Microsoft nixed Essentials for Windows 10, which is too bad since Movie Maker’s actually a nice bit of simple video manipulating software. They’ve even shuttered their official downloads links for Essentials. However, the offline installer is still out there in the wild, and works on 10.
For years now, perhaps even more than a decade, I’ve had problems with my stomach. Bubbles, cramps, swelling, pain, unpleasant bathroom issues ranging far beyond mere urgency. At best it was distracting. At worst, actually debilitating. It cast a shadow on everyday life, and ruined what should have been good times. Eating out made it worse. Eating not-great food made it terrible. Thus some of my worst bouts occurred while traveling, ultimately making vacations unpleasant. Traveling across Europe should be fun, not uncomfortable and stressful.
Along the way I had a myriad of diagnosis. IBS. Nervous stomach. I had a variety of procedures to no avail, from ultrasounds to, eventually – when I finally became frightened enough to start wondering if I had cancer or Crohn’s – a colonoscopy (which cost an arm and a leg since my insurance is terrible and I had it done prior to the recommended age of 50). Nothing. “You must have some sort of food allergy,” said the gastroenterologist.
Sure. But it must be an allergy to food in general then, because it doesn’t matter what I eat.
Despite supposedly having no data caps, the other day my provider interrupted my surfing with a message stating that I’d downloaded an “excessive amount” and should contact them to upgrade my plan. Interestingly, their website also doesn’t show any data caps or, for that matter, any plans for me to upgrade to.
I’m not real worried about it, but at the same time since I work full time remote I really need my intertoobs to work all the time. Then I remembered that the vacation rental we manage next door to me has internet that rarely gets used. Time to slap a wireless NIC on the server and push internet traffic through that router!
Doing so was easy. I had a halfway decent USB wireless laying around. I slapped it in, joined the next door wireless network, and then ran a route print:
The highlighted bit is the new NIC. Above it is the wired NIC connecting the server to my local network. You want the Metric on the NIC you want internet traffic flowing through to be the lowest. Luckily mine defaulted to that. If yours doesn’t do that you can manually set the Metric by navigating to the Advanced properties of the Network Adapters:
After that I simply removed the Gateway address from the properties of my wired LAN access NIC and voila – all my intertoobs were coming from next door while my LAN still had full access to my server. In order to double check I logged into my router and disabled internet traffic for the server IP address.
I also installed a groovy little tool called Network Manager so I can watch the traffic:
I admit it – I use Windows Sticky Notes. I hate how unconfigurable it feels though. The font is terrible, for instance. Lucky you can change it with a reghack.
|
1 2 3 4 5 |
REGEDIT4 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts] "Segoe Print (TrueType)"="consola.ttf" "Segoe Print Bold (TrueType)"="consolab.ttf" |
What’s happening here is, because the notes demand to use Segoe Print as the font, you’re changing what font Segoe Print actually is. Replace the .ttfs with fonts of your choice.
There are also a myriad of shortcuts for modifying existing note text:
Ctrl+B – Bold text
Ctrl+I – Italic text
Ctrl+T – Strikethrough
Ctrl+U – Underlined text
Ctrl+Shift+L – Bulleted (press once) or Numbered (press twice) list
Ctrl+Shift+> – Increased text size
Ctrl+Shift+< – Decreased text size
Ctrl+A – Select all
Ctrl+Shift+A – Toggles all caps
Ctrl+L – Left aligns text
Ctrl+R – Right aligns text
Ctrl+E – Centers text
Ctrl+Shift+L – Small Alpha list (3rd), Capital Alpha list (4th), small roman (5th), Capital roman (6th)
Ctrl+1 – Single-space lines
Ctrl+2 – Double-space lines
Ctrl+5 – Set 1.5-line spacing
Ctrl+= – Subscript
Ctrl+Shift++ – Superscript
For reasons I won’t get into here, the EFF has decided for now not to support Pale Moon, which is my current browser of choice (sideplug: Like Firefox but tired of it gobbling all your resources and crashing? Pale Moon my friend). The inability to install HTTPS Everywhere nearly had me leaving Pale Moon until I discovered that there’s a fork of it out there that works! So use Pale Moon, and install Encrypted Web (and uBlock Origin).
