Ask Paul: September 17 (Premium)

On this episode of Deep Thoughts with Jack Handy, no wait. It’s Friday, so here’s another great set of reader questions to kick off the weekend.

Site comments

christophercollins asks:

Comments here are turning into ‘get of my lawn’ type comments. While I understand everyone has an opinion, most of them end up commenting without even reading or following links in your articles. I love your writing and I try to ignore them. I’ve been a Windows user since 2.0 on DOS on my Tandy 1000. I build PC’s for both work and home and have for 25 or more years. I am following along and updating with the times like what I would consider any ‘tech’ or ‘enthusiast’ would do. Sometimes I feel like you could name this site. The comments with people not taking the time to understand OS changes or even why it’s happening are somewhat ridiculous at this point. Any thoughts? Ways to improve it? Sometimes I’m helpful. I’d hate to just block the comments altogether. Too much ‘tech hate’ on here for whatever reason… More so with non premium users.

Yeah. The comments here have always been a shitshow, frankly, and while it’s probably no different on similar sites, it’s still troubling. I’ve spent a lot of time on comment moderation in the past, but the sheer weight of the uniformed stupidity, tunnel-visioned opinions, and other nonsense is just too much for me. So in the past few months, I’ve scaled that back dramatically and now moderate comments quite differently.

This is a bit hard to explain because it’s kind of a back-end task, but what I used to do was go into the (WordPress-based) management dashboard and view the comments in reverse chronological order (new to old) until I hit the last comment that I had previously moderated (usually the day before but sometimes earlier that day). This gave me complete exposure to all of the comments—whether they’re from a new post or a two-year-old post, or whatever—and good control over spam comments (when I would then also go to the Users interface and remove those spam accounts). But it was also laborious, psychologically terrible and tiring, and sort of disconnected in that I wasn’t seeing comments in the context of whatever thread they were in.

So I don’t do that anymore. Instead, what I typically do now is look at the home page and Ctrl-click on the comments for all the previous day’s posts and then a few more from the day before that. Then, I can view/moderate all of the new comments in tabs together and in context, which is helpful, and it’s a quicker and less painful process. What I miss are comments on older posts and potentially some spam comments. But if anyone is seeing that kind of thing, obviously I’ll take action when alerted.

Since you are a Premium member, it may help to know that from my perspective, the Premium comments tend to be of much higher quality than non-Premium comments. And that, on a related noted, because of a DDoS attack (in August, I think) we are also manually moderating forum threads for now so that spammers can’t overwhelm the site; that bit will be automated soon, I hope, so that those who have been allowed through in the past will be able to post to the forums seamlessly as before. We’re working on that.

Long story short, in tech as in all other things in life, our ability to personalize what we see online has made all of us less open to other people’s opinions, and we are collectively starting to be more aggressive and abrasive about that. You see this very clearly in the comments. And I just can’t deal with it the way I use to and stay productive and sane.

PS: I’m glad I can watch you and Brad again as part of my waking up/breakfast routine. That short cast has been one of my favorite things for years. Really glad Brad can still do it.

Yeah, I am as well. Honestly, it’s 90 percent just a bs session between two guys, but I’m glad that some others enjoy it as well. I’m happy to keep doing it, and I’m glad that he is too.

Buying direct

crunchyfrog asks:

I have almost exclusively purchased and insured my phones and devices through my preferred carrier for many years now. Over time, I have seen that the carrier I have has slowly become more inflexible when it comes to leasing or even purchasing new phones and the insurance costs have increased as well. … What has evolved over the last several years is simply buying direct from the manufacturer and they also provide insurance as well at a lesser cost. Apple had really started this a while back and so has Samsung. Both also offer generous trade-in values which is a motivator. This being the case I ended up buying the Fold 3 direct from Samsung and received a much better deal.

I am curious since you are a tech journalist and know other tech minded people if you see that buying direct is trending up and not going through carriers anymore if at all. Your audience here is also an excellent source of what their experiences are too.

