Ask Paul: July 7 (Premium)

Happy Friday, and welcome to what has to be the longest Ask Paul I have ever written. This one is epic, and full of great questions. I hope I rise to the occasion at least some of the time.

Twitter vs. the world

ggolcher asks:

Safe travels!

Thanks! We arrived safely, with little drama. (A bit of a delay, but given the flight situation this summer, not at all horrible.)

Unless I’m misremembering, you’ve expressed a desire to move away from Twitter, but have not been able to find a viable alternative. Are you considering trying out Threads?

I will be writing what I think will be a long editorial on this topic as soon as I can. There’s a lot going on here, and in the space of just a few days, I feel like this situation has changed a lot. It’s very interesting (to me).

But to answer your question, yes, I will be using Threads to some degree, and I signed in with my Instagram account yesterday (I think, given the travel, it feels like weeks ago) just to get that going. At the very least, I will be auto-posting from Thurrott.com to Threads (as we do on Twitter and Mastodon). But it’s possible I could be more active. More on that soon.

Regarding moving away from Twitter, that too will be part of that longer coming conversation. But there is a lot going on there, and I feel like it warrants addressing it here to some degree. So…

There’s no logical argument that Twitter is “worse” under Elon Musk, but from a more subjective point of view (i.e. my opinion), I just can’t stand the guy and his rampant spread of misinformation while pretending that he’s about free speech. He’s a nutjob.

But I also use Twitter in ways that may be a bit different than most readers here, as it’s the biggest social media presence I have by far, and I can’t just throw up some ideological excuse for leaving. I have to separate my disdain for the man from my need for the service. This isn’t that hard: the people who have owned companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft are just as terrible in their own ways, and while some people do use that as a reason to not use those companies’ products, here too I have to be a bit more pragmatic. (You can see my opinions about people/companies in the starker light by observing what products and services I use personally, by the way. A lot of times, it’s just the lesser of two evils, as when comparing my only choices in smartphone platforms: Apple and Google are both terrible.)

Leaving opinion aside, until this past week, Twitter’s technical terribleness has not impacted me. I want to be very clear about that: I may personally hate what Twitter has become, but as far as using it as a tool to drive readers to the site, there has been no impact at all. It’s important that we be able to separate the opinion from the objective facts.

And now that’s no longer true: we used to have a Twitter feed module on the side of the site that commingled the Thurrott Feed tweets with my own, but because of the inane, knee-jerk, and illogical decisions being made over there, we can’t do that anymore. All that feed does, if you think about it, is drive people who read Thurrott.com to Twitter. It was a small net positive for Twitter, infinitesimally small really, but a net positive nonetheless. But instead of that win-win that made sense for everyone, now we have a lose-lose. So my opinion of Twitter is starting to collide with the reality of Twitter. And that stinks, because I need Twitter to some degree. My collective social media presence outside of Twitter isn’t anymore close to just Twitter. I had kind of standardized on it for the work stuff.

So we’ll see. But again, I will be writing more about this and several related topics soon and will expand on this.

Water heater

DrewTX asks:

Is your water heater issue in Mexico City resolved?  My very limited experience of these devices is that they seem to work best when their output is unrestricted.  For example: in the shower, we set the mixer to Full Hot (no cold coming through) and then ‘tune’ the heater to deliver ‘comfortably warm’ water.  Any attempt at Mixing seems to result in the heater tripping itself off.  So, for the showeree, there is only really a binary choice of temperatures: Full Cold (no heating); Full Hot (temp set on Heater).

It is not resolved.

As with that previous topic, there’s a lot going on here, but my wife and I will be discussing it in a video on our Eternal Spring YouTube channel soon. But I don’t expect you to watch that (or wait), so I can tell you what I know so far. Unfortunately, this story is developing.

We visited Mexico City for three weeks in March, and after we left, the apartment manager and a technician discovered that birds had built a nest in the exhaust vent for the water heater, completely blocking it. They removed the nest and tested the water, and it was fine: we had heat and full water pressure everywhere, even with all the water taps (showers, sinks, etc.) on simultaneously. They sent us a video demonstrating this. The problem seemed to be fixed. We were still dubious—I mean, it’s been a year, for f’s sake, and it was … a bird’s nest?—but hopeful.

We planned our next trip for July, again for three weeks, and figured we could verify that this fix worked then. But then friends of our best friends contacted us and asked if they could stay here for three nights in late June (they were flying to La Paz through Mexico City and wanted to check it out). I didn’t want to let that happen, as we had left the apartment in a state that was for us (our stuff in drawers, etc.) and not for others, and because I wasn’t sure the water was fixed. But we agreed, we met on Zoom, explained the situation, and sent them the keys. We were hoping for the best.

When they arrived last week, the power was out. But just in our apartment: it worked elsewhere in the building and in the area. So my wife Stephane, who pays the bills, investigated and discovered that our most recent quarterly electric payment, which she had automated, didn’t process correctly for some reason. So the power company literally came to the apartment the day those friends arrived and removed the meter from the outside of the building, shutting down our power. That bill, by the way, was all of $15. $15 f’ing dollars. And no one—the power company, the apartment management, or the service we use to pay that bill—had ever alerted us, giving us a chance to re-make the payment.

