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#3 – “Da Funk”

06/28/2026 / / 0 Comments

Hello again! My previous post was a very brief test on how it was to write blog posts on my phone. While I did make a post, I’m back on my computer for this one, so it couldn’t have been that great. This post will be a story on how Windows pissed me off, and that’s it.

Now, Windows is terrible, as almost anybody interested in tech will tell you. But unfortunately, because Windows is 40 or so years of technology mashed together into a big glob of an always breaking operating system, software is designed for it, and nothing else, because it shouldn’t break between versions. It usually does! That’s not my point, though. Software is also only designed for Windows because sometimes developers fear the penguin! I’m not quite sure what it is with Linux, but developers clearly must have something. One such developer is Bungie. Because I dare to like Destiny 2, I have to keep a Windows partition around on my PC because they instaban you if you even think about loading the game up on Linux.

So I was using Windows for Destiny, and it made me think: I had a few other games stuck in Windows jail. For example, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Battlefield 1, and Fortnite. As an aside, Battlefield 1 once even worked on Linux; EA is just evil, so they added a garbage anticheat which just eliminated the Linux players. Anticheat is kinda like DRM in that way. It doesn’t make cheaters or pirates go away, but instead it just kinda screws over your average consumer, for no reason. But because of the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse, as we’ll call them, I said, “OK let’s give solely Windows a shot. It can’t be that bad, can it?”

Yeah, if it wasn’t obvious by me stating it two or three times so far, Windows was that bad. In fact, it was bad twice over: I first tried Microsoft’s latest “gift” to the PC world in Windows 11, before going back to Windows 10 and having more problems. Now I’m back on Debian, with Windows just a thing taking up 300GB for Destiny 2 (where I started).

For a little context on why I was trying Windows 11, I hadn’t tried it in sometimes. I used it on a PC in 2021 when it came out, it was a miserable experience (partially the computer, partially Windows 11), and went back to Windows 10 by 2022. I had used 10 since then, and later switched to Linux as my main OS in 2025, so outside of school computers, I haven’t given the OS a new look in four, going-on five, years. Maybe they fixed what I didn’t like about it? Microsoft is really good at giving me opportunities to turn my thoughts into It’s Always Sunny titlecard jokes.

So, what was so bad at 11 then and now? Here’s a little list:

  1. The UI – Every Windows version comes with some fun UI upgrades. Windows Vista’s Aero theme is a great example. 11 comes with a nice UI with a focus on rounded corners, and making everything big as hell for no reason! Not only that, it messes with your workflow!
    • The Taskbar: When Windows 7? (I don’t know, I think it was 7) added icon buttons with no label, they gave you the option to keep the labels, as it was in Windows 95. 11, on the other hand removed this! On top of removing features, setting the taskbar to the left, right, or top? Gone! I will credit Microsoft here, labels got added back in 25H2, so I could have them again; taskbar placement is coming in 26H2, along with a way to decrease the size of the taskbar finally, so it’s reign of it being bigger than it ever was can end. Not bad. Then again, they created this problem in the first place.
    • The Start Menu: Jesus. Where do I start? Not only is it bigger for no reason, you yet again removed features. Plus, this introduces my other “favorite” aspect of Windows 11: messing with your workflow by making what there is even slower. To get to the list of your apps (yet again, Windows 95), it now takes an extra click.
    • The Right Click Menu: bigger, and again Microsoft doesn’t realize something is less functional when I have to take extra clicks to get stuff done. Who was this for?
  2. Performance: Turns out, this “beautiful” new UI comes at a performance cost. So did Aero, to be fair. But you know what came at performance gains? Windows 7, 8, and 10. The last three major versions of Windows gave gains, so not gaining one here kinda sucks. But I could even forgive that, if the new features were good, or the performance tax wasn’t that significant. Unfortunately, the performance tax is that significant. On my PC with a Ryzen 5 5600 and RX 6600, I consistently get around 10% slower performance on 11 compared to 10, which is already down vs. Linux. For what?
  3. The New Features: The big features of Windows 11 are UI improvements and integration of Microsoft services, especially Copilot. The UI improvements I mostly spoke on, but I would also like to add how the UI improvements have made Windows settings a further confusing experience, as while the app has improved, the legacy Control Panel is still here. Could they not just go all in? But the integration of Microsoft services
  4. The Removal of Features: I will credit Microsoft on this. They’ve fixed it. The little annoyances of “why is this gone” like right-clicking the taskbar for task manager, or the aforementioned window labels, are back. But my question is as follows: Windows has always been focused on legacy support. Why, and how, did these get the axe in the first place?
  5. The Bugs: Oh lord the bugs. Let’s just say there’s a reason I ran off to a stable Linux distribution. It does give me a laugh every week when I read tech news and see a new Windows 11 issue, though.
  6. Adding Insult to Injury: Sometimes, Microsoft will manage to do multiple of these at once. The best example is the “Widgets” screen, a new feature, replacing the “News and Interest” feature from Windows 10 and the Live Tiles from 8-10. Not only can you do less than the live tiles, for years, because it also replaced “News,” you had to deal with it, whether you wanted it or not. I will credit yet again that they removed it, but why was it an idea to combine these features?