I’m not sure I have any perspective with regards to what most people do, though if you watch First Ring Daily, you might have noticed that I was curious how Brad was going to upgrade to a new iPhone since that involves trading in an old device, and he had typically done this through his carrier (until now, as it turns out). This was interesting to me because I long ago moved to direct buying, like you, and believe that to be the very best approach, especially when you can get an unlocked device as opposed to one for a specific carrier. My goal is always to avoid the carrier as much as possible, which explains my move to Google Fi a few years back and then to Mint Mobile last year.

You cite some of the best reasons for doing so: Much better trade-in values, both for the same brand and, often, for competing brands now too, and better support. But I really like the freedom aspect of it too. If I choose to go to a different carrier tomorrow even with a newly purchased phone, there are no issues with it being locked or whatever. It always just works.

A lot of this is tied to changing trends with phones, which used to be heavily subsidized by carriers to hide the true cost (and to get people to keep paying them more every month in perpetuity). And while I’m sure many people do still pay for phones over time and would never think of fronting $1000 or whatever on a new phone, I like that freedom as well.

DirectStorage

madthinus asks:

With Windows 11 preloading on OEM machines as I type, at what point do we expect to hear about drives supporting DirectStorage in Windows 11? Or is this more a smoke and mirrors feature? Hype for something that is not there on day one?

Funny, I was just thinking about this.

We’ve only seen a few PC maker announcements for Windows 11 PCs, but there are more to come in the next couple of weeks. So far, I’ve not noticed anyone discussing gaming PCs with DirectStorage-compatible SSDs, but we will see that soon, and of course there will be DirectStorage-ready standalone SSDs as well. (DirectStorage will work with Windows 10, too, so those will be cross-compatible.) I assume we’ll hear something about this on or before October 5.

Building a gaming PC

helix2301 asks:

I was looking for a gaming machine and as a enthusiast wanted to build a machine like I have done for years but I noticed its getting harder and harder to so that anymore these days. Many small companies are selling prebuilt gaming machines and even getting cases is harder of last year or two.

Yep, this is a big problem right now. This is literally the worst time to try and do this, especially because of the issues getting graphics cards.

I know the chip shortage but even the custom built hardware forums have slowed down, Leo talked other day on The Tech Guy that was almost a right of passage years ago. Is there still a market for people wanting to build there own machines or am I becoming that old guy that doing his own oil change when the place down the street will do it for $19.99 lol

There is a small but lucrative market of people who want to build their own machines. But between the component shortage and the Windows 11 hardware requirements, this is just getting harder and harder. I wouldn’t even try to do this now.

Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Desktop

prettyconfusd asks:

I know you use/have used the Microsoft Ergonomic Sculpt desktop. Have you had any problems with the mice over the past few months? The primary mouse button on both of mine have become so unreliable as to be unusable the past few months.

Yeah, I’ve been using the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Desktop set for years, love it, and highly recommend it to others. I’ve credited this keyboard and mouse with keeping me safely productive over a long period of time, because I believe I would have had serious Carpal Tunnel or similar by now otherwise.

I’ve not had the problem you describe, sorry. My only real issue with this set is the proprietary dongle, and I wish that there was a Bluetooth option (or, for the keyboard, even a wired option). The dongle has been problematic in two ways: It has fallen apart on me more than once, causing me to replace the whole set because you can’t swap (or buy new) dongles, and if I try to use it with a dock or hub, it works unreliably, probably because of interference of some kind; I don’t have this issue when the dongle is plugged directly into a PC.

Ordinarily I’d guess the mouse has reach EOL and it’s time to buy a new one (which I have done anyway so I can use my PC) but what’s really weird is this happened around the same time on the set I use at home and also with the set I use at work. The home set is 8-9 years old but the work set only 2 years old so it has me very confused. I’ve looked through Windows update and the PCs are on different versions of Windows 10 (work uses LTSC) so can’t figure out a culprit.

Just wondered if you’d had any issues or had any ideas of my next steps in figuring this out? I’m not sure I want to buy a full new set just yet as literally everything else works perfectly (scroll wheel, secondary click and other buttons etc) so figured I’d ask.

