Like what you see? No.

1. Huh, the old tablet that we use for recipes in the kitchen is getting slower. We could do a factory reset, right? Oh, and we could root it and install a custom ROM - that might get more performance out of it.



2. But we were going to try it out on the late MIL's older, slower tablet first, in case it doesn't work. Let's do that.



3. We have to be able to sign into the tablet to root it, but we don't have the passcode.



4. There's ONE app that will work when you can't sign into the device. It runs on Windows. The last time we used our Windows laptop was years ago. The power cable from MIL's Windows laptop is still missing! And now so is the power cable to OUR even older laptop.



5. Okay, let's order a replacement power cable!



6. Nobody sells a power cable specifically for this model laptop anymore because it is so old.



7. You don't need a specific model's adapter - the important things are the input and output voltage and the size of the DC power jack on the laptop.



8. We have a set of DC power jacks that are supposed to be interchangeable, but the universal power supply they fit to is lost. Using them, we are able to determine what size the jack should be. We think. We're not completely sure because the jack seems to fit loosely, there is no standard coloration or naming or marking for the different DC power jack sizes and shapes, etc. Wax manages to find a replacement that looks like it will work on Amazon Germany.



9. Amazon Germany has saved her old address and she accidentally orders the adapter to it because she didn't realize one-click ordering was on.



10. The confirmation page for editing the mailing address in the order is broken.



11. She finds another page and manages to edit the order! But we still can't use the laptops.



12. She tries password recovery on her mom's tablet because she remembered that there used to be a list of her mom's passwords somewhere. She finds it in the hanging file folder labeled "Estate" at my suggestion.



13. The google password she needed is not on the list of passwords.



14. She tries password recovery on the google account that she needs to reset the password of the Samsung account that she needs to open the tablet.



15. The recovery email is hotmail. The password to the hotmail is ALSO not in the list. She starts trying passwords from the list and finds it before the account locks up!



16. Password reset takes 48 hours to make identity theft more difficult, so she is now individually opening and deleting over 2,000 spam messages from her mom's hotmail inbox (which wasn't even her primary email). Her mom died in 2019, but we've never had the ability to look in either of her email accounts before.



17. I guess we could just go ahead and try it on our tablet... but it does look a little terrifying.

When Microsoft can't afford human translators? +/- Cyberpunk dystopia betatesting?

A little while ago, my desktop computer at work was still running Windows 10, in Finnish, but the greeting screen before you sign in was a new photo from Bing every day and in the top left it said "Like what you see?" and you could click to help its algorithm tune to your preferences over time.

I installed all the available updates, upgraded to Windows 11, and installed all the available updates again. Then I changed the system language to Swedish.

When the computer restarted it said in the top right corner "Som bilden du ser?" (This is 'Like what you see?' word for word, using - incorrectly - the word that means like/as.) I took a photo of it to show Wax and make fun of.

Two days later when I got to work and signed in, it had corrected itself and said "Gillar du bilden du ser?" instead, which was what it meant to say all along.

A couple of possible explanations for this series of events occur to me:

• The Swedish regionalization of the program was new, and they pushed an update using a machine translation because they hadn't had time for a human translator yet. Then they fixed it when their translator came back from vacation.



• It's been incorrect for... however long, but some Swedish speakers who are more used to Windows than I am actually managed to find the feedback button and report the incorrect translation as a bug. I did glance around for it, but I didn't go as far as googling.



• One of our phones, even though they are both Android, was background eavesdropping when we walked the dog and I told Wax about the problem and the AI managed to parse it out and report it to Microsoft and they fixed it. Okay, so this is maybe less likely, but we are living in the future...