The Man Who Killed Google Search - Where’s Your Ed At blog, by Ed Zitron

Whatever you choose, the actual challenge will be convincing your family to use it just to speak to you.

They may not want to fully wipe sda, there’s a mounted partition- sda4

Isn’t the pebble watch getting a re-release? Might be neat to tinker with. There’s also a conversion kit thing for one of the classic digital casio watches. Both are tinkering friendly and open source.

Just spitballing, but most of modding skyrim is just loading .esm and .esp files in the right order.

You may be able to get the modlist downloaded, load order sorted (and any merged patches made if those are still a thing) in a Windows VM, then shift the files and load order list over to Linux so you’re just struggling with Linux compatibility to run instead of also with the setup of the mods.

As far as I know, that’s the reccomended way to handle modding for a lot of games running on linux through compat layer stuff.

As far as mods themselves, I’d pick one of the more popular packs on nexus or wabbajack that appeals to you and doesn’t seem to have a lot of complaints about bugs in the comments.

Modding has multiple hurdles. Getting the tools set up, getting the game set up, selecting and installing the mods, working out compatibility issues, and making sure everything runs at the end. By sticking with a popular modpack, you cut out selecting the mods and having to figure out getting them working together yourself. By using a Windows VM for initial setup, you cut out most of the struggles of getting the tools working on Linux. Hopefully that would cut the challenges down to a managable level.

You can also very easily disable it, or use a version of the site without it, unlike Google’s repeated insistence.

Most of the people I’ve met who consider themselves “rockstars” are middling at best, and are pretty much led around by the nose by whatever latest fad they just studied/found learning material for/found sales material for.

They absolutely knew how to play office politics and games about appearances to execs (being able to spout a lot about whatever latest term is showing up in the financial magazines the execs read while not saying anything concrete helps a lot), but when push came to shove they were always trying to find ways to make their responsibilities everyone elses problem so they could play with some new toy while they left a trail of halfassed rush work and mountains of tech debt in their wake.

It’s theoretically possible to extract all the GPO effected registry keys from the ADMX files Microsoft releases, but yeah, I have serious doubts that any tool like this will be able to just detect and track every distinct setting. Let alone accurately identify what each does. I’m sure there’s at least one setting that’s been carried over from the “stuff it in an .ini in a system folder” days.

But if there is some community sourced list for settings, where they’re stored, and how they work that would be amazing!

My work indicated that they would start expecting people to make use of Copilot. There’s been small errors in every answer Copilot has given me, but it has surfaced information and been able to accurately answer a few questions that would have taken me hours with Microsoft docs to find without knowing it in advance (I always confirm the data).

I can see the value in a natural language search engine. In being able to ask questions about documentation and software/system capabilities in natural language and get natural language answers.

But it makes too many errors to be reliable because it tries to be generalist instead of organizing concepts and tokens properly for the specific domain. It costs way too damn much for the not super impressive thing it actually does, and it only does that at a barely passable level.

I hate that me needing to use it for work for the sake of appearances only serves to normalize it to me and others, while adding to the inflated count of users.

git blame-someone-else

I’m running into this at work lately. Suits are forcing everyone to move from one email sending service to another to save a few $, and I got stuck tracking the progress of everything that needed to be moved.

Entire departments that openly told me all they do for the company is manage software to generate reports that get sent out via email automatically. One of their guys is using python. One is using some SQL server plugin that mixes “no code” shit with straight C#. Another is using an entire suite of outdated software that has its own proprietary email generation logic, and the only part they’re using is the email generation. The fucking lead? A god damn vbscript, used to dynamically construct a string that is sent to the command prompt to be executed. That string? Launch an existing PowerShell script that sends an email. I’ve seen the whole thing, that’s all it fucking does front to back. Just fucking use PowerShell straight for the love of all that is holy instead of this awful rube goldberg mess.

In other departments, people whose entire job description is “I admin and support these three systems” being unable to do literally anything in their systems without relying on the vendor’s help desk for the software. Shit that I was able to find out in 30 seconds with a search that got me the system documentation, they open a support case and are fucking helpless.

I just want to close the door and get back to working on my stuff, so I can stop taking mental damage from exposure to all the cognitive hazard messes these other supposedly technical teams have shit into existence.

One of the fun things about modern Windows is that ~1 shit still appears every once in a rare while. Gotta love just stacking more and more shit on top of ancient systems in the name of backwards compatibility!

I already deal far too much with trying to handle dumb fucking typos in employee data, and trying to turn human names into valid email addresses.

The first time I encounter something like this there will be a body. It will not be found.

For anyone sadly stuck on Windows, please, please for fucks sake don’t pay full price for a license. Go grab an OEM key from an authorized reseller for like $20.

There’s some limitations on how many machines you can use it on simultaneously. That’s it. Otherwise it’s a full valid license at less than 1/4 of the price.

Even better, just use MASgrave and pay nothing. Yo ho ho.

Does anyone know if KDE is any better with this?

Exchange Server is effectively dead mid October too. Technically they have Exchange Server SE as an option, but it’s clearly not how they want people using Exchange anymore. They don’t even want hybrid setups.

Which is extra annoying because if you have Azure AD (I guess it’s Entra ID now) syncing from an on prem AD forest, half of the mailbox management shit in Exchange Online just doesn’t work and forces you to make the changes on-prem anyway.

Yep, was literally made as a marketing stunt.

Windows Server is less of a general use server, and more of just a staging platform for Microsoft’s other specific server based software installs. And even a lot of those don’t co-mingle on the same server well.

Have fun with that then. Sorry about your balls.

If you’re competent and technologically saavy enough to use a Linux distro as your daily driver, you can learn to make Windows work for you too.

Waste of effort if you don’t need to interact with any Windows environments for school or work, but definitely possible.

For me? I’m happy to get paid to automate shit using PowerShell that should have been basic built in functionality from the start. PowerShell is just the most convenient scripting language due to being packed-in with most Windows installs, and tons of built in functionality for interfacing with other Microsoft products. So as long as Microsoft keeps sucking, I’ve got a comfy paycheck.

And if the year of the Linux desktop ever finally happens? I’m ready, I’ll be cheering, and I’ll be ready to get paid helping companies to make the switch.

I’m usually a Windows “shill” or at least a casual defender of it, as I work in a Windows environment and it’s not as bad as people pretend it is. No shade against Linux, I love it and Windows is bad. Just not like “I’d rather self-castrate” bad.

Anyway…

But for a home server? Either be super lazy and set up samba shares from your Windows desktop for the drives (avoid having a server at all) or bite the bullet and use Linux. You’ll get so much more out of a Linux server that it’s not even funny.