Computers and Operating Systems

Not sure how to organize these yet - perhaps something will occur to me later.

MacBook battery disappears!

Deep into an Android ROM build and maker session, I notice a helpful system pop-up warning me battery level is critical and I should do something soon or the system will execute a graceful shutdown. Now, in the state I was working at, there is no graceful shutdown - I had sessions open to work-threads in the Google Cloud that if my end dropped, they would, well, be running around headless, and in short order terminate. Which by itself is not unrecoverable, but the terminal session scroll buffers where they were encountering build errors would be lost. I'd have to unwind some of the work to get back to a starting point where I can resume. So, no, let's abort the graceful shutdown by getting power to the demanding little tyrant. In this case, an Apple MagSafe 2 in my backpack, other side of the desk. I jump to get it, plug it into the power strip, and route the cord to the magnetic catch (- brilliant piece of design there, I love magnets, although - but that's another Lab Note.) And the moment I click in, the screen blinks off. Sigh. For more, continue here. It does get solved...

Candidate keys to press to wake a sleepy laptop...into confusion!

Wake into hell

The nice Windows operating system has saved your laptop's battery by putting itself to sleep. A very nice feature, and it does massively extend the battery run time. And for desktops, reduces power use.

But why does does the keyboard act funky now?

This one is simple - you pressed one of the control keys to wake up the laptop - alt, ctrl, shift, window key or menu key. And windows, in its eagerness to wake up, simply missed the fact you let go of it. It still has it in its sleepy mind that you are holding down that one key - while you are not.

Remedy is simply to press it again. Excruciating details here...

Keyboard Blues

My bluetooth keyboard missed keystrokes erratically.

The radio in the computer was too eager to dive into low power modes. Turning this off solves the issue.

If you want to read more...

Wine-World

There are (a few, thankfully!) programs that are for unfathomable reasons only available on Windows - well, some reasons are plumbable, so not technically unfathomable - like games built before Mac or Linux were target platforms for games. Or the programmer is just adamantly refusing to - though that verges on the unfathomable. Anyhow -

A clever set of shims has been created that mimic enough critical Windows operating system elements to allow Windows programs to function. It it s a bit hit or miss, but there is enough desperate but clever people out there that in fits and starts more and more essential and esoteric features divined out of the innards of the Windows internals get replicated, emulated, reproduced or faked to the extend that popular or archaic programs need.

Here be my experiences getting my few (thankfully) essential but windows only program to run - in Mac or Linux.

EAC

TurboTax

Windows Crossword puzzler

Have Disks will raid

So, yes, I know - spinning magnetic media storage is soo last decade, and for sure not the place where you want to put crucial mission critical data. Or precious family memories.

Live data is best handled by Solid State Disks, these days, and that is what I do. But still, there is this stack of perfectly functioning 4 TB spinning magnetic media disks. 5 of them. I do pine to use them, for something...

Read what I end up doing here...

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