In 2011 I wrote The Windows 7 Pagefile And Running Without One. It’s been sourced, quoted, and held up as an example these several years. In reviewing possible changes to the upcoming Win10 Tweak Guide revision I decided to revisit this.
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Patch Tuesday Morning
I apologize that this post is as scattered as my life is right now. I’ll share someday.
Windows 7 EOL
Doomsday predictions, “end of an era”, supposed hacks. There are no answers to what will happen with Windows 7 going forward. Today is listed as the last day of extended support. Truth is nobody knows exactly what that entails. I wouldn’t be in a rush to ditch Windows 7 just yet but you do have options:
– “Upgrade” to Win10. The free option still works. I did it yesterday on my wife’s PC. It was my old one that I bought in 2008. It seems to be a little wonky and I haven’t had time to mess with it. I might just put Linux Mint on it.
– Install Linux. I use Linux Mint right now.
– Keep using Windows 7 as is. Should be OK for a while. At some point in the future that rig may need to be disconnected from the internet.
What are your plans?
Cryptic Rumblings Ahead of First 2020 Patch Tuesday
“Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity that Microsoft Corp. is slated to release a software update on Tuesday to fix an extraordinarily serious security vulnerability in a core cryptographic component present in all versions of Windows. Those sources say Microsoft has quietly shipped a patch for the bug to branches of the U.S. military and to other high-value customers/targets that manage key Internet infrastructure, and that those organizations have been asked to sign agreements preventing them from disclosing details of the flaw prior to Jan. 14, the first Patch Tuesday of 2020.”
New Intel Graphics Drivers
Windows 7-10 Braswell, 4th and 5th generations
Windows 7 & Windows 8.1 4th Generation
Windows 7 & Windows 8.1 6th Generation
Windows 7-10 Baytrail and 3rd generation
What a Charlie Foxtrot. You’re better off using the Intel Driver & Support Assistant.
Mark Hamill joins critics in deleting Facebook, condemning Zuckerberg
“So disappointed that Mark Zuckerberg values profit more than truthfulness that I’ve decided to delete my Facebook account,” Hamill tweeted. “I know this is a big ‘Who cares?’ for the world at large, but I’ll sleep better at night. #PatriotismOverProfits”
Who Signs Up to Fight? Makeup of U.S. Recruits Shows Glaring Disparity
“The men and women who sign up overwhelmingly come from counties in the South and a scattering of communities at the gates of military bases like Colorado Springs, which sits next to Fort Carson and several Air Force installations, and where the tradition of military service is deeply ingrained.
More and more, new recruits are the children of old recruits. In 2019, 79 percent of Army recruits reported having a family member who served. For nearly 30 percent, it was a parent — a striking point in a nation where less than 1 percent of the population serves in the military…
That has created a broad gap, easily seen on a map. The South, where the culture of military service runs deep and military installations are plentiful, produces 20 percent more recruits than would be expected, based on its youth population. The states in the Northeast, which have very few military bases and a lower percentage of veterans, produce 20 percent fewer.
The main predictors are not based on class or race. Army data show service spread mostly evenly through middle-class and “downscale” groups. Youth unemployment turns out not to be the prime factor. And the racial makeup of the force is more or less in line with that of young Americans as a whole, though African-Americans are slightly more likely to serve. Instead, the best predictor is a person’s familiarity with the military.”
Remembering Neil Peart, A Monster Drummer With A Poet’s Heart
“When Canadian prog-rock innovators Rush were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013, it was both somewhat surprising and totally appropriate that drummer Neil Peart opened the trio’s acceptance speech. The musician and author, who passed away at the age of 67 on January 7 after a private, three-and-a-half-year struggle with brain cancer, famously eschewed the spotlight and rarely gave interviews. However, the Ontario native was a quiet leader who shaped Rush’s voice, writing the bulk of the band’s lyrics and maintaining a steely, rock-solid presence behind the drumkit.”
One of rocks greatest drummers. Side 1 of the Moving Pictures LP is my favorite from them (I still have it). Anyone else play air drums whenever the hear Tom Sawyer?
Monday Morning Random Stuff…
Linux Mint 19.2 Released
“Linux Mint 19.2 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2023. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.”
I upgraded my VM and it went well.
