WTF Bites
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@Tsaukpaetra Ah, but how many have blocked you?
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@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra Ah, but how many have blocked you?
Two. @Mods can I get a confirm?
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Like, the new DWM and Aero were not really different from 7, but low budget PCs at the time came with complete crap graphics that couldn’t handle it.
PCs near the top of the heap at release could not really handle all the useless pretty stuff. Vista was the Crysis of operating systems.
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@dkf I survived by having a Linux server that doubled as a network router. I also had firewalls installed and running on all the computers, because I don't trust others. Mostly because I spent my youth hacking, among other things, so I had reason to not trust anything computery.
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@Tsaukpaetra I have you blocked - in spirit - consider it an honorary block.
Also,
twothree? THOSE ARE ROOKIE NUMBERS.
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Mostly because I spent my youth hacking, among other things, so I had reason to not trust anything computery.
Whereas I was working at a university and knew just what a bunch of rascals we had as undergraduates. I shall neither confirm nor deny whether I had previously been one of those rascals.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra Ah, but how many have blocked you?
Two. @Mods can I get a confirm?
No. That is to say, there doesn't seem to be a list of people who blocked a user on their profile and looking for that has already exhausted the
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Mostly because I spent my youth hacking, among other things, so I had reason to not trust anything computery.
Whereas I was working at a university and knew just what a bunch of rascals we had as undergraduates. I shall neither confirm nor deny whether I had previously been one of those rascals.
The schools I went to usually had the system admins come to our class every once in a while saying "I don't care how you do it, but please don't fuck things up and I won't care about your extended access."
The funniest part was that the school network and the city network was joined, so we generally had access to what the politicians and others in city hall was up to, even confidential stuff. We were all gray hats though, so it was mostly just for fun or the hell of it so
But man, for all the horrible security practices of today, 3 decades ago was just amazingly shit.
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I'm getting slightly annoyed at my work laptop. It is connected to the work domain (as it should), but it is also slow as molasses which looks like something caused by the group policies enforced or something similar. Today it even crashed and rebooted, didn't even display a bluescreen. And the system log just showed the "computer did not shut down properly" message. And a million group policy messages. Just because I did something crazy like close the laptop for 5 minutes and then tried waking it up again.
I found my work laptop doesn't respond well to the lid closing either. So I just leave it open/on. Until the weekend, then I turn it off. Of course, this is Ubuntu18...
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11’s ui and anything store related is a fucking tire fire. You could ignore the store for the most part on 10 but they're worse than Samsung now.
I don't think I've ever opened the Store on 11. It's pretty easy to ignore.
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@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
there doesn't seem to be a list of people who blocked a user on their profile
Well, fair enough. All I'd want is a highscore list frankly. But, it would be a reasonable mod feature, especially as I use this bit in encryption keys.
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I'm getting slightly annoyed at my work laptop. It is connected to the work domain (as it should), but it is also slow as molasses which looks like something caused by the group policies enforced or something similar. Today it even crashed and rebooted, didn't even display a bluescreen. And the system log just showed the "computer did not shut down properly" message. And a million group policy messages. Just because I did something crazy like close the laptop for 5 minutes and then tried waking it up again.
I found my work laptop doesn't respond well to the lid closing either. So I just leave it open/on. Until the weekend, then I turn it off. Of course, this is Ubuntu18...
I've taken to shutting my work machine down over most nights. I leave it on once or twice to do backups, but otherwise to save electricity and because Windows is just generally happier when it's working on a fresher boot.
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@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
Windows is just generally happier
I do not believe Windows' happiness or lack thereof is my problem.
Filed under: If Windows ain't happy, ain't nobody happy!
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I found my work laptop doesn't respond well to the lid closing either. So I just leave it open/on. Until the weekend, then I turn it off. Of course, this is Ubuntu18...
The previous notebook was OK, and both Windows and Ubuntu eventually handled sleeping without major glitches. But the current generation removed the power led that slowly blinked when sleeping, so one can never be sure whether the computer actually went to sleep or not.