I’ve read some pro-capitalist (anti-socialist?) rants lately, some penned by people roughly half my age, that have disappointed me in their shortsightedness. I’ve also read some writings by people like Stephen Hawking – who recently said we should not fear artificial intelligence, but rather capitalism – and a raft of economists, technologists and anthropologists – who are predicting a near future of technologically driven job scarcity – that lend credence to my disappointment. You don’t have to like it, but you’d be a fool to ignore it: we’re on the precipice of a future with a very different economic landscape, and more likely than not – especially if you’re young – you’re going to be in big fucking trouble if your value system doesn’t change, and fast.
Trust me. I know. Because, on a very small scale, I’m one of those people making you obsolete. Continue reading
I’m using some older Windows programs – abandonware stuff by this point – on Ubuntu Mate via Wine. I needed to install some custom fonts for these programs to use and had a bit of a time finding straightforward instructions on doing so. Turns out it’s easy. The fonts I needed are TrueType, so that’s all I’ve tested with.
Navigate to home/YOURUSERHOME/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts
You will have to enable hidden files in order to see the .wine directory, and if you haven’t done so already you’ll need to open the fonts directory as administrator (from the windows directory right click the fonts directory and choose Open as Administrator). Dump your font(s) into that directory. Then open a prompt and enter:
sudo fc-cache -fv
This will rebuild the font information caches for fontconfig system. Then you should be good to go.
“Some index files failed to download.” That’s the error I got upon running apt-get update, after having Ubuntu Mate notify me that some of my updates are, er, out of date. The indexes that failed to download were related to Flux, which I really liked having on my Windows machines. Turns out that, as of this writing, the repository of Vivid Vervet (Ubuntu 15) for Flux ain’t there. Take a look for yourself and see. I suppose I could install an older version, but since I wasn’t interested in getting into any compatibility issues I decided to bail on Flux for now.
But I couldn’t uninstall Flux. It isn’t installed. I need to get rid of the repository information. You’d think that would be as simple as remove-apt-repository blah blah, since adding it is a simple add-apt-repository, but nope. There’s no remove-apt-repository. Ultimately I opened the path /etc/apt/sources.list.d as admin, and removed the associated list and save files. Reran apt-get update and voila – both the errors and the nag referring to out of date updates disappeared.
Bad news. A serious flaw in TrueCrypt has been found that potentially allows full system compromise. The worse news? There’s no truly trustworthy TC successor for Windows out there in the wilds so far. Microsoft and Symantec both offer encryption solutions, but surely they’re rife with back doors. VeraCrypt is a fork of TC, but so far there’s nothing to generate any confidence that it too isn’t compromised.
The good news, I suppose, is that so far it appears that TrueCrypt on Linux doesn’t have this newly found flaw. Also, it seems this flaw requires the machine to be on and in Windows. In other words, if your fully disk encrypted machine is powered down, or your drives are removed or are external and the machine isn’t with them, your data remains safe. Cold comfort, really.
According to this reddit thread, yes. Time to move on if you’re using it. See below from their current privacy policy. Emphasis mine.
We collect non-personal data to make money from our free offerings so we can keep them free, including: Advertising ID associated with your devices Browsing and search history, including meta data; Internet service provider or mobile network you use to connect to our products; and Information regarding other applications you may have on your device and how they are used. Sometimes browsing history or search history contains terms that might identify you. If we become aware that part of your browsing history might identify you, we will treat that portion of your history as personal data, and will anonymize this information. We may also aggregate and/or anonymize personal data we collect about you. For instance, although we would consider your precise location to be personal data if stored separately, if we combined the locations of our users into a data set that could only tell us how many users were located in a particular country, we would not consider this aggregated information to be personally identifiable.
That’s a huge italicized if. Basically a get out of jail free card. IF we become aware that we’re collecting identifying data. If we don’t, well, sorry. We weren’t aware.