Release Announcement | How to upgrade
Macrium Reflect Updated Pulled?
v7.2.4398 was momentarily released last week. Not there anymore. No statement from the company on this.
Release notes still there: http://updates.macrium.com/reflect/v7/v7.2.4398/details7.2.4398.htm
Stuff I bookmarked recently. Some off topic, some not:
CafePress Hacked, 23M Accounts Compromised. Is Yours One Of Them?
“According to that HIBP notification, the breach itself took place on Feb 20 and compromised a total of 23,205,290 accounts. The exposed data included 23 million unique email addresses; some of the compromised records also included names, physical addresses and phone numbers…Why has it taken so long to find out about the CafePress breach? Good question. An equally good one might be “why have I heard about this breach from HIBP and not CafePress itself?” of course…There have been no notification emails from CafePress as far as I can ascertain.”
Amazon now lets you stop human review of your Alexa recordings
Apple and Google temporarily stop listening to Siri and OK Google queries
***Here’s How to Stop ‘Human Review’ of Your Alexa Interactions. (Apple and Google Too)***
81 of the Best Barrel aged Imperial Stouts, Blind-Tasted and Ranked
IMHO missing a bunch. Isn’t that the case with all such lists?
Good for Google, Bad for America
“At its core, artificial intelligence is a military technology. Why is the company sharing it with a rival?
“A.I.’s military power is the simple reason that the recent behavior of America’s leading software company, Google — starting an A.I. lab in China while ending an A.I. contract with the Pentagon — is shocking. As President Barack Obama’s defense secretary Ash Carter pointed out last month, “If you’re working in China, you don’t know whether you’re working on a project for the military or not.”
No intensive investigation is required to confirm this. All one need do is glance at the Communist Party of China’s own constitution: Xi Jinping added the principle of “civil-military fusion,” which mandates that all research done in China be shared with the People’s Liberation Army, in 2017.”
These scientists may have solved MLB’s ‘juiced’ baseball problem
“Within a matter of weeks, according to Smith and Nathan, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred could be ready to present the research findings and explain what has caused the baseballs to drive up the home run totals — not to mention fuel conspiracy theorists who have accused the league of juicing up the balls.”
This should make my home boy Justin Verlander happy.: Justin Verlander Says MLB Is Juicing Baseballs To Goose Up Offense
“It’s a f—-ing joke. Major League Baseball’s turning this game into a joke. They own Rawlings, and you’ve got Manfred up here saying it might be the way they center the pill. They own the f—-ing company. If any other $40 billion company bought out a $400 million company and the product changed dramatically, it’s not a guess as to what happened. We all know what happened. Manfred the first time he came in, what’d he say? He said we want more offense. All of a sudden he comes in, the balls are juiced? It’s not coincidence. We’re not idiots.”
Asked if he believed the balls were intentionally juiced by the league, Verlander said: “Yes. 100 percent. They’ve been using juiced balls in the Home Run Derby forever. They know how to do it. It’s not coincidence. I find it really hard to believe that Major League Baseball owns Rawlings and just coincidentally the balls become juiced.”
Thursday Morning Random Stuff…
Those patches from yesterday are under active exploit. If you are one of the three people that actually use Internet Explorer then get patched.
The article about Facebook I linked to yesterday made its way to the major news outlets. CNN & Fox & NPR.
Seriously, #DeleteFacebook : How to Delete Facebook
Linux Mint 19.1 Is Out
Mint has become my distro of choice. I conduct the majority of my web activities in a Mint virtual machine.
19.1 brings many changes and is an LTS release supported until 2023.
I’m not real thrilled with the default kernel of 4.15. The current LTS is 4.19 and it has been out since October. 19.1 is said to have support for installing “mainline kernels“. I’ve not seen a decent guide on this.
Download Linux Mint 19.1 Tessa
New features in Linux Mint 19.1 Cinnamon
AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 18.12.3 Drivers
Bugfixes
Release Notes
Windows 10 64-bit
Windows 7 64-bit
Other Software Releases
EMDB 3.29
FinalCrypt 2.8.0
HWiNFO 6 (I use portable.) (Use the green button to download)
VirtualBox 6
Stuff I bookmarked recently. Some off topic, some not:
Least-Educated State: California
California ranks No. 1 among the 50 states for the percentage of its residents 25 and older who have never completed ninth grade and 50th for the percentage who have graduated from high school, according to new data from the Census Bureau.
