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...