No I don’t want the AI features…

coffee, notebook, pen, on a table
Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay

Sometimes you need to check things out, as they could be costing you money for features you don’t need.

My monthly charge for my Microsoft Office subscription came through and it had risen from £5.99 to £8.49 a month.

I didn’t recall getting an email, but then realised it would have been to my outlook.com email address which I don’t really use and look at rarely.

I was a little surprised and a little annoyed. However I do use Microsoft Office a fair bit, so decided for the moment I would keep subscribing, well for the moment.

It was interesting then to note a day later I was on the Money Saving Expert website, looking at other things when I saw a link to an article.

Microsoft’s auto-adding up to £30 a year to 365 subscriptions for its AI software – but we’ve a trick to avoid it

I read the the article and I saw that the increase was due to the addition of AI functionality to the Office suite. Now this was something I had seen when using Office, but never used. It would appear that you can downgrade back to Classic and though you lose the AI functionality, the charge is the original £5.99.

Microsoft says the option to switch to a Classic plan will be offered for the next year. To make the switch:

Sign in to your Microsoft account.

Go to ‘Subscriptions’ and select ‘Manage’.

Select ‘Cancel subscription’. This will give you the option to choose a monthly or annual Classic Personal or Classic Family plan.

I did this and my plan reverted back to Classic.

I had seen the AI functionality whilst using Office, but most of the time I either wanted to turn it off, or I was ignoring it. So for me, no real loss of functionality, if anything it will improve my productivity as I won’t be distracted by it. 

You would have thought that Microsoft would remember that paper clip… Did people really appreciate that paper clip saying You appear to be writing a letter…. I certainly turned off that functionality back in the day. For me in many ways AI functionality is something akin to the paper clip. Thanks, but no thanks.

Not sure what happens next year, maybe we will all be forced to upgrade to have AI. One of the lessons here is to look at your subscriptions and emails.

Apple’s Image Playground

One of the new features for the Mac is Apple Intelligence. I was curious about Image Playground and how that would work.

Produce fun, original images in seconds with the Image Playground experience right in your apps. Create an entirely new image based on a description, suggested concepts, and even a person from your Photos library.

Having tried it, I would say it is nothing special. Yes the images are nice, but you can tell they are AI generated. It also doesn’t do photorealistic images.

As a tool to create some fun images to share with friends, yes it’s fine, so use it for that.

Roaming in Finland

I was flying off to Finland and would be using my iPhone out there.

Following issues with using data in Portugal a few years ago with excessive data usage on my iPhone, I followed the same process I had used in October 2023 when I went to Amsterdam and last year when I went to Europe.

When I was on the plane at Heathrow, I went into Settings -> Mobile Data and turned off virtually all the apps which could use mobile data. Took me a while as there were a fair few. I turned off mobile data for virtually all my apps and also specifically iCloud Driveand iCloud Backup. I am pretty sure they were the culprits for my excessive data usage whilst in Portugal.

As and when I needed to use apps, I either used the hotel wifi, or switched on mobile data for specific apps.

I didn’t  run out of data this visit, it was a shorter visit, just a few days. All worked fine.

I was also impressed with the mobile data speeds in Finland, which to be honest knowing their history (you know Nokia) wasn’t too surprising.

Well what is the point then?

When flying I usually download films and TV programmes onto my phone, so I can watch them in flight mode.

I had downloaded a film from Netflix, and on the plane I set it to play. After a few minutes whilst watching a film I had downloaded I got the following error.

You've reached the end of what was downloaded so far. Please connect to the internet to continue watching.

You’ve reached the end of what was downloaded so far. Please connect to the internet to continue watching.

Now I was a little confused, as I was sure the film had downloaded fully. I opened the film again and checked, by moving through the file that it was all there. So I started the film again, fast forwarded to where I was. I watched it for a few more minutes. I then got the error again..

I went through the same process again of restarting the film.

After the third time, I stopped watching.

I have no idea about the error and what caused it, I have had issues before where downloads have expired, but this was the first time I had this specific error.

The whole point of downloading is so that you can watch a film without the need for an internet connection. In this instance I couldn’t connect to the internet as I was in the air. 

Well that’s better

So after getting just 125 miles recently, I  did a charge to 100% and the predicted range was a much better 168 miles.

This was guessing down to warmer temperatures and recently using the heating less.

How low can you go?

After what I thought was a low predicted range at a 100% of 139 miles, I found myself with a predicted range of just 125 miles when I recently charged to 100%.

Certainly a combination of low temperatures, heating, pre-heating the driver area, motorway driving, and demisting the windscreen.

Though this time last year it was just 122 miles.

Disappointed but not surprised

Was disappointed but not surprised that the predicted range for the Funky Cat on a 100% charge was just 139 miles.

It has been cold and I have been driving with the heating on.

Well that was frustrating

One of the reasons I went out and bought the Canon R100 was so that I could have a higher resolution camera than my aging EOS 400D. The 400D did 3888 x 2929 10MB images, whilst the Canon R100 did 6000 x 4000 24MB images.

I would import my photographs from the 400D onto the Mac into Photos using an USB cable. It would import the full size images.

One of there features of the R100 is to use WiFi to connect the camera. There was a Mac app, but I decided to use the app for the iPhone. The app would import the images from the camera and then save them to Photos on the iPhone, which then would upload them to iCloud so I could access them on the Mac if I needed to. I thought I had cracked that workflow.

By chance, I worked out that my camera was exporting images to the iPhone at a reduced resolution, way reduced. It was importing them at 1620 x 1080 rather than 6000 x 4000. Great for Instagram or Facebook, but not so good for full size editing. 

On a recent visit to Glastonbury Tor I hadn’t deleted the images from the SD card so could re-import them at the correct resolution. You can compare the two images here.

This is the reduced image.

This is the original image.

You can click the images to see them full size.

In addition here is a zoomed in comparison of the two images, you can see the difference in resolution between the two images.

Screenshot

I did not realise that this was happening, so unfortunately, some of my first full resolution photographs from the R100 were lost. I had assumed they were transferring at full resolution, and I deleted them from the SD card on the camera.

I have changed the settings on the camera and I am now thinking about keeping the images on the SD card as a backup.

It was frustrating, so much so, that I am now thinking about going out again and retaking the photographs I had taken with the R100.

Tech Stuff: Top Ten Blog Posts 2024

Wordpress
Image by Werner Moser from Pixabay

Having posted that I was unable to post a top ten from 2024 looking at the dashboard I realised I could see the stats for the blog posts from 2024.

In 2024 I wrote 61 blog posts, down slightly from 2023 when I published 69 blog posts. In 2022 I wrote 30 posts. In 2021 I published 32 posts on the blog, and in 2020 I wrote 43 blog posts..

M4 Mac mini

Mac mini

I recently replaced my old iMac with a new M4 Mac mini. I went for the base model.

      • 10-Core CPU
      • 10-Core GPU
      • 16GB Unified Memory
      • 256GB SSD Storage

I have been meaning to replace the iMac for a while now, as it is old, and is no longer supported by Apple. I have replaced the fusion drive twice on the iMac, and I think that means it probably would go again at some point in the future.

So far, I have been really impressed. The new Mac mini is really zippy and certainly is fast enough for virtually everything I want to do with a Mac. 

The only real negative is the size of the hard drive. At 256GB it’s rather small. However the 2TB storage option would have cost an additional £800. Decided it would be easier to buy an external 4TB storage for £100 or thereabouts.

I got a 4K monitor to run it with, as well as a cheap Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.