I believe, in all my years of writing on Linux and covering Plasma, I've only briefly touched on the customization of the login and lock screens. But as you well know, this desktop environment is super-customizable, so you can do pretty much anything you like. Well, just recently, I encountered a scenario that prompted me to take a more profound look at these two elements, and tweak them to my liking.

My 2014 IdeaPad Y50-70 laptop, which runs Kubuntu 24.04 on it, has a 4K screen. This means, even if you configure desktop scaling, the login screen will, by default, look weird. Tiny, out of place. Add the bland wallpaper used in Kubuntu 24.04 into the mix, and you're really not starting your session on a positive note. The lock screen does respect your scaling, but it does not use your wallpaper. Let us rectify all these tiny issues, so we have a spotless desktop. Begin, we shall.

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Just a few weeks ago, we talked about Upscayl, a truly excellent AI-powered tool that can upscale your images. Before you say ZOMG AI, wait. This is a fully offline, open-source, cross-platform utility, and it doth not phone home or anything like that. Your work stays local. But the quality of upscaling will vary from image to image, as I've outlined in my review.

Now, what if you cannot use this program, for whatever reason? What if you have an unsupported integrated graphics card (as is typical on many a laptop), but you still want to try to upscale your old photos, reduce the blur, and make things better? In today's tutorial, I will tell you how well I fared using ImageMagick on the command-line, plus some wizardry with GIMP. Let's do 4K stuff the old-school way.

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Long long ago, in a galaxy far ... Nah. Back in 2010, I got myself a netbook. It was an Asus eeePC thing, small, robust, lovely, and reasonably priced. Fast forward a good decade, I've used it everywhere. Inside and outside, in rough outdoor conditions, and it's survived a dozen business trips with pride. Practical use, too, including mail, browsing, music, videos, writing books, everything you can imagine.

Over the years, though, its tiny, super-ancient processor started lagging behind the (mostly unnecessary) growth in computing demands for ordinary things. My last endeavor with this box was around 2019. I installed MX Linux 18 on it, and this fine, frugal distro gave it a fresh breath of life and relevance. I wasn't sure how much longer the system would receive updates, and what to do once that episode ended. Well, as it turns out, just when I thought it might be time to retire the eeePC, it snapped its red clamshell cover and shouted: I ain't dead yet. Well, let's talk about it, shall we?

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Every few months, I power on my test machine, emphasis test machine, and start the Windows 11 instance installed there, and check what has changed in the operating system, often for the worse. I do this for several reasons: 1) masochism 2) get new material for my blog 3) see what Microsoft is planning for the average user, and update my doomsday prepper toolbox. I did that a few days ago, and boy was I angry.

You may think I'm exaggerating of course, for populistic reasons. Nope. I tried to update the system, the update failed. I encountered a whole bunch of fresh ergonomic travesties. I encountered new inconsistencies in the Windows UI, and then some. Follow me.

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I am writing this review before the 24.04.1 release hitting me box. However, you may read it after the major point upgrade. Now, the reason I decided to create this piece is, I've been using my one Kubuntu 24.04 instance for several weeks now. It all started with an SSD upgrade on a 10-year-old laptop. The upgrade went fine, and I chose Kubuntu 24.04 as my distro. The operating system installation did not go well. The distro drivers setup was clunky, and I was quite unhappy.

Then, I wrote an entire, negative review on Kubuntu 24.04, and I felt it was rather mediocre, a regression in many aspects (much like the rest of the distrospace in the past few years). Since, the system has received a whole bunch of updates. The first round, a whooping 750MB worth of stuff. Then another and another, and with each iteration, things changed. I thought, if I'm writing about Kubuntu when things are bad, I should also write when things are good. Fairness, and all that. Well then, let's talk about that, shall we.

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Recently, I uploaded a new video to my Youtube channel. When I tried to add a description to the clip, Youtube wouldn't let me proceed to the next step. First, it told me I cannot use angled brackets, which is fine. Then, it told me that if I wanted to use URLs (to my own blog no less), I needed to verify myself. What.

And so I explored this venue a bit more, decided not to play ball with this nonsense, and removed the links from the description. But I also decided to write an article about this pointless experience, about this tiered reward conditioning mechanism. It highlights oh-so many things wrong with the whole modern media industry, and I want to express myself. Here we go.

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As you can see, I'm writing the fourth long-term usage report for this laptop much sooner than I normally would. My typical cadence for these periodic (but not period ha ha) pieces is roughly three months in between (or longer), but I had to make an exception this time, and give you a more "timely" update. Why? Well, we shall soon discover.

In my previous report, I remarked on how I'm finally happy with the Slimbook Titan. It's settled down after a rather rough start, and things are working smoothly. Well, were working smoothly. My system suddenly started experiencing some rather weird behavior. Things would sort of freeze for a few seconds, then go back to normal, but without the accompanying oops or kernel panic. This would happen mostly early on in a session, but not just. And thus, my good feeling of progress has gone down the drain. Follow me.

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Hear, hear! I am happy to announce the publication of my latest nonfiction, tech-related book. It comes with a snarky title How to Make Your Career Suck Less. Or, in other words, A Guide to a Less Painful IT Existence. This book is a culmination of some twenty years of my fairly successful work in the tech industry, where I've faced many an absurd situation, hordes of yesmen, tons of bureaucracy, and heaps of nonsense. And I bet, if you work in the tech space, you've experienced it all, too.

