dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

You must not live in an area where dumbasses paying tons of money to ruin their cars with crackle “tunes” is popular yet, then.

There’s one asshat with a Mustang around here that he’s got deliberately set to backfire about twenty times every time he takes is foot off the gas, and he goes ripping up and down the main drag all night. I’ve timed him and you can quite literally hear him coming from about two miles away.

I’m a pretty live-and-let-live sort of bird, but damn, bro. Give it a rest after midnight, will you?

I think before any technical aspects are considered, you need to figure out what to do with the gibbering hordes of idiotic users who seem to be drawn to these sorts of forums as if by powerful magnetism.

I have been led in desperation many times to a Quora thread in my search results. I have never in many years, not even once, arrived at a Quora thread that actually contained the correct answer to the question being asked at the top. It’s useless cesspit and insofar as I can be bothered to determine it always was.

Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on X that “no one in Minnesota is above the law.”

That includes you and your goons, dumbass.

I employed the super secure expedient of never exporting my keys. I have no idea what they are, I never did, and I never will.

There’s really no irreplaceable data on my Windows machine. If I have to reformat it some day A) that’s no big deal, and B) it’s Windows, what else is new.

Using Rufus still works. I did it as recently as a couple of days ago.

If you sign in with a Microsoft account at all I don’t believe there’s the capability to opt out.

I only use local accounts. I have never had a Microsoft account. I never will.

They don’t have a copy of every single Bitlocker key. They do have a copy of your Bitlocker key if you are dumb enough to allow it to sync with your Microsoft account, you know, “for convenience.”

Don’t use a Microsoft account with Windows, even if you are forced to use Windows.

Douglas Adams, apparently ever prescient, was on top of this long before the rest of us. This is from The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul, which I will remind you was published in 1988 and in the foreword says it was typeset on a Macintosh II:

There was a pay phone in one of the dark corners where waiters slouched moodily at one another. Dirk threaded his way through them, wondering whom it was they reminded him of, and eventually deciding it was the small crowd of naked men standing around behind the Holy Family in Michelangelo’s picture of the same name, for no more apparent reason than Michelangelo rather liked them.

He telephoned an acquaintance of his called Nobby Paxton, or so he claimed, who worked the darker side of the domestic appliance supply business. Dirk came straight to the point.

“Dobby, I deed a fridge.” (At this point in the book, Dirk has recently been punched in the face and is talking funny due to a broken nose.)

“Dirk, I been saving one against the day you’d ask me.”

Dirk found this highly unlikely.

“Only I wand a good fridge, you thee, Dobby.”

“This is the best, Dirk. Japanese. Microprocessor-controlled.”

“What would a microprothehtor be doing in a fridge, Dobby?”

“Keeping itself cool, Dirk. I’ll get the lads to bring it round right away. I need to get it off the premises pretty sharpish for reasons I won’t trouble you with.”

“I apprethiade thid, Dobby,” said Dirk. “Problem id, I’m not home at preddent.”

“Gaining access to houses in the absence of their owners is only one of the panoply of skills with which my lads are blessed. Let me know if you find anything missing afterwards, by the way.”

I’ll bet if you tried it the dealer would refuse to take it back.

I’d like to be a fly on the wall in that court case.

“Look, kid. Let me tell you the secret of show business. Step one is to find someone with a great act. And step two, steal it!”

Hey, I like my 3D TV. Every once in a while I manage to find a pirated video that’s in 3D and it’s pretty neat. And unlike the current avalanche of generative/LLM bullshit, I can turn the 3D off, and when I do it works just fine as a perfectly ordinary TV, and in no way does it nag me incessantly to turn it back on.

Well, which do we think would annoy nerds more: Lego bricks changing so that they or some combination thereof achieve a truly cubic aspect ratio (currently they’re not and they never have been; a 1x1x1 Lego brick is taller than it is wide or deep, and no approved combination of stock Lego parts can produce a truly cubic 1x1 piece) or Minecraft blocks suddenly changing to be vertically elongated to match Lego?

Ah, the old “unauthorized tampering with school computer equipment which Could Cause Irreparable Damage,” but is actually just a tacit admission that whoever is in charge of the computer lab doesn’t have the first clue about what they’re doing.

I had several of those throughout my school career.

The loser or one of his friends probably tattled. Most schools have policies similar to this, ostensibly to “prevent it from being brought to school” but in reality because school administrators wish they could exert control over kids’ lives 100% of the time but can’t, and they’re salty about it.

