Ask Paul: December 6 (Premium)

Happy Friday! The first Ask Paul of December kicks off an end of year wrap-up in addition to its normal end-of-week duties.

Video game soundtracks

j5 asks:

Morning Paul! Total geek question here. What are some of your favorite video game soundtracks, movie soundtracks, movie scores, and do you have any goto video game/movie remixes on YouTube that you like to listen to? This Halo ODST one has been one of my goto for a long time, especially in the morning hours.

My wife and I were trying a local Indian restaurant the other night and whatever music they had on was so familiar, it triggered an almost visceral reaction. It wasn’t this, but it very much sounded like the Narada new age (instrumental) music I used to listen to quite a bit. There was a period of time, through the mid-1990s, I guess, where I could safely buy anything this now-dead label produced and it would be good. But I still have a bunch of it, and it’s good for background music if you’re reading or writing or whatever. Oddly, it’s also difficult to find on streaming services. But the Halo ODST music you link to above is in this general area too, and is quite nice.

Also not exactly what you asked, but when the original Quake came out, one of its features was that you could put a music CD in the CD player in your PC and use that as the music in the game instead of the Trent Reznor/NIN soundtrack that it included (which was quite good, actually). But I found something even better: I would put the CD in for the Halloween 4 soundtrack and listen to that instead. The main theme is a modernized and sped-up version of the classic Halloween theme, and it matches with Quake quite well, sort of like playing Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon over The Wizard of Oz.

Anyway. Yes, I have owned and still occasionally listen to a small selection of video game-based music that’s interspersed with my Narada and other instrumental music. Oddly, there aren’t that many.

The most obvious and relevant are the soundtracks to Halo and Halo 2 (Volume 2). Classic. The Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 soundtrack by Hans Zimmer is good. And Zimmer, generally, is excellent. Check out the song Vide Cor Meum from the movie Hannibal, which was reused in the movie Kingdom of Heaven. One of my all-time favorites. I have an album called Immortal that has some of my favorite video game music ever, from Shadow of the Beast and the original Turrican, but I can’t find this online now. The original Beast music is by David Whittaker. But this take on the Beast main theme is pretty good, and modernized, and very reminiscent of the music from Millennium, which is one my favorite Narada albums, go figure. Oh, and the Millennium main theme is by, wait for it, Hans Zimmer. (Don’t confuse Millennium here for the TV show made by X-Files creator Chris Carter. I did love that show, and the music is quite good too. But unrelated.)

I think that’s most of it.

This isn’t video game related, but ex-Windows chief Jim Allchin is an accomplished musician, and while most of the music he makes is blues/rock-based, his first album, called Enigma, which I can’t find on a streaming service, has two rock instrumentals, Enigma Machine and Kick It, that I like quite a bit too. (It was originally available on iTunes, go figure.)

Movie and TV show soundtracks and scores are a lot more common in my collection/libraries. Some favorites include:

• Julie & Julia (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) by Alexandre Desplat
• The Essential Hans Zimmer Film Music Collection in addition to the other Hans Zimmer albums noted above
• Kingdom Of Heaven (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) by Harry Gregson-Williams (so it lacks the song Vide Cor Meum, which is on the above album)
• Titanic (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) by James Horner
• Star Trek V and The Russia House by Jerry Goldsmith (The Mountain from ST5 is a personal favorite)
• Ainda (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) by Madredeus
• Brokeback Mountain (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) – Various artists
• Downton Abbey (Original Music from the Television Series) – John Lunn, others
• Sherlock (Seasons 1 and 2) by
• Paris (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) – Kraked Unit, others
• The Thomas Crown Affair (1999) (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) – Various artists

Chained to a desk

bwookey asks:

Its time to purchase a new desktop PC for my small business home office. Considering all the problems with the last two Intel generations I’m considering selecting a PC with AMD, or waiting for desktops with Snapdragon ARM chip set. No gaming on this PC. What are your thoughts on which route to take?

If you need this right now, I would go with AMD personally. I’ve not tried an AMD Zen 5-based desktop yet, but based on my experiences with laptops, they’re killing it this round.

Snapdragon X-based desktops will happen eventually, but I suspect it will start with mini-PCs like the (canceled) Snapdragon Dev Kit that are basically display-less laptops (like NUCs). Beelink is rumored to be working on one, but there’s no ETA or hard information.

Somewhat related to this, BobSC asks:

Hello, was wondering if you can give us an update on how you like that HP mini desktop pc? I just ordered that model on a Black Friday sale, should get it in 3 days. Thanks. PS: Do you sit a monitor directly on top yours?

The HP Elite Mini 800 going strong with no issues to speak of. I use it every day, though I spend more time on laptops. I don’t put a display on top of it, that’s where it vents hot air. (Almost the entire top surface is vent holes.) Mine is just sitting flat on the desk, but you can get a vertical stand, which would make sense, and, I suspect, a VESA monitor mount. Or an under-desk mount, though you’d have to position it upside down. It’s a great little PC regardless.

Subscrptinsanity

madthinus asks:

How strong was the weed OpenAi smoke when they come up with a $200 per month subscription service?

I think it’s fair to say that the $200 per month OpenAI ChatGPT Pro subscription is not for everybody. Indeed, it’s not clear who would benefit from this service. But OpenAI says it’s for “researchers, engineers, and other individuals who use research-grade intelligence daily to accelerate their productivity,” so we’re talking about a very thin, Apple Vision Pro-like, vertical market audience.

I guess you could view this like an automobile. While most people are best served by a mainstream Honda, Toyota, or whatever vehicle, there are also Bugatti and Rolls-Royce models out there for those with highly specialized needs and big wallets.

Versioning

MichaelMDiv asks:

During the last Microsoft 365 outage, two of my documents (Excel files) were restored to earlier versions and I lost some data/updates. I was able to recover them by going into file history and restoring an “earlier” version, but it doesn’t give me a great feeling of confidence in Microsoft. Did you hear from any other users about this? Is there a possibility that Microsoft could lose so much data that I wouldn’t be able to restore through file history? Just wondering what adjustments I might need to make to prevent permanent data loss. It wouldn’t have been catastrophic, but it would have been a pain.

No, I’ve not heard about any outage-related data corruption. I’m not sure if you are using a consumer or commercial version of Microsoft 365, but when you say “file history,” I assume you’re referring to the OneDrive version history feature, which lets you access previous versions of documents and files from File Explorer in Windows or from the web. I’ve always had pretty good luck with this, though the number of versions you’ll see can vary wildly, based on how often you’ve edited it. (I have a document I’ve been working on for months that has about 25 versions, for example. But a quickie news article will have only a single version in most cases.)

I’m not sure there’s much you can do beyond just using OneDrive normally. But here I have to make further assumptions too. You’re saving documents to OneDrive in Windows, accessing them normally in Excel and other Office apps, via Auto Save, and that this is happening on a single PC? If so, two vague ideas come to mind.

First, The most basic thing you could do is just try to have at least one other PC that is syncing with OneDrive as well, I guess, just to get a copy of those files in a second local location.

You could also look at Excel (Word, etc.) options and save Auto Recover information more frequently (the default is 10 minutes, and that is saved locally by default, not in OneDrive, which is probably the right choice).

But for the most part, what you’re doing is almost certainly correct, and this event feels like an outlier, not a frequent problem, thankfully.

Unfair

train_wreck asks:

Alright, have to ask you about Gelsinger… any more thoughts now that there’s been some days to digest? Personally i think it was maybe a little premature to can him at this point, like maybe he didn’t get enough time to right the ship. But i also imagine there’s more to the story that might provide some clarity. Maybe things inside Intel (tm lol) are worse than we know.

When we learned about Pat Gelsinger on Monday morning, I assumed something had happened. Perhaps a customer had pulled out of Intel’s foundry because it wasn’t producing high enough quality results, or whatever. Or Intel had received some offer for part of its business and the board felt that it was too good an offer not to take. Something.

But it’s now clear days later that nothing happened. The board claims there will be no changes to the strategy or how Intel does business. And this raises serious questions about why it would want to remove the man who came up with that strategy and heavily lobbied the U.S. government to create the CHIPS Act, which along with a related military contract, just landed it a promised $11+ billion in loans and subsidies. It doesn’t make any sense. The timing doesn’t make sense. And now the rationale for it, too. I don’t get it.

Intel hired Gelsinger in June 2021, so he was coming up on his four-year anniversary. Perhaps there was a condition of his hiring that he turn the company around within those four years, and it’s now obvious that won’t happen. But without a different plan of some kind, it seems to me that firing him sends the wrong message to investors, partners, and customers. He inherited a mess and a legacy of bad decision-making by previous CEOs. Punishing him for that isn’t just “wrong,” it’s materially stupid. It could harm Intel more than help it, and that seems contrary to the role of its board of directors. If I were an Intel investor, I would be asking hard questions right now and demanding some changes.

