Currys unstoppable marketing / spam emails

It's not a secret that many websites and organisations will send you marketing / special offers regardless of how carefully you select correct checkboxes telling them that you don't want any marketing emails. In some cases the only difference selecting right boxes makes is that you will start to receive these emails not immediately, but a week or two later...

This is annoying, but at least most legitimate newsletters and marketing emails have working unsubscribe links and respect your choice to opt-out. Obviously, there are exceptions, both good and bad ones. And one of the bad ones is Currys.

Microsoft Family safety in Windows 10 just doesn't work...

Microsoft have been changing Windows built-in Family Protection in recent Windows 8 and 10 quite a bit. The latest one - Windows 10 version has been renamed to Microsoft Family and moved to the Cloud. All configuration and reporting is now done online on Microsoft Family website. In addition, in order to use Microsoft Family you have to convert all local user accounts to Microsoft Accounts. Now, it's somewhat silly to create email and Microsoft account for 4 year old, but this approach has some advantages. For example, once you setup user accounts and configure parental control settings once, it's super easy and quick to apply them to all your Windows 10 devices.

Buying USB Flash drive with hardware write protection

I have an old trusted no-brand 4GB USB Flash drive with hardware write protection switch that use to load various security and other tools to infected, or simply untrusted PCs. Hardware write-protection removes that constant need to remember to reformat the flash drive after every use with untrusted devices.

While 4GB is not much, it is more than sufficient for this particular purpose. However, recently I started noticing that write speeds on this thing are getting more and more sluggish. A quick test with AS SSD revealed that it wasn't just my imagination - an average write rate was just over 2MB/s. I don't remember this drive being so slow, so it's probably an aging flash memory issue.

Microsoft knocks down my NO-IP subdomains

This morning I tried to connect to some devices on my home network remotely only to find that they appeared to be offline. My first thought was that there was an issue with my home Internet connection, but after quick troubleshooting it appeared that all of my no-ip.org subdomains were not resolving.

I logged on to my no-ip account and found a formal statement explaining that Microsoft sized some of the most popular no-ip domain names!