They spend two nights here without power. They arrived on a Thursday night, we spent all of that Friday figuring out what happened, paying the bill, and getting the company to turn on the power. And a technician came to the apartment to put the meter back on, on Saturday afternoon. Seriously.

Anyway, the power was back on. The Internet still worked, thank God, the lights all came on, obviously, and it seemed OK. Except for one thing: those friends could not get hot water to come out of any of the sinks of showers. So we called the apartment manager and he had a technician come back to check out the water heater. But that, too, took days. He didn’t arrive until the other day, and so those poor guys stayed in our apartment, had no electricity for two days, and no hot water. Disaster. Just a freaking disaster. (They were very gracious about it.)

The technician believes the power outage damaged the water heater. I asked—four times—for someone to look at that exhaust house, suspecting that the birds had returned. (Why wouldn’t they?) But no one ever did. This incenses me.

And it incensed me more when we arrived very late last night because of the flight delays. Because the first thing I did was open the laundry room door and look up at the exhaust hose. Next to it is a small slatted window for just gas/carbon monoxide exhaust (the gas comes into the apartment there too) is clearly covered by a giant bird nest, as you can see pieces of it sticking into the inside of the room from the outside. There were people in there trying to fix the water heater, including the apartment manager, who was present when the original bird nest was found, and there is no way they didn’t see that. How this didn’t immediately trigger someone taking the next obvious step of looking in the water heater’s exhaust hose is not just unclear. It’s impossible.

But no one did. Which I know because I did it: and as I had feared and expected, the birds were back. That hose was clogged full of next for over a foot of its length, and it took a long time to clean it out. (I had to kill two little blue bird eggs in the process, too, and I’m not happy about that, but what else could I do?) That next was clearly there for many, many weeks, probably months. I bet they started it the day we left. But I cleaned it out.

And … the water is not fixed.

We don’t have hot water now, which is new. The water pressure fluctuates as it runs on hot, now, which isn’t new but was supposed fixed before. And the pressure is lower on hot, while it’s powerful and strong on cold. We have obviously contacted the apartment manager to fix this. But I bet we end up buying a new unit. As of now, we just got here late last night, it’s worse than it was in the beginning.

To recap, we ruined a couple’s three-night stay and now the water situation is worse than ever. So yeah. I’m doing just great. This is very upsetting.

UPDATE: We may have fixed it. And by we, I mean my wife. She was curious about why there was no hot water and, in looking at the water heater, saw that there is a hot water valve underneath. Checking it, she could see that it was all the way off. So she turned it all the way on, and now everything works normally. In fact, I just took my first perfect shower—no water pressure variations, no temperature changes—ever. Like … ever. What a relief. We still need to cover the opening of the exhaust hose. And of course we will keep an eye on this. But this nightmare may finally be over. –Paul

Lame Language Models?

Daninbusiness asks:

Are there any current uses of LLM AI that have you particularly excited or enthusiastic? I keep oscillating between being impressed with some of the ways it can be used as a brainstorming tool, and getting quickly annoyed with the limits of what it can do.

Same. But this will improve over time, and if you accept that these “AI” services are the future of, or the evolution of, digital personal assistants, and I think that’s a reasonable conclusion at this point, then that means they can still be helpful. More helpful than Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, etc., because those things were mostly trained on very specific and almost localized tasks, and “AI”—it’s not really AI, right?—is much broader. And there are now potentially exciting use cases around content creation I think really will make a difference. Image creation, of course, but also music creation and even video creation. Creative arts use cases like poetry and songs. Productivity use cases around getting started on complex creations like presentations and data visualization. Engineering and software development use cases.

But the key here, and this is so important, is that we need to collectively understand the limitations of these capabilities. That is, most AI creations should be the beginning of something, not the end product. We as the humans who initiated whatever AI task (for the most part) need to take the output and improve or otherwise modify it. Those who understand what these things really do sort of innately understand that, I think. Certainly, in my circles, including here on the site, do see it that way. But the danger here is that many will not. They will simply take what AI makes and go with it. There are already embarrassments caused by this kind of thing, like the lawyer who used AI to generate a court filing only to discover that all of the prior cases the filing cited were invented and do not exist. There will be so much more of that.

In the end, AI is a step forward. It will do what technology should do by making difficult tasks easier. It will improve our writing and other creations. Etc. But it’s only a step forward. It’s not the end game. The introduction of word processing did not result in the end of paper. AI will not result in the end of the many markets it impacts. But it will also do what technology does from a negative perspective. In the same way that the automobile negatively impacted the market for horses, or how factory automation eliminated some jobs, AI’s efficiencies will result in some temporary negatives. There are all kinds of jobs that existed 50 or 100 years ago that are no longer viable. AI will be a driver in a new round of that kind of change. But in the same way that it’s better overall that we, say, eliminate the coal industry, there’s a generational negative to that for the people who work in that industry. 50 years down the road, however, no one will care. If anything, we’ll wonder how that was ever a thing in the first place. Like smoking on planes. Or, just smoking.

I’m trying to maintain some healthy skepticism while also keeping an open mind.

This is exactly the right balance and one of the healthiest assessments I’ve ever read.

Some of the immediate/obvious uses of text-based LLMs seem like great ways of mass-producing filler and drivel; work and a human touch still seem very helpful for making content people would enjoy reading. Am I missing something?

No, you are not.

