Microsoft looks to be making a big change to how you install and log in to Windows 11

I rapidly scratched off Washington and Colorado due to the Kalifornication of both states. Idaho got a closer look.

Idaho is the best state in the Northwest by far. My wife and I purchased a beautiful 1941 Cadillac from eBay in Indiana. We drove it back across the country to get it home. It took us a couple extra days because all across the country people were so friendly and talkative that it slowed our progress. When we crossed the border into Washington there was a noticeable change in attitude. And we normally consider people from Eastern Washington to be the friendliest in the state, but Spokane is a bit of an outlier.

I am very sorry to hear of the health problems that you have been fighting for the last 40 years.

I grew up on acreage just outside of Tacoma. I always loved getting my feet off the ground. We had a tremendous rope swing that I installed from a branch high up in an ancient Fir tree on the side of a steep hill. When we launched ourselves using it, we would reach approximately 50 feet above the ground at its apex.

A few years later the rope broke after my little brother launched himself, fortunately he was only part way out and he came down on the side of the hill but just slid and tumbled down the steep slope until he came to a stop in the soft mud at the bottom and didn't get seriously injured. Unfortunately, I broke my foot when I lost my footing when climbing back down after tying a new rope to an even higher branch.

We had an old farm tractor that the neighbor gave us after we salvaged it from the mud that it had been trapped in for decades. The biggest expense when repairing it was buying new tires because the old ones had rotted. It would go really fast when it was in its highest gear. It was extremely fun to tow innertubes behind when it snowed. My brother and I constructed a large Rogallo style kite to tow behind it and hopefully get ourselves aloft, but it never worked out.

Fast forwarding a few years, I ended up buying some old hang gliders. I tried to teach myself how to fly them but had to take lessons after hurting my back. After a hundred or so hours aloft in hang gliders, I purchased a homebuilt ultralight airplane powered by a Rotax snowmobile engine.

I flew the ultralight for a couple years out of Port Orchard Airport. One day when I got back to the field, I found that the old man who kept his Piper Tri Pacer a couple doors down had given my wife a ride.

She marched up to me and said, “We need an airplane that I can fly in to.” So, I always like to joke that I am the first man in the history of aviation whose wife insisted that her husband buy an airplane. It usually goes the other direction.

We were members of an Ultralight aircraft club which evolved into an experimental aircraft club which evolved into a vintage aircraft club. So, I started taking lessons and we started looking for a vintage aircraft like the Aeronca that you learned to fly in. We had an Aeronca Chief inspected buy a mechanic but it had too many issues.

We ended up buying a Piper Cherokee because it was barely more expensive than a vintage aircraft; it is easier to fly, and is much faster and more versatile. After that we moved onto an airport with a bunch of houses built around it.

The rope string reminds me of my foolish adventures in the woods around Springfield, VA. The local kids had a favorite spot with natural vines that were about 3 inches in diameter and hung down 50 feet from the tree canopy. One would allow you to swing out from the edge of a steep hill and be well over the tree tops. If you were stupid and took more than one out and back, you had to drop increasing distances onto the hillside. Worst case a 100 foot drop. I decided one swing out and back was all the risk I would take.

You had an interesting progression in your flying pursuits. Definitely a win to have your wife angling for the plane. My wife ended up needing to take a gun safety course for a hunting license required for hunting with her Red Tail hawk. That spurred an interest in firearms, then she realized she needed communications in the field. She pursued a ham license. She volunteered to work at the Miramar Airshow and was recruited to work as a dispatcher at the San Diego Sheriff's Office. Peculiar how one thing leads to another.

Idaho has had a lot of growth, but it is still a good landing place for a retiree. If you don't have to find employment in the local economy, you are in good shape. My employment is not dependent on the local economy. It is a work from home arrangement from a prior San Diego based job.

I still have a Vic-20 around. It was purchased mostly for the kids to play video games. By the time I had PCs in each room and networked with coax based Ethernet, it was time to "up the game". There was a networked version of Doom available. I'm not a gamer, but I modified the code to change characters to things like pink bunnies before letting my sons play. They laughed a lot. That was nominally 1985.

While the kids were playing Doom on networked PCs at the house, I was getting work done on a TRS-80 Model 16 running Xenix. E-mail in 1983 was based on UUCP. My Xenix box was part of a nationwide network of UNIX style boxes. I put my first internet connection up in 1985 using a Xenix port of Phil Karn's amateur radio oriented "net" code. UCSD hosted my connection. It was very primitive. Telnet.FTP. Simple sendmail with internet style user@host e-mail addresses.

