Monthly Archive:: February 2023
If your main problem with the Microsoft Store is that you get too many relevant results when you search for apps, good news: Microsoft is officially launching Microsoft Store Ads, a way for developers to pay to get their apps in front of your eyes when you go to the store to look for something else. Exactly what Windows needs – more ads.
While many like how Windows 11 looks or feels, there are some who just want to cut out on what they feel is bloat as their hardware may not be good enough to run the new OS smoothly, or simply for the fun of it. Recently, a popular third-party Windows 11 tweaking and customization app called ThisIsWin11 (TIW11) evolved into Debloos or Debloat OS, which, as the name suggests, allows the de-bloating of the operating system. If one isn’t comfortable going about tweaking things themselves with it, they could also opt for Tiny11, which was released earlier today. This stripped-down Windows 11 Pro 22H2 mod requires 8GB of install space, 2GB of system memory, and perhaps the best part, it does not require TPM and Secure Boot. I always find the custom Windows versions scene fascinating. Legally, it’s a very grey area, but there’s usually some real gems in there, such as this one. As the creator emphasises – this isn’t for production use or for any machine that can run regular Windows 11, but it might be useful in certain niche applications or on older hardware.
So, Cartrivision tapes came in two formats: Black Tapes and Red Tapes. Black tapes you’d buy at the store like any other product, but for Red Tapes (which were relatively recent movies), you instead would go to the store and place an order from a catalog. The store would have it delivered by mail, then you’d come back in and get the tape. You’d take it home, watch it, and then return it back to the store. So… Video rental (like Blockbuster!), except they didn’t have any stock on hand, and only got the tapes on-demand by mail? Seems annoying. BUT OH NO: it’s far more annoying than that. See… Red Tapes aren’t mechanically like Black Tapes. You can’t rewind them. I’m a sucker for weird formats, and this one is definitely right up there as one of the weirdest.
I don’t expect to see any actual Mesa Vulkan drivers in Rust for a few years yet. My current goal is merely to explore the possibility. When the time comes that someone does choose to write a Vulkan driver in Rust, I want us to be ready. This exploration may also be useful for informing the Rust community about language features which would make the task easier. Converting existing Vulkan drivers to Rust is an explicit non-goal at this time. Rust seems everywhere.
I just finished my new project, it is called love. It allows installation of IRIX from IRIX, LINUX or WINDOWS. The reason for its existence is that IRIX installations are difficult, even for experienced users. New users almost always struggle with IRIX installations which can be demotivating and frustrating. My goal is to make this task easy, fast and accessible. This is absolutely amazing, and it works very well. This will make life for retro SGI users a lot easier.
It appears that Microsoft is getting more aggressive with Windows 11 promos. A Reddit user (the post is now removed) has published a photo of their Windows 10 computer with a full-screen Windows 11 ad offering to upgrade to the latest operating system. And in typical Microsoft fashion, available options are as head-scratching as it gets: two buttons, and both mean “I agree”. It’s garbage all the way down.
I wrote a popular post about serial ports once, and serial ports are something I think about, worry about, and dream about with some regularity. Yet I have never really devoted that much attention to the serial port’s awkward sibling, always assuming that it was a fundamentally similar design employing either 8 data pins each way or 8 bidirectional data pins. It turns out that the truth is a lot more complicated. And it all starts with printers. You see, I have written here before that parallel ports are popular with printers because they avoid the need to buffer bits to assemble bytes, allowing the printer to operate on entire characters at a time in a fashion similar to the electromechanical Baudot teleprinters that early computer printers were based on. This isn’t wrong, it’s actually more correct than I had realized—the computer parallel port as we know it today was in fact designed entirely for printers, at least if you take the most straightforward historical lineage. Let’s start back at the beginning of the modern parallel port: the dot matrix printer. The serial port still sees tons of use today, but the parallel port seems to have vanished entirely.