There will absolutely be original content created by an AI that will boggle the mind. Terrific music, perhaps. Paintings. New physical products. Whatever. But AI really is like music, when you think about it. People argue that there is no original music now because all of the notes have been available forever and all we can do is mix and match them in different ways. There are lawsuits when songs are too close to previously created songs, and mixed rulings there. But people still make original music today and, as a music fan, I’m still discovering good music. AI is going to mix and match with a broader set of notes, if you will, but it’s still a sort-of finite collection of stuff that is already out there. So we will see things that are objective copies inspired by prior work. And we see some things that are new and different to our eyes and ears. Even though the ingredients come from the same sources.

I am very much working my way through an understanding and rationalization of what AI is, what it might be in the future, and the ramifications. We all are, I think. So if you ask me this question in 6 months or two years or whatever, my answer might be different. This is sort of where I am now, given what we know now and what AI has done. We will all evolve in time.

Storage

Shane asks:

Storage. I am a keen amateur photographer and have been looking at additional storage. I know you have spoken about a NAS you had, have. Just wondered what your thoughts were on them.

Speaking of evolving over time. 🙂

With storage, especially for that data that is important to you—whether it’s work-related, photos and videos of your kids, whatever—you need to have redundancy, meaning the same data in more than one place, including physically, and you should probably have some mix and local (NAS, PC, etc.) and cloud-based options. With the caveat that not all data is equal and there will be mixing and matching.

One of the first articles I wrote on this site, which was started in January 2015, was about my purchase of a dual-drive Western Digital NAS in a RAID 1 configuration. (So, two mirrored 6 TB drives, for a total of 6 TB of locally redundant storage.) I bought this in the wake of a post about backup strategies, in which I noted that you need both local and off-site backups, and that backup should be automatic (set it and forget it). That’s still good advice, mostly, but times have changed, too. Cloud services are more reliable and less expensive. Our Internet speeds have made accessing cloud storage faster and more seamless. And thanks to changes in the ways that Windows (and other platforms) work, I have evolved the ways in which I integrate synced cloud storage into my workflows. I’ve written a lot about this generally, and about what I do specifically, but Don’t Be a Statistic (Premium) is the most recent.

Anyway, the NAS. I originally used this device as a local backup that supplemented cloud storage. But even in 2015, my NAS usage was mostly just about local redundancy of data that was also in the cloud. The NAS was never the “true source of truth,” or whatever, and I was never going to remote into it when I was away from home. It was just another place to put important stuff. And when WD finally stopped supporting the NAS in 2021, I naturally started wondering about what was next. In the good news department, it’s slow but it still works fine. I had turned off remote access long ago, and that’s the only real concern with an unsupported NAS. But I have yet to replace it. And I don’t use it very much.

So. To get to your needs or the needs of anyone else, it’s important to evaluate what’s available and what makes sense for your workloads. You have some data that may be in a certain service, like OneDrive, and if you were to be cut off from that tomorrow with no warning, that may or may not be a problem. Again, your most important data should be backed up redundantly, meaning in two or more places, and with geographic separation. That can be OneDrive and Google Drive. It can be OneDrive and a NAS. It might even OneDrive and a Thunderbolt 4 hard drive. This is kind of a personal decision.

My most important data is divided into work and personal categories. And for the personal stuff, the important data is photos. And so those are in Google Photos and OneDrive in the cloud, and on that NAS, still. Is each a 100 percent duplicate of the other? No. But it’s probably in the high 90s percentage-wise. It’s good enough. And Google Photos is the “one source of truth.”

For my work data, which is largely archival and not something I access regularly. I have two copies, one in OneDrive and one on that NAS. For the most part, OneDrive is the “one source of the truth,” and thanks to improvements in how OneDrive syncs with Windows and in our overall download speeds, that is incredibly convenient. I can search for and find what I want in OneDrive in the cloud instantly, in OneDrive on Windows very quickly, and on my NAS, it takes forever and sometimes just never comes back with what I need. This works for me.

I have already used 700gb of my onedrive storage. Here in the UK I think the internet speed is useless, 25 down, 4 up, so yeah useless. So this is a factor. But would an external hard drive really be best because of the internet speed. I just like the thought of that access anywhere like onedrive though.

Exactly. I’m in a similar position with regard to OneDrive, though I’m over 800 GB full (out of 1 TB). If this data is important to you, and it is, yes, you need another place for it. That can be another cloud service, of course. It could be something local like a hard drive or NAS. It depends on how you work and, yeah, that Internet speed is a factor. (On a home swap near Paris in 2009, the DSL connection was so slow, I would back up the photos we had taken overnight, and I would get up in the morning, and sometimes it wasn’t done uploading yet. I get it.) I would consider a redundant local solution, though, meaning two mirrored drives, whether it’s a NAS or USB-connected.

Also, photos are unique. Google Photos does a much better job with search, where I can type in something like Fontenay sous Bois, the name of the place we stayed with that slow DSL connection, to find out when it happened (2009, as I was hazy on the exact year). But OneDrive retains my folder structures, and for the way I managed photos, that can be useful too. For example, if I knew the year, finding those photos would be quick. You can easily back up your phone-based photos to multiple cloud services, too, if that’s of use. You may have faster speeds over cellular, which is interesting.

