+ Reply to thread
Page 2 of 2 FirstFirst 1 2
Results 51 to 58 of 58

Thread: Petty computer annoyances thread

  1. #51
    Oliphaunt Jizzelbin's avatar
    Registered
    Jul 2013
    Location
    in a mouth
    Posts
    10,670

    Default

    Oh. Come on. Enough is enough. Every single "media enhancement" to a webpage is bullshit. If you want extra, click on it. Every single goddamned thread anywhere has embedded previews of youtube links or fetched images.

    It's going to break the internet, kids.

    Yeah, it's mostly a joke, but, you know, the internet is composed of a number of physical tubes, and that is not a joke.

    ///////////

    Oh, about the Win10 thing: yeah, you abolutely can get Win10 down to 10GB of storage space. I just fired up that machine a few hours ago, and Excel works fine, which is all I care about. On the same machine (limited storage: eMMC, so can't really swap the drive out), CentOS 8 works fine as well, except for the godawful default desktop environment RedHat shares with Debian: that is one fugly environment.

    But, aside from cutting Win10 free of Defender, Updates, Cortana, all HW-specific drivers, and, I couldn't resist, adding ClassicShell, it's a good box for having the two main corporate players in one machine (Red Hat and Windows) in their "out of the box" appearance. And enough room (barely) to run VMs from within each.

    ETA/*Yeah, so, you actually can get Win10 down to the 3 - 5 GB range. If not much more. I've heard tales of 1GB builds. I'm not going to bother with it now, but about 10GB of storage space is OK for me now. You just keep trimming and trimming and suddenly you're face to face with the guts. It's kind of neat, but it's a lot of hand labor.*/
    Last edited by Jizzelbin; 15 Feb 2020 at 04:27 PM.

  2. #52
    Oliphaunt Jizzelbin's avatar
    Registered
    Jul 2013
    Location
    in a mouth
    Posts
    10,670

    Default

    Just reread a bit of the above:

    for future observers.

    The solution is to repackage the Win10 image file. It's not especially easy, and the information is not that easy to find, and it needs some specialized tools, which are all built into the Windows package. You can make these tools yourself, and execute them by hand, or just create a script (or, even better, a PWshell or whatever script) to perform them sequentially.

    It requires quite a bit of fiddling around and just seeing what the limits are.

    And, you'll probably never be happy: I'm still kicking myself that I didn't get rid of the login screen and any and all of the wallpapers, but for a quick fix for any UAC, Update, Defender, Cortana, whatever, it's fine. I'm not sure I can even ssh into it on my home network, but that doesn't matter to me.

    And, yes, HP hardware is shit. But before you crack the case to see what components are in there, you should look up online what the model number is and thereby save yourself the trouble of dealing with PITA housings.

    NEXT TIME: Investigate the machine, and think about rack-mounting it, while finding out the minimal requirements to turn Win10 into a functional server appliance with added (i) display (ii) hardware input. I think that's the only way people are getting 1GB storage space needed for Win10: you can ssh into it, it can do stuff, and you can see what the results are.

    Is that different than my use?

    Not really, except that there are some package dependencies needed for use of the Office Suite, notably.

    And, no, nobody has some exact recipe for what those are: you just have to sit there and figure it out. Not difficult, but time-consuming and tedious.

  3. #53
    Oliphaunt Jizzelbin's avatar
    Registered
    Jul 2013
    Location
    in a mouth
    Posts
    10,670

    Default

    On a similarly positive note, I found a couple of neat things.

    First, a browser extension called FoxReplace allows one to excise whole swaths of content from websites. This was more a curiosity, since somebody was complaining that a given forum lacked an "ignore" feature: this isn't exactly what this tool is built for, but it is able to parse what are called "regular expressions," developed by theoretical computer scientists and linguistics. So if one is careful about composing the right sequence of patterns, one could, for example, replace the space between, say, a username and his or her signature or whatever with whatever one wishes.

    Second, I'm very pleased that there is a ready-built tool called "Session Alive" that keeps one logged on to various websites with automatic "timeouts." I'm still testing it to see if it works reliably, but it would likely be worth the added electrical costs to keep a computer on overnight so that my employee page is always "up" (my mobile connection is often too slow or unreliable to pounce on various things that I'd like to respond to immediately), or even just a banking account website.

    So, with the exception of "writing" some regular expressions, I didn't have to write any browser extensions at all, which is fine with me.

  4. #54
    Oliphaunt Jizzelbin's avatar
    Registered
    Jul 2013
    Location
    in a mouth
    Posts
    10,670

    Default

    Not too exciting, nor really annoying, but as tasks they are annoying.

    Yeah, I don't think I can reauthor Windows 10 down any more than about 4 GB installed (at least in 64-bit version).

    BUT, notice anything unusual about these sentences?

    That's right, my daily driver computer seems to have permanently lost the following keys: { 2 @ w W s S } as well as the "speaker" button I was using as a "compose" key for creating accents/diacritics on letters.

    I don't think they're coming back, but at least I had a spare second to find where I put my xmodmap file (which I'd conveniently named ".x," so it took a few minutes to find it) and remap the Chrome "search" key + the adjacent letters and numbers to recreate them.

    It was becoming very annoying to try to type without those letters, especially the "s" and the numeral "2" and the symbol "@."

    It's a little odd typing this way, however.

    I could always just clean the keyboard, but I'm not going to do that.

    Or I could just use the identical model with 16 times the size hard drive (SSD), but I have all my stuff configured the way I like it and don't want to copy my .config files over and stuff, even though it would be a minor hassle at most.

