Copilot’s integration in Microsoft Office is really shitting me

I pay an annual subscription fee for Microsoft Office – or what is now called ‘Microsoft 365’. That means I always get the latest versions of Microsoft’s Office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Well, the latest versions of these apps all now have Microsoft Copilot integrated into them in the most irritating way possible.

The revenge of Clippy

In Word, for example, Copilot muscles its way into your writing flow through an icon that appears at the start of every new paragraph on your page (highlighted by the red square in the screenshot below).  

Screenshot from Microsoft Word showing the first two paragraphs of this post being written. There is a Copilot icon in the left margin, just next to where the author is about to start typing the third paragraph. That icon has been highlighted in the screenshot by a red coloured, rounded square.

Infuriatingly, in PowerPoint this icon appears above each slide, forcing you to reduce the zoom on your slide if you want to be able to go from one slide to the next using the ‘Down’ arrow on your keyboard or the scroll wheel on your mouse with just a single keypress/scroll.

Screenshot from Microsoft PowerPoint showing a Copilot icon above the top-left corner of the slide. That icon has been highlighted in the screenshot by a red coloured, rounded square.

Tell Microsoft to stop it. Just stop it.

I’m not the only one who finds this incredibly irritating. Unfortunately, an online search on how to remove these icons gave me only questions and no answers:

I did, however, find two requests in the Microsoft Feedback Portal about these annoyances:

So if you’re someone who also uses Microsoft 365, could you please do me a favour? Sign into the Microsoft Feeback Portal to both vote for those issues and add a comment of support under each as well (since that counts for more than just your vote).

Thank you!

What does the fox say?

For the hell of it, I asked Copilot how I could remove that icon from PowerPoint and the answer it confidently gave me was completely wrong (though it all other situations in PowerPoint this answer would have been completely right).

Screenshot of a Microsoft Copilot window in which Copilot tells the user to right-click on the Copilot icon and select “Hide Icon” from the context menu.

I down-voted that answer and asked again. It gave me another wrong answer. (Though, again, if Microsoft had integrated Copilot in the usual way, this answer would have been right.)

Screenshot of a Microsoft Copilot window in which Copilot tells the user to go to File > Options > Add-ins and disable the Copilot Add-in to PowerPoint.

To its credit, when I told Copilot both answers were wrong it asked me reach out to Microsoft Support and to provide feedback on the Microsoft Q&A Community. It even offered to help me post my query and feedback. So at least that’s something.

Screenshot of a Microsoft Copilot window in which Copilot tells the user, “I understand how frustrating that can be. It seems like this is a common issue, and there isn't a straightforward way to remove the icon through the PowerPoint interface itself. I recommend reaching out to Microsoft Support for more specific assistance. They can provide guidance tailored to your version of PowerPoint and system setup. You can also post your concern on the Microsoft Q&A Community with the tags PowerPoint and Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 Development. The experts there are proficient in handling such customization queries.”

The beatings will continue until morale improves

Microsoft will continue to shove Copilot down our throats until enough of us complain and maybe then they’ll give us the option to disable it. Or better yet, make its annoying icons opt-in instead of opt-out.

Though given how user-hostile and user-indifferent Microsoft has been over the last several years (aka how they’ve been on the path to enshittification), who knows if anything will change without governments fining them heavily and forcing them to change.

*sigh*

The POSSE approach to your online presence

In 2019 I explained how I was going to decentralise my online presence by cross-posting all my really interesting content to both social media and this blog. Since then I’ve posted all my content here first, and then shared snippets of that everywhere else.

This is not a new idea, of course, and I’ve been preaching variations of this owned-media-first approach for years at the places I’ve worked.

Screenshot of a flow chart from a slide deck. The flowchart shows stories pitched by Jetstar to the media with a wide arrow. A much narrower arrow goes from the media to the audience. Parallel to this is a wide, darker coloured arrow showing stories written on our own platforms. An identically-wide arrow goes from there to the audience, along with a smaller arrow showing stories on our own platforms being picked up by the media.

However this week, thanks to Molly White’s [citation needed] newsletter, I discovered that the phrase that’s been used to describe this approach since 2012 is POSSE, which stands for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

I thought I’d note that here and share a few interesting and relevant POSSE-related links:

  • The first item in the ‘Worth a read’ section of [citation needed] ‘Issue 69 – Nice’ (2 Nov 2024) is Molly White’s most recent mention of POSSE.

  • She talked about this approach in more detail in an earlier edition of her newsletter: ‘POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented world’ (27 Sep 2024).

  • Cory Doctorow is someone who follows the POSSE approach and in his most recent Pluralistic newsletter instalment, ‘Bluesky and enshittification’ (2 Nov 2024), he talks about why he isn’t joining Bluesky.

  • Here are the IndieWeb wiki articles on ‘POSSE’ and ‘PESOS’ (Publish Everywhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site.

  • Finally, David Pierce wrote a good article in The Verge about POSSE that is worth reading: ‘The poster’s guide to the internet of the future’ (24 Oct 2023).

Close-up photo showing a person typing on a laptop. (@Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash)

Syndicate or post natively?

The one aspect of POSSE I don’t do is the automatic syndication my content to other channels.

While I love using RSS to read content from lots of different sources, I don’t like doing the opposite: using a tool to automatically write content to lots of different sources.

I did use IFFT back in the day to automatically post my Flickr photos to Instagram and Twitter, but I don’t do that anymore.

I enjoy posting natively on the channels I use and, in turn, seeing what everyone else is posting there.

The only automation that comes in handy is Buffer, and that’s to schedule photo posts to Mastodon and Bluesky in the middle of the day when my desktop computer (where all my mirrorless camera photos are saved) is turned off.

It’s not easy, but it’s worth it

If you’re someone who wants more ownership of the content you’re putting into various social media walled gardens, I recommend you check out the POSSE approach and join us in a more decentralised web.

Giving up on Outlook (new) at work

I like the theory of Microsoft Outlook: an all-in-one personal information manager that handles your email, calendaring, task management, contact management, and RSS news aggregation.

Outlook for Windows promo graphic showing a screenshot of Outlook (new) on a computer and smartphone screen. (Source)

In practice, however, Outlook is a pain. It doesn’t fully comply with internet standards, for example, and its Windows app takes up a lot of computing resources.

Importantly, its latest version, Outlook for Windows – aka ‘Outlook (new)’ – is terrible. And after trying it for several months at work, this week I finally switched back to ‘Outlook (classic)’.

Outlook for business promo graphic showing a screenshot of Outlook (classic) on a computer and smartphone screen. (Source)

Let me list the reasons why

Now I’m someone who loves to use bleeding-edge software. I regularly try out alpha and beta releases of various apps and, as a Linux user, I’m comfortable with apps that have a little less polish (or sometimes a lot less polish) than commercial versions of the same thing.

But there were a bunch of things in ‘Outlook (new)’ that I just couldn’t deal with anymore. I even made a list.

Some functionality was missing or severely degraded compared to the older ‘Outlook (classic)’:

  • You can’t open shared mailboxes

  • Auto-replace text is not fully functional

  • Filtering/sorting of emails is much more difficult

  • Spell-check functionality is inconsistent: sometimes it only works half-way through an email and sometimes the red squiggly lines that are supposed to appear under the misspelled word don’t align with the text (the line appears in the middle of the word or it appears a line or two above the word)

The lack of compliance with internet standards is really irritating too. Especially when it comes to paragraph spacing around bullet points because that is rendered in an inconsistent manner:

  • sometimes the paragraph space before/after your bullet points remains and

  • sometimes it disappears when the email is read or replied-to.

