Month: June 2021

Windows 11 was officially announced on June 24, 2021. This may also be the day where we have witness the beginning of the end of custom PCs. Hidden in amongst the fanfare and the shiny new features are two seemingly minor footnotes that will have a major impact for anyone not buying a prebuilt, from the factory PC. These two statements are scary for those of us working, writing and playing games on homebuilt computers. They may have a huge impact on how computers will operate in the future. But how did we get here? We can blame the rise of mobile for most of this. If you were an executive at Microsoft, having watch your mobile and tablet efforts fail year after year then seeing two upstarts, one a fruity computer company who made decent hardware but didn’t focus on the operating system too much and the other an…

I can’t stand cats. This is because I am allergic and the second reason is that cats are a-holes. Yes, I will freely admit that I am a dog person. Having a pet that will love you unconditionally and will get just as excited upon your return no matter if you are out of the room for 5 minutes or 5 days. Cats, on the other hand, are pretty much 1/2 second away from clawing your face off at any given moment. It is a good thing that cats are lazy. Their sun-sleep-recharge cycles mean that they have less time for creating claw-shredding mayhem as they appear to sleep 20+ hours per day. However, cats can provide one huge benefit to developers: That is right. This person’s cat found a UI-breaking bug simply by sitting down on the keyboard. So is this telling us that in order to be a…

The command line is awesome. Seriously – if you have only ever used a mouse to navigate a computer then you are missing out. Way back in middle school I had a teacher for an anthropology class. One of the lessons from that class that has stuck with me all these years is how amazing and useful the human thumb is. To illustrate this concept, one day he would have all of the students tape or wrap their thumbs so that they couldn’t use them and then try to complete the school day like that. Let me tell you – it wasn’t easy. That is a little bit like using a computer with only a mouse. Sure – it is useful and handy and all, but you aren’t using all of the tools at your disposal. So let’s un-tape that thumb and set up something amazing on Windows – bash.…