My Canon camera took 78 photos today without issue. It then stopped taking photos, without explanation or apparent cause.
While editing a few of the good photos taken today, Windows 11 hard-locked, forcing me to reboot it. This has happened several times since installing the major fall patch.
TBD. There is still time before I turn in for the evening.
I have no idea what to do about the camera. For Windows 11, I am teaching it a lesson by rebooting into Linux Mint. It’s tough love, see.
UPDATE, The Next Day: Turned on the PC this morning (it is running Linux Mint at the moment) and the left monitor (HDMI) was working normally. When I powered on the right monitor (DisplayPort, but different cable), it was flashing and not working, so same behavior as before. It eventually went dark after 5-10 minutes. I turned the monitor off, then back on again and it started up normally. This suggests the cable is either not the issue or I indeed have two bad DP cables. I may try going full HDMI before the end of the day to see what happens tomorrow.
For a while now, I have been experiencing some weirdness with my displays. I have two 27″ monitors, both the same model, connected as follows:
PC: DisplayPort
Mac: HDMI
The weirdness does not happen on the Mac, so it seems related to DisplayPort (DP) somehow (maybe), but the cause could be:
Windows 11
Bad DP cable
Bad video card
Bad monitor
So far, I have determined the following:
Windows 11
Bad DP cable (maybe–see below)
Bad video card
Bad monitor
Because the issue happens in Linux Mint, which is like the anti-Windows, it doesn’t seem to be an OS issue. What exactly is happening, you ask? Several things, each horrible in its own special way!
The right monitor will sometimes glitch out after being turned on in the morning. The screen will flicker madly, and then sometimes lose signal altogether. If left alone, it eventually will start working normally. Usually rebooting the PC will also fix it.
Sometimes both monitors will lose the DP signal entirely and just go blank. I don’t know if the signal recovers on its own in this situation, but some testing suggests that if it does, it takes longer than I’m willing to wait (hours, at least).
Something I just noticed today: The DP and HDMI (to Mac) connectors on the back of the right monitor will get very warm, even hot, after a while. They remain cool (normal) on the left monitor. This, along with a dead pixel on the right monitor, leads me to think the right monitor is ailing, even if it isn’t the ultimate culprit.
Tonight I lost the DP signal on the left monitor, which is unusual, but it happened after swapping DP cables, so maybe there is a bad cable. I have cast the possibly bad DP cable aside, but don’t have a spare one that will reach to replace it, so right now the PC is connected with a combo of DP and HDMI. The DP cable that is now connected to the right monitor is the one previously connected to the left, so it may be good. Or “good.” But as noted above, I’ve sometimes lost signal on both monitors, which would mean two bad cables (theoretically possible) or, more likely, a bigger piece of hardware has gone awry. Or gremlins and gnomes are involved.
Anyway, I’ll see what happens, but for the moment both monitors are working and nothing seems to be getting super hot (yet). I will shut the monitors off when I go to bed and see what horrors await me in the morning when I turn them back on.
The best case scenario is that it is just a bad DP cable. The worst case is pretty much anything else, because both the monitor and video card would be very expensive to replace.
Computers are fun1They are! It’s actually rare for me to have hardware issues, so it’s especially annoying when they happen, particularly when the cause is uncertain..
I got presented with this dialog box in Windows 11 today. I can confirm it left me unsure on how to proceed.
(I also confirmed that at least the current version of Windows 11 I’m running gets a bit snaky with programs if you leave them open and running for long periods of time.)
As Brad Colbow opined not long ago, there are no more tech good guys. It seems every large tech company goes bad at some point. Maybe they all start bad and it just gets worse as the companies scale up. Whatever the case, the people who now defend the likes of Google and Microsoft seem kind of weird, or they’re lawyers.
Here’s my somewhat arbitrary ranking of how evil each of the Big Tech™ companies are:
MOST EVIL: Meta. First, the name change didn’t fool anyone. This is still Facebook and all it entails. Also, Zuckerberg was pretty off on the metaverse being the Next Big Thing (NBT). He’s probably looked into changing the company name again to AI. They get top spot because they’ve valued engagement over actual people’s lives. They are literally willing to let people die if it benefits the company. Anyone posting or using Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Threads would do well to remember this.
FROM A TO EVIL: Amazon. Like Google and MS, Amazon has used its monopoly to crush competition and then made its own experience that much worse, because why be good when you don’t need to be? They rank so high here because of their huge reach and influence. Bonus evil points for implementing a Vader-ish “Pray I don’t alter the deal further” by adding ads to Prime video, then demanding you pay extra to remove them. Good companies that respect their customers don’t do things like this.
DON’T BE EVIL: Google. Remember when web browsers started including pop-up blockers because web ads had become so pernicious and obnoxious? That was before Chrome even existed. In the early days of Google search, company stewards warned of mixing search with ads, fearing the latter would corrupt the former. Today, Google is a company that sacrifices everything to squeeze as much money as it can out of its ad/browser monopoly. They paid Apple over $20 billion in one year alone to be the default search engine in Safari. The company has no real purpose or vision except to sell ads and make profits fatter. It’s soulless, crushes competition through its monopoly muscle, and has directly contributed to making the internet a worse place.
EVIL, TOO: Microsoft. Speaking of monopoly abusers, there’s Microsoft. They got their wrists slapped in the late 90s, early 2000s by the US Department of Justice for their shenanigans with Windows and Internet Explorer. That wrist slap did create an opening for Chrome, though, so oops! Today, Microsoft leans heavily on its cloud services to make money. It also actively seeks to make Windows worse by shoving ads, tracking and other cruft into it. It may have directly contributed to Linux getting 1% more popular. That’s a lot for Linux! It got me to try Linux, for Pete’s sake. MS also seems soulless in the same way as Google, with no real vision except to chase trends (currently AI) and make as much money as possible.
THINK EVIL: Apple. Apple may be #4 on this list, but it’s rising fast. The first company to be valued at over $3 trillion US, Apple seems to exist now for two reasons: To make pretty good hardware that it sells at premium prices and to extract as much profit out of absolutely everything they do, and to keep extracting maximum profit, no matter what the cost to their reputation or long-term health. Apple, more than any other company here, is simply riven by greed, fostered by its long-standing culture of controlling all the things. Once services started making more money than anything but iPhone sales, Apple changed from a hardware company to “must always squeeze every dollar out of every avenue possible” company and has bitterly fought EU regulators, among others, to keep their gross profits untouched. I feel the tide is turning and Apple is determined to defy reality. We’ll see how that works for them. In the meantime, their once-beloved reputation is in tatters as they reveal themselves to be out-of-touch (see: the “Crush” ad), entitled and greedy.
BONUS EVIL : The company formerly known as Twitter. X gets included because it still carries outsize influence. Journalists, or people who call themselves journalists, have demonstrated repeatedly that they are quite happy to hang out at a Nazi bar. This particular Nazi bar is so ineptly run that it’s losing a ton of money, while allowing hate, racism and everything terrible about people, to flourish. But because it’s run (so to speak) by one of the richest (on paper) people in the world, there’s no danger it will go away any time soon.
This list may be updated if I realize I’ve forgotten one evil tech company or another (the original post missed Amazon, which is kind of funny, since I put them at #2).