Copilot, Thunderbird, Teams, Firefox, ChromeOS Flex

1. Interestingly, Microsoft Copilot App doesn't pass the response language to the response to the audio reader. This means that the reader has to guess the language, and sometimes it gets it wrong. It's really funny to hear Finnish being pronounced as if it were English, Chinese, or something else entirely! The Google Gemini does this way way better, even on parts of the sentence like place names.

2. Microsoft finally blocked Mozilla Thunderbird users out. Use their bleeping webmail or official Outlook application. That's nothing new, Tuta and ProtonMail have done that from the beginning. All your email are belong to us. Crappy and bad code freaking everywhere. Yes, it was possible to deep tinkering to fix that, but it's not joy and wasted a lot of time.

3. This error message is here, because it's highly misleading. That's NOT the actual problem: "uncaught exception: initFromOutgoing failed, hostname: smtp-mail.outlook.com mailnews.smtp: NetworkTimeoutError: a Network error occurred SmtpClient.sys.mjs:478:17 _onError resource:///modules/SmtpClient.sys.mjs:478 mailnews.smtp: SecurityError info: SmtpClient.sys.mjs:494:21 onError resource:///modules/SmtpClient.sys.mjs:494 mailnews.send: Sending failed; The message could not be sent because the connection to Outgoing server (SMTP)  timed out. Try again., exitCode=2153066800, originalMsgURI=undefined MessageSend.sys.mjs:319:32 fail resource:///modules/MessageSend.sys.mjs:319 deliveryExitProcessing resource:///modules/MessageSend.sys.mjs:669 sendDeliveryCallback resource:///modules/MessageSend.sys.mjs:723 OnStopRunningUrl resource:///modules/MessageSend.sys.mjs:1417 onStopRequest resource:///modules/OutgoingServerService.sys.mjs:117 onerror resource:///modules/SmtpServer.sys.mjs:675 _onError resource:///modules/SmtpClient.sys.mjs:507"

4. Finally received about 8 conflicting sets of instructions how Thunderbird should be configured to work with Outlook and 7th set of instructions did actually work. It's so nice how simple things can be totally screwed up by providing lots and lots more disinformation and bad error messages and inconclusive feedback. - Unfortunately nothing new. The main instructions on Thunderbird site ar crap, the instructions on Microsoft's site are useless, both contain blatant disinformation misleading users. But the solution is here (@ support.mozilla.org), and on top of this I needed to use my personal domain and email, instead of my outlook.com username which works everywhere else when logging into Microsoft services. So there was extra trap hidden there. On bonus of that it required modifying TB configuration to allow web cookies (in email program, yeah, f-that) and then it finally worked out.

5. Frustrated with Teams WebHooks - they’re completely broken! I’ve had to switch our notifications to Matrix and email (good old SMTP with all of it's flaws and problems) because dealing with Teams has been a lost cause.

6. Did I say s-it code freaking everywhere? Firefox "Temporary Containers" Extension container identifier assignment has been broken for years, and it still is. Every bleeping time when you encounter that issue, it gives impression that they really don't know what they're doing. It's not that hard after all. How you can have several containers with same unique identifier. Now I have container #23 and container #23 and as you might have guessed, those are two different containers. In some cases it can have security implications, but mostly just clearly indicates how bad the code is. When checking for uniqueness in integers becomes rocket science for someone ... *sigh* ... Yet, I'm quite sure that most of users don't even realize it's broken because they don't pay any attention towards what they're doing.  - I changed the numbering now to run continuously up, so the broken re-use logic wouldn't mess up things.

7. Just testing ChromeOS Flex (@ Wikipedia). If it turns out to be good I could even recommend it for many users for security reasons. It's actually quite nice and good, when thinking about normal users. All you need to care about is having single set of secure credentials, everything else is taken care of. Then computer is like having a big phone. When you launch shell / terminal, it's virtualized! Even if you try traditional system sabotage stuff will destroy Linux system or Windows system in seconds to totally unusable state, it won't affect the host OS at all. Lots of Windows 10 systems are going to expire, and this could be great and even way better option for normal users. Even me as hardcore tinkerer still could consider something like ChromeOS for my travel laptop as it just works option.

8. Summary: Oh well, lot of issues and a few solutions in this post, joy. - Life is.

2025-03-23