Maybe there is more we don’t know. I still feel like there almost has to be. But if this is literally all there is to it, Intel needs a new board of directors. You don’t just fire the CEO and continue forward with his strategy unchanged.

It’s a wrap

helix2301 asks:

First I want to say I love the Windows Weekly thanksgiving eve show where you are like “Guys my kids are here and I am sitting with you two start the show Leo lets get this moving.” LOL I found it funny cause we had a guy work on wednesday at meeting going on and on and I am like dude office closes at 3 today at 3:01 I am in car even if you are still talking.

Funny. Windows Weekly has turned into a three-hour-long slog, and I’m not sure how that happened, but it cuts into my dinner plans every Wednesday as-is. On Thanksgiving Eve, with the kids both home together for the first time in several months, my mind was elsewhere. Related, someone sent me this image from their year-end Pocket Casts round-up. Jeeps.

Other thing is I love the fun stuff we get like your top 5 of “something for the year” (books, podcasts, etc). I enjoy the yearly spotify wrapup and pocketcast what you listen to feature this year. The your year in xbox and steam open the valve on your year. Tells you what you played or listened to and hours and other cool facts you dont think of during the year. Can we get somethese stats about you maybe your pocketcast, spotify or audible wrapup?

Yes. I enjoy these things as well, and not coincidentally, I’ve already started working on my articles about my favorite books/audiobooks, podcasts, and new apps of 2024. And I’m thinking about doing a few more. Maybe devices and/or laptops? Video games? Music? (Embedding or linking to one or more playlists might be interesting.) We’ll see, but I will get through those first three before getting into to it too much.

So, without ruining those coming articles, I will say that Pocket Casts tell me that my top five podcasts of the year were The Rewatchables, If Books Could Kill, .NET Rocks!, American Scandal, and That Chapter. I listened to over 70 hours of podcasts in 2024, apparently, less than I did in 2023. I completed 93 episodes.

My Xbox Year in Review is interesting (to me). I play video games a lot less than I did before 2023, but I also played a lot more this past year than I did in 2023. 95 hours of playing. 14 games, almost exclusively on PC. (89+ hours on PC, 3 hours on Cloud Gaming, and somehow 3 hours on Xbox, though I don’t remember ever using it. Maybe my son played a bit in early 2024.) My most-played games were Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (over 60 hours!), Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, Doom Eternal, Microsoft Flight Simulator, and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024.

Google Photos tells me I took over 17,000 photos and almost 500 videos in 2024.

The music wrap-ups are always interesting. I listened mostly on YouTube Music through August or so, and mostly on Apple Music since then, so this one is a little mixed. YouTube Music says I listened to over 12,000 minutes of music, my top song was Volver A Comenzar (MTV Unplugged) by Cafe Tacvba (which it absolutely was), and that Def Leppard was my most played artist (seems right). I’m in the top 0.5 percent of Collective Soul listeners (their most recent album is great, so that makes sense). Apple Music had me at over 4000 minutes, but listed David Gilmour was my top artist. (His latest album is great.) My top song on that service was Estoy Aqui by Shakira, which is on two of our playlists. (Interesting that my top played songs of 2024 on both services are Latino.)

Why do you think companies do this just for press I know spotify wrap up popular thing share on social media kind fun.

I think it’s a nice engagement thing, plus companies like Apple and Spotify seem to get a lot of press for these things.

Microsoft should do windows wrap up your five most used programs.

I suspect this would shine too harsh a light on the ugly underbelly of Windows and the PC, in that the most-used app by far is a web browser (Google Chrome) and that most usage is with classic desktop apps that all originated decades ago. Also, because PCs are mostly for work–aside from those who game on PCs, of course–many of those most-used apps are probably less-than-beloved. (I use Slack every day, and Discord every week, but because I have to, and I hate both.)

I will do an apps write-up, as noted, but I probably think about this more than most, re-configure the apps I use the most often several dozens of times each year, and have a script that neatly outlines what those are, which I edited as I go. So it’s always top of mind. That said, I also have these weird outliers, and I experiment. For example, as I write this, I’m using Microsoft Edge across PC, iPhone, and iPad, and that is very much not my normal configuration. But that’s part of the job.

Anyway. More on this soon. And if anyone is interested in any other types of “end of year wrap-up” posts, please let me know.