CanuteTheGreat's BLOG

Category: Windows

  • Apple is winning, MicroSlop is done for!

    Apple is winning, MicroSlop is done for!

    I’ve had a long-term dislike for Apple (I mean they did threaten legal action against me on 6 different occasions…), but they sure have their shit together compared to everyone else these days. MicroSlop can’t make anything usable at this point. With the exception of Office, I see no reason for them to even exist.

    Nightjob bought me an 18″ Alienware Area-51 with an nvidia 5090 – it’s a pretty nice laptop, but windows constantly has these microfreezes where the keyboard and mouse (even bluetooth) stop responding for 1 – 5 seconds. Any videos playing continue working fine. It has 3 hard drives in it (16TB total!) When I boot into Linux (any distro) there are no freezes and it is blazing fast, so I know it isn’t a hardware issue. Although in Linux I cannot control the screen brightness at all and the audio is fucked after each reboot. So, despite the microfeezing it spends most of its time in winblowz. I’ve reinstalled windows 3 times with and without all the dell shit – doesn’t seem to make any difference so I suspect the issue is with windows itself. Speaking of dell shit, their stupid fucking supportassist app frequently stops working and just has a big ‘ole spinning wheel. How hard is it to make shit that works these days? Must be more AI vibe coded shit or something…

    Dayjob bought me a 16″ MacBook Pro M5 with 128GB of RAM, but only a single 2TB drive :'( – keep in mind I’m not an Apple fan (see first paragraph) – like at all. That said, this this is fucking awesome! Everything else seems like a pile of shit after using this! The screen is amazing, the keyboard is delightful, MacOS Just-Fucking-Works-Without-All-The-Bullshit (TM) and there is no bastardized WSL – I have native terminal, real UNIX under the hood, and shit just works without having to dick around with things.

    Then I saw Apple released a new MacBook Neo in the $599 to $699 price point (depending on options) – I think MicroSlop is completely done for now. I don’t see any of the PC manufacturers being able to compete at that price point with a stable OS. Sure, there’s Linux still, but with the exception of maybe Framework, I don’t really see any serious competition here. The big names (Dell, Lenovo, etc.) that have laptops in the sub-$1K price range with Linux on them are essentially disposable garbage.

  • Customizing Windows Sandbox

    Customizing Windows Sandbox

    Windows 10 introduced a neat feature called the Windows Sandbox. It creates a temporary (ephemeral) Windows VM (same version as host) that when closed is destroyed along with the contents. When you open Windows Sandbox it is pretty bare with no extras. However, it is possible to create it with a bit of customizations added. This is accomplished by creating a wsb (Windows SandBox) file.

    Example wsb that creates a shared folder (downloads/wsb_files) on the host in my user (canut) home directory.

    <Configuration>
<VGpu>Default</VGpu>
<Networking>Default</Networking>
<MappedFolders>
   <MappedFolder>
     <HostFolder>C:\Users\canut\Downloads\wsb_files</HostFolder>
     <ReadOnly>false</ReadOnly>
   </MappedFolder>
</MappedFolders>
<LogonCommand>
   <Command>C:\Users\WDAGUtilityAccount\desktop\wsb_files\startup.bat</Command>
</LogonCommand>
</Configuration>

    The startup.bat file is executed at “logon” to the VM after creation. The contents are:

    C:\Users\WDAGUtilityAccount\desktop\wsb_files\SurfsharkSetup.exe /exenoui /qn
C:\Users\WDAGUtilityAccount\desktop\wsb_files\qbittorrent_4.6.4_x64_setup.exe /S
explorer.exe C:\Users\WDAGUtilityAccount\desktop\wsb_files
"C:\Program Files\qBittorent\qbittorrent.exe"

    This .bat script will run the installer for surfshark’s VPN, then install qbittorrent, -both of which need to be downloaded first – and then it will open explorer to the wsb_files location and finally run qbittorrent application.

    There are a lot of possible customizations, official examples show more of them.