Some of you may have already noticed, Microsoft is getting very pushy about installing Windows 11. On one of my machines, it started the process under the guise of a standard update. Softwarekeep.com has an excellent article titled "How to Cancel Windows 11 Update and Stay on Windows 10" that covers many ways to handle this. One option is to revert back to Windows 10 within 10 days of Windows 11 being installed, found here: Start menu > Settings > Windows Update > Advanced options > Recovery > Previous version of Windows. After this arbitrary 10 days, you need to do a clean Windows 10 install. I also recommend the free Windows Update Blocker, currently at version 1.7, as a way to control your Windows updates.
- Microsoft is also on my naughty list this week for their disingenuous offer of 30 free days of Azure access. I activated it to do a DP-203 Azure Data Engineer course. Ten or so days in, I apparently ran out of "money" so I lost access. This is patently absurd, misleading and punishes those trying to get a handle on Microsoft technology. Now I'm stuck with watching videos while not being able to practise or follow along with the training. Epic fail Microsoft.
- After what seems like forever Amazon has a new kind of Kindle out, the Scribe. This is a 10.2-inch display that you can write on. There are a number of challengers already in this market and I'm still happy with my Boox Note Air that does this and more for a similar price. At the very least Amazon finally has a reader again with a large screen, better for textbooks and the like. Of course, at US$480 (16,500 baht) for the 64GB version with a cover, premium stylus and charger, it may be out of the price range of some. It doesn't support Audible with sound nor does it come with any waterproofing. Writing on a PDF could be better but they have promised a series of updates to follow the release adding more features like different brush types.
- Fans of the TV show The IT Crowd will appreciate the recent story of the Interstellar Boundary Explorer spacecraft, launched in 2008, being effectively turned off and on again by Nasa, restoring command capability and bringing it back to full operational status. The number of times this works for a computer is almost countless.
- The experiment that is Meta is not doing well as thousands are due to be laid off. Like many things in the technology world, the timing for Meta was not right and the Zuckerberg experiment is not yet ready for prime time. Decent VR headsets are still too expensive for the mass market and with many parts of the world in an economic downturn there are not many people jumping in wholesale. It will happen but perhaps not as Meta and probably not for another couple of years. There are also still issues like protection for children on a platform that has yet to be ironed out.
- In slightly scary news, in a new paper titled "High-resolution Image Reconstruction With Latent Diffusion Models From Human Brain Activity" by Prof Shinji Nishimoto, AI software Stable Diffusion was used to process fMRI brain scans to generate pictures. More simply, they are getting closer to retrieving images from people's brains. It is not quite reading your mind but the image quality has been improving over the past 12 years. Where this ends up and when is still an open question.
- In related news, the "mad" scientists at Johns Hopkins University have been building miniature brains based on tiny lumps of nerve cells called organoids. About 100 million human neurons are built in a good old Petri dish and trained to play Pong. This was one of the first video games and consists of two rectangular paddles that bat a square ball back and forward. It's not advanced intelligence but the very fact that they are building these indicates potential somewhere down the arrow of time. Getting from the current state to a thinking organism is a very long way off, or so they claim, so organic Skynet is thankfully still a way off.
- It appears that Germany will soon be following the US and the UK in banning Huawei and ZTE equipment being used in national telecoms networks. Germany has resisted this for a while but apparently, the US has been persuasive. Huawei is still expanding its 5G markets in Southeast Asia with Malaysia as the next possible location for their equipment. Huawei and ZTE maintain their networks and equipment are secure and do not pass sensitive information to China but others claim to have evidence that this does occur. Some will remember Germany catching Microsoft out doing something similar in the past, so it would appear that everyone does it if they can get away with it.
- Finally, for this week, I've published my first fantasy novel on Amazon, The Staff Of Life, Book 1 – A Beginning by James Hein. If you like this genre, please take a look.
James Hein is an IT professional with over 30 years' standing. You can contact him at jclhein@gmail.com.
