Tag Archives: frustration

On the futility of using Microsoft as an email provider

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My $DAYJOB, like many others, have a Office 365 subscription, using also services like Microsoft’s Outlook for email. While I have, at a previous job, had mixed experiences with Microsoft and their upside-down view on how email should work. After fighting with their abysmal Outlook software, and their even worse web interface, my previous employer eventually managed to get the company they had subcontracted for email services to open up IMAP, and that was the end of that. With my current employer, I have used IMAP from the start, first continuing to use the Opera Mail client, despite it being out of support, and recently moving to its spiritual successor in Vivaldi.

This was working fine, I could mostly ignore Outlook and its idiosyncrasies. Until 2022-11-01, that is.

The powers that be at Microsoft were rolling out several changes, one was to remove support for password log-in, instead forcing everyone to use a web browser for logging in (fortunately, that was postponed a bit), but the other was some kind of update to the IMAP servers that failed horribly. Since it was the email client that started complaining, I first thought it was a bug in Vivaldi. And posted about it there. After researching it, I did find that Vivaldi was speaking IMAP correctly, but the servers didn’t understand it. I was pointed to a thread at Microsoft’s support forum, where I was far from the only one to have the problem, across different accounts and mail clients.

One would think that a company that provides a paid-for email hosting service that in an update breaks the support for a standardized network protocol would be quick to fix it. But, no. I am writing this at the end of January 2023, and it is still broken. I guess now that the tech oligopoly of Microsoft and Google has embraced and twisted email into whatever they want it to mean, they can do what they want and not care about end-users, without much recourse.

A sad state of affairs.

Running memtest86 on a Mac Mini

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At $DAYJOB, we are having issues with a Mac Mini that is acting up. It crashed on boot, and re-installing macOS didn’t help as it complained about the file system being damaged, no matter if I reformat (“erased” in Apple-speak) or repartition the disk. The built-in Apple Diagnostics tool crashed after about 16 minutes, so I thought I’d run memtest86+ on the machine. But without a working OS boot, I was unable to get it up and running, and googling for information didn’t help.

To get it running, I had to create a bootable USB stick, for which I had to find a Windows machine and run their USB Key installer. However, the disk did not show up in the list of boot options when booting the Mac Mini pressing the Option key. To find it, I had to install rEFInd on a second USB stick (they have a USB flash image ready for download, so no Windows machine needed).

With both USB sticks in the Mac, booting with the Option key let me select the rEFInd USB stick, which in turn found the memtest86+ stick as a “Legacy Windows” image. Now the test started fine.

Sound output from the wrong jack

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Debian recently released an update to their stable release, version 8.7, and with it an update to slightly more recent Linux kernel version (up to 3.16 from 3.2). Well, that would be nice to have I thought, and updated my office workstation and rebooted. Everything looked fine, it even picked up and updated the Nvidia graphics driver that I always have problems with. But then, when I tried to play radio over the Internet, the sound suddenly started blaring out from a speaker inside the chassis that I didn’t even know it had, instead of my connected proper speakers.

So, first I thought the driver was broken, so I rebooted back to the old kernel. Still wrong, then I turned power off and back on and started the old kernel, still the wrong output. Strange.

I have a HP Z220 Workstation (from 2013) at the office, with an “Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04)” audio controller, with a Realtek ALC221 chip (as per output from lspci -v and /proc/asound/card0/codec#0). It took me an hour of intense googling to find the correct set of keywords to find something, but apparently most English-language threads use “jack” for the outputs. I should have known that.

I eventually stumbled on this ArchLinux thread from 2014 which mentioned a tool called hdajackretask that can be used to rearrange the outputs from the HDA cards. Debian distributes this utility in the alsa-tools-gui package. After installing the package and changing the output type I managed to get sound playing through my speakers again.

hdajackretask screenshot, setting "Green Line Out, Rear side" to "Line out (back)"

Screenshot from hdajackretask, used to select output devices from an HDA audio card

Now to actually get some work done. That is Mondays for you.

The futility of OSX parental control and web browsers

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I have kids. Two of them, the youngest is five and the oldest is about to turn eight years old. Since they see me and my wife use a computer regularly, they of course also want to use it. The oldest has access to computers at school, and if they are going to be proficient with computers, they need to start using them at an early age. I have a MacBook Pro that they both have accounts on, both set up with OSX’s default “Parental Control” feature.

That works fairly well when they use the local application (Photo Booth is a favourite, if I hadn’t blocked it their little clips would probably have ended up on YouTube if the knew how to upload them). Well, before getting to the applications, there are all these little pesky pieces of software that phone home on every start-up, under the guise of doing software updates. No matter how many times I block “Google Software Update” or “Paragon Updater” and the like, every time they log in to their accounts, they get a message that they cannot run them. Well, they learn to click “OK” and go on with their life. Using a web browser is a lot more hassle, though.

I had initially set up a whilelist in the Parental Control settings, to only allow them to access certain web sites. That doesn’t work, since every site in the universe now include stuff from other places, either be it CDNs, Google’s web tracking stuff or a JavaScript library that they are too bored to copy to their own domain. I can live with that, a lot of it can be blocked with Ghostery or similar, but that is if you can even get to it.

Trying to even run a web browser on an account that has Parental Control enabled is a chapter in itself. First it is the phone-home auto-update stuff that kicks in every few moments. Then there are the pre-installed shortcuts (at least in Opera) that wants to download screenshots to display inside the Speed Dial screen (why can’t they just ship with default images?). Then even trying to type a web address keeps trying to send every single keystroke to Google, requiring having to close a dialog after every single letter in the URL. In Google Chrome, it seems utterly and completely impossible to disable this behavior. Opera has it, hidden deep inside its configuration options, but I then I have to enter a magic key combination to remove the Search field. And fight the blocked URL pop-ups to remove the pre-installed Speed Dials.

I need to try out Vivaldi for the kids’ accounts. I know it can be configured to be less intrusive, and it doesn’t send all keystrokes to the search engine. When I set up the account for my oldest daughter there wasn’t a stable version around, but it should be fine now.