As a perfectionist, I have been struggling to have a perfect PIM (personal information management) solution. For the personal part, I currently use (Exchange-based) Outlook.com. For the professional (institutional) part, things have been so hard. This entry records some of the problems I have encountered so far, and for certain ones, a solution. Expect this entry to be a mess and full of complaints.
这次 Microsoft 和 Apple 都令人恼火！
我之前在知乎问题“为什么很多人要禁止 Windows 10 自动更新”下多个回答的评论区宣传 ShutdownBlockReasonCreate 这个 API，尝试“教育”开发者正确处（阻）理（止）Windows 10 自动更新重启带来的关键任务被终止的问题，还因为这个被人挂了。一开始我抱着怀疑的态度提出的方法，之后不知什么原因就假设这个 API 确实有效了——我当时已经知道该 API 不能其效果的情况，但是我没料到“大更新”的时候 Windows 真的会用那么暴力的方法重启电脑。本文记录了一些我的观察，并从使用者的角度给出一些关于 Windows 10 自动更新处理上的建议。
Have you ever tried using UseNewEnvironment switch when invoking Start-Process cmdlet? Intuitively, turning it on makes the newly created process use the default environment instead of that of the parent process. However, its semantics is way more complicated, obscure and buggy than the intuition. TL; DR: You rarely want to use this switch.
Ever since I used Windows NT (for me, the first Windows NT I used is Windows XP), I’ve been familiar with the importance of Ctrl+Alt+Delete. The combination is known as the secure attention sequence for Windows. In an uninfected copy of Windows, the sequence is handled exclusively by Windows, and is used to thwart trojan dialogs luring users’ credentials. Requiring SAS before Welcome Screen is a quite usable security feature. However, it is not the case for Credential User Interface.
Clear-RecycleBin is a cmdlet that clears your recycle bin. Internally, it calls SHEmptyRecycleBin function. It has been malfunctioning for a long time: when you run the cmdlet for the first time in a PowerShell session with Force switch on, it produces an ErrorRecord. Further investigation shows that it is detecting error status of SHEmptyRecycleBin the wrong way. To make things worse, SHEmptyRecycleBin is really bad at error handling.
a.k.a. How to be disappointed again by UA. I was visiting New York University and Carnegie Mellon University. Flying from Beijing to New York, from New York to Pittsburgh, from Pittsburgh to Beijing via Chicago, I chose United Airlines, one that suffers from previous scandals on ‘violently reaccomodating a customer’. It turns out that their in-flight entertainment system is also torturing! This entry was written during the flight from Chicago to Beijing.
Groove Music allows the user to store their music collection, including songs available via Music Pass subscription, those purchased from the Store, those stored on your OneDrive and those stored locally. This gives the users false impression that purchased music are secured by Microsoft’s service so they’re never lost.
清华网络费用非常高！另外，曾经清华网费有死锁，因为使用了网银；后来采用了微信、支付宝，声称解决了死锁。但我今天一试，发现根本不是这样的！（已更新）
如何背叛“微软教”。7 月 24 日更新：我的一个好朋友也要换手机了！
I should have honoured myself as a bug trigger.
