Tag: TODO: Blog Idea

GLOWING RECTANGLE OF DOOM

FOOLISH MORTAL!

Do you DARE look into the GLOWING RECTANGLE OF DOOM?

— Um, can I turn the brightness down? Or maybe switch to dark mode?

ALL IS DARKNESS

— Wait, I thought you said it was glowing?

THE GLOWING RECTANGLE OF DOOM CAN MULTITASK

— Ok, got it. Doom, glowing darkness.

— You *did* say it could run Doom, right?

IT IS *OF* DOOM, NOT *FOR* DOOM.

(the glowing rectangle prefers to avoid dependency loops)

— So what kind of doom are we talking about here? Classic, like fate? Or modern, like impending disaster?

— And why am I getting so many notifications from it?

FOOL! The GLOWING RECTANGLE OF DOOM TOOTS AS IT PLEASES!

Start on Wandering.shop

Photos of a local park that doubles as a flood control basin…

A recent news article with photos of a local park that doubles as a flood control basin.

Polliwog Park in Manhattan Beach protects homes by collecting rain runoff
Polliwog Park did what it is designed to do during Thursday’s heavy rain, by collecting rain runoff, and providing food and a resting place for local and migratory water birds.

And some photos I took after storms in 2017 and 2019 (since I can’t exactly go out right now)

Flickr album: Flooded Park

On Wandering.shop

Anita Donut

Sign stack at a mini mall with various business names including

Yeah, I could use one too, but it turns out they don’t have any at this time of day.

#puns #signs #donuts

On Wandering.shop

Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve had a donut since last March. I used to only have them when someone brought a box in at work, or occasionally I’d stop by a donut shop on the way to work. Neither of those have happened for a while.

Across many experiments, participants tried to fix problems by adding stuff

Interesting: “Across many experiments, participants tried to fix problems by adding stuff” even when removing something was a simpler solution.

When asked to fix something, we don’t even think of removing parts

On Wandering.shop

And now I’m reminded of an essay I saw years ago about how people are more likely to ask for a preference to change application behavior than just ask it to change.

On Wandering.shop

Found the ancient G2 (HTC Desire) phone (back when there were Android phones with actual …

Found the ancient G2 (HTC Desire) phone (back when there were Android phones with actual KEYBOARDS!). It still runs. Wondering if there’s something I can put on there that’s newer than the ancient version of Android it has, but it’s too old for LineageOS.

Anyone know what might run on it?

On Wandering.shop

I saw this squirrel from about 20 feet away. It slowly moved toward me, pausing to pose every few feet. I think it was hoping I would feed it.

I saw this squirrel from about 20 feet away. It slowly moved toward me, pausing to pose every few feet. I think it was hoping I would feed it.

I saw this #squirrel from about 20 feet away. It slowly moved toward me, pausing to pose every few feet. I think it was hoping I would feed it.

#animals #nature

On PixelFed.Social
On Flickr

On iNaturalist

Cooper’s Hawk (Takeoff!)

A Cooper’s Hawk I spotted on a walk around the neighborhood.

I heard a *lot* of sparrows chirping in a tree behind a house. Then this hawk flew up and perched on the nearest telephone pole and the sparrows all just dropped silent. It stayed up there for a few minutes, then flew to the next pole, then flew off out of view.

The photos aren’t great, but I like that I managed to catch it this clearly. The last one I saw, I only had my phone with me.

#hawk #bird #nature #photo

A mottled brown bird with a hooked beak and yellow eyes, perched on top of a wooden pole and looking off to the side.

The same bird leaping from the top of the pole and spreading out its wings.

On Photog.Social

As I was walking through a residential neighborhood, I heard a *lot* of sparrows chirping in a tree behind a house. Then this bird flew up and perched on the nearest telephone pole and the sparrows all just dropped silent. It stayed up there for a few minutes, then flew to the next pole, then flew off out of view.

On iNaturalist

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In response to a complaint by InvaderXan about in-your-face recommendation engines

Ugh, yes! It’s like starting up my coffee maker in the morning and having it ask me if I’d like to order an iced tea.

No I don’t want iced tea right now, that’s why I’m starting up the coffee maker!

On Wandering.Shop

There’s a cloud-based music player that I keep getting mad at because we have different ideas of what it’s for. To me, it’s a way of listening to music I’ve already chosen. To the publisher, it’s a way for them to sell me additional subscriptions.

%&^% Microsoft app store

As if I didn’t already have enough reason to distrust the MS app store, it spontaneously uninstalled the kid’s copy of Minecraft. Which also deleted all of his local worlds.