The most annoying annoyances

What annoys me the most, I think, is how you keep losing focus every time you perform a basic action:

  • When you press the ‘delete’ key to delete an email, focus doesn’t immediately move to the next email in the inbox. So if you press ‘delete’ again, nothing happens because no email is selected. Yes, it shows you the next email, it’s just that this email is not selected in the inbox.

  • The same happens when you (click-and-drag) move an email to another folder: it shows you the next email in your original folder, but that email isn’t selected (ie in focus).

  • When you unpin an email from the top of your inbox (which is the one piece of functionally I loved in the new Outlook), you lose focus on that now-unpinned email. So if you were thinking of moving this email to a folder (now that you’re done with it), you can’t do that easily. You have to scroll down through your inbox to find the email again. And because it’s no longer selected in your inbox, it’s not shaded in a different colour and so it doesn’t stand out.

These lost-focus annoyances all stem from the fact that ‘Outlook for Windows’ is basically a web app in installable-software wrapping. Meaning the kind of intuitive focus-shifting that you used to get in ‘Outlook (classic)’ you can’t replicate in the web version of the same thing. Or maybe you can and they just haven’t gotten around to it yet? Either way, this focus loss was really starting to shit me.

Happy days are here again

The upshot of all this is that I’m back to using ‘Office (classic)’ – which is basically the latest version of ‘Outlook for business’ from Office 2019 – and I haven’t been happier!

Oh, and in case you’re wondering. For my personal email, calendaring, etc on my Windows and Linux computers, I use the fantastic Mozilla Thunderbird (10/10 would recommend).

Thunderbird promo graphic showing a screenshot of Thunderbird on a computer screen. (Source)

Ticketmaster is a pain: "Secure Ticket selection is required"

tl;dr If you get a “Secure Ticket selection is required” error when trying to pay for a ticket on the Ticketmaster website, temporarily turn off all your adblockers and reload the webpage.

Nadia and I have gone to the Australian Open tennis tournament in Melbourne pretty much every year since 2007.

Collage of selfies of a man and woman at a tennis tournament. In most photos the pair are outdoors and are wearing hats. In one of the selfies they are standing in front of Rod Laver Arena.

So when the pre-sale for AO25 kicked off today, I went to buy us a couple of tickets.

Screenshot of an email that reads, across multiple lines, “AO25. The hottest tickets in town. Get Set! Your AO25 Pre-Sale hits today. Your access code to early tickets.”

But the Ticketmaster website kept spitting out this “Secure Ticket selection is required” error every time I tried to make the final payment.

Screenshot of a website form-submission error that reads only, “Oops! Secure Ticket selection is required.”

The problem, of course, was that there was no ‘Secure Ticket’ selection visible on this page for me to make.

So I did what any normal person would do: I fired up my favourite search engine and ran a search on that phrase :)

To my surprise, I got only a single hit to a Reddit thread from about a year ago.

Screenshot of a search engine result from the Moto GP subreddit on the topic of ‘Phillip Island race’.

Since most of the people on that thread didn’t have an answer, and the solution only comes at the end of the thread, I figured I’d write this quick post to add to those search results.

Basically, the ‘Secure Ticket’ selection loads from a third-party website and that third-party website component gets blocked by your adblocker. The fix is to temporarily turn off your all your adblockers and reload the page. When you do that, you’ll see the ‘Secure Tickets’ component that was missing from the page before.

Screenshot of a webpage component titled, ‘Secure Tickets’. This upsell tells you that “By upgrading your tickets to a Secure Ticket you will be eligible to receive a refund if you are unable to attend this event for any of the reasons in our Secure Ticket Terms and Conditions”. This component forces you to make a choice between, “Yes, please upgrade me to a Secure Ticket for an additional $8.62” and “No, thank you. I do not wish to upgrade to a Secure Ticket”.

It’s a pain that you’re forced to actively say “no” to this upsell, but I appreciate that they don’t automatically opt you in to it. (Which they’d be fined for if they did, of course.)

But it’s a bigger pain that they haven’t yet implemented this upsell into their main ecommerce sales path, and so it has to load from a third-party domain.

I would have assumed they did this deliberately, thereby forcing people to turn off their adblockers. But if that was the case, they would have told us what to do in the error message. Since they didn’t do that, we can’t attribute this stuff-up to malice – which I guess is a plus, given all the other reasons to dislike Ticketmaster!

Anyway, now you know the workaround so you know what to do if you get that error. (*sigh* What a world we live in.)

PS, for completeness’ sake: a search on Google for that error notification gave me just 14 results, with the top one being the same as the one from DuckDuckGo.

Screenshot of search engine results, the top one from the Moto GP subreddit on the topic of ‘Phillip Island race’.

Affinity six-month free trial!

I am not a fan of Adobe and I go out of my way to avoid Adobe products, which is why my image and vector editors of choice are Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer, respectively.

I’ve been using Affinity software for years and I love it. You pay a one-off fee and the software is yours for life (no subscription!).

So if you’re in the market for an image or vector editor – or desktop publishing software, for that matter – then I would highly recommend at least trying Affinity’s products.

The cool thing: everything is currently on sale for 50% off. Or you can get a six-month trial of all their products for free. Yes, completely free!

Give it a try. You won’t regret it.

Decision fatigue solved: what to watch next

How do you decide which movie or TV show you’re going to watch next?

Do you make lists? And if so, how do you organise those lists?

After years of trial-and-error and one-dimensional list making, I now have a solution that works exceptionally well for me. So let’s talk about it.

To get to my current solution I had to solve three problems.

1. Effort required to watch

Some media takes effort to consume, while other stuff is quick and easy to watch.

When I used to have all my movies and TV shows in a single, long list, deciding what to watch next became a chore in itself. As I went through the list, I’d need to keep track of which movies and TV shows I had the mental capacity to enjoy at the time. And because it took so long to pick something, I’d often just end up watching what was being broadcast on one of the movie channels instead – flicking through until I found something interesting enough.

I fixed this problem by grouping my next-watch items into three ‘brain power’ categories: 30%, 60%, and 90% brain. Now, based on how I’m feeling and how much effort I’m willing to expend, I can decide which of those shorter lists to look through. I also maintain separate lists for movies and TV shows, which makes the lists even shorter.

So what do those brain power categories mean?

30% brain

This is stuff that’s easy to watch – low emotional stakes, relatively straightforward plots; usually something fun and quick.

Action and comedy media tends to fall into this category, as does most YA stuff; some talk shows and panel shows too. Most reality TV doesn’t fit here though, since that to me is 10% brain media and I usually get bored watching it.

Some examples of 30% brain media that I’ve enjoyed watching recently are Obliterated, Wednesday, and FUBAR.

These shows might not be 30% brain for everyone, of course. But for someone like me who watches a lot of action and SFF (science fiction and fantasy), they all make for low-effort watching.

60% brain

This is stuff that has a bit of meat on it, but you don’t need to fully invest yourself emotionally to enjoy.

Plot-driven and character-driven action and drama media tends to fall into this category, as well as some SFF stuff with more advanced world building.

Some examples of 60% brain media that I’ve enjoyed watching recently are Reacher, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and Fallout.

90% brain

This is stuff takes a bit of effort to enjoy. You need to invest yourself mentally and emotionally, but the resulting payoff is worth it.

The things that fall into this category are advanced drama, action, and SFF. Mostly stuff that you can’t or don’t want to binge-watch.

90% brain media I’ve enjoyed recently: The Peripheral, Shōgun, and Silo.

Yay for Tumblr

This way of categorising content into how much effort it takes to consume comes from Tumblr, by the way. I can’t find the original post (it was from a long time ago), but in it the poster had said they were tired and only had the energy to watch a “30% brain” TV show that night. This method of classification stuck and is now used quite frequently on that social network.

