The computing stuff rant thread

[Mr Larrington]

No evidence to suggest that the mod was made by actual Canadians, though.  No BEARS or møøse standing at the roadside for starters.

[Mr Larrington]

Bollocksbollocksbollocks!  Looks like that power glitch has killed an old and slow but still useful NAS drive.  Makes spinny-up noises but isn't talking to the network.  Blinkenlights on the network switch not blinken.  Bollocksbollocksbollocks!

[Kim]

Windows is making barakta particularly sweary this morning.  This doesn't end well...

[andrewc]

She's going to defenestrate something ?

[Kim]

She's already had to reboot because her desktop turned into a distorted image of the Stupid Visual Stress Library.  Again.

And, in the interests of letting Microsoft off the hook for a bit, she's now swearing about $university departments being so bad at communicating with each other that they don't even share a heating system.

Ah, maybe not:  "Why have you saved that in such a stupid distorted fuckwit format?!?"

That's either Acrobat, or timetabling.

ETA: It was timetabling.  Unclear if there was PDF involvement.

[barakta]

Acrobat combining of two image files together but it mashed the image. CBA.

[Mr Larrington]

Another day, another fuck-up by Microsith.  Update 5034441 is failing.  To make it work you have to fanny about increasing the size of the recovery partition.  And then you discover it’s an update patching a potential security flaw with Bitlocker WHICH DOESN'T EVEN RUN UNDER THIS VERSION OF FUCKING WINDOWS sort it out u muppets 

[Mr Larrington]

Look, it’s very simple.  All I'm trying to do is to create a mod to paint a Kenworth W900 with a 72” sleeper cab dark green with natty yellow go-faster stripes and the words “TRUMP IS A CUNT” written in large friendly letters on the back.  It's not rocket surgery and I've done This Sort Of Thing a dozen times before so WHY THE FUCK AREN'T YOU WORKING 

[JonBuoy]

Another day, another fuck-up by Microsith.  Update 5034441 is failing.  To make it work you have to fanny about increasing the size of the recovery partition.  And then you discover it’s an update patching a potential security flaw with Bitlocker WHICH DOESN'T EVEN RUN UNDER THIS VERSION OF FUCKING WINDOWS sort it out u muppets 

I had this on Tuesday but unfortunately the error code is unhelpful.  I found a plausible-sounding 'solution' somewhere on t'internet that involved stopping various services, renaming a couple of folders as folder.old, restarting the services then restarting the PC.  It wouldn't boot.  In fact it wouldn't do much at all 

On Wednesday evening I borrowed a laptop to create a bootable USB but didn't have a spare USB stick that was large enough.  Then I had the wonderful idea of using the SD card from my standby Garmin Etrex, copied the maps etc to the borrowed laptop's hard drive, created the bootable ISO-thingy and booted it up to get it to restore Win10.  It wouldn't.  I eventually managed to persuade it to give me a DOS window and searched for all of the files/folders with the word 'old' in them.  There were only three likely ones and I vaguely recognised two of them.  The new version of one of them looked OK but the other contained a logfile that ended with an error.  In desperation I deleted the folder and renamed the old one to be the current one.  To my relief (and surprise) it booted up OK 

This was late on Wednesday evening and when I Googled the update error I saw that loads of people had had it and the general advice seemed to be to leave it and wait for Microsoft to sort their mess out.  To cap it all I then deleted the contents of the SD card and copied the map files etc back onto it, replaced it in the Etrex and fired it up.  It was OK until it wasn't - part way through booting up it shut down.  I then reformated the SD card and copied the files back onto it with the same result.  As a last desperate attempt to get it working I deleted a few old map files from it and just left the latest version.  To my relief it worked and I was now back where I had been 52 hours earlier...apart from now my laptop has started telling me that one of the batteries 'has failed due to normal wear.' 

