Technology

Windows 11: The road to insanity

Or death by a thousand cuts, if you prefer.

I have a new PC. It’s mere months old, and yet already Windows 11 is bugging out and acting weird. Some examples:

  • The context menu you get by right-clicking will randomly switch between the new Windows 11 style and the older version used in Windows 10.
  • Snipping Tool will sometimes fail to open, producing a dialog to find another app in the Microsoft Store (trying again usually works).
  • Other random applications will just stop working, needing to be ended via Task Manager. The main culprit remains File Explorer, which will occasionally stop responding, even when opening a window with as few as two files in it. Sometimes it eventually recovers, sometimes it just needs a full restart.
  • General snappiness is already eroding as Windows does whatever it does to make everything slower.
  • Even the usually sturdy PowerToys sometimes has its tools fail to work (like Preview) until you recite the proper incantation.

Anyway, rather than just complaining, this may finally inspire me to move the drives from the old PC into the new one, and get a proper dual boot system going again. That way I can install Windows XP, a stable operating system.

Just kidding.

(Although it wasn’t bad once you had all three service packs and patches installed.)

I’m going to install some Linux distro. My short list is:

  • Linux Mint (I’m most familiar with it)
  • Kubuntu (because I like KDE Plasma and this is one of the more mainstream distros to use it)
  • ??? A lot of others could go here. My bootable USB stick is ready.

The meaning of life as it applies to app updates

This is my way of saying the number of apps needing updates on my iPhone is now 42. I am seriously impressed it’s gotten this high.

Meanwhile, I am still mulling over what phone to get as my ailing iPhone 12 continues to sputter out. I’m still leaning heavily toward Android and away from pricey Pro/Max/Ultra models, because my phone use would not justify the added expense.

My list so far includes:

  • Google Pixel 9a or 10a (they are near identical–it might come down to price if I went this route)
  • Google Pixel 10
  • Samsung Galaxy 25 or Galaxy 25 FE
  • Moto G Stylus (midrange with a few flaws but no dealbreakers)
  • OnePlus 13 or 15

I haven’t 100% ruled out getting another iPhone, because while there are no good big tech companies, I don’t feel Apple is worse than Google. But I’ve seen iOS 26 and Liquid Glass in action and I have an irrational dislike of how they look and feel, and there is no escaping them with a new iPhone.

That said, if I could be convinced, the models I’d consider would be:

  • iPhone 17
  • iPhone 16

The 16e (or rumoured 17e) would have been a contender, but it has too many weird compromises for the price.

Here is a cat looking at a smartphone:

41!

41 apps now need updating. For a while it was 40, then dropped to 39, then went back up to 40, and now it’s 41.

To me, this is the most interesting game I have on my iPhone. How many apps can get queued for updates before something forces itself? I suspect I will find out soon.

In Apple-adjacent news, Jonathan Horst, who got kicked out of Linus Media Group because his YouTube channel Mac Address was too clever and different, is back with a new channel called Think Different. I like his style and approach (though not his newly shorn head). His first video is a delightful rant against Liquid Glass and flat design. Good stuff.

I read the news today, oh boy

(Yes, I am misquoting the lyric, but that’s to be technically correct–the best kind of correct!)

Specifically, I scanned the CBC News site. Did I leave better informed? Marginally. Did it make me feel better? Absolutely not.

I’ve learned my lesson. Next time, I’ll be more careful when I let me attention slip and go wandering websites.

Here is frantically typing cat, which I will aspire not to be when I’m surfing the net, as one does.

(Also, any excuse to post this gif.)

Favourite toots

A toot is what some people call posts on Mastodon, the federated, decentralized social media service (and the only social media I check in on anymore). I saw this today, found it delightful and I am sharing it here, as the tenets of social media dictate:

Oh, and a link, too:

My favorite kinds of toots:

– I thought this was interesting.
– I went outside, this is what I saw.
– I’m making something.
– I’m trying something new.
– This is my jam. (Any kind of jam.)
– I made a thing and I’m proud!
– I’m bad at it a thing, but I’m sharing anyway!
– This is my important animal or person.
– Whimsical shitpost.
– Real life mundane thing.— Steven Hoefer (@troublewithwords@wandering.shop)

I am buying music again

I still have Apple Music (my partner uses it and his CD collection was lost years ago), but I’ve recently started purchasing albums again, so far digitally, but I’m also thinking about going to local indie stores hunting down CDs like it was 1995.

Today, I bought Supertramp’s 1977 Album, Even in the Quietest Moments. I used a digital service I’d never heard of before today–7Digital–which I found on this site after a search: Digital Music – Music Canada. The service seems fine. I got a zip file with the MP3 files contained within. Not as seamless as iTunes, but it also didn’t require me to install software first to grab the album.