I guess technically your issue is related to mine: If you could just replace the mouse and use it with the existing desktop set’s dongle, that would be better than replacing the whole thing. (Likewise, if it was Bluetooth-based, same solution.)

I suppose you could complain directly to Microsoft and see whether they can just replace it. But you won’t be surprised to discover that its actual warranty is both short and limited. Just trying to figure out what you can do is difficult. This site is borderline useless, for example.

Sorry, I don’t have much to offer here.

Sign language

bschnatt asks:

You’ve spoken of your son many times, so I’m assuming you know sign language. How often have you come to the rescue to interpret for a hard-of-hearing complete stranger? I’ve seen this a couple times in fictional movies, so I’m curious how often it has happened to you. Have you ever pretended to be deaf (gesticulating with your hands) to get out of a sticky situation, LOL?

My son got his first cochlear implant when he was 18 months old, about six months after he became deaf, and because the implant was so successful, he was “mainstreamed”—meaning that he went through the public school system normally after a few years of training—and thus never had to learn sign language. He did/does rely heavily on lip-reading, however, and is excellent at it. But he hears well, given the condition, and speaks clearly with none of that lisp-like quality that many deaf speakers have.

We always figured that if something went wrong later in life he/we could learn sign language. But when it was time to choose a college, we latched onto the Rochester Institute for Technology (RIT), which among other things has an excellent deaf program that’s sort of ancillary to the normal degree paths. And so he went there and was suddenly thrust into a world of deaf people, most of whom weren’t as lucky as him with regards to the success of implants. Or were simply deaf and never got implants. (This is controversial in the deaf community, but we always felt that you give the kid everything they can get and not artificially limit their life experiences because of whatever caused the deafness.) And he very quickly learned sign language almost completely through immersion and he is quite fluent now, five years later.

But we still don’t know sign language. And it is fascinating to see Mark with his friends from school because they communicate in a hybrid way that usually involves speaking, signing, and lip-reading all at the same time, and they will sometimes emphasize spoken words with a quick burst of sign or vice versa. It’s impressive.

Finding new music

bschnatt also asks:

I am horrified to find myself turning into my father. I listen to less and less music as I get older, and the music I listen to is more “Enya / Patrick O’Hearn” and less “Boston / Pat Benatar” nowadays. Are you in the same boat?

Yes. It’s hard to find new music when you’re older, and as I said to my wife, literally and coincidentally just last night, it feels like music gets less and less interesting as we get older. She mentioned something I had forgotten about, which was that when the kids were home and younger, we would drive them around to whatever activities, and they would want to listen to their music on the radio, and we would sometimes learn about songs and groups we liked that way. They’re both out of the house now, so that’s over.

I check in on what’s new in YouTube Music, but that’s mostly for new music from groups I already like, and there’s a great YouTube Channel, Professor of Rock, that has helped me discover (or rediscover) music from that past that I had forgotten about, didn’t know about, or wasn’t interested in at the time.

We do listen to a wide range of music spanning the 50s to today, and I think the one thing that’s missing today is an appreciation of music from previous eras. When I grew up in the 80s, we listen to 60s and 70s rock and pop all the time. I feel like that doesn’t happen anymore. But we still do, and we listen to some modern music too, though there’s less and less of it each year.

Do you listen to music while you work?

No. Music is too distracting, even instrumental music, and writing requires concentration; I am very sensitive to noise and sound. The only exception is when I fly, though I can’t explain why: I will often write on a laptop while listening to something at low volume over noise-canceling headphones. This used to be mostly instrumental, but in recent years I’ve switched to Pink Floyd or a mix of the two most recent U2 albums.

Office web apps

lewk asks:

I quite like the Online Office applications quite a bit. I just wish I could use them in their own app windows and not in the browser. Has Microsoft said anything official about making them into PWA’s? In which I can, say, install Excel as its own PWA, to run in its own window, with some offline capabilities?

