Errands, dishes, cleaning the house, illegally unpaid overtime, Sisyphean traffic, overeating, illegally unpaid overtime, doomscrolling the YouTube homepage of all things if you can believe it, dishes, researching projects I don’t start, near-catatonic day sleeping, opening and closing my kitchen cabinets to look inside, a few rounds of Megabonk on handheld or iOS 4 era tower defense games on my phone, staring at the ceiling listening to weird internet music, programming 0.04% of a new personal project, Sisyphean traffic, errands, staring at the ceiling listening to podcasts about the terrible football team I follow, researching projects I don’t start, overeating, a few rounds of Megabonk on handheld or iOS 4 era tower defense games on my phone, cleaning the house, doomscrolling the YouTube homepage of all things if you can believe it, dishes, near-catatonic day sleeping, researching projects I don’t start, staring at the ceiling listening to nothing, illegally unpaid overtime, dishes, traffic, ceiling, dishes, unpaid overtime, podcasts, sleep,

The game I’m currently playing is great! I haven’t been able to play this last weekend though. Please ignore that Steam says I haven’t launched it since November 4.

I’ve hit procrastinating games that I want to play. Do you understand where that leaves other things that could be more important?

If the Mullvad desktop app could just exclude the Tailscale ports this would be fixed. I like their implementation but I would much rather have the full controls of the Mullvad software itself especially if I’m on a desktop.

I think I’ve heard somewhere an opinion that someone preferred the original atmosphere of the game even if it was flawed. I do wonder if they have a mode for that.

I haven’t played the game so I don’t know, but that’s the first thing I think of for some reason

I’m so vehemently opposed to using their euphemism for it. “Age verification” is just the marketing name for it, it’s identity verification.

Huh. Reddit used to allow VPN users to access images they host even if they didn’t let them browse the platform anonymously. Guess they “fixed” that.

O&O Shutup10 is the most straightforward for Windows. You can run it every once in a while to see if anything’s changed, and it will let you know.

I did have reduced frights on and it didn’t work for me. I’ve even read some anecdotes about it being worse than having it off. It doesn’t remove the creatures I think it just makes them walk slower and makes the sounds less jumpy, I think.

Put off the DLC for so long (4 years now? 5?) that I’d have to relearn a fair bit to get back into it.

I remember being chased by a creature and noping out. I’m not built for horror games and that was a huge shift in tone from the idyllic feeling of the base game. I get that the thing I’m avoiding is basically a sprite with eyes and some music cues designed to feel a little stressful but I don’t know.

Oh there’s absolutely no excuse for it not to open Terminal when you type terminal. I can’t replicate it on my side but I’ve probably turned that “feature” off ages ago. I’m a little surprised at the downvotes, as I’m making fun of Windows. Linux used to have a reputation for its learning curve, especially knowing CLI commands. Daunting stuff for the average user. It’s better now, and beautifully enough it’s Microsoft’s fuckery with putting unwanted shit in their OS that’s teaching people more about the inner workings of the system they’re using, both pushing them towards gutting the OS, and towards other OSes. In the Lemmy demographic that’s usually Linux, around me it’s actually been Macs, and those are even more egregiously expensive where I live.

Another way the esotericness tables have turned: the Windows configuration UIs have similar names, do adjacent functions, and aren’t listed anywhere in one place. You have to know what setting you want and where it’s found. There used to be one Control Panel, and a few advanced tools you could find in the Start menu. Microsoft wants to “modernize” some of these, so they’ve pulled parts of their settings piecemeal into their new Settings UI (which they call an app, I don’t like that). But you still have some settings that are still in the legacy Control Panel UI. You have a ton of settings that are still in standalone legacy settings UIs. Some of them look like Windows 10, some like Vista/7, and there’s a handful that look like Windows 95. You need to know that the display color calibration options in the Settings UI can be overridden by the vendor’s control software (that’s a whole rant), and that what you actually want is a standalone settings window called Color Management. You need to know what operations can be done in Disk Management, Disk Cleanup, Optimize Drives, you need to know that they exist, and you then need to know if the command you want is actually only achievable in diskpart. I have nothing against diskpart but I can’t tell you which among Terminal, PowerShell, or Windows PowerShell (or any of the x86 variations plural of each of them) is the right place to use it. I can intuitively tell it’s not Windows PowerShell ISE or Azure Cloud Shell though. Yay for computer literacy. I type cmd into the Start menu and it works from there, so I’m content with that. I can’t say Raspberry Pi OS has this many configuration locations but once you know the two or three places to look you’re done.

