Posts by TSM

That script I wrote three years ago is now doing what? How many times?

That's fine, if (a) you can find the relevant documentation when you need it and (b) the systems haven't changed in the meantime to the point that the documentation is somewhere from slightly inaccurate to actively misleading. Obsolete documentation is (in my experience) both a much worse and a much more pervasive problem.

Had this happen recently when we had to invoke a DR process (which fortunately I knew) that we hadn't needed in several years. [I know, TRWTF is not practising our DR processes regularly. TRRWTF is that we used to do this, but don't any more.] We did eventually find some documentation a few days after the fact, but it was largely inaccurate.

It doesn't help if you change your documentation platform every now and then, and in between reorganise the IT teams periodically so that half of the documentation you need is now in some other team's area. Even apart from those issues, when you have something that involves multiple departments it's impossible to find whether the latest thing is the one on Confluence or one of the ones on Sharepoint or the ones in various Teams channels or the one in an email chain, because everyone has their own ideas on where to put stuff...

Re: On the flip side

> I taught myself Z80 assembly language from books as a pre-teen, and my degrees are in the sciences, not in anything IT related.

(Almost) same [I was a teenager by the time I got into Z80 assembler] and same! I did do a computer science unit in first year but that is the extent of my formal CS education. Like you said, it's the desire to understand that is needed to get you that habit of looking at context above and below and around the thing you're doing and making sure you understand it.

One door opens, another one closes, and this one kills a mainframe

Re: Heavy doors

Logically, if opening all the doors is enough to tip over all the cabinets, then opening one door would be enough to tip over one isolated cabinet.

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: Golden Junque

Looks like there's also a Hemispheres (small).

So they must be fairly useful...

BOFH: Get me a new data file or your manager finds out exactly what you think of him

Re: Oh the pain!

You mean the things that used to be sometimes useful, before they all got converted into buttons that take you to the help portal on the company's website (or worse, the URL that used to be the help portal years ago), but don't do anything to guide you to a relevant help article, even assuming that one exists?

Re: Oh the pain!

We got hit by that one some years back. One of our kids needed to submit a form to get a Universal Student Identifier, required for educational purposes. The way to do this was to submit an online form with a bunch of ID document details, however when we tried to do this it failed because the document details could not be verified automatically.

After much trying over a period of days we eventually figured out that the automated document verification service appeared to only be available during Canberra office hours (which, because of timezones, were over by the time we had been trying to submit the form). Of course this was never mentioned anywhere and the error message on the failed attempts contained no useful information.

BOFH: Ah. Company-branded merch. So much better than a bonus

Re: AHH the good old USB

Our machines are set by group policy to not even recognise USB storage devices. It's a pain any time I want to move files around, especially in bulk.

Pixies keep switching off my morning alarm, says Google Pixel owner

> Unless his list is ~14 songs long, the issue should not reappear every couple of weeks.

Depends how long it takes him to wake up. Some people are heavy sleepers; he might not wake up properly until several songs into the playlist. My wife certainly doesn't wake up when her radio (we're old fashioned) starts playing. It wakes me up though!

Techie called out to customer ASAP, then: Do nothing

(from the article)

"Whether the customer ever realized it was being fooled is lost to history."

Was the customer being fooled, though? I thought it was the customer initiating the callout, because:

"The cost of having Paul travel to the site and do nothing was tiny, when compared to the penalties the customer was owed under the contract if nobody appeared on time."

I assumed the customer was willing to take the risk of paying the tiny fee for a chance at the large penalties - a reasonably rational (especially since it appears there was a good chance Paul might not have made it in time) if less than ethical course of action. I don't understand how the story makes sense any other way. So how is the customer being fooled?

Boeing Starliner's 1st crewed trip to the ISS delayed again over battery overheating risk

Hold on a second

> Software bugs in the flight code also had to be checked

The bugs had to be checked? Shouldn't they have been FIXED?

(Yes, I understand that bugs can be acceptable in this sort of thing if they have been rigorously analysed, the scope for problems is known, and if necessary appropriate mitigations are put in place. I wouldn't describe this as "checking" the bug, though.)

User was told three times 'Do Not Reboot This PC' – then unplugged it anyway

Re: Content

> or even better perform upgrade during the weekend when nobody is in.

I mean, that's what they did in the article.