2. Priority-sorted lists

Grouping to-watch items into separate lists doesn’t solve the problem of having to go through each list every time you want to watch a movie or start a new show. So now I prioritise my lists, with the things I want to watch first placed towards the top.

Every now and then I’ll go through each list and re-sort it, moving the items I feel like watching sooner further up the list. This usually happens after I’ve listened to a podcast episode featuring someone who talks about a movie or TV show they were involved with.

3. Search-minimising processes

Maintaining three priority-sorted, brain-power grouped lists – one set for movies and one set for TV shows – didn’t solve all my problems though. I needed to create some additional processes to make everything run smoothly.

I did that by adding three more lists:

  • Inbox: This is where all new items go if it’s not already clear which brain-power list they should be sorted into.

  • Waiting: This is where I move TV shows when I’m waiting for the next season to start.

  • Watch next: This is where I put items that, regardless of brain-power level, I want to watch as soon as possible.

Now the first place I look is the ‘watch next’ list. And as I start to clear this list, I add items from the three brain-power lists to the bottom of this one.

Great success

Screenshot from KanbanFlow

I moved fully over to this system at the end of last year and it has been working incredibly well for me. So much so that a few months ago I adopted the same approach for the books I want to read.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering which tool I use to maintain these lists, I use the free version of KanbanFlow since that has all the functionality I need.

What system do you use for deciding what you’re going to to watch or read next? I’d love to know.

Refurbished ThinkPad FTW!

I bought a laptop that replaces three devices with a single one.

The best part: it’s not even a new laptop. It’s a refurbished Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 9) from 2021 that I bought from Reboot-IT :)

Product photos showing the front-on and angled views of a black, thin, and light laptop.

The three devices this replaces are my:

  1. Travel device: an underpowered and now end-of-life travel Windows tablet/laptop that, as of this month, no longer receives operating system updates;

  2. Portable device: a high-performance, but heavy and bulky gaming laptop with an almost-dead battery that I have since installed Linux on;

  3. Back-up windows device: a gaming desktop that developed a hardware fault a few months ago but is still my back-up Windows computer.

I have both Windows 11 and Linux Mint installed on my new (to me) laptop, with Linux Mint as the primary operating system.

(Windows I have on there just in case I need to use the full Microsoft Office suite for something or if my current gaming desktop dies and I urgently need to use Windows for something. Both scenarios are unlikely, but not completely out of the question.)

This isn’t even my first ThinkPad

This laptop is actually the third ThinkPad in my life. My current work laptop is also a ThinkPad X1 Carbon, though that is a sixth generation (Gen 6) model from 2018.

My first ThinkPad was a ThinkPad X210 Tablet PC that I bought in 2010. I saved up for three years to be able to afford that, and it was the most I’d ever spent on any electronic device in my life (equivalent to $4,800 in today’s money!).

Photo of a brand new, chunky, black ThinkPad tablet PC lying on a brown dining table. Lying on the left of the laptop are some users guides and warranty documentation. Lying on the right is a black, ThinkPad-branded wireless mouse.

I loved that laptop and used it for four years before replacing it with my first gaming laptop in 2014.

What’s even cooler is that it still works just fine! Here are my two ThinkPads side-by-side, with the chonky, twisty boy on the left running Ubuntu and the thin-and-light one on the right running Linux Mint.

Collage of two photos showing black ThinkPad laptops face-on. The photo on the left shows a small, chunky tablet PC and is labeled ‘Lenovo ThinkPad X201 Tablet PC (2010)’. The photo of the right shows a sleek, thin laptop and is labeled ‘Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 (2021)’.

The joy of underpowered devices

There are three reasons I went with a refurbished laptop instead of buying a new one (like I have every few years since 2006):

  1. My primary operating system on this laptop is Linux. And, unlike Windows, Linux doesn’t need fancy new hardware to run perfectly well for years on end. So there was no need for me to buy a brand new device.

  2. Refurbished laptops are a whole lot cheaper than new ones. You can buy 7-10 year old ThinkPads for $400-600 and 3-7 year old ThinkPads for $700-900. In comparison, a current-generation ThinkPad (Gen12) with the same specs as the one I just bought will set you back $3,400. Buying used or refurbished tech isn’t for everyone, of course. But I’m enough of a tech geek to be comfortable rolling with whatever I get.

  3. I didn’t need a high-performance device. I wanted something thin and light and capable, not something screamingly fast. This is the same reason why, earlier in the year, I bought a Lenovo Tab M8 eight-inch tablet ($170 on sale) instead of an iPad Mini ($830 for the lowest-spec model). I just wanted something to read books and email on, and that tablet lets me do everything I need. Same with this laptop. I already have a powerful gaming PC for all my gaming and multimedia editing needs so I don’t need my portable device to be top-of-the-line or even from this year’s product line.

Linux as my daily driver

What I’m looking most forward to, I think, is using Linux a lot more than I have in the past.

I’ve used Linux on and off since 1996, but I’ve never had it as my primary operating system. And, in some ways, it’s still not that. My gaming desktop is supremely capable and, in most cases, that’s what I’ll use first.

But now that I have a laptop that is actually usable (unlike my old Windows tablet/laptop) and portable (unlike my old gaming laptop), I expect I’ll have Linux in front of my a lot more often. That should be fun, so onward and upward I go :)

 

Old desktop wallpapers

I was going through my old files recently when I came across the first computer desktop wallpaper I made with my own photos.

This collage features Rufus, our Labrador retriever, and I took these photos in 2006.

When I took the first photo I’d called down to Rufus but he hadn’t yet figured out where I was calling from. The second photo shows him figuring it out. And the third photo is his reaction upon seeing me.

Collage of three vertically-sliced photos, each taken moments apart, of a yellow Labrador retriever dog sitting on a patch of dirt and looking up at the photographer. In the first photo the dog looks puzzled as it tries to figure out where the photographer is calling him from. In the middle photo he looks up and sees the photographer. In the third photo his tail starts wagging and he is happy to see the photographer.

The collage above is a 1024×768 pixel image, so you can tell how long ago I made it!

The only other photos of mine of I’ve used as wallpapers are these ones from a trip to Alice Springs, Uluru, and Kata Tjuta in 2010.

Photo of Kata Tjuta, a group of domed rock formations in a desert that has red sand and patchy green flora (shrubs and trees) that gets denser the closer you get to the rocks.

These photos are 1920×1080 pixels in size, so you can tell I’d upgraded my monitor in the intervening years :)

Photo looking down at several footprints in red/brown desert sand.

I do love a good computer wallpaper, and I’ve collected dozens, if not hundreds, of excellent images over the years.

I’ve never used any of my other photos as wallpapers though. There’s no need to, when there are so many other excellent options out there – some of which I’ve been very happy to for, like the ones from Vlad Studio.

The monitor I’m working on now is an ultrawide 3840×1600 pixels, by the way, and this is my current wallpaper.

Close-up photo of hundreds of rounded pebbles in many dark shades of black and red.

Networking, security & backups in 2024

I made a couple of upgrades to our home network recently so I thought I’d map it out and talk about it a little.

Home network

About a year and a half ago we bought a house. One of its major selling points (at least for me) was that it came pre-wired, with ethernet cables already installed in the walls.

Here’s how I used that to set up our home network – one that provides high quality wired or Wi-Fi internet access in all rooms, bathrooms, and outside areas.

Network diagram titled ‘Home network’. The diagram shows four room locations, one roaming location, and wired ethernet cables in the wall of the house. The garage is where the internet is connected via an NBN modem is. That room also has a router, switch, NAS, and printer – all of which have wired connections. The downstairs living room has a network switch, TV, UHD player, and home theatre – all of which have wired connections. The upstairs retreat has a Wi-Fi extender + switch and TV, UHD player, and home theatre. All but the home theatre have wired connections. The upstairs home office has a desktop with a wired connection. Finally, we have some roaming phones, tablets, laptops, etc that are connected via Wi-Fi.

