the instruction leaflet implies they offer FreeDOS and a Linux distro as home PC choices, in addition to all three choices having something approaching user-accessible manuals.

OH MY GOODNESS!!!!!

(buried in a corner of the leaflet, but still...)

8D

Power-user dicks when asked how to do a simple task: "RTFM!"

TFM:

It's time for a new out of body^W box experience. Today's tech support patient is a PC transfer to a new-in-box Windows 11 PC.

My wall calendar knows what's up.

Merry Samhain and happy November, folks!

Some interesting 50th anniversaries are coming up this month:

Unix First Edition, the first actual manual for Unix, on Wednesday,

The Intel 4004, the first CPU on a chip, two weeks from today,

And then me. Yeah, I don't know yet how I'll celebrate my 50th birthday.

Happy 20th anniversary to #Windows XP and almost 20th to this iconic #WindowsXP installation photo! #WinXP (It was yesterday, but...)

This weekend's achievement: Successfully rearranged my living room without the space to do it in, while blasting Two Steps From Hell.

When people don't know even the basic theory of how their own computers work, can you really blame them for not knowing the dangers of risky browsing behavior & how to spot them?

Malware authors exploit owner-user ignorance, & anti-malware vendors encourage that ignorance.

Hackers somehow got their rootkit a Microsoft-issued digital signature: https://www.zdnet.com/article/hackers-somehow-got-their-rootkit-a-microsoft-issued-digital-signature/

"In order to stay safe, we recommend that users only download software from the vendor's website or from trusted resources." ... Um, isn't that why code is signed, victim blamer?

e621 is leaking out into the real world: https://screenshotsofdespair.tumblr.com/post/662330411317411840

Give me that stupid & supremely campy '70s & '80s YA sci-fi. The aesthetic is beautiful.
The Tomorrow People
UFO Kidnapped
Captain Power
Photon
That last one still has me saying, "The light shines!," or, "Let the darkness grow!," when I wait for something to light up.

Way back in '13, I remarked: `sc` is an old-school spreadsheet for the #DayWithoutX, but there's no way to marshal data between sc and Excel without troubling data loss?

#TIL there's a better console spreadsheet, `teapot`, it's batch-mode scriptable for shellscripts, and it can at least marshal Office Overkill XML if you save them in Lotus 1-2-3's WK1 format instead of XLSX.
https://www.syntax-k.de/projekte/teapot/

TEMPEST hazard of the day: ordinary ethernet cables. https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/14/lantenna_ethernet_cable_rf_emissions/

And now, the showstopper y'all saw coming: My customer has to make a Google account in order to do anything more than just turn it on.

How do I turn it off?