Google shows that this appears to be a general problem, and the suggested solutions do not work. Some posts even claim that this has been broken for so long that it’s outrageous that Microsoft still hasn’t fixed it. I can now confirm that there is a working solution, but it’s so obscure that not even an hour on the phone with first Xbox Support and then Microsoft Support was able to resolve it!

So, here’s the solution:

These following steps will fix the problems for your own account. — If you want to fix it for a child in your family, first follow these steps 1–6, and then continue with the steps A–G in the next section.

If you’re still reading, I’m guessing you’ve been struggling for a while to get this to work, so take a moment to breathe, relax, and focus. The following steps are proven to work, but if you’re stressed and tired, please don’t hurry. You’re going to jump between Microsoft and Xbox account pages, so make sure you’re awake.

Closing remarks: If this helped you, please like the page, share it, leave a comment, send me some satoshis :-)

1. It’s not in your Microsoft Account. It’s in your Xbox Account.
   • But I don’t have an Xbox account! Why would I have one, when I don’t have an Xbox? This is Windows [or whatever you’re using].
   • Yes, it’s weird and wrong, but that’s where it is.
2. Make sure that your Minecraft Launcher is using your Microsoft Account. We will re-use those credentials for a new Xbox Account.
   • Look in the top left corner of the launcher:
   • If this is not the player account you intended, click that menu and log out.
3. Open your favorite web browser and visit https://account.microsoft.com, then check that you are logged in there with the same account that your Minecraft Launcher uses, or log in with that account.
   • Look in the top right corner of the page:
   • If this is not the account you intended, click that menu and sign out.
4. Now visit https://account.xbox.com/Settings — this is where you sign in with the same credentials once more.
   • Unless you already have one, this is your new Xbox account!
5. In the left-hand list, click on Privacy and online safety, then on
   Xbox/Windows 10 online safety.
6. In this section, Allow the setting Join multiplayer games.
   • You can set everything else to Block.
   • Click Submit.

If you are setting this up for a child in your family:

1. 1. First follow all of the steps 1–6 above for the parent account.
   2. Sign out of the Microsoft Account and also from the Xbox account.
   3. Repeat the above steps 2-4 using credentials for the child, in order to create the Xbox account for the child.
   4. Sign out from both accounts again, and sign in again with the parent account.
   5. Now visit https://account.microsoft.com/family and click on the “More Options” menu for the family member that needs multiplayer access.
   6. In the left-hand list of the parent’s Xbox account page, click on
      Privacy and online safety.
      
   7. Click the image of the child account, then on
      Xbox/Windows 10 online safety.
   8. In this section, Allow the setting Join multiplayer games.

It’s not very elegant, but at least you only have to do it once (per person). Still, one would think that a business like Microsoft could make a simpler procedure, especially for people that don’t even have an Xbox.

If this helped you, please like the page, share it, leave a comment, send me some satoshis :-)

If you don’t know that feeling of confusion followed by irritation and then sadness, now’s your chance to relive it!

We live in a time where wheelmice are disappearing again. They are now being usurped by touchscreens. I used to think that putting a touchscreen on a laptop is nonsense: it already has a keyboard, touchpad, trackpoint, and commonly a USB mouse as well. Today’s post is my admission that I am mistaken—a touchscreen on a laptop is remarkably useful!

For a few months now, I have been the happy owner of a nice business laptop. It’s a used Lenovo ThinkPad T440s with an Intel i7 CPU and 12GB RAM. I grabbed it because used ThinkPads with that much memory are rare. It needed a new battery, and now it has power for a whopping 7 hours of work. Even so it’s not too heavy.

The surprising thing that is really worth telling about is that it has a touchscreen, and I actually use it!

I usually do not like to use laptops, at least not without having a mouse next to it. I can’t control a trackpoint at all, and even a large touchpad is rather smaller than my hand, or than the screen. Yes, they allow multipoint touches so you do rudimentary gestures like scrolling, but a mouse is much faster than swiping around on a touchpad.

But do you know what’s even faster than moving a mouse? Press that button—literally. Swipe the literal page to scroll through a document, drag an icon to a folder, tap an application in the Taskbar, minimize a window … it’s so intuitive to operate that I do not miss the mouse or its wheel at all. I hardly notice that I am using the screen. It is so much faster than reaching for the mouse, finding the cursor, moving it over, and then clicking.

I don’t really notice that I use the touchscreen, but I guess I use it a lot because I’ve started to touch the screens of the other household computers and don’t understand why it’s not responding to my touches. Only after repeated touches do I sheepishly realize that, oh, this one doesn’t have touch! Haha, oops. My bad.