Well, there's no reason why future generations ought to suffer. Reflecting on my own career, I would like to help people achieve higher job satisfaction and self-realization, if possible. In a way, this book is a practical howto on a lot of topics, with a simple aim: navigate the IT world career with greater ease. If this sounds like this something you might want to sample, even for pure fun, without any higher goals, then please, follow me.

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Normally, I am rather disdainful of many things AI. Not because there's anything inherently wrong with the idea of Artificial Intelligence per se. No. What I dislike is the buzz and hype around technologies and products purporting to be AI, when they are, at best, glorified statistics, lathered with a thick layer of marketing nonsense. Now... Say you have lots of old, low-res, blurry images. Can you make them better? With AI?

If you've watched TV crime shows from the early 2000s, you just "enhance" stuff. Only, every time you upscale an image, James Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann spin in their graves, because you're violating the laws of thermodynamics. Entropy and that. Creating data out of nothing. Magic. But that's actually what AI-powered programs promise. The question is, can you do AI without surrendering your soul to the cloud overloads? Ah, seems like you can, after all! One such tool is Upscayl. Open-source, cross-platform, AI image enhancer. Sounds fantastic. Now, let's see if it actually works as advertised.

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How many zips could a file manager zip if a file manager could zip some zips? All right, here's a possibly pointless scenario for you. Say you have a compressed archive of some kind (zip, 7z, tar, rar, whatever), and you want to create a new archive, using the existing one as a source. For instance, you have a file called dedo.zip and you wish to "compress" it further into dedo2.7z.

If you ask around, you will realize that multi-level compression doesn't necessarily have any benefits. Depending on the scenario, the file format, and the compression algorithm, your second-level archive may in fact be larger than the source, and if you also use encryption, in some scenarios, you might even degrade the security this way. But I'm not here to change the world, I'm here to solve a simple issue. Plasma's file manager, Dolphin, does not seem to be able to create multi-level archives. If you select a compressed file, right click, there won't be an option to compress, only extract. All right, so how do you work around that, then? Today's article shall reveal.

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Here's something fun and yet technical for today! I made a video of a rather jolly driving session in the fantastic racing simulator Assetto Corsa. To be more precise, it's an eight-minute clip of my record-setting lap, made in-game, transcoded using OBS Studio, and then polished with KDEnlive (in Linux), showing (off) what I've been able to achieve playing this sweet title. This won't make the world a better place, but it just might be entertaining for the petrol heads and gear heads among you.

In more detail, it took me roughly four months of non-stop driving to reach the result of 7:20.069 at Nurburngring Nordschleife Touristenfahrten (Tourist Lap) in a BMW M235i Racing in Assetto Corsa. I would drive every day, 4-5 laps each time, trying to improve, to nail down the entries and the exits. Looking at the video, there's still more room for improvement, like an even wider line, somewhat later entries, earlier exits, and then some. But why don't you watch it, and judge for yourself?

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Over the years, in my various Windows-related articles, I've written a great deal about these programs and their value (or lack thereof). Seemingly, there ought not to be any fresh reason to talk about them yet again. But there is. Just recently, Microsoft announced it was deprecating Control Panel, and then quickly went back and reworded the phrasing of this statement, following massive, massive backlash. You see, complaining does work wonders!

Well, reading that page, one specific phrase triggered me immensely. It was the totally deluded statement regarding Settings, reading: "...Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience". Ah, the modern and streamlined experience! Hot garbage. Well, for the umpteenth time, I will talk some more about Control Panel, Settings, the infestation of low-IQ touch-based stuff on the desktop, and such. Follow me, if you please.

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Several weeks ago, I told you about the "can't send video" problem in WhatsApp. You wanna share dank memes with your buddies, and technology be standin' in your way, fam, fr. Well, in that guide, I explained how you can work around the issue - by sending HD videos, duh. But then, if you only have SD quality content, what can you do? On the phone, it ain't trivial, but on the desktop, you have a range of options.

In today's wee tutorial, I will revisit an old and powerful media editing tool - ffmpeg, your one-stop shop for everything audio or video. This program lets you manipulate media files any which you want - convert among many different formats, split and join clips, scale, extract individual frames, add subtitles, change playback speed, and so much more. Well, let's talk about converting video into animated images, GIFs.

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I think the concept of purchase verification in digital stores is a great one. Really. But. The implementation of the said idea can sometimes be rather crude. Lo and behold, my latest experience with the Google Play store. I presume the application received an update, and when I launched it, instead of getting into the main interface, Google Play popped a full home screen banner, telling me I've not set any purchase verification.

True. Because I have NO payment method in the store, so there's no point to any verification, now is there. Only I could not dismiss the notification. I could either set biometrics (nope), or a password. The thing is, I don't mind the password, but right then, I didn't want to do it. Not when Google decided to "activate" me. I had opened the store for a very specific reason, I wanted to install an app, and the system was forcing me to do admin work. But there's no button to exit or skip this step. Well, let's skip this step.

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A brief intro for those of you wondering what this is about. DOSBox is an emulator for MS-DOS, an operating system from before the Windows 95 era. Y'know, DOS. Great. It lets you take screenshots of games and programs running inside the emulator window.