Anyway. Whichever way you go, it needs to make sense for how you work, and you should have geographically redundant backups of your most important data. Some combination of cloud and local does seem to make sense for you.

Why Windows

Markld asks:

I am like you I prefer a Windows PC over anything when I need to be productive. Smartphones, Tablets, Chromebooks, are still to me consumption devices, although capable of doing things.

Yeah. I mean, it’s smart to keep an eye on this and see if or when one of those devices crosses the line and can be useful for productivity work. That line will be different for everyone, of course, and some people can already do so. I think I’m at the furthest end of that spectrum in the opposite direction, however. Like over the horizon. But you never know.

However, that doesn’t mean the Windows PC is off the hook as being the best it could be in terms of being productive. I know companies that manufacture PCs make tradeoffs and do things to make a profit. Windows as an operating system is mature, and despite Microsoft’s best effort to F things up, I am liking Windows 11 more and more.

Same. My criticisms of Windows 11 fall into two general buckets. There’s the stuff that literally impacts me—like the inane pop-up interruptions, some functional regressions, and pernicious new features that force me to use Edge when I have already chosen a better browser—and then the stuff that is more about consumer advocacy. That is, things that don’t bother me, but I feel that others should know about them because everyone is different, and many of the issues impact the non-technical majority. Like a few other topics that have come up today, my role is slightly different because it’s not just about me. And I’ve been doing this long enough to empathize with those who are (and can be) impacted by problems that don’t affect me.

But overall, I do like Windows 11. I prefer it to Windows 10, and that means I prefer it to any personal computing platform. In some ways, I guess, familiarity leads to a better understanding of things, both good and bad. I don’t know if it’s “easier” to criticize something you know very well, but the more you know something, the more qualified you are to criticize (or praise) it.

Anyway…

So without considering the Windows operating system in this question, I was wondering in terms of hardware what could be done to make it more capable, therefore we will be more productive? I decided to leave the question open ended and let you take it any direction you wanted, though it may be a fun question.

That is interesting, thanks. I hope this isn’t like when you think of the perfect response much later than when you’d prefer to have delivered it.

But the first thing that comes to mind here is this notion of how Windows and the hardware on which it runs are symbiotic, and that changes that PC makers make or want to make can drive changes to Windows, while the reverse is also true. On both sides of this equation, you have smart people looking into the future, trying to determine which coming advances can have the most impact.

But they also have to deal with unexpected changes they did not foresee. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic drove a temporary work-from-home (WFH) movement, and as the pandemic eased up, that transitioned into a hybrid work world that may or may not be temporary. (My gut feeling here is that more people will work from at least some of the time than before the pandemic, of course, but that many of the masses who had hoped to just stay home forever may find themselves forced to back to the office at least some of the time. There is evidence that this is already happening.) Regardless, the pandemic drove dramatic improvements in the hardware and software that we need to collaborate remotely using PCs in our homes. And products that were aimed at a pre-pandemic world in which we mostly met physically together in one room somewhere, like Surface Hub, are now greatly diminished.

God help us, but if we do have another pandemic in the coming several years, at least we’re better prepared across the board from a technology perspective. But we can’t predict that kind of thing. What is interesting to think about are the trends that we can reasonably expect in the coming years and how they may impact Windows and the PCs on which it runs.

I don’t see any high-level changes to personal computing over the next 5 to 10 years from the perspective of which platforms matter and the rough mix of what we use to do what. Even things like the hybrid computing topic I discussed last weekend don’t yet shuffle the deck from a high-level, since hybrid PCs haven’t exactly taken over the market and won’t, and because a device like Pixel Fold that can replace both a phone and tablet is just shifting where most consumption tasks occur. But for all the writing in that article, the one big thing that I maybe didn’t pay enough attention to was the possibility of a hybrid form factor that bridges the creation/consumption gap. This is the iPad as a laptop thing, I guess. That is, the biggest threat to Windows is that some hybrid device type will become productive enough to challenge Windows PCs. And the question there is, how do Microsoft and the PC makers respond?

We’ve seen what they’ve done so far, of course. Microsoft adapted Windows to run on hardware that is more device-like than PC, including Arm-based hardware, which can be thin and light. And it created Surface Pro, formalizing the tablet 2-in-1 form factor. These efforts have largely failed in the sense that they didn’t become volume sellers, replacing laptops, and because they did nothing to stem the popularity of the iPad. The software isn’t there, and the devices aren’t very good consumption tablets. That is, we do have tablet 2-in-1 PCs, but they can’t replace an iPad for most people.

So what’s next? We’re waiting on the slow boil of Windows of Arm to pick up steam, and we now have all our hopes in the one basket of Qualcomm’s acquisition of NUVIA for its more PC-like Arm hardware. But even without that, Microsoft continues to push Windows on Arm, both software advances, its own hardware chipsets, and Surface hardware, and Intel and AMD have reacted to the Arm threat by adapting their own processes to be more Arm-like and, more recently to embrace AI, which is another major area where the PC will evolve in the coming years. Arm + AI is interesting, right? A nice combination of hardware efficiency, performance (if we can figure that out on the PC side), and AI smarts. (The Achilles heel here is the software. And from what I can tell, Microsoft has no plans for a new mobile apps platform in Windows that might fix that.)

