Notices by Tim 🎮 (timixretroplays@digipres.club), page 2

Your login session at work lasts exactly 168 hours (24*7) and at 168 hours and one minute, you get two MFA prompts simultaneously. You can't click on Outlook yet because the MFA system "didn't hear from you". After logging on, you join your daily Teams standup anonymously, because you don't have time to dig through dialog boxes that ding at you when you click on them to find the one with the working login button. A password prompt appears for a moment, you start typing, then it disappears again.

Your cheap home PC doesn't have the physical space for another hard drive inside, so you buy an external one and your wireless keybbbbbbbbboard starts acting up when you're backing up.

Seriously, USB 3 devices put out a bunch of 2.4GHz interference and it fucks up wireless gear. Put your dongles on cheap USB extension cables and blutack them to the underside of your desk, I promise you'll stop hating Bluetooth quite so much if you do this.

Bluetooth is still shit, but this one's USB's fault.

That 168-hours-and-a-bit slowly cycles later and later into each passing week, and you fucking dread when it reaches late Friday afternoon, because it means Monday morning will be written off by logging in, rebooting, and patting multiple Microsoft applications on the head, and you're useless to your busy colleagues until you do.

This program with no icon or name is preventing you from restarting. You click Cancel. It restarts anyway.

Also, how likely are you to recommend Teams to a friend?

You buy a second-hand but still quite new wireless gamepad. It dies unexpectedly at the approximate age of 16 months. There's a listing for a replacement battery on Amazon and a disassembly guide on iFixit, so you take a punt on a new battery and swap it in.

The gamepad's still dead, so you email its manufacturer for A) a repair, or B) spare parts, or C) to offer them even more money to fix it, but they don't provide any of those for a device still sold new today.

Get fucked, Steelseries.

And here's the thing: None of this stuff makes me angry. Annoyed, sure, but I've been around computers since I was a toddler, and I have to solve shit problems like these for myself every day.

What makes me angry is: What about all the folks who aren't computer people? How the absolute fuck do they survive in a world where you can no longer function as an employee, a family member, any sort of citizen without encountering this stuff?

Those people are fucking heroes, and I'm angry for them.

Do you work in IT? Do you support a system? Do you work on a helpdesk? Do you take calls, answer emails?

Congratulations. That's no longer your job title. From the moment you read this, you're a user advocate.

Process issue holding something up? Bug in the app? Is a particular system always down? Advocate for your users. Go to bat for them with the teams responsible for their struggles.

Folks will say "oh thank christ, it's you" when they hear your voice on the phone if you advocate for them.

This shit is why, when banks announced they were going to stop processing physical checks and a whole wave of elderly folks protested, I understood. It's one of the last fleeting vestiges of anything in their lives that still makes sense, and arguing about the cost of supporting obsolete systems is an absolute red herring.

It's not about the money. It's not about the tech. It's about kindness, and being fucking human to each other.

tl;dr: In a world where companies will fleece you, scammers will steal your grandmother's savings, your chat program algorithmically charts your gender, and your car's manufacturer sells analytics about the way you drive without a second thought:

The only thing that matters is kindness, and we could all do with a lot more of it.

Also, I'm going to go have a drink or two now. Holy hell, that little rant has been building up for a while now.

I think I'm becoming utterly disillusioned on tech stuff lately. I'm hugely aware of the "you like stuff you grew up with" and "you have less patience for stuff as you age" biases, but even so...

Streaming is shit.
Searching is shit.
Researching is shit.
Shopping is shit.
Troubleshooting is shit.
My phone is shit. Autocorrect, touchscreen keyboards, Bluetooth, AI, Android Auto, Spotify, all shit.

It's not even capitalism or consumerism, I'm just tired of arguing and fighting with things I own.

It's Friday night, it's cold outside and I'm still working on that whole social life thing, so here's a long rambly thread about the 15-pin PC gameport and its historical significance, because it's something I want to practice writing about at length (if anyone was silly enough to give me a PhD for something, it'd be for this nonsense).

Feel free to mute this thread if that's not your thing - or if it is, bookmark it for later, or prepare to be en-knowledge-ified!

#retrocomputing #retrogaming

@thomasfuchs that's a phenomenal image! Do you mind if I appropriate it for my phone's wallpaper image?

Interested in a completely #opensource #FOSS portable media player? Go check out the #Tangara, designed and made right here in Australia: https://cooltech.zone/tangara/

They've just launched their funding campaign for it on Crowd Supply, and have immediately blown past their goal, so it seems certain they'll be able to make them. But being totally open source software and hardware, you can also just go make your own!

One last sanity check of the processes I've developed for the chessboard project - threaded inserts, magnets, dowels to combine parts, and multi-filament surfaces - before committing time and plastic to the final product.

I've decided to print it topside down, so the visible chessboard surface will be the first layer. I have a brand new build plate that will only ever see chessboard parts, so the surface finish won't be tainted with the outline of prior test prints. #3dprinting @3dprinting

Have you ever tried emulating #Windows98 on a #Ryzen system and had it crash spectacularly? Just within the last year or so, someone's written a patch for 95/98/98SE to fix it!

There's a floppy image you can boot your VM from, which will patch and fix your Win9x install even if it's partially installed and you hit the Explorer crash, so it doesn't even matter hugely where/when in the installation process you apply it. https://github.com/JHRobotics/patcher9x/releases/

Boosts for visibility welcome!

#retrocomputing