I know that I will have to move to Linux eventually. I’ve only complained about things in Windows that aren’t designed to abuse the users directly, which is a drop in the bucket, ethically at least, when you look at the responsibilities of the world’s most (or second most) influential company regarding personal computing. But I look at all this and feel like it’s accelerating the scary trend of younger people getting worse with computers. I was able to follow instructions correctly in a novel computer environment to set up a mini homelab with a bunch of Linux servers talking to each other. People my own age and slightly younger at work seem to know fuck all about the computers we use and that terrifies me. We were supposed to get better over time, not worse! There’s a new, younger IT guy, he’s not much younger than me, and half of what I’m procedurally required to ask his help on is something he doesn’t understand at all.

Home server mountain hermit life is no longer over the horizon for me, that’s all I can say really.

You’re not wrong but there’s something very funny about a gaggle of Linux evangelists complaining about it not being obvious what aliases to type to open something

AFAIK there was a memory leak in PowerToys. But it’s definitely ballooned in scope since it was first released. I suppose turning off the parts you don’t need would help but it really should still be more efficient. Doesn’t help that the Microsoft Department of AI Department seems to have started sinking its teeth into it as of the last few updates.

I’m seeding a handful. I think maybe one or two has a non zero share ratio, and none above 1. But it’s not clogging up any bandwidth for me, so I’ll keep it going for now.

This might have been the last AAA game I was hyped for, bought at full price, and enjoyed within its buzz cycle.

I should play it again.

On-device translation is also exactly what I want out of this tech and we have it. You can even just go to about:translations. This isn’t 2001 anymore, you shouldn’t be using someone else’s server to translate something quick for you. Not at first pass at least.

My imperfect solution of downloading on PC over time and using the network transfer feature might still be better suited for the way my internet speed and quota works, but this is great for small updates and that kind of thing.

Everyone who has looked up useful stuff to print knows about Gridfinity, but boxes.py looks so cool! Reminds me a lot of an earlier era of computer software, when it seemed like half of all programs were made to help you do things off-screen, a lot more printing and scanning. Maybe that’s just me, I don’t know.

The open source stuff aren’t as polished but they don’t want me dead so I guess that’s an easy decision to stop looking at Prusas for me.

For the future: File Lockpick, from PowerToys. The only thing the Windows product managers haven’t ruined, and only because it’s on Microsoft’s GitHub and not built into the OS. Or in Winget, since this is Lemmy.

You can just right click the drive that won’t eject or the file that won’t cut and it’ll list everything that had a handle open, without digging through the SysInternals programs.

I wonder where my computing would be if I spent all this time scaling the Linux learning curve instead of the Windows one. Probably more friction at my work-issued Windows machine. Probably increasingly many hours saved on “fixing” every successive Windows install.

For me it ends up being SpaceSniffer a solid 20% of the time.

For what it’s worth Windows 10 is/was perfectly usable after setting it up properly. A bit of customization needed but nothing crazy. Honestly I liked the OS and its design, it felt very clean and utility oriented.

I’ve set up a new Windows 11 install from scratch this past month and it has been a real pulling-teeth experience. It’s not completely unfixable (yet) but even the annoyances that are not sinister are perplexing. There’s a new context menu that has a cut down layout and takes a few milliseconds to load - I get the design decision to keep it short, and have a button for more options, but it lags - so I’m out. It’s just a little hidden config to automatically skip to the full (more cluttered but no lag) menu (which you could do by holding shift every single time). There’s a few dozen little annoyances like that. A few are bigger than others, like the need to drive Copilot out to the desert and double tap it in the head unceremoniously. They’ve put it in Paint. They’ve put it in fucking Notepad.

That’s not even getting into how desperately they want every user signing away the rights to their bone marrow to the Microsoft Corporation. The computer I’ve set up is more or less where I want it to be, but I’m wary of things breaking with an update.

I’m not big on quotes but I’ve been coming back to Ed Zitron’s words a lot lately:

I will never forgive these people for what they’ve done to the computer.

I find it funny how the tables turned. Used to be that Linux was the one that needed unintuitive setup and Windows was the one that just worked. I don’t think I’ve used a single Linux image that didn’t just drop me into a desktop environment no questions asked upon boot, and that’s a world away from the awful, awful new Windows experience. Unless Microsoft conspires to make the next decade of Linux hardware drivers absolutely abhorrent, I think this will have to be my last Windows machine. That or the entire executive suite of Microsoft’s OS division has an epiphany about not wanting to spend eternity in hell.

For all the Just Use Linux people: I’ve got more machines running Linux in my house than Windows. I’ll get there, Microsoft is just doing everything they can to push everyone off their OS.