OneDrive and the Rug Pulled from Underneath Me

 

As someone who has set up many new computers over the years, I've gotten used to the tedious process of loading software from discs and installers. However, I was pleasantly surprised at how streamlined Microsoft has made the setup experience on my latest PC. Getting Windows and Office installed was a breeze compared to the olden days of swapping floppy disks and CD-ROMs. 

However, this simplicity came with a devious dark underbelly that left me incredibly frustrated - the aggressive integration and default setting of OneDrive for storage. At every turn, Microsoft seemed to be steering me towards using its cloud service whether I wanted to or not. Most insidiously, it had automatically set my Documents, Photos and my Desktop Folders to be synced and stored in OneDrive. 

I already have a personal OneDrive account that I seldom use. But when I did a quick test of uploading some photos, not many from my camera, I quickly maxed out the free storage, most of which was being consumed by weird files on my desktop area. Suddenly, I was being pestered to pay for more OneDrive space that I never asked to use in the first place. Where was the option to opt-out of this default OneDrive setting during setup? It felt like the rug was pulled out from underneath me.

Instead of spending a couple days getting a new PC ready like I used to, I've now wasted that same time trying to unravel and opt-out of most of the undesired OneDrive integration that Microsoft shoved in my face. What initially looked like a fresh, streamlined setup experience left a sour taste thanks to this aggressive cloud storage agenda. 

Dear Microsoft, please make OneDrive an explicit choice again, not a default imposition!!!

Tales of Woe, and hopefully meeting a new friend

 After many trials and tribulations, so many, I had given up blogging about them. I’ve had a whole series of older computers from my business die off one by one over a few years. The majority have suffered death by upgrade, so i'm starting to fear those massive windows updates that never really worked. I guess one of the big problems was I had older hardware and it was stuck in Windows 10 land and not upgradeable.

I had replaced an old favourite PC in my studio with a slimed-down Lenovo box. It had a small ssd drive, supported by two hard drives, adequate memory, it was an i5 and it ran Windows 11, I love it. It did have problems running a large-screen TV when using the second screen/monitor or projector. But I do love the fact that I can have a large screen TV on the wall, perfect to paint from. Most of the computer gear sits on a narrow shelf and I have a couple of keyboards, one waterproof on my art table and a second wireless., that can be used anywhere. The table is set up such that I can draw and paint on it or I can also use with one of two easels standing up. I’ve also recovered an old sound bar so I can have good quality music as I’m painting. Its also set up for running Zoom meetings and making You tube videos (if I have the time!)

I still use an older Windows 10 HP Pavilion desktop in my office as the master for my network and main computer. It’s also got a small ssd drive but has 2 internal and 3 USB hard drives hanging off it. It is currently doubling as my master media storage, (eg photos videos and music). Unfortunately, it is misbehaving a bit, Finally I do miss my NAS storage, which no longer works on my upgraded LAN (windows 11 is implicated) , I really wish I knew why.

Quite a while ago the battery died in my beloved little HP Spectre. The little two-in-one that I took travelling, sitting on the couch or in fact all over the place. It was getting quite old and only had a small 11” screen but I still loved it and missed it dearly. The ordeal and potential expense associated with trying to get the battery replaced meant it is lying dormant.

I had a corneal graft last year and struggled a lot when one of my two monitors on my main computer decided to go dark, very dark, too dark to read easily. Taking the monitor off the computer and plugging it into something else showed it was fine so I assume it’s the graphics card on the computer, or a graphics driver upgrade issue, just another frustration with the Windows world. I’ve really had a lot of trouble getting used to what now appear contrasty monitors and smaller text (OK it’s the same size text just harder to see without an update to my glasses prescription after the corneal graft]. I can only get about one hour at the screen before my eyes feel strained. Usually not enough time when I’m playing with photos,

So I’ve been looking seriously at different screen technologies and decided I like TVs with OLED screens. I used to like the Apple iPhone style IPS format screens on my phone and Spectre, and was with LCD monitors. So I had begun investigating screen type and size, by actually looking at them in stores. When I noticed an advert on TV about the Lenovo Yoga Range, two-in-one style computers, checking the web there was a model based on an Intel EVO i7 processor with a 14inch  OLED screen. I was at Office Works on a different matter and so I checked it out. It was very easy to read at a standard viewing distance. I didn’t take long to decide it was time to get an upgrade.

