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winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
pivotman319 🦊 :aromantic: :flagace:
@winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
18 followers 4 following 260 posts
average fox-wolf-person thing (aka "folf").

does TF2, P2, SFM and Windows-related stuff. preserves software to help educate people and also for fun. QA for […]

🌉 bridged from https://wetdry.world/@winload_exe on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/
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winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
i should add that the lower the RP level, the probability of explorer misbehaving on you just kind of spikes up to tenfold in contrast to RP01 or even the boilerplate Windows 7 UI you get on non-redpilled builds
7989 on RP03, with most Win32 shell elements (like the new taskmgr) enabled and the charms bar displayed. because explorer is expecting the Start screen to initialize, it never finishes loading and stays in an unusual state where the superbar has no pinned icons and the desktop area is never displayed. oh, and trying to toy with the Charms bar in any way crashes explorer. 8102 explorer with RP03 policies installed in place of RP01. the Windows 7 UI is mostly there (traditional Start menu and all) but aspects of the new Win8 UI like the ribbonized Explorer are also shown. the Explorer shell has also hung by this point because it tried to load the Start screen code paths a few seconds after the desktop UI has loaded.
December 1, 2025 at 11:20 AM
winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
i'm undecided, someone help me pick what upgrade option to pick from this list.
the Windows Web Installer for build 8028 prompting the user to pick an upgrade path... for which there's nothing to choose from.
November 2, 2025 at 5:46 PM
winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
Pro-tip: you can boot straight into a Command Prompt shell in any bog-standard Windows installation media or WinPE just by holding down the Control key; `winpeshl` has a hook that overrides the startup check for `startnet.cmd` and `setup.exe` in the ramdisk […]

[Original post on wetdry.world]
October 30, 2025 at 1:25 PM
winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
Bonus: the reference SFM render i hacked up in like fifteen minutes just for pose work + warmup
Pose reference for the above images: the surrounding area is a giant test stage for animation tests, and Atapi is instead substituted for a placeholder dummy mesh pointing at a rather threatening bitten apple. For warmup purposes, I tried de-rusting my SFM skills by adding a standin pose of my folf fursona (Loxi) looking incredibly unimpressed at the situation while holding an electric self-heating coffee mug with the words "I LOVE ELECTRIC" and a heart symbol printed on.
October 30, 2025 at 12:46 AM
winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
the embodiment of fear

drawn for an upcoming blog post by @sterophonick
Atapi, an anthropomorphic cat with red and blue highlights, trembling and screaming in fear as an iPhone 4S they own begins to magically float up in the air and emits a blue glow, while stating: "Jailbreak my phone". In front of Atapi is a rolling chair and a desk with a computer in front of them, with an iTunes activation failure dialog being displayed. Ditto, skirt alt.
October 30, 2025 at 12:42 AM
winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
the most recent Windows insider preview release added an internet speed test "button" to the Wi-Fi control center that actually just tells you to fucking Google it instead

i cannot take this bloody company seriously these days
Windows 11 preview build screenshot of the Wi-Fi control center. There is a speedometer button labeled "Test internet speed" next to the refresh available networks button, which supposedly by its name would bring the user over to an actual network speed test page. The actual result after clicking the button is Windows opening a Bing search result page for "internet speed test". The results it produces are bogus, and were clearly generated by a language learning/artificial "intelligence" model.
October 28, 2025 at 4:05 PM
winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
[Dispatch datamining; spoilers for upcoming episode?]