Re: Content

> It also doesn't have any information why it shouldn't be rebooted, so the user may not know how important it is.

The article did say

> replaced the desktop background with a big sign, white writing on a bright red screen, saying 'Software installation in progress. Do Not Attempt to Re-boot This System'."

So there was some information about the reason it shouldn't be rebooted.

Also doesn't sound like it would have looked like an advert.

The article felt pretty weak to me for other reasons though. Especially when it says "The few machines that hadn't upgraded weren't a worry: someone always turned off their PC by mistake or did something else that needed intervention" but then goes on to explore the details of one case of this happening. Why is it worth doing that, if this was an expected and normal part of the process? Is the leap from "accidentally turning off their machine" to "pulling out the plug to try to get it working again" really so vast that it elevates the story into something worth reading?

Dear Stupid, I write with news I did not check the content of the [Name] field before sending this letter

Re: Live by the shoddy business practices

I know your pain. When my ADSL modem died a few years ago, I was unable to convince my ISP's tech support that a problem with the line would not explain why it wasn't able to route local traffic - or why the power light wasn't coming on any more. It took a technician visit (who confirmed that yes, the line was fine) before they would accept that the modem needed to be replaced.

Artificial pancreas successful in type 2 diabetes tests

Re: Exciting news

I'm a LADA which seems to be not well understood yet, hooray. Diagnosed a couple of years ago. Despite going from 8 to 12 units of insulin since I last saw my endocrinologist my levels are higher than ever... maybe the metformin is not working as well, or maybe my pancreas is starting to give up the fight. My immune system already killed off my thyroid years ago so it has form for this sort of thing (and at the time of that diagnosis my doctor warned me that I'd be at increased risk for other auto-immune diseases, so here we are).

CGMs have just gone onto the subsidy list here in Australia for people with Type 1 so it might be worth looking into. Kinda squeamish about the idea though.

Version 5 of the Endless OS enters testing

Re: Looks like Windows 11

> I do wonder about the possibility (probability?) that I (and others) like the early windows generic interface - menus, taskbar, heirarchical start menu - only because that's what we learned first.

I think there's more to it than that. I started on GUIs with MacOS System 3 (although it was upgraded to 7 after a year or so) at uni and Windows 3.0 at home. Windows 95 was a massive improvement over 3.x by every measure, provided you made sure to configure startup options to suit your DOS games and didn't try to run them under Windows. And most Windows versions continued to improve for quite some time. I certainly wouldn't want to go back to the Windows 95 UI, much less anything earlier.

A key factor in making the most out of the Windows UI has always been a willingness to spend some time organising and customising things. This didn't really start to lose its effectiveness until after Windows 7. Focusing particularly on the start menu and taskbar (since the main job of the OS is to let me start applications and manage the applications that I have running), here are some things both good and bad that stand out to me version by version from 7 onwards (except enough has been said about Windows 8 so I'll ignore it here). Some of the Win 7 things are really Vista things because I never used Vista enough to count:

Windows 7:

* Searching on the Start Menu is OK, but if (like me) you have everything you want in tightly controlled, nested folders, it doesn't help much.

* HomeGroup is terrific. Sharing a printer is much easier than ever before.

* Libraries seem kind of unnecessary.

* Taskbar is still relatively useful as long as you set it to never combine.

* Why would I want windows to be transparent? If I'm working in one window I want to see that window, not what's underneath it.

* Jump lists are pretty cool, if nigh-impossible to discover.

Windows 10:

* I see we still haven't gotten Settings and Control Panel merged after the Windows 8 mess.

* HomeGroup is gone :( Sharing printers is back to being somewhat painful.

* Give up on Start Menu folders. Also, accept that you won't be able to find executables for a bunch of programs.

* Organise the Start Menu by pinning instead. (This was more a work thing than a home thing for me.) Pin every single program you use regularly to the Start Menu with a small tile, organise them into appropriate labelled groups, and set your start menu to show pinned apps by default. Then you have instant access to everything you need. On the rare occasions you need something else, it's easy enough to switch back to the all apps view and search for it.

* Taskbar is still relatively useful as long as you set it to never combine and to show text.

Windows 11:

* OK, let's put the taskbar back on the left (literally the first thing I did).

* I see we STILL haven't gotten Settings and Control Panel merged.

