* Posts by LenG

271 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Feb 2018

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Updates are plenty but fans are few in Windows 11 land

LenG

Fixed

I honestly don't understand why Microsoft thought people would want their OS. It makes no sense.

LenG

What are these adverts of which you speak?

With pi-hole on my DNS and ublock or similar on my browser I virtually never see adverts except when I start amazon without a query.

As for the interface, Classic Start Menu keeps my system effectively unchanged over Windoze version updates.

My one regret is that so many apps have gone the way of android using odd meaningless glyphs in random positions. Bring back CUA!!

I even like titlebars which change colour to highlight the window with focus.

PS: There is a lot to be said for focus follows mouse, with or without autoraise as you prefer.

EU users can't update 3rd party iOS apps if abroad too long

LenG

Why does anyone buy Apple?

Overpriced locked down inflexible ... whatever.

I used to have an Apple IIe - in the days when Apple was the epitome of open hardware. You could do amazing things with that machine. After that things went downhill.

Dell staff not alone in being squeezed to reduce remote work

LenG

Pay for what you want

I'll come to the office daily if my travel time counts as part of my working day and my company pays my travel expenses.

Otherwise I'll come in occasionally to maintain contact or if there is something needing my physical presence.

In its tantrum with Europe, Apple broke web apps in iOS 17 beta, still hasn't fixed them

LenG

Typical

This sort of crap and lockdown is why I have never bought another Apple device since my old Apple IIe

Windows 11 24H2 is coming so we can all shut up about Windows 12 for another year

LenG

Lifetime

I confidentlty expect Win 10 to be the most-used version well into 2026

Return to Office mandates boost company profits? Nope

LenG

Re: Just reduced my office time

You've put your finger on another ridiculous fashion in employee mismanagement - open plan offices. For any job which reuires concentration these are a complete disaster.

Windows 10 users report app gremlins after Microsoft update

LenG

The time for change approaches

For some time the only thing which has kept me on windoze was games. However most of the games I am interested in can now be played on linux and the only thing keeping me on windoze is inertia. I've freed up an M2 SSD and will shortly be installing linux on that to make the system multiboot. This will allow me to discover anything essential which I can't run under windows and can't do without.

Microsoft touts migration to Windows 11 as painless, though wallets may disagree

LenG

Money

Because it allows system manufacturers to sell "more poweful" and definitely more expensive hardware. After all, they HAVE to sell the latest and greatest ... or at least the latest and more expensive.

LenG

Re: Small to invisible

I disabled TPM on my windoze box which seems to have stopped the "update to Win11" nags

LenG

Why?

Having spent considerable effort in beating win10 into submission and severing all ties from my system to MS (exccept for OS updates) why on earth would I want to switch to a new OS which has absolutely nothing new I want, let alone need.

With gaming on linux improving all the time I anticipate being an MS-free household next year.

Windows 11 unable to escape the shadow of Windows 10

LenG

Better is in the eye of the beholder

You may find Win 11 better but for me there is absolutely no feature I want and I require the ability to customise the interface for my own needs.

Windows 12: Savior of PC makers, or just an apology for Windows 11?

LenG

My way or the highway

Microsoft needs to lose the attitude that they alone know what is best for their users. The OS should be a hihly flexible interface to a set of services which users can mix and match to their own requirements. I've managed to beat windows 10 into submission, more or less, but from what I can see Win 11 would be more difficult and ive me nothing new that I want at the end of the process

Tool bag lost in space now tracked by garbage watchers

LenG

Why people should read more SF

There is a wonderful James White short story called Deadly Litter - the title says it all

Take Windows 11... please. Leaks confirm low numbers for Microsoft's latest OS

LenG

Hoping to get rid of Win 10 soon

To be honest, the only reason I have windoze at all is that there are gamers in the house. I run on an ultrawide monitor which makes a vertical taskbar more or less mandatory if you don't want to suffer from neckache. Anything which stretches across the whole screen (apart from games) is very difficult to handle. I do not have a M$ account and have no desire for one. I gather from what I have read that it is actually possible to install W11 without one, although much more difficult than it was for W10. Not sure if you could do an upgrade in place without the account, though, or if you can get rid of it later.