I had two main goals when planning this network:

  • Put all bandwidth-heavy activities on the wired network. This includes things like 4K media streaming to our TVs and the backing up of large media files from my desktop to the NAS. Doing that leaves the Wi-Fi network free for our laptops, phones, and smart home gadgets.

  • Make sure our work laptops are a single wall away from a Wi-Fi access point. Both Nadia and I work from home at least two days a week and both of us do lots of video conferencing. So our work laptops (which we use upstairs) need to have access to a strong Wi-Fi signal.

Happily I was able to achieve both of those goals.

With this set-up Nadia and I can do simultaneous video conferencing for work without any issues. And I can do things like download hundreds of gigabytes of computer game data to my desktop without interfering with the TV show Nadia that is streaming downstairs.

New router and a UPS

A couple of weeks ago I replaced our ailing primary router (all its ethernet ports had died) with a Synology WRX560. And because our secondary router is a Synology RT2600ac with the latest firmware installed, I’ve been able to configure that as an extender. So now we have a mesh Wi-Fi network throughout the house.

Finally, this weekend I put our primary router, NBN modem, and NAS behind a CyberPower UPS. I’m pretty sure our previous router developed its issues because of recent power surges and outages. This UPS has automatic voltage regulation so it’ll protect our primary networking devices (and NAS) while also giving us about an hour of back-up battery power.

Protecting our data and network

With everything always connected, I need to make sure our devices and gadgets are secure. I do this using the Swiss cheese model of layered network security.

All security layers have some holes (like a slice of Swiss cheese does) but, by adding multiple layers with differently-arranged holes, you can minimize the chance of anything getting through.

In our case we have protections at the router layer, operating system layer, and browser layer.

Screenshot of a diagram titled ‘Security strategy’. The diagram has three columns with icons for browser, operating system, and router. Each column is split into incoming and outgoing directions, with risk mitigation measures listed under each one. The router column has active threat protection, two-factor authentication, and auto lock-out under incoming; and it has Cloudflare DNS under outgoing. The operating system column has active threat protection, full drive encryption, and 3-2-1+ backups under incoming; and it has NextDNS under outgoing. The browser column has password manager, two-factor authentication, DNS over HTTPS, HTTPS-only, and uBlock origin under outgoing.

Incoming controls

Active defense against incoming attacks is managed through threat protection at the router and operating system levels.

Passive defense is managed by using things like full drive encryption (which means upgrading to Windows 11 Pro so we can use BitLocker) and a comprehensive back-up strategy (more on this in a minute).

Outgoing controls

Since malware and ransomware attacks are often triggered by what you do in your browser, we use layers of outgoing security to protect against this:

  • Our primary router is configured to use Cloudflare’s DNS service,

  • our operating systems (in our computers, phones, and tablets) are all configured to use NextDNS, and

  • our web browsers all use uBlock Origin and a bunch of other security and privacy-forward configurations.

Finally, all our online accounts use unique, long, randomly-generated passwords that are managed by the Bitwarden password manager. And we have two-factor authentication set-up (using Aegis) on all the accounts that offer this feature.

Recovering from a disaster

If, in spite of all those protections, things do go horribly wrong – or maybe if there’s a fire or natural disaster – our last line of defence is a comprehensive back-up strategy.

A 3-2-1 back-up strategy – the least you should be aiming for – says you need to have:

  • 3 copies of your data,

  • on 2 different mediums,

  • with at least 1 copy in the cloud.

We have a 4-4-2 back-up strategy with:

  • 4 copies of our data,

  • on 4 different mediums,

  • with 2 copies in the cloud.

Screenshot if a graphic titled ‘Back-up strategy’. The screenshot shows backups from a desktop. There are constant, selective back-ups to a cloud sync location; hourly, selective back-ups to a cloud backup location; and hourly, comprehensive back-ups to a NAS backup location.

How I do it

I use Sync.com to maintain a constant, synchronized copy of all my important files in the cloud. This gives me two copies, on two different mediums, with at least one copy in the cloud.

I then use Arq to simultaneously (a) backup a selection of key files to a cloud storage bucket and (b) backup all my files (which includes large, replaceable media files) to our network attached storage (NAS) at home. So that’s two more copies, on two additional mediums, one of which is in the cloud.

Naturally all these files are encrypted before leaving my computer and access to the NAS and all those cloud services is protected with unique, long, random passwords and two-factor authentication.

Keeping up with our needs

Doing all this takes time and effort, and it doesn’t come cheap. But so much of our lives is online these days that the cost of inaction – and the risk of losing that much of our lives – is much higher than the cost of doing everything I’ve talked about above.

It wasn’t always like this for us, of course. Our cost and effort has kept pace with what we’ve been able to afford along the way. We’re just privileged to be in a position where we can do something this sophisticated and automated. (Gone are the good old days of backing up to multiple 3½ inch floppy disks and, later, USB sticks.)

I hope, regardless of your personal set-up, that you too are doing the best you can to keep yourself connected, but protected.

Happy days!

The last twenty-four hours have been very exciting for me. At least in terms of typography.

That’s because, years and years after falling in love with the Chaparral typeface, I finally get to use it on my website! That and Myriad, which is the typeface I’m now using for the headings and navigation.

Wait. Something changed?

Before today I was using the excellent Merriweather for this website’s body text and Oswald for the headings and navigation.

Both those typefaces are free and open-source, and both are available through Google Fonts – which is the font collection you could pick from when building a site on Squarespace (the platform this website is running on).

Graphic showing two blocks of text side-by-side. The block on the left has the heading ‘Old’ and uses the Merriweather (body text) and Oswald (heading) typefaces. The block on the right has the heading ‘New’ and uses the Chaparral (body text) and Myriad Condensed (heading) typefaces.

I’d always thought about updating the typefaces on this site, but (a) I love Merriweather and (b) I didn’t want to go through the hassle of trying to see if there was anything better than Merriweather on Google Fonts.

Then last night I discovered that Squarespace now offers the full suite of Adobe Fonts to choose a typeface from, and so here we are :)

The decision about which typeface to use for headings and navigation was pretty easy too. I had a bunch of good options to choose from, like Proxima Nova, League Gothic, Brandon Grotesque, and Alternative Gothic (which both Oswald and League Gothic are reworkings of, by the way).

I ended up going with Myriad because (a) it’s a gorgeous typeface (basically a copy of Frutiger) and (b) both Myriad and Chaparral were created by Carol Twombly (in 1992 and 2000, respectively) when she was a type designer at Adobe. As you can see from the graphic above and, indeed from this website, the two pair really well.

Why is this a big deal to me?

This change in typeface is noteworthy because the only reason I started using Merriweather in the first place was because it is the closest free, high-quality alternative to Chaparral that was available on Google Fonts all those years ago. But now I get to use the typeface I wanted to use all along!

I am particularly pleased that, with just this small change, the vibe of this site has gone from “modern and sturdy, but also warm and readable” to “subtly classy, but also friendly, lively, and readable”.

Yay!  

Journey to my favourite typefaces

I have used and played around with many, many typefaces (and their fonts) over the years. These are my current favourites.

Graphic titled ‘Typefaces I like and that I use more than others’ that shows several typefaces categorised under the headings: ‘Sans used frequently’, ‘Sans used when needed’, ‘Sans used when infrequently’, ‘Mono for text, coding apps’, ‘Mix used on our websites’, ‘Serif used frequently’, ‘Serif used when needed’, ‘Serif used when infrequently’, ‘Serif used for reading’, ‘Slab used as needed’.

How did these become my favourites?

