Playing cards with Ogii and Tsogt.
We have a lot of leftovers to get through, which makes for some weird combinations, like a snack of vodka, candy corn, and birthday cake.
Safeway used to have these rosemary fries I really liked.
These by Alexia.
But it appears they no longer carry them.
We used to drink Bundaberg root beer on occasion, but I haven't found that in Hawaii; only their ginger beer.
Naraa bought Tsogt a new iPhone for his birthday.
While I cooked steak for dinner.
His birthday cake.
He bought many snuff bottles from a couple of different antique stores in Chinatown.
We watched New Year's Eve fireworks from our place.
Ogii made chislic.
Then we went to the Ala Moana mall to shop.
They have a huge food court.
With cheaper fast food options.
We got chicken and Asian.
The Christmas tree is gone, but many needles remain. They're easy to sweep up, though.
Shopping at the Aloha Stadium swap meet.
Where Tsogt found some more antiques.
Eating Five Guys for lunch.
Me cleaning the windows.
Tsogt cooking dinner.
Eating.
Naraa and Ogii by some large flowers.
Eating breakfast at Forty Niner.
They went shopping again and found more stuff.
While I made dinner.
This store that shut down already has a new one in its place.
It looks like sports clothing.
And this new Mexican restaurant looks almost ready to open.
CocoNene at the International Marketplace.
Various Hawaiian stuff inside.
An art studio in the back.
With photography prints from local artists.
Tsogt made dinner.
Many fires around Los Angeles.
They haven't been around these areas recently, especially Malibu.
Which has some roads closed down.
One of the fires from the air.
The Palisades fire is around Malibu.
Buildings destroyed in Pacific Palisades.
It's the new year; time to set up my new laptop some more. Even with only a web browser running, over a third of the memory is used, and this laptop has a lot of RAM. It's annoying how memory these apps use.
Scores and weather and news; I don't need all of that crap taking up memory. Delete.
I don't like any of the new movie making software on Windows, so I always install Windows Movie Maker. It's no longer supported by Microsoft, but you can find it as a part of Windows Essentials 2012 on other sites.
There we go.
Armory Crate is an app that shows you various stats.
I'm mostly interested in temperature. If photo editing apps start to work hard, I don't want the computer to overheat, especially because it gets quite warm in the afternoon at home.
The laptop has this flashing light on the back cover, which is annoying. Good thing I can turn it off.
It's also advised to turn on Battery Care Mode, which only charges the battery to 80%, which is supposed to improve the long-term battery life.
I also prefer Windows Explorer to open to This PC rather than whatever annoying thing Windows 11 was initially set to.
One thing I absolutely hate about Windows 11 is that you can't use keyboard shortcuts in Windows Explorer; you have to click with the mouse on each menu item, which is much slower.
It looks like other people have that problem, too.
Good thing there's a simple solution to reverting back to the Windows 10 menu.
Instead of the Print Screen button simply taking screenshot of the screen, it brings up this menu, which lets you select just a portion of the screen or even take a video. Again, not things I do, and it adds another step to what was previously a simple process. Good thing there's a way to do it the old way: just hold shift while pressing the Print Screen button. But it's just a bit harder to do now.
I also wanted to upgrade to Pro so I could use Bitlocker to use encrypted external hard drives.
The system area said you do it through the Microsoft app.
But it wasn't working.
Eventually I got it to work another way. So annoying.
Another thing I didn't like was this nvidiaapp was in the run memory. I use Notepad a lot, so I can usually hit Windows+R, then N, the enter, but with this other app starting with N in the memory, it took a few more steps.
Google says there's a way to clear the run history.
But when I tried it, it didn't work. Maybe I'll have to edit the registry, which is always a bit dangerous.
Even though I changed the resolution to 1920x1080, the laptop will occasionally go back to 2880x1800, and I have no idea why. It's fairly fast to change it again, but why does it stay the same most of the time and rarely change back for seemingly no reason?
I wanted to clean the fans in the bottom of my old laptop, as they had some dust on them. So I bought this computer screwdriver kit with all different types of heads.
I got all of the screws off of the bottom panel except one, which was became so stripped no head would get it open. I think the screwdriver kit was so cheap the heads were soft metal and got ground down instantly. What a pain.