Ask Paul: July 17 ⭐

Happy Friday! We’re in Mexico, we have no Internet, and the U.S. is either covered in smoke or underwater. But it’s all good, or will be, and getting the weekend started a bit early sounds like a fantastic idea.

“Please Let This Hot Pink Pixel 11 Leak Be Real”

Well, the leak is real

🤯 Reimagined

michaelmdiv asks:

You seem to have reinvented yourself a couple of times (i.e. moving from software guy to journalist). What are some of the lessons or tips you could share from those transitions?

Excuse the stream of consciousness here. And elsewhere, actually.

I need to be super-clear here: I never went into anything in life with any kind of a plan. I mostly just ping-ponged between events that were thrust upon me or just occurred to me, and I decided accordingly when possible. Most of whatever has been good in my life is luck or happenstance. I guess that’s true of some/most of the bad things too.

I feel like people grow up with whatever assumptions and opinions based on their upbringing and that hopefully you evolve and change when you learn more. When I grew up, I was good at drawing for some reason, and so it seemed like that was going to be some way forward. Certainly, my mother thought so, and she pushed me into various art classes, some private and some with groups. After the fourth grade, she enrolled me in a summer art program at a nearby private school that I did enjoy, but then my parents decided I should go there the next school year. And that did not work out well. So I had one year outside the Dedham public school system, even though at some point that private offered to let me go there for free for some reason.

Anyway, by the time I graduated from high school, I had won every art award you could win and I was going to the Art Institute of Boston while everyone else I knew was going off to what I’ll call normal colleges and probably then to normal careers.

That did no go well either. Just a few months into this, I realized that this was a path to never making any money, and I wasn’t happy with the classes, most of the teachers, the lack of any computer anything, and I just coasted and dropped out after the first year. I ended up taking a year off, worked at Toys R Us, where I met the woman I’m still married to–more luck–and then went back to school in New Mexico of all places. For one year, because that, too, did not work out. The issue was that I had no real direction. I had enjoyed art until the art school beat it out of me, but I had gone back to school for … nothing? I don’t even remember what my major was. English maybe. It didn’t make sense.

Somewhere in here it occurred to me that I could maybe turn my love of computers and technologies from a hobby into a career. And so after coming back from New Mexico, getting married, and continuing schooling part-time at night, I decided to actually go to school to learn software development. Long story short, we moved to the Phoenix area and I tried again. This time much more successfully.

Life is weird. In Phoenix, there was one false start that could have taken me in an entirely different direction and then the thing that did kick off what I’m still doing.

My dad called me one day and said he had met this guy that owned a software company in Phoenix, they were expanding, and they needed people who could write software code and didn’t mind some travel. He told the guy about me and let me know he might be calling. Which he did. I was still very early into my schooling at that point, so I was underqualified. But I went down to this small business and met with the owner and some other manager types, and it went well enough, but it was obvious I would need training. This was a UNIX shop and I can’t even recall what it was they did anymore, but part of the job was traveling to the Midwest for weeks at a time to be on-site to help whatever customers and it sounded interesting. I met with the guys doing this work and we hit it off instantly. It was clear this would be an interesting opportunity and one that would let me jump past whatever number of years I’d be in school and just get the job I was going to school for in the first place. But I didn’t get the job. I was told that, yes, the guys I’d work with wanted me there but the owner/management was just worried about how long it would take to get me up to speed. So that never happened. But if it had, my life would have been different.

What did happen, of course, is that I met a professor while at school who jumpstarted what did become my career. He asked me to help tech-edit a book he was working on, then he asked me to help write it, and then I ended up writing it all, based largely on some handouts he and another professor had made. And we worked on both books simultaneously, the first couple of which I only played a minor role in. But this may be the first example I can think of where I actually took a real chance on my own behalf and it paid off. Because I had written that first book almost completely, I asked if I could be the primary author. He agreed, and we went on to write several more books. I wrote others on my own.

These things are all just chance, or luck. A guy who worked at the publishing company that published our me first books (and this professor’s books) left and started a small Internet publishing company and hired me. I wrote books for him and that company and did technical work around our co-located web server and traveled between Phoenix and the Bay area regularly. I started what we would now call blogs as the web was happening, as logical follow-ups to the email newsletters I had made while still in school. Because of what we were writing, we kept getting into Microsoft betas. We were invited to the Windows 95 launch but skipped it because we were on a deadline. But when Windows NT 5.0 was coming around, I went to the reviewer’s workshop in Seattle that year and was inspired to start the SuperSite for Windows, which I saw as a temporary, limited thing for discussing that one release. But it snowballed. When the Internet startup basically failed, the guys from WUGNET offered to host my sites–the SuperSite and WinInfo, which came out of a newsletter–for free and I worked with them. We moved back to Boston.