...and that is how I spent a fair chunk of this week 

[cycleman]

Look, it’s very simple.  All I'm trying to do is to create a mod to paint a Kenworth W900 with a 72” sleeper cab dark green with natty yellow go-faster stripes and the words “TRUMP IS A CUNT” written in large friendly letters on the back.  It's not rocket surgery and I've done This Sort Of Thing a dozen times before so WHY THE FUCK AREN'T YOU WORKING 

Republican computer 

[Mr Larrington]

Look, it’s very simple.  All I'm trying to do is to create a mod to paint a Kenworth W900 with a 72” sleeper cab dark green with natty yellow go-faster stripes and the words “TRUMP IS A CUNT” written in large friendly letters on the back.  It's not rocket surgery and I've done This Sort Of Thing a dozen times before so WHY THE FUCK AREN'T YOU WORKING 

Republican computer 

Turns out another mod which applies a different paint job to the same truck – this one endorsing Eleanor of Aquitaine and Rigoberto Uràn – doesn’t appear either.  Although it’s there on that profile's existing truck.  Meanwhile ones for Freightliner Cascadias are working as expected

[barakta]

My work computer keeps losing my nice black desktop and letting the default image of one of our buildings desktop load over it. Said image is STRIPY and gives me massive visual stress and overload (and has triggered migraines for me if I can't get rid). I then can't get my black back cos the personalisation settings are "set by your institution" without a full reboot which wastes time and loses all my state which I have to reload.

It happens at random, 3x this week so far. I've managed to get a screenshot of the horrible background and the locked out settings window and will be emailing IT on Monday to ask them to unlock personalisation for me damnit and to stop this happening as an accessibility issue.

I understand we have to block accessibility/personalisation for students come some shitheads set WILD settings on public PCs and run away leaving PC unusable for others till IT revert it (why don't they just revert on reboot?) but staff should have full visual control of our PCs damnit.

[Mr Larrington]

I got it working for the green and yellow paint job but all efforts to make t'other one behave itself have failed.  The virtual Bethany (13) will have to make do with a mostly black one with chrome trimmings instead.

Bethany (13): Huh! I ent no goff!

[citoyen]

Tried to open Teams this morning (necessary evil) but it seems to have been uninstalled from my machine.

On further investigation, I'm guessing this is related to MicroFascists replacing 'Classic' Teams with 'New' Teams. But that isn't supposed to be happening until March. And our IT admin people haven't made 'New' Teams available yet.

FFS.

I'm making do with the web app for now.

I presume New Teams will be exactly the same as Classic Teams but with all the genuinely useful features removed in favour of whatever "improved user experience" bullshit MS want to convince us we really want but actually have no earthly use for.

[Jaded]

The main benefit of any version of Teams appears to be that you can take part in video chats that have been set up in Teams.

[Kim]

The main benefit of any version of Teams appears to be that you can take part in video chats that have been set up in Teams.

With a secondary benefit for those in the business of selling RAM upgrades.

[citoyen]

The main benefit of any version of Teams appears to be that you can take part in video chats that have been set up in Teams.

Unfortunately, this is precisely why I need it for work.

As far as I can see, the main reason for a new version of Teams is to push all the social media functionality to the fore. I can manage without that, thanks.

I would be very pleased if New Teams no longer had the ability to use it as a file repository but I'm not holding out hope.

This upgrade wouldn't be a problem if not for the fact that I have a non-conventional set-up. Most people across the organisation access work servers through a Citrix workspace. But our team need to use Adobe products, which aren't compatible with Citrix (or so we've been told, I don't know if this is the whole truth and nothing but the truth). So we have standalone machines and work outside Citrix, with special privileges set up to access work servers.

I can normally install the apps I need to use without Admin interference but New Teams is blocked. Probably for very good reasons, I'm sure - presumably the same reasons they've blocked the desktop Outlook app (I've always had to use Outlook via the web. Ugh!).

I presume Citrix users will go on using Classic Teams until at least 2047.

[ian]

I think I'm on the 'New Teams' which looks just like the Old Teams and still plays the usual game of hide the useful functionality and then remove it because no one is, after all, now using it. The inability to do useful things like save or flag chats etc. remains intact and the search is still everything you'd expect from a Microsoft search engine.

