Windows Nostalgia A recent video on Windows 7 as daily driver OS by Brodie Robertson was hilarious but also arguable. For me, XP is the best OS ever made by M$. However, it has became not so useful nowadays neither for retro gaming (which 98SE is the king) nor for day-to-day usage, due to both hardware and software incompatibility. The compromise would be Windows 7. I agree there are too much of accumulated unpatched security vulnerabilities, but there are tricks to mitigate most of those either technically or strategically. ...

The End of Timelessness? As a free and open source provocateur, I use Linux on my old and new hardware. But when installing OS for non-tech-savvy people, most of time, Windows is my only option. Nevertheless, I often install and recommend open source tools on Windows platform for them. During Windows 8 to 10 LTSB period, I wasn’t so interested into installing the latest Windows. However, when M$ decide to block hardware in their installer either via TPM or CPU generations, I started installing later version of Windows just for bypassing the restrictions. ...

WSL Installation There are some special use cases where I would like to go through and show the process of setting up WSL. Ubuntu’s official document works well on Windows 11 LTSC for WSL installation, there is also a tutorial from sitepoint with more details. I’m doing this on a double debloated version of Windows 11 from previous post of Tiny 11 WTG, where I downloaded WinGet, extracted DesktopAppInstaller_Dependencies.zip and installed with PowerShell: ...

Eventually, I found myself with enough leisure and motivation to set up a crypto wallet. For my situation, investing time and money into my skills, knowledge, and projects yields more return and safer than in finance. But in this time, I found some good VPN deals which I would like to pay with XMR. Plus it’s convenient to have some spare crypto in wallet for making donations to my favorite creators and projects, so it’s time to set things up. ...

Recently I came down to want a mobile hotspot when going out of home, something like Netgear Nighthawk M series, but able to flash custom firmware (OpenWrt/pfSense equivalents) and cheap. However, there is no such thing on the market even without budget consideration. So it has to be done with DIY, like USB tethering with a router. In the case of tethering or so called Ethernet over USB, we are using a phone as a cellular modem for our router. ...