And then what was still Windows NT Magazine came calling. Really Duke Publishing, but they were expanding from print to online and saw my work and wanted me to write one of their email newsletters, which I agreed to immediately. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was their biggest newsletter, and it was a responsibility I took seriously, but I later learned that some of the old-timers there resented this young guy coming in from the web. I guess the work was good enough because Duke purchased my websites and brought me onboard. This gave me some nice exposure, and I had a column in the print magazine, etc. I was heavily involved with Microsoft, of course, and the whole space. Kept writing books. And so on.

Leo Laporte left his TV gig and started TWiT and called me to ask about doing a Windows podcast in mid-2006, another bit of luck I never asked for or saw coming. I had known him from Tech TV, which I had watched and was fascinated by. And he introduced me to a whole new level of exposure I never saw coming, which had nothing to do with why I accepted this work. We’re closing in on 20 years as I write this.

There’s more, there’s always more, but this is already longer than I intended. I guess what this all means is that life hands you what it hands you and you can do with it as you will. Some people are go getters, they make things happen, but that’s not me. I made some good decisions and some bad decisions. Many of things I wanted to do just failed. Some of the things I fell into succeeded. Some didn’t. I never had a plan, not really. But plans emerged as things changed. I feel like I may approach thing differently than some, but fundamentally what I do is express my love of this stuff, which resonates with some, but also try to help those who find it confusing or too technical. And it was always about that, not some company or some product, but about the technology and how it could best be used to improve things and how it could be fixed when it did not.

My whole life is luck. We’re in Mexico right now because of luck. The pandemic happened, the European home swaps came to an end, we thought temporarily, and then we just had to figure something out. Mexico fell into our lives, I didn’t seek it, but we fell in love. If the pandemic had never happened, if the U.S. had allowed Europeans to come into the country in mid-2021, would never have come to Mexico. Ever. It never would have crossed my mind.

Pennsylvania, same thing. My father lived in New Mexico, which is why I went there. He owned a condo near Phoenix, which is why I went there. He lived and worked in Europe for 8+ years in the 1990s, which is why I went to Europe for the first several times and fell in love with it and travel. And then he moved to Pennsylvania, which is why we started visiting there and I started asking why we weren’t living there. We finally moved there in 2017. It’s an astonishing amount of luck and circumstance and I’ve left out a lot too. It’s too much. But you get the idea.

There is a theory that one makes their own luck. I guess so. I think of it more like you’re given whatever chances and you react or don’t. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t. And then decades go by and you don’t remember how the heck you landed where you did or why.

Many, many years ago, I was speaking at some user group event and someone asked me how they could get into my line of work. They wanted advice, basically, wanted to know how I did it. And my response was basically that I can’t help you with that. I was presented with whatever opportunities and it was all luck. You will have different experiences. You will land somewhere.

This has happened to my son, too. He went to school for basically what I was going to school for–software development, but with a bit of psychology thrown in too because things change–and graduated during the pandemic when there were no jobs. He had been working at FedEx, first part-time and then more so, and he liked his boss and coworkers, but he spent a year or two actively seeking a job in his field. I tried to remain quiet on this, I felt that he ha a good thing going at FedEx, everyone loves him, and he keeps getting promoted. And then he realized that was true on his own and just accepted that he was in the right place for him. Which in many ways is tied to him almost dying as a child (bad luck), losing his hearing (bad luck), getting cochlear implants and being as successful as one can be with these things (very good luck), and then going to a college (RIT) that has an incredible deaf program (very good luck or at least a good choice). Which is where he ended up working at FedEx (good luck). And still lives. And he has all kinds of great friends and a community around him. It just worked out great.

Is there a theme in here? Maybe. But this is my experience. Some reading this will be more proactive, will do things differently, and will literally make things happen. I am vaguely jealous of that, I don’t have that skill. But I’m also OK with how things worked out. It was not what I saw for myself as a child or teenager. It was not what I expected to do when I went back to school for the third time. Etc. It is just what happened.