I started, like almost everyone does, by using the default typefaces that come with operating systems and word processors.

Not long after, however, I got into typography in a big way. I bought books, did a lot of online learning, and played around with dozens of typefaces and fonts. I used to build and manage websites for a living, so this was partly professionally motivated.

Over time I upgraded to the more interesting, versatile, and practical typefaces listed above. I thought I’d take this opportunity to share some of the mini typographical journeys I took along the way.

Typeface or font?

Before we continue, there is one thing I should clarify:

  • Typeface = the design of the letterforms and accessories (ie numbers, punctuation)

  • Font = the actual item that produces the letterform, meaning everything from the 12-point piece of metal that gets inked and punched into a piece of paper all the way to the digital file that contains the code for, say, ‘Helvetica Neue Italic’.

To use a book analogy: This Is How You Lose the Time War is the typeface while its hardcover, paperback, EPUB, and PDF versions are its fonts.

Most people’s introduction to typefaces is via the fonts installed on their computer though, so non-design folks tend to use the two words interchangeably. I will not.

Mini typographical journeys

Arial: default typeface in Microsoft Word on Microsoft Windows

Graphic titled ‘Upgrading sans #1 - Arial’. The graphic contains four boxes, grouped by default/free typefaces and purchased/paid typefaces. The four featured typefaces are Arial, Avenir Next LT, Whitney, and Inter.

TOP LEFT: Arial is a well-designed and incredibly useful typeface, and I still use it every day at work (though not by choice). It is, however, a boring default that it is now considered the most neutral of typefaces.

TOP RIGHT: Once I became aware of other, more interesting typefaces, I immediately gravitated towards Avenir as the typeface I’d much rather use instead. Unfortunately, Avenir costs several hundred dollars. Fortunately, Avenir Next has been included as part of Microsoft Office since 2019 and so I now have access to a really good version of this typeface.

BOTTOM RIGHT: Not long after I fell in love with Avenir, I discovered Whitney and fell in love with that even more. Whitney is more practical and versatile than Avenir (at least for my purposes) and is also conveniently packaged for office applications (eg Word and PowerPoint). It costs a lot less than Avenir but is still a decently priced typeface. So yay for getting a bonus at work and treating myself to something nice :)

BOTTOM LEFT: More recently I came across the free and open-source typeface Inter, which is an excellent, more interesting alternative to Arial. (Inter is a version of Roboto that’s been optimised for interfaces, by the way. So a good alternative to this would be Roboto itself.)

Helvetica: default typeface in Microsoft Word on Apple Macintosh

Graphic titled ‘Upgrading sans #2 - Helvetica’. The graphic contains four boxes, grouped by default/free typefaces and purchased/paid typefaces. The four featured typefaces are Helvetica, Frutiger Next, Fact, and Inter.

TOP LEFT: Helvetica, the digitised and slightly upgraded version of Neue Haas Grotesk, is another excellent typeface. But, like Arial, it is now an overused default. (FYI Arial and Helvetica are not the same typeface. [1])

TOP RIGHT: Helvetica is used frequently for signage, but for that purpose I much prefer Frutiger. Frutiger, however, is expensive. Also, its has different revisions and interpretations, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.

BOTTOM RIGHT: Fact is an excellent typeface inspired by Frutiger that costs a lot less and is much more versatile (it has 96 styles and supports 100 languages). It is also on sale these days in case you are interested.

BOTTOM LEFT: Inter (a version of Roboto that’s been optimised for user interfaces) is a great alternative to both Helvetica and Frutiger, and it is also completely free.

Trebuchet MS: my favourite default typeface for creative uses

Graphic titled ‘Upgrading sans #3 - Trebuchet’. The graphic contains four boxes, grouped by default/free typefaces and purchased/paid typefaces. The four featured typefaces are Trebuchet MS, Montserrat, Whitney Narrow, and Ideal Sans.

TOP LEFT: With Arial and Helvetica out of the way, let’s talk about my favourite default typeface: Trebuchet MS [2]. This is a friendly sans serif font that I love to use when writing, and for the longest time it was my default email typeface. Trebuchet MS is also a “web safe font”, meaning it is universally installed across all browsers and devices. Unfortunately, it had its heyday on the web in 2009 and it is quite limited by modern font standards (its bold isn’t particularly bold, for example).

BOTTOM LEFT: Enter Fira Sans, a lovely, comprehensive, well-designed typeface that is much better than Trebuchet MS in all ways. This is my current typeface of choice when using Google Docs.

BOTTOM RIGHT: Lovely as Fira Sans is, I think Whitney Narrow is nicer. When I’m not using Google Docs, I use Whitney Narrow instead of Fira Sans.

TOP RIGHT: The one downside to Whitney Narrow is that it isn’t as rounded and friendly as Trebuchet MS, which brings us to the typeface I use most often these days: Ideal Sans. In fact, I’m writing this post in Microsoft Word using Ideal Sans right now.

Tahoma: my favourite default typeface for professional uses

Graphic titled ‘Upgrading sans #4 - Tahoma’. The graphic contains three boxes, grouped by default/free typefaces and purchased/paid typefaces. The three featured typefaces are Tahoma, Fira Sans, and DIN Next LT.

TOP LEFT: Back in the 1990s when I used Trebuchet MS for all my creative work, I used Tahoma for all my professional work. (Tahoma is basically a narrower, more tightly spaced version of Verdana.)

BOTTOM LEFT: But this too I replaced with the more friendly and full-featured Fira Sans.

BOTTOM RIGHT: In some situations, though, I use DIN. Originally created for road signage, it actually works well in text-dense designs and infographics. In fact, my resume is in DIN.

Verdana: the most legible web safe sans serif typeface

Graphic titled ‘Upgrading sans #5 - Verdana’. The graphic contains three boxes, grouped by default/free typefaces and upgraded/free typefaces. The three featured typefaces are Verdana, Open Sans, and General Sans.

TOP LEFT: Like Trebuchet MS and Tahoma, Verdana was designed as a typeface to be used on computer screens. And, like those two, it is also a core font for the web. I like Verdana. It isn’t particularly friendly or elegant, but it is my typeface of choice for email.

BOTTOM LEFT: Verdana might have been incredibly popular on the web in the 1990s and 2000s, but in the 2010s that crown was taken by the more elegant Open Sans. I like Open Sans too, but OMG is it overused.

TOP RIGHT: If I do need to use a typeface like Verdana or the excellent Montserrat – both of which are a little overused – more often than not I’ll reach for General Sans. Where Verdana is big, with perhaps an overwhelming focus on legibility, General Sans is compact and geometric, but somehow doesn’t look condensed, which I think is cool.

Calibri: the newer default typeface in Microsoft Word

Graphic titled ‘Upgrading sans #6 - Calibri’. The graphic contains three boxes, grouped by default/free typefaces and purchased/paid typefaces. The three featured typefaces are Calibri, Source Sans, and Whitney Narrow.

TOP LEFT: In 2007 Calibri replaced Times New Roman as the default typeface in Microsoft Word. I used Calibri for a while, but I never fell in love with it. After all, its defining character trait is ‘friendly neutral’. By the way, starting in 2024, Aptos will by the new default typeface in Word.

BOTTOM LEFT: Almost immediately after Source Sans was released in 2012, I started using that instead of Calibri. Source Sans is a free, high-quality typeface from Adobe.  

BOTTOM RIGHT: And once I’d bought Whitney Narrow, that took over from Source Sans in most situations.

Times New Roman: the default serif typeface in Microsoft Word

Graphic titled ‘Upgrading serif #1 - Times New Roman’. The graphic contains two boxes, grouped by default/free typefaces and upgraded/free typefaces. The two featured typefaces are Times New Roman and Source Sans.