I'm told you can now run many windows games under linux so my current plan is to build a linux boot stick and see what I can get working.

Google Chrome Privacy Sandbox open to all: Now websites can tap into your habits directly for ads

LenG

Pi-hole is your friend

Blocks more or less all ad-slingers.

Mind, I still do my best to prevent anyone tracking my likes and dislikes even if the information is useless to them.

LenG

Sneaky

I have chorme on my system although I don't actually use it unless I find a particularly picky website which does not support my browser(s) of choice. Hoever, reading the article prompted me to fire it up with a view to updating and looking to see what sort of privacy options it would provide.

Chrome started with a message to say it could not be upgraded but I could reinstall with the latest version. When I said yes a download page popped up with a pre-checked option

"Help make Google Chrome better by automatically sending usage statistics and crash reports to Google. Learn more"

in a font so small I had to almost put my nose on the page to read it.

Chrome is now deleted.

Intel seems to think Wi-Fi 7 is too cool for old-school Windows 10

LenG

No WiFi 7 on Win 10?

Makes me glad tht all of my gear is on wired ethernet. Never did trust this new fangled wireless stuff.

Musk's X tries to win advertisers back with discounts

LenG

What a pile of ...

From morbid curiousity, I just tried to access x.com. It redirected to a twitter URL and presented me with a white box.

Yhe top line had an x to leave and a fancy X

Under which it said "Sign in to Twitter"

If you are going to launch a new brand surely you should make sure to use the new name not keep thowing the old one in people's faces?

LenG

Re: Define Extortion

Surely you mean X-Torsion ... the art of getting money from people by twisting their arm?

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

LenG

Re: farm supplies

Terrible decision that. It was so much fun watching foreign tourists trying to figure it out.

Nearly 1 in 5 academics admit close encounters of the anomalous kind

LenG

Re: UAPs, previously known as UFOs

There is a very significant difference between the connotations of UAP and UFO. Personally I find the new terminology both more precise and less lumbered with connotations of little green men and alien inteligences.

TikTok to let Oracle view source code, algorithm, and content moderation

LenG

Probably safer on TikTok than anywhere else

Given that the Federal authotities abused their surveillance powers over 280,000 in the last year or so I'd feel much safer using TikTok

No more feature updates for Windows 10 – current version is final

LenG

Re: Truly, certainly not

Or Classic Start Menu

More ads in Windows 11 Start Menu could be last straw for some

LenG

Win 10 forever

This sort of garbage is precisely why my new PC (due for delivery later this week) will be running Win10. And the TPN will be disabled to avoid a sneeky unwanted upgrade to 11.

Microsoft adds features to Windows 11 monthly – managing it is your problem

LenG

Yet another reason to never upgrade from win 10.

I need to invest a bit more effort in getting games running reliably on linux then move permanently and totally to that platform.

And surely an enterprise platform should above all things be stable. Which business wants to have the expense and difficulty of answering mirriad "yesterday it worked, today it doesn't" queries on a monthly basis.

Latest Windows 11 build shares desktop real estate with, er, Spotify

LenG

Just say no

Fortunately my home built PC will not run Win 11. I made sure of that when I built it. And after a certain amount of customisation and software it looks more and more like Win2000

Google lets a few Android devices into its Privacy Sandbox

LenG

Alternative approach

I'm not sure I'll ever be able to fully prevent the various service providers from gathering information about me but I'm not too bothered as I have made a pretty good fist of ensuring that ads aren't actually displayed.