Most of the music I listen to is stuff I already own, anyway, so all I’m really doing is just adding to my library after an extended break. I like that this music is mine and it won’t suddenly disappear or get replaced by some alternate version I may not prefer.

And even though I’m going old school with music purchases like in days gone by, this doesn’t mean I’m ready to embrace the 8-track again.

Apple Music: Let me rearrange your music in arbitrary ways for you

When I went jogging today, I opted to listen to the 1991 R.E.M. album Out of Time. I have this album on CD and had ripped it many years ago for my music-listening pleasure.

Apple Music doesn’t care about that on an iPhone, because it installs its own version of the album. Fine, same music, what’s the difference?

Except today when I go to play the album I see this:

Curious! There are two versions listed, mine and a 2016 remaster.

I check mine:

The first track, “Radio Song” is strangely absent. I check the other version of the album (reader, I knew what I was going to see):

Oh, there’s “Radio Song”, all by itself in its own album. Why did this happen? I don’t know. I know it’s happened before and I’ve seen others report similar issues. The thing to note here is that you have no ultimate control over what happens in Apple Music–Apple does, along with the record labels. This wasn’t a licensing issue where the album got pulled, though–and even if it was, I actually own the album outright, anyway.

Instead, Apple Music apparently got “confused” and took a perfectly working album and split the songs between two different versions. How do you then reconcile this?

The fix was to delete both albums, then add the 2016 remaster to my library. The version on my PC is unaffected and works the same way it has for the past million years. Well, at least the past 20.

I ended up listening to Green1I have downloads over cellular disabled (1988), which Apple Music has so far chosen not to mangle. I should probably go check now, though.

The Fediverse in one post

The only social media I use regularly these days is Mastodon, which is part of the Fediverse, a loose collection of sites and services that are federated (connected) but are still independent of each other. Its central feature is probably that it is not centralized. There’s no single server, no giant tech company controlling it and there are no algorithms.

It tends to attract somewhat nerdy people because no one shows up to “go viral” or be showered in likes. And among those nerdy folks are inevitably the “Well, actually…” people who have a need to argue about everything and drive people away. The “I hate to be that guy” guys who delight in being That Guy.

Someone on Mastodon today outlined, in convenient list form, all the wrong ways to interact with others there. It’s a very good bad list.

Remember, you’re on the Fediverse, so your job is to

– Make people feel bad for using other social media
– Guilt-trip anyone who uses AI in any way
– Attack people who don’t include alt text
– Argue with anyone in tech because they must be tech bros
– Oppose anyone with entrepreneurial or for-profit interests
– Shame those who use GitHub or any corporate-owned or American product
– Nitpick even the good things just because you can
– Be morally superior and overly aggressive about supposed data privacy issues in tools that handle public posts

Alright, sarcasm over. Seriously, stop it.— Roni Rolle Laukkarinen (@rolle@mementomori.social)

The phone quest begins again after five years

Free smartphone clipart!

The last smartphone I got was five years ago, in January 2021. I picked up a base iPhone 12 with 128 GB of storage, which was double the default at the time.

The phone has mostly done what I need a phone to do, and my phone use has narrowed down to just a few tasks since I got it. I am old school, so some things people do on their phones I still prefer to do on my PC, with its nice big monitor and full-size, clicky keyboard. Also, no one will ever convince me that typing on a smartphone is fun, or that editing text on the same is anything but a special kind of techno-hell.

But the reason I am writing this now is that while I’m content to use a five-year-old smartphone, my iPhone 12 is getting more, let’s call it eccentric. Most notably, it no longer accepts phone calls, which is an important part of being a phone. Instead, it shunts every call immediately to voicemail. In a way, it’s nice, but it’s gotten increasingly troublesome. I don’t know if switching to a new phone will fix this, but I’d still rather try a new phone than wipe my current phone, set everything up again, find out it fixed nothing and now be stuck with iOS 26 and “liquid glass.” So a new phone it is.

It’s not only my phone use that has changed since 2021, the major tech companies have pretty much given up on the idea of being good or decent and now they just compete on being various levels of awful. This puts me in a quandary, because if I want to jump from the iPhone because Apple is no good, switching to Google-controlled Android is not really better. It’s like someone offering you a dirt pie or mud pie for dinner.

I could get an Android phone and run a third-party OS like Graphene, but my desire to experiment has limits and I have a suspicion that fiddling around getting a phone to do the few tasks I want it to is not an area where I’m interested in exploring those limits.

But I’ve surprised myself before with how far down rabbit holes I’ve been willing to go. I mean, I never tried Linux before and I came close to making my new PC Linux-only. I might still!

Another aspect is I no longer have a desire or requirements for a flagship phone. I just don’t need the latest, best thing out there, so I’m willing to consider mid-tier phones from brands like Motorola. This is as close to exciting as getting a new phone will be for me.

I will provide further updates once I start perusing various models and brands.