Oh, and Copilot had also suddenly appeared on her computer overnight.

(Believe me, we had previously made sure it was not on there.)

Has anybody else with old versions of Microsoft Office, licensed from the original product key, suddenly found them deactivated, demanding activation, and refusing to accept activation via the product key?

Did Microsoft just push an update to do this to old Office versions, so that you can no longer run them except via a Microsoft account login?

It is sure looking like this happened on my wife's computer.

Still here, all is well -- for us.

We didn't even lose power which, if you know Hawaiian Electric, is amazing. (About 10,000 households here did, and 90% of Kauai.)

Were our preparations overblown? Perhaps, and yet if we had not made some of them, they might have been lacking. Who's to say?

Over the next few days we'll be taking things down and putting them back away and wondering when the next one's coming. A new tropical depression is already starting off the coast of Mexico

Lowell was Category 5 yesteday, back to Cat 4 this morning, but could be Cat 5 again by Mon or Tues when it hits or passes.

Today I'll do some digging and shoveling around the back to rebuild some berms & swales I'd made to direct ground flowing water away from the house - they got gradually flattened by trucks driving over.

Also making sure everything is charged because the house is going to be DARK once we lose power, and we are almost certain to.

I hope the predictions are wrong.

This is almost certain to happen now. Nearly all models agree on this.

Whether it will hit the islands or narrowly miss Kauai and Niihau, where it will hit, and when are all still shifting and the models are flipflopping back and forth, but it's time to prepare seriously.

Taking a day off work today to inventory the plywood panels under the house that I have cut to go over the windows, and make sure they're not rotted. Any windows I skipped the last time, we cut panels for those now.

I might be too busy to report on this over the next several days, so I'll just say a few words now.

Two full-on hurricanes are heading in our direction right now, Lowell projected to pass south of the Hawaiian Islands as a *major* hurricane, then Karina to the north, plus Marie that's still too far away to tell.

BUT two major models predict that as Karina weakens, the low-pressure area will abruptly pull Lowell north/east, directly towards Kauai or Oahu. Where/when exactly is still shifting.

I kinda liked the model we had for the previous several decades where tech stuff kept getting cheaper and cheaper and you kept getting more and more for what you spent on it.

I liked that a whole lot better than I like this.

I noticed last night while pricing drives for backing up my NAS system that the 4TB NAS-grade hard drives which cost me $84.99 each in Dec 2020, today cost $249.99.

Almost 3x the price for the identical model: WD RedPlus 4TB 5400rpm WD40EFRX

It might be some of that's due to unusual demand for an older model of drive in limited supply, but even a newer similar 4TB NAS drive from WD is $199.99, 2.35x the 2020 price.

It's not a literal necessity, like high food prices, but damn.

Hey there, hello! What the hell, I have nearly 500 people following me right now? I didn't expect that.

My follows are still wide open, but please keep in mind:
* I don't expect or tolerate racist, sexist or anti-femininist, anti-trans or TERF, anti-LGBTQIA, ablist, anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian, anti-Jewish, or anti-neurodiverse prejudice or rhetoric from my followers.

If I see any from you, I'll probably block you, with few exceptions.

My interests are wide and my posts all over the map.

DID YOU KNOW that

Ivar Krueger, 'The Match King', invented off balance-sheet debt and made it a cornerstone of his financing?

That was only *one* of his many achievements before he bankrupted himself, most of his investors, and many of his creditors, went a fair way towards crashing the world financial markets, and then committed suicide.

Ah, those innocent bygone days of the early 20th century!

Fortunately nothing like that could happen nowadays with our sophisticated financial systems.

RE: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/116664889071510207

I confirmed for myself - this was still working as of earlier this morning. In fact, it gave a whole succession of different answers, different every time I asked, including "None" and "All of them."

I think it's getting rapidly to "underground railway" and "hiding Jews in the attic" time in the US. (We don't actually have an attic, unfortunately.)

So I just asked my wife if she's willing to shelter people in our house and she said yes.

I'm putting it out there, if any trans person needs to get out of where they are fast, but can't get out of the US for whatever reasons, we will take you in until our house is full.

Will other cis people step up to say the same, please?

RE: https://toad.social/@wdlindsy/116301677453295956

Hell of an article. Absolutely dead on, and it's a shock to see anything so honest in a newspaper nowadays.

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/laguardia-crash-tsa-ice-trump-20260326.html?id=taRayQvhWMZCK&utm_source=social&utm_campaign=gift_link&utm_medium=referral

Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme fucking chose.

That song is almost 60 years old and still becomes relevant every few years.

I hate it.

I hate this fucking awful system we have where nobody in any position of power is ever held responsible for anything whatsoever, where the media lovingly fawns over a bunch of war criminals fawning over each other.

And it's one, two, three,
What are we fighting for?
Don't ask me I don't give a damn,
Next stop is now Iran.

And it's five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates!
Well we ain't got time to wonder why,
Whoopee, we're all gonna die!

Americans live in a space and time when our popular websites are running reviews of the best gas masks to use when our government attacks us with teargas.

The Abbot of the Temple of Cat, receiving visitors.

Quite glad I bought the RAM upgrades for my PC a year or two ago, even though I only got around to installing it recently. (And it's a mere 64 GB and DDR4, so it's practically archaic lol.)

Another Question for my Linuxheads (2 of N):

What password manager can I use on Linux (Debian trixie to be specific) which has the good properties of the old v4 version of 1Password I use?

That is:
* Uses a solid established cryptographic format for encryption, in which all sensitive data is encrypted when stored;
* NO subscription or centralized web service;
* Keeps copies of all its PW files in some directory hierarchy which can be safely synch'ed and shared across computers.

+

If somebody's done it, and you know of it, please point me to it.