“AppleCare+ monthly price increases by 50 cents for Mac and iPad”

Please tell me Apple blamed the component crisis

✈️ Travel

justme asks:

Travel-related question for you this week. Now that you’ve had your home in MEX for a while, how are you finding the PA-MEX shuffle? Have you gotten to the point where the travel and transition has become almost routine? Are you still changing the way you execute the mechanics of the actual travel or do you now have an established pattern of what you do (meaning things like Uber to the airport, minimal baggage, etc) and how you do it.

It is a curious thing that I’ve traveled so much in my life, I had years there where I was gone 30+ weeks in a year for work travel, and we spent about 20 years visiting Europe multiple times every year, with three-week trips in the summer, and I still do not travel well. I’m not afraid of flying, like Brad is, and like one of my Boston friends is. But I do get nervous, or maybe stressed is the better word. Not because of a plane or whatever. But maybe because I’m always worried I will forget something or whatever. Every time I have to fly, I feel the stress building up. I always wanted and expected this to get better in time, and it has not. I don’t know why I am like this.

The flights to and from Mexico are routine in some ways and less so in others. We exclusively flew non-stop out of Newark on United for much of this time, but AeroMexico added direct flights from Philly and so we use whichever makes more sense for the trip at the time. We have status on United, so we can often fly business class, and I am all about reducing the travel-related terribleness, so having space is nice. But AeroMexico is inexpensive and we can often upgrade there too. United and AeroMexico fly into different terminals at the airport in Mexico, and the experience is quite different, with the United experience being dramatically better.

Newark and Philly are both a bit under 1.5 hours away by car, which is horrible. We can’t leave our car at those airports if we’re gone for more than a week or two, so we’ve tried all kind of ways to get back and forth and pretty much just take Ubers. This has worked out surprisingly well, but not always.

We only fly with carry-ons, never check luggage. I am almost always the first person on the plane after all the special preboarding groups and, if not, I’m in the first 1-5 people. I want to get settled, ensure I have space for my things, and that’s crucial if you’re in the first row and don’t have underseat storage. Etc. It’s all routine.

For this trip, we had a mid-afternoon departure, which is unusual. I prefer to fly as early as possible because that helps with the cascading series of issues that can cause delays basically every day, and it gets worse the later you go. But this meant we could sleep normally, not that I slept well that night, and we had some time in the morning to work and clean up. You spend part of each day the previous week preparing things for this trip, you’re leaving a place empty for a long time. We have neighbors in both places that help with mail or whatever, which is crucial.

This trip was an 11:30 Uber to Newark, and I was stressed. A weird change from Terminal C, which is for international flights, to Terminal A, which is now gorgeous and modernized, and a very quick trip through security. My bag is full of electronics, but with TSA Pre, there was no taking out anything, no questions, it just all sailed through. We hung out in the United lounge because it’s free and there’s food. We got to the gate about 20 minutes before boarding time to find an older Mexican couple already in line in Group A, so I was third not first. Still stressed. But there was no need to show a passport or boarding pass anywhere in the U.S., which was incredible. And we were on the plane promptly. But then is sat there, delayed for 40 minutes, because afternoons are like that. We had to fly over land only, also unusual, because of some rocket launch, so that added time too. But we arrived just 20 minutes after our original ETA, and it was fine. Mexico scans your bags on the way in, I keep waiting for them to question all the crap I bring, but they never do, and off we went. We called an Uber and 25 minutes later we were at our apartment. My stress had finally come to an end. I guess that’s what it takes.

So I guess there is a routine, of course. There are differences and there have been changes over time. The AeroMexico experience is often less expensive but the terminal it flies into is terrible. Anyone else would just get used to this. It’s normal. But I still get stressed every single time.

How are you finding entering/exiting both countries? Do you ever mail things to either home ahead of time to minimize what you carry?

The experience has improved dramatically on both sides. It’s fascinating. We got TSA Pre pretty early on for the quicker/simpler security lines. And we got Global Entry about five years ago, which I only know because I just renewed it. In both cases, the original sign-up years ago was this in-person meeting and a huge inconvenience. Since then, it’s all electronic and faster. The experience at the airport has gotten better too. When you come home from an international trip, you blow by the masses of humanity waiting in lines in customs, Newark or Philly in my case, and never wait in line. It was always fast, but now it’s even faster: You walk up to a camera, it snaps, you walk out, and you’re outside of customs and security in no time at all. It feels like cheating.