Of course, there are still times when I use the touchpad, e.g. , when a little more precision is needed. Especially in text, a mouse is still practical. Windows Touch can even do “text selection” in the same way as you are used to from Android / iOS, but this is one thing where accurate operation is faster with the mouse or keyboard.

Touch usually means that the screen is glossy and not matte, which I don’t like, primarily because a glossy screen acts like a mirror and the fingerprints are visible. My screen is nearly as matte as a normal one, because thankfully it’s not a glass panel so it doesn’t act like a mirror. And because it’s so matte, fingerprints are invisible—that’s essential. I only see the fingerprints when I look at the screen at a nearly flat angle, which of course isn’t how you generally look at a screen.

—So there you have it: a quality touchscreen is surprisingly useful and amazingly intuitive that I use more often than I could have guessed! I doubt I will ever buy a laptop without touch, just like I would never buy a mouse without a wheel.

The phone itself is still in mint condition and runs every app I need – and it does so faster than the 2020 budget phone that my wife uses with such admirable patience.

New phones are odd, in 2020: either they are ridiculously overpriced flagships, or they are reasonably priced with worse specs than the phone I am looking to replace. The obvious solution is to buy neither, but instead last year’s flagship: I got myself a mint Samsung Galaxy S10.

While setting up this new phone, I notice in my Google account that it has been almost 5 years since I started using that old phone. Not bad at all! I wonder whether the new one will last me just as long? I frankly doubt it.

By the way, it was somewhat of a coincidence that the new phone is also a Samsung Galaxy S-series. I was reviewing the entire market and looking for any phone that could match my specific criteria. In the end, the S10 was the only model that satisfied all my requirements.

The other day I received a text message that led to a phishing scam. I didn’t fall for the scam but I thought it would have convinced many people that I know, so I decided to publish this as a general warning and reminder to everyone to stay vigilant.

In these modern times I often order stuff online, and the attackers use this trend to catch people unawares. This attack started out in a fairly believable manner: a notification that a package has been held up in the distribution central.

Undeliverable package! Status: your package has been held up in the distribution central. Track your package: [short link]

I suspected a scam immediately, so I didn’t go to that link on my phone. Instead, I started a safe machine and typed the link into a web browser (in safe mode, to be extra sure). 

The short link in the text message redirected to this page that was no less suspicious. First, the text message was in German but the page title is Danish, and the URL’s top-level domain .pw refers to the island country of Palau in the Pacific Ocean. It is unlikely that DHL would use that domain.

Track package: [pre-filled code] Search

Clicking that search button showed a search result with this text:

Your package is on its way.

Current status: stopped in the distribution center. Reason: weight limit exceeded. Amount due: €2. Delivery will be processed within 24 hours after payment. [Pay now]

And clicking through to the payment screen gives me a form which I did not fill out, so my trail ends here. But notice the footer that says “Chances4prizes”! On another attempt it read “Enter2Gain” instead, and there was a copyright link to the ugly “small print” that, surprisingly, revealed that this was a subscription. That page was removed when I revisited to make these screenshots. 

Please fill out the form: [first name, last name, address, phone, email]

So there you have it. If you believe the text message and think this process will release a package that is held up, then you have been fooled, and it will cost you. Don’t get fooled.

But how large is the broad side of a barn, anyway? Would you be surprised to learn that scientists have actually worked that out? And why do I know this??

Some time ago, I was trying to find a way to remember my license plate that ends with the letters “FB”. I don’t like a particular social media site so I was googling for other things that use those letters and discovered that it is also a unit of measurement used in particle physics: fb means femtobarn. I immediately chose that as my mnemonic simply because of its nerdy obscurity.

What I want to share here is its ridiculous back story: what the hell is a femtobarn?!

Okay, stay with me, we’re going to dive into particle physics now:

In the 1940s, physicists working on the Manhattan Project used a particle accelerator in their research. As it turns out, “particle accelerator” is what it does, but not what it’s for: it accelerates particles all right, but it does that to smash those particles into a target so that the collision effects can be measured: that target is an atomic nucleus. It being during World War II, the physicists needed a secretive unit to describe the approximate cross-sectional area presented by the typical nucleus. It goes without saying that such a nucleus is ridiculously small in our everyday world, but for particle accelerators that is actually considered a large target.

Hitting … Large … Target … Hmmm …

The challenge of hitting a large target is nicely contained in that “broad side of a barn” idiom, so they adopted “barn” as their secret unit: a barn is defined as the size of a typical target: the approximate cross sectional area presented by the typical nucleus, or 10^-28 m².

I’m sure they all laughed nerdily about their clever idea.

Now, the prefix femto means one quadillionth. So a femtobarn is 10^-43 m², or one quadillionth of a barn. That is a tenth of a sextillionth of a sextillionth of a square meter!

And that’s a pretty good description of the size of my car, too…