He's also a fellow fountain pen fan! Which I got into while taking that class and he was encouraging of when I talked to him about it.

I don't mind when games I play for atmosphere and narrative only have basic autohints, like Control, Uncharted, and Mass Effect.
The best is when a game goes above and beyond with assist options like Tactical Breach Wizards, Mars First Logistics, Another Crab's Treasure, and Return to Monkey Island.

I think the need for ultra flexible assistance rises as the reason to play the game becomes more about challenges, like Celeste, Sekiro, Baba Is You, and Hotline Miami.

A factor I think often makes devs avoid opt-in assistance is it's not discoverable and requires explicit user decision and action, unlike auto-hints everyone hates. Sadly, many players just give the hell up at the first speed bump without trying anything, and being inclusive of them has some merit.

It took an embarrassingly long 7 months to figure out, but I believe my phone was refusing to roam to or stay on BSSIDs with stronger signals because of my custom DTIM Period settings. 1 is the default, and 2 or 3 are recommended, but I foolishly listened to someone on Super User who said to use 4.

Wow that actually works. It's surprisingly nice, kind of like it should have always been this way.

Hooking into Visual Studio and MSBuild was way easier than I thought, but calling NuGet through the client SDK was way harder so I used a different technique. I expected the inverse.

Maybe it was this too. At least I correctly guessed the workaround ahead of time. www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microso...

Oh apparently it was a known OS issue that's being fixed by Microsoft after I did all that work. I knew it wasn't my fault. support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/5...

A second PC's Windows Update error 0x800f0983 PSFX_E_MATCHING_COMPONENT_DIRECTORY_MISSING was also fixed with an in-place upgrade/repair installation from a Windows ISO. I never knew about it before, but this feature was added in Windows 8, 13 years ago.

What actually worked was an in-place upgrade using a mounted Windows ISO, with "keep all settings and apps" enabled. I hadn't tried this operation before but it worked shockingly well. Did not have to manually restore or reconfigure anything, and Windows Update installations succeeded after this.

The CBS log indicated errors installing SmbDirect and WorkFolders-Client packages, which I had uninstalled earlier. Reinstalling them using optionalfeatures, PowerShell, and DISM all failed or timed out, from sources like Windows Update, various ISOs, WIM images, and SMB from a donor computer.

The root cause seems to be editing %SYSTEMROOT%\System32\IntegratedServicesRegionPolicySet.json, not uninstalling Edge. I did not change its ACL, but rather launched notepad or VSCode as TrustedInstaller, so it's not failing due to changed ACLs, but rather changed file contents.

The differentiating factor seems to be uninstalling Edge. I had used the IntegratedServicesRegionPolicySet.json trick (without the ViVeTool feature flag hack or Control Panel\International\Geo registry changes) from winaero.com/uninstall-mi.... I wonder if that action is reversible.

The issue reproduced easily in a virtual machine.

A third machine that is configured similarly installed this update fine. All three are fairly ordinary Windows 11 Pro or Home installations. I did the EU trick to uninstall Edge on all, but that didn't break update installation on the third machine, so that's probably not the culprit.