This trip was interesting because Terminal A in Newark was completely modernized. We never took out ID or boarding passes. We went through security with a camera snap, like when you come back with Global Entry. No shoes off, no computers out, no nothing. We boarded with no ID or boarding pass, too, just the camera. And then we get to Mexico City and land in the terminal we prefer, and it, too, has been thoroughly modernized (which we saw as it was happening, but it’s done now). You go down into the same huge customs room, empty as always, but now it’s all automated with machines and cameras. We have residency, so there would be no waiting even if there were lines, but there are never lines. We did have to scan our U.S. passports, the first time on this trip they were needed for anything. But we were out of there in the time it took to walk from one end of that room to the other. Minutes later, we’re outside in the air.

I’ve never mailed anything back or forth. If I were to do that, I’d use FedEx or UPS, not the mail. I could see needing that, but it’s not happened yet. We carry what we need with us. (I said we never check bags, which is true. But we did check a bag once, in mid-2022, when we flew here with an inflatable mattress. So we did check that.) I cart things back and forth and try to minimize that when possible. We have so many things here I don’t have to bring too much for day-to-day, like clothes or toiletries. But we also now have too much here, in some ways. Well. I do.

For this trip, I flew here with a laptop bag with two laptops and my iPad Pro, various earbuds, cables, chargers, etc., almost normal. My carry-on luggage had three dress shirts that I only ferry back and forth because I can’t buy them anymore and several t-shirts because I needed replacements. I brought some contacts, some other toiletries, and then some electronics: A laptop and tablet I’m reviewing, some IKEA smart water detectors, which are small, and a few other small things. I am hoping to carry less when we return, but I also have things here–too many laptops, for starters–I’d like to winnow down. Perhaps there are local homes for them here.

As an aside, this question/discussion topic was inspired by a couple of recent articles I’ve read about American expats doing the ‘Schengen Shuffle’ — essentially following the 90 in 180 day rule to live in the EU visa-free with the other 180 spent in places like Thailand, Singapore, Australia, the UK and Japan. In your case, I know you have a visa for Mexico, but I was struck by the nomadic similarity of it all. Plus, I know you and your family used to do home swaps in Europe and greatly enjoyed it.

Yes. I know people from Canada who have a similar schedule, I assume because of whatever Canadian laws. In our case, we never have to come home, we could stay here forever if we wanted. When we go through customs we take out our residency cards, which gets us through a faster/shorter line if there are lines and ensures we’re not auto-registered for a six-week stay, which is the normal limit.

It’s a weird existence. All those years we were going to Europe, we wanted a future where we split our time between the U.S. and some country there, probably France. In Mexico, we achieved that, but there’s no good schedule, no perfect routine. You’re either in one place too long, in which case you miss people and things in the other, or it’s too short and you’re flying too much, which is expensive and horrible. There are logistical things around doctor appointments and so on. We met with our accountant about our taxes the day before we flew here, for example. Each trip to or from is often tied to scheduling all the things that need to happen and making plans to see people you haven’t seen in a bit. We have friends and family back in Boston, complicating it further. Be careful what you wish for, I guess, you may get it. Then you’re really screwed.

Where’s home? Both places? To our friends in PA, it’s there. To the friends here we walked up the street and saw as quickly as possible, it’s Mexico, and that actually came up. Welcome home. We just left home. But we also just came back home. It’s very strange.

“New ClickLock malware targets macOS users to steal passwords”

This is what happens when people finally use your product

📉 Bad data

jrzoomer asks:

Paul regarding Windows marketshare, if you look at Statcounter’s latest, it has Desktop marketshare of Windows down to 56% have you seen this?

Yes. And it’s completely wrong.

And it bugs me how many just took this at face value when there is that 21 percent “unknown” that is obviously Windows, meaning that nothing has changed. Windows is still in the 70 to 80 percent range of desktop computing usage, of course. Probably more, actually, since Mac is barely 10 percent and Linux is low single digits. We all see what we want to see.

But here’s what I do know. Big growth–and for this topic, big usage drop-offs–almost universally only happen when the product/market in question is small. That is, it’s easy to experience double-digit growth when you own 6 percent of a market, but much harder when you own 60 or 80 percent. Windows is never going to lose 20 percent share in a quarter. Just inertia ensures that.