So welcome Slaty, so named because it’s very thin, layered and a dark grey. I look forward to you becoming a great friend.

Are LLM amazing or simply stupid?

I watched a very relevant TED talk by Yejin Chai “Why Ai isincredibly smart and shockingly stupid”, which opens with the quote “Common sense is not so common” which comes from Voltaire around 3  centuries ago. I totally agree that the current large language models {LLM}, which many call AI (but I call Artifically Intelligent), lack common sense. This should be very obvious if you he ever used them.

Still I am finding LLMs helpful. They're sometimes amazing for cleaning up typos, especially for folks like me who struggle with dyslexia.  They're also good for fixing the weird stuff that happens when you dictate and/or use predictive text.

I've been trying out a few of the most popular ones.  To compare them, I created an informal scorecard system that tracks how well they handle different aspects of text, like key ideas and paragraph sentiments.  Here's how it works:

• OK: This means I can use the text without any changes.
• Reword: Sometimes the wording needs a little tweaking, to sound less know-it-all.
• Fact Check: often some points get over-embellished
• Wrong: clearly made up or simply wrong
• Missing: important information left out (ignored)

So I recently was asked to speak and I outlined some ideas but in a rehersal it took 20 minutes. I recorded and timed it by dictating into a Word document (<windows key> and H) roughly 6 pages of rabbling text, lots of good stuff but… … So I asked each of ChatGPT, Claude.AI and Google’s Gemini (previously Bard)  each to summarize it into a single page.

Their score cards were not so good

I feel that it is the Dunning-Kruger effect that AI suffer most!  These AI Bots display a smug self-confidence that they know everything but show no common sense to realise how little human norms and values they actually understand.

Finding the Ideal Surface for My 9X5 Artworks on Wooden Panels

The quest to find the ideal surfaces for my 9X5 inchartwork for the 2024 VAS Exhibition continues! I'm planning to create two pieces, one in watercolour and the other in soft pastels. To test out different surface preparations, I made three variations for each medium on some scrap plywood.

 Let's start with the watercolour surfaces:

• W1: Just plain white acrylic, which behaved a lot like Yupo paper.
• W2: White acrylic topped with a thin coat of regular gesso. This improved colour intensity and gave sharper hard edges compared to the acrylic-only surface.
• W3: White acrylic with a 50/50 mix of transparent gesso and regular gesso. This surface had the most texture, but the paint went on nicely with great intensity, and it was easy to lift off.

Both W2 and W3 seem promising, except that the watercolour washes picked up brush marks on all the surfaces. For the next trial, I'll need to apply the gessos with a foam roller.

Now, onto the pastel surfaces:

• P1: Just an old layer of Derivan background paint (China Red). This added a nice tooth to the surface, and the coloured ground made the pastel colours sing.
• P2: White acrylic with standard gesso on top. The least successful option.
• P3: White acrylic with the 50/50 transparent and regular gesso mix. Good coverage with a light pastel touch, but the colours looked pale.

 I tested various pastel marks, from very soft to hard, and even Conte pencils. Getting details on such small panels is going to be a challenge, and I need to experiment further with different "background" paints and "watercolour ground".

Stay tuned for more experimental fun on the road to the perfect 9X5 surfaces!

Spambots be gone

Has anyone else discovered a sudden massive increase in the number of views being recorded on Blogger (this site)?  I was rather pleased with myself struggling to over half a million views over the past 20 years. Yes I have been using Blogger for 20 years! However, in the past month the pageviews have risen by over 100,000. Over the past week the recorded pageviews are between 2,000 & 3,500   per day. but actual pageviews, even most recent posts, seldom exceed 10 views per day.