* WHY CAN'T I RIGHT CLICK ON THE TASKBAR TO PULL UP TASK MANAGER? [Note: as of sometime in the last couple of weeks, this is back! Why it ever went away is beyond me - but I was very glad to know the Ctrl+Shift+Esc shortcut in the meantime.]

* Pinning still kind of works to organise your Start Menu, but not as well: you don't have groups any more and you can't control the layout beyond "less pins" and "more pins". You can't turn off recommendations altogether, which is a pity because if I could use those last couple of lines for pinned apps I could fit all the ones I want to use on the same page and not have to scroll.

* There's really no way to ungroup my taskbar icons? Great, let's add time and extra clicks every time I want to swap to an app that has more than one open window. That's only (unsurprisingly) all the ones I use most often. [I think I need to train myself to use the Task List button for app switching rather than the taskbar icons.]

You might notice from the above that there's been useful UI stuff in most of the Windows versions I've used. But I haven't found anything in Windows 11 that works better for me, and several things that are quite a bit worse. It feels like the Windows 8 experience again in some ways (though certainly not as bad).

Stuff that I don't remember well enough to attribute to a particular version, or that has been a tendency over multiple versions:

* Taskbar functionality took a hit for me in whichever version insisted that all the windows for the same application had to be together. But the forced grouping in 11 has really killed it.

* Why don't jump lists work on the pinned apps view? (Not sure if this was the case in 10.)

* Steady removal of detail for customising the layout and appearance of the UI. Fairly minor for the most part and understandable from a vendor perspective. It'd be nice if everything that remained didn't get shifted around continually, I might have been able to find things sooner.

* I actually don't want to search the internet from the Start menu pretty much ever (I will note that it is handy in the case of an app that you thought you had previously installed but actually hadn't yet; but that's a very niche case). If I did want to, I wouldn't want to use Bing.

* Flat UI. Ugh. Borders served a purpose.

Someone else mentioned the rise of skinny, nigh impossible to use scrollbars (especially when you're on the bus and bumping around). I only don't include it above because it only shows up in some apps and I don't know if it's an app thing or an OS thing.

Two signs in the comms cabinet said 'Do not unplug'. Guess what happened

Re: DO NOT REBOOT THIS COMPUTER!!

> I put a big sign on the monitor saying "DO NOT REBOOT THIS COMPUTER!! It is being used for $PURPOSE and needs to run interrupted!".

He was just trying to make sure it ran interrupted, like you asked.

Just follow the instructions … no wait, not that instruction to lock everyone out of everything

Re: Writing instruction manuals is an art....

Don't worry, one day soon it will just be a file that you can only access by pressing a specific sequence of buttons on the infotainment panel.

Re: Bah!

Perhaps we need to muster up all the intestinal fortitude we can gather and pretend to be really into such things. Then it will be uncool and they may finally go away.

Go ahead, be rude. You don't know it now, but it will cost you $350,000

Re: You get what you order

Not always. I'm happy to recommend Fisher & Paykel washing machines after ours lasted us 17 years - replaced a couple of years ago by another F&P of the current nearest equivalent line but with larger capacity.

On the other hand I couldn't tell you what brand our freezer is, but I'm happy to get another one if and when it decides to pack up.

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

Re: Bad design

> Ovens for example, never have a simple way to set the bloody clock, they ALWAYS have some weird thing that involves pressing 3 buttons at once and then turning two knobs simultaneously while casting the runes.

Ours isn't too bad. The function knob on the left has six settings, going clockwise they are Fast Set, Slow, Time, Oven, Mind, Set. Time (in the vertical position) is the normal setting and just displays the current time. The ones before Time are for fast (1 hr/step) and slow (1 min/step) increments to the clock. The ones on the other side are for the automatic start or stop (I don't even know which) function that we never use. So it's just "turn it two steps to the left until it gets to the hour you want, one step back to the right until it gets to the right minute, then back to the central position." The only hard part is timing the turns so that it stops on the number you want, but if you miss it you just have to go around again.

Senior engineer reported to management for failing to fix a stapler

Before I was even working in the IT department - but doing IT-ish process improvement in the department where I was working - I was asked to help someone out with their digital camera, which was the first time I'd seen one (this being about 18 years ago). I have no recollection of the actual problem but it was indeed pretty simple to sort out.

