Very rough at the moment, with lots of issues that make it an early Beta, but it was nice to be able to scp over the save-hacking bash script I just wrote and have it Just Work, including creating a symlink to the save directory used by the Windows version of the game so that I could easily go back-and-forth between editing and testing. The supplied version of Ubuntu came with an old version of JQ, but I just grabbed the latest Linux binary with wget and all was well.

I’m going to try to build a decent Perl environment with Perlbrew, so that it survives reinstalls and upgrades. Then I can have some fun. If they ever get the Japanese IME working with WSL (or more precisely, their console window), I can have real fun.

"It's taking a bit longer than usual, but it should be ready soon"
    --- Windows 10 installer on a Lenovo S12

That’s what she (Cortana) said.

[Update 10/15: Ars Technica reports that Microsoft has called this a “mistake” and promised to fix it in the next update.]

I’d like to say a hearty “fuck you” to the person who decided that the optional update “Upgrade to Windows 10 Pro” should be selected by default. I caught it in time, but damn. That’s “anal probe with a rusty crowbar” behavior.

[Update: this isn’t happening to everyone, so I suspect the fact that this device is a Surface Pro 2 is the reason. They may pull this stunt on other users later, but someone likely decided that people who owned a Microsoft-branded tablet would be thrilled rather than appalled. They’re wrong, of course, since there’s no way to undo it and they removed full system backup/restore in Windows 8 (Acronis works nicely). They seem to think that their “system restore” functionality plus user-data backups is sufficient, neglecting the days of work it would take to reconfigure applications and restore data that isn’t covered by their partial backups.]

[Update: at this point, it looks like the auto-install kicks off if the background downloader has successfully finished copying the N-gig image to your hard drive. If you don’t leave your machine on unattended for long periods of time, you might not get the surprise for a while.]

I think I speak for every network manager and privacy advocate in the world when I say, “fuck you with a rusty crowbar”.

For those who don’t know, one of the features in the Windows 10 beta (and already in the field in Windows Phone 8.1) is WiFi Sense. The short version is, if you share your wireless access with someone, you’re now potentially sharing it with everyone on their contacts list from Outlook.com, Skype, and even Facebook if they link their accounts.

And the network owner can’t stop them from sharing the password, or even find out that it’s happened. MS offers only one way to prevent this from happening, and that’s changing your network’s SSID to contain the string “_optout”. (This article notes that Google has their own magic string to prevent your wireless from being mapped by their cars, so the new hotness is “_optout_nomap”. No doubt Apple will jump on the bandwagon as well, and next year it will have to be “_optout_nomap_nocandyfromstrangers”).

They claim it will only give limited access to all these strangers, and not let them see anything else that’s on your home network, but that requires that we not only believe that there are no security holes in a Microsoft product, but that the raw password is securely stored in three different online services and every stranger’s device.

The only real defense is to use WPA2 Enterprise authentication, which requires a Radius server. Unfortunately, a lot of consumer-grade wireless-only products won’t do that at all. Last time I tried to get a Kindle to use it, it detected it but never actually sent the username/password combination.

[Update: Microsoft’s FAQ for this misfeature includes the statement:

It can take several days for your network to be added to the opted-out list for Wi-Fi Sense. If you want to stop your network from being shared sooner than that, you can change your Wi-Fi network password.

Crowbar, Rusty. Rinse and repeat.]

[Update: just tested a Kindle Paperwhite against a WPA2 Enterprise wireless running TTLS/PAP user-based authentication. It sent an empty password, so no, you can’t protect your home wireless from Wifi Sense if you plan to connect common small devices to it.]

Our executive admin came by asking if there was anything she could use to convert some photos from color to black-and-white. Assorted people have Photoshop, but she didn’t want to take up anyone else’s time, she just needed something quick to paste into a slide/report/whatever.

Trivial with Preview.app on a Mac (in fact, hard to avoid, since the misnamed app autosaves even accidental changes made to any image or PDF you view…), but she couldn’t find anything in a stock Windows 7 install that would do it. I vaguely remembered having tripped over some image-modifying tools in Microsoft Word, so I pasted a work-safe sample photo into a new document, right-clicked, selected the obvious-looking “Format Picture…” item, and found tools for cropping, resizing, and recoloring. Ten seconds later, I right-clicked the photo again, selected “Save as Picture…”, and we were done.

Microsoft finally released the Surface Power Cover recently, and it was worth the wait.

There is only one downside: the keys aren’t backlit, like the standard Touch and Type Covers. I can’t imagine why they did this, since the set of people who want significantly more battery life and don’t want a backlighting option has to be pretty small.

Physically, it’s twice as thick and twice as heavy as the standard Type Cover, giving my Surface Pro 2 more of a netbook feel to carry, but not unpleasantly so. It came with a warning label telling you to make sure you have all the latest software updates before attaching it, but since I preordered mine the moment they flipped the switch on the Microsoft site, I got it the day before the official release date, and the firmware updates didn’t show up until the next day. It worked fine, though, and after the update, the battery levels were tracked separately.