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I found my work laptop doesn't respond well to the lid closing either. So I just leave it open/on. Until the weekend, then I turn it off. Of course, this is Ubuntu18...
The previous notebook was OK, and both Windows and Ubuntu eventually handled sleeping without major glitches. But the current generation removed the power led that slowly blinked when sleeping, so one can never be sure whether the computer actually went to sleep or not.
Mine would go to sleep. It would just never wake up again until you do the long-press on the power button.
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@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
Windows is just generally happier
I do not believe Windows' happiness or lack thereof is my problem.
I wish I could say the same but Linux is not a first class operating system for my company.
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@boomzilla Perhaps I should rephrase. I don't think making Windows happy should be my responsibility. If it wants to sulk because I actually use my computer and only reboot when I absolutely have to, too bad for it. Unfortunately, when it's unhappy, it has ways of making me suffer, and I have to give in to its demands, and usually sooner rather than later.
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@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra Ah, but how many have blocked you?
Two. @Mods can I get a confirm?
No. That is to say, there doesn't seem to be a list of people who blocked a user on their profile and looking for that has already exhausted the
.@shadowmod blockcount @Tsaukpaetra
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@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
11’s ui and anything store related is a fucking tire fire. You could ignore the store for the most part on 10 but they're worse than Samsung now.
I don't think I've ever opened the Store on 11. It's pretty easy to ignore.
You may not have opened it, but it definitely opened you!
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I found my work laptop doesn't respond well to the lid closing either. So I just leave it open/on. Until the weekend, then I turn it off. Of course, this is Ubuntu18...
The previous notebook was OK, and both Windows and Ubuntu eventually handled sleeping without major glitches. But the current generation removed the power led that slowly blinked when sleeping, so one can never be sure whether the computer actually went to sleep or not.
Mine would go to sleep. It would just never wake up again until you do the long-press on the power button.
Fixed with a recent BIOS update and firmware driver version bump.
Filed under: Fucking Dell...
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@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
@boomzilla Perhaps I should rephrase. I don't think making Windows happy should be my responsibility. If it wants to sulk because I actually use my computer and only reboot when I absolutely have to, too bad for it. Unfortunately, when it's unhappy, it has ways of making me suffer, and I have to give in to its demands, and usually sooner rather than later.
If I only did stuff I wanted to do they wouldn't have to pay me.
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But the current generation removed the power led that slowly blinked when sleeping, so one can never be sure whether the computer actually went to sleep or not.
Those things (and power LEDs in general) are always the burn your retinas blue ones. Like the halogen headlights that make you think they have their brights on. I actually have a piece of aluminized foil tape over my desktop power LED because otherwise it lights the entire room and the pulsing when asleep is really annoying.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:
I actually have a piece of aluminized foil tape over my desktop power LED because otherwise it lights the entire room and the pulsing when asleep is really annoying.
If you put wax paper over your windows and use tissue boxes as shoes, you can avoid further harmful effluvia. I hear that the temperature in a salt cave is stable year round, too - and then all the lamps are salt lamps.
And it's not burning! It's redox, yes, but the photon capture induced dye bend is not a burn.
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And it's not burning! It's redox, yes, but the photon capture induced dye bend is not a burn.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:
But the current generation removed the power led that slowly blinked when sleeping, so one can never be sure whether the computer actually went to sleep or not.
Those things (and power LEDs in general) are always the burn your retinas blue ones.
Not on the notebooks. The Dell notebooks have had tiny white leds for long. The previous gen has a really tiny dot, and the current has a bit bigger thin line, but it's only on some time—and it's not very obvious when.
Like the halogen headlights that make you think they have their brights on. I actually have a piece of aluminized foil tape over my desktop power LED because otherwise it lights the entire room and the pulsing when asleep is really annoying.
… and there is a colorful glow from the vents because when I was buying memory the better ones all had pointless leds on them. Fortunately there is a closed door between where I sleep and where my desktop is, so I don't care.