[HTFB]

I would be very pleased if New Teams no longer had the ability to use it as a file repository but I'm not holding out hope.

No such luck. We were being shoved brutally towards using Teams, just before lockdown, because you can have a Sharepoint repository per Team and the monolithic departmental repository was full. The change has, ahem, not entirely helped knowledge retention and management.

[SoreTween]

I presume New Teams will be exactly the same as Classic Teams but with all the genuinely useful features removed in favour of whatever "improved user experience" bullshit MS want to convince us we really want but actually have no earthly use for.

Based upon the vastly increased swear quotient of colleagues silly enough to move the slider across to 'new' I'd guess you're spot on.

[TheLurker]

The two most terrible and depressing words to hear for any product, IT or otherwise, are, "new" and "improved".

[Kim]

In a idle moment, I found myself contemplating whether - in the absence of Hanlon's Razor - the enshittification of Teams is a deliberate ploy to sabotage remote working for the benefit of The Man's investment portfolio.

[barakta]

Me: I finish a student meeting and think "oh I'll get lunch before my 1:30 student" *log out*. I then can't remember if my next appt is 1pm or 1:30. Log back into check.

Windows: "Ha ha, your password is too old, you need to change your password RIGHT NAO and I won't log you in until you do!"

Me: "Fucks sake, I'm not in the mood to think of new passwords, this is rude" *gives it new password* *logs in* next student is 1pm not 1:30 (glad I checked) but means I don't have time to eat and prep. So downgrade to MakeTea.

Me (with tea): Log back in. Load up student stuff for prep. Can't find the join thinger for my meeting in Outlook, find the meeting link another way *clicky* nothing happens. I realise Teams has a whiny message saying "you are not signed in" while showing me most of our team stuff. I log into 3 places, 2 factor auth them. Try opening teams again. I am now late for the appointment. Teams demands 2FA but on receipt of correct code, it just flashes and closes.

Me (increasingly late and pissed off): I email student to apologise and say I'll be late. I reboot the fucking machine.

5 mins later it deigns to let me back in. But I have to log into everything, So many things demand 2FA codes that the system refuses to generate one "you've had too many, timeout". FUCK OFF.

I eventually get into Teams and into my meeting over 10 mins late. A good 15 mins wasted. I haven't got ANY prep, I have to open student records and info while doing the meeting which is stressful and means I'm not as "up on stuff" as I usually am.

I am '-' to asking IT to set the password change with:
1) a fucking reminder first, give us a few days notice
2) don't allow the system to demand a password change at fucking random

This is the IT equivalent of someone walking up to a desk with papers, picking them all up, and hiding them somewhere so I have to look and refind them all.

Infucking furiating and unbelievably rude. Executive function theft of the highest order.

[Auntie Helen]

Unfortunately, Work got me a new computer at the beginning of the year, which meant that I also have had the pleasure (!) Of being automatically upgraded to New Teams.

I can confirm that it is as bad as old Teams, only with extra big menu bar icons/buttons, so you can’t see all the icons you want at once, much more complication in trying to personalise the menus for you, because the space is padded out by some automatic Microsoft buttons you cannot remove, even though you will not use them even until the end of time, and of course the other traditional examples of moving things just for the fun of it.

Of course, with a new computer I had to re-organise all my shortcuts and stuff like that, and some things I have not yet managed to do.

Amazingly, I was able to keep the old Outlook because I have hundreds of folders on the left-hand side and the new Outlook spaces them out really really widely which is of course a disaster for me as I already have to scroll down through loads. However, I expect that I will end up with new Outlook by the end of the year, because Microsoft will sneakily do it while I think I’m clicking okay to print something, or something.

[Cudzoziemiec]

I am '-' to asking IT to set the password change with:
1) a fucking reminder first, give us a few days notice
2) don't allow the system to demand a password change at fucking random

That shouldn't even be a demand, it's just basic common sense. And basic politeness.