• PhreakyByNature@feddit.uk
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    1 month ago

    Anyone who has to use Windows and suffers this, PowerToys is your friend. Locksmith identifies what’s locking your file and allows you to free it up. Dunno why PowerToys isn’t bundled by default tbh.

    • ProfessorProteus@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Dunno why PowerToys isn’t bundled by default tbh.

      PowerToys give the user more power, which goes directly against Microsoft’s own goal.

      Also, less seriously, “toys” implies the user might enjoy the experience, and you know they can’t let that happen.

      • alqloe@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 month ago

        Shut up. It is literally made by Microsoft. As a place to experiment what to include in Windows. Don’t argue with strawmen

        • danc4498@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          Shut up. I also think power toys that feature basic functionality and have been around for decades should be included in Windows. I can’t always install this on a computer that needs it.

      • Omgboom@lemmy.zip
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        1 month ago

        Psexec can be pretty dangerous. Psexec.exe -i -s gives you access to the NTAUTHORITY/SYSTEM account, which is higher than Administrator. One time at work I was trying to do something and was getting permission denied so I decided to use that to get around the problem, I got to spend the afternoon talking to our security administrator because he got a bunch of alerts from our antivirus.

        • elvith@feddit.de
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          1 month ago

          Never thought about that, but since these tools just work, when you copy them to your PC… how does psexec do that? It’d either need you to be an administrator (and then it’s not really a privilege escalation as you could have registered any program into the task scheduler or as a service to run as SYSTEM) or it’d need a delegate service, that should only be available when you use an installer - which again wasn’t was has been done when just copying the tool.

          • 0xD@infosec.pub
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            1 month ago

            You need Administrative permissions for psexec. It uploads a file to the target computer’s \admin$ share (just C:\Windows) and starts a service to execute it. Services run as SYSTEM so that’s why you get those privileges.

            (Hah, I forgot your message while typing mine and just copied you :)

            Edit: fixed c$ to admin$

            • elvith@feddit.de
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              1 month ago

              I found a blog post outlining exactly that. If you use it locally, it will install and start a service temporarily. That service runs as SYSTEM and invokes your command. To succeed, you need to be a local administrator.

              If you try the same remote, it tries to access \\remote-server-ip\$admin and installs the service with that. To succeed your current account on your local machine must exist on the remote machine and must be an administrator there.

              So in short: It only works, if you’ve already the privilege to do so and the tool itself is not (ab)using a privilege escalation or something like that. Any hacker and virus may do the very same and doesn’t need psexec - it’s just easier for them to use that tool.

              • 0xD@infosec.pub
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                1 month ago

                Thank you for clearing it up!

                And regarding your assessment: Exactly!

    • Car@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 month ago

      I always thought it wasn’t included by default to mitigate malware damage to a system. Malware needs to be just a little bit more advanced if it can’t hijack Powertools to do what it wants

    • 0xD@infosec.pub
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      1 month ago

      Because it’s still in development, but afaik it is the goal to include it once it’s stable.

    • kuneho@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I recently discovered Resource Monitor (resmon) can do that, too!

      I was using Unlocker waaaay back, I loved it. Since then I wasn’t looking for alternatives, but since resmon also can do that, it’s more than enough.

  • Bassman1805@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    My first attempt at running Arch, I managed to fuck it up so badly that I had to write a script to write zeros to every bit of my HDD. Fun times.

      • Bassman1805@lemmy.world
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        Honestly don’t even remember, but it was in my peak “know enough to be dangerous” days in college. I almost certainly didn’t have to go that nuclear to fix it, but that’s what I did.

        Take 2 of Arch, after that wipe was completed, went pretty well. It revived an old piece of shit laptop for another few years before its motherboard gave out.

        • henfredemars@infosec.pub
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          1 month ago

          I’ll wager guess it was something to do with confusing GPT and MBR partitioning. There was a time where some BIOSs and loaders only understood or preferred one over the other, leading to weird incongruences depending on what you’re using to look at the disk. You have to actually overwrite the partition tables to get a clean start.

  • jet@hackertalks.com
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    1 month ago

    Inodes can be kept active by unlinked filehandles, a fun way to spend a afternoon figuring out where all the space went.

    • merthyr1831@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      ChromeOS is so funny because it’s either way too anal about what you can do or there’s a part they forgot to harden against end users and the power of linux spews forth with endless destructive potential

    • drathvedro@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      Windows, too. Turns out, there’s a hard-coded image size limit. If you’ve got a ~5k screen or bigger, or equivalent size virtual desktop with multiple monitors - you gotta find a way to compress it below limit. Nope, webp is not accepted, even though it is perfectly capable of using it.

    • the_third@feddit.de
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      1 month ago

      Yep. I mean, these days we use LVM, but I’ve actually resized a mounted partition by deleting it, recreating it with the same start and later end and rebooted for resizing the filesystem within (because the kernel won’t reread active partition tables). Felt janky as fuck, but worked 🤷

  • Destide@feddit.uk
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    1 month ago

    Had a call to sort an issue where someone couldn’t open an excel file because they already had it open don’t know why that needed a warning over a simple window switch to the sheet they wanted but hey stopped me doing what I was doing for nothing

    • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
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      1 month ago

      Yeah, needing to use Microsoft Office for everything at work is a damn pain. This one time I am trying to close Word, but then I must have clicked the top right X one too many times so the “You can’t close Word until the Closing… dialog is dismissed” dialog pops up, which itself interrupts the Closing dialog…

      Screen photo

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        I lost a lot of respect for Microsoft when I first saw that issue. It’s such an easy to avoid limitation. Like probably a similar level of difficulty to remove that limitation than to write the error message explaining it, unless it’s more of a spaghetti mess than I’m expecting it to be.

        • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 month ago

          It’s to do with the ability to work with data across all open workbooks:

          You can reference [Workbook.xlsx]Sheet1!B2 but if you have two excel workbooks open, both named Workbook.xlsx which one should be used?

          • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            If you want to reference other files, you should use a less ambiguous way to refer to them. Like a relative path or full absolute path. The fact that that weakness is because of a half-baked feature like that actually makes me lose even more respect.

            Edit: thanks for the info though, it does add some missing context.

          • psud@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            So throw an error at runtime on that macro, most workbooks aren’t the target of a macro

          • Morphit @feddit.uk
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            1 month ago

            Whichever one has the smallest relative path to the workbook using it? How does it find the workbook if it isn’t open already?

    • Liz@midwest.social
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      1 month ago

      “Hello, yes, IT department? I think my co-worker’s keyboard is missing all their punctuation marks. Yes, it’s making communication very difficult.”

  • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    There was a point not so long ago where Adobe Collaboration Sync got so bad on my Windows 10 box it wouldn’t let me close any pdfs that were open. “File in use” error, even if all Adobe programs were closed except for that pdf. I’d have to go into Task Manager and manually kill it. Between that and Adobe Updater I couldn’t get rid of it by any known means, and it was choking the shit out of my machine.

    I’m transitioning to Linux but not there yet, still need the Windows box for now, so I had to do something. But I’m old school, so it was a DOS batch file to the rescue. I call it “kiladobe.bat”:

    taskkill /f /im armsvc.exe       
    del "C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\ARM\1.0\armsvc.exe"      
    taskkill /f /im AdobeCollabSync.exe     
    del "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat DC\Acrobat\AdobeCollabSync.exe"      
    

    It’s now a scheduled task in taskschd.msc. I put kiladobe.bat in the main Adobe program folder (heh) and run that task as administrator at startup and every four hours or so, give or take an hour.

    No more problems.

    Now, all that remains is that every so often I see the command window flash up for a split second because this batch file is killing Adobe shit, and it just makes me smile. (I could probably make it stop flashing up the CLI, but I genuinely enjoy the reminder of how I’m fucking Adobe’s virus-like install and lock endeavors up the ass.)

    EDITED TO ADD a simple “@echo off” by itself as the first line would probably turn off any appearance of the CLI, if anyone wants to use this text for their own batch file. If that didn’t work I’d probably throw a space and a “>nul” at the end of each line to grab the output and throw it into neverneverland.

              • smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.deOP
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                1 month ago

                To be honest I do not like PDF readers being bundled in browser’s binaries, I see web rendering engines themselfs as a pile of legacy impossible to rewrite spaghetti.
                Qutebrowser for example has PDF.js as an optional, installable dependency. I guess Firefox can be recompiled without PDF support, if someone wants to save those… 3MB. But just that my Linux mind has slight aversion to bundling stuff in single binary, because on Linux installing 1 or 100 programs if they are packaged takes the same time.

                Ah. And some commands for PDFs are really useful :P.
                For example I used convert file.jpg file.pdf to upload couple of documents I had scanned as pictures but website required a PDF extension.

                • NoFun4You@lemmy.world
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                  1 month ago

                  Nice.

                  The question I have is does tesseract do better OCR on pdfs than chat GPT lol

                  Also obligatory fuck Adobe.

      • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        I have Foxit installed and can usually use that, but am forced to have Adobe Reader installed for other reasons.

        Adobe Reader will now never be updated on my machine. It’s a small price to pay. And Foxit is great for most pdf tasks.

  • Richard@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    The Tux reminds me of playing Super Tux Kart today… I really hate that GIMP mascot now,

  • ddkman@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    This is funny, because copying files to a USB flashdrive, is just inherently disfunctional in linux.

      • ddkman@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        Hang on there is a sync option? Does that make the progressbar work? If so why is it not enabled?

        • smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.deOP
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          1 month ago

          Yep. Almost all operating systems have a bufor that tell programs file was moved when it is still in the process. It makes perfect sense, it speed things up and extends the lifespan of the device.

          You can flush that bufor manually with just the sync command or disable it for whole partition with -o sync option. Technically you should unmount drives before unplugging for safety anyway, but people are stupid or more important lazy and in my opinion for external devices mounting with sync really should be the default. Maybe some low-level developer would disagree.

          • Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 month ago

            I’m very confused by this thread.

            Progress bars are handled by the applications themselves, whether flushing happens or not;

            immediate flushing does not increase storage lifespan, in fact letting the OS decide when to do it may allow wear-leveling to work better.

            (Though, IMO immediate flushing should be the default for removable media on user-friendly distributions, like swap partitions are)

            • smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.deOP
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              1 month ago

              Progress bars are handled by the applications themselves

              Yes, but OS must tell the application how much of the operation is done

              immediate flushing does not increase storage lifespan

              I was trying to say the opposite. Caching/buffering is what longers the lifespan and can speed system up

      • ddkman@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        To be fair in the other direction. Debian and Ubuntu and forks have it. They handle pretty much all filesystems fine, which is indeed impressive. Suprisingly Windows also has pretty good EXT drivers, so in a way the world is in harmony :D .