Posts by Code Dinosaur

No account? No Windows 11, Microsoft says as another loophole snaps shut

Re: They are fighting against the kind of people they NEED as Windows users

I've just spent two hours trying to get a friend back into his Windows 11 laptop. It was setup with Windows 11 linked to his old hotmail address & is complaining that his PIN doesn't work. He made the simple mistake of saving his family photos to the pictures folder, which backed them up to one drive, filling it up & so now his account is locked. His dual factor email is 12 years out of date, his phone is a landline which can't receive texts & although he can see his emails he can't get passed the catch-22 that to add a new fall-back email or phone he has to use the email or phone that he doesn't have. I've sent him home to wait for a response from MS account recovery, but until then his expensive laptop is locked & encrypted. If successful I'll make sure he has the right authenticators & fallback methods so the bastards can't lock him out again.

If it was my machine I'd linux it, but he has stuff on the internal SSD & MS have locked it down "in the interests of security" so I don't think I can get his files back for him. He never asked for this so called "security", he never even wanted his family photos in the cloud, but he was sucked into their grip because save your stuff to "my pictures" or "my documents" is so ingrained in all windows applications.

Great business strategy, put your files here, we'll put them in our cloud, charge you to hold them & if you don't pay we'll lock down your account so you can't use your own computer.

LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks and real-time collab

Re: All you need

My record was 630Mb in Excel, that was constantly crashing the file server, reduced to 500kb after the round trip. Just because Excel lets two people edit a worksheet at the same time, doesn't mean you should actually try it. Only had to do it once mind, once I realized what they were storing in the file I added it as an SQL table in their main bespoke application & told them never to use Excel as a database ever again.

Microsoft turns Windows Subsystem for Linux into an app for Windows

Re: @phuzz - WSL-as-app

Which with most modern bios, especially on laptops is very difficult.

I've run various linux distros on my my machines over the years, sometimes dual-boot, but mostly as the only os. I like linux & although I'm employed to write applications for Windows I prefer linux on my personal machines.

I currently have one laptop that despite having a decent sized built-in ssd, will only boot linux from a micro-sd card. After hours trying all the bios switches available that is my only non-windows option.

Another laptop doesn't even give me that option, it can boot from a windows installer, but won't touch anything non-microsoft.

A third laptop was dual-boot, but always reverted to windows only after patch Tuesday, so is now Mint only.

A new desktop can boot from a linux dvd, but once installed to an ssd, my preferred os is instantly locked out. That £900 investment has been reduced to acting as a cd jukebox under windows until I can figure out how to unlock the bios. I've set the various switches sufficiently to annoy the Windows 11 hardware checker, but that's still not enough to make MY COMPUTER boot what I want.

Another desktop can boot from a linux ssd that was setup by another machine, but won't look at a bootable usb drive containing a linux distro.

All of these issues relate to the bios blocking legitimate uses of MY COMPUTER. The only device I've bought in the last four years that will boot linux without fuss is my pi & that isn't quite fast enough for video editing.

Vote to turf out remainder of Nominet board looks inevitable after .uk registry ignores reform demands

Re: Shine a light

Assuming your current registrar allows you to set the transfer tag. If they don't then you have to pay £10+vat to force the transfer through Nominet's system.

Cancelled in Crawley? At least your train has free Wi-Fi now, right?

Only One Website

Only one web-site is required when traveling by train & that is realtimetrains.co.uk, all other sites should be throttled automatically to 300 baud to discourage those who can't live without streaming or arsebooking.

HostingUK drops offline after losing Farmer vs Fibre competition

Where you can be absolutely sure both sites will be taken out, the next time Amazon or MS fiddles with their core routers

Whois? Whowas. So what's next for ICANN and its vast database of domain-name owners?

Re: Namecheap offering FREE whoisguard

I've just moved registrars (to get away from 123) & my new one gave me free "privacy" on two of my domains for a month, then started begging me to sign up for it at £12 a year per year, telling me of all the terrible things that could happen if my details were out in the open, like they've been for the last 10 years.

Strangely after last Friday they stopped trying to sell it to me.

About fifteen years ago I bought a domain name to do some testing for a project I was working on. As I was a big fan of P G Wodehouse I named it after a club in one of his novels (not the drones, that had already been taken). About three months later I got a letter from lawyers representing his literary estate telling me I infringing his copyright. As I had finished the project I was working on & couldn't be bothered to argue I just reset the name back to the registrars holding page. But I still wonder if they were using a scatter gun approach in the hope of finding somebody who'd invested in marketing under one of "their names" & would therefore pay them a licencing fee.

My PC is broken, said user typing in white on a white background

Re: Black on Black

Clearly a fan of Disaster Area & wanted to copy their colour scheme.

"Every time you try to operate one of these weird black controls that are labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you've done it"

No Windows 10, no Office 2019, says Microsoft

Re: Cold Dead Hand

Office 64bit is a blessing & a curse. I'm currently moving users to a Citrix hosted Office 2016 environment, but we've had to insist on 32bit as we use a lot of interop code to control Word for producing documents. That really doesn't play nice at 64bit

Time to make up: Realtime collaboration comes to Excel

600Mb Shared Excel File

About three years ago I had some users sharing an Excel file to record quotes they had done. A worksheet that started as 50k grew rapidly to 600Mb as Excel tried to do it's versioning & sharing thing, it clogged the file server with locking errors & gradually brought down every machine that touched it. After washing it through libreoffice I moved the data into SQL & gave them a simple editing screen. One day's development gave them a much better system & got all their machine's running at a decent speed.

I also went the full "Linus" on my users explaining why you don't share spreadsheets or use them for database jobs. To this day if I'm walking round the office I see users swiftly hiding an instance of Excel afraid I might spot their illegal use of a spreadsheet.