I think that your background is very interesting and amazing. I have to admit that most of my home networking has been for media sharing between computers that I have had connected to our televisions. I use a program called Audials that I have been using for years to record and share streamed content using Plex.

I have a large collection of vintage “home computers” and game consoles from the 1980s including Apple, Atari, Coleco, Commodore, Radio Shack/Tandy, Spectravideo, Texas Instrument and Timex along with a few other weird off-brand products. The ones that I didn’t purchase new were mostly purchased from thrift stores in the 1990s and eBay and antique stores more recently. But I never have purchased a Vic-20. I would obtain these old computers and game consoles and try to get them to work, and then and obtain software for them. It was a hobby.

My aunt and uncle owned a business where they mostly rebuilt generators, alternators, and starters for cars and trucks. My aunt was the bookkeeper for the business, and she began purchasing computer equipment for their business starting with Radio Shack/Tandy. They had a lot of money invested in the TRS-80 based system that they put together.

I think I mentioned that I had to drop out of college and work for a family business for about ten years. While I was doing that, I did manage to take some classes at Community Colleges. One of them had a bunch of TRS-80 Computers in their computer lab. So, I did get a little time on them.

Later as I was separating myself more and more from our lumber remanufacturing business, I got a work study job starting out helping students with learning disabilities but fairly quickly being able to transfer to the computer lab assistant at the downtown “business center” of another community college.

We had about two dozen IBM PC clones that were not networked together, each had its own 10MB hard drive and a 5 1/4” floppy drive for students to save their homework. If I remember correctly, these were running MSDOS 3.2 and we had a shareware-based menu system from which students picked the program that they wanted to use. The students were not given access to the command line to keep them from screwing things up.

The primary subjects being taught were Lotus 123, Word Perfect, Basic Programming and an introduction to computers in general. I still have some of the textbooks. There was only one lab assistant on duty at a time. Since the computers were not networked, and did not even have modems let alone network cards... we had to manually update each of the computers using the floppy drives. Each computer had its own set of floppies so we would do about half of them at a time when doing “maintenance” or updating them.

My job was mostly helping students with their homework although I did fill in for absent teachers fairly frequently which was not that big of a deal since most had lesson plans that they tried to follow. These computers had no access to the internet, Compuserve, AOL, email, the school network or anything else. Yet at the time I thought that those 10 Megabyte hard drive’s were amazing. That summer we vacuumed out all of the computers and upgraded all of them to “massive” 20 Megabyte hard drives.

When I had been going to Western Washington University just a few years before they had no PC’s just terminals connected to their mainframes. While I was in high school I often worked nights as a janitor for one of my bicycle racing buddies. We cleaned the offices for several businesses. One of them was the headquarters for a fairly large lumber company. They had a mainframe and terminals. We cleaned the computer room in addition to the office. I was in awe at that time. Their computer was worth a fortune, but it probably had less actual processing power than most cell phones do today.

I have never been much of a gamer myself although I do have a first-generation PlayStation that I modded so that it could use CDR disks with collections of games that were not approved by Sony. So, for a while I did become proficient with game controllers. But other than that my gaming has almost all been with a progression of flight simulators.

I like to use them with a VR headset and rudder pedals to augment the flight simulator style joystick. I actually have quite a bit of money invested in our current system, software and fleet of virtual aircraft. It is no substitute for actual flying but I do like to fly virtually into new destinations. When we are not able to fly our real airplane, like right now I do like to fly around the pattern at our home airport regularly to help keep myself proficient.

Sounds like a nice collection of vintage computers. My Model 16 had a DS-DD 8" floppy. As time passed, it was getting more difficult to find 8" floppy media. I solved that problem by making a wiring adapter between the 8" floppy controller of the Model 16 and a 3 1/2" DS-DD floppy disk drive. It worked flawlessly and solved the media problem. The hard disk inside was upgraded to a 350 MB 5" drive with a controller than predated IDE. End of the road for that machine for hard disks.

This weekend's festivities include upgrading the house router to a TP Link model with WiFi7 capability. A task I want done while I'm still around to do it. It will future proof the house network for many years.

You leveraged your skill sets nicely to find and improve employment. I enjoyed teaching at the community college level for 3 1/2 years. Great students. Limited budgets. Affordable education. We don't do that as well in eastern Idaho. The new CEI facility in Idaho Falls is a good start.

Sounds like a nice collection of vintage computers

In reality it is mostly a large pile of e-waste that has very little value to anyone other than a hobbyist such as myself. I have been correctly accused of being a hoarder. Most of it is stacked out in our airplane hangar. I will probably start putting things that might have some value to others up on eBay when we are ready to move to a cheaper part of the country.