Fortunately most of the persistent worlds he plays are either on Java Edition or on a realm, and we had a backup of the local Win10 worlds from a couple weeks ago, but WTF, MS – you don’t fucking DO that!

Best guess is it downloaded the latest update overnight, failed to install, and messed up the rollback.

When we were trying out the Minecraft beta a few weeks ago, we noticed there’s this weird thing where the MS store thinks he doesn’t own a copy of MC until you click on “Buy” at which point it realizes he does and starts downloading it. It could be a problem with that.

Or it could be a mismatch with Xbox Game Pass, which we just got.

Either way, though…

WTF…. apparently an interrupted update from the MS store translates to an uninstall

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/xbox/forum/all/game-just-uninstalled-itself/536072e1-b735-4af0-a8fe-e80815032597

WHAT IDIOT CAME UP WITH THAT DESIGN

wait, that’s in the xbox forum…not clear whether that applies to microsoft store apps on windows 10 too, but given the ridiculous folder structures, I’d guess it’s probably the same thing under the hood.

Thread start on Wandering.shop

Video card shuffle complete!

After getting the nice new card for the gaming PC, I was hoping to just shift everything downward, but its old card made my main desktop really unstable, and my desktop’s old card physically wouldn’t fit in the ancient box we have hooked up to the TV for media.

Old card is now doing Folding@home in the gaming PC. Medium card in my desktop has been replaced with a compatible one & I plan to sell it since it worked fine in the other box. Left the media box alone.

It’s weird, the Radeon card that was in the Windows 10 gaming PC worked great – no problems at all. I only took it out to get a more powerful one.

But when I moved it to my dual-boot system, it worked immediately on Linux, but it kept freezing Windows whenever I tried to update the driver or tools. And I’d get random crashes during games that had been totally stable on my old, less-powerful Nvidia.

Indications pointed to chipset compatibility problems with the mobo.

Between all the crashes and knowing that I couldn’t update the drivers, ever, it became clear I’d need to either replace the motherboard & hope that fixed it, or just replace the card. Back to the old one? Not after a month of awesome graphics performance! So I looked for a comparable Nvidia. Not as good (or expensive) as the shiny new one, but a lot better than the old one.

Once it arrived, I think I had everything working on both operating systems within 30 minutes.

Slightly related: Took the kid to meet-and-greet/supply pickup with the new teacher, which was all …

Slightly related: Took the kid to meet-and-greet/supply pickup with the new teacher, which was all done as drive-through in the school parking lot.

1.5-hour time slot per grade, with each teacher camping out under a different awning next to the parking lot with grocery bags of books & supplies for each student. Drive up wearing masks, go to the right teacher, roll down the windows, say hi, pick up the supplies, stop by the PTA awning on the way out & go.

Online classes start tomorrow.

On Wandering.shop

No surprise the same people who reject climate science because they don’t like policies to deal with climate change are rejecting epidemiology because they don’t like policies to deal with a pandemic. That’s not rationality, skepticism or critical thinking. It’s willful ignorance

No surprise the same people who reject climate science because they don’t like policies to deal with climate change are rejecting epidemiology because they don’t like policies to deal with a pandemic. That’s not rationality, skepticism or critical thinking. It’s willful ignorance

Moving Windows

I remember easily moving a Windows 10 system to an SSD using Acronis. Not this time. The clone tool isn’t willing to clone *some* partitions instead of a whole disk, so I can’t use that, and the bootable restore tool can’t see the external drive where I put the backup file.

Looking into alternatives. For tomorrow. Or maybe Saturday.

Next morning:

It’s my dual-boot system, so I’ve got a full Linux installation on there anyway. Last night I created an image of the Windows partition, saved it to the external drive (which Linux can see just fine, unlike the so-called universal restore image) and now I’m trying to restore it to the new drive.

Beginning to wonder if it *would* be easier to install Windows fresh and then figure out how to transfer all my saved games. All the other data is easy.

That evening:

I did a clean install, copied my AppData folders, got everything working…then discovered I couldn’t boot it without going through the BIOS screen. I’d accidentally booted the install image without UEFI, so it installed MBR. I couldn’t get GRUB2 to chain load it & the Windows UEFI boot loader could only see the old installation I wanted to remove.

So I did ANOTHER clean install, in UEFI mode, but this time set aside just the save files I wanted.

Bleah.

But it’s working now!

I’ve got UEFI loading GRUB2, which can boot Fedora or chain to the Windows UEFI menu, which will load the shiny new installation of Windows.

Now I just need to figure out how to tell the Windows boot menu that the alternate Windows installation isn’t there anymore & remove it from the list!