Not a replicant

What I like about pihole vs. dedicated ad-blockers, is that a pihole can block telemetry as well. There are lists of Microsoft and other data-gatherers you can import, and even if you can’t stop the data collection, it dead-ends the attempts to upload it.

What, not even an IBM POWER 10 ?

“All I said was ‘that piece of halibut was good enough for luigi’”

“BLASPHEMY”

“Luigi, luigi, luigi”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ5YU_spBw0

The speed of transcoding video using FFMPEG on a non-GUI installation of Debian, on an old small-form-factor PC - 2nd-generation i7, 16GB ram, 240GB SSD.

I’ve still got the box, CD, and Manual for Aldus Pagemaker, but what I use is InDesign from CS6 - the last non-subscription version.

Neil Young + Crazy Horse Bob Dylan + Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers

You will continue to receive Windows Defender updates. I have a Windows 8.1 tablet that keeps updating Microsoft Defender antivirus. It’s only used to connect to RTSP streams for music.

Ah yes, that’s a concern - but I have a job in Task Scheduler that re-writes my registry tweaks - mostly changing various tasks back to “disabled”. You can trigger it hourly, or on an event. As soon as a selected event - such as a telemetry switch-on - hits the event log, the “disable” script runs.

There’s other ways, like taking ownership of the executables and changing permissions to lock out the “SYSTEM” account.

And pihole blocks DNS resolution of the telemetry harvesters as well. Windows update won’t touch that. It’s not 100% effective, but I couldn’t be bothered to take it further.

Conchiglie - kon-kill-ee-a (last letter rhymes with ‘hay’)

Little shells, each one a cup for sauce.

Audio playback is such a low-demand process, surely a player (e.g.VLC) can spare a thread to line up playback of track 2, a few seconds before track 1 ends? It knows the exact length of the track, why can’t track 2 be initiated when the audio level in track 1 drops to zero (or minus infinity dB) in the last frame?

iddqd

I tried co-pilot. Once.

I asked it “why does Windows Defender peg my HDD* at 100%”

The reply was “I don’t know, but here are some google searches that might help”

Microsoft’s own co-pilot doesn’t seem to have access to microsoft products, so now I uninstall/deactivate it every opportunity I can.

*yes, a HDD. Not ideal for performance these days, but it’s the last laptop I have with a HDD, and I use it for experiments.

A sequel to Ex Machina - Ava’s experiences in the real world. Caleb has managed to escape, and he’s tracking her.

Ringworld and its sequels The Ringworld Engineers, Ringworld’s Children, and the Ringworld Throne, with some less-dated attitudes. I mean I’m not totally opposed to rishathra as a concept, but just a few tweaks here and there to catch up with modern attitudes.

If money really wasn’t an issue, the entire “Known Space” series. A chance for some really good CGI with Pierson’s Puppeteers, Kzin, and all the specialised post-human races living on the Ringworld. And Thrint, Slavers, Outsiders, and so on.

Then there’s the first-contact “The Mote in God’s Eye” and its sequel “The Mote in Murchison’s Eye” AKA “The Gripping Hand”. Another opportunity for some interesting three-armed CGI aliens.

Oh, and “Footfall” - an alien invasion story. These aliens look somewhat like baby elephants 😲

Some of your data flows through Syncthing servers (but I agree that’s a great product, I use it myself) LibreOffice works for entry-level users, but it does not have the same functionality as MSOffice. And the UI sucks as much as MSOffice.

It’s not difficult to block the mining and telemetry. Pihole, a few registry tweaks, a few scheduled tasks disabled and life goes on.

Folk see nothing wrong with spending hours tuning a Linux distro, but they object to doing the same with Windows?

FWIW I use vanilla Debian for everything other than what I’m required to use Windows for.

One doesn’t need to pay for MS Office. Not home users, anyway.

AKA the Jason Bourne school of editing.

I worked in local government that used Unix workstations for GIS (Graphic Information Systems) - mapping of the local government’s property boundaries and many other layers. The DB was held on a DEC Alpha, and it was all very pricey, albeit very good at its job. ESRI ARCGIS, etc

When the time came to replace, they moved it all to Windows. The workstations were beefed-up PCs running NT4.0 and the DB was on a server with NT 4.0 server. DEC was gone by then, absorbed into Compaq, Alphas were discontinued, and no-one wanted to migrate to SUN or HP.

It would certainly accelerate the development of language. How many new words will be invented, or existing words subverted, to serve clandestine communications and slip past the filters? Steganography, anyone?

Can I See Great Etchings Near Dubai Ending Roughly? <- That’s a bit weak, but you get the idea.