Thunderbird email client is Go for new plumage in July

LenG

Upgraded interface

Please tell me I can keep an old-fashioned title bar/mneu bar/dropdown menu interface and not have to cope with another "modern" horrow show with weird hamburger glyphs and similar crap dotted all over the place. If not, I might as well go over to gmail,

Four top euro carriers will use phone numbers to target ads and annoy Google & Facebook

LenG

Pseudo

According to the Oxford disctinary, oseudo (adjective) means

"not genuine; spurious or sham."

So, they are offering you a not genuinely anonymous token.

Amazingly accurate!

Tech job bloodbath comes to IBM, CFO links layoffs to Kyndryl, Watson Health

LenG

How things change

When I first joined IBM, some decades ago, they still claimed "Respect for the individual" as a core corporate belief. There were still procedures for raising and escalating issues, but the writing was on the wall. All of the corporate ethos evaporated. I eventually took early retirement when their latest rationalisation/improvement of the pension scheme left me in a situation where, had I stayed, I would have had to work several more years just to get back to the pension I was then entitled to.

Getting out was the best decision I ever made.

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

LenG

Re: It does suck

Can't agree more. I spend a lot of effort trying to get Win 10 to look as much like Win2000 as I can. With Classic Start Menu and a hell of a lot of registry hacks it comes moderately close. I see no compelling reason to upgrade to Win 11 and several months of pain if I do, with no guarantee that I can get even as close as I am now to what I want.

I also use Linux with the xfce desktop. I'm currently holding off upgrading until I get a chance to see what the latest iteration looks like.

LenG

The most scarey phrase in a product update description

"Exciting new user experience"

If you see this, run. And it is not just computer OS's. Virgin Media recently updated the interface to their TV box. There are now several screenfuls of lines of small pictures taken from the show they represent. Not that you will recognise most of them unless you are a real TV fanatic.

The general idea behind most modern interfaces seems to be make them as bright and flashy as possible and leave plenty of opportunities to advertise (even if they call it "recommended for you".

As for windows, I spend quite a bit of time with each new release, if I take it, trying to make it look as much like win2000 as possible. I've been moderately successful with Win 10 but you need to resort to settings, registry hacks, group policies and third party software to get close to anything I find accessible.

Win 11? Unless it changes dramatically I can't see myself ever taking it voluntarily. TBH almost the only thing I need even win10 for is gaming, I can do everythign else I want on linux and I don't even have to pay for it.

The IT decision-maker that really matters? Your pet

LenG

Re: Why?

Nah,

"Because some idiot will buy it"

Intel's top-spec Raptor Canyon NUC can double as a 700+W space heater

LenG

I bought one of the 5th generation NUC's with an i5 processor when they first came out and installed linux on it. It has been running more or less continuously ever since acting as a gatekeeper to my system from the big bad web and a backup when my main PC is down for some reason. Lovely and useful device. Can't see a real use case for this monster.

Oh, great. By peering into twilight, boffins find 'planet killer' asteroids in our system

LenG

A cure to global warming?

"If 2022 AP7 were to collide with Earth, it would be a mass extinction event as dust would be blown up into the Earth's atmosphere for years, blocking out the precious needed sunlight."

So we're dead if it does and dead if it doesn't?

Juno offering Linux-powered tablet PC for pre-order

LenG

Honest

I could probably find a use for this as-and-when it is ready to ship. The website flags it as a beta product and there is a status list of various work items. The Mobian OS itself is flagged as unstable and the two alternatives as very unstable. Various other significant modules require work. I was amused by the entry for "suspend"

"Suspend but does not wake up". I think that is more commonly known as shutdown.

I'll bookmark the page and check in occasionally to see how it is progressing. Meanwhile my plans for a homebrew linux touch device based on the Pi are on hold.

Serious surfer? How to browse like a pro on Firefox

LenG

Re: Palemoon

In an ideal world you would be correct, but two points arise:

1. I am not in a position to know whether Palemoon is behaving correctly.

2. The problem websites are numeroius, and include a number of banks and the NHS. Suggesting to such institutions that they change code which works perfectly in all major browsers for the benefit of a single minority-use broiwser is an exercise in futility.