I've written about DOSBox many times before, as early as 2006 when I created this website. Then, I crafted a number of articles that highlighted my success in reviving old DOS-era games, the 80s and 90s classics. The best thing, DOSBox lets you emulate both IPX and Serial connectivity, so you can even play multiplayer games on your LAN. Recently, I also wrote a tutorial that shows how to resize/rescale the DOSBox window so that you can play the old, ancient titles with good clarity on modern HD/UHD displays. And that, finally, brings the question. If you take screenshots of these old games in say a 1920x1440px window, do you get same-size images? The answer is no. So how do we fix that? Aha.

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If you think I harbor disdain for mid-level management borglings, sycophants and their minions, you're absolutely right. I do. The perfect blend of cowardice, lack of imagination, shifty morals, and inability to truly inspire others is hard to like. And yet, these seem to be the defining characteristics of the vast majority of managers in the tech world. Wherever you work, whatever your role, there's a pretty good chance, at least 80% I'd say, your manager will be Bill Lumbergh from Office Space. Or one of his near-identical clones. On top of that, your boss wants you to be productive! Hear hear.

More disdain. Indeed, whenever I hear any workplace mention "let's measure productivity", my BS klaxons fire off. Not because the concept is bad. No. It's because the concept is completely misplaced, misguided, and impossible to achieve. And in this article, I will explain why, and also vindicate thousands upon thousands of people who tried to tell their manager it can't be done, only to be met with a blank stare of incomprehension. Begin, we shall.

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All right. This is a somewhat niche, convoluted topic. Let me start with some background information. A couple of years ago, I started a journey of trying to migrate away from Windows. To that end, I'm using a laptop, one Slimbook Titan, as my experiment platform. I'm trying to do everything I want or need on it, in an attempt to fully mirror the Windows experience. Part of that setup includes using excellent-but-Windows-only software running through WINE. By and large, this has been a rather successful experiment so far.

However, I did encounter a rather weird snag. During the setup and configuration of SketchUp Make, which I use for 3D modeling, I somehow managed to "bork" the WINE-specific system menu and task manager launchers in my Plasma desktop. They no longer work. The program runs great, but it can only be really invoked on the command line. The usual GUI-driven tools simply fail, quietly. In this article, I will show you how you can fix orphaned WINE system menu entries (probably due to multiple WINE version installations), and create custom launchers that will always work. Let us commence, then.

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How long does it take for one to have a quiet, peaceful smartphone experience - Android, specifically - from the moment of purchase, past initial tinkering and configuration, past some updates and such, until the user is happy and confident the things are as they ought to be? My experience shows that the number varies vastly, from one manufacturer to another, from one device to another. With the Samsung A54, that number has yet to be determined.

Without going into too many details - after all, that's what the original review is for - I have a new phone, and I'm not too happy with it. The hardware is good, the camera is reasonable, the price is really nice, and it will have five years of updates and patches. Awesome. But the software is annoying, the Samsung ecosystem is really in-yer-face, the phone apps are many and pointless, and worst of all, some nine months later, I still occasionally have to fiddle with the phone, changing this or that little setting. All of these escapades are outlined in rich detail in four long-term reports. Start with the fourth, and work your way back. Now, let's see what this fifth review will bring.

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My early experience with the Titan wasn't a good one. The setup was rather messy, and there was a moment where I almost considered physically demolishing the device. Luckily, hard-earned and hard-spent money begets respect, and so I eschewed hardware-focused violence and went on with nerdy suffering instead, taming the laptop and its operating system to a usable state. Fast forward two long-term reviews later, the Titan is a-OK.

It is time for me to give you a fresh look at this machine, its Nvidia graphics and its Linux distro, some six months since my last essay. I consider these occasional re-reviews highly important. I chose this machine for a rather particular reason - to test the viability of using Linux as a primary operating system in all aspects, including the critical domain of gaming. I want to get rid of Windows in me household, if possible, and that means being able to replace every aspect of functionality with a Linux equivalent. I don't want to compromise on usability, and in parallel, I don't want to reduce my IQ by using Windows 11. Hence, this series of tests and trials and tribulations and happy moments. Report 3, here we go.

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There I was, minding my own business, not doing anything harmful to the environment when a need arose for me to invoke the Windows Task Manager on a Windows 10 box. I did, and I immediately noticed something different. Instead of showing thumbnails of graphs of different resources (network, disk, CPU, etc) in the sidebar on the left, the Task Manager was only showing these blobs of color.

On its own, this wouldn't be a problem if this is how my box was configured. But it wasn't. The disappearance of the thumbnail graphs alarmed me. Because if you don't introduce any changes to the system, the system shouldn't change. Basic physics. And yet, this happened. The only thing that could explain it, barely, is that the machine had received some (unfortunate) Windows Updates earlier in the month. My job was to figure out how to restore the little graphs. Follow me.

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Let's start with a disclaimer. I know the product name ought to be capitalized. But that makes for a somewhat chewy reading, and so, you will forgive me for spelling things out a bit differently. That will not change the essence of this review. Speaking of, let's do a software review! Our candidate for today is OnlyOffice Desktop Editors, a free software office suite a-la LibreOffice or Microsoft Office. Of course, one cannot mention one without the other (two). Mostly.