Of course, that only reinforces the general belief that you do know how to solve every problem. I did eventually teach the Marketing department how to randomise lists and how to compare two lists in Excel, so they didn't have to ask me to do it for them every time they needed it. So these days it's mostly my team members asking me about actual job related stuff, which is nice.

Tetchy trainee turned the lights down low to teach turgid lecturer a lesson

When I was at uni - around 30 years ago, sigh - what the lecturers wrote on the blackboard was generally what we would write in our notes; the additional discussion, Q&A, etc. was not normally written down although of course you could do so if there was something you found illuminating. Overhead projectors with the continuous rolls were used usually to supplement, for instance if they had been asked to explain something in the main notes and wanted to draw a diagram, or if they wanted to show something that would have taken a lot of time and effort to draw by hand. When I did my honours dissertation presentation it was all on OHP transparencies.

I remember the first time we saw a computer projection in one of our classes - it was not done the same way as today; there was a special backless LCD (I think) monitor that could be put on top of the overhead projector like a fancy, animated transparency. Because everyone had overhead projectors and almost nobody had a dedicated computer projector.

To preserve Earth's treasures, digital silence is golden

Alternative truth being rediscovered: Humans are awful.

As a corollary, if we can find a spot without many of them, we should keep it that way so we can enjoy it.

BOFH: It's Friday, it's time to RTFM

Re: Watch for hidden acronyms.

Both scanners and cameras, I believe.

And it was Technology Without An Interesting Name, if I recall correctly.

You can never have too many backups. Also, you can never have too many backups

Re: Stack popped reading that procedure....

> The classic solution would be using a Grandfather-Father-Son rotation

This was at a point in time where the backup hadn't been done for a month. You're still doing a month's worth of data entry over the weekend.

We were promised integrated packages. Instead we got disintegrated apps

Re: Photos via MMS

> The only thing you didn't explain is why on earth would you need to send a picture from your phone... What could be so urgent it can't wait for you to get home/to work and do it a more conventional way?

Well, in my case yesterday, I wanted to send my daughter pictures of the various multi-colour yarns they had at the shop I was in, so she could tell me which ones she wanted me to buy for her. Taking the pictures, walking home with them, showing them to her, and walking back to the shop to buy the selected ones would have been rather inefficient. (Especially when the response after the first round of pictures was "can you take close-ups of all the ones of this type?")

Mind you, our phones refuse to send photos to each other via MMS or Bluetooth, even though both phones can send and receive photos via MMS with other correspondents; our current working theory is that our phones simply hate each other. So we had to email photos to each other instead.

Enough with the notifications! Focus Assist will shut them u… 'But I'm too important!'

Re: I like that man - even if he did move to France

SQL Developer does this to me all the time - I'm typing in a query and part way through it pops up a dialog box to tell me that the database connection has been reset, and waits for me to click "OK", which of course is the only option. Everything I type before I notice the dialog is there gets lost.

Something similar with one of the apps I use (though not as useless as a mere notification) - on launch, the application displays a dialog box for you to select which connection to use, and to enter login details if you don't have the option set to save them. If you have so much as looked at another application while this one is starting up, this window appears underneath everything else, and doesn't have a task bar button; you have to alt-tab to it - and it appears at the end of the alt-tab list, though of course that's not particularly hard to get to.

More than once I've gone to restart my computer, and on closing down everything else found one or two of those windows patiently waiting for input.

Re: Windows System Sounds - office hell!

I just keep a pair of earphones plugged in to mine. I put them on if I'm on a call or want to listen to music, and the rest of the time they absorb whatever sounds my laptop wishes to inflict on the general environment.

The perfect crime – undone by the perfect email backups

Re: You just never know...

I've had some old requests. One company wanted an explanation a couple of years ago of ~$10k of due payments that were showing up in a report as not having been paid; we had to restore a system we'd decommissioned in 2015 to investigate what had happened to them, but the payments they were asking about were from the 2008 kind of era, so you'd think they could have asked a little earlier. (The big one that was almost all the total was paired with an equal negative amount which was also showing unpaid; most of the others had been paid, but the invoice had been transferred to from a subsidiary to their main company, so it didn't get picked up properly in the data update that got the payment information out of the old system. I think in the end they technically owed us a bit, but we obviously weren't going to press them for it.)

