A letter from Nov 17, 2025

Dear FutureMe, Today, at work, was the IT enable of "Windows Hello or Else". Well, my older Lenovo mini-tower is no bueno because the TPM isn't new enough (Microsoft's bogus-new-sales-for-our-hardware-partners project). Without TPM 2.0, I couldn't upgrade the virtual machines to Windows 11. Windows 10 doesn't support Windows Hello, so my main rig, which I've been using for about a decade, is ******. I so dearly love Microsoft (not). The machine has the Intel Core i7 6700 chip which cranks along at a fine 3.4 GHz. I've been running three Windows 10 virtual machines on it just _fine_ for years. I'd bumped it up to 40 GB RAM, and added a solid-state 2 TB drive. I'd added a four port video card, and had four monitors surrounding me. (Yes, I bought the monitors with as much curve as I could get, for $175 each - well, three of those). Thankfully, my boss had given me an old beefy laptop (a hand-me-down) and it has 32 GB RAM and Windows 11. I unplugged one of my curved monitors from the minitower, and plugged it into the laptop. So at least I have two screens now. The problem, of course, is that Windows sucks. On my Linux VM host, I had focus-follows-mouse set, so that no matter where I pointed the mouse, that was the active screen. Also, I was doing programming in the Kate editor, and now I'll have to switch to Notepad++. It's not bad, but it doesn't have a connection to my Linux Language Server Protocol (LSP) server, which provides language support features. Many people at work used RDP to a get to a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), and ... that server doesn't support Windows Hello either. Oh, also, a power distribution unit failed, no alerts went out, but VMware rebalanced the workload on the remaining host machines (blades). Is it a problem if most blades have 30 virtual machines on them, but one has 140? Happy Dumpster Fire Monday!