Ernie's

I needed a way to put persistent reminders on my desktop to remind me of daily tasks and appointments, because I'm easily distracted, and I can become so engrossed in what I'm doing that I lose track of the passage of time, not a good thing on days I have appointments, or fail to feed my dog or cat on schedule. To make things even more complicated, I dual-boot Windows 11 Pro 25H2 with Garuda Mokka Linux, so I wanted solutions for both OSes. After a lot of searching on the Internet I came to the conclusion that what I want isn't available, at least not in a way I'm comforted with using. Across my search efforts I used Google's AI overview extensively in an effort to discover a solution that would do what I wanted, in a way I wanted (I' can be picky when it comes to my computers). After a few months of this on-again - off-again search, I gave up and decided to put my efforts on a back burner for a while. A few weeks later, I read an item about Windows Task Sched...

Due to OneDrive so aggressively activating/reactivating "features" I don't want, I've removed it from my Windows computers - very carefully, step-by-step, as follows: 1. Copy all folders/files within your OneDrive folder to a safe location - an external 2TB USB3 SSD drive, in my case. 2. Set all folders/files to be available offline (this will copy everything on OneDrive to your local computer), on all PCs. 3. Check that the Backup "feature" is disabled, and stop synchronization in your Windows OneDrive app, on all computers. 4. Disable your OneDrive app, then remove/uninstall it in Settings | Apps | Installed apps, on all computers. 5. Sign out of OneDrive and delete everything in your OneDrive folder that you can, on any laptop/secondary PCs you may have, then delete everything that you can in your OneDrive folder on your desktop/primary PC, and check that everything's removed from OneDrive online after emptying the Recycle Bin there, then sign out of ...

Introduction/Information I dual-boot Windows with Garuda GNU/Linux (the KDE-Lite flavor). At present, no Arch-based distribution supports secure boot out-of-the-box, but Windows 11 wants secure boot enabled, so I went looking for a solution. I found one that integrates secure-boot support into my Arch-based GNU/Linux distribution on the CachyOS Wiki that uses the sbctl package, and it works flawlessly for me, with one caveat that your computer must have the ability to enter set-up mode, or manage/delete PK keys in the EFI (BIOS) interface. A second caveat is that only dual-boot (Windows with a single GNU/Linux distribution) works at present, and I have not yet learned a way to use sbctl with non-Arch-based distributions, unless they have the package available in their repository. With that said, the best feature of sbctl is that it creates a post-build hook so when you get an updated kernel, the image gets automatically signed for you as part of the installation, so you don't ha...

I have used a number of distributions over the years, starting with Mandrake Linux which morphed into Mandriva after a few iterations, then when the company stopped distributing/supporting it, I switched to Mageia, a community-based fork of Mandriva that was originated by several members of the Mandriva development team (I had vowed to never use a corporate/Company based/supported distro again as a result of my experience with Mandrake/Mandriva). When I ran into issues I could not resolve with Mageia 8, I used Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) for a time. When Microsoft released Windows 11, I became aware of UEFI with Secure Boot, and I though it was a good idea. For me, security is a layered affair, structured something like an onion. The more layers I can add to my security system, the more roadblocks there are for the bad guys, and each segment of my system that I make more secure adds another layer to my security onion. I mention Secure Boot because none of the distributions I use...

For any GNU/Linux users (Debian based distributions), here is a list of several common apt commands and their descriptions: apt command function of the command apt install Installs a package apt remove Removes a package apt purge Removes all traces of a configuration (including configuration) apt update Refreshes repository index apt upgrade Upgrades all upgradable packages apt autoremove Removes unwanted packages apt full-upgrade Upgrades packages with auto-handling of dependencies apt search Searches for the program apt show Shows package details apt list --upgradable Lists all upgradable packages apt list --installed Lists all i...

I have subscribed to US-CERT Security Advisories, and several other related security advisory mailing lists for more years than I can count. Today, I received an Advisory from US-CERT titled ‘Keeping PowerShell: Measures to Use and Embrace, with a link to a PDF document of the same title, at ‘ Keeping PowerShell: Measures to Use and Embrace | CISA ’. In and of itself, this document is probably not of much interest to most home Windows 10 or 11 users, but reading it informed me that there is a newer and possibly more secure version of PowerShell available to the general public. The document linked above was not very clear about that, but the suggestion was there. I make it a policy to keep all the software on my computers as up to date as possible, based on the information I have at any given point in time, so when I learned that there is a newer version of PowerShell available, of course, I had to get it. WindowsPowerShell 5.1 comes preinstalled in Windows 10 and 11. Since it is needed...