Category: M$

  • Today in Programming: Microsoft MakeCode

    With the twins, I messed around with a Neopixel strip. Not sure what I’d do with one in a future project, but at least I know how to program it in MakeCode now. Our project:

  • Vivaldi on Windows Part 2 (plus a teeny bit about Vivaldi on Linux)

    I’ve been using Vivaldi as my default browser for about a week now. As I said in the penultimate paragraph of the post where I mentioned exploring various browsers, I don’t really use my browser on Windows for much more than uploading YouTube videos. And I mentioned last time that it wasn’t the best setup…

  • Vivaldi On Windows Part 1

    This is the first post continuing my exploration of web browsers outside of Firefox and Google Chrome. You can read the introduction here. For the first browser I wanted to check out on Windows, I decided to check out Vivaldi. My thought process is that I’m most likely to end up with Brave, so better…

  • A Couple Windows 10 Upgrade Gotchas

    A Couple Windows 10 Upgrade Gotchas

    I “lost” my optical drives. I had to mess with a registry key to get them back. Here’s one I didn’t realize until I went to play Civ 5 and my saves were all gone. Because I have my main OS on a small SSD (and originally had my games on a regular hard drive…

  • This guy has figured out the holy grail of PC gaming

    I’ve been dreaming (no foolin’) about this for two or more years now – having one computer running Linux with a Windows VM for gaming when there aren’t Linux ports. Less hardware overhead for me. But until now VMs haven’t been able to gain native use of the graphics card. This guy figured out how…

  • Upgraded Windows 7 to Windows 10

    After waiting for a bit, turned out that the only real issue with Windows 10 is that you shouldn’t do Express Install unless you want Microsoft spying on everything. Also, now that I’m doing photography on Linux (another post about that at some point), the only thing I had to lose was the ability to…

  • Looks like Microsoft came up with their own BTRFS-like system, neat

    I hope it’s a little more mature in Windows 10 – I’ll definitely consider it when I update my photography hard drive.

  • Free Windows VMs!

    For once I found a way to run Windows for free that wasn’t a scam! Turns out the Microsoft makes VMs of Windows XP through Windows 8 available for free. The point is for you to be able to test how your websites will look in different versions of IE and different versions of Windows.…

  • Skype Text Message are NOT Secure

    A little less than a month ago Ars had a story about Skype’s text messages being insecure. This is pretty devastating considering how many political activists are using Skype to stay secure from governments like China and Russia. The article doesn’t mention anything about the voice communications, but I would be a little cautious if…

  • Review: Windows 8 Developer Preview

      I decided to check out the latest Windows release to see how much it differs from my Windows 7 install (on my video game/photography computer).  So I installed it into Virtualbox.     At first it wouldn’t install and I couldn’t understand what was going wrong.  Turns out that in the settings under the…

  • Customizing the Look of the OS

    I forgot what post online got me thinking about this stuff, but I really don’t customize my computers’ desktop environments much.  Generally, I tend to change the background image and leave it at that.  I took a look over my desktop image gallery here on the blog to confirm my suspicions. Starting at the bottom…

  • Guess What? Linux May Not Be for Everyone

    I feel like I may have covered bits of this here and there, but I couldn’t find it after a cursory check through my blog.  Fanaticism is fanaticism, whether it’s religious or technological it follows the same path.  Witness anyone who has just become an evangelical Christian (and it probably extends to other religions) as…

  • A Quick Review: Windows 7

    This is the first time in nearly 10 years that I’m moving to a new version of WIndows.  I pop the CD in and boot up.  I see a text screen as Windows “loads files”. Nothing here different from a Linux distro.  Then the Windows logo pops up. Wow, I’m impressed that Microsoft finally caught…

  • Photojojo for Late Nov to Early Dec

    It looks like the theme is cake.  Along with Kayla and something MS is famous for.  This cake, by the way, was made by Dina. If you like, see the web version of the Photojojo time capsule here.

  • When Being Proprietary Makes You Do Stupid Things

    Recently Microsoft screwed themselves over.  We have MS Money 2006 from back when I was still getting into Linux and hadn’t convinced my wife completely about how much better it was than Windows.  Recently we switched to back to a credit card where we previously used to download the transactions from within MS Money.  When…