    TL;DR.

  5. #55
    Oliphaunt Jizzelbin's avatar
    Registered
    Jul 2013
    Location
    in a mouth
    Posts
    10,670

    Default

    Are you fucking kidding me?

    Yes, obviously I screwed up the Windows on this one shitty HP POS box, but that was to be expected, operating on a Live system using the durr software NTLite.

    Oh, see how nicely I'm adapting to the new keyboard pattern? Different chords, indeed. Whatever stank cornholer talks about "touch-typing" and ZOMG is an uncoordinated boob.

    Yeah, whatever.

    BUT, how stupid is this? So, trying to fix the broken Win10 on this machine, I go back to CentOS8 on another partition, and thinking I'd already installed GParted. No. Whole nother library.

    BUT, at least I can wean myself off using GParted and just use regular parted to fix stuff.

    Yes, I know how, but it's just easier for this task to go GUI than wait to download 100MB of dependencies.

    This is low-stakes consumer stuff, so it doesn't matter, but it's good to be less of a pussy about it.

  6. #56
    Oliphaunt Jizzelbin's avatar
    Registered
    Jul 2013
    Location
    in a mouth
    Posts
    10,670

    Default

    Oh, and fuck it: I'm wiping that whole fucking machine, give CentOS the whole whopping 30 GB, and just run all my Windows shit from quem-KVM.

    And, yes, I'm happy to let NTLite do the stripping of the Windows builds: if I never have to write another dism instruction by hand, I'll be happy with that. Fucking A, that's what GUIs are for, especially when it maps pretty neatly to instructions one understands.

    ETA and no, I'm not going to apologize for using GParted over the TUI: hell, that's what it's for. OTOH, this present case requires me to either use parted TUI or DL a bunch of shit from the...I forgot E-something library/repo. So, I remove the MBR and all Win data, reformat all to ... why the fuck not, just all ext4, and resize my partitions the old fashioned way.

    EETA Oh, and now for this other machine: there I can actually do a micro Win 1809 and, by using only a 32-bit ... no, that machine has ample storage... No, I think I'm going to ... No, I can get Win10 to behave on this machine, I'll just restrict its stranglehold on resources (RAM and low-end cache).

    EEETA Oh, just replace where I say "TUI" and put in "command line" or "instruction plus args." I think TUI means that fancy text thing like you see, where it's a whole interface. My mistake in terminology.

    I don't think this machine can do a VM of basic 1809 Win10, and from within there, create another VM, and run yet another Win10 for editing the wim files.

    Well, it might. It will have to.

    EEEETA Oh, I'll explain the MS numbering scheme: by "1809" it means, 2018 in the month of 09, i.e., September.
    Last edited by Jizzelbin; 22 Feb 2020 at 12:26 PM.

  7. #57
    Oliphaunt Jizzelbin's avatar
    Registered
    Jul 2013
    Location
    in a mouth
    Posts
    10,670

    Default

    Oh.

    Fucking A.

    I've got Win10 1809 64-bit down to about 7 GB. That's compressed using CompactOS (or whatever!), to be sure, but I don't like it. CentOS8, then KVM into Win10. Or vice versa. I don't care anymore about reauthoring LTSB/C MS machines. I love MS, they got some of the best people there, but as a consumer, it's just not worth it. I don't think it can go any lower and still be able to run a VM with whatever.

    Meh. I'm happy to run Win101809, my current build, on about eight-nine gIbs of storage, installed, no pagefile, compressed, but it's not worth more effort for me.

    I feel sorry for people who use 30GB of storage on one of these shite eMMC "machines," and have it all taken up with Windows mechanics, but. hey, that's everyone's lot in life.
    Ergh.

  8. #58
    Oliphaunt Jizzelbin's avatar
    Registered
    Jul 2013
    Location
    in a mouth
    Posts
    10,670

    Default

    7:30 AM? Weekday mass at the seat of the whatever "archdiocese"?

    Fuck.

    You.

    Weekday at St Patrick? 1800?

    Fuck.

    You.

    Goddamned motherfucking inbred hillbillies, I'll just go in and do one...no...three motherfucking rosaries and not in no English and whatever.

    Fucking asshole liberal Protestants.

    Yeah, whatever.

    Oh.

    Well, just like shut up and stuff. At least I'm not denying Einstein like some dumbass Karen. I still wear a coat and tie and do my best. I'm really trying to be a better person.


    ETA

    Oh! Motherfuck!

    Goddamned Ste. Cécie's got weekday at 0800! Son of a bitch!

    Yeah, it' s in Spanish, but it's the exact same fucking thing, and I do all the responses in Latin under my breath anyway, and just fake it when they do the whole "congregational singing" thing (although I do like to sight-sing).

    Motherfuckers. Well, I haven't read much up recently on who Ste. Cecilia was, but this is not too far out of my way and I don't care if the weekday mass is in Spanish, I can't receive the eucharist until I've confessed three years of missed Sunday masses anyway.

    EETA Oh, I've got a shit ton of venial sins. Language is a problem for me. Yeah, the serious blasphemy and general heretical (atheistic and abuse of venerated names — well, that's a problem). Those are ongoing problems. More serious, to me, are missing the chance to commune in good disposition every festal Sunday.

    I'm sure lots of "cultural Catholcs" go chow some host whenever they want, but I couldn't do that.
    Last edited by Jizzelbin; 02 Mar 2020 at 06:27 AM.

+ Reply to thread

Posting rules

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts