Ask Paul: November 7 ⭐

Happy Friday! We’re flying to Oaxaca today for a long weekend, but first we have this great collection of reader questions to consider.

? Cause and effect

lvthunder asks:

Where is the joy? As we go into the holiday season, I would like to see some articles about the tech you either enjoy or are looking forward to. It seems most of the articles are about how bad insert product or company has been or a device review.

This is a great idea. In my defense, I’m in many ways driven by what’s happening in the world, and I can’t really invent good news per se. And this has been a rough year for enshittification, though antitrust is finally starting to make some inroads there.

Semi-randomly, and this is by nature incomplete, a few of tech—related things I’m happy about.

• IKEA just announced over 20 Matter-compatible smart home devices—smart light bulbs, water leak sensors, motion sensors, remote controls, a lot more—and they are incredibly cheap. These will be available worldwide, so I will be stocking on some of these things, most notably water leak sensors for PA and Mexico for when we’re away from either place.
• I was getting nervous about Affinity when they went dark for about a month and didn’t have an obvious way to download any of their apps. But the new Affinity app is free, like really free, and that’s incredible. I prefer separate apps, personally, but this is Photoshop-level quality for free, for real.
• I don’t use VPNs all that often, but I had to do so twice on this trip to Mexico, once for downloading and using the new Google app for Windows, which is US only (will be writing about this soon), and the other for a bank-related need that was particularly problematic because our daughter totaled her car and there was a lot to do there, difficult when away. I like when things work, and Proton VPN couldn’t be easier to use.
• I’m excited that Google and Epic Games settled, not because the outcome was better or resolved all the issues there, but because it was the right thing to do and that compromise is the common-sense endgame that is lacking everywhere else in the world these days.
• I was sort of routinely going through some Windows 11 “decrapify”-type things for the book and to see what had changed, and I have been extremely pleased and surprised by how well Tiny11 Builder works now. This thing exists to get Windows 11 installed and working on lower-end PCs, but its use in de-enshittifying the system is much better than expected. I will likely have a follow-up right before we go home in a few weeks.
• I’m working on a “What I Use” article for this trip, and I ended up buying more tech-related items than ever before. So I will save that for that post, but it’s mostly been quite positive.
• Most of the AI news we see now is in a spectrum between FUD and nonsense, but Mustafa Suleyman, who was an unknown to me before he joined Microsoft, has been pleasantly surprising. Unlike most leaders in this space, his head is in the right place, even if the details are lacking on the biggest of his plans.
• This is amazing.

I’ll try to think through how this might be a sort of regular thing. Given how dark the world is right now, a little brightness is warranted.

? It’s all in the timing

jwpear asks:

Listened to the discussion on the 2nd gen Snapdragon Elite in the latest Windows Weekly. This was timely as I’ve been debating the purchase of a Surface Laptop 7 to replace my Surface Laptop Studio (1st gen) and wondering how close we are to a new model. Microsoft seems to be pushing these hard with both a discount of up to $550 (for the model with 32GB of RAM) and $600 trade in for SLS if you purchase the Surface from the Microsoft store.

I’m curious, what would you do? Just wait or go ahead given the steep discounting. I realize this is very individual question, but WWPD. I use my machine for casual development. The battery life is very interesting. And I’d like to experiment with local ML. If the X2 is as good as the benchmarks suggest and the battery life remains as good at the X1, I’m definitely getting it. I’d sell whatever I have at the time. I lean toward wait, but man, next June is a long time to wait.

If I were going to bet money on this, I would bet on the Snapdragon X2 launch mirroring that of the first gen from two year ago, so announcement in May and then availability in June. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen earlier, and I wish it would. But that’s the guess.

I would buy the Surface Laptop 7 now and not wait. My experiences with Snapdragon X are universally positive, even on the lowest-end models. And Surface Laptop 7 is still my favorite laptop.

I’m also not opposed to a refurbished device. I’ve had good luck with Apple refurbished devices. Wouldn’t qualify for the trade in, but I could sell my SLS on Swappa.

Microsoft has a refurbished store as well by the way, though the selection is on the light side. I haven’t bought a refurbished product there, but I’ve used the Apple refurbished store many times, and it’s always been terrific.

