This accidentally fell out of her pocket when I bumped into her. Took me four goes.
Tuesday, October 25
Steven Den Beste
I got a note from a mutual friend this morning confirming the sad news - Steven Den Beste has passed away.
Although he mostly retired from political blogging years ago, he continued posting about lighter topics here at mee.nu, and I've been in touch with him almost daily over those years. I respected and admired him as much as anyone I've known, and I've been proud to call him a friend.
He's been in poor health lately following a stroke in 2012, but while he grumbled sometimes, he never complained. So this still came as a shock to me, a tragic loss of a friend and a member of my little community here.
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That video had me conflicted. Half of me was squeeing, "D'aawww, what an adorable little big kitty!", while the other half of me was shouting "Dude, get away from that lynx before it bites your face off!"
Posted by: Peter the Not-so-Great at Saturday, October 22 2016 10:21 AM (jS1F0)
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He certainly seems friendly, but he's quite a big kitty. There are more videos of him; he seems to be comfortable with his owners but less so with strangers.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 22 2016 11:47 AM (PiXy!)
Easiest thing to do turned out to be reset Windows entirely. Azusa is working now. And also suddenly has lots of free disk space.
So, yay.
I'm not getting a signal on the HDMI port, but I'll wait for the post-install stuff to finish before I worry about that too much.
Edit: After poking around in the Intel drivers, I found the setting to re-enable the HDMI output. This model - a Dell Inspiron 15 7000, model 7548 - has dual graphics, integrated and dedicated, and switches between them dynamically. It seems that resetting Windows caused it to forget how to do that. Still better than the Black Screen of Death, but hardly ideal.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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So, Azusa, my shiny Dell notebook, got unceremoniously murdered by an errant Windows update (as if there were any other kind).
I can get it to boot in safe mode (which is now completely undiscoverable - if you don't know how to reach safe mode, you will never find it).* Windows 10 has apparently lost the network and video drivers, which means that when booting normally I get a black screen and no network access. Booting into safe mode loads the default video drivers, which don't work right on this hardware (it has dual video controllers and a 4K screen) but work enough.
I downloaded the network drivers, put them on a USB drive, and copied them onto the Azusa - because once the network is working again, I can download anything else I need.
And you know what? You can't install drivers while running in safe mode. And since the drivers are broken, I can't run anything when I'm not in safe mode.
And I have to type that by hand. I can't copy and paste because the drivers are broken.
* Shift-click the power button in the login screen, then reboot.** That will give you a menu where you can choose safe mode, and, you guessed it, reboot again.
I think a mid-level manager at Microsoft asked his team "How can we make things as annoying as possible for someone who is already having a very bad day?" and they then had a very productive brainstorming session.
** How undiscoverable is it? I just did it, and I still didn't know how to do it. You click the power button, and then shift-click the restart option. Shift-clicking the power button itself does you no good at all. And holding down shift gives you no indication that anything has changed.
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When my old PC up-chucked and died on me a few months back, I replaced it with a Mac Mini. One of the reasons I chose an Apple was to avoid dealing with Windows 10. I seems I made the right decision.
Posted by: Peter the Not-so-Great at Monday, October 10 2016 09:43 AM (jS1F0)
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Windows 10 itself isn't bad, but the update process is a a colossal mess. I do have a Mac as well, but that has its own problems. Mostly not because things are broken, but because they are working precisely as designed rather than the way I need them to work.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, October 10 2016 07:33 PM (PiXy!)
And Apple, if you would kindly stop breaking essential functionality, I would appreciate it.
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BLAARGH
So I finally found a mouse driver that makes using a 27" iMac bearable, and Apple updates their so-called operating system and now it doesn't work any more.
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Monday, October 03
Crapware Live Blog, Part 71732
I managed to get the Xperia tablet to move apps to the SD card again. The problem was not the size of the card, or the amount of free space, but the partition table. The Android disk partitioning utility creates disk partitions that are incompatible with Android.
I partitioned it on my Mac (you can't partition SD cards on Windows (because fuck you, that's why) and the Mac Disk Utility doesn't work either, but you can do it from the command line.
Meanwhile, my Dell notebook got the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. And now it doesn't work any more. The Black Screen of Death - where the update kills both your display driver and your network driver.
And of course, updates are mandatory.
It should be straightforward enough to fix once I find the right drivers, work out how the hell you get Windows 10 into safe mode (shift-click the restart button, yeah, very intutitive that), and install them and reboot a few more times.
But seriously, Microsoft, you've bricked two of my Windows 10 systems with your crappy updates already. If you're going to make updates mandatory, they have to work every single time. Otherwise you can just piss off.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, October 04 2016 03:30 PM (PiXy!)
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Pixy, obviously you need a different edition.
Out of curiosity, did you get errors or just not have the options?
There's a command-line tool, diskpart, that you could try and see if it works. I used it recently to clean partitions off a thumb drive that, IIRC, Disk Management couldn't/wouldn't.
Posted by: RickC at Wednesday, October 05 2016 08:06 AM (ECH2/)
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That'll be it; I used Disk Manager, not the command line. That means that Windows and Mac have exactly the same limitation in their disk management UI.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, October 05 2016 09:58 AM (PiXy!)
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Hah. I suppose I should clarify that I was able to split a 1GB SD card into two ~487GB partitions with Disk Management. I used diskpart to redo a flash drive that had been previously used as Windows install media and had something like 6 partitions on it; I needed to roll that back down to one, and Disk Management couldn't handle that drive.
I have no idea why one type of flash media would work with DM and the other wouldn't.
Posted by: RickC at Wednesday, October 05 2016 11:27 AM (ITnFO)
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BTW, Googling found a page on superuser.com where someone claims that "You can't delete a partition while it contains a filesystem that is currently set to be always mounted. Remove the drive letter (From the Change Drive Letter and Paths option) and then you should be able to delete the partition." Although I think the SD card I modified did actually have a drive letter, so who knows.
Posted by: RickC at Wednesday, October 05 2016 11:32 AM (ITnFO)
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Thanks for the info. Maybe it was a partition table problem from formatting it with the Android debugger earlier. There was no error or other indication of a problem, I just couldn't do anything.
I took a quick look online and was told you can't partition an SD card under Windows and assumed this was in fact true.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, October 05 2016 02:52 PM (PiXy!)
Out of curiosity, did you get errors or just not have the options?
There's a command-line tool, diskpart, that you could try and see if it works. I used it recently to clean partitions off a thumb drive that, IIRC, Disk Management couldn't/wouldn't.