We should also credit PCs makers, especially but not exclusively Lenovo, for experimenting with new PC form factors in the wake of Microsoft’s inability to do so after its one hit with Surface Pro. Nothing has stuck yet, but they’re trying, and based on my own experiences, it’s starting to get interesting. Here’s where we get back to that hybrid thing, which I think plays a big role in what’s coming. Dual displays are fairly common on desktop PCs and docked laptops, but not so much on the go, and it’s important to remember that laptops are the most popular PC form factor by far. So what might we do to make that experience make sense?

Lenovo provides some clues. It has experimented with any number of dual-screen and folding-screen laptops and other portable PCs. Back in the day, Lenovo used to sell ThinkPad portable workstations that had a second screen you could pull out on the side. It has experimented with a second (e-ink) screen on the outside of the laptop lid. A second screen on the wrist rest. A folding PC tablet 2-in-1, the ThinkPad Fold X1, that mimics folding smartphones. And most recently with two equally-sized displays that can be used both vertically and horizontally. Each has compromises. But God love them, they keep trying.

The last of those PCs, the Yoga Book 9i, is perhaps the most interesting because it is the most practical despite the weirdness of it all. (I will publish my review while we’re here in Mexico City.) It’s sort of a hybrid device because it can replace two devices (a laptop plus a USB-C second display) and, like the Pixel Fold and other folding smartphones, it achieves something interesting by letting us use the second of those two replaced devices in situations where we wouldn’t normally do so. (We leave the house every day and always take our phone, but rarely take a tablet, but with a folding smartphone, you leave the house every day with the equivalent of both. Interesting, right?) Yes, some people travel with a second display. But most don’t: they leave it at home attached to the dock.

Is the Yoga Book 9i the “solution”? I mean, probably not. Oddly, its biggest weakness—look at me screwing up my future review—is that it’s not a very good laptop (traditional clamshell form factor). More on that soon. But further revisions could fix that, and I think this device is good enough to warrant that work.

Look, we’re going to get better and faster connectivity. Better intra-device interoperability. Faster and more efficient hardware. Better screen technology. All the expected improvements. And while the PC has been surpassed by the smartphone from a versatility perspective, it’s still an incredibly versatile and adaptable platform. Laptops took over from desktop PCs years ago. And that form factor could be replaced by some hybrid form factor, maybe one that we’re now inching toward with these interim hybrid form factors. That makes sense since, after all, that’s what a hybrid is. A transition.

Short answer: Hybrid + AI + underlying improvements to hardware efficiency.

Play it again, Sam

leoaw asks:

As you’ve bought different gaming systems over the years, are there any classic games that you always like to have on the new systems? From the Sega Genesis to Nintendo Switch, the one set of games I’ve always bought is whatever the version of Atari Arcade Classics are made for that console.

Despite being part of the first wave of video game players, my sweet spot is the 1990s, which represents the transition from 2D side-scrollers (platformers) to first-person 3D shooters. This started with Castle Wolfenstein 3D, but really hit its stride with DOOM, which, among other things introduced the other key component to this shift, multiplayer gaming. That piece was improved dramatically with Quake, basically perfected with QuakeWorld, and I’ve been riding that wave ever since. Literally.

So the games that I go back to again and again are DOOM, DOOM 2, Quake, the first three Halo games, and many Call of Duty titles. But from a nostalgia perspective, it’s those 90s titles. The Id Software stuff. I’ve revisited other games many times, too, of course, like Duke Nukem 3D, the other Quake titles, DOOM 3 (literally right now), and so on. But as much as I love the Amiga still, it’s the post-Amiga 90s PC shooters that really do it for me.

Microsoft’s spam filters

lenh51 asks:

Paul – I have a question about Microsoft’s email spam filters.  Virtually every day I am bombarded with emails that announce my account at Company X has been suspended and I need to login to fix this.  Or that a package from Company Y cannot be delivered because they have an incomplete address and I need to login and fix that.  When I look at the email address that such emails come from, they are clearly garbage addresses such as this one:  [email protected] (from a recent email received a few days ago). Clearly in no way shape or form is this from the company which supposedly sent the email. 

I do not understand how in this day and age, Microsoft is unable to identify this as spam and automatically move it to my junk mail folder. Note that I use the desktop version of Outlook that comes with my MS  365 subscription. Any thoughts about how this happens?  Is there some setting I should be changing to make the spam filter more discerning?  Thanks in advance for your insight.

Unfortunately, this is an ongoing and persistent complaint and there are no good answers that I know of. But I also don’t use Microsoft’s email services, so I don’t have any insight there. Well, beyond the fact that I don’t have this issue on Gmail (Google Workspace) and that my blocking/reporting as spam of unwelcome email senders seems to be effective. I suspect someone here can contradict that, but I also hope someone here can help.

You might reach out to an Exchange/Microsoft 365 expert. For example, Tony Redmond is the lead author of the authoritative Office 365 for IT Pros, and I know he came up out of the Exchange world. Perhaps he has an answer.

(Sorry.)

Doing the Mexico City shuffle

JustMe asks:

How are you finding the travel between PA and Mexico City?  When you leave your flat in MEX, do you do anything specific/special given you might not return for a month or so?  Have you established a routine in your travel (things like, drive to EWR, park, train, how and what you pack each time, etc).  When you get to MEX, do you generally Uber or taxi home, or do you take the Metro?

