the most ridiculous usb charging cable that exists (and you'll want one)
Before I saw this cable, I thought of every type of USB connector type I've ever used. There's "the big rectangle" A type that everybody knows, the one most people call a "printer cable" B type because of it's notchy squared shape, mini USB (all my older Garmins use this), micro USB (smaller and flatter than mini USB), and C (which largely replaced micro USB).
Well, there's a cable that does more, and it's specifically for charging:
...the 10-in-1 universal charging cable.
Surprisingly, this thing is really cheap to buy.
If you have any one of those funky connectors on an electronics thing you own but your charge cable/block/brick is busted or lost, that's what this cable is for.
And by "electronics thing" I mean old smartphones, weird Bluetooth earphones, speakers, adapters, and so on. For whatever it is, chances are this cable has that connector you need to send power to the electronics thing you have.
The only thing I see missing is USB B type, but that's fine because I've never seen anything that uses B for power. Data, yes, but not power. I remember electronics things of the past that used some of the connectors seen. I also remember how frustrating it was when you lost the cord/charger for the whatever-it-was (most likely from accidentally throwing it out).
The connectors on a 10-in-1 are C, mini, micro, M300, DC2.0, DC3.5, DC4.0, 4s and a few others. It's probably true you don't know what connector type you need, and that's okay. It's more likely just from a visual you'll look at it and say, "Yeah, that connector is the one I've been trying to find."
Yes, this thing just looks stupid. But I don't think there's any possible way to make a 10-in-1 appear any better. Stupid as it may look, it serves a purpose. And that purpose is to get power to an electronics thing so you don't have to spend a boatload of money otherwise on a super-specific charger just to turn the stupid thing on.
Sometimes ugly cables are necessary to get the job done, and this is one of them.
a rare problem that resulted in a dead usb flash drive
I had a "rugged" flash drive, but mine is dead to the world.
I've only seen a flash drive have real-deal hardware failure once before what I'm about to describe. Years ago I had a 512MB (yes, megabyte) SanDisk cruzer, and beat the crap out of that thing. One day, it started rejecting any attempt to write data to it. That's a telltale sign that flash drive has reached the end of its useful life, so yep, stick a fork in it, it's done. Chucked it.
The way this rugged drive failed however... this was not only way different in the way it failed, but rare.
"Tough" flash drives mostly either have hard rubber cases (mainly for waterproofing and shock protection) with caps, or metal cases that can really take a beating. Mine had the hard rubber case thing.
What happened is that I plugged this flash drive to a computer, it detected once, seemed to work, then didn't, and that was it. Dead drive.
I should note this flash drive wasn't new. More on that in a moment.
I figured okay, the file system probably got screwed up, no big deal, just delete and recreate the file system. Pop the drive into my Linux computer, nothing. Doesn't even show up in gparted. Pop the drive into my Win11 computer, go to Disk Management. Still nothing.
When the drive was plugged into Win11, the "connected" sound happened, but all the Safe Disconnect showed was "Flash DISK" and nothing else. No media, no drive. It existed yet didn't exist at the same time.
I do some research, and something I can run in Linux is this to see what's going on:
watch "dmesg | tail -20"
I run that, watch the screen, plug in the drive, and see there's that "Flash DISK" again with a nondescript "USB" listed as manufacturer. That's not normal.
After more research, what I found out is that the flash drive's controller cannot talk to the NAND chip anymore.
Now if I wanted to, I could use other software to determine who made the controller, download what's known as a mass production tool (a.k.a. mptool) software that specifically supports the controller I have, and maybe save the drive.
No, I'm not doing that. Even if I saved the drive, there's no guarantee it would ever work the same as it did before since I strongly suspect the memory on it is toast. This thing is getting chucked in the trash.
What caused this kind of flash drive hardware failure?
Not Rufus, although that software did put the final nail in the coffin, so to speak. But again, not specifically Rufus's fault.
If you don't know what Rufus is, it's very handy free software used for writing bootable ISOs to flash drives. For the recent computer I just installed Win11 on, a USB stick had a bootable ISO written to using Rufus (a different one since the rugged flash drive failed).
