Year: 2020

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Faced with the clock telling me that I should cook dinner, and a disposition that feels more like going Barny Gumble on an Espresso machine: I opted for a plot involving fried rice.

I diced and pressed some tofu, something I’ve never worked with before. Interesting to me however the recommended way to prepare it for frying or baking is essentially the same way I was taught to prep eggplant for the same cooking methods.
But aside from that most of the ingredients were chosen based on leverage.
  • About 1/3 of the tofu block.
  • Half a can of peas and carrots, so that I can use the peas for flavoring something else.
  • A chunk of  steamed broccoli and cauliflower that leaves enough leftover for another meal or two.
  • About half a thing of mushrooms that were on sale when I did the shopping earlier this week.
  • Plenty of rice, and enough leftover for a meal or two.
Pretty much other than seasonings: everything was chosen because it’s something that’ll save time on another meal.

The dogs of course are always interested in food: but they love their extra special treat even more.

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 I find it interesting how readily Misty manages to find such napping accommodations on her own.

Willow, whose aptitude for reshaping her environment in the name of comfy is only exceeded by humans, of course plots down on top.

And then there’s the debate of what comes first: my lunch or their second walk, lol.

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 Various sad and comical things.

Decided to try an old SSD in my spare enclosure. But I found while my Linux machine blows away just fine on I/O performance: my NT partition maxes out at about 30 MB/s on Crystal Disk Mark and 11 MB/s on Windows time.

In fact every fracken’ thing I plug into my USB 3.0 port maxes out at that speed.

So decided to do a little poking around. My NT install comes from Microsoft, not from Dell, so there’s a minimal of their things tacked on. Looking for updated drivers, I was kind of just glad to see W10 well represented given the age of my Latitude.

Found a BIOS update and dared to do it. Going from A00 to A20 (2018) was a lot of versions.A001 I think was dated 2012, and the oldest available. Mostly it’s fixes and security updates. But low and behold upgrading my BIOS a terrifying number of versions forward: my USB 3.0 is working right.

That is to say, Crystal Disk Mark basically jumps from ~30 MB/s to 250 MB/s, and Explorer reports much more appropriate speeds itself.

Amusing to me, one of the features I kind of missed was the option of Secure Boot. Which was added in one of the many updates. Ironically, a cyber security report from the NSA actually has better descriptions of the new UEFI settings on my system than Googling them ^_^.

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While the timing worked out well, I had to go pick up Misty’s prescription: so may as well do the shopping. I do think that the photos show the dangers of being so hungry you’re ready to drop, and finding yourself in the grocery store. Something like that, yadda, yadda.

The salad kit was probably a mistake, but speed was essential. The fried chicken will also last three or four meals if I have filler. Not to mention it’s shareable with the dogs.

Typically I’m too cheap to buy parfaits at the grocery store, and rarely have enough fresh fruit to make one. On sale for $2, I said screw it.

The cookies on the other hand were because I can only die once, probably, 🤣.

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 When I think back over the past fifteen years and the various systems I’ve used, I think a table of Bluetooth problems would look like this:

  • GNU/Linux on PC: 100% success, or no BT driver.
  • FreeBSD on PC: 100% success, or no BT driver.
  • Android on phone, tablet, television, and laptop: 90% success.
  • Windows NT on XP, 7, and 10: 25% success.
  • iOS on tablet: 100% success.
Actually, come to think of it, aside from the ruckus with Google changing BT stacks and a painful Nexus 7, I’m pretty sure the only operating systems that ever give me grief about Bluetooth are all ones baring the name NT!!!
I’d like to think it would suck less on a device with an integrated Wi-Fi/BT card. But applying USB BT to laptops and desktops has definitely been a painful experience over the past ~15 years.

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 While I tend to take an easy going attitude, I have to admit there are days when I feel like Deadpool with only twelve bullets left.

Especially that part at the end.

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 Willow: “I wanted three walks and a steak. What I got was two walks and a dog treat.”

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 Sometimes it’s hard to gauge whether he’ll hath frozen over a few more degrees, or if I should be hopeful.

Crunchyroll’s Fire TV app has been upgraded to “2.0”, making an experience more like what their iPad app has been like for quite a while now. Even more so than the redone Xbox One app from a while back, but that’s probably because Android and iOS have more in common.

Being less useful to me, I don’t use the iPad app much unless I’m working around bugs in the old Fire TV app, like how it would like to only list partial data; like showing several European dub and omitting the English sub version from the UI.

Thus far the new app doesn’t seem to have any obvious bugs, and brings the more useful data set the iPad app does. Somewhat slow, but hey, at least the fucker works. I’m usually just glad if their (often crappy) apps work without death by buggy crash happy software.

Of course my test of the app? KonoSuba!!!

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 Well, that’s kind of neat. Windows Defender can run Edge in a Hyper-V session as part of “Application Guard.”

Considering that browsing the world wide web is pretty much a living definition of remote code execution, it’s probably about time someone tried to make a standard feature of isolating the browser. If WSL2 is any indication, Hyper-V also offers great performance if your machine doesn’t suck.

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 Some days: you’ve just got to say screw it, and order a pizza.

At least stuffing one’s face with food is still a positive way to end the day. And in my case, since I rarely get pizza anymore, extra deliciousness 😁