So, 11 wasn’t gonna work out. So later that day, I went back to Windows 10. I didn’t consider 11, or my experience with it, much the fault of Microsoft, as it was really my curiosity that took over. But now that I was back on 10, nothing could happen to ruin it and I could just play my games, right?

I was on Windows 10 for a few more days, but it is the shorter part of this story. I set up Windows how I liked it, and installed my games. However, a few more things went wrong, which is why I went back to Linux. First, I dared to play a game. Oddly enough, when I opened Black Ops Cold War, my screen started to flicker, and the taskbar kept popping up. Annoying, certainly, and I tried to fix it, but found nothing. Maybe because I can play that game on Xbox easily, but I didn’t mind too hard, and just uninstalled. A day or two later, I joined a Discord call with my friends, and the same thing happened. That one, that’s a dealbreaking bug. I troubleshooted everything, and eventually realized that it was a Windows issue, after going as far as to reinstall my GPU drivers after 9000 steps relating to the app to make it work.

So, I had to reinstall. But seeing as I still found 11 unusable and 10 managed to break on me in a day, why bother? I went back to Linux, and that’s where the story ends. Rather anticlimactic, I know, but that’s how life is.

I hope you enjoyed that rather pointless story, at least much more than I “enjoyed” Windows. Thank you for reading today’s post, I hope you enjoy them as much as I like writing them. Have a good rest of your day.

#2 – “Nightvision”

06/26/2026 / / 0 Comments

This is the first post I’ve written on my phone, so it’ll likely be about 3 sentences long. I’ve proved I can do that!

Anyways on what I did today: I installed LineageOS on an old (2016) Samsung tablet. I think that Lineage is quite an interesting project, breathing new life into older devices. I’ll comment more on usability in the near future, as I may try it on a phone or use said tablet to learn about its quirks vs Android.

I know it was three paragraphs, but that’s all for this one. Give me a break, because I wrote it on a phone! Have a good rest of your day, and thank you for reading.

#1 – “Eternal Summer”

06/25/2026 / / 0 Comments

Hello again! In my previous post, I said I’d like to keep these blog posts as a daily thing. That was three weeks ago. So, I failed. But in between then and now, some things have changed that make this a lot easier of a task. First off, the Knicks won the finals; this means that my last post aged well. Second, and much more important to why daily blog posts are easier to do, is that my summer vacation has begun, meaning I should have the time for 69 or 70 daily posts. That’s why I’ve numbered them, so I can keep track.

The goal is to post these “daily,” with daily in quotes because my sleep schedule will be all kinds of messed up. I’m counting this post for Wednesday, June 24th, but as I’m writing this it’s really 1:50 the following Thursday. In other words, daily with days quantified as the span I am awake, rather than a specific 24 hour period. That could mean a day can have one or possibly two posts, or perhaps if my sleep schedule gets extra screwed, some “days” will have two posts while being in different days (this assumes I pull an all-nighter and know I’ll be lazy enough to write a post the next morning).

Anyways, enough about the technicalities of my blog posts made so I can yap to a guy without a guy to yap to, on to the contents. I’d like my posts over the summer really to be something of a time capsule of it. So I may just yap on what I did that day, or current thoughts on a show I’m watching, or review of an album I’ve listened to or movie I watched. For example…

Stuff I’ve Done

or: doing exactly what I said a sentence ago

Note: These sections are collapsible. If you just so happen to be interested in anything here and want to remain unspoiled, don’t read it!

The Sopranos (Last Watched: S6E7)

I like this one. Not a thing I have to justify in the slightest, as I think most people will easily tell you this is one of the greatest shows of all time. What I’ll focus on today is the show up to this point, which is the vast majority of it, but I think that’s OK.

The dynamic of Tony balancing his life as the mob boss and life with his family, especially in the early seasons with his mother, is fantastic. It’s all brought together with what I think is the pivotal aspect to the show, the therapy scenes. The therapy scenes are, in some way, the most difficult scenes for the show to balance.

