The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

[Wrathbone]

Common Ridings.

What the hell are common ridings?

This is a common riding.

An annual event in a select number of Scottish border towns where the locals all wear rosettes, wave flags and walk through the bunting-draped streets, following after others riding on horses, in a hollow and cringe-worthy display of local pageantry, celebrating antiquated parochialism and insular bumpkin culture.

I absolutely despise this sort of thing.

Never heard of it before, but reading up on it has not endeared me.

The day begins before dawn, at 4:00 am Selkirk Flute Band begin to march around town, wakening, in turn, Standard Bearer and Provost.

And every other poor bastard in the area. Wouldn’t stand for that crap round here, I’d be onto Environmental Health.

[Alan]

Still sounds better than the orange fecking walk.

[Stormbringer]

Let's blow some trumpets and carry a man through the streets on a daft chair...because...because it's just what we do in this wee toun!

[Stormbringer]

Roundabouts.

Specifically, the road system that connects Glasgow and Edinburgh.

I took a trip today to visit my 101-year-old grandma in Troon (she's barely alive) and trying to figure out what lane of a roundabout you're supposed to be in at the last possible second before you realise you've taken the wrong exit and need to add a twenty-minute detour to your trip while you navigate back to where you should have been in the first place...IS A NIGHTMARE!

Doesn't help that one of your kids throws up in the back of the car either.

[Stormbringer]

Still sounds better than the orange fecking walk.

It's just the same thing on a more local scale. Celebrating some centuries' old "achievement" (in the case of some of these wee towns it's something as simple as capturing a flag from the opposing army five centuries ago) and putting on some ribbons and making an excessively loud noise in order to brag about it annually, while making outsiders (and women) feel hassled and unwelcome.

[Stormbringer]

The fact that Netflix is capped at 720p on Chrome, forcing me to use another browser (I'm using Edge, because it works at 1080p on that).

Also, Edge. That diabolical MSN news feed, which is mostly clickbait and (quite literally) fake news.

[Wrathbone]

The fact that Netflix is capped at 720p on Chrome

Still better than C4 live streaming in a browser, which I’m sometimes forced to do to watch F1. It’s like watching a crappy Dailymotion rip of an especially knackered VHS.

[Mantis]

I'm getting a really weird bug on Prime on my PC now where it says that my cable or rig setup somewhere isn't good enough for HD streaming so everything streams at SD quality.

I don't watch much Prime on the PC at all anyway so it's not much of a bother, but it's odd that this has randomly started happening for no reason at all.

[Rusty]

Silly question but have you tried another browser?

[Mantis]

Yep, same problem on Edge, Chrome and Firefox.

I'm not too bothered about fixing it as I'm building a new PC over the next couple of months and will be using the old one to stream everything from a Plex server going forwards.

[Wrathbone]

I'm not too bothered about fixing it as I'm building a new PC over the next couple of months and will be using the old one to stream everything from a Plex server going forwards.

Having spent the last month building a streaming server, I'd have a look at Jellyfin rather than Plex. Free, open source and zero complaints so far. From what I gather, Plex has nosedived into adverts and upselling features.

[Raid]

Does anyone actually understand what any of this means?
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsof ... ng-copilot

Davuluri confirms that in the wake of AI, Windows is going to change significantly. The OS is going to become more ambient and multi-modal, capable of understanding the content on your screen at all times to enable context-aware capabilities that previously weren't possible.

"you'll be able to speak to your computer while you're writing, inking, or interacting with another person. You should be able to have a computer semantically understand your intent to interact with it."

What does "Ambient" mean in this context? Has anyone ever wanted a piece of software to be "pervasive"? How many sodding modals does it need to launch Chrome or swap to my Discord window? Honestly it sounds like they're trying to rehash Clippy; something that tries to guess what you're doing and offer solutions that you don't want and didn't ask for. Except now it's baked into the OS and there's no way to escape it.

I honestly think that Microsoft don't have a single clue what their customers actually want their software to do.

[Sly Boots]

It sounds awful. When Win11 reaches its end of life I might have to seriously look at other viable OS platforms.

[Wrathbone]

What does "Ambient" mean in this context?

All-pervading, I suspect. Clippy has achieved apotheosis.

It's increasingly tempting to make a permanent switch to Linux.

[Animalmother]

Sounds like their trying to emulate computers from Star Trek where you just speak to it or some such dumb shit.