I am familiar with pre-IDE hard drives. I still have at least a couple MFM controllers and hard drives in my assortment of vintage computer equipment.

You leveraged your skill sets nicely to find and improve employment.

This is not a completely accurate assessment... I spent approximately ten years in a family business that was mostly a giant pain in the rear but did get me to expand my horizons a bit. I did try to take classes that might have eventually helped me get an engineering degree. What I knew about computers before working as a lab assistant mostly came from working with computers outside of an educational setting. I got my job as a Hazmat Fire Officer because I have always been extremely good at taking any type of standardized test... which civil service tests used to be.

My firefighting experience reminds me a little of my experience flying. By the time I jumped through the hoops to get my private pilot's license I had already been flying hang gliders and ultralight aircraft for years. I got a 100% on my written test by reading books, watching VHS tapes and getting a sign off from the instructor who I logged dual time with. My first solo in a General Aviation aircraft was anti-climatic because I already had at least a couple hundred hours in my little ultralight airplane. Even my first solo in the ultralight by accident but anti-climatic because of all the time that I already had flying hang gliders.

I didn't mention that I spent quite a bit of my childhood interested in chemistry. I learned as much from this as I did in college chemistry classes that I took along with continuing education in Hazmat operations.

I didn't pay much attention to my teachers in school, but was clever enough to get good grades anyway. I always had my own agendas from the time that I was a child. I have been thought to have attention deficit disorder and hyper-activity along with being somewhere on the Asperger Syndrome Diagnostic Scale. But they did not diagnose this type of thing when I was a child or put me on drugs which I am grateful for. I get along well with others for the most part.

I had no idea that my brain worked differently from others until I got a work study job helping people with learning disorders. This caused me to become interested in the subject. Later in my life I went to a mental health professional who felt that drugs would be helpful to me. But the drugs suggested would all have caused me to lose my FAA Medical Certificate.

I am not completely normal but have learned to live with my eccentricities as have my wife, children, and grandchildren. We all have our crosses to bear. I feel very fortunate that I am able to troubleshoot and figure out how to fix nearly anything.

Sorry for another meandering and lengthy post.

A task I want done while I'm still around to do it.

I sincerely hope that this will be a long time from now.

I set up a WiFi6 “mesh” router system last year, but I went on the cheap side, so it has had some irritating issues. I have a router on each floor of our three-story house connected with cat 5 cable and another router out in our hangar which is about 100 feet away. This gives me good coverage everywhere. The routers transmit both on the 5.4GHz and 2.4GHz frequencies so they work with all of our security cameras and lights.

We do not have very good cell phone coverage, so we usually make WiFi calls with our cell phones. The issue that I have is that when the cell phones switch from router to router they often drop the call. My next-door neighbor is some type of IT engineer. He says that purchasing a higher quality system would likely be the easiest way to get better and more reliable performance.

My wife enjoys the British comedy Doc Martin, I remind her of the central character, except that I am more friendly and talkative. But I can be awkward in social situations and am not always very good at recognizing non-verbal cues from others.

You still found a way to succeed in spite of the obstacles. I found it interesting that many software engineers fall in the "Aspie" category. It's a mindset that complements the level of focus required to write software competently. My oldest had ADHD in a big way. He was kicked out of kindergarten the 2nd day. He needed heart surgery, so drugs like Ritalin were not an option. Once the first heart surgery was done, he did try Ritalin. It helped a little, but he ended up needing an IEP and special ed schooling. He had a memory like a steel trap and read massive books...and could quote sections with ease. What he lacked was executive functioning to plan and execute and objective. He also lacked focus and was dangerous driving a car. He ended up buying a car and having his youngest brother do the driving. Quid pro quo access to use the car. After 4 heart surgeries, a pacemaker, 2 artificial valves, a tricuspid collar, he succumbed to a Z-Pak prescription at age 32. Sudden cardiac death.

My ad hoc kitchen chemistry yielded all manner of interesting things. Hydrogen sulfide, bottle rockets, hydrogen balloons, nitroglycerin, contact explosive. It was useful experience for my college labs later.

So they are taking away the “Join a Domain instead” option? Because that let’s you set up a local account, defaults to WORKGROUP, and you can still manage local accounts via lusrmgrmsc.

