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The day-to-day grind of maintaining a sprawling Obsidian vault finally pushed one user to try a different path: they migrated thousands of notes into Joplin, and within weeks declared they weren’t going back — praising Joplin’s genuinely open-source model, straightforward sync options, and noticeably lower maintenance overhead. This move — from a file-per-note, plugin-heavy second brain to an app built around an offline-first database and pragmatic syncing — is an instructive case study for...

Microsoft is testing a set of context‑aware AI editing tools that sit directly in File Explorer, letting you right‑click an image or document and invoke tasks such as Bing Visual Search, background blur/removal, generative object erase, and document summarization — and there are documented ways to try them today if you’re willing to run Insider builds or use community tools to unlock the hidden flags. Overview Microsoft’s newest experiments move small, repeatable editing tasks out of full...

Microsoft told many owners of older Windows 10 PCs they couldn’t move to Windows 11 — but hundreds of readers proved otherwise, using two straightforward workarounds to complete upgrades on hardware Microsoft’s installer flags as “incompatible.” The result: real-world evidence that the blockers are surmountable for many machines, but also a clear list of risks and trade-offs that every homeowner, refurbisher, or IT pro should weigh before attempting the same. Background / Overview Microsoft...

Nearly half a century after those first keystrokes on primitive terminals, Microsoft has made public the assembly-language source for its 6502-targeted BASIC interpreter — a compact, remarkable artifact of early microcomputer engineering that is now available on GitHub under a permissive MIT license. Background The story begins where modern software companies rarely do: with hand-crafted assembly and the need to make every byte count. In 1975–1976 Bill Gates and early Microsoft engineer Ric...

Early benchmark data shows Ubuntu 25.10 holding a measurable advantage over Microsoft’s Windows 11 25H2 in CPU‑heavy workloads on a high‑end AMD Ryzen 9 9950X testbed, with Phoronix’s first‑look geomean numbers pointing to roughly a ~15% edge for the Linux build in this specific profile. Background Ubuntu 25.10 and Windows 11 25H2 are both due for broad release in the coming weeks, but they arrived in preview/daily snapshot form early enough for independent benchmarking. Phoronix ran a...

Chrome profiles quietly solve one of the most persistent productivity problems in modern browsing: context bleed. By giving each role or mode—work, personal, social, research—its own isolated browser environment, profiles prevent tabs, bookmarks, extensions, cookies, and signed-in accounts from colliding. The result is a faster, less distracted workflow and a far cleaner way to manage tab hoarding than endlessly piling everything into a single window and hoping a bookmark folder will save...

Microsoft’s decision to close a high‑visibility employee forum and to roll out a phased, three‑day‑a‑week return‑to‑office baseline represents a coordinated reshaping of how the company will manage employee speech, campus security and everyday work patterns — a package Microsoft frames as necessary for safety and to accelerate cross‑disciplinary AI work, but one that also raises immediate questions about transparency, legal risk and talent strategy. Background / Overview For much of the...

Hell Let Loose refusing to start on some Windows rigs has become an annoyingly common thread in community help channels — players report the game showing the Easy Anti‑Cheat splash, briefly loading, and then closing with no error, or the launcher simply returning to the desktop. A concise KeenGamer troubleshooting guide collected six practical fixes — disabling Varjo services, forcing DirectX, verifying files, running the executable as administrator, repairing Easy Anti‑Cheat, and a handful...

Installing Windows 11 on Proxmox is eminently doable, but it’s not the “select ISO and click next” experience many users expect — you’ll need additional ISOs, a UEFI firmware, a virtual TPM, and the correct VirtIO drivers at the right step in the installer to get a clean, performant VM. Background Proxmox VE is a powerful, Debian-based virtualization platform that leverages KVM/QEMU under the hood. That architecture gives you tremendous flexibility — native ZFS support, snapshots, clustered...

Microsoft’s Office productivity stack is entering a new phase: after years of deep reliance on OpenAI, Microsoft will begin routing select Copilot workloads inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook to Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 models, creating a multi‑model Copilot that assigns the “right model for the right job.” Background / Overview Microsoft’s integration of generative AI into Microsoft 365 — branded Microsoft 365 Copilot — began as a close, product-defining partnership with OpenAI...