? Extraneous and unwanted

jeroendegrebber asks:

My Onedrive folder now suddenly has a folder called “Microsoft Copilot Chat files”. Removed it, and it pops back up in a minute. Is this yet another ensh*ttification item, or is this something you can disable? I’ll be honest, I have not yet checked your windows guide on this.

I routinely see two additional unwanted OneDrive folders all the time, Attachments and Microsoft Copilot Chat Files, and no, there is nothing that I’m aware of that will prevent these from appearing. (I never use Outlook or Outlook.com, so I’m not even sure why the first one is there.) I also delete them as I see them, and they always come back.

I had reorganized my OneDrive folder structure when Microsoft started quietly enabling Folder backup in Windows 11 behind my back, and I would prefer to not have any of the default top-level folders. But the Desktop, Documents, and Pictures folders (plus Personal Vault) are permanent, so you can’t really delete any of those either. (You can delete Videos and Music, go figure.)

Incidentally, David Plummer just released a video title Windows s*cks. Recommended watching.

Yeah, I subscribe to Dave’s channel, so I watched that one yesterday. It’s … fine. It’s basically the conversation we’ve been having about Windows 11 for the past three-plus years condensed into 20 minutes. And while it won’t be news to anyone here, the more play this topic gets, the better. Oddly, he doesn’t touch on some of the bigger issues I and others have pointed out in Windows 11, most likely because he doesn’t encounter them.

But as far as a “power user” switch or whatever, God yes. We needed that yesterday. And one thing that’s always missing from Microsoft pop-ups these days is a “never ask me or show me this again” button. We’re basically asking to be treated like adults, which feels reasonable to me.

✨ MAS AI

gregsedwards asks:

I know you already use AI tools to create graphics (thanks for the recent nightmare fuel rats’ nest of hands), but do you have other plans to leverage AI to add value to the site?

First of all, I’m kind of glad you brought up the image I used for the Well, That Settles That ⭐, as I specifically asked for three hands somehow shaking each other and knew this might be vaguely disconcerting to some. But the image isn’t “incorrect” in that there aren’t extra fingers or whatever. But … yeah, no need to look at it again. Sorry 🙂

One idea might be to use a tool like Eleven Labs to clone your voice and create a low-effort “virtual podcast” from your articles. I already use Read Aloud mode in my browser to consume articles on the go, but the voices are pretty robotic, and I think it’d be really slick to be able to listen to an article being read in your voice. You might even be able to automate these into an alternative podcast to which users could subscribe.

Yeah, that is one thing I’ve thought about, not that specific tool, per se, but just some way to turn articles into a podcast-like thing you could listen to. I assume there are lots of solutions like this, and I like this kind of feature in reader-type apps, though Instapaper doesn’t offer this feature to my knowledge. But “Listen to this article” seems like a good Premium feature.

Another idea might be to index the decade-worth of content to create a Thurrott-bot for the site. I ran across this tool called Delphi (delphi.ai) that lets you build a virtual version of yourself that you can put out there as a chat bot of sorts. I mean, the name alone should pique your interest. ?

Ha. 🙂

There are two file-related AI use cases I would like to figure out.

One is just a private archive search/research feature I could point at my OneDrive, Google Drive, and/or Synology-based document archives so I could find things I’ve written in the past more easily.

The second is an AI-based search feature for the site, as the current site search is terrible, and I find myself using Google to search my own site, which is silly. (An option to just search Premium articles or whatever topic would be nice, for example.)

And the third is sort of a combination of those two things where a reader could in essence search both the site (for 2015 and newer articles) and potentially search my archives too. Kind of make it a living thing.

I follow all these AI integration stories (OneDrive + ChatGPT, etc.) closely so I can work towards at least some of this.

Finally, I see a lot of social features being built into Club TWIT lately, and I’m wondering whether you’ve considered implementing anything similar here for Thurrott Premium members. Private Discord access, virtual meetups, games, early access, etc., might be nice perks that would serve to strengthen our community.

Yes. I was literally just talking to Robert about some features along those lines and tied to the currently well-hidden “Thurrott points” system he put in place. I want to call out things more visually and obviously in the sidebar, etc.

That will happen, and I have a post I’m working on ahead of a related continuation of our switching payment systems in which subscribers will be notified on the site ahead of renewal. That will solve two problems for the short term: The old/current system doesn’t have a way to proactively inform people about renewals, which is a major issue, and the sooner we get everyone over to the new system, the faster we can remove the old, half-broken one.