LEFT: I’ve used Times New Roman a lot over the years and let me tell you that I do not like it very much. Sure it has its uses, but I’ve never been a fan.

RIGHT: As soon as I got my hands on Source Serif, it was all over for Times New Roman.

Garamond: a more elegant typeface that had a terrible font

Graphic titled ‘Upgrading serif #2 - Garamond’. The graphic contains two boxes, grouped by default/free typefaces and purchased/paid typefaces. The two featured typefaces are Garamond and Stempel Garamond LT.

LEFT: I love the Garamond typeface, but the Garamond font that comes with Word is terrible.

RIGHT: The Linotype foundry has an excellent version of Garamond created originally by the Stempel Type Foundry in the 1920s. I snapped up Stempel Garamond LT when it was on sale once and I’ve never looked back.

Georgia: the most legible web safe serif typeface

Graphic titled ‘Upgrading serif #3 - Georgia’. The graphic contains four boxes, grouped by default/free typefaces and purchased/paid typefaces. The four featured typefaces are Georgia, Merriweather, Charter, and Mercury.

TOP LEFT: I like Georgia. It’s not particularly elegant or refined. But like Verdana, with its focus on legibility, it gets the job done. For years my personal website used Georgia for its body text typeface.

BOTTOM LEFT: I love Merriweather. Ever since Google Fonts came on to the scene, I’ve used Merriweather for my website’s body text typeface. Indeed, that’s the typeface you’re reading this in now. [UPDATE: This is no longer true.]

TOP RIGHT: When not publishing online, I will sometimes use Charter as my Georgia replacement. Charter is older than Georgia, and it was designed by Matthew Carter, the same type designer who created both Georgia and Verdana.

BOTTOM RIGHT: When I do need a truly excellent, versatile, and highly legible serif typeface, most of the time I’ll turn to Mercury.

Honourable mentions

I haven’t talked about monospace or slab serif typefaces; this post is long enough as it is. But a couple of quick shout-outs.

Two graphics, side-by-side. One is titled ‘Graphics’ and features the Zilla Slab typeface. The other is titled ‘Coding apps’ and features the JetBrains Mono typeface.

LEFT: Zilla Slab is a free and open-source slab serif typeface created by the Mozilla Foundation. All the headings in the graphics used in this post are set in Zilla Slab.

RIGHT: JetBrains Mono is my coding typeface of choice. I blogged about this a couple of years ago.

Two graphics, side-by-side. One is titled ‘Text apps’ and features the Berkeley Mono and JetBrains Mono typefaces. The other is titled ‘Reading apps’ and features the Literata and Bookerly typefaces.

LEFT: Joplin and Notepad++ are, respectively, my note-taking and text-editing apps of choice. I use monospace typefaces in both. Berkeley Mono is gorgeous and joy to work in. It is a paid typeface, but it’s worth it (I got it on sale when it first launched). JetBrains Mono I’ve already talked about above. It is a free typeface.

RIGHT: Literata is a free and open-source typeface commissioned by Google for its Google Play Books app. Bookerly is a proprietary typeface (though available for download) commissioned by Amazon for its Amazon Kindle e-reader devices and apps.

Two graphics, side-by-side. One is titled ‘Elegant neutral’ and features the Neue Haas Unica typeface. The other is titled ‘Modern slab’ and features the Sentinel typeface.

LEFT: Neue Haas Unica is an elegant hybrid of Helvetica, Univers, and Akzidenz Grotesk. I don’t use this style of typeface very often, which is why it hasn’t come up before, but I do really like this interpretation. Also if you don’t get it as part of a bundle like I did several years ago, Neue Haas Unica is pretty expensive. Which is why it’s much easier to recommend Inter or Roboto everyone. (They’re both free!)

RIGHT: I’m not a big user of old style, Clarendon-esque typefaces, but I do like Sentinel. If nothing else, it pairs brilliantly with Ideal Sans.

Final thoughts

So there you have it. More than you probably wanted or needed to know about why I use the typefaces I do. I don’t know if you had fun reading it, but I enjoyed living it and then telling the mini stories about it. And, of course, I enjoyed creating all those typography graphics since, frankly, that’s half the fun of writing posts like this :)

One last thing I should mention is that, when I bought Whitney a long time ago, I discovered that Hoefler&Co is my favourite type foundry. The folks there created Whitney, Whitney Narrow, Ideal Sans, Sentinel, and Mercury – all of which I’ve bought over the years. I’m pretty sure I’m going to buy more of their typefaces in the future. It’s nice when you find a bunch of designers who really float your boat.

May you find the type foundries, type designers, or even just a bunch of typefaces that bring you joy.

Footnotes

[1] Many people think that Arial is a copy of Helvetica. It is not. Arial is designed to be a drop-in replacement for Helvetica, yes, but it is technically a copy of the older-than-both Akzidenz Grotesk. When Helvetica was created, the designers hoped it would be as popular as Akzidenz Grotesk. More on all that here, if you’re interested.

[2] Trebuchet MS was also inspired by Akzidenz Grotesk.

I bought a camera!

It’s a Fujifilm X-S10 and it’s really cool.

Face-on photo of a Fujifilm X-S10 camera.

I finally outgrew my existing camera system

I’ve been wanting to get an interchangeable-lens camera for years, but I wasn’t buying one because these types of cameras are:

  1. Inconvenient: they’re bulky, heavy, expensive, and they have a learning curve

  2. Unnecessary: I wasn’t being limited creatively by the camera I already had

I’ve bought one now because both those things have changed…

1. Camera technology has evolved

Mirrorless interchangeable-lens cameras (MILCs) came onto the market several years ago and they’re smaller, lighter, and cheaper than DSLRs. They do still have a learning curve though.

The best part is that all the top camera brands now make mirrorless cameras, so there are lots of models to choose from at different price points.

Screenshot of the digiDirect camera store website showing all the mirrorless cameras they have available for sale. In the left column of the website is a list that shows how many mirrorless cameras each brand has for sale. These numbers range from 1 (ILFORD) to 65 (Nikon).

2. I reached the limit of what I could do with my existing camera set-up

My current camera is a Pixel 6 Pro smartphone. It is a highly capable camera and is something I have on me at all times. However, it has a relatively small imaging sensor, and the capabilities of its lenses are limited by the thickness of the phone itself.

Google’s computational photography does let you take some truly excellent photos, of course, but I’m now at the stage in which I want both higher quality images and more precise, manual control over my photo taking. That’s not something any smartphone camera can offer.

That said, for a while I did extend the capabilities of my phone’s camera by using external lenses designed for smartphones. The telephoto, wide-angle, and macro lenses from Moment let me take some really cool photos, likes the ones below. But using these lenses was only ever a steppingstone to where I want to go to now.

Collage showing photos taken from primary, macro, tele, and wide angle lenses.

I will continue to use my phone camera, of course. As they say, “the best camera is the one you have with you” and I do have my phone on me literally all the time. So I expect many of my everyday photos will still be shot using that. 

That said, the whole point of getting a small and light mirrorless camera like the Fujifilm X-S10 is that I can carry it with me pretty much everywhere I go. I almost never leave home without my backpack and this new camera will now be added to my everyday carry.

Close-up photo of a Fujifilm X-S10 camera lying on a table, party wrapped in a protective pouch.

Choosing my camera upgrade path

Once I made the decision to get a mirrorless camera, the question was: which one?

That then led to four other questions:

  1. What’s my budget? This was between $1-2k for the camera body, kit lens, and maybe one additional prime lens.

  2. What do I intend to do with my new camera? Mostly take non-professional photos of my life (ie family, pets, events, travels, streetscapes, landscapes) and occasionally a few short videos. Even more occasionally use the camera as webcam (eg when I’m presenting remotely at a conference).