Oh, okay, they left in an entire chunk of episode 3 right there
One of the hacking sequences present in the yet-unreleased Dispatch episode "Turnover" that was apparently left over in the demo's files, in which the player is introduced to an enemy that follows the player (the "antivirus"), an angry Cthulhu-like red ball with tentacles. The tooltip says: "The Anti-Virus is a threat to any hacker that tries to invade a system. Avoid it at all costs." Ditto, the same enemy in an angered state.
October 27, 2025 at 8:51 AM
winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
the start of every counter-strike 2 match, ever
1024 by 768-pixel large screenshot of nothing more than pure white, save for the Windows 10 taskbar search
October 20, 2025 at 8:14 AM
winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
now _this_ is the sort of speed the internet highway was designed for 😎
a graph showing send/receive transfer rates on the mobile hotspot i'm connected to, usually averaging 56 kilobits per seconds (Kbps), with send peaking at 500 Kbps at one point status on my phone showing that it's connected to a 5G network and insisting it has relatively good cell coverage. the mobile hotspot is turned on.
October 14, 2025 at 12:58 PM
winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
Steptions
Configure Your Server Wizard in Longhorn build 4066 displaying the words "Preliminary Steptions" in the page header
September 28, 2025 at 11:05 PM
winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
for once, i'm glad Valve did not go through with this godawful version of the AR2 when HL2 was nearing completion.
September 20, 2025 at 9:38 AM
winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
* be an education company
* get dragged into an EU initiative that promotes giving kids a tablet to work with
* produce lots and lots of cheap tablets running some kind of Android with a crappy MediaTek MT8768 SoC
* do some poor hardware design choice […]

[Original post on wetdry.world]
an open lock, signifying that MDM has been disabled entirely. this device was originally shipped with MDM enabled. about page in AOSP settings on said crappy education tablet AOSP version and build info CPU-Z reporting on the crappy education tablet's device information. it has a crappy MediaTek MT8768 IoT chipset, a 1920x1200 pixel display (@ 25 DPI, which sounds wrong since it's recording the wrong screen size of 89.14 inches? (equivalent to a large whiteboard)), 4 GB of RAM and ~64 GB of internal NAND storage
September 13, 2025 at 9:06 PM
winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
ah, the two most critical sections of the Drive Tools explorer toolbar

Manage, and Manage
two sections of a drive management toolbar both labeled "Manage", containing the Disk Defragmenter, Disk Cleanup and Format utilities. the latter "Manage" section does not have Disk Cleanup.
September 3, 2025 at 1:18 PM
winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
TIL that the HL2: EP2 hunter's phongwarp texture has been consistently reused in the valve games following OB's release:

* portal 2's laser reflection cube basically just copies the hunter phongwarp 1:1 for its glass
* TF2's merasmus model also reuses the […]

[Original post on wetdry.world]
the ep2 hunter model and the reflection cube side-by-side in portal 2; both of them carry the exact same green metallic sheen in-game merasmus model reusing a green recolored version of the hunter phongwarp the hunter phongwarp texture as seen in HL2: EP2 and portal 2; basically a 128x128 pixel heat map the exact same texture but recolored to a very dark green and blurred, for use in merasmus's clothing in TF2
September 2, 2025 at 9:53 PM
winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
A large hallway made out of metal. A skylight illuminates the room. Soldiers trying to stop the player from entering the teleporter room. Their attempt to stop the player is impeded by a balcony overlooking another hallway.
August 30, 2025 at 9:04 AM
winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
update: the Seven Hour Chore has now turned into a Month-Long Passion Project
A giant teleporter room in the style of the Combine Citadel architecture observed in Half-Life 2. there is a central, high-tech-looking teleporter situated in the middle of a very, VERY tall building made entirely out of metal, designated with code "X2". there is a portal being produced and is shining very brightly. Combine forces (five soldiers and a Hunter) are attacking the player. Same room, different view. The room is massive, being made entirely out of metal and stretching down to however the hell far down this building goes. Two glass bridges connect the pathway to the teleporter, which apparently can be controlled by a futuristic-looking terminal. Giant metal arms that rotate around the teleporter are present to supposedly conduct/contain energy. There are organic pipes supporting the Citadel building at a corner, and the walls around the room primarily consist of exposed machinery and giant two-sided panels. There are decals on the walls to indicate that this is a core room. The room may be entered through two large hallways, one of which is gated off with an energy field. Ditto, different angle facing upwards. The room similarly stretches upwards some baffling 3.4 kilometers directly up into the sky. There are energy pylons producing high-energy pellets in the background. Combine soldiers chasing down the player in a hallway leading to the teleporter room.
August 30, 2025 at 9:01 AM
winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
so I ended up addressing this blaringly obvious elephant in code.
August 17, 2025 at 11:29 PM
winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
another year spent
Loxi (me, fox-wolf) sitting in the middle of a void wearing a party hat and blowing a party horn, sitting next to a pair of pink- and blue-striped balloons (and one larger yellow smiley cat face balloon) as if laying down like a Touhou Fumo plushie. I contemplate to myself: it's birthday i love existing i'm too old now wow, i'm 22 now. i hope i don't explo- i magically explode, in the worst fucking composited way possible
August 11, 2025 at 10:02 PM
winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
krita screenshot of a layer named "this is the part where I'm going to fucking suck at drawing circles for the next 30 minutes". it depicts line art of a balloon with a cat face printed on it.
August 11, 2025 at 9:08 PM
winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
latest steam beta client update apparently includes a CPU temp monitor, which works nicely
in-game screenshot of a hallway containing work-in-progress PBR conversions of various TF2 materials like walls, ceilings and floors, with parallax mapping and reflections coming from the tiled floor. there are many energy balls and portals placed across the room. the subject of the image in question is actually the Steam overlay's updated performance counters, which shows a one-line representation of the overall CPU, GPU, and RAM load on the computer as well as the current framerate (of which the game is currently locked to a solid 60 FPS). the new thing in this performance counter is the CPU temperature stat (added in today's client update), which is currently being recorded at 58°C. same exact deal as the other image, at the other end of the hallway. the current CPU temperature stat as displayed by the overlay is 56°C.
August 9, 2025 at 8:17 AM
winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
they could have fixed this by literally moving the intel room away and fixing up the brushwork.

