Just a moment ... ...

 

If you have been wondering why my blog has fallen silent of late. There are two reasons, some health issues (I'm well on the mend now) and arghhh I've had enough of Windows upgrade! I'm and not looking forward to Windows 11!

I have been seriously battling against Windows 10 updates since October last year, even longer if you count my little toshiba netbook (now happily being an occassionally used Linux machine that has stepped up to replace others that have fallen). During this time three (and a half) computers have stubbornly refused to reboot after upgrades and I have wasted too many days trying to reload windows (using both thw offical windows  tools (which end up in deep loops of incomplete installs) and using Ventoy on a bootable standalone USB to install from various ISO files. Trying to install official Microsoft version of windows just lead back to stairng for hours at the Just a moment screen followed eventual with a blank screen and a computer which would boot.

I even tried out the available beta version of Windows 11, it ended quickly on all computer saying the computer was not suitable (no reason given) but I assume thay are in the too old category.

A real savioue was a version of Linux Lite (warning this site was pop up ads which I find annoying), a cut down version of Ubantu that can be run from the USB drive. Using it I discovered that all the computers had been repartiontioned to have a tiny inital partion (too small to load a viable version of windows onto. I then swap the haddrive on my main computer over to a resude harddrive that I had freshly reformated. That the half computer that died above. It look promising for a windows reinstall but soon arrived that the endless Just a moment loops. CHecking drive from the standalone linux lite USB It too was repartioned. Whate the?

Whilst there are hundereds of items showing up under the "failed windows upgrade"serach (you should be totally ashamed microsoft) I could not find any reliable dicussion of this repartioning on any forums. So I got brave and used the Partioning tool in Linuz light to investigate, sure enough I found windows.old and my user data in the second partion. Not so useful as I already had backs on external drives. Then I merged the first two partions and did a windows reset. My laptop had to run through a lot of installing and upgrading including more Just a moment times BUT eventually it was able to reboot itself. Some light at the end of the tunnel at last!

Suspicious behaviour, and a decline in trust

The news that Adobe was going to put the price up (actually doubling the price) of their basic Creative Cloud Photographic offering, was soon “retracted” as just a marketing A B test. That’s some test!

Then came the news that long time CC subscription holders would have to update and only be able download two of the most recent versions of the adobe apps. The reasons given escape me because I also found them a bit difficult to swallow.

Next a third strike for Adobe!  They were exposed writing to users warning them that using old version of the software (that those user paid good money to “rent” from adobe) would leave them open to a third party legal action. Again I find this unbelievable unjust. Like Adobe is happy to abandon them. What is going on at Adobe, don’t they care what their users think.

So I must admit I was feeling a bit smug that I resisted the subscription model (for purely cost reasons) Even though I still have to occasionally update my software. Many companies try to get that upgrade fee out of you often (eg yearly) I normally resist and upgrade on the second or third iteration and or when new features I would regularly use are rolled out. Generally I download the free trial versions first so I get a good idea of what I need versus could wait a little longer for.

Such an upgrade was the latest version of Corel Video Studio it performed way better with the 4K video from my new little Olympus and I like the multi cam synch capture. Suddenly I was  being annoyed by a nagging pop up messages every day (offering what seamed a reasonable discount). So I caved in and ordered the upgrade at the AUD$51 price. Even before I had finished and had only downloaded the initial setup program, another message popped up offering a slightly higher discount. Bummer, This is not clever marketing this is just annoying.

I do like the Corel Video Studio 2019 Pro by the way. It is a good upgrade.

What the heck are your heavily automated market teams up to software suppliers? Do you understand why you are loosing our trust?

Giving Google Photos another chance

Against my better judgement, I left google photo on my new android phone, It immediately insinuated itself into my photos uploading everything (yes I have checked the only upload photo on WiFi connection option). I then just ignore it. Well it did keep updating itself and occasionally asking if it could vacuum up (it uses the term backup) any images saved it new folders on the phone. I got one or two excited notification that the assistant had made a very lame slide show it called a movie or had enhanced one of my images (made it black and white). So I figure its mostly harmless and just keep saying no.

At their recent I/O conference, supposedly for developers, Google announced an upgrade to google photos, included improved sharing, a photobook printing service and a new feature to come called Google lens (a turbo AI charged version of google goggles that will start adding details of what you photographed to you photo’s presumably captions or metadata (read that as where to buy it)

This is google’s mobile phone oriented hype (promotional clip) to make sharing look great, and not something more akin to skynet. I’m not thinking it is so intentionally sinister, its more just a feeble “Emperor's New Clothes” metaphor/slight of hand trick to open up and share even more of you private life with a colossal secretive corporation, who make there money selling such stuff to advertisers (oh yes and the NSA and perhaps others also vacuum it up as well.)

Well there are legitimate reason to want to share photos, firstly publically, so as for a blog post or privately just for the eyes of family and friends. I still use google photo via open writer (an open source version of microsoft’s now defunct Live Writer blogging tool). Once upon a time when google photos was picasa web album you could also get a link to the ,jpeg file or embedded code that could be pasted in any regular HTML. Not any more I’m afraid, google will only let you play like that to google+, facebook and twitter (yes not even blogger). While the Open Writer connection still works I will keep using it but I am now a little less confident in its long term availability.

There are better places to publically share your photos, eg dropbox or flickr.

The private sharing is via share albums which you can allow others, with valid google accounts) to have access. Which is an improvement on having to make things publically viewable if you want to share.

The facial recognition isn’t to bad (possibly better than picasa’s)and once you identify them, add their google account IDs to the face and authorization to share with them and photos of friends and family can trigger a notification that you have a new photo of them, and they will be able to access the photo. I’m guessing this aimed at overly social teens and twenty something’s but I can see it ending in tears and regrets.

