I've used AOMEIBackupper to make a WinPE bootable flash drive, against the possible future need to restore my IdeaPad 3 using a system image.

I toyed with the IdeaPad 3's BIOS, after figuring out that it requires rapid-pressing of F2 after a restart to enter the BIOS setup.

I have a 32 GB USB drive with Hiren's Boot CD on it. Boots and works fine as a WinPE environment. I can even connect to our home wi-fi.

The clencher, however, is that it has AOMEIBackupper on it, with which I can restore my laptop using an image made with that same software and stored on an old, long-gone laptop's repurposed SSD, a 340 Gb drive housed in a Sabrent USB-powered case.

Now perhaps I'll be diligent enough to take the time to get the same sort of setup working for my primary desktop PC — the one I use all the time for work.

In an elevated command prompt:

FOR %F IN ("%SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package~*.mum") DO (DISM /Online /NoRestart /Add-Package:"%F")

FOR %F IN ("%SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientExtensions-Package~*.mum") DO (DISM /Online /NoRestart /Add-Package:"%F")

Next do these steps:

Disable Background Apps for all users with Group Policy Editor 1. Enter gpedit.msc into the Run text box by pressing Win + R. 2. Navigate to "Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\App Privacy" 3. Double-click the "Let Windows apps run in the background" policy in the right pane. 4. Select the "Disabled" choice, then select "Apply" and "OK."

Man, OneDrive and Zoom both really hog my PC resources. So, on my work desktop PC I've opted to not start OneDrive with Windows. Additionally, I'm doing some of the things below to see if they break anything and — if not — if they seem to improve the desktop PC's responsiveness. This is a Hewlett-Packard Slim Desktop S01-pF2xxx with 32 Gb of RAM and an Intel Celeron CPU at 3.3 GHz, running on Windows 11 Home OS build 22631.3737 (64-bit).

Step 1: Disable background apps running — requires this step on a Win 11 Home PC.

I can't remember who put me onto this nifty javascript utility. It was someone on the donationcoder forum, but it's been a long time ago and cursory search didn't turn up the relevant post.

Anyway, encrypt-to-HTML is a real jewel written by Steve Clay, a Floridian web dev. You supply it plain text, either by typing or pasting into a textbox, or else from loading it from a file, and it produces an encrypted HTML file containing your protected content. When you open the produced HTML file in a browser, you're provided with a password textbox. You must enter the correct password and then your plain text will be decrypted and shown to you.

You can download this utility here. It's a 12.6 Kb download.

Windows 10 exposes lots of privacy leaks. One way that it does this is by sending lots of telemetry as apps phone home, supposedly only sharing non-personal, usage-related data. I was able to inexpensively obtain Spybot Anti-Beacon. It's running right now on my laptop, blocking 248 potential telemetry leaks.

Today I made the decision to henceforth store my website locally. I chose to run it atop ZWAMP, a micro-alternative to a LAMP stack that only has about a 405 Kb footprint on disk, and uses around 100 Kb of RAM. Now that's micro!

Installed it and got Flatpress CMS running quickly on my laptop. Getting it working on my desktop PC at home required me to first disable IIS in Windows 10 Program and Features, so that ZWAMP's Apache service would run. So, now I have practically unlimited storage space for my blog, and I can mirror it across multiple PCs and removable media.

My backup scheme is to stop ZWAMP temporarily, then archive it and the contents of its subfolders (note: web houses your website/blog) in .zip format, which I upload to my NAS, Mega, pCloud, etc.

I'll use my laptop as my day-to-day machine for website maintenance, and do regular syncs to my desktop machine and one or more removable and remote media repositories.

I'll have a rather more static online website, located — at the time of this writing — here.

Asmodat Folder Locker is a great freeware program for protecting your files and folders with password encryption. I have a copy (link is only accessible by webmaster) of version 1.4.1. It does its job well, and is very fast.

I've discovered the blog of Mr. Riley, a web programmer. He has lots of great Twine code examples.

Mr. Riley is a teacher. He has a good starting point example of a combat system for a Twine game called Twine Fray.

I plan to scour his blog for learning purposes.

Lately, I've been reading some articles put out by prominent researchers in the SETI at Home project: Here is an explanation of the Drake Equation. And here is an article of what we might expect from E.T.

For a while now, I've had my desktop PC (which I don't use on a daily basis but do leave running) executing BOINC and assisting the SETI @ Home program to process telescopic data.

BOINC downloads scientific computing jobs to your computer and runs them invisibly in the background. It's easy and safe.

About 30 science projects use BOINC; examples include Einstein@Home, IBM World Community Grid, and SETI@home. These projects investigate diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research.