Matisyahu's Blog

There appears to be one constant in life and that is the lousy reliability of synchronising over wifi – it never worked when I had a Mac and it appears with the Phone Link that has continued. On a good side, hooking up the phone via a USB-C cable to my laptop and then dragging/dropping the files to my music directory on my phone worked flawlessly. The one thing you may need to do is disable it showing up in File Explorer has I have noticed some weird behaviour but everything else it is working perfectly. Call me a bit old school but I’ve never had a cable steer me wrong – plug in, copy the files over.

Don’t me wrong, I can see the benefits of using wifi but I found that it ended up dying around half way through the synchronisation over wifi for no apparent reason but I did a drag and drop and it was copied pretty quickly. Oh, and another thing, when you plug in your phone you need to ensure that it is unlocked so that it appears in File Explorer because on Samsung phones there is a feature called ‘Block USB connections while locked” which is a built in security precaution so that if you lock your phone, someone steals it then they’re unable to access the data on the phone without having to first unlock it.

Windows 11 25H2 has been made available on the release preview channel (link) and because it is based on the same code base as Windows 11 24H2 the net result should be a smoother upgrade with a lot of the features already baked in and it is a matter of Microsoft ‘clicking the switch’ and enabling what is already baked in. One of the features is the Administrator Protection which appears to be opt in but I wouldn’t be surprised if at some date they make it a mandatory requirement at some stage in the future since it all falls inline with Microsoft’s focus dealing with security and reliability.

When it comes to the reliability part of the equation there is work to create a framework for security software companies that currently reliable on kernel modules which can cause problems as we saw with the recent CrowdStrike. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same framework will be used by the likes of Easy Anti-Cheat and other such software since both employ the same sort of monitoring but for different purposes. Hopefully what it should mean is that only but the bare essentials are run in kernel space which should make the whole system a lot more reliable. I guess I’m lucky in that I don’t have any software that relies on such functionality so I avoid many of the issues that people talk about online.