Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Category: Technology (Page 1 of 2)

Come on Microsoft

October 21, 2024 /

Over the past few months I’ve been using Microsoft Outlook on the Mac as my main email program for a project I’m working.

It took a while for me to re-familiarize myself with the program as I’ve mainly used Apple Mail for the past few years. It’s worked well for me but I haven’t had to worry too much about calendars and scheduling meetings.

This project changed all that and there I was neck deep back in Outlook, scheduling meetings and making updates.

One thing I noticed. When I updated a meeting invitation to add a new person, or remove someone, every attendee got a meeting update. That wasn’t how I remembered it. There used to be a question asking if you wanted to update all or just changed attendees.

I assumed with Office 365 an the new user interface there was a setting I was missing, and once I found that setting, the question would reappear.

Except I couldn’t find the setting, and my meeting attendees started to grumble about all the emails.

I asked one of my colleagues about it. We went back and forth and scratched our heads, and she asked someone else and we had an answer. That feature doesn’t exist on the Mac version of Outlook, but you get it on the Web version.

What!

I felt like I’d stepped back to the 1990’s.

On one level I kinda get it. As a developer, do I want to work on thirty year old email software or the cool code they’re writing at SpaceX to capture and reuse launch boosters?

I’ve experienced similar situations in the past, and I know it’s a challenge to ask a developer to work on legacy code, but a feature miss like this that’s so disruptive across multiple organizations, is disappointing.

One Small Step

October 14, 2024 /

This past Sunday, I happened to catch a headline that SpaceX were planning to launch the fifth test flight for Starship.

When I saw the headline, it was about halfway through the launch window, so I flipped over the the SpaceX site to see what was happening. It was the first time I’d seen the real time video feed of re-entry using Starlink terminals on the capsule, and it was impressive. There was imagery all the way from re-entry to splashdown, even through the traditional “communications blackout”

Even more impressive was the capture of the Super Heavy booster. I missed seeing it real time, but watched the re-play several times as the booster plummeted down, the rockets fired and it drifted down and was snared by the chopstick arms on the gantry.

There were so many things that could have gone wrong on this initial attempt, but the capture was executed perfectly.

Each test flight is one small step to achieve the ultimate goal of using Starship to send people to the Moon and Mars, and bring them back.

I am of an age now where my participation in such a mission is a non-starter, but I sure hope I’m around to see it happen.

Another Upgrade

July 16, 2024 /

This past weekend, I finally finished the read through and edit of my latest novel and began putting the changes into the Scrivener project.

My normal workflow once a story is finished, is to run it through Pro-Writing Aid to catch grammar, punctuation, and spelling issues. Then I print out and do the read through mentioned above.

I use Pro-Writing Aid as a desktop app, and when I opened it there was the message – upgrade available. So I upgraded. The desktop app is still there but in addition, I now have ProWriting Aid Everywhere.

I left Everywhere alone for a week or two because my guess was this upgrade required a learning curve. And boy was I right.

Being able to pull up ProWriting Aid without leaving my Scrivener document was a huge plus. Potentially, it lets me combine two steps into one – make the edits, check with ProWriting Aid. Done!

Except not exactly.

The integration works well in Word and Obsidian. Not so well in Scrivener. The first thing I noticed was all the spellings I added to the ProWriting Aid dictionary were gone and there didn’t seem to be a way to recreate them. Perhaps not much of an issue when writing a contemporary story, but a real pain with all those Babylonian names and places.

I finally found the dictionary in my online profile and added the words, but I used to be able to do that directly from within the app.

I can absolutely see the advantages of having ProWriting Aid available without having to leave the application you’re writing with. It’s just going to get longer to get used to, and understand the nuances, than I thought.

Tentative Steps into AI

May 20, 2024 /

A few weeks ago I mentioned starting a new project and the first night nerves associated with that experience.

The nerves have mostly settled down now, but spiked a little when I had a new application make its appearance on my desktop this week. Microsoft Co-Pilot!

To say there’s a huge amount of noise around AI, and how it will impact our lives in all areas is likely an equally huge understatement. I am not anti-AI, I just haven’t prioritized the time to really dive in and understand the implications.

I’m the type of person who learns best by doing something rather than reading about it, so I tend to prioritize time when I have something specific for that application. I didn’t think I’d reached that point with AI until I had to review several meeting recordings relevant to the projects I’m working on.

Each meeting was about an hour long and it promised to take me nearly two days to go through all of them. And then a colleague suggested using Co-Pilot. It took a while to work out how to use the interface, and request a summary of the first meeting.

There was a slight delay – maybe ten seconds – before a window popped up with a half-page of text that not only outlined the discussion, but also highlighted the action items. I listened to the first meeting all the way through and didn’t find anything Co-Pilot had missed. After that, it took less than an hour to get summaries of the other meetings.