How well does it work? Well, I just finished 45 minutes on the elliptical with a ripped Bluray disc playing, at 2/3 volume and 100% brightness, with WiFi turned on. The system reported that I had just over 15 hours of battery life left, and based on how the Pro 2 has performed the past few months, I believe it.

Outlook 2013 started breaking for our users last week. Only some of them, and not all at the same time, but the symptom was that the application would no longer start, hanging at the “loading profile…” screen.

The solution is to switch to the “Windows 7 Basic” graphical theme, turning off all the 3D UI decorations.

No, seriously.

And that’s about four days of sysadmin time that we’d like back, please.

So, right after Christmas, I caught the brief window where the Microsoft Surface Pro 2 was back in stock in my preferred configuration (8GB RAM, 256GB SSD), and bought one, along with the only keyboard cover that was available in a non-hideous color, the first-generation Touch Cover. Since they still haven’t released the Power Cover that gives you real keys and an extra 50% battery life, I made do with that for a while, and then got a good price on the second-generation Type Cover at Amazon Japan.

[Note: for the last few releases, it’s been a lot less painful to switch keyboard types in Windows; you used to have to hack the registry when you had US Windows and a Japanese keyboard, now you can just add the correct layout and manually switch. It still can’t auto-detect different keyboards the way the Mac has been doing for a long time, but it’s progress.]

There are a few quirks that have been discussed in the many reviews of the Surface Pro, but it’s genuinely good hardware, marred only by the immaturity of Windows’ handling of high-resolution displays. Basically, every piece of software that isn’t rebuilt to use the (apparently-incomplete, at least that’s why Adobe says they’re having so much trouble) HiDPI APIs will be scaled to make the text readable, and this breaks all sorts of layouts. For many applications, your choices are “big and fuzzy”, “way too small”, and occasionally “missing most menus and dialog text” (yes, that means you, FontExplorer Pro). “Way too small” is particularly annoying with a touchscreen, but the pen and trackpad have the resolution to handle tiny targets. And the problem goes away if you connect an external HDMI display.

My only complaints about the keyboard covers have to do with the trackpad. First, there’s no way to shut off tapping. There’s an app that claims to offer this feature, but it simply doesn’t work on the Pro 2, and there’s no hint of an update. On any tap-enabled trackpad, I’m constantly mis-clicking while trying to move the pointer across the screen, and it drives me nuts. They’re just too damn sensitive about the amount of pressure required to “tap”.

The second problem with the trackpad is that it often doesn’t work if you plug a USB device in. Because Microsoft’s own USB/Ethernet adapter is a 10Mbit USB2 device, I bought a third-party USB3 gigabit adapter that also includes a 3-port hub. It works great, but if I plug in the adapter and then wake up the tablet, the keyboard cover doesn’t get enough power to run the trackpad. Reverse the order and all is well.

Typical battery life is 8+ hours, unless I’m playing Skyrim, in which case I get a bit over 4. It never gets uncomfortably warm, and the fans are nice and quiet. The two-position kickstand is a nice upgrade over the first-generation Pro, and makes it possible to play Skyrim in bed on a lap desk. The speakers are quite loud for a tablet, and better than most laptops I’ve used.

It’s fantastic for Illustrator since the last update, but until Adobe gets the resolution problems sorted out, Photoshop is annoying to use, both because you need a hack to make the icons visible, and because the 64-bit version has issues with the Pro 2’s graphics drivers. Lightroom is fine, and InDesign is reportedly working well, too. [all of these being the pay-to-play CC versions, which is a rant for another day. Let’s just say there are some cranky pros out there annoyed by a combination of incompatible changes and workflow-crippling bugs]

The “app” market is, as expected, filled with iPaddish crap. I’ve deleted most of the apps that I’ve tried, and I haven’t found a lot of good ones to try. If I had to choose between a standard Surface and an iPad, I’d buy the iPad and complain about it; instead, I get to enjoy the Pro 2.

How do I feel about Windows 8.1? It was designed for a tablet, works well on one, and sucks elsewhere. There are some compatibility issues compared to Windows 7 (VPN software, assorted third-party drivers, etc). On the little netbook I upgraded, I needed to hunt down a Start-menu replacement to make it tolerable; not good, just tolerable.

Oh, and how did I pay for it? A friend sold off a bunch of my old Magic: The Gathering cards on eBay. Just a handful of high-value cards paid for the tablet, keyboard, gigabit adapter, HDMI adapter, and a new Bluetooth mouse, with money left over. We still need to go through the rest of my cards and put them all up as a big batch. And then see if anyone wants to buy a big batch of INWO, black-border Jyhad, XXXenophile, etc…