Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

Even though I fix PCs for a living, my perspective is rather uniquely that of a (fruit-free) Unix user who constantly wonders how Windows is considered an OS ready for desktop use.

The problem Microsoft has to clean up is that users of its most successful products were taught by an endless stream of ads (and obvious lack of user education) to click everything, without caring that very few of them were taught the social skills necessary to spot and question the weaselly behavior inherent in advertising.

The locked down nanny of a Web browser that Edge is, seems to be a brutally excessive way to do that, though.

It took three times of allowing the Firefox installer, all via hidden options, before Microsoft actually allowed the installer to run.

This ain't no fly-by-night, Microsoft!

Firefox? Mozilla? Not commonly downloaded? Is 1998 calling?

Microsoft, I know you're trying to shake your reputation as malware-friendly, but doing this when downloading a popular Web browser is over the Edge.

It seems the hardware was fine, but a brand new ethernet-free lappy fresh-installed with a manufacturer-supported OS according to the manufacturer support phone desk's instructions didn't have a compatible driver. Does anyone even think about driver availability?

Insert the generic dongle, pick a wifi network, lock up for lunch. Come back, eject dongle, and presto! The on-board wifi does what it should've done if the manufacturer thought for five seconds about the driver.

Y'know, @hp@twitter, in an age when everything needs to access a network to get anything done, integrating a network device that doesn't have driver support built in to a supported OS is not smart.

I shouldn't have to buy a generic wifi dongle to download & install a wifi driver.

Did you know you can dual-boot #Windows10 on a #Windows11 PC? Boot Win10 installer, Shift-F10, use "diskpart" to shrink the Win11 partition, then install Win10 in the free space.

The installer will helpfully detect both versions and give you a dual-boot menu! 🙆‍♀️​

The installer will also helpfully call both bootable Windows partitions "Windows 10" for you! 🤦‍♀️​

I'm installing #Windows10 for a customer. It needs me to connect to the Internet, but the only option I can click on is "I don't have internet".

Yes, really.

"Network:"
"Let's connect you to a network
To finish setup, you'll need to connect to the internet."

"I don't have internet"

There is literally nothing else on the screen or in the tab order.

World class quality product from the corporation that wants to be the only *micro*computer *soft*ware company in existence.

Anyway, it was and is a great computer, but the single worst thing ever about the Commodore 64 personal computer is the Commodore 1541 floppy disk drive.

I was reminded today about the worst backup mistake I ever made.

Way back when hard disks were luxuries, I was making a backup of a floppy disk by copying it to another floppy. I verified which disk to copy and which was blank, but while the disk copier was loading, I got them mixed up.

The disk was halfway through quietly formatting away, in the slowest floppy drive ever invented, when I noticed the disk in my hand was the unformatted blank.

Profane lamentations for days.

The 40th anniversary of the Commodore 64 is this month. Watch out for nostalgia grifters, and double check that post and poster before you RT, boost, or share that trip down memory lane.

I had the dream again, and it was clearer. It was pairs and quartets of hexadecimal digits. This time, the opcodes were marshmallows, and the oat operands were common addresses and values. They looked like Alpha-Bits pieces stuck together.

I ate an A9 marshmallow, a 04 bit, an 8D marshmallow, and a D021 bit. Then my placemat turned purple.

I'm so completely consumed with C64 programming that I dreamed I was eating 6502 assembly language code for breakfast. I don't remember what they looked like, but the opcodes and operands were sweetened oats, and the registers were marshmallows.

Reminder to fellow programmers:

Make computers conform to people.
Stop trying to make people conform to computers.

Make computers help people.
Stop following the trend of making computers harm people.

Oh, wait, that's why. DAs don't have to preserve the color matrix if the main app tells them they don't have to.

I finally wrote a program that produced an obvious assembler error. geoAssembler saves errors to geoWrite documents and runs geoWrite directly. geoWrite also didn't repair colors until after a DA ran.

Today literally marks one year since my hypertension crisis diagnosis. I made it.

I had gone in for mystery bruising that seemed related to the painful sneeze the week before, not for heart-related suspicions.