For that rugged drive I used, it had been written to as a bootable USB several times before - but not exclusively by Rufus. In fact, the last time it was written to was using the Windows Media Creation Tool for Windows 10.
I had Rufus running, plugged in that rugged drive, tried an ISO write, and within seconds, nope, not happening. Drive is dead.
Again, this wasn't Rufus's fault. Rufus just happened to be the thing I was using at the time that ended that flash drive's life. It could have easily happened with any other ISO media creation tool.
My best guess as to what happened?
Two things. ISO writes and heat.
If I were writing things like documents or images, no problem, since those are little file writes. But when writing multi-gigabyte ISOs? Different story. That heats the flash drive right up, stays that way for a while until the writing is done and many files are written both large and small.
Neither fsck nor CHKDSK would have helped me here, because even if the flash drive was deemed "good" by either utility, the failure still would have occurred. I'm certain of that.
What usually happens with a flash drive is that when it starts to near the end of its useful life, file writes start failing (like the 512MB I mentioned above), then fail some more, then finally the drive isn't even recognized. The rugged flash drive was different. There was no warning at all and it just straight up stopped working completely.
What I've learned
Flash drives should not be trusted with anything to be saved for the long term. Thankfully, the one I had that died didn't have anything important on it. As crazy as this sounds, for long term storage, it's better to use DVDs.
windows 11, now slightly less terrible than it used to be
I said recently that Windows 10 will be dead in October. Although my primary computer runs Linux, I do keep a separate Windows laptop for "runs only on Windows" specific stuff. It runs Windows 10. Or rather, it used to. Now it runs Windows 11. It's a bone stock install with the latest version. Thankfully, Win11 doesn't suck as much as it did a year ago.
When I say the installation is bone stock, I'm not kidding. What I always do with Windows is run a few third party programs to disable all the crap I don't want. Not this time. Instead, I just ran Win11 as intended...
...almost.
The only thing I did differently is install the OS without a Microsoft account (meaning local account only). Since that was doable, that's what I went with. Aside from that, everything else is the standard Win11 installation.
I'm running Win11 on a laptop over a decade old with a Core i5, 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. I thought briefly that maybe I should buy a 512GB SSD since those are cheap now, but nah, I had the 256GB as a spare and just used that. For what I use the laptop for, that works. I could upgrade the RAM to 16GB, but Win11 runs fine with 8GB.
I hate that the right-click context menu has been changed. There's a registry mod that brings back the old menu, but I haven't done it yet.
I cannot find how to make the non-movable taskbar smaller. That's annoying.
There does not appear to be any show-all option for taskbar icons, as in for the smaller ones on the right. Any time anything new is installed that has one of those icons, I have to manually enable that so I always see it. It also annoyed me that the "Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media" icon was hidden by default in a submenu. Stupid.
When changing certain settings for certain things, I found a mishmash of earlier crap and some positively ancient crap all over the place - in stock Win11. It's a mess. The Device Manager looks straight out of Windows 2000, as does sound event control. Control Panel is still there that looks straight out of Windows 7, while at the same time Settings exists, which is a Win11 thing.
File Explorer is better. I like that. Many improvements there.
Command Prompt and Terminal are much better because of tabs and a nicer font.
Notepad is better as well, but still nowhere near as good as Notepad++ (arguably one of the best text editors ever to exist).
Boot-up time is quicker than Win10, but shutdown time is about the same as 10.
Win11 has TAR support with ZST compression. That's a very nerdy thing, but I like it because ZST archives are nice to work with. When I type tar --zstd -cvf archive.tar.zst folder-to-archive, it works the same as in Linux. Good. Opening a ZST can be done using stock Win11 File Explorer as well. Also good.
Terminal in Win11 does allow me to do things somewhat "the Linux way", which I appreciate.
I like that I can run the older style programs in Win11 that I prefer, such as IrfanView (image viewer/editor), LibreOffice, 7-Zip, Notepad++, and so on.
Add/Remove for uninstalling crap seems to work okay, although I had to uninstall Microsoft Teams twice just to get it out of there. Win11 was really insistent on keeping Teams for some reason.