We did, however, tape over blue leds on fucking switches in the hotel room on vacation this summer. They had the small lights so you can find them in the dark, in blue and fairly bright. Really obnoxious. We also unplugged TV in hotel rooms in the past to get rid of their red standby light (it's not like we ever watched TV on vacation, especially since it's usually in language we don't understand anyway).
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@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:
I actually have a piece of aluminized foil tape over my desktop power LED because otherwise it lights the entire room and the pulsing when asleep is really annoying.
I use a small cork placemat for that (helped by the power button being on the top side of the case). It's nice and thick and good at stopping light. I don't care about lights inside the case, or even know if there are any: the sides are nicely solid and opaque though.
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Have you considered turning it off?
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Weirdest thing I ever had with Win98, I was a holdout who didn’t want XP even when I bought a new computer in like 2004, and the place I bought from was still able to get 98 OEM so he sold me one of those.
Turns out Win98 had some freaky issues with having 512MB RAM such that pretty much any app that used the hardware to any real extent would trigger a blue screen relating to the core memory driver. I forget exactly which DLL it was.
It would BSOD, seem to recover, but the app I was just using would shut down, then a little later it would BSOD again and reboot. Reboots would then fail with something about Windows protection mode being broken.
I discovered a weird solution that seemed to somehow work, to this day I never understood why: let Windows start then after it started, rename the offending DLL. (And rename it back before rebooting.)
It needed to be there for boot, it didn’t need to be there after boot, and somehow not being there made everything work just fine. And it was a memory related thing, even though memtest etc found no issues with memory…
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Win98
512MB RAM
I ran that with 16 MB.
E: never mind, I missed the time frame.
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@topspin to be fair, from 1996 to 1999 or so I was running Win95 on an 8MB RAM potato, then in 1999 Win98 on a 128MB better potato. By the time it was 2004 I was working full time and had just earned a massive bonus from saving the company a large amount of fines and nonsense (something something mortgage regulation) and I figured I’d treat myself to something a bit less potato than I had.
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I figured I’d treat myself to something a bit less potato than I had.
So you got a hot potato instead?
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@dkf well, that machine did blow itself up in 2006 necessitating a new motherboard and CPU… so yes?
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The schools I went to usually had the system admins come to our class every once in a while saying "I don't care how you do it, but please don't fuck things up and I won't care about your extended access."
The funniest part was that the school network and the city network was joined, so we generally had access to what the politicians and others in city hall was up to, even confidential stuff. We were all gray hats though, so it was mostly just for fun or the hell of it so
But man, for all the horrible security practices of today, 3 decades ago was just amazingly shit.I remember in school our graphics art teacher told us one Monday that he had spent all weekend deleting all the games we had hidden on the servers and making sure we couldn't put them back, blah blah blah. Right in the middle of that:
"Why aren't you paying attention? What are you doing?"
"Playing SimCity."I actually was. He had found what amounted to our honeypots. Copies put in conspicuous locations for them to find if they went looking. They never found the ones we were actually using.
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We did, however, tape over blue leds on fucking switches in the hotel room on vacation this summer. They had the small lights so you can find them in the dark, in blue and fairly bright. Really obnoxious. We also unplugged TV in hotel rooms in the past to get rid of their red standby light (it's not like we ever watched TV on vacation, especially since it's usually in language we don't understand anyway).
The last time I stayed in our local hospital, I asked the nurse for a bandaid.
Why, did you cut yourself?
Naw, the standby light on the TV directly opposite of my bed is really fucking bright and I already have trouble sleeping here, so...
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
I remember in school our graphics art teacher told us one Monday that he had spent all weekend deleting all the games we had hidden on the servers and making sure we couldn't put them back, blah blah blah. Right in the middle of that:
"Why aren't you paying attention? What are you doing?"
"Playing SimCity."I actually was. He had found what amounted to our honeypots. Copies put in conspicuous locations for them to find if they went looking. They never found the ones we were actually using.
We enabled remote management of the admin systems and set them so that they couldn't see the partitions (or whatever the Netware term was) where we stored things; those were only discoverable from the cluster in the public area of the college.