I hope that I'm not jumping in too early with the WiFi7. The manufacturer recommends using the same SSID for all 3 bands (2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, 6 GHz) so that capable devices can switch seamlessly between bands. My current Asus router is configured with unique SSIDs for 2.4GHz and 5 GHz. I have a LinkSys Velop Mesh as well. Having multiple SSIDs causes some grief getting to the laser printer. I'm going single SSID with the WiFi7. The new router support WPA3 security. Not all of the equipment in the house is WPA3 capable, so fallback to WPA2-PSK was necessary.

I'm not a huge party fan. It has been almost 30 years since I last attended an office party. Working remotely makes that preference easier. I get plenty of interaction at the twice weekly Teams meetings.

I found it interesting that many software engineers fall in the “Aspie” category.

I have a daughter, a grandson, and two nieces who are all a little on the edge. I believe that a lot of firefighters have issues with ADHD which is sometimes associated with thrill seeking pastimes. Fortunately, I survived all the close calls that questionable behavior caused me to be in.

I can remember standing at cliff launches at several sites looking over the edge and waiting for the conditions to get right. On more than one occasion I got impatient and just took a leap before I should have. One time one of the people who was helping me didn't let go of my wire and almost caused me to crash back into the cliff.

Another time I made a poor launch and immediately dropped into zero visibility and fell hundreds of feet before the hang glider picked up enough speed that it nosed up by itself and popped out of the cloud that was forming against the side of the cliff. I had fallen nearly half of the elevation from the launch to the landing area... I couldn't do anything while I was falling because any input from me could have caused the hang glider to bank into the side of the cliff. It was a surreal experience that made no lasting impression at the time other than me chastising myself about not being more patient and doing such a bad launch.

My ad hoc kitchen chemistry yielded all manner of interesting things. Hydrogen sulfide, bottle rockets, hydrogen balloons, nitroglycerin, contact explosive. It was useful experience for my college labs later.

I started out with a chemistry set that was sold by Sears and Roebucks. I worked through all the experiments in the manual within a day or two.

We lived on a busy road so I started making a selling planter boxes, it turned into a very profitable enterprise. So I ended up with plenty of money to order burners, glassware and chemicals mail order. My dad didn't have any reservations about ordering his 11-year-old son chemicals and lab equipment. I started working my way through other chemistry books “for boys”. My room started looking a little like a set from Breaking Bad.

Unfortunately, one morning just before my mother was having a get together with her women friends from church... I had a minor mishap. Unfortunately, it involved a runaway reaction which released enough hydrogen sulfide to make our house nearly uninhabitable for the rest of the day. My mother was so upset that my entire collection of equipment and chemicals was impounded, and I didn't get them back until I was living on my own.

a runaway reaction which released enough hydrogen sulfide to make our house nearly uninhabitable for the rest of the day.

I made a similar error with a small test tube, a small scoop of sulfur and a pea size chunk of wax. Warmed it over a candle flame and out wafted hydrogen sulfide. It very much stunk up the house. Ooops.

So they are taking away the “Join a Domain instead” option?

There are several options to bypass this. The easiest is to make a bootable USB drive using RUFUS with the installation media from Microsoft. You just pick the option to use a local account, and it still works just fine. If you go through the thread one of the posters provided directions and a link to do it another way using the command line.

I know a lot of people who get their panties in a wad about this, but there is nothing stopping you from using an alias with your new Microsoft account. You can use a $3 a month pay as you go cell account for your primary phone number and a Google number for your alias. These are handy for many other purposes as well.

Personally, I usually associate my installations with a Microsoft account that I use sometimes with as few as one computer. This can make it easier to keep using your retail license if you change your hardware or start with another clean install.

I loved making hydrogen balloons using aluminum foil and a strong solution of lye. I would set up several plastic bottles and make multiple balloons at one time. Then I would either use firecrackers to set them off which gave the most satisfying explosion, or I would make a whole bundle and wrap toilet paper around it until it would slowly ascend and then explode dropping burning toilet paper. This provided quite a light show over the busy road that we lived on.

Of course, when I found out from "The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments" that heating wax and sulfur together made a far more pungent gas, I thought that this would be a very funny thing to fill balloons with. I was planning on moving my operation outside but didn't see the harm in filling a balloon or two in my room. It turns out that producing larger quantities are a very bad idea in a small bedroom. My mother was an RN and found out that what I was doing was not only very irritating but was actually dangerous. So that was the end of that. Especially after my little brother had burned off his eyebrows with some flash powder that I had made a week or two before.

https://dn790000.ca.archive.org/0/items/GoldenBookOfChemistryExperiments/TheGoldenBookOfChemistryExperimentsbannedInThe60-s.pdf

I was only asking because I’ve built out 50-60 Win 11 machines for various clients over the last year or two, and while the intaller tries to push you into using an M365 account, it isn’t necessary.