I've already reviewed this product twice before (and OnlyOffice has a range of other solutions, as well). My general impression was that you get a pretty solid, rounded suite, with lots of goodies, lots of nice, convenient extras, decent file format support, and modern looks. That said, the performance and Microsoft Office compatibily could be better. All right then, let's have a fresh take. Begin.

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In my Kubuntu 24.04 review a few days back, I asserted that the distro does not have a GUI driver management utility, and that this is probably the worst aspect of this system. As it turns out, I was wrong, but for all the right reasons! Now, this wee fiasco actually allows me to write an important article that addresses basic usability in Linux distros. I find it a bit weird to be writing this, in 2024, but hey, the Linux desktop has not really progressed much in the last decade, and even regressed a lot in many aspects.

Let me show you how things went, and why I came to my wrong conclusion, and then how, the over-nerdiness can actually lead you down the wrong path. This article will be useful, as it's going to highlight a dozen cardinal problems with how Kubuntu (and Linux in general) manages basic user-facing stuff. Let's commence.

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Your favorite dinosaur reporting for duty! Blissfully optimistic and full of hope, I shall commence to test the latest edition of the Plasma desktop environment. I've tried the 6.0 release three times already, on three different systems, with varying degrees of success, and lots and lots of bugs. Most of those were caused by the underlying problems in KDE neon, the chosen test bed. But since one cannot really separate the distro from the desktop environment, the results are, ipso facto, one and the same. Meh.

In the scenarios where I was able to separate system from userspace, Plasma 6 delivered decent results. My opinion is that Plasma (version independent) is the best desktop UI for Linux, and in general, offers a really nice, slick experience. However, I'm no fanboy, and therefore, I don't just blindly accept all and every decision introduced by the KDE team, or ignore the problems that crop up in the development of the system. So far, my impression with Plasma 6 is not as stellar as it could be. Let's see what 6.1 can do. Follow me.

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It would seem, if it were up to tech bros, assorted corporate magnates, and random deluded executives and associated ladder climber sycophants out there, we would all be paying a subscription to use our own kidneys and expected to be grateful for it. Indeed, the level of greed in the modern tech space (and broader) is so shamelessly blatant and rampant, one almost reminisces with more than mild nostalgia for the days of the First French Republic and their use of stringent quality control measures. Fact, there were zero software bugs back then.

Alas, we now live in a "democratic" world, and we cannot resort to a more literal use of physics to solve problems. We must have a civilized discourse, right. Predictably, you may assume that words won't change anything, and most of the time, you'd be correct. But there's one really cool thing about the Internet - it likes to amplify negativity, and negativity is the only thing the big companies fear. Thus, your own weapon against being spiritually and financially degraded by the corporation is to immediately, vehemently and most loudly voice your complains about their stupid ideas and solutions. As it turns out, you may win some.

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In many ways, LibreOffice is the Linux of office suits. What do I mean by this? Well, some releases are good, some bad, there are often seemingly random regressions in between, and it never quite fully manages to become the ultimate replacement for Microsoft Office. On top of that, LibreOffice is dogmatic, and it sticks stubbornly to an ideology that, in the long run, actually causes more harm than good. My opinion, of course.

That said, I've been using it forever, I like it, it's my primary office suite, and I've written many a book using it. The problems almost always revolve around document format support, and the fact publishers and companies out there insist on Microsoft standards. This forces me to always make the very last revision to any one of my manuscripts in Word, even if the entirety of work is done in LibreOffice until that point. But I digress. I would like to review the new LibreOffice version, 24.2. A year-month naming convention, perhaps it spells an additional, fresh, much-needed change to the suite? Begin, we do.

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It's like Mediciens Sans Frontiers, only different. Let's start with some basic claims. The Plasma desktop environment is great. It's also very fast and responsive, and seem to be getting better and better all the time. You're not likely to suffer from its performance much, and yet it can be made even sprightlier. Ahoy.

In parallel, until very recently ( Plasma 6 to be more accurate), Plasma's default screenshot tool Spectacle would take screenshots with borders and shadows enabled, and no GUI option to turn these off. This would result in images with a roughly 200-300px frame, composed of a lightly shaded alpha layer. Annoying if you want clean pictures of specific application windows. Well, today, I want to show you how to kill two dinosaurs with one meteor. A tweak that will give you both performance improvements and borderless, shadowless screenshots.

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A couple of years ago, I stopped doing Linux reviews. I realized my efforts were pointless. Most distros do not want to succeed. They don't want to be big. They don't want to be in the spotlight. They prefer to be the underdog, so they can always duck into the shadows when the maturity pixies come a-callin'. Sounds harsh, but it's the cruel, sad reality. The simple fact is, today, the vast majority of distributions isn't any better than what we had 10 years back, and in many cases, they are actually worse, for a variety of reasons.

Today, I will break my own rule. I am going to write a review - sort of - of Kubuntu 24.04. I'm not doing this with a happy face. In fact, I'm seething with anger. If you've read my article on how I made an old laptop youthful again with the replacement of a mechanical disk with a solid state one, then you already know the gist of it. Yes, it should have been a happy article, but it turned into an old-school command-line and GRUB troubleshooting of totally pointless, useless, dejecting stuff. Why? Because Linux. Follow me.