Later on we put Linux on those machines so that we could use them as better terminals onto the central systems. (Instead of having to use 640×480 with a 16 color palette, we could have 800×600 monochrome which was much better for getting work done. And the genuine VGA monitors mostly didn't hate us totally, but it was right at the limit of what they could do.)
The most fun part was waking someone up in the middle of the night by playing music on the floppy drive in their bedroom. After that incident, everyone started to try to adopt decent security practices.
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The most fun part was waking someone up in the middle of the night by playing music on the floppy drive in their bedroom.
Floppy drives are long since gone but we have a bat file available in one of our management systems that we can execute on systems:
powershell -windowstyle hidden [console]::beep(440,500); [console]::beep(440,500); [console]::beep(440,500); [console]::beep(349,350); [console]::beep(523,150); [console]::beep(440,500); [console]::beep(349,350); [console]::beep(523,150); [console]::beep(440,1000); [console]::beep(659,500); [console]::beep(659,500); [console]::beep(659,500); [console]::beep(698,350); [console]::beep(523,150); [console]::beep(415,500); [console]::beep(349,350); [console]::beep(523,150); [console]::beep(440,1000)We use it when there is a machine somewhere but we don't know where and we cannot track it down. Execute that a few times and someone will file a ticket eventually.
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@Polygeekery yeah they gave up on finding the skit we hid from them and just shorted that we had more control of the systems than they did.
And as we didn't want others to dick around with our stuff, we also secured the easier holes. If you weren't just a script kitten, you could come in.
Since then I've tried explaining to a lot of organisations why their shit isn't secure, but they don't care it understand.
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
The most fun part was waking someone up in the middle of the night by playing music on the floppy drive in their bedroom.
Floppy drives are long since gone but we have a bat file available in one of our management systems that we can execute on systems:
powershell -windowstyle hidden [console]::beep(440,500); [console]::beep(440,500); [console]::beep(440,500); [console]::beep(349,350); [console]::beep(523,150); [console]::beep(440,500); [console]::beep(349,350); [console]::beep(523,150); [console]::beep(440,1000); [console]::beep(659,500); [console]::beep(659,500); [console]::beep(659,500); [console]::beep(698,350); [console]::beep(523,150); [console]::beep(415,500); [console]::beep(349,350); [console]::beep(523,150); [console]::beep(440,1000)We use it when there is a machine somewhere but we don't know where and we cannot track it down. Execute that a few times and someone will file a ticket eventually.
Speaking of finding machines... Have you ever found a machine hidden away in a wall or something like that?
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
The most fun part was waking someone up in the middle of the night by playing music on the floppy drive in their bedroom.
Floppy drives are long since gone but we have a bat file available in one of our management systems that we can execute on systems:
powershell -windowstyle hidden [console]::beep(440,500); [console]::beep(440,500); [console]::beep(440,500); [console]::beep(349,350); [console]::beep(523,150); [console]::beep(440,500); [console]::beep(349,350); [console]::beep(523,150); [console]::beep(440,1000); [console]::beep(659,500); [console]::beep(659,500); [console]::beep(659,500); [console]::beep(698,350); [console]::beep(523,150); [console]::beep(415,500); [console]::beep(349,350); [console]::beep(523,150); [console]::beep(440,1000)We use it when there is a machine somewhere but we don't know where and we cannot track it down. Execute that a few times and someone will file a ticket eventually.
I don't have access to a physical windows machine with sound output. What does it play?
Since it starts monotonously with 3 longas (???), my guess is Imperial March.
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@HardwareGeek sweet. I'm almost proud of figuring that out from text only.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
11’s ui and anything store related is a fucking tire fire. You could ignore the store for the most part on 10 but they're worse than Samsung now.
I don't think I've ever opened the Store on 11. It's pretty easy to ignore.
You may not have opened it, but it definitely opened you!
In Soviet Windows, all your files left you
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Thanks, that helps a lot.
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Thanks, that helps a lot.