i fear what valve would have done in THEIR version of `mtt_spy.bsp`...
proposed fix in a fan-made recreation of the Meet the Spy stage map, where the intel room is actually separated away from the basement hallway. this fixes the continuity problem entirely.
August 5, 2025 at 12:30 PM
winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
why have one PLOC language pack when you can have _two_ instead?
the Language control panel applet in the Windows 8 RTM build (9200) erroneously reporting two of the same pseudolocalized language pack being installed on the system, alongside a single copy of English (United States)
July 29, 2025 at 1:15 PM
winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
uh-huh

yeah. _sure_ , VMware. _totally_ disabled on that end.
VMware insisting that my laptop doesn't have a GPU driver installed despite the fact that there very clearly is one present in it DxDiag on the host machine reporting DirectX feature levels up to version 12.1 and a WDDM 3.1-capable GPU driver present 3D accel working perfectly fine on the same Windows 8 virtual machine that VMware claimed was not supported
July 29, 2025 at 1:02 PM
winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
ah, yes, i certainly would like to use the discord overlay for

_checks notes_

art programs
discord hooking itself onto krita for whatever reason
July 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM
winload-exe.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy
I heard some people liked nuts.

So, here's my nut collection.
Picture of a small assortment of various ARM devices laid down on a bed, with comments describing each one. Depicted: Two Surface RT tablets of both 32/64 GB varieties with original charging adapter. Both have a Nvidia Tegra 3 (T30) system-on-chip. They are used to differentiate Windows 8 builds. The 64 GB model has Windows builds 8422 and 15035 present on the eMMC, while the 32 GB "sacrificial goat tablet" is running a customized WinPE from Windows 10 April 2018 Update ADK off of a ramdisk. There is a USB hub with a US layout keyboard, mouse and a workload USB drive (marked with a cat face). A Samsung Galaxy J5 (2016; SM-J510FN), which used to be my former daily driver phone, a Microsoft Lumia 950 Single SIM (RM-1104) and a 4 GB Raspberry Pi Model 4B prototyping board (with an attached heatsink, a corresponding SD card, an SD card reader and a USB-C power adapter) are laid on the bed. The Galaxy J5 is running original firmware, but is temporarily soft-bricked due to Knox burning the warranty void fuse via OEM unlock. The Lumia 950 is running a standard copy of Windows 10 Mobile, displaying the glance screen (time and date while on standby). Both phones have Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 (MSM8916) and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 (MSM8992) SoCs, while the Pi 4B has a Broadcom BCM2711 SoC. The phone I took this picture with, a Samsung Galaxy A36 5G (SM-A366B/DS), is also labeled in this picture despite being out of sight.
July 25, 2025 at 3:51 PM