I do suspect bad actors, possible spambots, content scrapers or maybe a hacking attempt gone wrong. I really can not see what might be achieved by such an activity, perhaps other than wasting bandwidth (which I can not see evidence of). Is it part of giving a legitimate address for a phishing scam to fool validity checks?

Ok now I have noticed. Do I try to inform Google?  Yes, but I have gotten nowhere again. Have you ever tried to contact good with a problem? y=You will know what I'm talking about. Is is another massive "I don't care" / #FAIL google!

So what can I find out about these extra views (which I might just call an attack). Well it must be automated to reach that number. Its seems to be totally originating from Hong Kong, using apple MacIntosh and Chrome, the refereeing URL being reported as other by Google Analytics. The biggest puzzle is my blogger site is recording these extra views but my actual page view seem to be remaining normally low. Are these numbers even real? Should I be concerned, given the location these pageviews seem to be originating?

What is with the cable octopus?

 

Trying to clean up my desk inevitably runs into the USB cable tangle. Whilst USB A is pretty universal the number and variety of devices it can ad-hoc connect to a computer is amazingly diverse. Sometimes it’s used for charging, most often t will be to transfer data or connect a different peripheral temporarily.  

The downside is many use different or non-interchangeable plugs at the other end. Whilst they are all obey the USB standards,  the plugs vary to suit the devices they being connected to. I currently have 5 different device end styles. That’s quiet a tangle on my desk. So I used a spiral cord minder to group the cables together at the USB-A end. A bit of magic using a split tube, lets me keep the cable close to the computer but neatly away from my work area.

This little diagram gives an idea of many of the current plug types, but there are many more including USB-C and a range of proprietary connectors for specific devices eg. cameras, phones and watches.

Iuse pairs of recycled bread-bag ties, that I colour coded to help keep track of which of the ends match up. It nice, simple and neat. Better still no time wasting searching for the right cable.

Luminar Neo's GenAI Tools Need More Time in the Oven

Luminar Neo recently added three new generative AI tools called GenErase, GenExpand, and GenSwap, all supposedly based on generative AI technology. I’d seen a bit of hype about them and they just turned up for a 30 day trial, so I just need to play and try these new features. I have to say they clearly needed more time in development before being released to the public.

The tools are only available through Neo's subscription service presumably because they utilize cloud computing power. This means they will likely never be available to run locally on a desktop.

I was most interested in testing out GenExpand, which is supposed to let you extend the edges of an image. I do like Neo’s Panorama stitching extension but I often get bulbous, untrimmed images when stitching together handheld panoramas in Neo, so I thought GenExpand could help with that. Unfortunately, my first attempt to expand a massive 588MB panorama got stuck taking forever and then just produced blackness over the area I’d selected. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

 A smaller test image did successfully expand, but the new edge addition was blurry and grayscale. On closer inspection the horizon matched byt clouds and waves didn’t matchup well to the original.

Hoping for better luck, I tried GenSwap to insert a kangaroo into a photo. The AI clearly wasn't trained on enough Aussie animals, its a bizarre creature but “thats not a real kangaroo”. At this point, my enthusiasm was waning.

Finally, I tested GenErase to remove objects from photos. It performed decently but didn't seem much better than the standard erase tool already in Luminar Neo. Trying to erase a larger object again resulted in the tool freezing up.

In the end, while the ideas behind these new GenAI tools are intriguing, I feel they simply aren't ready for practical use. Too many bugs, glitches, and failures to finish make them more frustrating than functional. Luminar Neo would have been better served by traditional beta testing before releasing them. For now, I don't trust these tools, or for that matter many other developers' generative AI tools to deliver satisfactory results, or are my expectations too high? Maybe someday the technology will mature into something more reliable, but for now GenAI feels more like a breakable flashy toy and “trying to keep up with the Jones”.