• Got in trouble for painting, or rather inking, a still life assignment in art class in black and white.
• Was threatened with a zero and write up for “lack of effort” for handing in a typed book report at the end of the same class period in which it was assigned. Don’t get mad at me because you assigned a book I’d already read and refused to allow me to choose another.
• Threatened with expulsion after being called onto the carpet in the principal’s office for a Very Stern Talk with a policeman present and everything for having a doodle of a benzene ring on the cover of my chemistry class notebook, because this was apparently “bomb making plans.” A demonstration that the school issued textbook for this very same class was just chock-a-block full of not only this but illustrations of similar molecules was not received well by the administration (“backtalk”) but ultimately I escaped unscathed.
• Sent to detention for my first and only time for gainsaying my biology teacher during a tirade delivered to the class early in the semester on the topic of, “Microscopes are important because you can’t see no cells with just your eyes [sic],” and I responded by not raising my hand per se, but rather holding up a hard boiled egg from my lunchbox.
• Subsequently determined undetentionable during that selfsame detention due to the mandatory assignment therein, which was a photocopied form letter thing which was obviously designed to make you feel very very sorry and very very guilty about what you did with a writing prompt at the top demanding a minimum of three full paragraphs on the topic of, verbatim: “Explain why you are here.” No further instructions. I started with the big bang and worked forward from there, and I got to about page four of meticulous blackletter script on both sides of each sheet of paper before the teacher supervising the detention room finally noticed (probably due to the bold text) and whisked one off of my desk, briefly skimmed it, and then threw me out. I was not allowed to keep what I had written. For all I know it’s still pinned to the wall in the staff room, decades later.
• The reason for the blackletter script was because I wrote everything with a mildly customized vintage Sheaffer fountain pen specifically to annoy that same teacher. I imagine this also annoyed several others, although one or two were appreciative. For instance, my 11th grade math teacher bribed me with extra credit by having me hand letter titles on things for her that she’d photocopy and use as handouts, or whatever. Numerous attempts were made to bring the hammer down on me for this in some form or another, none of which were successful.

I have more. These are the most amusing ones.

Yes, I was an incorrigible little shit when I was in school, mostly because I won’t countenance bullies of any stripe. Being bullied by other kids is bad enough; If you’re a teacher, do better.

?

In the Enterprise editions of Windows, you can already uninstall it. Maybe not via group policy, but you can just find it in the Apps > Installed Apps list and right click to uninstall it. On the various home user editions of Windows, this is probably not the case. (I have zero systems running those, so I can’t check.)

The Enterprise LTSC IoT version of Windows 10 doesn’t even come with Copilot, nor have any updates for it thus far installed it on any of the systems I administer, either. Apparently only 11 does.

What’s new here is apparently being able to trigger this via group policy, but for anyone in the here and now you can already disable Copilot via group policy as well, even on your local system, even on Windows 11.

And even in the cases when you think it might have games, it turns out they’re not on the cartridge.

Fortunately (?) my PSU let the smoke out about three years after I bought the initial one for that build which had IIRC a pair of 7950GTs in it from my previous machine, in SLI. So I had the opportunity to throw a modern-ish Corsair 850w power supply in it which has all the modular plugs I need. That box has had a succession of random graphics cards in it ranging from that old pair of 7950GTs, then a GTX680, then finally my current GTX1080Ti. Honestly, the 1080 is still plenty enough for most games in 1080p (possibly serendipitously) as long as you don’t feel the pathological need for raytracing or frame generation.

You can sidestep the NVMe issue as long as you don’t care about 100% speed by slapping a PCIe to NVMe adapter board in one of your handy unused x16 slots now that you’re no longer using SLI (if that reminds you of anyone you know). I’m not certain booting off of that is viable and I haven’t bothered to try to figure it out, so the boot drive in that machine is a SATA SSD currently.

On the bright side, that board has ten SATA ports so turning into a drive farm is a trivial prospect if you’re into that kind of thing.

It says in the article.

The reason given is rising raw materials costs, i.e. metals, and the price increases they’re talking about are on the order of around 10% which is obviously a slap in the face along with everything else that’s going on in the hardware world, but by the same token pretty minimal compared to said selfsame everything else.

I think I paid $40 for my CPU cooler. So, if I ever need to buy a another one for some reason and now it’s $44, well, I guess I’ll live.

Hell, I have a Sandy Bridge based machine I built in 2012. It’s getting there, 14 years old now, and with its 1080ti in there it can still play most games just fine. It’s not my primary rig anymore but it’s still trucking the same as it ever was.

Mainstream PC performance really hit its plateau by, when, like 2018? I imagine somebody with a machine that’s only 8 years old will probably do just fine unless some critical and irreplaceable component in it explodes.