I wonder if this might not warrant a long-form write-up. My wife and I often discuss how buying this apartment, for all of the headaches (see above) and upfront costs makes travel so much easier. This is the type of thing that is somewhat obvious before you experience it, but as with the benefits of the transition beyond home ownership that I discussed in the most recent Premium newsletter, where knowing it is one thing, but experiencing it is another. There’s just a lot more to it.

Here’s a simple example, and it’s the first we experienced: last May, when we finalized the purchase and had this place we were staying that was not a hotel, we went to bed the night before the morning when we were going t to fly home when our phones started buzzing. It was United Airlines, informing us that they had canceled our flights and were thoughtful enough to rebook our direct flight with business class seats to a multi-leg set of return flights home (with one of the stops on the west coast, the opposite direction we were going) in coach. The initial reaction was no different than any other trip, a mad dash to correct that crappy alternative via phone calls, support chats, and website flight research. But then it dawned on us: we have a place to stay, and we can stay here as long as we want at no additional cost (vs. that roughly $200 a night it would cost at the hotel we had used to that point). And so we simply did what so few other people can do and just had them rebook us, with business class seats, on a flight home 4 or 5 days later. That was huge. And new.

Since then, we furnished the apartment so that it’s a home with all the stuff one might need, and we both created a home office setup in which we leave a lot of computing equipment—docks, external keyboards and mice, laptop stands, and so on—and can just arrive here with whatever laptop, plug in those docked setups, and work normally. We’re not carting around all that crap back and forth. It’s nice, it’s efficient, and it’s more like the situation at home.

We leave clothes here, too. All of our toiletries. And we’re careful to document what’s here and what isn’t, and we leave with a little to-bring list for the next trip. Each time we come here, we bring a little more to leave behind, and then we travel home lighter, which is excellent. In time, we’ll almost certainly just need a single carry-on bag (like a laptop bag) for the flight. For someone who has spent his entire adult life trying to optimize travel, this is like science fiction. I could have never dreamed of it being this effortless.

Mexico City helps matters by being on the same continent as our home (as opposed to Europe). The flight is direct, with no stops. It’s shortish, 4 to 5 hours depending, and is only 2 time zones off. By comparison, going to Europe requires an overnight flight, which is horrific for me, often requires additional stops, and I’m wasted by the time I get there and need days to recover. Here, we hit the ground running.

Here’s what yesterday was like. We flew late, which is a mistake for all the obvious reasons, but it was so much cheaper than the more ideal morning flight, and we were able to swing business class seats for the same price as coach on that earlier flight. We were delayed by about an hour because that’s what happens this summer, but we made up time and only arrived 30 minutes later than expected. We were literally in row 1, and thus were the first people on the plane. And the first people off the plane, too: when we arrived in Mexico City, we exited and walked to customs, and there were no people waiting, which is typical here, with lots of open lanes. (We had only one trip here where we arrived to see a big line in customs.) We got through customs immediately and found ourselves calling an Uber less than 15 minutes after we stepped off the plane. (I quipped to my wife that our “seat to street” time was just 15 minutes.) That ride was $10—Mexico is cheap, and most Ubers around the city are $3 to $5 max—and it only took 20 minutes to get to our apartment, which is typical. We dropped off our bags, walked two blocks to our favorite restaurant, and had drinks and a snack. And then we walked home and went to bed.

That is a positive travel experience. Compared to the nightmare of flying to Europe and how taxing that is mentally and physically, it’s just night and day. (I once referred to a mobbed customs in Paris as “the people who God forgot.”) And while we did go to bed pretty late, with the time change, we were up and working normally this morning with no issues.

Some of the things we do are still evolving. For example, one of the issues with being away for three weeks is that you run into big costs with parking the car at the Newark airport in the U.S., which is 90 minutes from our home.) In addition to driving and parking, there are hotels at the airport where you can stay for one night and then leave your car there. This is good on two levels: if you have a morning flight you don’t have to dash out at 4 am or whatever and you feel less rushed, and it can be cheaper than even extended parking at the airport; they have regular shuttles to and from the terminals. But when you’re away for 3 weeks, those are all expensive. So we keep experimenting.

On the last trip, we used Uber. You can book an Uber in advance, which is easy enough, and it costs about $130 one way before the tip. That’s dramatically more expensive than leaving the car in Newark. The bigger issues in the trip home: you can book that, too, of course, but the timing isn’t as accurate because anything can happen with flights. And so we just arrived at the airport, made our way through customs, and then just ordered an Uber home. Despite that being a 90-minute drive to another state, someone accepted immediately so it worked out great. Plus, I didn’t have to drive after a flight, which is nice. This worked out well enough that we did it again on this trip, no issues so far. But there are other options, like a bus from the nearby local airport to Newark, that we will investigate and decide based on price.

While we’re in Mexico City, we walk, take Ubers, or take the Metro depending on what we’re doing. A big part of why we chose this place is its location: my wife and I created a document about the apartment for that poor couple that stayed here last week (see above) and we listed 10 of our favorite restaurants, bars, and cafes, all of which are a 7-minute or less walk from the apartment. With a 20-minute walk, you can get to any of the top-rated places in Roma Norte (our neighborhood) or Condessa, both of which are packed with incredible places to eat and drink. It’s just its own place. But of course, sometimes you want to go further afield. Ubers, as noted, are typically $3 to $5 depending on where we go, including to Centro (downtown, essentially). And the closest Metro stop is a 5-minute walk from our apartment. It costs 25 cents per ride (God, I love Mexico) no matter how far you’re going. Centro is a 15-minute ride, roughly.