If this is going to change, it will negatively impact most of my clients.

This is also the first time I’ve heard of this and I signed up with for the public early access Win 11 beta test/dev team...

Very cool book. Thanks for the link. I used pool acid and aluminum foil for my hydrogen generator. 3 balloons would easily raise an M-80. Cotton string soaked in potassium nitrate makes a durable slow fuse to gain more altitude.

the installer tries to push you into using an M365 account, it isn't necessary.

I understand exactly why Microsoft nags are both annoying and frustrating. I am surprised with all of the machines that you can put together that you have not already been using a tool such as Rufus that still gives you the option to turn this off with just a check box. There are many other options as well.

Very cool book. Thanks for the link. I used pool acid and aluminum foil for my hydrogen generator.

That book was one of my favorites. It was apparently banned from school libraries but was available all when I was a child.

12 ounces of lye granules cost less than 50 cents back then. I purchased my own rolls of aluminum foil as well. The problem with using a strong lye solution is that the reaction is exothermic and gets hot enough that enough steam can be created that the balloons do not float. The solution was to keep the mixture diluted enough that the foil was not consumed so quickly or to just let the bottle cool down if it got very hot.

In one of my junior high science classes I demonstrated filling balloons with hydrogen. The teaches had been using sulfuric acid and galvanized nails to produce hydrogen for his demonstrations. I considered this an inferior method.

The teacher's lab assistant who was not known for his intelligence, took one of the small balloons that I had filled and lit it on fire while holding it in his hand. When you do this, it just makes a woof sound as the hydrogen catches on fire. Although, hydrogen is much lighter than air and the flames go up I was not aware that doing this would not result in getting burned with a small balloon.

This all seems very funny to me now because I am fairly certain that the activities that my science teacher demonstrated to us would likely get him in trouble these days. I liked him a lot and took summer school classes from him because he tried to find activities that not only were informative but also captured our interest.

I bubbled my hydrogen through water on the way to the balloon. Never had a wet one that wasn't buoyant.

My high school chemistry teacher treated us to some interesting experiments. We made isoamyl acetate (banana oil) from vinegar and isoamyl alcohol. We made oil of wintergreen (methyl salicylate) from methyl alcohol and salicylic acid. We collected red rust and aluminum cans and ground them into a powder that we lit with a strip of magnesium to create steel with a thermite reaction. A small volcano was created with potassium permanganate and glycerin. A very exothermic burn of sugar and potassium perchlorate. Contact explosive (ammonium nitrogen tri-iodide). It was an amusing class. I read the class text and did every exercise in the book in 3 1/2 weeks because I transferred from the band to chemistry 9 weeks into the year. It was an easy A and good preparation for UCSD later.

Very neat!

My hydrogen balloon operations were always based on quantity and not quality. I wrapped cold wet rags around the necks of the plastic bottles that I used to help condense the steam and also had extra bottles that were rotated in and out of production to give the lye solution a chance to cool.

I tipped over bottles on more than one occasion and ruined a couple of pairs of pants but always had a charged garden hose nearby, so I never received a serious chemical burn.

This was during the early 1970s and when we were still in a cyclic cold spell. The glaciers on Mt. Rainier had been growing. The Nisqually glacier actually took out the bridge that led up to the Paradise Visitor Center. My favorite science teacher took students up to the Carbon Glacier each year and we measured it’s advance down the mountain with survey equipment.
At that time scientists were predicting the possibility of a new ice age. We were using the data that the teacher had collected over the previous years to estimate how long it would be until the bridge that led to the Campground, we hiked from would likely be wiped out.

But as we all know now from the warming hysteria the cold trend was cyclic. It was a surprise to me when the cyclic warming trend that started in the 1980s has been used to justifying spending Trillions of dollars to reverse what will almost certainly be a cyclic trend as well. I feel lucky to have had instructors that were trying to teach us something rather than indoctrinate us.

I was fortunate to attend lectures from Geology Professor Don Easterbrook my first year out of high school when I went to Western Washington University. This was long before Global Warming Hysteria took hold. Partially because of my science teachers in Junior High and High School I had developed an interest in Geology.

Approximately 10,000 years ago a flash in geologic time, the land that our house sits on was covered by approximately half a mile of ice. Attempts are now even being made to distort the Geologic record for political purposes. Unfortunately, persons who have opinions and knowledge that contradict the narratives of the left such as Professor Easterbrook find themselves villainized and forced out of their positions.