  3. Which camera system (ie body and lenses) do I want to buy into? I wasn’t particularly fussed. That said, I wanted to invest in a mirrorless camera system that I could grow into and evolve my photography with.

  4. What else is important to me? A camera that I can carry in my backpack with me everywhere, so something that’s small and light. A camera with a good auto mode and good auto focus. A camera that colour-grades the photos the way I like them, so I won’t have to tweak the colours of most of the photos I want to share with people. And, ideally, a camera with weather proofing and built-in image stabilisation.

Price range

After a great deal of research – which I thoroughly enjoyed doing, by the way – I concluded that I needed to get an intermediate ($1,000+) or midrange (~$2,000) mirrorless APS-C camera.

Beginner level cameras (ie point-and-shoots) and budget mirrorless cameras (ie entry level mirrorless ones) didn’t meet my functionality and capability requirements. While more professional cameras (ie mirrorless full-frame ones) were both too large and very much beyond my budget.

I’d have preferred a midrange camera – all models of which seem to have weather proofing and in-built image stabilisation – but I was happy to settle for an intermedia level camera since most midrange cameras are out of my price range (unless you can get them second hand or during a really good sale).

Short list

This was the initial shortlist I came up with:

I had two Sony cameras on my list because the A6400 is an intermediate level camera that I could afford first-hand and the A6600 is a midrange level camera that I might have been able to get second-hand (if I got lucky).

Photo of a digiDirect shop storefront, a digital camera store. On the display window next to the entrance is a large poster that reads “Boxing Day” and “Our biggest sale of the year is back”.

The Fujifilm X-S10 has everything I need, and them some

Each camera in my shortlist had its pros and cons but, ultimately, these are the things that got me to pick the Fujifilm X-S10 over the other options.

Great colours

I prefer the out-of-the-box photo colours you get from Fujifilm and Canon cameras over the colours you get from Nikon and Sony cameras. Had I got the Sony A6400 – which was my very close second choice – I would have had to manually tweak the colours of many of the photos I took and then wanted to publish.

(This is what I have to do with my Pixel 6 Pro right now, by the way. In the world of Android smartphones, I prefer the photo colours you get from Samsung phones over those you get from any other Android phone camera. But since I very, very much prefer everything else about Pixel phones, photo colours end up being what I compromise on. As a result I have to slightly tweak the colours of most of the photos I take with my Pixel phone before I share them or publish them online.)

Excellent extensibility and growth

Fujifilm and Sony both have a fantastic lens selection (including third-party lenses) and they both have a great camera upgrade path (ie more capable camera bodies you can upgrade to over time).

There are many more third-party (and therefore lower cost) lenses you can buy for Sony cameras versus Fujifilm cameras. But the Fujifilm lenses you use on their APS-C cameras bodies are the same ones you use on their full-frame camera bodies. So if I was to upgrade to a full-frame Fujifilm camera body in the future, I’d get to keep all my existing lenses. With Sony I’d have to switch to a different type of lens and so all my existing lenses would be useless to me.  

Not that I’m looking to upgrade to a full-frame camera any time soon, by the way. But who knows where I’ll be in ten years and what I’ll think of past-me if I do decide to make that change.

In-body image stabilisation (IBIS)

You generally only get IBIS in midrange cameras. The Fujifilm X-S10 is the only intermediate level camera body with IBIS. Like the Swiss flag, that to me is a big plus.

I don’t expect to be shooting much handheld video (which is what IBIS is great for) and I don’t expect to be shooting professional-level landscape photos (for which a tripod is recommended anyway) but I’ll take any extra edge I can get to take sharper photos.

USB-C power and audio

Another thing you only get in midrange cameras is a headphone port that lets you monitor your audio while you’re videoing something. The Fujifilm X-S10 is the only intermediate level camera that has a USB-C port that you can plug your headphones into (via a provided adapter) to monitor live audio. 

I don’t expect to be shooting much video with this camera, but that audio monitoring capability is definitely good to have.

Oh, and as a bonus, this USB-C port can also be used to power the camera. This is great for both charging your battery and for when you want to use your camera as a webcam.

Black and white photo of a woman just before she bursts into a smile.

It's not all rainbows and unicorns though

For all its features and capabilities, the Fujifilm X-S10 also has a few limitations.

Limited auto-focus and burst-mode

Sony cameras have the best auto-focus and face detect capabilities, and they do a great job with burst-mode photos as well (ie taking several high-quality photos per second). The Fujifilm X-S10 isn’t as good at either of those, so I don’t expect fantastic results when photographing sports and action. I’m okay with that. I don’t take many sports or action photos anyway.

Limited 4K video recording

This camera has a thirty-minute limit on recording 4K video in-camera. (There’s no limit if you’re using an external recorder.) That also doesn’t bother me because I’m not buying this camera for its video capabilities. If I was going to be doing more videography than photography, then I would probably have bought one of the Sony cameras instead.

No weather sealing

No intermediate level cameras are weather sealed. That means I can’t take this camera out in the rain. And I need to be careful when using it around sand or water as well; or when its super dusty outside. But that’s okay because I didn’t expect to be doing (much of) that anyway.

Photo of a stuffed toy version of a webcomic panel that shows a dog with a hat holding a white coffee mug that reads ‘This is fine’.

Taking the next steps in my photography journey

Now that I’ve finally got my hands on this camera, it’s time to learn to use it properly. I’ll publish another post later in which I list all the useful learning resources I’ve used so far.

For now let me leave you with a comparison that shows the quality of photos you get from the Google Pixel 6 Pro smartphone camera compared to the photos you get from the Fujifilm X-S10 mirrorless camera. I should note that the objective of this photo was to focus on the fence, and only on the fence. It’s cool to see what you can achieve with the Fuji without even trying too hard.

Collage of two photos of the same scene taken by two different cameras: the Google Pixel 6 Pro and the Fujifilm X-S10. The collage is titled ‘Focus on the fence’. In the foreground of the scene is the ornamental top of a metal fence. Behind that is a garden with some bushes, more of the fence, cars parked on the road, and several trees. In the Google Pixel 6 Pro photo the fence is focus while everything else is slightly out of focus, but still very much recognisable. In the Fujifilm X-S10 photo only the fence is focus, while everything else behind the fence is pleasingly blurred and out of focus.

That comparison above highlights the two specific things I’m most looking forward to right out of the gate with my new camera (versus my smartphone camera), which are its ability to:

  • do precise focusing on your subject

  • shoot photos with a narrow depth of field (in which everything in the foreground and in the background are pleasingly out of focus)

So onwards and upwards! Let the learning and then the photographing begin.

2022 NBN update: 3% faster

Every time we move house my first blog post is always an update on what the NBN internet speeds are at our new place. This time is no exception.

What is different this time is that, instead of renting, we’ve now bought a house in Melbourne’s northern suburbs. (Yay!)

Compared to our last place, the upload and download speeds at our new house are around 3% faster – which is cool.

A graphic titled ‘2022 NBN update: speeds up 3%’. The graphic shows two sets of bar charts, one with a heading of ‘average download speeds’ and the other with a heading of ‘average upload speeds’ — both showing download/upload speeds in megabits per second, or Mbps.

There are six bars in each chart, one each for the years 2009, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022. Both download and upload bars increase dramatically in size from 2009 (when the internet connection types was ADSL) to 2015 (when the internet connection type was FTTB).

The bars were highest in 2018, with 105.2 Mbps download speeds and 37.2 Mbps upload speeds in Kingsville. The connection type in this location was FTTP. In 2022 the bars show 94.7 Mbps download speeds and 18.9 Mbps upload speeds in Melbourne’s north. The connection type in this location is FTTC.