I once described any decision, whether it’s buying a new smartphone or choosing a spouse, as a matrix of factors, and so that’s not all of it. But the convenience, cost, efficiency, and desirability of this place are off the charts. And is collectively a big part of why we’re here. It’s not all perfect (see above). Nothing is, I guess. But the good has outweighed the bad by a wide margin.

Charging developers to create solutions for your platform

helix2301 asks:

I am an indie dev, I am not going to even mention my site because I am not looking for a free plug. I have several apps and software I sell on the windows store and off my website I recently ported a few over to Android. But I have done nothing on Apple because of that $100 dollar a year fee for developers. I know $100 dollars cost of doing business, but I don’t make a lot selling apps or software. The few apps I give away on Windows store would be fun to port to App Store but to spend $100 dollars to give away something for free not fair.

Do you think Apple should have a program for free apps or people like me who want give it away for free? Microsoft and android only charge 10 and 20 dollars for dev fees for lifetime while Apple is $100 a year.

Apple is doing something only a dominant company can do: charging you for something that its would-be competitors cannot. I guess it’s a privilege they enjoy.

Should Apple charge developers an annual fee to join its developer program? No. Very much no. That’s ridiculous. Any platform maker should be beside itself with joy that anyone would support them in that fashion, and that’s especially true when most of those developers will be paying a 30 percent vig on every cent that make in that store. Furthermore, Apple is unique in that its developer infrastructure pays for itself and is wildly profitable because it earns so much from those developers via those fees. That business is a perpetual cash machine.

That said, my views here might be considered slightly naïve. For example, using this same logic, I once opined that Microsoft should just give Visual Studio away for free. Why on earth would this company charge customers to use its own developer tools? But that’s a business like anything else, and while Microsoft doesn’t make much on app store fees, I suspect its Visual Studio licenses help pay the associated bills. Microsoft can’t subsidize that business like Apple can.

So I don’t know.  And in both cases, you can get started for free. You can develop an iPhone app without having a paid developer license, and you can just pay that bill if you think you’ve finally created something that will cover the fee. With Visual Studio, you’re free to use Visual Studio Community, which is free, as an individual or enthusiast, and then opt into paying for full Visual Studio if you go commercial.

It’s not the end of the world.

On top of that you must use there API you can’t use others example maps and web. Some companies like Brave Leo was saying found a way around this but then the app got pulled. I know we have talked about this before but how many indie devs like me refuse to put good apps on store because of the $100 dollars to give away free app?

I run into this kind of thing too, and it’s always with smaller companies. I am, at best, an enthusiast developer, and one of the things I’d really like to do is take advantage of third-party controls so that I can build more sophisticated versions of apps like .NETpad. But those controls are really expensive, often around $1000 each, and not only does what I’m doing not justify the cost, it would also make it impossible for me to write about the experience. Imagine my documenting a future version of .NETpad where the first step was asking readers to spend $1000 on a third-party control. It doesn’t work.

In that case, the costs are literally because these are small companies and they don’t offer free or cheap solutions for individuals, they target professional developer shops. I’m like a kid looking into the window of a store full of items I can’t afford to buy.

On discord the general feeling is Microsoft, Android and Amazon have next to no fees because of trying to attract developers. Do you feel that to be true?

Yep. They would love to charge what Apple charges. When you’re an also-ran, you need to adjust to reality. This is why Pixel phones (Pixel Fold not included for some reason) undercut the price of Apple and Samsung flagships: they can’t afford to charge the same prices because their business is so much smaller.

Interview

spacecamel asks:

I know you don’t do a lot of interviews, but I would love for you to interview Florian Mueller (FOSS Patents) when the Activision trial is over.  He has done work for Microsoft and Blizzard over the years, and I think you would be able to tease out some good insights.

I would like to do that.

For whatever it’s worth, he’s on the list of people I know virtually, have never met, but have always had positive feelings for, and I really like the work he does. And on the flip side, he clearly follows me too, and he’s sent me links to things he thinks I’ll like, including several times during this Activision Blizzard drama.

So I will try to make that happen. In the meantime, those who are not familiar should check out his blog, FOSS Patents. I consider him to be the top analyst in our industry when it comes to patent and copyright issues, and his developer background really helps to inform his writing.

Bait and switch

madthinus asks:

Paul not a question, but just a heads up. If you check Windows Update and a Preview update is available and you choose to install it, there is now a pop up with an option “To turn on latest updates as soon as they are available” or “install”. I really hate what have become of Windows Update.

Yep, I did see this, and I discussed it in Windows Weekly #835, which we recorded the day after Microsoft (re)shipped Windows 11 version 22H2 Moment 3 as a preview update. In my notes, it reads like so:

Deja vu: Microsoft issues Windows 11 version 22H2 Moment 3 as a preview update

• A quick update on that new switch in Windows Update

To me, this is yet another example of Microsoft introducing some new behavior into the update stack, not explaining what it really is, and then its true meaning becomes clear only over time. What I mean by that is that Microsoft added a new Windows Update feature, a toggle titled “Get the latest updates as soon as they’re available,” back in April, about a month after it revealed that it had changed the release schedule for preview updates to occur each month in Week D (two weeks after Patch Tuesday and typically two weeks before the next Patch Tuesday). (And not to muddy matters, but this new toggle was in fact a preview update in its own right; it appeared for everyone two weeks later in early May. Round and round we go.)