I’m still not sure about AI and fiction writing, but I am very sure that if an application of AI saves me nearly two days of listening to meetings I didn’t attend, then sign me up for more!

A Geek Moment

April 15, 2024 /

It has been many years since I wrote software code for a living, and maybe ten since I last dabbled.

The dabbling was building a database of stock and futures prices using Groovy and the lightweight H2 database. I had a fairly robust application and a good block of historical data when I ran into a couple of problems. The goal of the database was to calculate the relative strength of a stock or future against its peers, as described by Tom Dorsey in his book Point and Figure Charting. At that time, I couldn’t find a Groovy or Java application that allowed me to calculate the results I needed – bad planning on my part as I couldn’t get my head round how to write the code. The second problem was that H2 changed their database structure and for the life of me I couldn’t work out how to migrate.

As a result, the project just sat there with nothing happening. I’m still collecting the raw price data, but right now it sits in flat files on my hard drives and backups.

About three years ago, I dusted off my coding gloves and used Python to manipulate some health care data for a project I was working on. Now Python as I suspect most reading this know, is incredibly powerful and has a host of open source libraries available to the developer. One of those libraries matplotlib has a whole set of finance utilities. I looked at the library, and put my notes aside but the thought of it never really left my mind.

This past week, I pulled out the old Groovy scripts and looked at migrating them to Python. I rethought exactly what I had been looking to do that first time and scaled back a lot of the calculations that weren’t really necessary. The refactoring ended up being much easier than I expected. And fast. Over 200,000 rows into a SQLITE database in about five seconds!

I also found some interesting and illuminating thoughts in Jeremy Du Plessis’s book The Definitive Guide to Point and Figure. I still need to think through the calculation routines based on his writing, but I may not need matplotlib after all!

iPad Revisited

April 8, 2024 /

It’s nearly two years since I wrote about my iPad purchase in the Brave New World post (May 2022 – Richard Freeborn).

In that post I talked about the keyboard, and how, without email I was able to be quite productive. I am still using the iPad for writing, usually with Scrivener because that’s where my fiction lives these days, but there are a few differences.

About six months ago, I bought a Macally bluetooth keyboard. It’s a full size keyboard with a separate numeric keypad. I hadn’t realized how much I missed that numeric keypad until I had it back again. Another feature of the Macally keyboard is the ability to connect up to three devices and switch between them seamlessly, with just a quick hoy-key combination.

It was very easy to connect the keyboard to the iPad, and much as I still liked the Magic keyboard, being able to sit and type with the correct posture was wonderful. It’s on these occasions that I make use of the separate iPad mouse, which to be honest doesn’t get much other use.

What I haven’t managed yet on the iPad is a heavy editing session where I have two or three or more chapters open in panes on the screen so I can make updates and corrections – like putting consistency into hair or eye color. that’s pretty easy to do on the Mac Mini with a 20+ inch monitor. Not so easy on the iPad where you don’t have the ability to pop out and rearrange documents. To be fair, when I get into those big editing sessions, there’s usually a pile of papers strewn across the desk as well!

Overall though, I’m still very pleased with using the iPad as a dedicated writing device for places away from my office. And I’ve still avoided configuring email!

Change for the sake of Change

March 11, 2024 /

Have you had those nagging little pop-ups and messages from Dropbox?

They started with me last week. First about upgrading to the next level, and secondly performing a reinstall for the new version of Dropbox. I ignored the first as I’m barely using half of my current space allocation. I did accept the second, and then the fun began.

Dropbox shut down and went through the usual install and relaunch cycle I expect when installing new versions of applications on the Mac. This time there was a wrinkle. I got the message Dropbox was moving my files to a “secure” location.

What? Where?

Previously the Dropbox folder was located in my Documents folder, and now appears in Finder under the Locations heading. No indication of where, if anywhere, it resides on the hard drive and all you see in Get Info is Dropbox. Not exactly helpful.

Fortunately my technical skills haven’t completely rusted away, so it was into Terminal. A search through the hard drive found Dropbox and all my files in the folder Library -> Cloud Storage.

Satisfied, I had my files somewhere I could find them, I forgot about it until I accessed one of those files. I think it was a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet. At that point I got a warning message and the request to allow the application to access Dropbox files. And this has been a consistent event when I first open a file for the first time in the new Dropbox structure. Grrr!!!

I expect there’s a reason for this change, but it would be nice if Dropbox explained what they were changing and why the need to move all files to some obscure location.

Or it might be some tech-weeny’s bright idea of cool where no-one thought to question the consequences.

Another Upgrade

February 13, 2024 /

Back in July of last year (System Upgrades – Richard Freeborn), I detailed the results of changing out our router and the improvements we had as a result.