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Linux security is an interesting beast. Because Linux, by and large, is not a consumer-facing product, its security solutions also aren't consumer-facing. In other words, if you use Linux for work, there are lots of security programs and tools that can help you get the desired results. However, these are made for professionals, they are not easy to configure and use, or they are easy to use but also quite expensive.

This makes the home user security somewhat tricky. If you expect simple, GUI-driven tools to scan your system and give you a clean bill of health, you're probably going to struggle finding some, or any. Here on Dedoimedo, I've reviewed a number of Linux scanner utilities in the past. Most notably, chkrootkit and rkhunter, both command-line tools and quite nerdy at that. Interpreting the results of these tools was quite difficult, and you're more likely to have to deal with false positives than real infections. This brings me to Lynis, a security auditing, testing and hardening tool. Not for home users, then. But could they, perhaps, still somehow benefit from it without going overboard?

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In recent years, the amount of stupidity going into Windows has risen exponentially. If you're not in the mood to be treated as a chimp, you need to invest time removing pointless features and options from the operating system. This can be done in two ways: (mostly) manually, as I've shown you in my Windows 11 taming guide, or using third-party apps that can do some of the hard work for you. Both approaches have their advantages. The manual work is slower, more frustrating, but you have better control and understanding of what you're doing. But speed is also good, especially if it comes with accurate results.

After I posted my abovementioned usability tutorial, the floodgates of email came wide open. Dozens of people contacted me, telling me of this or that tweaking program or utility, all designed to make Windows less pointless. Well, today, I'd like to talk about one of the recommendations. Or rather, two. A set of programs by O&O, which can turn off most of the annoyances in Windows rather quickly. But there's also the question of efficiency and safety. So let's see how this experiment went.

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Back in 2014, that would be 10 years ago, I bought myself a bargain. A beefy laptop that did not cost an arm and a leg, just a leg, and it delivered in turn an i7 processor, 16 GB RAM, an Nvidia card (GTX 860M, equivalent to GTX 580 back then), plus a 4K display. The only downside? It had a mechanical disk, a 5,400rpm 1TB HDD, albeit with an 8GB hybrid, cache-like SSD add-on. The machine performs diligently over the years, and eventually, I made it into a Linux-only system. The only downside? Ultra-long boot times.

What I find a bit sad is that it would seem most mainstream distro developers nowadays simply assume their users run the same gear as they do, namely powerful rigs with ultra-fast storage. They seem to forget the mechanical hard disks. This is a bit of an irony, because Linux is supposed to be the savior of old hardware, due to its frugal requirements. Well, not so when the boot times are 2-3 minutes. So I thought, let's "revive" this machine. I splurged 70 dollars and got me a 500GB Samsung EVO 870 SATA SSD. Can this make the Y50-70 sprightly again? Let's check.

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This could be a good name for a new Clancy's blockbuster. Or something. Now listen. A friend of mine contacted me (yes I do have friends), and told me how his Windows laptop shows a Hidden network in the list of Wireless networks that he can use. He had no idea whence it comes. I said, interesting, would you like me to help. And so I began a lil' sleuthing operation. The plot thickens.

I brought my own hardware to test, as I assume other people's devices aren't necessarily configured correctly, and so, I don't want to use bad data to make wrong assumptions - I want to use good data to make wrong assumptions. I fired up my Linux laptop, and I couldn't see any hidden networks using some basic tools in a terminal. I then booted a Windows laptop, and lo and behold, the hidden access point was there. I started moving around his house, and the signal strength wouldn't drop. I assumed this may be a Windows bug. Or is it?

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Over the past five years or so, I've written about half a dozen articles on how to manage desktop and application scaling in Linux on high-density displays. It all started with my Slimbook Pro2 laptop and its 14-inch display, capable of showing a lovely 1920x1080px grid, too small to properly view at such a small screen. And so I started a tutorial on how to manage scaling in the Plasma desktop, specific tweaks for various applications, and then some.

Since, I've written other guides on this topic, covering snaps, WINE applications, Steam, DOSBox, and whatnot. Because the information is scattered over multiple tutorials, and search engines ain't what they used to be, i.e., not quite as useful and accurate, I thought of making one big compilation that should help you find all of the relevant tweaks and commands, for all your Linux needs, in one place. Let's go.

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Let's talk about my Slimbook Executive, shall we. 'Tis a productivity laptop I purchased about a year back, as a replacement for my older Pro2 machine, also from the same vendor. The former system had been in pretty heavy use for about five years, and I foresee a long future ahead, now that I've replaced its battery. Over the years, I wrote no less than fourteen periodic, long-term usage reports detailing everyday use, problems, niggles, and the good side of using Linux as your primary system for real-life needs.

In the past year, I continued the long-term usage tradition of reports with the Executive. There have been three reports thus far, and they show a pretty consistent trend. This is a solid laptop. It's stable, robust and fun. The ergonomics are excellent, from the case via its delightful, color-rich screen to its sturdy, well-spaced keyboard. Kubuntu 22.04, chosen as the operating system, also behaves, delivering pretty good results. Well, it's time for another lil' review. Let's see what's happened since.

