Month: March 2023

Windows 11 first impression: it is awful

I want to have a shortcut open cmd.exe with a starting folder location. Not difficult at all in Windows 10.

In Windows 10, I could scroll through the Windows menu and find Command Prompt and then click-and-drag to make a shortcut on my desktop. Then I could modify the properties as I want.

Windows 11 doesn’t let you do this. It will launch the command prompt, and it will let you pin it to either the task bar or the start menu – but those shortcuts do not have properties you can modify. Well, one of them did, but starting folder was not a property I could set.

“Well David, how about choosing New Shortcut and following the prompt?” Okay, sure. Right-click the desktop, choose New ==> Shortcut. It asks “What item would you like to create a shortcut for?” You tell me, dimwits. Under Windows 10, I’d copy the existing shortcut and that would be defined for me already. Does your dialog box have a search function in it? No.

Great. I need to crank up a Windows 10 machine so I can find the location on that box, and on the Windows 11 box browse through arcane mysteries of %windir%\system32\

Finally, I’m getting a shortcut started, and now I need to set the starting directory. Windows 11 helpfully removed the Browse button….

I swear, it seems like whomever is in charge of Windows hates their users and are doing shit just so that the next time their annual review comes up, they can say that they did shit. Sure, it was shit that made user’s lives worse, but there isn’t a feedback mechanism for that, now is there? So that didn’t happen.

At least the icon picker still has a Browse button.

Factorio map generator seed

4010922000

I like this one because there is oil near (enough) and the biters are far enough away that I get some time to build defenses before they go full on constant attack mode.

  1. Start a new game
  2. Next to the Map generator screen
  3. Paste in the new seed
  4. Adjust Resources, terrain, enemy, and Advanced.
    • I change Research queue availability to Always
  5. Preview

Here’s a jumpstart iron miner and smelter:

0eNqdlNtugzAMht/F16FqIDTAq0zTxMHrIoGDknRbVfHuC616XNpSLp3In3//lr2Dqt1gbxQ5KHagak0WircdWLWmsh3f3LZHKEA57IABld0YVRtDaKJOkaJ11BjVtjAwUNTgLxR8YE8J1mnC6NNzyhovcuPhnQGSU07hQco+2H7QpqvQePhDEQx6bX2uprGy58mEwRaKKI19jUYZrA+fYtR4g45P6B+tG6So/kLrAsx0kR6pi3QIkJJbkYosGue//sPEFexKZBxAizsW3u98GVKYnjDOlGR7bVxUYfu42+WtwJCLqxd6P6N52Ej5Aiw5wkQWhmVzpiLyKVPJZ9i5l/nUTr6cg84nofksQ7IphvDJy3QemxzH5td/fymKi9PE4BuNPdTKuJB5LOVKcBlnw/AHrQGN8Q==

My favorite coal jumpstart rig Early Coal Mining Rig:

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

Microsoft Outlook.com is playing Catch-22 with me

My SMTP mail server is relatively new, and it took a few weeks, but Microsoft has blocked it’s IP address. The non-delivery report (NDR) says this:

For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster.

Care to guess what gets rejected because I’m on their block list? That’s right: postmaster@live.com and postmaster@outlook.com

For what it is worth, I’m currently getting a 9.8 out of 10 on mail-tester.com: https://www.mail-tester.com/test-1dcmfmxh8

OpenSuSE upgrade did not work – reinstalled fresh from a new ISO

Pro-tip you should have done a decade ago: add a second hard drive to your machine, and put /home on it. Then during the install of the fresh OS, do not format that disk, simply mount it as /home

In a previous post, I was whining that YouTube videos were not working. I also (rather mean-spiritedly) implied that maybe Google was screwing with the connection because I was looking for ad-blocking videos. That was wrong: this fresh install of OpenSuSE has fixed that problem.

Of course, never does a single thing change, and I happened to roll over into the new month, so T-Mobile doesn’t see me as over my “unlimited” transfer limit.

But for all that testing I did, what I hadn’t tried was Windows versus Linux. I saved off a problematic YouTube link to my NextCloud Tasks, and logged in to it on a Windows machine. It played perfectly.

D’oh! It’s my OpenSuSE machine that’s borked.

I’d done an Upgrade per SDB: System upgrade to Leap 15.4

So I downloaded the ISO and did an Install not an Upgrade, and now that problematic YouTube video plays correctly.

I’m still going to have to install all the packages that went away. But that is a trade-off I’m willing to make, for being able to see videos of how to open up the connection to Mariadb running on a Synology NAS (for example).

I dread upgrading OpenSuSE to a new version

This time is no different. Ugh.

It always breaks so much stuff.

I don’t understand why it’s so hard to keep the list of Image Magick delegates from one version to the next.

I don’t understand why it’s so hard to find how to add the delegates that were removed during the upgrade.

Today, I need to convert a PDF to a PNG and convert -version tells me I have support for

  • bzlib
  • lzma
  • x
  • xml
  • zlib

none of which are image related.

Of course, this work I need to do is time-sensitive, and instead of being able to get events published to the web site for this coming weekend, I’m having debug why Image Magick is broken again.

I’m an hour in, and it’s still broken, and there’s zero information on how to fix the problem. One person said “just install from xxxx and it just works” – no, it doesn’t.

It shouldn’t take an more than an hour to convert one file from PDF to PNG.

Sometimes I hate being on OpenSuSE.

To be fair, SuSE was always more geared to be a server operating system, on which one could install a desktop environment. And with server environments, one needs to be a little more careful than with a desktop environment. If I break something on a desktop: one person (me) is affected. If I break something on a server: a thousand people are affected. So SuSE doesn’t tend to rush to implement the latest / newest thing. It also imposes defaults that are more secure (less permissive) than you might find on something else.

But apparently during the upgrade, something was reset to not allow me to execute magick filename.pdf filename.png and I’m having a damned time figuring out how to fix that. There doesn’t seem to be a README file anywhere that explains it.

I assumed that when I went into YaST and added ImageMagick and Ghostscript that things would work. You know what you get when you assume, correct?