I keep waiting for this as well, and, yes, there are indications that Microsoft is moving them to PWAs, starting with the Outlook apps (Outlook.com and Outlook on the web). But yeah, as of now, it’s not a seamless experience, and while you can “pin” Office.com or the individual apps to your taskbar, that doesn’t work well. I will probably write something about this soon as part of that “To the web” series, but the best I’ve found so far is to use the Office app in Windows 10/11 as a front-end of sorts to the Office web apps.

Also, I have a tip. The Android Outlook app finally added the ability to remove those gosh-awful Profile Pictures (Sender Images). Under Settings > Appearance > Density. You can even change it so the message list is compact. Every single outlook client has had this ability for years, except android, and it drove me nuts. The head of Outlook for Android even responded to a tweet of mine about 4 years ago saying that it was a highly requested feature and to stay tuned. I didn’t realise it would take years for them to implement, but I’m so happy it’s finally here. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks and it’s been glorious.

Nice, thanks!

Politics or just common sense

usman asks:

I guess this is a tech and politics focussed question following on from ‘From the Editor’s Desk’ about 9/11.

I saw some comments to this effect, but I don’t see it as political. I just described what happened honestly. That this kind of thing is seen as political, or even betrays some political leaning of mine, is not surprising, that’s our divided, overly-politicized world today. But I really don’t see how the truth can be political.

The ending paragraph was quite a powerful one about wasted military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. It reminded me of the general protests by engineers from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft against their employers for working with the military.

Yeah. I just saw an article explaining that the privacy backlash we’re finally seeing today can be tied directly back to Edward Snowden, so depending on one’s point of view (politics?) he’s either a savior or a traitor and should be celebrated or sentenced to jail.

But I hate what my country became in the wake of 911 because it was a brief moment of unity, not just within the United States, but with most of the world, and we squandered that out of fear. And that just sucks. It’s easy to justify bad behavior when you’re hurt, but the reality is that we stomped on the ideals that make America great, what makes America, America. That is far worse than what happened on 911.

It’s a terrible legacy, and to put it on a more personal level, think about the ways in which individuals can respond to tragedy: Some rise above it and persevere, while some simply repeat the mistakes of the people who wronged them in the first place. We went in the wrong direction after 911, and for what seemed like all the right reasons.

Usually, the consensus from journalists is that it’s Patriotic for companies to work with their country’s military. It’s a fair point but after what we’ve seen from leaks and whistleblowers about the US and NATO’s actions during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, does that statement still hold true and why are these legitimate voices of concerns of unnecessary war, international imperialism, etc just brushed away?

If the United States literally had some moral high ground, you could almost justify corporations helping the military on what we’ll call patriotic grounds. But it doesn’t. And it is perhaps interesting the people who feel that way the most strongly are also the same people who are most outraged by Chinese companies helping their government and military. Beyond basic ignorance, does anyone really believe we’re “better” than other countries? Well, yeah, of course they do. But if you know history, have traveled the world, and understand the reality of the outsized impact that we have on the planet, the picture isn’t so pretty. So rather than defend China, which is crazy, I’ll just say that we often overlook our own problems in ways that we aren’t so forgiving when it’s another country.

There are no good answers here. The US regulates the companies that operate under its jurisdiction, and the government/military are some of those companies’ biggest/best customers. There’s going to be collusion, and there are going to be those standing up for what they believe is right. If history is any guide, and it is, we’ll never find the right balance, we’ll just veer wildly between the two extremes.

White bars

wright_is asks:

We are starting to see a white bar at the top of windows – about 1/3 of the window / the top third of the screen is just white. No title bars, no menus, nothing. You can’t minimize, maximize or close the windows directly, you need to go to the task bar. The information at the top of the windows is also not visible. This is mainly on things like Teams and Chrome and Edgeand only on laptops or desktops with Intel integrated graphics.

Have you ever seen this? Do you know of a solution? I suspect that some update of the app, like Teams, doesn’t play nicely with the graphics driver, somehow. Something in the Chromium engine? Or dodgy display driver updates from Intel?

No, and that’s quite curious. I wonder if anyone else is experiencing this here?