Robert is also itching to remove OpenWeb for comments, which I love, but it’s difficult to integrate that with the points system, etc. So we will keep debating that.

Keep up the great work!

Thanks. But thank you for the suggestions, too. I still struggle to use AI day-to-day, not because I’m against it, but just because I have my own ways of doing things and it never presents itself as something I may want or need. I do think there are some excellent use cases for the site, per your suggestions above. I will throw all this by Robert.

? Dungeons & Dragons

christianwilson asks:

How was your experience playing D&D over on TWiT recently? It sounded like it was a lot of fun.

It was like riding a bike in many ways, though I was mostly a Dungeon Master and not a player with the group of friends I played with. I was introduced to my friend Jeff by a shared friend in the 7th grade, and he handed me a copy of the Dungeon Master’s Guide that he had purchased so I could read it and create a game. We played through the end of high school, and tried a few other games like Traveler, a sort of science fiction D&D. And then again as adults from 1990 through 1993. So it had been a while.

One thing I was telling Micah (who is the DM in this game) is that the online nature of the dice, player sheets, and so on is a terrific addition to the game. It would be great if everyone were there in person, too, though I suppose in that case we’d just use real dice. But it enables the remote experience we did, and it’s nicely done.

By the way, Jeff and I are still friends (and we’re both still friends with the person, Andy, who introduced us). He and his wife often travel with us, had gone to Europe with us dozens of times over the years, and they were here in Mexico most recently back in March. But I see him and a few other core friends every time I go back to Massachusetts as well. And they will stay with us over New Year’s too.

It’s a great, creative hobby to get into. I’ve been playing with a group of friends monthly for nearly a decade straight and it is an evening I always look forward to. Did playing spark any interest in playing more D&D or other games like it?

I’m definitely open to it. One of the guys who played was saying that he plays in a game with his 12 year old daughter, which is cool. I had played various videogames with my son as he grew up, culminating in our midnight Call of Duty runs before we could just download the games electronically, and that kind of bonding time is really nice.

Semi-related, my wife and I went to one of the bars we frequent here the other night, and is was dead, so we had a lot of time to chat with one of our friends who works there. She had a green brooch on that I can’t say I even noticed, but my wife pointed to it and asked what it was. I looked at it, finally, and said, “There’s no way she’s this nerdy, but that looks like a Lothlorien Mallon leaf that you would wrap Lembas bread in.” Our friend’s eyes widened and she first said, “Why would you think I’m not nerdy?” And then said that was precisely what it was. Nerd credentials extended.

This is a Lord of the Rings reference for the non-nerdy in the audience. Apparently these were her favorite movies growing up, similar to Star Wars for me, so we had a long-running conversation on this and I’m sure my wife regretted asking about it.

? Predictions and predilections

gg1 asks:

Hope you had a great birthday, Paul!

Thanks! Tied to the above nerd reference, my birthday was a reminder of how nice the people are here. On the night of my birthday, we went to our favorite local spot to watch a World Series game, and the people there knew it was my birthday from social media somehow and they brought out a cake with a crazy Mexican candle. The next night, we went to another favorite spot and a friend there started asking me about candles and events, and I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I guess he had seen the photos from the night before, so they brought out a cake (well, waffle) with a candle too, and too many shots, far too many shots. And then the night of the LOTR conversation above, we hadn’t been there in a few weeks because of the previous week’s World Series schedule. And as we were talking with the person noted above, another friend there popped up with a present because they had missed my birthday. Geeze guys. It’s crazy.

Any predictions for Ignite coming up soon? In that vein, anything tech-related that excites you for the remainder of this year?

Microsoft Ignite is getting tough because it was all cloud for a long time, all Teams for several years, and now it’s all AI. So I have to assume we’re going to learn a lot about Microsoft AI and frontier model progress, an endless list of new Microsoft 365 Copilot features, and so on. I suspect there will be in-house Microsoft models coming to 365 Copilot. Perhaps the first official 26H1 confirmation, though Windows news is always light and/or just security-focused thanks to the Secure Future Initiative (SFI). But I don’t have much hope for Windows or dev news, and those are my big concerns.

