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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 6th, 2023

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  • I also use ZArchiver and unzipping is zippy (sorry) in my experience. Not quite as fast as Linux but that’s to be expected considering the hardware difference.

    However Windows is quite slow in this regard in my experience. It can easily take 30 seconds to extract a zip file that Linux can do in under a second, often with a sub 1MBps throughput. This is on an NVMe SSD.




  • I have a few examples:

    • Flight Sim 2020
    • Windows Defender is the best antivirus, better than all those paid crapware antiviruses
    • An attempt at an independent browser engine that wasn’t the dated IE
    • This is a hot take but seamless integration of local file storage with OneDrive. Yes, they are way too heavy-handed about forcing this on you and it’s really stupid how it moves your files without telling you, but I’ve never seen a file manager that handles both local and cloud files faster than W10’s file manager (a big part of the reason why I was mad about W11, because that advantage disappeared)

    The only useful thing I can think of after the pandemic is the CPU scheduling updates for Alder Lake, but that was pretty much a necessity. Everything else is AI overhype, rewriting programs to make them slower, and/or yet another way to invade people’s privacy




  • A friend tried to get me into Half-Life multiple times and I just cannot get into it.

    It’s a fast-paced FPS game, which means I’m likely to get dizzy after some time but something about the ambience makes it worse than usual. I can play Skyrim for up to 1.5 hours at a time, Minecraft or Fortnite for 45-60 minutes, but I’d be lucky to play 20 minutes of Half-Life without my head pounding.

    Plus, it’s a linear, story-based game, and I’m more into games based more on mechanics and progression (like Pokémon, Factorio, Cities Skylines, Civ, Balatro, and incremental games) than story. And at least for as long as I’ve tried to play it, there isn’t even much of a story.



  • Lately I’ve been really annoyed by Microsoft products. For a certain work-related thing we were using Microsoft word to collaborate and it randomly would stop letting some of us edit, throwing warnings like “Allow access to your Microsoft 365 account” even though I was already signed in, and clicking on allow access would just bring the warning back upon refreshing.

    Which would happen every 20 minutes because it gives me a pop-up to sign in, with three buttons on the pop-up. Two are cancel buttons, and the actual sign in button is invisible. I was already signed in, of course. I couldn’t continue working until a refresh.

    Moving pictures is the biggest pain for some reason (and it isn’t even better in LibreOffice Writer). It’s been like this for years.

    And then they have the gaul to start throwing AI everywhere when they can’t even make their basic systems usable. I’m starting to root for Microsoft’s failure these days, because they haven’t done anything useful or innovative since the pandemic.

    Disgruntled, I suggested that we switch to Google Docs (yes, I know it’s Google, but we all already have Google accounts and we needed this done in a few hours), and everyone instantly agreed because I had just said their frustrations out loud.








  • During my long motorcycle road trip to the twisties, I saw this huge white structure looming distantly in front of me. I wondered what the heck it was, first thought it was some kind of coal processing thing and then thought it was a wind turbine under construction. But as I got closer, I saw that it was a freakishly large dish. During my next stop, I confirmed it was this telescope. Should’ve taken a picture of it.