“No surprise”, says the residents of the other 49 states.
The Runaways’ Jackie Fox Locks Up Her First Week on Jeopardy!
A former bassist with The Runaways — the late-1970s all-female, teenage proto-punk/hard-rock band that inspired countless women to take up music — Fox has stirred interest in the rock world and beyond with her success on the syndicated game show. After a Wednesday-morning taping at Jeopardy!’s studio in Culver City, she had earned enough money to win again, for her fourth day as champion.
She is one smart lady: Fuchs earned her B.A. summa cum laude from UCLA in Linguistics and Italian, with a specialization in computing, and her J.D. from Harvard, where Barack Obama was one of her classmates. Fox speaks Italian and French, as well as conversational Greek and Spanish.
The Runaways – Cherry Bomb – Official music video
Windows 7 Support
Last week Microsoft announced extended support for “Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Enterprise customers in Volume Licensing” through January 2023. “Volume Licensing” means businesses, not home users. Home users will be EOLed on January 14, 2020.
This will leave users with either Windows 8.1 that nearly nobody wants, or Windows 10 that many people don’t want. I’m not all that sure anyone wanted either one to begin with. A Windows 7 Service Pack 2 would have done nicely. Never the less, here we are.
Windows 7 support for home users will end over 10 years after it was released. We whined when they stopped supporting XP, an operating system that they supported for nearly 13 years. But, to be fair to Microsoft lets look at some other operating systems:
(Dates are best I could find, if you have a correction please post it.)
Apple
macOS 10.11 (El Capitan) Oldest supported Mac OS, Released in 2015
iOS – oldest supported phone (iPhone 5S – September 20, 2013) = approx 5 years old
Linux
Linux varies wildly by vendor but here is my best estimate:
Kernel 3.X EOL 2015-16, 3.5 to 4 years after initial release
Kernel 4.X initial release was 12 April 2015 and is current.
There is a kernel branch called LTS that differs from the above. These “”longterm maintenance” releases have varying expiration dates.
Individual vendors set there own schedules and can often range up to 6 years. The latest Linux Mint LTS release is 19/Tara was released June, 2018 and is supported until April 2023, just shy of 5 years.
Android
Android support is an unmitigated disaster. There seem to be no rules at all. As far as I can tell most phones stop getting updates about 3 years in.
Conclusion
You can see that Microsoft supports their operating systems a long time. Longer than anyone else. Still, for us Windows 7 lovers, end of support will truly suck. From Microsoft’s viewpoint maintaining 3 desktop operating systems is difficult, I get that. But the thing is, they are going to keep maintaining it for businesses anyway. Leaving home users out of the loop seems to be a cold blooded money grab. It is, IMHO, a big middle finger to everyone at home using Windows 7.
*notes
Windows lifecycle fact sheet (Applies to: Windows 10 Windows 7 Windows 8.1)
Wednesday Random Stuff…
Virtual Machine Host Software Updated
VMware Workstation Player 14.1.3 – 1 bugfix, OpenSSL update, Sprectre/Meltdown patch
VirtualBox 5.2.18 – a few bugfixes
Speaking of VMs. Many of you know I do most of my day-to-day web activity in a Linux VM. In the past I’ve used openSUSE. I have switched to Linux Mint 19 “Tara” Cinnamon. About the only thing I had to add after standard install was Chromium, Tor Browser, and HPLIP (HP printer drivers).
Foreshadow
Great. Just fracking great. Another Spectre type CPU vulnerability.
“Foreshadow is a speculative execution attack on Intel processors which allows an attacker to steal sensitive information stored inside personal computers or third party clouds. Foreshadow has two versions, the original attack designed to extract data from SGX enclaves and a Next-Generation version which affects Virtual Machines (VMs), hypervisors (VMM), operating system (OS) kernel memory, and System Management Mode (SMM) memory.”
Wired has a good breakdown.
The Guardian – How to turn off Google’s location tracking
After Monday’s news, I was gonna write up something on this and saw this article. It is well done.