I was less successful when we had a legal request (for a court case) to recover all payments made to a certain vendor ever. We could give them back to ~2006 OK, but before that payment information would have had to be dug out of our (current - 3) system, which was an Access database with a custom front end. Which I was reasonably familiar with, and which I'm pretty sure were backed up to offline storage (they were backed up initially to our fileserver, and some years later we had a big push to archive unused stuff off the fileserver to offline storage), but neither I nor anyone else I asked who'd been around in that sort of era could work out where those archives actually were now, or if they still existed.

Well, you clearly shouldn't have been stealing cameras in the first place!

How one techie ended up paying the tab on an Apple Macintosh Plus

Re: No convert

Did you know the F8 thing still works, more or less?

Looks like the first press of F8 puts it into an odd selection mode, then subsequent presses select the word, sentence, paragraph, and whole document.

But then you're still in that selection mode, and clicking with the mouse will select from wherever the starting point of the latest F8 selection was to the current mouse position. It's a little odd to get out of.

Switch off the mic if it makes you feel better – it'll make no difference

Indeed, the article on this very site about the wallpaper speakers (https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/29/mit_flat_speakers/) does specifically discuss their potential as microphones, which researchers are actively pursuing:

----

MIT professor Jeffrey Lang confirmed as much in an email to The Register.

"The same device can work as a microphone," said Lang. "It can be mounted on the surface of any object and used for sound recording. The device itself is passive and generates voltage signal under incident acoustic waves. But we apply a small transimpedance amplifier in order to obtain a large signal-to-noise ratio."

"We actually have an upcoming paper that reports the microphonic performance of the same device. The amplifier is the only part that consumes power. If a standalone design is needed, usually the signal storage/processing and wireless transmission consume much more power than the amplifier itself."

"But we can either use a battery or integrate energy harvesting components to make it standalone without wiring to external power. For instance, our group is also developing thin-film solar cells and it's possible to integrate that with the acoustic thin film to provide the energy."

----

So we can look forward to a time when our houses really are listening to everything we do all day long.

Your software doesn't work when my PC is in 'O' mode

Around 20 years ago the organisation I worked for had a strict policy of having all computers turned off at the end of the day. This policy was accompanied by a photo of the mangled remains of a computer in one of the workshops whose monitor, IIRC, had decided to set itself on fire one night.

You can buy a company. You can buy a product. Common sense? Trickier

I did once waste a fair bit of my ISP's tech support time trying to figure out why I couldn't access my email, which had previously been working.

After about half an hour of rechecking various settings and trying all manner of things, I realised that I still had my work VPN active from when I'd been fixing an issue remotely, hours earlier. (I already knew that my work VPN blocked my ISP's mailserver, though this is fortunately no longer the case.)

Prototype app outperforms and outlasts outsourced production version

Re: Been there - done that

Sounds like they were indeed a team of tools.

No, I've not read the screen. Your software must be rubbish

Re: penultimate hurrah?

Yes, that's why Win98 was the penultimate (second last) entry in the 9x family. I'm not sure what your point is here. Or are you just riffing on WinMe since it came up?

The dialog in question does have a "Don't show this dialog again" checkbox.

Unfortunately I have to leave it set to show the dialog every time, because if I don't, it doesn't turn off the inbuilt speaker when I plug in headphones. And they're treated as a single "Speaker/Headphones" device in the control panel, so I can't just disable the speaker and leave the headphones enabled, which would be my preference.

Bouncing cheques or a bouncy landing? All in a day's work for the expert pilot

I think you mean "autodetecting external screens, and then deciding randomly whether to use the same settings as the last time they were on this screen configuration, or to turn some screens off at random just for the hell of it."

At least that's how my work laptop behaves. Plug it in, see whether all the screens come up, and if not (about 10% of the time) go to display settings and put it back to "Extend" rather than "Show only on monitor <whichever one it likes today>".

BOFH: On Wednesdays, we wear gloves

Re: Beyond 2000

I remember when it was "Towards 2000"...

Wi-Fi not working? It's time to consult the lovely people on those fine Linux forums

Re: Always read from the end

Sometimes you need to be more thorough. Particularly on the Microsoft forums, I've seen error message threads which have a collection of five to ten separate fixes, each of which fixes the problem for a distinct subset of users.