Microsoft’s September Patch Tuesday delivers a surgical corrective: the cumulative updates released on September 9, 2025 refine the User Account Control (UAC) behavior introduced in August and restore expected installer and streaming behavior while preserving the security hardening that closed CVE‑2025‑50173. Background Microsoft shipped an August 12, 2025 security rollup that included a targeted fix for a Windows Installer privilege‑escalation vulnerability tracked as CVE‑2025‑50173. The...

Microsoft has pushed the September 2025 cumulative for Windows 11 version 23H2 — KB5065431 (OS build 22631.5909) — and the update is available both through Windows Update and as an offline .msu installer from the Microsoft Update Catalog. This release is a targeted quality-and-security rollup rather than a feature pack: it addresses recent regressions that affected streaming (NDI), tightens SMB handling, and restores expected behavior for Installer/UAC workflows introduced by the August...

Microsoft’s productivity stack is entering a new, more plural era: after years of deep integration with OpenAI’s models, Microsoft is reported to be adding Anthropic’s Claude — specifically the Sonnet model family — into Office 365’s Copilot workflows, creating a multi‑model orchestration that routes tasks to the model best suited for each job. Background / Overview For most of the past three years Microsoft and OpenAI were effectively inseparable in the public mind: Microsoft provided the...

More than a third of New Zealand’s retail investors now report using generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot to inform investment decisions — and a substantial majority of those users say they are satisfied with the results — a shift that is reshaping how ordinary investors research, validate and execute portfolio ideas while exposing fresh governance and market‑integrity risks. Background The findings come from Chartered Accountants Australia & New Zealand’s (CA ANZ)...

Dave Plummer’s confession that his port of 3D Pinball for Windows — the Space Cadet table so many of us grew up with — once drew frames “as fast as it could” and reportedly hit roughly 5,000 FPS on newer hardware has resurfaced a powerful, funny and instructive moment in Windows engineering history. The anecdote reveals how a tiny design choice in an era of constrained hardware turned into a conspicuous CPU-hogging oddity as processors and system architectures evolved, and how a pragmatic...

The countdown to October 14, 2025 has turned what once felt like a routine product lifecycle event into a corporate boardroom dilemma: continue to run a mature, widely deployed operating system with mounting security and compliance risks, or expend capital and operational bandwidth to migrate fleets to Windows 11 (or alternative platforms) before Microsoft stops shipping routine security updates. Microsoft’s official notice sets the deadline in stone and lays out ESU and migration options...

For millions of Windows users the familiar, maddening moment when music or game sound collapses into muffled, mono telephone audio the instant a Bluetooth headset’s microphone is used may finally be ending — Microsoft has integrated Bluetooth LE Audio support into Windows 11 and introduced a super‑wideband stereo routing mode so compatible headsets can deliver stereo media and high‑quality microphone audio at the same time. Background / Overview For nearly two decades PC Bluetooth audio has...

The UK Department for Business and Trade’s three‑month pilot of Microsoft 365 Copilot delivered a familiar but important paradox: users reported real and concentrated time savings—especially on written work and meeting summaries—but the evaluation could not find robust evidence that those measured time savings translated into improved departmental productivity during the trial period. Background / Overview The pilot ran from October to December 2024 and provided around 1,000 M365 Copilot...

Microsoft’s September 2025 Patch Tuesday delivers a heavy, operationally important security payload: this cycle addresses roughly 80 CVEs across Windows, Office, Azure, Hyper‑V and related components, including several critical remote‑code‑execution (RCE) and elevation‑of‑privilege (EoP) flaws that should move immediately to the top of enterprise patch lists. The release also comes with two calendar items that change risk calculations for IT teams: Windows 10 reaches end of support in...

Five years after Microsoft shipped the Surface Duo, the company’s boldest pocketable experiment—a dual-screen Android handset that briefly promised to reshape mobile productivity—stands as a study in ambition undone by rushed execution, poor communication, and mismatched expectations. Background The Surface Duo arrived in a crowded moment for smartphone form factors: folding glass panels were just starting to enter the mainstream, and makers were wrestling with whether a single, foldable...