Our NBN connection type is still FTTC though. But that’s okay, the speeds we’re currently getting are sufficient for our needs.

There’s just two of us here, so Nadia and I can stream multiple 4K videos simultaneously without a hitch. And both of us can seamlessly participate in 1080p video conferences at the same time as well.

Of course, the second NBN Co give us the opportunity to upgrade our connection to FTTP, we’ll jump on that straight away :)

For now, though, I’m super happy with what we’ve got.

Medibank data breach

Finally got the email [1] from Medibank saying that my old membership data with them was stolen by cyber criminals.

Screenshot of an email with the heading ‘An important update from Medibank’.

The email reads: “Dear Ameel, We’re deeply sorry to inform you that some data relating to your former membership has been stolen in the recent cybercrime event. This email details what specific membership data was stolen, outlines actions you can take to safeguard your online identity, and the services available through our Cyber Response Support Program”.

The email then goes on to list what categories of data have and have not been stolen. The data stolen is name, gender, date of birth, email, address, phone number, policy number, and passport number. The data not stolen is credit card and banking details, and health claims data.

I left Medibank in 2009 so, with the exception of my name, gender, and date of birth [2], all the other data they have one me is now outdated and irrelevant.

And while it’s not great that various cybercriminals now have this data, in the broader scheme of things ‘tis but a flesh wound. After all, there’s not much that cybercriminals can do with a single old residential address, an old pre-paid phone number, and an expired Pakistani passport number :)

(Why Medibank kept all my customer data thirteen years after I closed my account with them is a whole other issue, of course. *sigh*)

[1] I got the email from them on 15 November 2022.

[2] You can find all this about me using open-source intelligence gathering anyway — like by looking through my social media feeds and seeing when my friends have wished me ‘happy birthday’, for example.

Digital cameras through the years

As I dug through my old photos to precisely date my lost Instagram years, it occurred to me that I hadn’t documented anywhere all the digital cameras I’ve been using since 2005. So here’s that list in a nice timeline for future reference.

Infographic showing a series of digital cameras and smartphones placed along a timeline from 2005 to 2021

I don’t just have a timeline, I actually have a record of the first date on which I took a photo using each of these cameras. So, for completeness’ sake…

  1. Olympus µ-20: 4 Jan 2005

  2. Sony Ericsson K750i: 6 May 2006

  3. Canon IXUS 120 IS: 23 Aug 2008

  4. BlackBerry Bold 9000: 25 Jun 2009

  5. HTC Desire HD: 27 Nov 2011

  6. Apple iPhone 4: 1 Dec 2012

  7. Samsung Galaxy S III: 2 Feb 2013

  8. Samsung Galaxy Note 4: 9 Nov 2014

  9. Google Pixel XL: 2 Nov 2016

  10. Google Pixel 3XL: 18 Dec 2018

  11. Google Pixel 6 Pro: 28 Oct 2021

Fun times, and some really good photos too – the oldest of which you can see on my Flickr photostream, by the way (which I don’t post to anymore).

I look forward to seeing which camera – smartphone-based or otherwise – I get next.

UPDATE: I bought a new camera, a Fujifilm X-S10, in December 2022.

My lost years on Instagram

I’m not a fan of tightly gated internet communities. By ‘tightly gated’ I mean communities (ie social networks) that don’t provide public RSS feeds and also don’t let you view anyone’s content without being logged in yourself.

Instagram is one such gated community.

All my photos used to be publicly accessible

Before 2007 I didn’t publicly share many photos online. Those that I did, I uploaded as albums to this website – like my engagement and wedding photos.

Then in 2007 I joined Flickr and started posting all my photos there. Flickr was an excellent site, and I even had a paid account for several years.

My Flickr photostream from 2007

Instagram launched its Android app in April 2012, so a few months later I started posting photos there as well. During this period I cross-posted all my photos to both Instagram and Flickr.

Flickr stagnated, Instagram innovated

Unfortunately, Yahoo! pretty much stopped investing in Flickr. So, while Instagram was becoming increasingly easier and more fun to use, Flickr stayed where it was.

That’s why from 2017 I stopped cross-posting, and instead posted all my photos to Instagram only.

My Instagram photos from 2017

Facebook locked down Instagram

In the earlier days of Instagram you could still browse someone’s profile and look through all their photos without needing an Instagram account yourself. But, over time, Facebook made Instagram an increasingly tighter gated community.

Recognising this was happening, from the start of 2019 I started cross posting all my photos to this blog. That’s where we are now.

Diagram showing four timelines. Three of these are light grey in colour and are labeled ‘Flickr’ (2 Mar 2007 to 7 May 2017), ‘Instagram’ (8 Nov 2012 to 9 Apr 2019), and ‘Random tangent blog’ (1 Jan 2019 to now). One is orange in colour and is labeled ‘Instagram only’ (2017-2019).

Unlocking two years of ‘lost’ photos

What all this means is that I have almost two years’ worth of photos locked inside Instagram’s walled garden. This is what I’m now here to fix.

Over the next four posts I’ll re-share all my Instagram photos from 2017 and 2018 that are currently only available on that platform.

Here goes…

Workarounds

There are four types of tech users:

  1. Regular users: they only use what works; they do things the way they’ve always done them; they aren’t good at troubleshooting

  2. Power users: they know how and, more importantly, why things work the way they do; they can troubleshoot, find solutions, and find workarounds

  3. Fixers: when something goes wrong, they don’t just find a workaround, they actually figure out what’s happened and then they properly fix it

  4. Hackers: they figure out why things went wrong and how else things can go wrong; they find the edge cases that make things go wrong

I bring this up because, while I’m usually a fixer, when I don’t have enough fucks to give I’m happy to just be a power user.

Screenshot of a Kindle Store page taken from an Amazon Kindle Oasis device.

Case in point: since my Kindle Oasis firmware got updated last week it has refused to open the book that I was reading when the update took place.

I’d tried everything short of completely factory-resetting the device when I found a workaround: if I go to that book in the Kindle store (via the device) and once there I click the ‘Read’ button, the book opens and works just fine. So that’s what I’m doing now.

Is this a pain? Yes. Does it fix the problem? No. Do I know why there’s a problem? Probably. Do I care enough to do something about it? No.

And so I keep using the workaround :)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

Hello Windows 11!

It’s finally time…

Screenshot of a window titled ‘Windows Update’ that reads “Upgrade to Windows 11 is ready—and it’s free!” and “Get the latest version of Windows, with a new look, new features, and enhanced security” plus a button that reads “Download and install”.

This upgrade notification comes six months and five days after Windows 11 was officially released.

And it’s almost exactly a week after I did an in-place Windows 10 upgrade to fix a corrupt print services install that had been messing with my regular Windows updates.

Screenshot of a window titled ‘Windows Update’ with heading that reads “Error encountered” “There were some problems installing updates, but we'll try again later”.

For weeks I’d been getting that unhelpful 0x800f0831 error when trying to update Windows.

To fix this I ran the Windows Update troubleshooter and tried all the troubleshooting tips I could find on the web. Nothing worked.

I then pored through the Windows Update install logs to see what was wrong. I found the error — a Windows install-on-demand printer service installation had been corrupted — but nothing I tried to do fixed that issue.

In the end I had to overwrite my current Windows install with an in-place Windows 10 upgrade. #NucularOption

That finally cleared the logjam because now it’s upgrade time…

Time card image from the SpongeBob cartoon series that reads “Two hours later”.

…and after lots of downloading, installing, rebooting, Windows updating, and app updating, I’m finally all set to enjoy Windows 11!

Screenshot of a welcome window titled “Hi Ameel” that reads “Let’s make sure everything is set up just how you want it” and has a button labelled “Get started”.

So far it’s great!