Posts by David 132

Re: Rollout stopped because...

...and CoPilot integration, so that every time the battery level changes, you get a different hallucinated definition of the word "battery".

Just curious but what do you mean by "plug'n'play version"? Presumably a RaspPi in a case, pre-loaded with Pi-Hole, but any particular vendor/type?

I built my own by putting Pi-Hole x86 on my NAS/Jellyfin box, but I'm always open to new suggestions - especially for my less tech-savvy relatives, for whom "plug it in, turn it on" is about as complex as they can handle.

Re: Microsoft Edge entered the chat.

> You don't think that the massive advertising campaign might have had something to do with it?

That, and the propensity a while ago of just about every software download, no matter how unrelated, to bundle a Chrome installation with it, or at least offer to install it in a would-you-like-to-not-decline-to-not-install-this-browser-now-or-later type dark pattern fashion of varying subtlety? For those that have forgotten, Chrome was, for a while, the Bonzi Buddy or Bing Toolbar of PUPs.

Firefox here, and happily so.

Re: Confirms my decision...

Just curious, do you use it with a network adapter or do you find that USB-Parallel adapters work adequately well?

I've told this anecdote around here in the past, but... in a previous life, my employer had standardised on IBM Thinkpads (yes, IBM, that tells you how long ago it was). Solid, reliable, could be used to stop a parabellum round at point blank range...

One year, the IT department decided to hand out HP Elitebooks, as a pilot, and I was "selected" to receive one.

All seemed to be OK, until I was at a company training conference in Vegas-or-wherever; seated in the front row of the lecture room, I was typing notes as the instructor spoke. Suddenly and without warning the Scroll Lock key (why? it's not even as if I was using it!) popped off the laptop's keyboard, flew through the air, and landed in front of the instructor. Who without breaking his flow picked it up and handed it back to me.

I swapped back to a Thinkpad on my return to the office.

Re: Advertising?

Wow. That's an odd restriction; understandable I suppose in that they don't want employees (inadvertently) installing some cryptomining "extension", but I would have thought that the reduced bandwidth consumption and increased safety of having a reputable ad-blocker would appeal to even the most curmudgeonly of BOFHs.

Can you run Pi-Hole locally and point your DNS to localhost?

Or lobby your IT dept to at least whitelist something like UBlock Origin?

I work for a large international tech company (no, not that one) and we're positively encouraged to use Firefox, with whatever extensions we want.

On that topic, I wrote myself a little Windows applet that registers as a handler for URLs, and gives me a pop-up dialog with the choice to open clicked links with either Edge (Sharepoint, some particularly crusty intranet stuff) or Firefox (everything else). Based on the domain it'll auto-select one browser or the other, e.g. links to (say) whoevermyemployeris.com can be configured to auto-open with Edge.

If anyone here would find such a tool handy, and promises not to laugh at my spaghetti C# code, I'm happy to share it.

Re: Windows with pushing pay as you play games etc.

Gah, yes, few things raise my blood pressure as much as the depressingly- and inappropriately-cheerful "$crapware_X Just Got Installed! Check It Out!" popup appearing in Windows. That's a setting that gets nuked from orbit very first thing after I acquire a new Windows PC, no matter how misleadingly-named it is in Settings. "Occasionally show Suggestions" sounds so helpful, doesn't it?

Re: Who are the dopes?

Pretty sure the First Rule of massgrave is "Don't Talk About Massgrave".