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The Internet is a battlefield. On one side, you have ordinary people who just want to browse the net and consume stuff without any great fanfare. On the other, you have advertisement agencies and companies who would, if they could, force everyone to watch pointless ads 24/7. You would assume most people don't care, but as it turns out, in the past few years, more and more people are actively blocking ads. For many good reasons. They are largely pointless (low quality, low value, low intelligence), they waste bandwidth and power, they can be a vector for malware, active and passive. The need to block them is great. And there are some awesome adblockers out there.

This wouldn't a topic that needs any great re-discussion except ... Google decided to change the extensions model for Chrome, something called Manifest V3. This thing comes with a variety of technical changes, for a variety of reasons. TL;DR: Whether you accept what Google claims to be valid or not, Manifest V3 could limit the effectiveness of classic adblockers, by a huge margin. Coincidence? Doesn't matter. The question is, are there any V3-compliant adblockers that could still offer the same adblocking functionality as before? Well, the creator of the fantastic UBlock Origin (UBO) extension has produced a new tool - UBO Lite, designed to help people stop stupidity, come the full force of Manifest V3 sometime soon.

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Here's a scenario. You go to a fair at the outskirts of your town. There, among the many rides, you find this machine. It works like this: you insert a token, you ask it a question. The machine vomits out a slip of paper, and on it, there's an answer. A piece of wisdom. Welcome to 2024 and the so-called AI chatbot thingies.

Today, there's an enormous amount of hype around AI. Not only is this annoying, it's also aggravating. Nothing insults intelligence quite as much and quickly as the passive-aggressive combo of corporate buzzwordology, greed and incorrect use of technology. First, AI ain't AI, it's just machine learning. Second, the fact it speaks like a human doesn't make it even remotely human. Alas, the distinction is lost on the masses. Indeed, if you think about it, the great danger in this AI hype is that its only viable purpose is to make stupid stupider.

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This may sound like a trivial task. You have an SD card, or perhaps a hard disk. It has a partition, and this partition is formatted with the exFAT filesystem. Quite a common scenario where you need large files but cannot use NTFS. Shouldn't be a problem, because modern Windows releases support exFAT natively, plus this is actually one of Microsoft's own formats. However.

I noticed that neither Windows 10 not Windows 11 automatically presented the connected exFAT storage devices in File Explorer. Whatever the official documentation said, I couldn't "see" the cards and the disks. And so, we have this little guide, which will show you what you need to do to be able to use your exFATs. Notice there are many wordy puns brewing in the offing. Let's begin.

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In 1989, a phenomenal game came out. It was an F-16 simulator, and it was called F-16 Combat Pilot. This game had it all. Realistic cockpit and flight regime, check. Blackouts and redouts, check. No external view for added realism, check. ILS, check. Campaign mode where you could control a squadron of planes, check. Reconnaissance missions (with an ATARS pod), check. Weather, difficult landings, check. Serial connection two-player Gladiator mode, check. All of this, and more, came in a humble package of just 680 KB.

Combat Pilot also had a clever anti-copy mechanism. You had to open the manual to a specific page, paragraph, and word, and input those to be able to fly. I happened to own the original European market CGA version, and one thing that irked me was that the box depicted the game in EGA. 16 colors rather than just 4. Later on, I got myself the EGA version, too, but the manual did not work. This was the North American version, what, and the manual was different. And so I waited and waited, until just recently, I finally figured it out. With a mild delay of just 35 years, I bright you the review of one of the finest combat aircraft simulators ever made.

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Every time I think Windows 11 cannot surprise me with nonsense anymore, buzzer, bzzzzzzz, wrong. There's always something new. But hey, anger and fresh material for articles, winning. As it happens, a few weeks ago, I powered on my IdeaPad 3 laptop for some dual-boot testing, Plasma 6 and all. Once I was done with that, I thought I should boot into Windows 11, and do some basic maintenance, updates and such.

Like the opening sentence of the War of the Worlds musical, no one would have believed ... that I would find myself behind the keyboard for a good few hours, fuming, tweaking, trying to get the operating system in order, yet again. The exercise from six months ago, repeated, with interest. Let's talk.

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In the past decade, most software user interfaces have undergone a significant degradation in accessibility, usability, and ergonomics. Why? Touch. Middle management saw the usage growth in the mobile space, and they figured, hey, if we replicate the smartphone interfaces onto the desktop, we will get MOAR success. End results, more mouse clicks, more confusing menus, loss of productivity, and then some.

One of the things that irks me is the Firefox scrollbar functionality. It's not consistent on every platform or operating system. Somewhere, you get reasonable default behavior. Elsewhere, you don't. This little tutorial will show you how to improve your Firefox ergonomics, namely always have scrollbars shown, and make them thicker and easier to use with the mouse pointer. Let's start.

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I hate buzzwords. With a passion. Buzzwords are a hallmark of incompetence, superficiality, lack of personality, and then some. They are what distinguishes a skilled technologist from a fluffer. They are also a great way to identify people, with minimal mental effort. You come to your workplace and some fake-smile human drone starts spewing words d'jour, quoting this or that article they read and got inspired by on the business social media the day before. You instantly know, all right, let's avoid this person. If, then, algorithm!

