My Love-Hate Relationship with Windows

Okay, to start off: I’ve been using Windows for as long as I can remember using computers. As a little kid, I used my father’s Windows XP laptop to watch YouTube and play Pinball. Later on, my parents digged up a Windows 3.11 beast, on which I mainly played the few games it had and toyed around with various settings. I spoke no English at the time, which made it even more fun.

So we’ve established I grew up with Windows and I should probably like it. And I do like it: it’s a great productivity tool once you get used to it and things just work. But sometimes, they don’t. And what infuriates me is that the things that don’t work are either the most obscure, forgotten features in the world, or the most commonly used interactions in the entire system.

Have you ever tried to update and shut down a Windows PC? It’s been an option for several years now, but every single time I’ve tried to click on “Update & Shut down”, the PC has instead updated and restarted, which is endlessly annoying, since I usually shut down before bed, so now I have to walk over and shut it down again from the lockscreen. Why?! How is it possible that this has been happening to me on at least 2 different PCs for as long as the feature has existed and still hasn’t been fixed? This isn’t happening to just me either… So annoying!

I actually tried to update and shutdown again a few days ago when it popped up in the Start menu. I’ll let you guess what actually happened:

  1. It worked;
  2. It updated, but restarted.

Drumrolls please… neither! Windows decided not to update and then restarted! Because why would it do any of the two things it said it’s going to do?

Today was the absolute cherry on top. I was in bed reading a book and got quite annoyed at the humming from my PC, so I lazily decided to connect to it via Remote Desktop on my phone, and shut it down – this has worked numerous times before. I did click the button and even saw the screen saying “Shutting down”. I thought to myself – “Great!” Alas, two hours later I realised my PC was still making noise. So what happened? Windows had single-handledly decided to abort shutting down for whatever reason (the only app running was Discord, which doesn’t prevent it). I have no idea what happened, but what I do know is that I had to channel my annoyance somewhere, which somehow led you to reading this. Honestly, if you’ve stuck around after so much of my whining, you deserve an award.

I have a couple of devices – an iPhone, an Amazon Fire tablet running Android (which I’m using to write this article right now), my Windows PC and a laptop running Arch Linux. No other device has trouble shutting down. In fact, Linux takes the prize on this: writing shutdown -h now fully stops the thing within 5-6 seconds. Amazing! Maybe Microsoft could look into hiring those awesome engineers from OpenAI to work on the shutdown feature of Windows. Surely if they can create AI video successfully, they could maybe fix shutdown? What do I know, I’m not the company that has been developing operating systems for the most of its existence… :/

i use arch btw

How to setup mutt with Yahoo Mail

Hi! I just stumbled upon terminal email clients, and decided to give mutt a go. This is how you setup mutt with Yahoo.

Install mutt

Using your preferred package manager, install the mutt package. I’m on Arch (btw), so for me, that’s pacman:

sudo pacman -S mutt

Configuring mutt

I followed the steps from this forum post:

1. Create the config directories and files:

mkdir -p ~/.mutt/cache/headers
mkdir ~/.mutt/cache/bodies
touch ~/.mutt/certificates
touch ~/.mutt/muttrc

Note: the -p on mkdir is a flag to create missing parent directories. So the first command will create ~/.mutt/ and ~/.mutt/cache if they don’t exist, before attempting to create ~/.mutt/cache/headers.

2. Create a Yahoo app password

Yahoo won’t let you sign in from any app without an “app password”. The idea is that your main Yahoo password is restricted to the web client only. Open up the Security page in your Yahoo Account preferences – link.

Scroll to “How you sign in to Yahoo”, which should have a panel for “Other ways to sign in” with “App Password” underneath. Click on “Generate and manage app passwords”, enter a name for the app (it doesn’t matter what you write here, I used “mutt laptop” so I can differentiate between apps easily). When you enter the name, the password will appear. Write that down somewhere, because you won’t get to see it again otherwise.

3. Configuration file

Open ~/.mutt/muttrc with your preferred text editor (nvim of course) and use the following template:

# Yahoo settings
set imap_user = "username@yahoo.com"
set imap_pass = "password"
set smtp_url = "smtp://$imap_user:$imap_pass@smtp.mail.yahoo.com:587"
set smtp_pass = "password"
set from = "username@yahoo.com"
set realname = "Your real name"
set folder = "imaps://imap.mail.yahoo.com:993"
set spoolfile = "+INBOX"
set postponed="+[Yahoo]/Drafts"
set header_cache=~/.mutt/cache/headers
set message_cachedir=~/.mutt/cache/bodies
set certificate_file=~/.mutt/certificates
set move = no
set sort = 'threads'
set sort_aux = 'last-date-received'
set imap_check_subscribed

# Some tweaks
set ssl_starttls = yes
set imap_keepalive = 300
set mail_check = 90
set timeout = 15
set charset = iso-8859-1

4. Replace placeholders

  • On the bits where it says username in the values (e.g. username@yahoo.com), put your login, so essentially write your email address.
  • Don’t forget to replace “Your real name” with whatever you wish to show up as the sender when sending mail. For the webmail client, this is whatever name you’ve configured in your Yahoo account.
  • On the bits where it says password, use the App Password we generated above.

Voilà!

You should be all set. Run mutt in your terminal to see if it worked. Hopefully you get to see your inbox! (I have some Cyrillic emails which show up as ?)

An issue I encountered

It’s a good client, but it + kitty (my terminal emulator) do not seem to pair well. Let’s look at an email with links:

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is image-1-1024x431.png

Yeah, not pretty. If you’re looking for a solution for that, this blog seems to have fixed it, but I haven’t tested it. Happy mutt-ing!

Welcome to whatever this is!

Hi, dear reader! Welcome to my website, I guess. I hadn’t ever planned on writing a blog (it’s 2024, I’m Gen Z, sue me), but I realised occasionally I have thoughts that I find cool, but don’t have anyone to talk about with. So this is where they’re going now!

A bit about myself: I’m a self-taught programmer from Bulgaria, I love tinkering around with systems and stuff that’s more “behind the scenes”. I’ve been coding since around 8 years old and have gained quite a lot of weird and quirky bits of knowledges from random areas in development that have piqued my interest as I grew older. I really like roleplay games (not the DnD style, but actual real world roleplaying) and I sometimes journal.

I don’t have any plans for this. No set interval between posts, nothing. Some may be in Bulgarian, who knows: I get a spot on the Internet to dump my ridicolousness in now, and that’s all that matters to me!