Since then, I’ve been working around increasing issues with my MacBook Pro. The speakers died some time ago, and plugging in an external speaker wasn’t too much of an issue, especially as the general sound quality was much better.

The track pad and bluetooth were another problem. The track pad developed a mind of its own, sending the cursor all over the screen, or just not responding. That meant a separate wireless mouse. Again, not a big problem. What did bother me more is that the bluetooth keyboard would for no reason stop working. When I investigated further the MacBook had turned off Bluetooth, and the only way to get it back was to shut down and restart.

And then there were the software updates. About a month ago, Microsoft informed me they couldn’t upgrade Word and Excel because the operating system was too old. Can’t be, was my first thought, and then I did some research.

The MacBook Pro was nine years old, which explained the pieces failing every so often. I really didn’t really want to buy more hardware at the moment, but hardware has a mind of its own, so I was back at the Apple store looking at options.

My first thought was an iMac, but it looked to be older Apple technology. I didn’t want to bite that hook, and a few months later see the release of a whole new iteration. I’ve experimented with using the iPad on travel trips, and it works well, so I didn’t see the point in another laptop, which led me to the Mac Mini.

The immediate drawback appeared to be no keyboard, mouse, or monitor. Wait – I’ve already added those onto the laptop, and one thing we have in the house is plenty of spare monitors. No camera? Again, we have those sitting on a shelf not being used. So I ordered the Mac Mini. It arrived two days earlier than scheduled and as soon as I plugged in the keyboard, mouse, and monitor, it asked me if I wanted to connect to another Apple device and copy from that.

Now, Apple has tricked me before this way with my iPad, but I was prepared to give it a try, and surprisingly the Mac Book and Mini talked to each other and about five hours later everything was up and running on the Mini. I had some problems with license counts on some applications, and the Mac Book Pro NTFS app doesn’t work with the Apple M2 chip. Both took a little time but were easily resolved.

Total time to upgrade and iron out the kinks? Less than a day. It’s the easiest upgrade I’ve ever done.

Meaningless Error Messages

February 5, 2024 /

This past weekend was a catch up on the many admin tasks put aside while we were out of town for most of January. One of those catch up activities is to scan and shred documents. I moved to electronic storage for copies of bills and invoices about ten years ago and managed to retire and remove a full four-drawer filing cabinet.

Despite this, and having multiple backups, both on a physical hard drive and in the cloud, I still keep hard copies of some documents – contracts, and the final versions of manuscripts spring to mind immediately.

As you’re probably suspecting, there was quite a pile of paper to scan, and as I got through the pile, the Epson printer/scanner barfed. That’s not unusual as pages get caught and jammed every so often. This was different though. There was no paper jam icon. Instead I had an Epson error 100069 and a message telling me to restart the printer. Easy enough, and for good measure, I checked nothing was caught in the scanner feed.

Restarting went straight to the same error message and a suggestion to contact Epson technical support. So straight to the browser and a search, and a discovery.

There is nothing on the Epson site that acknowledges printer error messages, let alone a list of what they might be, and how to resolve them. Buried deep in the results of another search I found the title Epson’s triple secret error codes. Now that seemed promising.

And it was.

The 100069 message essentially means the scanning function has serious issues. It could be the scanner motor pulley (checked it and looked okay), or a failed scanner motor or scanner sensor or . . . Given the amount of scanning I do, my guess is it’s the sensor or motor, which almost certainly means a new printer.

I don’t begrudge the cost of the new printer (actually, yes I do 🙂 ). What does frustrate me is how hard it was to diagnose the problem. I love the printer, and will replace like with like, but come on Epson, you’re better than this.

An Update on AI Audio

January 8, 2024 /

AI is the current hot topic in many areas of our lives at the moment – from an AI engine being the first level of customer support, or those incessant robo-calls, to “creating” stories or images.

I have been following the various legal cases that are currently in flight, but that isn’t the focus this week. Instead I want to talk a little about AI audio which in the past two years has gone from almost pariah to an accepted medium.

As I mentioned in the posting of October 2022, I ran my novel Thieves in the Temple through the free Google Audio converter and played around a little with the various voice options. I didn’t do much more than that, and made it available on Google Play for the same price as the paperback. At the time, Google Play was the only place to make it available.

Fast forward to today, and those options have grown dramatically. The AI audio files from Google Play can now be made available on Kobo, Draft to Digital, and Book Funnel to name a few.

The feedback I had on the audio sales showed me there are still some tweaks I need to make to the text so the AI can interpret the words more easily. Those tweaks are on my schedule for the first quarter of 2024 so by the second quarter, the audio of Thieves in the Temple and the sequel novel Death at a Wedding will be available more widely.

Stay tuned for updates.

« Older posts

© 2024 Richard Freeborn

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