Ask Paul: January 6 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Here’s another great set of wide-ranging reader questions to help kick off the weekend a bit early.

Site issues

Because this is such an ongoing concern on the site right now, I wanted to address this first.

GT_Tecolotecreek and bleeman write:

Please, an update on the login issue so many are seeing!

George addressed this in a forum thread so it’s likely many didn’t see it. But here is his latest reply regarding the login issues:

“There has been a lot of feedback regarding the need to frequently log in. The settings for the site are configured to require re-login every 30 days. There was an issue with the ‘remember me’ function. We believe we have addressed that issue and a bit more tuning to address the login frequency issue. Would appreciate feedback from the community days on what you experience. Thank you so much!”

Please provide that feedback in the original thread, not here: it’s unlikely that the people who can fix these issues will ever read this post. But know that we are racing to fix the issues that have come up as quickly as possible. Thanks!

EOL

ggolcher

Windows 7 ESU and Windows 8.1 end support next week. Any plans to look back on these products and the consolidation for Windows?

Yes, I do have something planned. I’m not sure what else to say. 🙂

Paint

lwetzel asks:

Did Paint get Dark Mode?  I wasn’t clear from Windows Weekly what the keystroke you were trying was, nor if it put Paint into dark mode.

No, it didn’t.

For those who don’t understand this question, I was comparing the modern makeovers that Microsoft gave to both Paint and Notepad on this past week’s Windows Weekly. The basic gist is that where Notepad retained all of its previous functionality and picked up support for Dark mode/Light mode configuration, Paint did not. And worse, Paint lost functionality, including its previous support for a full range of keyboard shortcuts. I brought up Paint while describing this, and was surprised when a keyboard shortcut that previously didn’t work—ALT + F to open the File menu—now worked. So it must have been quietly fixed. But no Dark mode yet, no.

It’s a culture thing

sabertooth920 asks:

Why do you think that Google has never been able to supplant Amazon in the voice assistant market?  It seems like it had all the pieces in place.

Right. I’ve written about this topic in the past, but I do feel that some recent developments could hint at what’s happened here. And to be fair, it’s likely that the rise of Matter as a standard may somewhat render this issue less problematic.

But yeah: how is it that a company with Google’s AI expertise and resources, and the automatic usage that comes with owning Android, could be outmaneuvered by Amazon, a company with heady resources too, sure, but also a distinct low-end strategy when it comes to hardware? How is this possible? I had assumed for years that it was only a matter of time before Google Assistant surpassed Alexa.

But what we’ve seen year-over-year, consistently, is Amazon outperforming Google in this market. It releases far more first-party products each year, and it upgrades its developer capabilities far more often as well. The result is obvious enough: Amazon still very much controls the smart assistant market.

But with the post-pandemic economy teetering on the brink of recession, some of Big Tech’s darkest secrets have been laid bare. And amid all the layoffs and cost-cutting, these companies are starting to do something that Satya Nadella did immediately when he took over as CEO of Microsoft: taking a hard look at individual businesses and cutting heavily with the loss leaders. And it is interesting, and I think instructive, to see where each company made cuts.

Google, for example, killed Stadia, a high-profile but low-usage service, and it also killed the next Pixelbook laptop. And while we may mourn the loss of the Stadia for its technology, which was good, the reality is that there are more people complaining about this loss than there were people actually using it. (More on Stadia in a moment.)

Amazon, however, made cuts in a surprising place: its Alexa devices unit, which was reportedly losing $5 billion every year. It then instituted two rounds of layoffs, at least one of which targeted its Alexa, Kindle, and Halo teams. Clearly, this high-flying business wasn’t so high-flying. One might describe it largely as an investment.

This will seem overly dramatic, but I see parallels here with the Cold War, when the Soviet Union overspent on military and defense to make it appear as if its economy was as strong as that of the United States, pitting communism vs. capitalism. The truth came out when the Soviet Union fell in the early 1990s.

