At some point I was trying to coordinate a situation with someone from our client using the Teams of my organization. It worked for a while before being blocked by Teams, because we were in a different organization.

I’m sure it was a configuration issue, but I am not an admin for MS shit, had hundreds of calls, needed to communicate with my clients, and was blocked by that crap.

I may have swore a bit.

My previous job was tech support for multiple companies. One of our clients was using Salesforce. Another client used Jira.

A handful of clients were using their own Teams to which I had to connect or run using Citrix and Pulse Secure/Ivanti. Sometimes I had to juggle between three or four Teams.

I’m so glad I quit. I can only hope my next employer won’t use Teams, but I won’t hold my breath.

Just wanted to add that maybe the last thing that we did for the environment and that really worked was for acid rain in 1991. At least where I live.

A few years before that there was the Montreal Protocol that banned CFCs and helped to heal the hole in the ozone layer. I think.

But yeah, I don’t remember anything of the sort recently,

Do you not have ears?

I live in a high rise in a metropolis and wish they would be banned. The maintenance crew of the university the other side of the street is using those things in the spring and fall. Exactly the time of the year when I want to open my windows, they, with their ear protection are blasting their engines on and off and on and off and on and off and on and off, while I’m trying to watch a video or listen to some music. Whiiiiiiiiiiir, pap pap pap pap pap pap whiiiiiiiiiir whiiiiir whiiiiiiir whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiir pap pap pap pap pap whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiir.

There’s a hundred windows in front of them, and another high rise just the other side of the street. How many people are just as annoyed as I am because those lazy fuckers can’t be bothered to use a rake?

Worse, the maintenance of my own high rise joins them a few times a month to blow the gravel off the fucking concrete around the building. So again, windows open, all you can hear for an hour is those fucking blowers on and off and on and off and on and off.

The other day I was eating on a terrasse and the handymen were replacing pieces of wood. Well, instead of sweeping the wood chips, he used a fucking blower among the people eating, to “clean up”.

Those things can go to hell for all I care.

But it was maybe a few months old at best. Maybe it had a defective battery from the start but I contacted Xiaomi and I’ve been told it was “normal” in “winter”. Then when I looked online for this issue with Xiaomi phones, the people on the forums said it was “normal”, and that I expected too much.

In the end it was probably a defective battery. I couldn’t believe that they were selling millions of these and that people always just kept them warm all the time. Like, they have a proper winter too in some parts of China, and I can’t imagine millions of people having their phone dying on them as soon as we get into sweater weather.

But obviously this left a bad taste in my mouth. This and having to ask permission to root my phone.

I decided not to buy another Xiaomi phone when the one I previously had would turn off when it was a bit mildly cool outside.

Like, I would take it out of my pocket to look at bus schedules but it would turn off after a few seconds of being exposed to 5°C, saying the battery was dead. Another time I had it attached to my bike handlebar and it kept turning off because apparently 13°C with the wind was also too chilly. Every time that fucking Xiaomi phone was feeling a bit chill, the battery would just die. And not even in freezing temps!

I looked online and everone of the fanboys on the forums kept saying that this is normal, battery performance degrades in winter, that iPhones do the same, and apparently all other phones do the same. In short, I had unreasonable expectations.

Yet, all my other phones’ batteries didn’t die within seconds of taking them out of my pocket, even in winter.

So, I don’t have to bother with their names anymore.

Por que no los dos?

It’s interesting to see how this strategy changes depending on the species.

Some birds will fake being injured to lure predators away from their chicks, and others will attack anything coming too close.

Aside from the sad news, as a Montrealer, the title confused me.

When I hear about the North Shore it’s usually to describe the north of Montreal, as opposed to the south. I thought the title was lacking precision.

Then I read the article, saw Natashquan, and realized ‘North Shore’ in this context is about Côte-Nord (North COAST).

I didn’t know it could be translated to ‘North Shore’.

I was using E16 years ago and liked it but eventually switched to Gnome (2, I think), after waiting for E17 for too long.

What made me quit was the wait. All the other DEs at the time were releasing new versions frequently but Enlightenment took forever.

I was working as a level 1 tech for a consulting company. I had to take calls and monitor the systems.

We had a ticketing system in place where we received alerts and various alarms in there. But because some of my coworkers didn’t do anything with these and some systems (and clients) suffered from this, people in management thought it would be a marvelous idea to have those alerts and alarms make a notification in Teams.

So when some random location lost internet for a few minutes, we sometimes had hundreds of Teams notifications.

I quit last month. I couldn’t take it any longer.

Rice. I know it’s common in Asian countries but absolutely not where I’m from.

I’m a francophone and tried to explain that France is not “dépaysant” enough for a vacation and the closest word I came up with is “exotic”, but it’s not exactly what I want to convey.

Und dann es gibt wann und wenn.

I’m a native French speaker that learned English in school, and we had to get used to words spelt the same but with a different pronunciation and sometimes a slightly different meaning.

Don’t worry, you’ll probably get used to it.

I’m not a cable expert by any means and can’t answer all the questions, but I can tell you that the protocol used by cable is called DOSCIS. So it might guide you into some of those answers.

And the coax cable itself doesn’t go very far now because it’s connected to a fiber network somewhere in your neighbourhood.

TIL that the US makes their prisoners pay for their food. I mean, obviously.

It became untenable well before that for certain people. It’s all stuff that can be changed or disabled but the Start Menu in Windows 10 with the tiles, and its default search on Bing was infuriating. I do tech support and some clients just don’t bother to deactivate it. There is also the whole thing about Microsoft removing parts of the old Control Panel and its utilities.

But another aspect of why they may also be losing market is how bad they have been with other architectures, like ARM. Windows for ARM seems to be lacking a lot. Even though they have been slowly getting better with emulation, they are still very much behind macOS and Linux. And I’m just a level 1 tech, but it seems like ARM devices and other low power architectures will slowly replace the old home desktops. They may have made a big mistake there.

But they still hold the corporate world and governments by the balls so, it’s gonna be interesting to see.

I’m always a bit amazed of how things have progressed and on what Linux can still run.

This is an extreme example, but it’s also possible to run a modern Linux OS on SBCs like a Raspberry Pi Zero, and still have something somewhat usable depending on your needs.

To have a computer half the size of a credit card with more RAM than my full tower rig from 2001 is amazing. And it can even run software from that era with dosbox or wine.

My 15 years old laptop is still supported and can still read 1080p on YouTube, using Linux.

Linux devs just recently decided to drop support for 486 CPUs and some early Pentiums.

There’s just no competition.

With boot disks. When installing an OS, it was common to have the installer ask if you wanted to create a boot disk in case anything happened to the MBR. They also came with the OS if you bought it prepackaged.

There was also a trick that would boot a Linux system from DOS using loadlin.

Back in my days (late 90ies), smartphones were not a thing. I had to dual boot into Linux, face a problem, reboot into Windows, search for a solution or a package, then reboot into Linux. A second computer was very useful. But now, yeah, most issues can be solved using a smartphone.

However I tried to format a micro SD card with an OTG cable and image it for a Raspberry Pi using my smartphone lately, and I never succeeded. My phone doesn’t have an integrated micro SD card reader nor the option to format one. All the apps I found that were claiming to format SD cards did nothing but show me ads. Just another Raspberry Pi would have been more useful than a smartphone at that moment.