back of a spreadsheet; back of the net

I don't know how to trust anything I read or see online any more.

Just a few days ago, I started reading an article talking about archive.org and how it stopped doing some sort of widespread page collection in 2024 around the time of their DDOS attack. The article also mentioned Google stopping its "cached page" collection as a related event, leaving us now without any easy and trustworthy reference to past online experiences. Actual published information can now simply be made to disappear... gaslighting anyone who thought they remembered it.

I think the article intended to tie this chain of thinking to our current control by a few plutocrats over our broadcast and online media, providing them ample opportunity to manipulate our societies and politics for their economic benefit. It was a very long article, and I stopped reading it halfway through, intending to come back to it later. Today, I can't even remember which website it was at. It was an important article, but I've lost it in the aether. I really need a convenient replacement for Pocket, which is what I used for a long time to store webpages into categories for easy recall.

With AI videos, audio, and images all being so realistic, I just don't know how anyone can know anything beyond what they see with their own eyes. And our brain's memory is itself famously faulty. There are important political events happening on the world stage, and it's difficult to know for sure where to direct one's attention.

The only option that I can see is for everybody to record everything around them at all times. Then any disputed event can be compared against multiple data sources for corroboration. But I see people online freaking out about any recording of anything because you didn't ask permission of anyone in field of view. I'm so tired of this obligate ownership of everything everywhere.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this train of thought. I know that somehow this topic is related to technological telepathy, in this dystopian world where we suffer the manipulation of reality by forced control over recording and recall of events. Once again, I advocate total freedom instead of compartmentalized "ownership" of any experience, perspective, or opinion. The one thing I argue against is lies... the presentation of one thing as something else that it is not.

For easier searching later, I decided to make a brief post today just about some HTML tags that I use.

For pre-formatted text, I discovered in yesterday's post that long lines of powershell code were not wrapping to new lines. I eventually got it working as intended by formatting the HTML tags like this:

<pre style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Text goes here. blah blah blah.</pre>

I wonder, though, if I should switch to monospace font for computer code? In the past, there was the TT (teletype) tag, but apparently that's another technology that has been deprecated. Here's an example of the new KBD (keyboard) code instead. I don't know. It looks exactly the same to me, except for the change in vertical spacing. I'll stick with PRE instead, I guess. I could use KBD inline within a paragraph if needed.
<kbd>this is a test. blah blah blah.</kbd>

Far more frequently, however, I use the HTML tag to display a little sideways-arrow which users need to click to "open up" a section of text. Using this tag liberally helps keep long posts from flooding other peoples' blog feeds. Readers can choose whether or not to read the long diatribes (or see the large pictures) in the main part of the blog post. Here is the code I use to accomplish that feat:

<details>
<summary>Click the arrow to read the blah blah blah...</summary>
All of the usual blog content goes here.
</details>

There. Now I can find these tag details again when I click the HTML tag on my blog. Bread crumbs to help a failing memory.

Today at work, I wanted/needed a faster way to collect particular events in the Microsoft Windows event logs. I had the obvious way to collect them from the gui, but I needed something better. I decided to try powershell.

Get-EventLog -LogName System -Source Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-General -After (Get-Date).AddDays(-10) | Where-Object { $_.EventID -eq 1 -and $_.CategoryNumber -eq 5 } | Out-GridView

Possible detection of CVE: 2025-11-15T20:31:07.5402125Z
This Event is generated when an attempt to exploit a known vulnerability (2025-11-15T20:31:07.5402125Z) is detected.

Get-WinEvent -FilterHashTable @{ProviderName='Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-General'; Id=1; StartTime=(Get-Date).AddDays(-10)} | Where-Object { $_.Message -match 'Change Reason:.*time zone.*' } | Select-Object TimeCreated, Message | Out-GridView

Finally! This new powershell command shows the correct reason for the log entry and the directory path to the program that produced it. That's exactly what I needed. Yay, although I'm clearly out of practice with powershell. After collecting data, I opened a ticket to have our next tier of IT take a look at my computer and find why this particular event keeps showing up. Something is changing my timezone (to the wrong timezone) throughout the day, even after I manually change it back to the correct timezone.