Stuff I bookmarked recently. Some off topic, some not:
Ajit Pai grilled by lawmakers on why FCC spread “myth” of DDoS attack
“An FCC Inspector General (IG) investigation found that the FCC lied to members of Congress multiple times in letters that answered questions about DDoS attacks that never happened. Pai’s FCC claimed for more than a year that a May 2017 outage in the public comments system was caused by multiple DDoS attacks. In reality, the FCC system crashed because it was unable to handle an influx of comments triggered by comedian John Oliver asking viewers of his program Last Week Tonight to oppose Pai’s net neutrality repeal.”
Mystery Russian satellite’s behaviour raises alarm in US
“Russian intentions with respect to this satellite are unclear and are obviously a very troubling development,” she added, citing recent comments made by the commander of Russia’s Space Forces, who said adopting “new prototypes of weapons” was a key objective for the force.”
Sacramento welfare investigators track drivers to find fraud. Privacy group raises red flags.
“The EFF has a more skeptical view of the data-collection practice and said it’s “disturbing” that millions of people who are not suspected of a crime can be tracked with license plate photos.”
Suns Out, Guns Out
Remember our hero JJ Watt? Dude is ripped. I’m sure he will be destroying people. Don’t know how much NFL I will be watching this year but that is a topic for another day.
The Internet Reacts To JJ Watt’s Freakishly Large Arms In Latest Instagram Post
Friday Random Stuff…
I lost internet and TV like many people this afternoon. No biggie, I just took a nap 😉 It isn’t like there is a ton of worthwhile tech news out there. Everyone is screwing off enjoying the summer weather, myself included.
Linux Mint 19 “Tara” Cinnamon released!
Busy doing other things right now so it will be a while before I fire this up.
Every Android Device Since 2012 Impacted by RAMpage Vulnerability
Above is a good breakdown. Below is the official page on this.
https://rampageattack.com/
Marketing Firm Exactis Leaked a Personal Info Database With 340 Million Records
“including phone numbers, home addresses, email addresses, and other highly personal characteristics for every name. The categories range from interests and habits to the number, age, and gender of the person’s children.”
Rafting
I decided to go back to West Virginia and raft the New River Gorge again. I had my sites set on the Youghiogheny River but my head about exploded trying to find a decent place to stay up there where you can actually do something at night. Someone needs to set up a resort up there like they have in West Virginia. I’ve stayed at ACE Adventure Resort once and I will be doing Adventures on the Gorge for the second time. Those folks have it down with rafting, ziplining, rock climbing, hiking, horseback riding, and more. They have a bar and a restaurant on site and often live music. They have a full range of camping and more importantly cabins with AC! I’ve done all the “camping” I wanted between Northern Germany in the winter and the Saudi desert in the summer.
I also hope to mountain bike a little up in the mountains. When I say “mountain bike” I mean basically trail riding. I had to give up the hard-core stuff. My ego was writing checks my body couldn’t cash anymore and my wife and friends let me know it.
Reader Emails
I haven’t done this in a while. Hope you find something useful here.
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My Rescue Flash Drive
Creating a multi-scenario rescue USB flash drive. (Updated and expanded version of previous articles.)
*Edit – Tired of YouTube telling me I can’t embed videos on my own site because of background music.
PLEASE let me know if the embedded video at the bottom of this post is working.
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Random Christmas Eve Stuff…
Sorry for the lack of news. I’ve been super busy with work and I’ve got a terrible cold/flu/whatever on top of that.
Linux Mint 18.1
Mint 18.1 got released last week. Very disappointed in this release.
It is using LTS kernel 4.4. Skipping this one.
Winbubble
Winbubble is tool I used to tweak some Windows stuff (mostly GUI customizations). They now have a version for Win10.
Not as many options as it had for previous Windows versions.
Old version for Windows XP/Vista/7/8 is at Major Geeks.
ETC.
Google sued for encouraging employees to spy on each other
Reader Emails
(shortened to make them a quick read)
Q – Where do I get Win10 ISO’s?
A – Official downloads: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO
Easiest way – Microsoft Windows and Office ISO Download Tool
Q – After installing and deleting openSUSE I have left over entries in my UEFI boot menu. How to I get rid of it?
A – EasyUEFI – http://www.easyuefi.com/
Q – I need a large regular hard drive for video editing. What do you recommend?
A – The best SSDs and hard drives are always listed here: http://www.storagereview.com/best_drives