no one follows the trees warning
You know the parable about how the foolish man built his house upon sand and the wise man built his house upon rock and it’s always about having a sturdy foundation well there is also the fact of location which is that the sand probably used to be rock except it’s been eroded to sediment because it’s a FUCKING FLOODPLAIN
flood Plain perfec t size for put town in to b\uild! inside very Soft and Comfort town safe happy put town in Floodplain. Put Town In Floodplain. no problems ever in flloodplain because good Shape and Support for town roads weak of big town citizens. Afloodplain yes a place for a town put town in floodplain can trust floodplain for giveing good place for town. friend flood
I got a laptop with Windows 11 for an IT course so I can get certified, and doing the first time device set-up for it made me want to commit unspeakable violence
Windows 11 should not exist, no one should use it for any reason, it puts ads in the file explorer and has made it so file searches are also web searches and this cannot be turned off except through registry editing. Whoever is responsible for those decisions should be killed, full stop.
Switch to linux, it's free and it's good.
u r absolutely right I have SO many complaints about Windows omg.
For anyone who'd like to follow along, I'm gonna share how to get around those things with group policies bc they're more user friendly and descriptive than registry editor imo :3 I'll also show how to get around needing a Microsoft account to get setup.
For the Device Setup
"OOBE" stands for Out Of Box Experience which is what that setup workflow is. But it also happens to be a folder with a little program in it that'll let you skip connecting to the internet; this makes it so you don't have to sign up with a Microsoft account and can just use a normal local one instead. And it already comes preinstalled! Here's how you get to it:
- Hold Shift + F10, or Shift + Fn + F10 depending on your keyboard.
- Click inside the window that pops up, type the following and press enter afterwards to run it: OOBE\BypassNRO
- I believe it should restart your computer automatically, but if not then restart your computer or type: shutdown /r /t 0 /f
Now when you're brought back to the setup workflow, the page where you connect to the internet will have a new button on it that lets you say you don't have internet. Clicking that and proceeding through the rest of the setup lets you get around the Microsoft account thing.
Group Policies
You don't have to know much about them, these are just a bunch of specific settings for what your computer can or can't do that lets you decide how it works in different ways.
I'm gonna show you how to turn off the recommendations and internet stuff basically. For now bring up search and type gpedit, pick this
It'll open up to Local Group Policy Editor and we can get started :3c
Start Recommendations
In the side menu, go to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar. Click on Settings to sort them with all the "Turn off" ones bumped to the top.
Here's what you should set:
- Turn off user tracking: enabled
- Turn off feature advertisement balloon notifications: enabled
- Remove Recommended section from Start Menu: enabled
- Remove Personalized Website Recommendations from the Recommended section in the Start Menu: enabled
- Do not search Internet: enabled
Windows Spotlight
Back in the side menu, go down to Windows Components > Cloud Content
- Turn off all Windows spotlight features: enabled
- Do not use diagnostic data for tailored experiences: enabled
Cortana
In the side menu, this one's back at the top under Computer Configuration. You're gonna want to go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Search
- Allow Cortana: disabled
- Don't search the web or display web results in Search: enabled
News and Interests
In the side menu go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > News and interests.
- Enable news and interests on the taskbar: disabled
Microsoft Account Login Nudges
When you don't use a Microsoft account they'll nudge you repeatedly to sign in so you can "get the most out of your experience" *gag*. The group policy for turning that off has a note that suggests it might not work with Windows 11 though (implicitly), so you can close the group policy editor window now and for this last one let's just open up the regular settings.
Go to System > Notifications > Additional settings, then uncheck all the boxes. And there ya go! (✿◠‿◠)ノ u are done.
Group policies are kind of a rabbit hole so while there is a lot more you could change or read into, for your own sanity's sake I would advise against it and say call it a day lol
This is all extremely good information, thank you very much for the addition!
I endorse this as an IT technician. I do this to every new Win11 device I set up.
As a bonus, run Chris Titus Tech's debloat tool on it.
It allows you to add tools, remove/disable shitty parts of windows, and easily change some settings. My default is running the preset for a desktop/laptop and applying security update settings, but there are so many options to customize. I used it on my personal laptop.
We are still being subjected to systematic bombing in all areas. These pictures were taken last night, when 51 people were killed as a result of these attacks that we saw and heard. They were very terrifying. Please help us so that we can leave here as soon as the crossing opens in the coming days.
Please donate to my friend Nader. There are no donations left in 10 hours. They really need and deserve our support. Their campaign has been verified by gazavetters and he is number 4 on their list. Every donation helps, contributes and saves their lives. Please donate.
Please share and donate to help Nader. He hasn't received donations for a long time. Please donate.
Guys, please donate. Please don't let us die while you watch. You can save us with your donations so we can leave as soon as the crossing opens. Please donate now, please.
Crawling out of my hole to remind people that with this current update to Firefox (version 144) they've gone and dumped in their lot with a buncha lil AI tools, namely Perplexity as a new search engine.
So if the sound of that leaves your mouth tasting of tar, here's what you want to do:
In the url bar, type in about:config
It'll give you a big scary warning page that you might poke holes in your browser. Good. You want to do that. Click continue.
One by one, you're going to need to put each of these into the search bar in the page, not up top:
browser.ml.enable
browser.ml.chat.enabled
extensions.ml.enabled
browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled
browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled
Each of these are gonna have a lil toggle icon on the right hand side that looks like a funky double-ended arrow. Click that and the value next to it should change to false. It all auto saves as you go. Some of these might already be set to false by default and that's peachy.
The next best thing you can do for yourself is to set your default search engine to udm14 or Qwant, but for now, we're just tidying the garden a lil bit.
Buck Up And Drive | indiegamelover.com/BuckUpAndDrive
Have no idea if the game’s any good, but something funny with it is that there’s billboards around the map and they sometimes have pride flags on them, and in the setting there’s a pride flag toggle, but if you set it to off, instead it makes EVERY billboard a pride flag, so kudos to whoever made this for that power move
Relevant to what I just reblogged, every library I've worked at has enthusiastically gone all-in on Banned Books displays but only one was just as eager to put books by and about trans people on said displays with zero compunctions. It really opened my eyes about who these kinds of displays were for/what kind of message was being communicated, when they're proudly displaying 1984 for the twentieth year in a row but freezing up at the suggestion that we also display, for instance, Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer during the height of its controversy