Here, the truth came out when the economy tanked. And what we discovered was that Amazon was using its vast resources to buy into a market that it saw as being important in the long term and strategic. And Google … did not.

Why is that? I think it’s a cultural thing. Google is a very different company from Amazon, of course, but it’s also a very different company, period. And part of the Google culture is this endless series of internal projects, some of which become businesses, that are abandoned (or at least left in a holding pattern) as quickly as they are created. Google is infamous for killing businesses, and this is part of the same cultural norm there. It’s almost like management and the engineers both grow tired of products once they’re up and running.

That’s what happened to Stadia, right? It had great technology, and it was the right idea. And Google just … let it hang there, did little with it, and then killed it. Classic.

Google’s corporate ambivalence about Google Assistant and the smart home market might generally be viewed through this same lens, I think. And Amazon’s major pushes could likewise be seen through the lens of its culture, which is scrappy and confrontational and kind of a “play to win” thing. Google just shows up and assumes it will do well because it’s Google. It’s kind of an extreme version of Microsoft’s Windows-centric strategies of the early 2000s.

Anyway. That’s my guess.

There is no answer

harmjr asks:

USB C charging for laptops. When using a third-party chargers do we need special cables for charging a laptop?

I just got a new HP Pavilion X360 (11th gen processor) to replace a HP Spectre X360 (8th gen processor) the Spectre HP USB C charger works with both laptops. So I got a I bought a charger with a 65W USB-C port but it will not charge the laptop. It will charger my work’s Dell laptop but it says charging slowly.

So I am wondering if its the cables. I know you been going through this recently in your cable clean up.

Yep. Boy. Welcome to the wonderful world of USB-C.

Having researched this exhaustively, I can tell you that there is no easy or inexpensive way to pick up a USB-C cable and determine that it will work for whatever purpose. Point being, if you have cables and chargers lying around, they may/may not work across devices.

But having looked into doing something like this as part of the More Mobile thing, when I was choosing between USB-C hubs and Thunderbolt docks, I was careful to buy a USB-C cable (extender) that would let me use a USB-C hub that I bought without any performance issues. (The description of the cable extender explains its capabilities.) And when I bought a USB-C cable and power adapter for that hub, I likewise made sure that both could handle at least 65 watts. I got a 6-foot Apple USB-C Charge Cable (which is designed for MacBook Pros) and an Anker PowerPort III 65W Pod Lite USB-C charger.

Both of the HP laptops you mention should be 65-watt devices, and both should work with the same cables and power adapters. You don’t mention what the Dell model is, it’s possible it’s more than 65 watts. If not, my guess would be the cable.

Apple Watch and apps

j5 asks:

Hey Paul so now that you have an Apple Watch are there any health and fitness apps you’ve been trying out? It’s a new year so I’m hitting the ground running with the proverbial health goals lol. Some of my favorite iOS apps in this category are Zero (fasting app) WaterMinder (..water) Aetna Attain (lucky my work supports this app) and Apple’s Health and Fitness apps. These 2 I think are really great! I love to go through all my information and see how I’m doing. For me, it’s really motivational, helps to get me off my duff. Do you have any goals in this are for the new year? Thanks!

I have not investigated third-party apps, but I check in with Apple Health and Apple Fitness every day, and I monitor my progress with the three rings on the watch all day long. I agree about the apps: both are well done, and Health in particular provides an amazing range of data, nicely presented. Obviously, there are some data points that aren’t particularly actionable—what can I do if I sleep poorly?—but this is the big strength of this platform overall.

From a health perspective, there is no single wearable that can, by itself, monitor the most pressing metrics, like blood sugar/glucose and high blood pressure. But where those solutions do exist in external devices, it’s clear that Apple Watch (or at least the broader Apple health ecosystem) will be supported (and may in fact be the only ecosystem supported), and that may be reason enough to buy into this for a lot of people. In fact, I’d really like to figure out a glucose device so I could see how different food types spike my blood sugar.

But I think about this stuff a lot, and I wish I could get to the point where I didn’t need to be compulsive enough to check my progress on health/fitness goals so often. I don’t know if that can ever happen, though. I want to know if my resting heart rate changes for better or worse, for example. I want to know if this thing detects any abnormality. It’s kind of a grind. Maybe future embeddables will render this kind of product obsolete, and I can simply be alerted if things go in a certain direction.

Anyway. For now, I’m just waiting on my 6-month usage timeframe to elapse so Apple Watch can start providing me with meaningful trends. I think I got this thing in mid-September, so it will probably be mid-March before that happens.

Games, Linux, and NUC

JustMe asks:

With all the hoopla around Microsoft and CoD on Playstation, why havent Microsoft pointed out their own precedent – Minecraft.  Many in the Minecraft community thought Microsoft buying it would be a death knell for the game – and yet it continues to grow, multi-platform even.

I feel like they have at least mentioned Minecraft, but, yes, Minecraft is the poster child for the image that Microsoft would like to project. I guess the issue is that there is a better example in ZeniMax/Bethesda, as that too is a game publisher with multiple studios and multiple franchises, and it maps neatly to Activision Blizzard as a precedent. And while I think the record there is still quite positive in making Microsoft’s point, it’s not as clean, and detractors can point to the handful of future games that will be Xbox exclusives.

Have you managed to keep using Zorin regularly, or has that project been shelved?

I do still have Zorin on a laptop, though I’ve been experimenting with other Linux distributions recently as well. I’m not sure I’m ready to write about it, but in keeping with my idea about writing more shorter developer posts, I don’t want this to slip through the cracks either. I will say that the problem with Linux, generally, and very specifically to me, is workflow/app related: I rely po very specific apps and services, and not having them on Linux (like OneDrive with Files on Demand, or Adobe Photoshop Elements) is a bit of a roadblock. That hasn’t really changed over time.

Have you continued to use your old NUC or have you found a replacement for it?

So, I don’t mean to be coy here, but I will be writing about that very soon. I did find a replacement. A desktop-based replacement. More soon.

From the world of the hypothetical (because its the new year and all) – if you ever had to give up playing CoD, is there another game franchise out there you could potentially embrace?  Halo?  Titanfall?  Dark Souls?

In an odd bit of timing, today is the final day of my Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, which I had gotten about 18 months ago via a friend from Microsoft for a discount. When the year ended, I woke up one day to find that I couldn’t play online—there were no warnings, for some reason—and so I renewed month to month, which is expensive ($15 per month). This has been bugging for since it started, maybe five months ago or so. And so this past month, I decided to finally look into fixing it. And the result is semi-explained in Microsoft is Gaming Xbox Live Gold (Premium): I went back to Xbox Live Gold, which only costs $60 per year (as opposed to $180 per year for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate). You know, assuming you can find that. I bought mine on Amazon as a digital code.

And the rationale for that, aside from the obvious cost issue, is that I do only play one game: Call of Duty. Granted, I have a library of purchased games, that includes, among other things, every previous Call of Duty title. But I pretty much stick to the one game.

(There’s another question about the Game Pass to Xbox Live Gold shift below.)

I have tried, over the years, to play other games, and there are over 230 owned games in my library. I was a huge fan of the first three Halo titles and played those repeatedly, though most of that was in the pre-COD times (on console). I have tried with various COD-like and shooter titles, and while Battlefield never stuck (I own Battlefield 3, 4, V, and 1), I loved Battlefield Bad Company. I think I finished Dead Space, but I own Dead Space 2 and don’t remember it much. Destiny and Destiny 2; own them both, never got into them. The Far Cry series. (I played through the first one on PC many times.) The entire Gears of Wars series (and I played the first one through several times). Homefront: The Revolution. Medal of Honor: Airborne (after having played the original games on PC). Half-Life, Half-Life 2, and the Half-Life Episodes titles. Various Star Wars titles. Titanfall. Rainbow Six Vegas and Vegas 2 were incredible, and I spent a lot of time in those games, sometimes with my son.

