I’ve finally added an RSS link on the sidebar of the site. It should work in your favourite (or even most-hated) RSS reader, making it easier than ever to keep up with whatever rolls around in my noggin and ends up on this site. It’s like the Year 2000 all over again!
This coincides with me trying to find another RSS reader myself and maybe stick to it. It could happen!
Also, this seems like a good random post to update on how I was looking into other options for my blog after all the WordPress drama of the past year or so. It turns out that trying to break out of a 20-year habit is hard (I started this blog on WordPress in 2005). And I always found something I didn’t like in the alternatives. But I am still looking in a casual kind of way, part of it being driven by the curiosity of what else is out there now for blogging.
A floppy disk. Kids, ask your parents! I graduated from 5.25″ floppies to DVDs over the years.
In the weird old days when you wanted software for your computer (because software for a portable phone was not a thing yet), you had to go to a physical store, buy a box with a disc in it, take it home, install the software, then hope (especially if it was a game) that the copy protection didn’t screw things up. If you didn’t want to insert the disc every time you ran a game like some kind of savage, you’d have to go to some skeevy-looking website and grab a no-CD fix.
Sometimes the no-CD fix worked flawlessly, sometimes it required the tech equivalent of arcane magic to work, sometimes it did nothing (or put malware on your PC).
I don’t look back fondly on any of the stuff I just described…except for the actual experience of looking for new software/games in stores. Back in the timeframe I’m describing, roughly the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, I would learn about new games through magazines like Computer Gaming World or PC Gamer. Or sometimes I would learn about them by actually finding the new games sitting on the shelves of a software store. It seems absolutely quaint now that this was how you could discover a game, but it’s true!
Some random memories:
Convincing a store clerk to sell me the Not For Sale version of the Commodore 64 game The Castles of Dr. Creep, circa 1984. A friend and I played it co-op in the store and I had to have it. I can’t recall what store I bought it from, other than somewhere just outside of Victoria.
Going to the Eaton’s store in Duncan and buying some generically-packaged versions of old Infocom games for cheap, back around 1985 (think Zork and a few others). To this day, I have no idea if these were legit copies. They were about $20 each, which was very cheap back then.
Buying OS/2 4.0 on floppy disk at Egghead Software. I don’t remember how many disks it came on, but more than a few! It was also surprisingly cheap, around $50 or $60 because IBM was trying to undercut Windows upgrade pricing. I never made much headway with it, and IBM abandoned OS/2 not too long after.
I want to say I bought my Windows 95 upgrade (on CD ROM!) at Computer City, where I worked during the launch of Windows 95 (at the Coquitlam store), but I’m not 100% sure. It seems like the logical place to have picked it up, and I know I grabbed it right away. I worked at Computer City for six weeks before quitting. The chain collapsed and vanished the following year.
Going to Super Software in Richmond and splurging one day by buying two games at the same time, each costing $50. I picked up Populous and SimCity, both for my Amiga 500. Probably the best 1-2 gaming purchase I ever made on physical media. Super software was also relatively gigantic and catered to every major platform back in the day: Apple II, IBM, Commodore 64 and Amiga, Atari ST, Atari 8-bit (and probably others I’m leaving out). It seems nutty how many different systems existed back then. There’s actually a 1989 commercial for Super Software on YouTube.
Buying the last copy of Age of Empires II (1999) at a Future Shop location on the day of release. It came in a gigantic box and had a relatively thick manual.
A few years later, I bought Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002), one of the first games to come in a mini box, with little to no documentation. Steam was only two years from launching and the end of physical media was nigh, though you’d be able to buy games on disc for some years after.
Last night, when I should have been getting ready for bed, I instead decided to fix my grub bootloader, which was displaying Linux Mint as Ubuntu. Easy to do in Linux Mint itself, as I already had previously installed a grub customizer.
I rebooted from Windows 11 and the grub menu came up, showing Ubuntu, as expected. I selected it and Mint loaded…but something was wrong. My second monitor stayed off and when the desktop loaded, it was locked to a resolution of 1920×1080 instead of the native 2560×1440.
Before diving into troubleshooting, I opted to just restart again first. This time, the grub menu correctly listed Linux Mint 22.2, which I was not expecting. But the one monitor issue persisted. The second monitor had just been working in Windows 11, so I didn’t think this was a hardware issue.
Again, I avoided troubleshooting (it was late, as mentioned, and I didn’t want to start going down rabbit holes), and instead went into the Driver Manager and did a very Windows thing in these types of situations–I updated the drivers, specifically the Nvidia drivers for my RTX 2070, sticking with the newer (and recommended) set. I rebooted again. The grub menu still said Linux Mint 22.2 and the monitors worked correctly when the desktop loaded. I had to tweak a few settings, like refresh rate, but everything was otherwise back to normal.