Which brings me to algorithms. Recently, there has been a great deal of Internet chatter over the AI revolution, disruption and similar nonsense. A bunch of companies have developed sophisticated tools, you can interact with these tools using "natural" language, and all of a sudden, it's Artificial Intelligence (AI) everywhere, everything. Just like the fads of touch and smart this that a decade back. Boring. Worst of all, there's this whole talk about how AI will disrupt the modern workplace. Specifically, how AI can or should replace human workers. Sure, except those ought to be clueless middle-level managers, and not ordinary grunts. Let's elaborate.

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Assetto Corsa is the finest driving simulator out there, me thinks. It's a phenomenal game, and despite its age, it delivers spectacular results. Accuracy, precision, fidelity, you name it. You really and truly feel like you're driving a real car in real life. And I can attest to this, as I've burnt rubber on a variety of race tracks, including Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium, wut wut. How Assetto portrays the feeling is uncanny.

At some point though, you will hit the wall. Your lap times stop improving. Then, you begin to wonder. Have you lost it? Or perhaps, is there a way to make your driving somehow better? The simple answer is, yes there is. And it's built into the game. Let's proceed.

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I've been an Amazon customer for more than 20 years. I've been publishing books with Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) for more than a decade. I've also used Audible. Apart from having spent a significant amount of money with Amazon, I was always rather impressed with their customer service. It used to be amaz-ing [sic]. Typically, you could send a single email about your issue, and you'd get a detailed, clear reply, and things would always get resolved right away. During my Amazon Fire TV setup a few years back, I had some problems with connectivity. Support phone call, an hour spent with a customer representative, and the dude was, for the lack of a better word, a true professional. Patient, funny, knowledgeable. But all that's in the past.

In the past two or three years, more or less since the pandemic, I noticed a sharp decline in the quality of the Amazon customer services. First, they removed email for most of types of queries. It's chat or phone. The chat always starts with some pseudo-AI bot that's annoying and useless. Then you get routed to human agents who are way less helpful then they used to be. But today's topic revolves around my attempt to set up a business account, and how Amazon cost me 300 Euros in garbage second-hand used routers that were supposed to be brand new devices.

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Like any self-respecting memeista, I often share incredibly stupid profoundly intelligent snippets of Internet wisdom with my (real) friends. These come in the form of images (often GIF) and videos (the memes, not the friends), and we distribute them among ourselves using a variety of digital methods, including WhatsApp. For pretty much ever, I've never really had any issue delighting my friends. But then.

A few days ago, I tried to send a short video to one of my buddies. WhatsApp protested saying: Can't send this video. Choose a different video and try again. Golly. At first, I thought this could be some sort of "AI" nonsense, and it somehow decided my meme was too legit to quit. But then I realized the problem is much much simpler. Let me illuminate you. After me.

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Awesome One: Humor, paired to philosophy. Sounds like either an extremely boring combo or a spectacularly entertaining formula, with a twist of intellect for good measure. Luckily, Existential Comics is the latter. Think modern-day scenarios, life's absurdity at its best, ancient world wisdom, guns, Socrates, puns, and history.

Awesome Two: Do you like speed? Check. Cars? Check. Simulators? Check. How about PC gaming simulators focused on cars? Check. Well, good fortune be smilin' at ya, because OverTake aims to cater to all yer needs. If you're into computer games that promise loud engine noises, tire squeal, gear changes, curvy tracks, and above all, the finesse and precision of driving, then you ought to check OverTake. Vroom vroom vroom stu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tuuuu. Ah yes.

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It's been a couple of months since the big Android 14, One UI 6.0 upgrade on my Samsung A54 smartphone. As you probably know, I got this device as a replacement for a failing low-mid-range Nokia X10 that started losing its battery charge too rapidly. I selected this Samsung mostly because of its five-year patch policy and decent price for its hardware spec. Since, I've been using it quite some, with moderate degrees of satisfaction.

Those degrees are explained in more detail in my long-term reports for this phone. The last piece revolves around the big version bumped, linked above. The others cover various facets of everyday use, mostly my frustration with taming this device to my liking. I had spent too much time trying to sort out the privacy aspect, and yet, to this day, the phone keeps annoying me. All right, let's do the fourth review.

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Red Alert is best Red Alert. Or is it? Some twenty summers ago, I used to play Red Alert a lot, and when Yuri's Revenge was released, I found the franchise even more fun and exciting than before. Entrenched infantry, Kirov airships, improved graphics, the whole deal was magical. In 2008, I got myself the Command & Conquer The First Decade DVD Collection, played some more. Then, a few years went by ...

Some time back, I got some serious Command & Conquer cravings, and decided to try the games in a more modern settings, including Linux. Indeed, I showed you how to play Red Alert as well as Red Alert 2 in Linux. Then, once Red Alert Remastered got released and had me seriously hooked on building tanks and Tesla coils, I decided to try the Linux experiment once more. Indeed, using Steam Proton, the results were phenomenal. Just a month ago, the second installment in this fine franchise got released on Valve's gaming platform. I bought it immediately and decided to try the game in Linux, straight away. Let me share the details of that experiment.

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Functionality, first and foremost. My motto. A tool that doesn't do what it's supposed to do is a broken tool. A useless tool. Unfortunately, in the software world, in the past decade or so, there's been a trend of offering half-broken tools as a way of life. Create a replacement for something "old", but the replacement is only half as good. Then, it will be "fixed" (iterated) over some weird "agile" "continuous development" process over the next few years. For example, in Windows, Settings is still not as good as Control Panel. Don't want, don't care.