And the broader question, it looks like the trend of Windows is on the way down, while Mac and Linux are on the way up in the last few months. Is that because of Mac and Linux being more preferred now for local AI use? Is this enterprise decision making? I could imagine Linux gaming on the rise with SteamOS and Proton, but that doesn’t explain Mac rising. Is it just consumers getting weary of Microsoft (privacy concerns/pushing their own services in Windows)?

I think it’s fair to believe that Windows usage will trend downward over time. Not because of any particular failings there, though it’s comfortable to believe that the enshittification has somehow finally triggered a mass exodus, but because things change. With the move to mobile, which dwarfs desktop usage, it makes sense that platforms made by the companies that dominate in mobile will start performing better too. There are ecosystem advantages, etc. that Windows lacks. Most Windows usage is not “people forced to use Windows,” as the Mac and open source crowds want to believe, it’s just what people are familiar with and it works. There are choices of models and form factors, different price points. You know, actually advantages and reasons.

But when people have really good experiences with an iPhone, say, and then an iPad, an Apple Watch, AirPods, and whatever else, it makes sense that they might buy a Mac if they need the desktop experience. I’ve said this many times, but it still surprises me that the Mac didn’t get 20 percent share 10 years ago. It barely cracked 10 percent this month.

Linux? Eh. Windows 11 runs faster on the Steam Machine than the Linux OS it comes with. The performance and compatibility of games will always be better on Windows. Linux is great, I love it, but let’s be honest here. It’s a lot of work. I think most people want something that just works. Not something that may or may not solve some perceived issue with Windows while introducing its own bizarre problems no one normal knows how to solve. The Mac makes sense to me for that audience, which is big. Chromebooks always made sense to me for the Android crowd, and GoogleBooks will continue that.

But inertia is the best friend of Windows. Businesses know it and trust Microsoft. Ordinary people know it and it just works, despite all the enthusiast complaints. No one is running for the exits, and the work Microsoft is doing this year actually helps prevent that from happening too. That Microsoft actively undermined Windows for years and didn’t have bigger usage share issues says a lot.

Or am I overthinking all this and this is just normal fluctuation, sometimes it trends up and sometimes it trends down?

StatCounter was never the best source of data, but its main competitor is gone and all we have left, like Counterpoint, are small unknown companies I’m not sure if we can trust. In the sense that one can prove anything with statistics, we need to be careful with these numbers. When it comes to usage share–which is what this is, not market share, which is unit sales–the only trends you look at are annual. Not quarter over quarter. And not month over month: That measurement is nonsense and is often inaccurate. This month more so than ever. Month-to-month may make some sense for literal usage share, like the number of people streaming music or whatever, but even that will have inaccuracies.

Maybe the simplest way to explain this is confirmation bias. The anti-Windows crowd wanted to believe this so badly they stopped thinking straight. My issue is that there even is an anti-Windows crowd in this day and age. But you learn a lot from this kind of thing. They’re still out there, holding the torch. For some reason. There are healthier things to think about.

(StatCounter is down as I write this. Not sure why, but I feel like a big correction is coming.)

“OpenAI launches branded merchandise including a $70 basketball”

Not the first hardware product most were expecting

🎵 Music

anoldamigauser asks:

Saw your recommendation for MusicBee on Windows Weekly. Went to the website and saw that it supports Windows Phone 8+ and Zune. Wondered if you checked that out for old times sake.

I hadn’t, but that’s hilarious. I may have jumped the gun on that pick because it’s something I will be writing about, hopefully soon, tied to the An Inconvenient Truth series and what it may or may not mean to have a hybrid music experience that includes both a subscription service (Spotify or whatever) and a local MP3/FLAC music collection. There’s a whole physical media angle, of course–and speaking of overblown statistics, did you see that audio CD sales are up this year?–and we’ll see where it takes us. But MusicBee is a great app for getting meta data right. I’m surprised by how good it is. I’ve been using it regularly for weeks, and it just nails the basics. Not as a player, that’s terrible. But for managing and optimizing your own music.

(And thank God for that. I do see that its website still mentions Groove Music, so it clearly hasn’t been updated in a meaningful way in many years. Whatever, it works.)

“Microsoft warns customers AI will mean busier Patch Tuesdays”

It’s only busier for them, our experience is unchanged