Most importantly is the fact I was able to get along with Win11. When I tried it before, I hated it. But now it's slightly less terrible. I was able to get the OS installed, get everything working, Windows-Updated the bejeezus out of it, and I can run my Windows-specific stuff on it that I need to.
I believe there are 3 big reasons why it went better this time. Some time has passed and many bugs with the OS have been fixed, I used a local account instead of a Microsoft account on installation, and I installed it clean.
The clean install is a big deal, because I'm absolutely certain that had I installed this over an old Win10 installation, that would have not gone well. Better to just use a blank SSD and install it clean, which is exactly what I did. It worked.
windows 10 will be officially dead by october 2025
Did you know Windows 10 was originally released July 29, 2015? At the time I write this, that was nine-and-a-half years ago. And if you didn't know, Microsoft's official end-of-support date for Win10 is October 14, 2025.
This does make me wonder if there will be a repeat of what happened to WinXP users when Win7 was released.
I remember back in 2009 when Win7 was new. I was all-in with it, but a ton of XP users had absolutely no intention of switching, with the thought of, "I'll run XP forever! Ha!" Well, we all know how that fared out, because nothing is forever.
The vast majority of those XP holdouts ended up with computers that got old, broke, data was lost, and they were forced into the uncomfortable position of buying new computers.
It didn't have to be that way.
It is amazing to me how the holdouts who use old operating systems do not prep for the future at all. Even something as simple as buying a 512GB USB stick (which is cheap now) to back up important data is something they absolutely will not do.
What's available now that wasn't back in '09 are cheap mini PCs. These things by design barely take up any space. You buy the thing, learn the OS, get used to it, and can switch over at a reasonable pace instead of being forced into it.
Did I do that? No. I did the "hard mode" thing, switched to Linux in '23 and continue to use it. But I wouldn't ask a Windows user to do that. Instead, I just say get a 512GB stick, copy over your stuff, get a mini PC, set it up to your liking, copy over your backed up data, and ta-da, done. Now you're ahead of the curve and don't have to be forced into any unnecessary computer purchases.
Will the Win10 holdouts take those reasonable steps? Smart ones will. As for the rest, they'll keep using Win10 after October, maybe get away with it for 6 months to a year, but then uh-oh, something on the computer broke. Could be hardware or software, but something will break. If it's hardware, the new replacement stuff won't support 10. If it's software, the new version won't support 10. You're screwed both ways.
"But everything works on 10 now!" Yeah, currently. But six months to a year after official support ends? Yeah, good luck with that. You'll need it.
Better to just back up your stuff and ready a cheap computer box now rather than when it's too late.
my boomer car of choice, late '80s personal luxury car
I don't own a car like this, but I'd like to because it speaks to my middle aged sensibilities now.
What is a personal luxury car? A two-door luxury sport coupe that has some size to it. There's the traditional four-door luxury sedan, but the luxury sport coupe is the smaller version of that and usually has more power to it.
Does any carmaker sell a new personal luxury car? BMW and Audi still do, but they obviously don't have the feel of how personal luxury cars used to be. A true personal luxury car is supposed to be more comfort (as in more luxury) than sport, and that's not what the German carmakers are building.
In the late '80s, the best personal luxury cars were from General Motors and Ford. GM had the Chevrolet Monte Carlo, Buick Riviera, Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme and Cadillac Eldorado, and Ford had the Thunderbird and Lincoln Mark VII.
Cars like this can go fast-ish, but that's not the point of them. This is a type of car that cruises really easy anywhere it goes. It's especially good for long highway drives.
Some question why the personal luxury car even existed. I don't. I totally get it. It's a car that's luxury and comfort first, sport second, a big trunk for some utility, and wrapped in a package that's not some big ungainly sedan. This is a car for just you and not for sharing (hence personal). It can carry two adults comfortably. You and somebody you like. That's it. Yes, it technically has back seats, but those are never used for people, nor would you want anybody back there.
I do hope America builds these again, because I want one. Maybe Cadillac will be first to bring it back. If they do, I hope they also bring back the Eldorado nameplate and call it that.