Nice error message, Microsoft

We're sorry, but your password couldn't be changed. Code: 0x8007052d

What does this mean? It took me a bit of experimentation, but I figured it out. Windows Ten has, believe it or not, a maximum password length. (That's not a typo. I don't mean a minimum. That would actually make sense.) It has two maximum password lengths, actually.

The above error message is what you get if you exceed the longer length limit of 63, when changing the password at some point after the account is set up or, at any rate, after the computer is set up. (I haven't tested what the rules are for additional accounts you create later.)

So what's the shorter limit? 20. When you turn on your computer for the first time and create an account and enter a password, you must enter a password that is 20 characters or shorter. There's nothing on the account creation screen to indicate this, and no warning if you exceed it. Everything seems to go fine, in fact, until you later try to log in, at which point you can't. (This can, of course, be solved in the usual ways. So much fun.)

Now if you'll excuse me, I have an urgent need to go install a real operating system. Immediately.

Arbitrary Screenshot

I've been tapped. The instructions don't specify an order, so I used directory order (ls -U), which is, generally speaking, the order in which things were created. Based on that, the fourth subfolder in /b4/img (where I keep most of my images) is sshots, which as you might guess is where I generally put screenshots.


The fourth file (using directory order again) therein is this little gem.

Wow, that's old. I believe this is from the era when I was using a Windows Me system as a temporary stand-in (which ended up lasting for several months) because my Linux system had developed hardware problems. I had forgotten that Inkscape had been around that long. That was way back before I built the FreeBSD system, which I used for a couple of years, and then I upgraded/migrated it to Debian stable a good while ago, back when sarge was current IIRC, and now etch is living on borrowed time.

Anyway, I took this screenshot to show how practically all software honors the system colors (in the shot you can see OpenOffice.org, Gimp, and the web browser from the Mozilla application suite). But then you also see how Inkscape looked at the time, and how it absolutely didn't make any effort to match at all. It has since somewhat improved, incidentally. It still doesn't use automatic on-screen document colors from the system colors, like OpenOffice does (as you can see), but recent versions of Inkscape do at least paint the UI in the system colors, as you can see from this much more current screenshot:


Inkscape is still a pain to use for me, compared to other applications, because of the fact that it doesn't automatically use system colors for the document while editing. I generally end up changing the actual document background color for editing comfort (I can't work with blinding white backgrounds; it hurts my eyes and gives me a headache), and then I have to remember to change it back any time I want to print, or export a raster image, or anything along those lines. Annoying.

But at least the chrome is painted in system colors now.