More 50th anniversaries

Let the record show that Melody and I marked the semicentennial of our second date — but we marked it one day late, and by doing something unlike that date though like many later ones — going for Mexican food, this time at El Real in Bethlehem, Georgia. Click here for more details, written on the 45th anniversary.

Upcoming semicentennials: my first dinner with her parents (May 21, after which 18-year-old Michael was allowed to take 17-year-old Melody out in the evenings); our "photo safari" to Braselton (June 21). Details are in the May and June 2021 Daily Notebook.

And we grew up and got married and lived happily ever after!

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Bitlocker encryption: blessing or curse?

I got to the UGA library this afternoon, settled down to work with my 14-inch ThinkPad T490s laptop, booted into Windows after using Linux, and found it in another of its snits in which it wanted the Bitlocker encryption key every time it booted Windows. This time, Secure Boot and TPM were working normally, the problem was persistent, and I could only imagine that Bitlocker was corrupted by a recent Windows update (said to have happened to a few people, not many), Linux had done something to it, or Bitlocker was upset because I had repartitioned a disk drive (see below about dev drives).

Well... my considered decision was to turn off Bitlocker and also not store clients' confidential data on this laptop. Nowadays, when working on clients' data, I remote in to Ignatius (my big desktop) over Tailscale VPN. I can do this with the laptop running either Windows or Linux.

I thought earlier that Windows Updates were liable to turn Bitlocker back on again. Apparently, one of them did, but if you turn it off again, it stays off.

The big benefit from turning Bitlocker off is that now Linux can read the Windows disks, increasing the usefulness of the dual-boot machine.

The only real reason I don't switch this laptop to Linux entirely — which may happen eventually! — is that I use it to control my telescope and capture image data. The software for that, N.I.N.A. among other things, is only available for Windows.

Why might this not be a good idea? Some thought is called for. Bitlocker encrypts your disk drive so that if someone steals your laptop, they can't put your hard disk into a different computer and read it. So when I did away with Bitlocker, I also had to stop carrying clients' confidential data on the laptop. I handle some data that is required by law to be protected.

If you run Windows, please check whether you have Bitlocker running, and back up your keys. It's a straightforward thing to do. I backed up my keys to my Microsoft account and also to an unencrypted drive on another machine (a USB drive would be fine) and also printed them out — I carry the printout in my wallet!

And consider turning off Bitlocker if there is little risk of your laptop being stolen, or if the data on your disk would not do a lot of harm if it fell into the wrong hands.

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Do you need a dev drive?

If you process large amounts of data, and particularly if you copy large amounts of data onto your computer from elsewhere, you may need a dev drive. Click to learn more.

Dev drives are disk drives (or partitions) with a new high-performance file system and, crucially, by default, a less time-consuming kind of virus protection. Basically, Windows Defender scans files when time is available, rather than while they are being written.

Use a dev drive for data you are processing. Do not use it for downloading from the Web; you want virus protection to take priority then.

I created dev drives on my two laptops, the one on which I acquire astronomical images and the one on which I process them.

Caution: In view of my previous experience I recommend turning Bitlocker off before creating a dev drive (and turning it back on afterward). Just a hunch. On one of my laptops I ignored that precaution and had no problems.

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Remote Desktop Protocol now wants .RDP files digitally signed

If you connect to a remote Windows computer by clicking on an .RDP file, as I do several times a day, you may have started getting a warning. Microsoft now wants all .RDP files to be digitally signed. Click here for more explanation.

Apparently, some people somewhere have had problems with counterfeit .RDP files. Someone could give corporate users a fake .RDP file that connects to a fake server rather than the one they want to access — and immediately collects their username and password for nefarious use.

For now, there's a registry fix that eliminates the warnings, although it may not work forever. I used it. Details here, near the bottom of the page.

Here is a handy utility for self-signing .RDP files — I have not tried it yet. You don't need to pay for a certificate; just self-assign one, since you only want it to be trusted on specific computers, and you can tell each of them to do so.

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A thought about Windows vs. Linux vs. macOS

One final thought: Many of us formed our expectations about operating systems back in the early 2000s, or inherited expectations from others who formed them then, and back then, there was a bit of a software shortage that has greatly lessened.

From the dawn of microcomputing to well after 2000, you had to choose your OS to run your software. If you wanted a great variety of software for common tasks, you had to choose Windows. On the Mac you could have excellent software, but only a limited selection of it (it was especially weak on programming tools), and Linux was hit-or-miss.

Not any more! I'm still seeing a bit of that kind of shortage in software for astronomical imaging, but not much else. You can buy Microsoft Office for the Mac; LibreOffice, freeware, practically supersedes it anyhow and is available for all three OSes; the best graphics software actually spread from the Mac to the PC; Audacity audio editing is available for all three; and, to my delight, Microsoft's crown jewel, the .NET Framework and Visual Studio Code, is available for all three.

So my choice of OS now depends on what clients need. I may actually be getting a Mac soon, to experiment with neural networks on its high-performance CPU.

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