I think one of the biggest strengths of any show is a great first season. This show has a phenomenal one. So far through the show, it is my personal favorite, although season five is very close. Maybe it’s because they didn’t know where the series would go, but that season is the only one with a complete arc. And I think the dynamic of Tony and his mom, and his reaction to it through therapy while having to hide it from the mob to keep up his “tough guy” image is fantastic.

Another great aspect of the show is how it balances dark comedy with the dramatic elements. The show can manage having some of the most dramatic moments on television, with the line “He was gay, Gary Cooper?”

I also like how the show is not afraid to show its characters in terrible light. This may seem like a point where it’s like “OK, so what?” now that we have shows like Breaking Bad, but I think The Sopranos is better at it too. For every moment where you side with Tony, there’s at least two to remind you that the characters in this show are almost all horrible people.

To wrap this section up as opposed to yapping worse than six barbers, I’ll talk more on where I think the show is going. Predictions are fun. First of, I think Vito is going to die. The show always gives you those moments of hope that maybe something will work out, especially with Tony B trying to be legitimate and Adrianna’s whole character arc, before ripping it all away. I just don’t think Tony can get over Vito’s homosexuality. Second, I think something will happen that will get Tony at war with New York. I don’t know exactly why I think that one, or how it can happen, but I think it will.


That’s really all I have to say this post. I really wanted this to be a shorter post to get back into writing as a fun little hobby. I expect these will get longer as I go on. Have a good rest of your day, and thanks for reading.

Apologies to Genesis

06/02/2026 / / 0 Comments

This will be another short post. But this is my formal apology to the band Genesis, for I have greatly underestimated their work. I listened to a Genesis album for the first time about two months ago. Before this, I had known of the later hits such as “Misunderstanding” or “Follow You Follow Me,” but despite being a prog rock fan I had not listened to any Genesis album in full, also knowing the band had two distinct eras: a prog era led by Peter Gabriel and the later “pop” era led by Phil Collins.

So about two months ago, I finally listened to a Genesis album in full, listening to Selling England by the Pound. I thought it was OK, but I thought the album’s bits of greatness in tracks like “I Know What I Like” and “The Cinema Show” evened out with overlong clunkers of “Dancing with the Moonlit Knight” and “The Battle of Epping Forest.” Shortly after this I listened to the album preceding that one, Foxtrot. This one I thought was more consistent, and yet again liked, but also thought that it didn’t really reach a greatness I see in tracks by other prog bands like King Crimson’s “Starless,” Yes’ “Close to the Edge,” or Pink Floyd’s “Dogs”.”

I was willing to see the band out, though, and I listened to the last album of the Peter Gabriel era, The Lamb Dies Down on Broadway. This one I couldn’t really tell what I thought, so I promised myself I’d relisten. Boy am I glad I did that. On relisten, Lamb just clicked with me. The experimentation musically on display is fascinating, especially with how easy it is to listen to comparably to other prog bands. This started the revelation that led to this apology. I can’t stop listening to Genesis now. I listened to a later album, Duke, from the Phil Collins era, to see if I’d like the poppier stuff or if I thought the band would fall off past a point. Needless to say, I loved that one too. That one is interesting because while I would still lean to call it pop music, there is still a significant amount of prog elements, to create almost “progressive pop” if you will. It’s a gorgeous sound that is incredibly unique and I cannot recommend enough.

To loop this back, after Duke, I relistened to Selling England, and that album clicked so hard, I’m wondering how the hell I could have ever thought “Moonlit Knight” was not a great song. In fact, I’m listening to this album as I write this post!

To close, I’d like to recommend you listen to Genesis: especially Selling England, Lamb, and Duke. These albums are filled with such a unique sound and such fun experimentation that even if they don’t click on first or second listen, they are worth going back to anyways. Maybe you’ll discover some new favorites. This is only my second blog post on this blog, so I don’t know how well this promise will age, but I’d like to try to write one post every day, even if rather short like today’s (I was busy, OK?). I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy writing, because to me it’s fun to just yap into the void about something I love. Have a wonderful rest of your day, and listen to Genesis!

Brief Thoughts on Effective Computing

06/01/2026 / / 0 Comments

I’ll try to keep this one short, although it is my first post on the new site, so who knows how well I’ll keep that attempt? This post, I’d like to talk about one “mistake” a lot of people make when either learning how to use or while using a computer. I put mistake in quotes not because it’s truly a mistake, but more of a misaligned viewpoint that hurts how much you can really “get” the computer: people try to adapt entirely to the computer, instead of using the computer to adapt to themselves.