In Linux, Wayland is supposed to replace X11. It's been fifteen years since Wayland came to be, and I've tested it dozens of times in the past decade, to see whether it can do what it ought to do - offer functional parity let alone superior functionality to the "old" tool. So far, every time, the answer has been a big no. But recently, I had a chance to test Wayland quite some as part of my Plasma 6 series, and I want to share my findings here. Let's see whether this "new" display protocol can finally usurp the old stuff. Commence.

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Roughly ten years ago, I contemplated buying myself an Abarth. The only reason I decided not to was because I felt the seat was too short for me. While I'm not the tallest person in the world, I have fairly long legs, and Abarth's nicely sculpted buckets only reached to my mid-thighs, making longer drives a bit of a strain. In the end, I went for an Opel Corsa OPC, which had the finest Recaros out there - few cars I've driven since match the pure joy of that driving position. Indeed.

But the Abarth-ness of that experience stayed with me. Over the years, I have been able to partially recreate it through copious amounts of simulated driving in Assetto Corsa, but at the end of the day, 'tis still only a game, no matter how accurate and precise. Well, a few weeks ago, a good friend of mine - a frequent Assetto Corsa driving buddy - had a chance to gallivant in a '595, for a whole week. And thus, ladies and gentlemen, for the second time ever, Dedoimedo gives you a guest post. Think of me as a ghostwriter in this story, a jealous ghostwriter who had to listen and transcribe stories of fun that would be the driving of this be sporty machine. Let's begin.

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Today, I want to revisit an older topic, already covered here on Dedoimedo. Namely, how to install and configure SketchUp Make 2017 in Linux using WINE. If you're a fan of 3D drawing and such, SketchUp is a great way to create models before you export them to another program for rendering. However, it's also not a native Linux application, hence my guide on this topic.

We need to improve on that article, though. Ever so slightly. Simplify it, make it even more robust. Now, remember, the old tutorial still works. It's perfectly fine. Here, I just want to give you a mildly tweaked edition of it, so you can be 100% sure you get the best experience and compatibility with the program. Let's go.

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The title of your se ... my new book. That's it! In the next couple of months or so, I intend to publish my latest tech-focused project: How to Make Your Career Suck Less. It will be the culmination and the compression of my experience of some twenty summers working in the tech industry, with all its passive-aggressive absurdities and nonsense. It's time to put aggressive in passive-aggressive.

On a slightly more serious note, How to Make Your Career Suck Less is going to be a guide on how to improve your work satisfaction, on a personal level, and on a professional level. I'd like to give you some honest advice, based on my own tech PTSD, on what to do, and even more importantly, what not to do. The book will cover topics like how to handle micro-managers, how to create your first open-source project, your first conference, your first big project, how to write a practical and useful CV, and then some. As always, you'll get the usual dose of tongue-in-cheek curmudgeony Dedoimedo philosophy, the stuff you've learned to (hopefully) love and appreciate over the years. If you'd like to be an early reviewer, ping me.

Coming soon, stay tuned ...

DOSBox is one of my favorite programs out there. I still remember the colossal thrill I felt when I used it to emulate the Serial connection between two LAN computers and play an ancient F-16 simulator, something I had waited for, almost twenty long years until that moment. Ever since, DOSBox is a loyal, trusted friend in my arsenal.

I still play DOS-based games now and then. But the computers of now ain't the computers of yore. With mighty resolutions, the tiny 320x200px DOS equity can be problematic if shown in true 1:1 scale on modern displays. Today, I'd like to show you a handful of tricks on how you can enlarge DOS games but also play them with a reasonable level of clarity on a typical HD/UHD screen. Follow me.

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My exploration of Plasma 6 be continuing. I've already conducted two tests, the first using only a virtual machine as the distro wouldn't install on physical hardware, and the second on said physical hardware after the distro developers and maintainers fixed some things. The system in question is my 2020 IdeaPad 3, with an AMD processor and integrated graphics.

Now, I want to see what happens when I try KDE neon + Plasma 6 on my 2014 IdeaPad Y70-50, a laptop with some fairly beefy characteristics, even for today's standards - an i7 processor, 16GB RAM, a discrete Nvidia card. This is extra important because Plasma 6 uses Wayland by default, and so, it will be quite interesting to see how well the new desktop cooperates with the graphics card and its proprietary drivers. Let's.

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I have to apologize in advance. I really shouldn't be writing this article. Paradoxically, by creating it, I am giving people the ability to use Windows 11, as this guide will remove a lot of the pain points and pointless features of this operating system. Thus, instead of avoiding it, people may actually choose to use it. Since I honestly believe you shouldn't be using Windows 11, I will achieve the opposite of what I feel.

However, I am also aware that many people are forced to use Windows, for many pragmatic reasons. Not everyone has the knowledge to use other things (like Linux), they may require it for specific games or programs, they may need it for work, and so forth. I have started my migration away from Windows. It's going really well. But it's still a massively complicated endeavor, and it takes a lot of time. For most people, it's easier to just tweak an unruly operating system some, and get on with their lives. Thus, I thought, if users are going to try to undo Windows 11's pointlessness anyway, they as might as well have a top-notch tutorial to do that. And this is why we're here. Proceed.

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