Then I went to bed, forgot about technology, and had a good sleep.
This morning, everything is still working as expected.
Hopefully this is the last of my PC drama for a while. I’m going to start speccing out a new system again. This one is closing in on seven years old, and I think it’s trying to tell me something, the computer equivalent of “duct tape can’t fix everything” or something like that.
This has nothing to do with food preparation. If only it did.
As mentioned a few days back, I was playing around with a few Linux distros. Most of the well-established ones allow you to install them alongside other operating systems (usually Windows, but could be another Linux distro). One of the ones I tinkered with was Pop!_OS, which is Ubuntu-based, and I forgot it does not do this.
What it does is it declares itself the One True OS and the only way to access anything else is to mash the F8 key when booting up and choosing a boot partition, like some kind of caveman.
I’d had this happen once before (probably the last time I messed around with Pop!_OS) but couldn’t remember the details on how to fix it, so off I went to the interweb. I’m recording the process now for the inevitable time I do this yet again.
First, grub is actually GRUB and is an acronym for GRand Unified Bootloader and the version I’m using is GRUB 2. You can read a little more about it here.
By not supporting grub and doing its own thing, Pop!_OS would just boot automatically, never giving me the usual menu and 10-second (default) time to choose which OS to run after a reboot.
To get my grub working again, I had to repair the grub using these steps:
Boot using a Linux Mint live CD (in this case, actually an ISO file living on a USB stick).
Open the Terminal and install a program called Boot-Repair.
Command: sudo apt install boot-repair
Update Boot-Repair, then run it.
Important: Choose Advanced Options and make sure I select the right partitions that Mint is on (in this case, it has its own internal SSD) and copy and paste the necessary commands into the Terminal when prompted.
Remove the USB stick and reboot.
NOTE: Since I still had a working Mint install, I could have mashed F8, booted into Mint and installed Boot-Repair and run it from my actual copy of the OS, rather than from the USB stick, but I only figured this out later, because my brain likes me doing things the hard way, at least the first time. More here.
It worked and I have my boot menu back. It was even nice enough to keep Pop!_OS listed after it was acting like a punk and trying to take over. The only hiccup is Boot-Repair sees Linux Mint as Ubuntu, as it is an Ubuntu derivative. Unless I actually install Ubuntu itself again, this isn’t an issue, though I can use a graphical grub editor to tweak the name if it really bothers me (it will probably eventually other me).
In the end, it was a hassle, but now I’m both better prepared and (hopefully) smarter about this for the future.
I’m still toying with making my next PC Linux-only, which would mean no need for grub at all. I feel I’m pretty close to that now, as I find working in Mint pleasant and Windows 11 regularly annoys me (to be fair, it has a bunch of stuff I really like, but it’s akin to a plate of yummy food where you have to keep picking out little rocks before you can enjoy it1Or whatever analogy you prefer. All analogies kind of suck.).
If you want a “pro” tablet with a display above 11 inches, you are going to pay dearly, especially if you’re using Canadian currency.
The reason I’m checking is that my current iPad, a 12.9″ Pro model from 2020, is now five and a half years old and will eventually stop getting support from Apple. Apart from the battery not lasting as long, the iPad actually still works perfectly fine, so I’m not in a rush to replace it, I’m just preparing for the eventual possibility.
And here are the prices:
Apple 13″ iPad Pro with M5: $1,800 (this doesn’t include the pen(cil), which adds another $170. This is LOL pricing and is over $500 more than what I paid for the 2020 equivalent. Someone’s got to pay for the gaudy gold trinkets Tim Cook is using to curry favour with wannabe dictator Trump. This is also a good reason to never buy Apple again.
Wacom MovinkPad Pro 14: $1,260. This is actually pretty reasonable compared to Apple and even to Wacom itself. Also, it comes with a larger screen, and expandable storage, but no cameras. And you also get Wacom’s industry-best stylus. It runs full Android.
Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra 14.6″: $1,750. Only $50 less than Apple, but Samsung gives you a larger display, expandable storage and includes the S Pen.
If you go with the low-end tablets, like the base iPad or Galaxy S10 Lite, you get a smaller display around 11″ but only pay around $500. I moved to the larger iPad Pro specifically because I wanted the larger canvas, so these wouldn’t really appeal to me.
Weirdly, this means Wacom is likely to have the eventual replacement for my iPad Pro. By the time I’m in the market it will probably be $1,800.
A new retro console! An Intellivision console, just like I had as a surly teen! It’s called the Intellivision Spirit.
But wait, there’s a YouTube link in the same article…
This seems to suggest the name is Sprint, not Spirit. And yes, it is the Intellivision Sprint, not Spirit1Bonus: How does a carpet get “cigarette-soaked”, exactly? And were the kids playing Intellivision back in 1982 chain smokers or something?.