Anyway, at that time, it published a support document explaining this new feature. “You can choose to get the latest non-security and feature updates as soon as they become available for your device (now and in the future),” it explains. “Your device is now ready to get the latest updates going forward.” What that really means is/was open to conjecture because Microsoft never really explained what it does. “After you set the toggle to On, your device will be among the first to get the latest non-security updates, fixes, improvements, and enhancements at the time they’re available for your device,” it explains, vaguely. “You only need to set this option once and it stays on (although you always have the option to turn it Off later).” I figured it was about those Week D updates, though that support document literally does not say that (the word “preview” does not appear once. In other words, toggle it on and you will automatically get preview updates. Just a guess.

So I did what you’d expect: I toggled it on, on most of my PCs. And I waited to see if anything happened when Microsoft issued the next preview update.

By the time Moment 3 had (re)arrived in preview form in late June, however, I had a few new review PCs in-house. And I didn’t enable this toggle on those PCs. But I still wanted to get that Moment 3 preview, so I did what you do: I clicked the “Downloads & install” link under the preview update in Windows Update and got the pop-up you mentioned.

Think about this for a second. I had wondered whether this toggle would automatically download Week D preview updates, something Microsoft doesn’t address in a support document about this feature. But what I hadn’t considered was that you would have to enable this feature before you could install any Week D preview update. Yet another thing Microsoft doesn’t address in that support document. So this is like some updating circle jerk with two pieces, the current preview update and that toggle.

I assume you could enable the toggle, download the latest preview update, reboot the PC, and then disable that toggle. But why not just allow users to manually install a lone preview update?

And then the light dawned. As it does so often when you have to figure out the motives of the kind of company that introduces a new Windows feature and then accompanies it with a full support document that describes this feature but literally never explains its real purpose. This has become my life.

And its real purpose is this: Microsoft doesn’t want to randomly download one preview update. Microsoft wants you to open the spigot and then forget that you just agreed to let it install any freaking things it wants on your PC. Not just preview updates, but whatever other nonsense, at any time it wants to do so. It’s like having to invite a vampire into your home before he can enter. Once you’ve invited Microsoft into your Windows Update, it will do what viruses and other malware do: whatever the frick it wants.

The good news? You can toggle that option to Off if you don’t want that. For now?

But there’s more good news. What I just found out in writing this response—God, there’s always more with this stuff—is that if you try to download a preview update but decline the offer to turn on the spigot (by clicking “Now now” instead of “Turn on”), then the preview update actually does still download and install. Huh.

So this is also an example of social engineering. It looks like you can’t get a preview update without toggling that feature to On, and so most people who want that preview update will likely say yes, opening the spigot.

In other words, Microsoft has become a vampire that uses social engineering to distribute malware.

I may need counseling.

VPNs

christianwilson asks:

How do you feel about the VPN services that are out there these days? Do you recommend them to people or have reservations?

When I was writing the Microsoft Edge chapters for the Windows 11 Field Guide, I was struck by how important it was that anyone who uses this browser takes a lengthy series of steps to protect themselves from all the tracking and other dangers of the world that the browser pretends to fix but doesn’t. And that led to a chapter I hadn’t originally planned called Set Up Microsoft Edge Correctly that I kept updating over time as I discovered more and more issues with the browser.

Anyway, among the advice in there is a set of three things that Edge users can do to prevent tracking online: install a tracking blocker (my choice is Privacy Badger, but uBlock Origin is a solid choice as well), install an ad blocker (because ads are often used for tracking purposes too, I recommend AdBlock Plus), and use a VPN (my choice is ExpressVPN). But the VPN thing is optional and it’s something that most users will never need, and something that most technical users will only need occasionally. (Also, good VPNs are not free.)

I heard someone mention they were using a VPN to protect themselves online, but the reasoning was very misguided and the use of a VPN was actually causing them problems. They were using it to prevent their data being stolen in a breach, which obviously the VPN does nothing for. Given that most (all?) reputable sites are using HTTPS anyway, I think people are led to believe they solve problems that aren’t always there.

Right. There are some good use cases for VPNs, of course, but to me, it’s mostly about privacy and/or tracking. VPNs can hide your online activities from your VPN, which isn’t a concern for most people. But that can be important on an untrusted network, too, and lots of people use VPNs to mask their actual location so that they can masquerade as being elsewhere and potentially bypass location restrictions on streaming services. But it’s overkill for most.

In my role as an unpaid Brave spokesperson, I will just point out that Brave has a “New private window with Tor” feature that does what almost everyone thinks “New private window/New incognito window” does (but doesn’t), by hiding your browsing activities and IP address. This is a VPN, but it encrypts your traffic and is sort of the next step up from private browsing (which isn’t all that private).

Anyway. I don’t think VPNs are essential for most. I do use ExpressVPN from time to time, but mostly for that location thing. And not just for video streaming: one time, I had to change my location in Mexico so that it looked like I was in the U.S. to make a hardware purchase online.