A suspect a good compromise would be for PM to detect this particular error condition and allow users to permit this error. Oddly, an early userland workaround, involving disabling HSTS via the Palemoon Commander utility, is no longer available as the disable option was removed from the utility.

LenG

Palemoon

Several people have mentioned Palemoon. This is still my browser of choice for many things but unfortunately there is an ongoing issue with various buttons (often in popup forms etc) in websites being unresponsive. The Palemoon response seems to be that they are doing the right thing and everyone else is wrong in allowing the button to be pressed. Which seems a little ... arrogant(?).

Our software is perfect. If something has gone wrong, it must be YOUR fault

LenG

Sounds like the new VirginTV homepage.

Massive ammounts of useless function, no way to disable or configure the thing, and some very strange bugs.

Rufus and ExplorerPatcher: Tools to remove Windows 11 TPM pain and more

LenG

Minor Correction to article

Making some tweaks like these easier may help it win over some of the doubters.

Should read

Making some tweaks like these easier may help it con the stupid.

Microsoft brings tabs to File Explorer

LenG

Re: Still awful to use

Yup. Personally I use MultiCommander which is similar (two panes) but offers tree-sidebars in each window if required and a lot of extra stuff. Lacks the FTP support (I use filezilla) but has an interesting "flat filesystem" view which is sometimes quite useful.

I just wish file selection dialogs could be trained to use something other than bits of File Manager.

Clustered Pi Picos made to run original Transputer code

LenG

Just for consistency

The reference to A Fire on the Deep confused me somewhat. It is a superb book which I have read several times but I did not recognise the use in that book. Turns out the extended quote is actually from "A Deepness in the Sky" - the second book in the universe of AFotD.

Engineer gets Windows 11 working on a Surface Duo

LenG

The reason for the hardware requirements

I'm personally quite certain that the main reason for the strict requirements is to encourage the purchase of new equipment which will, in all likelihood, come with win 11 preinstalled. Otherwise most people will be quite happy to continue with Win10

Why the Linux desktop is the best desktop

LenG

Re: How about Quicken?

I managed to move my data to gnuCash, which is a perfectly competent freeware home accounts package, but I honestly cannot remember how I did it.

Microsoft brings Cloud PCs and local desktops together in Windows 365

LenG

Scarey

"are just the beginning of our Windows and Microsoft cloud integration." Possibly the most frightening thing I have heard from M$ since they first announced Win 10 as an operating system for life or whatever the marketing shite was at the time.

Given that nowadays the only thing I actually NEED windoze for is games I'll have to keep a close eye on Gamebuntu and its ilk.

Brit data regulator fines five cold-calling fiends £405k

LenG

Still at it

I had a call this morning from someone telling me the extended warranty on my washing machine had expired and they were ringing to renew it. I found this strange since I never take out extended warranties in the first place and I declined immediately. However, I'm pretty sure the woman said she was from Appliance Cover. Fortunately, although elderly, I am not particularly vulnerable (except to physical violence)

France says Google Analytics breaches GDPR when it sends data to US

LenG

Re: Pi-hole

Actually, pi-hole does not block the text ads at the top of a search as they are served from google.com. However, it does block http://www.googleadservices.com so if you click on the ad you will not see it. In some ways this is the worst possible outcome as it can leave you with a completely unclickable page of crud when you do a seach. Fortunately, if you run an in-browser adblocker as well and block google.com with that then the ads vanish (at least they do with Adblock Latitude).

Heart attack victim 'saved' by defibrillator delivery drone*

LenG

Wonderful

but I will be really impressed when the drone applies the defibrilator without an expert on hand!

Gnu Nano releases version 6.0 of text editor, can now hide UI frippery

LenG

Vi forever

Sorry, can't see any advantage in changing from vi. It is a bit of a pig to learn but once you have it works more or less everywhere.

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