Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

Don't buy an HP laptop unless you love paying a premium for disposable hardware.

The only ones I've put my hands on lasting more than 4 years without something critical breaking are ones that spent at least 3 of those years turned off and collecting dust. Even better, when they break, simply buying replacement parts is a crapshoot of no-name third-party vendors with sketchy reviews, even on major second-party retail websites.

Customer: "I need a new computer. What kind should I get?"
Me: "Your pawn shop's oldest computer."

Ars Technica, 2025-04-11, "Microsoft is putting privacy-endangering Recall back into Windows 11": https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/04/microsoft-is-putting-privacy-endangering-recall-back-into-windows-11/
Snapshotting and AI processing a screen every 3 seconds. What could possibly go wrong?

For the last six days, everything everywhere broke both all at once and one at a time, somehow, all needing my personal involvement to fix, with not enough rest and no me-time. I exist, fatigued yet indefatigable.

It gets better. If I pass the mouse pointer over the OneDrive tray icons, they all go away as soon as they find themselves under it.

You have OneDrive.

I have SeventeenDrive.

#Windows 10 22H2 with a wifi network set to metered.

Programming languages that use their own package managers are safer and more secure than programming languages that rely on the underlying OS's package manager, and other lies programmers tell each other: 2025-02-05 edition.

Ars Technica, "Go Module Mirror served backdoor to devs for 3+ years": https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/02/backdoored-package-in-go-mirror-site-went-unnoticed-for-3-years/

It's apparently a false positive: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/loader-needs-to-be-updated-14-stable.94857/ #FreeBSD

(The release notes URLs for 13.3-RELEASE and 13.4-RELEASE don't discuss boot loader changes or actions.)

#FreeBSD 13.4-RELEASE-p2 amd64 with EFI (pretty sure UEFI), GPT, & encrypted ZFS root, after performing the steps recommended in:
- https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.0R/relnotes/#boot
- https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.1R/relnotes/#boot
- https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.2R/relnotes/#boot

Photographed with a Sony Mavica MVC-FD51, and read in using a SmartDisk FDUSB-TM2.

Task: Read an error message lasting only 0.5s between POST & OS loader.

Screenshot it: 🤡​

Take a photo with a smartphone: It unreliably spends up to 5s refocusing before snapping a blank screen.

Take a video with a smartphone: The error is too blurry to read, only coming into focus long after it's gone.

Take a photo with a flip phone's potato: It unreliably delays up to 2s.

Break out a 1998 camera that uses an actual floppy disk as film & USB FDD: Success on the very first try!

WAT 💾​

On the eve of 2025, 18 months after Microsoft decreed that "Outlook for Windows" will replace "Windows Mail" in both Windows 10 and Windows 11, 18 months after Microsoft promised it'll eventually support IMAP accounts just like its obsoleted apps did from Day 1, it still doesn't, and now every IMAP user who didn't know any better is SOL.

Happy new 1925, Windows users!

The GNU's Not Unix Image Manipulation Program, the legacy Photoshop workalike for Linux:

Why did they have to give its acronym an ableist slur when "GNU IMP" was---and still is---right there!

(It certainly misbehaves enough while still being useful enough to be an imp of folklore.)

Some of the MS Answers suggestions worked, some didn't. "bootrec /fixboot" gave "Access is denied" for example.

But when it was done, the new SSD booted all the way. Now on every boot, it stops to ask which OS I want to boot: "Windows 10" or "Windows 10".

... I have to start over from cloning the full SSD again, don't I.