Now, that may sound paradoxical. How can you learn something without being willing to actually try it out? My response to that is that in interacting with the computer, and unlike the computer itself, things aren’t binary. There’s more than one way to approach a task. Is it possibly more “correct” to learn the Microsoft way, or the Apple way? You can certainly argue so, and it would be hard to argue against you, but from a more philosophical standpoint on interacting with the computer, the question should not be is a method “correct,” but if a method is functional. Functionality, in this case, I shall define as something that makes sense for the user, and leads to efficient interaction with said computer.

Finding the Link: How do you understand the computer?

“What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.” – Steve Jobs

To admittedly leech off of Jobs’ quote about the computer as a “bicycle for the mind,” I would like to ask a simple question. Does everybody ride a bicycle in the same way? No! We learn to ride a bicycle on training wheels. Why would we throw our mind into the deep end, and hope everything works out? That approach is why I think computing can be so overwhelming to some; by looking at it from a perspective where you have to learn everything, you overload the mind and end up not being able to gain anything.

If I can propose a method for gaining an effectiveness at computing, take the operating system you want to learn, and break it into pieces. I will concede that simply saying “break it down into smaller bits and just get it” isn’t all there really is to it. Learning isn’t quite that simple. But what may help people get over the hump, so to speak, is by finding pieces analogous to their real world experience. For example, explaining a computer’s file system is simply something that an average person is not going to understand. But if you were to compare it to a filing cabinet, with each file and folder like the papers in folders in labelled drawers of said cabinet, I think it may help that concept come into perspective for people. You can also use this logic once you’ve learned a little bit, and learn something new. For an example I recently experienced, the jump to the Linux GNOME desktop environment was a very strange one coming from Microsoft Windows and the traditional “desktop metaphor” (pictured).

The traditional Windows desktop
GNOME desktop

And I will admit, trying GNOME for the first time felt akin to having to launch a spaceship with no prior knowledge of physics while simultaneously having to play Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. It just wouldn’t click: the problem was I was trying to learn all of GNOME at once, and was fundamentally missing the point. Understanding it wasn’t a matter of knowing the ins and outs of every feature, but comprehending the workspace-based workflow. I was recommended a YouTube video that made that link fall into place. The workflow was like sorting a desk, and keeping each “group” together. That image of a sorted desk made the workflow make sense, and I’m currently typing this off my laptop using Debian Linux on GNOME, because I made that workflow work for me. Of course, there’s a little more to it, and I’ll get into actually adapting to a system, but once you’ve figured out that basic understanding of a computer, I think you have done 70% if not 80% of the work already. And really, you can be perfectly competent with that. But the other 20% is where I think the magic of a computer is truly revealed.

To wrap my thoughts on that fundamental understanding, I just want to make a small clarification: the link doesn’t have to be a file cabinet or a desk. It can be anything. Physical objects were for my purposes, and in my experience, easier to understand and write about, but some people may find understanding in a more abstract way. That’s fine! It is not how you get there that matters so much as that you can reach that fundamental understanding. Once you’ve reached that, you’ve opened a door to something brilliant.

Adapting the Computer to Yourself

If somehow the heading didn’t make where I was going obvious enough, that aforementioned last 20% to effective computing is yourself. This is the harder part to describe, because obviously everyone is a different person. Everyone doesn’t ride a bike exactly the same, even if those differences are very subtle. So this section will read more of a small list of one or two tips to try out, as a suggestion. Maybe they’ll work for you, and everything will even further click into place.

One very popular method is the keyboard shortcut. By hitting Ctrl+C followed by Ctrl+V (Cmd+C, Cmd+V on Mac), you have just done what was previously done by right clicking, hitting copy, right clicking again, and pasting. It’s a small change, but over thousands and thousands of copies and pastes, it will start to add up. The natural extension of this is macros, which are shortcuts that execute a series of commands, such as typing out a sentence.

Another method I enjoy to speed up computing is workspaces. Windows, macOS, and most Linux desktops have had a form of this concept for some time now. I believe on Windows it is called Task View, while on Mac and Linux it is called workspaces. The concept here is a little more abstract, as I alluded to in my explanation of how GNOME clicked for me, but it functionally allows you to have multiple desktops to switch between, each with its own applications. This separation of applications helps with dealing with a very cluttered desktop, and being able to just have what you need for each task, instead of 8 apps overlapping all serving different purposes at once.

Just as different computer apps have different purposes, different people also have different outlooks. But I believe a fundamental change of perspective to finding an understanding of computers can help people break through and find a greater efficiency with it. I hope you may take away something from this, and want to try finding that spark, if it seems that it just isn’t making sense to you, or you know someone with that problem. Thank you for reading.

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