I can
that, thanks to the magic of template parameter pack expansion:
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We did, however, tape over blue leds on fucking switches in the hotel room on vacation this summer. They had the small lights so you can find them in the dark, in blue and fairly bright. Really obnoxious. We also unplugged TV in hotel rooms in the past to get rid of their red standby light (it's not like we ever watched TV on vacation, especially since it's usually in language we don't understand anyway).
The last time I stayed in our local hospital, I asked the nurse for a bandaid.
Why, did you cut yourself?
Naw, the standby light on the TV directly opposite of my bed is really fucking bright and I already have trouble sleeping here, so...Here is the US, that would cost you at least $10.
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We did, however, tape over blue leds on fucking switches in the hotel room on vacation this summer. They had the small lights so you can find them in the dark, in blue and fairly bright. Really obnoxious. We also unplugged TV in hotel rooms in the past to get rid of their red standby light (it's not like we ever watched TV on vacation, especially since it's usually in language we don't understand anyway).
The last time I stayed in our local hospital, I asked the nurse for a bandaid.
Why, did you cut yourself?
Naw, the standby light on the TV directly opposite of my bed is really fucking bright and I already have trouble sleeping here, so...Here is the US, that would cost you at least $10.
Just think of the risks! What if the outside of the band-aid wrapper wasn't sterile?
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Speaking of finding machines... Have you ever found a machine hidden away in a wall or something like that?
No. When I say that we need to find a machine it is more like we need to find a machine that a user moved somewhere else. Almost always a laptop. Almost always a machine that was used without proper procedure. Usually "appropriated" from somewhere else. Another department that got shut down or something. "Oh, they won't be needing that laptop anymore but our department really needs another machine!" Stuff like that.
Or, if we take over IT for a new client we can push out our management software to all of the machines in Active Directory but there might not be any documentation of where every machine is at or a helpful naming convention. Even if there is some sane, descriptive, naming convention that does not mean that a machine that started out in accounting had its name updated when it was moved to reception. In some cases there appears to be some sort of naming convention but it only seems to make sense to the person before us.
Or one that came up recently with an existing client where we actually do have a good naming convention already in place: When we get new machines in the very first thing that we do is wipe it and do a fresh install of Win10. It means all machines are starting off from a known state, you don't have to worry about leftovers from some shovelware causing odd issues down the line, etc. Our install media also automatically joins the machine to the domain, sets our local admin username and password, configures it to connect to wireless if needed, etc. It also sets a machine name of "New-(serial number)". If we know where it is to be deployed to then we go ahead and change the machine name to what it should be (in this case the username of the employee or in the case of machines with more of a kiosk usage their location, possible secondary identifier, plus the last two digits of the year of deployment). If we do not know where it will end up at "Hey, we have 8 laptops here for deployment. I don't know where they are going to end up at. Get them setup and I will decide later where to put them", which is not uncommon when a purchaser finds a good deal on laptops and knows there is a coming need, we leave the "New-(serial number)" machine name and ask them to let us know which machine ends up where. Sometimes (usually) they don't. Sometimes we may have to track them down later. We can track them down to a specific AP if they are online but that may be all we really know.
If we have a list of laptops and a list of users they went to, not a big deal to figure out. Email the users a sheet showing how to get the info and have them send it to us. Or just view their screen and you can find some way to identify them. Lots of ways to solve the problem.
But what if you have a department where most people have desktops but they have a floater laptop that everyone uses? Or possibly a few departments that do?
You can go to the location where a machine is known to be based on AP, fire off that script and listen and possibly find it. Alternatively you can have the RMM application run that script every 15 minutes until someone submits a ticket.
Our RMM also has a way to send chat messages to users. Do you know what 95% of people do? They close it without reading it at all. I guess they assume it is a pop-up or something? So fuck 'em, they get the Imperial March.
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I worked on a project where we almost deleted a much loved feature because no one complained about it for a while. Didn't think anyone was using it.
I didn't know you worked on Firefox's FTP support.
Edit: oh wait, you said "almost".
I remembered Firefox Panorama and now I'm sad.