Aside from the list of positive developments up top, our trips back and forth to/from Mexico are always interesting because there are things I can’t do here, so I have this to-do list I keep updating for when we get back. And then it will get busy, before and during the holidays. There are four pre-CES meetings in New York on my calendar that I need to figure out. And phones to possibly upgrade, though I’m still working through that. I would like to get one of the new iPhones, I guess, though I’m not sure which one (and Apple just dropped the trade-in value on my iPhone by $30, which I guess was unavoidable, timing wise). And, per Paul’s Pixel 10 Diaries: A Foldable Future? ⭐, possibly a Pixel 10 Pro Fold if I can make sense of that financially.

I can’t do this immediately, and if this trip is any guide, I won’t be able to do this when Apple finally upgrades the iPad Air in the spring either, but I would like to swap out my 11-inch iPad Air for a 13-inch iPad Pro (or iPad Air, given the cost) so I can see whether having the bigger display and a full-sized keyboard can put that Magic Keyboard laptop-like experience over the top. So that is further out, I guess. And I wish there was a version of this where the screen could be in portrait mode: There are third-party keyboard covers that do that, but I find Bluetooth connections to be iffy for this kind of thing and like the reliability and lack of latency that you get through the smart connector.

Also unclear is when I will add two more drives (for backup) to the NAS we have in PA, but I could see doing that while we’re home. I don’t know whether I mentioned this anywhere, but during the two week period between our trip to Berlin in early September and our flight here to Mexico in late December, my wife somehow managed to corral the cats that are my sisters and their mother, and we purchased the condo we’ve been living in there since late 2023. So we have a list of things we want to do there related to general house maintenance and updating and only some of that will happen during the 6 week-ish period we’ll be there before mid-January. But we’d like to replace our couch and love seat, which the cats had destroyed and we had just left like that. And with the IKEA news noted above, I could see getting some smart sensors for when we’re away.

? Locked out

harmjr asks:

Brad bought a NAS because he’s prepping for the Lockout Apocalypse. In listening to him talk about it I am really wondering about his fears of losing access to his Outlook.com account. I love OneDrive and set to sync all the files to any PC I am using but wonder how real his fears are about losing access. I do have MFA, recovery email setup. Any other preps? Second what is the likely hood of Microsoft doing this.

The possibility of Microsoft locking Brad or anyone else out of their account is very low, as is the case with Google, Apple, and whatever else. But this does happen. It happened to me with YouTube in January, and we’ve all seen the horror stories about some cloud provider cutting off access to an account because they had photos of their baby in a tub or whatever and some bot or human thought it was child porn, and then the victim could never get the account back. So it’s important to be prepared.

In Brad’s case, he has a unicorn Outlook.com account (brad@), so people are constantly trying to steal it. He has protected it correctly, so he should be fine, but bad actors often find a way, so you never know. For most people, of course, that’s not an issue, and if you’re just using a normal @outlook.com, @gmail.com, or whatever email address, you won’t see the issues Brad has anyway.

My YouTube experience prompted me to start the Online Accounts (2025) series, which is ongoing and will definitely continue past the end of the year. There are a few articles I started but haven’t finished, including an important one called “Succession” that involves how to set up your online accounts to survive you so that your loved ones can get in them and do whatever after you’re gone. But as far as basic online account security goes, Tip: Properly Secure Your Microsoft Account is still relevant, though I need to update that soon because of recent passkey updates in Windows 11 and elsewhere.

Generally speaking, the advice here is obvious enough:

• Secure your MSA and other online accounts in all the prescribed ways, meaning multiple 2FA entry points, ideally without text messaging.
• Make sure that none of the data that is important to you is in only a single place. That can be a single hard drive on a single PC that can be stolen, lost or broken. But also really important data like photo collections and so on that need to be in multiple places with geographic separation (for example, a local backup plus one or two cloud-based backups in OneDrive or whatever).
• Use a third-party password manager (identity manager).
• Use a separate 2FA app for codes, and ideally have that available on multiple devices (if you have one phone, perhaps also a tablet).

Ideally, this stuff is a “set it and forget it” type scenario, but security practices evolve and the introduction of passkeys and now portable passkeys has shifted things yet again.

I will try to cover all this and whatever else in that Online Accounts series. I need to keep this stuff up-to-date.