We cannot assume that Windows will collapse under its own mediocrity; if that were true it would have happened decades ago. We must kill Windows. We must cut it out from our lives like a tumor; we must systematically consider what we need from it and seek to construct alternatives with purpose.
Install linux! Doesn't have to be on your Main Computer. Just give it a shot on some smaller device you got lying around. I'm not joking when I say that I have had more Fun On Computers since i started using linux on my laptop two years ago and I have no regrets. Just try it out! Windows fucking sucks ass!
In Linux there is no adware out the gate, no Copilot, no news tickers to disable in the Start menu. There are no dark patterns attempting to trick you into some thoroughly mediocre service that is, optimistically, fourth best in its category. You do not have to look up how to disable OneDrive in Linux. The right click does not have a submenu where they hide all the useful stuff that was in Windows 10. Installing the OS doesn’t require you to search for your Microsoft login or buy a cheap gray market product key from a country where the software doesn’t cost like $120 retail (although at this point Microsoft is basically begging people to keep using Windows 11).
This stuff has seeped into the soil like a crude oil spill. There is so much viral hyperbole about what these things are capable of that is often followed by a sobering and less sexy reality. What I mourn is the loss of trust, the alienation of people with institutional knowledge and the chaotic disruption of real communities by strangers walking in like a toddler with a Glock.
A review of Nix/NixOS after using it on all my machines for three years. I'll cover what works, what doesn't, and why it's the first OS that's stuck with me.
I am so curious about NixOS. I have been doing okay with Ubuntu recently on my laptop but I simply love the smell of a new distro
I do not trust that all these big tech companies will remain solvent. They are currently making a multi-trillion-dollar infrastructural investment so that software devs don't have to write regex anymore, and so that regular people don't have to learn how to use excel formulae.
Laura is right
The classic pattern of new technology adoption is something like an S-curve: it starts out serving niche uses for users who need its particular combination of attributes, but as the technology gets more capable and less expensive, it gets adopted more broadly, until it reaches some particular peak. When a technology gets replaced, in turn, it tends to follow this pattern in reverse, getting removed from more and more uses but continuing to be used by users who value its particular combination of attributes.
As a big fan of the warm amber glow of early plasma screens (much like CRD, who made a good companion video for this article if you are like me), this was a fun read.
A Simple Site, offering (relatively) Slow Servers hosted on Secondhand Systems in Spokane, Washington, with (hopefully) Satisfactory Service.
Low power VPSes for cheap, with a focus on privacy.
The goal of the 50-year computer is not to be tiny, ultra-portable and ultra-powerful. Instead, it should be sturdy and resilient.
Very neat little thought experiment/theorycrafting for a Long Life computer. I do think we should be thinking about this sort of thing more!
browser-based simulator of the Windows 98 disk defragmentation service.
Amazing find. This site is a time capsule from about 2010 that collected images and records of home-modded PC cases from the time period (& seemingly back to about 2000). If you, like me, grew up in this era of computers, this is a wonderfully nostalgic site to poke around through. It's all in French, but I managed.
[...] I went digging for the credits of the Microsoft employees who worked on the user interface back then and found my way to Virginia Howlett, who joined Microsoft in 1985 as the company's first interface designer, and worked there up through the launch of Windows 95.
I'll admit, I never considered using old laptop motherboards as the base for a homemade all-in-one PC. This is an intriguing option, even with some obvious downsides.
At some point, I stopped thinking about it as a project. It was just a tool, same as the other tools around the shop.
I found this video a really cool example of custom hardware manufacturing. I would love to make something like this at some point -- I think the wave of "cyberdeck" fetishism is a bit goofy, but seeing people actually creating devices that work exactly in the ways that they need them to is so cool to see.
All eleven District Attorneys' offices run on a shared database called DAMION, which holds the record of essentially every criminal case in the state and is roughly twenty-five years old.
Interesting story if a bit AI-wonky, however what you really need to see in this piece is the screenshots of Win95-era justice department software that is apparently still in use. Wowie
The first stop is removing the toolbar and the sidebar, and any other bars. The second is switching to the icon view, and picking the right window dimensions. What’s needed next is a link to the Applications folder. The last ingredient? A custom background that’s placed underneath and creatively uses the fact the size and the position of all the icons are known.
Lovely little collection of Mac install windows. h/t to waxy.org.
It is, genuinely, a dramatically more empowering way to use your computer than the alternative, and it will enable to think about your computer as a tool in ways that are completely different.
This website was made with the command kind in Linux! Almost everything I do these days on The Computer includes using the command line and guess what? It's great. It's a really good way to interface with a computer as it turns out. I agree with Bruno.
So, you may notice things look a bit different around here.
Bruno moved his blog to a proper selfhosted option instead of Bear, which is something I am also considering, so this was a great read of what I should expect.
GDID is the persistent Windows ID that helped FBI trace a Scattered Spider hacker despite VPNs. Here's how it works and how to limit it.
Another great reason to use Linux.
Neverclick uses on-device computer vision to label everything clickable with keyboard hints, so you can navigate any app without touching a mouse.
intriguing. and I appreciate the dev being honest about the AI usage (sounds like extremely minimal). The program itself does not use any LLMs as far as I can tell, no phone-homes. as a big fan of "hands stay on keyboard" I like this idea.
Child labor is very “useful” if you want cheap labor. It’s 100% deplorable to use it or accept it. Child labor is a monstrosity. But if “useful” is enough, do we need to accept child labor? [...] Usefulness is a very weak argument in support of something.
Really fun technical breakdown of all the computers in Jurassic Park (1993). I love this stuff.