I've done the very same thing. Googled for my odd problem, been happy to see there was a single forum thread about it, realised it was an old thread I'd started, read to the end, and left to ponder the "never mind, I've managed to fix it" message I left last time.

If I recall correctly, I managed to nevertheless use that information to fix the problem - by looking in my sent emails from around the date of that last post for any that might be related to the issue. I don't think I got the actual answer, from memory, but enough hints to put me on the right track.

I would drive 100 miles and I would drive 100 more just to be the man that drove 200 miles to... hit the enter key

Re: are you sure (y/n)

Frankly anyone doing their internet banking at a cyber cafe is putting themselves at significant risk even if their bank does log their session out immediately. From what I've heard the incidence of keyloggers etc (known to the operators or not) at those sorts of venues is rather high.

LibreOffice 7.2 brings improved but still imperfect Microsoft Office compatibility

Re: incompatibility issues

The printer obsession does extend into places you wouldn't expect it.

I recently had to fix an issue where commands like setting the page header and footer in an Excel document (from Access VBA - don't ask) failed, because the print spooler service had been disabled for security thanks to PrintNightmare, and without it the user didn't have a default printer, and without a default printer the very concept of page formatting makes no sense, apparently.

Re: incompatibility issues

Yeah, I had very similar issues in the same era. Going between Mac and PC would screw up a bunch of stuff, in particular all my equation objects were essentially destroyed - as I was doing honours maths this was a bit of a problem, and in the end I had to avoid the Macs and edit it only on PC.

For postgrad I learned how to use LaTeX instead and was able to move seamlessly between Mac, PC, and SGI Indys for my editing - and as a bonus the files were a lot smaller, which was useful when they all had to be stored on floppy disk for transit.

Electrocution? All part of the service, sir!

Re: caught the voltage switch while reaching for the power switch

All the ones I recall seeing on computers (a handful or two, I guess) have just been an exposed rocker switch.

BOFH: They say you either love it or you hate it. We can confirm you're going to hate it

Re: Deja vu!

> Mageia highlights only the file name before the extension when renaming - does Windows still highlight the whole name, including the extension? I am not interested enough to fire up my dual-booting laptop just to check

Nope; from about 7 onwards, I think, it initially only highlights the part before the extension. You can of course subsequently alter the selection as you choose, but if you just go click-pause-type, the extension will be untouched.

And if you do change the extension* it pops up a dialog to warn you that you might be making the file unusable and asking you if you really want to go ahead. Though of course the average user won't read the warning and will just press "OK" anyway.

* except in the case where it didn't have an extension originally

Microsoft made $167m a day in profit, every day, over the past 12 months

Re: The first RANSOMWARE O.S...

Right now I am struggling to get my daughter's old Win 7 laptop (which she uses for university) to activate her copy of Office again - I've tried enabling the TLS 1.2 stuff as per their article, without result - which took some searching to find since, of course, there was no error message, just a silent failure. And yes, Win 7 is no longer supported, but the computer likely won't manage an upgrade to Win10 since it struggles enough as it is. More memory would probably help, but I just don't have the money to keep my kids updated with modern hardware.

But Microsoft's certainly not earning any brownie points with me when it refuses to acknowledge my perfectly valid licence, and won't let my daughter save or edit documents in a few days' time.

So if I can't get this sorted we may have to try migrating her over to OpenOffice / LibreOffice instead, at least until we can afford to buy her a new machine. At which point it's going to be very tempting to burn her a live DVD of one of the alternatives and see how her system performs with it.

Games are the real problem with moving, of course.

Don't cross the team tasked with policing the surfing habits of California's teens

Re: Unions...

I'd have been tempted to retitle the positions as software typists. But that might have ruffled a few other feathers.

Yep, you're totally unique: That one very special user and their very special problem

Did the same on my work laptop, after one too many times of accidentally turning the volume down instead (the brightness controls are apparently Fn-up arrow and Fn-down arrow on this one).

Now my main irritation is that when I'm using the laptop keyboard, the trackpad picks up lots of unintended movement / touches and I often wind up inserting text at some randome point because it thinks I clicked the mouse there. I used to have the option set to disable the touchpad when an external mouse is connected (which it nearly always is), but had to untick it when it started refusing to enable the touchpad even when there wasn't an external mouse. (Lots of fun trying to find and navigate that dialog when you don't have any functional pointing device!)