Every once in a while, a game will stick. Army of One/Army of Two back in the day. At least a few Assassin’s Creed games (I played the first one through twice, and own most, maybe all, of them). I played Bioshock all the way through. I finished Crackdown (and got every achievement minus one orb!). Firewatch is an incredible game that I finished, and is nothing like most of the games I played, though I did finished much of the Telltale Walking Dead series (some on iPad, some on console). INSIDE. LIMBO. Portal and Portal 2. Tell Me Why (which I haven’t yet finished but could see doing so).

And there are older PC games I’ve replayed (sometimes many times) on console: DOOM, DOOM II, Duke Nukem 3D, Wolfenstein 3D, and many of the newer Wolfenstein titles (II, The New Order, The Old Blood).

And honestly, looking back just at the titles that are in my digital library above, that’s not a horrible list for someone who only plays Call of Duty. And those are games I spent significant amounts of time with. There are many others, and many others still there were disc-based and long gone now.

But yeah. It’s 2023 now, my time is limited, and one of the things I like about COD multiplayer matches is that they’re about 7 minutes long, I can jump in and out as needed because I have things to do, and I don’t have to think too much. In fact, that is the real appeal: as my mind goes elsewhere while playing, I often come up with something work-related that was eluding me before. And I can jump out and get back to work. So I’m not sure I’ll actively seek new games now, per se, but I will keep my eyes open. You never know.

LastPass

jrzoomer asks:

Regarding Lastpass, you seem undecided about moving away from it. What are your holdups and if you did move to a new password manager which would you move to?

I don’t actually use LastPass, but my wife does, and that’s the concern. But I used to use LastPass, and as part of this mess, I went in, shored up the security, deleted some accounts, and changed the passwords on a few. I think the final reckoning here is that anyone on LastPass needs to make sure they’re using 2FA, change their master password, and then—ugh—probably change every single password for every single account in there. Starting with the most important ones (banking/financial, online presence accounts like Apple, Google, and Microsoft, online merchants that have your credit card info, and so on). And then you can decide whether to move off of LastPass. Or not: security experts I trust, most notably Steve Gibson, say it’s safe to stick with it.

As for what one should move to, the most frequent recommendations I’ve received are for 1Password and Bitwarden, the latter of which has a few advantages in that it’s completely free (or can be), open source, and can be hosted locally if you’re that serious about security. But both come highly recommend. This isn’t really my area of expertise.

I need to rethink what I’m doing. Right now, some subset of my passwords are stored across at least three identity services—Google account, Microsoft account, and Apple—and I’m using the password manager in Brave as my primary service. The issue with Brave, though, is that it can’t be used for password autofill on mobile (as can Google, Microsoft, and others), and so I’m using a slightly out-of-date version from Google/Apple there. (You can have multiple password autofill services configured on iPhone, which is interesting.) So I need to take the, ahem, brave step of consolidating there and get my passwords out of some of those services.

From Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to Xbox Live Gold

spacecamel asks:

On Windows Weekly, you mentioned giving up your Game Pass subscription for just a Gold Subscription.  Is there any way to convert Game Pass back to Gold?  For the last couple of Black Fridays, I would gather discounted Game Pass codes but did not see any this year.  Also, I am like you and play one game… a lot (don’t ask my wife about it).  Since I will be following a similar path, I am wondering if there is anything special I need to do.

So, I can’t actually do this until tomorrow because you have to wait until the Game Pass subscription lapses. If you try to add an Xbox Live Gold subscription to an account that already has an Xbox Game Pass subscription, the web wizard will convert it to some number of months of Xbox Game Pass. This varies by the subscription type: with my Ultimate subscription, I think it was 4 months. It’s probably 6 months for Console and PC subscriptions.

What I did was buy a 12-month Xbox Live Gold subscription on Amazon for $60, which is full price. I got a code via email, and tomorrow, when my Game Pass subscription is over, I will apply the code to my account. You can do this from the Xbox app, the Microsoft Store app, or the web on Windows, I’ll use the website. (You can view your subscriptions on the Microsoft Account website.)