The story was posted two days ago (as of this post I’m writing) and this curiously obvious gaffe has not been corrected. The first (of two) comments also points out the error.
But hey, it’s just a sloppily rewritten press release, rather than AI slop, so I guess we should be thankful for that.
I have an external 2 TB Samsung SSD and wasn’t using it for anything in particular, so I loaded up some of the better-known or regarded Linux distros and tried each in turn to see how they fared.
Bazzite: Billed as the distro for gamers, this took a very long time to install and when it finally did, I kept getting odd error messages and quirky behaviour. I tried installing again and it booted to a blank desktop, with only the mouse pointer visible. Could be my system, but whatever it was, my experiment with Bazzite ended here.
Pop_OS: I installed the beta, which is using the also-beta Cosmic desktop environment (DE). It seemed fine, but I decided I didn’t want to mess around with a beta after all. I’ll try it again once it’s a regular release.
Fedora: The KDE version. The default wallpaper is weirdly unattractive, but it otherwise it was perfectly fine. No issues stood out, but overall it felt a bit bland. Not a bad choice, though.
Ubuntu: I have played around with Ubuntu before and the setup was fast and polished. I am unconvinced that Gnome is better than KDE for the desktop, it’s more just different. However, I got further with Ubuntu than all the others, so it was doing something right. I missed the desklets from Mint, but other than that, everything else seemed to work well.
I’ll keep Ubuntu for now and tinker with it some more, but none of these have convinced me to move on from Linux Mint just yet, partly because of the time I’ve invested in customizing Mint, and also in part because none of them do anything better enough to woo me away, even though there are bits and pieces I like about each distro (except Bazzite).
One plus: All distros now use the grub loader to make it easy to dual (or triple) boot between Windows and one or more Linux versions, so it’s relatively painless to try them out.
A breathtaking example of dark patterns and how not asking for consent from a user can lead to a tech-related catastrophe filled with bogus warnings and alerts.
A neat tale of dogged perseverance beyond what most people would do, with connecting-the-dots and searching saving the day.
A sad testament to what a big ol’ pile of poop Windows has become in its latest incarnation. For every good feature, it feels like there are two user-hostile ones added.
My own experience with Windows 11 has increasingly soured since its debut, which is a neat trick, considering an OS normally starts out kind of janky and unstable when it launches and smooths out over time. Instead, Windows 11 has become both increasingly fragile and obnoxious, with ads, dark patterns and AI shoved into every corner of it, even basic apps like Paint and Notepad.
404 Media has a piece on AI slop videos that are all over Instagram and TikTok that not only evoke nostalgia for the 1980s, which has been a thing for a while, but goes further, with generated characters with feathered hair creepily inviting you to come back to 1985 and join them.
Tip: You can’t actually do that. You are stuck with 2025.
I especially like this paragraph from author Matthew Gault:
These videos are awful AI-generated slop, yes, but it’s more than that. Reactionary nostalgia, a desire to return to a fake past or a time when you were young and things were better, is part of why the world is so fucked right now. It is, literally, the basis of MAGA. Worse, these videos about the “past” tell us a lot about our present and future: one where AI encourages our worst impulses and allows users to escape from reality into a slopified world that narrowly targets whatever reality we’d like to burrow into without dealing with the problems of the present.
It’s like the Matrix, except stupid, horrible and about as cool as roadkill.
UPDATE, one day later: Now up to 32 pending updates!
What’s funny is when 27 apps on my iPhone 12 needed to be updated, I did update 7 of them and just days later the number of updates is already past that initial 27, to 30. This is just silly.
Phone updates are silly.
I want to see how long I can go before something stops working.
I have avoided discussing this in much detail, but in brief: I don’t like Liquid Glass. Like, at all. I think it’s glitzy, half-baked trash from people who don’t understand or care about good UI. But author Matt Gemmell put it better on Mastodon:
Liquid Glass is the kind of thing that would happen if someone with no UX design experience was put in charge of design, had no opinions on the matter so asked for suggestions, then approved the ideas from the youngest and least design-experienced people who could implement the most flashy demo.
It is thus, comprehensively and multifariously, Not What Apple (Used To) Do. An emblem of the sickness in the company, driven by moribund leadership, dilute focus, and ever more stagnant insight.
Here’s another thing: the degree of vacillation on design in public betas is disgraceful. About 5% of the time, when you change something due to feedback, it’s because you’re responsive and democratic. The other 95%, some highly-paid and ostensibly professional people did not sufficiently consider what they made. Design is intention and anticipation. Aesthetic fuckery is just playtime. When you then make multiple significant changes in successive betas, it’s no less than rudderless farce.