Unfortunately despite the claim better organization of your images via AI, the misclassification of places and things in my images is still overwhelmingly woeful. Ok I tend not to take tourist shots and I have travelled a lot BUT to only about half the places google think I’ve been. Under things I saw I’d supposedly taken about 50 shot of auroras! That is one of my biggest photographic desires and whilst I perhaps could have last weekend I am positive I never have. They were mainly star images with light horizons, nothing like auroras. The closest image was a strange green light I photographed in April 2010, it was in the western sky not the south and whilst i can’t explain it is probably not an aurora. (Google you keep disappointing me)

I also went on-line to my google photos web page, and its much the same as the last “upgrade” two year ago, but I did notice a new item called ARCHIVE with a new sticker beside it. Please don’t be decieved this isn’t anything like an archive it will keep all the photos but wont show then in the normal photos view. Presumably because people soon realis4 it is a very cluttered place it might be a much better alternative to not upload them in the first place. I must again stress google photo is not a safe place to store your only copy of your digital photos. If you must it can be used as one offsite place to have as a backup (particularly og phone photos) provide you have another backup under you control (like on your computers hard disk)

So I will keep any open mind, keep using google photos to hold my blog images and let it upload photos from my phone but I am unlikely to return to using google photos as my on-line place of choice to share or organise photos.

Windows 10 update–Still limping along

I am slowly working through the various hickups and straight out bugs involved with upgrading to windows 10. The list is too long and boring to try and explain here but I have had to update a numbers of drivers and re-install software (strangely some only needed to be reloaded on one machine but not on another) and a lot of fruitless searching forums on the net. It felt like I needed to stand on one foot, do some incantation, wave my hands over the keyboard and paise an unknown deity. {only joking}

Most of the forum notes and recommendations are a little mis-informed and my conculsion is that so much of the “crowd sourcing” assistance is not that worthwhile, infact I am concerned those elaborate procedures could either be damaging or be malware to encourage you to unknowly open security doors. Thus I suggest that you only take notice of genuine sites (eg the manufacture’s or developer’s verifiable sites) and not following a google or bing link to an unknown author, software utilty supplier etc. However having warned you off internet advice I have a little of my own, having found a couple of good solutions to many issues that are pretty simple to fix.

If your icons are still on your desktop from before the upgrade, but the programs no longer work. It may be as simple as running the program under compatibilty mode. To do this right click on the shortcut icon on the desktop. Then right click and go down to the properties item at the bottom of the list of options. This brings up the shortcut dialogue so choice the compatabilty tab, and tick the run this program with compatibility mode for check box, Click on the V on the righthand side of the selection box below and select windows 7 compatability. Finally click Ok. Its very obvious in retrospect but watch a lot of issues dissapear. This worked especially well with my no longer functioning version of HP’s great HP Soltions Center (which handles many of the multi function of HP Photosmart printers). I have to admit I didn’t find this solution till after I’d uninstalled and re-installed the HP printer drivers and all-in-one-printer software updates for a third time only to find the exact same problem not being able to start the software from the computer but that I could correctly invoke some actions from the printer panel!

On at least some occasions when the same software misbehaves under windows 10 it might be as simple as running the software using administrator. this can be done by right clinking on the icon and selecting the Run as Administrator option. If this does fix the problem you can set up a more permanent setting so the program is always run that way. Once again you start with a right click on the desktop shortcut icon, find the properties option and click on it. This will bring up the shortcut dialogue. Now click on the advanced button, to bring up the advance properties dialogue, where you just need to tick the run as adminstrator check box and finally click on OK.

The real elephant in the room for Windows 10 is the problem where the start menu doesn’t work (I have had this on my laptop) and there are often associated problem that cortana doesn’t work and the search windows is unresponsive (can’t type anything in it, if it appears at all) you can not select or run windows apps. Its a long list of associated woes, which all significantly reduces the functionality of windows 10 if you have been used to using it under windiows 7. Lookiong for web advice is frustration overload, especially unhelpful are the microsoft and microsoft oriented forums. Clearly there isn’t one fix for all variations of this problem but this link from Bristish Telecom is the most authorative explaination I have found (and worked for me). It is astounding Microsoft have not already created an upgrade to fix this problem or at least put together a simple to follow set of instructions themselves.

If your icons aren’t on your desktop already you’ll have to solve the third issue first!

To upgrade OR not?

It seems almost everyday my android is updating some app. Sometimes that has not been for the better (eg Google+), Windows and Java seem to want to upgrade monthly, even weekly at some times. Usually as a principal I like o keep at least one computer as up to date as possible, and its usually the computer I am using most. Most software suppliers these days provide “free” updates will you are within the same major version number but charge as you upgrade from one main version to the next, which is a reasonable approach. Some automatically notify you when an update is available, and prompt you to upgrade. For instance today lightroom has let me know version 4.3 is available. However other than “unspecified” bug fixes I can not see any feature I need. So should I even upgrade? Well, no suspense I will update, I like my software to be as up to date as possible.

The dark side of this automatic upgrading is that occasional an updated driver (or ”lack of” the appropriate updated driver on your machine) will cause something that was working to stop working and frustration set in, One way to minimize the likelihood of this is your have access to more than one computer is to Try the updates out on you secondary machines for a couple of days then upgrade your “production” machine. A second option is to wait a few days and look of the user forums for the software, problems usually surface pretty fast on forums. The final option if only update if you think its really necessary (you’ll be safe in the knowledge that what you have works, you might however miss out on faster processing, fantastic new features or just a general improvement if how things work.