tech, news, productivity, views and stuff
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
Dropping four places to tenth place was a post from May 2020, on how the amazing BBC Archive had posted a series of images of empty BBC Television sets across the years to be used as BBC Zoom and Teams Backgrounds. I used these quite frequently in my Zoom meetings.
The post at nine was about Roaming issues in Spain.
Having some photographs when I visited The Harry Potter Studio Tour I decided to share some of the more suitable photos as backgrounds for Zoom and Teams and this was the eighth most popular post on the blog rising one place from last year was: Harry Potter Teams and Zoom Backgrounds.
The seventh most popular post was from 2020, about the death of my Polaroid Pogo Printer, No More Pogo, which I had bought back in 2009.
Dropping one place to number six was Using iPad as separate whiteboard in Teams. This was a post in response to a tweet on the Twitter. This inspired me to give it a go and see if I could get it to work and as a result documented the process.
Fifth place was Ten Amazing Winter and Snow Backgrounds for Teams and Zoom perfect for this time of year.
Well we had winter and now we have summer. The fourth most popular blog post on the blog was from April 2021 and was a series of images (virtual backgrounds) I wanted to use for online meetings over the summer: Ten Amazing Summer Zoom and Teams Backgrounds.
Bluesky on the iPad was the third most popular blog post and reflected the growth of Bluesky in 2024.
At two, rising back six places, this blog post was from December 2020, Ten Great Christmas Zoom and Teams Backgrounds. Using the excellent image sites, Unsplash and Pixabay, I put together ten festive images that could be used as backgrounds for Zoom and Teams meetings.
In July 2021, there I was opening a PowerPoint file from my OneDrive folder when I got this error message: Sorry, PowerPoint can’t read ^0. I couldn’t open any of my files on OneDrive. Having looked around for a solution and to be honest it wasn’t too much help. I did try and reset OneDrive but this didn’t work. I was convinced that this was a permissions issue rather than file corruption or data loss. The file sizes looked fine for example. In the end though I did come up with a solution which I wrote up as a blog post to help others: Solving the Sorry PowerPoint can’t read ^0 error and this was the most popular blog post this year, for the third year running. Obviously still an issue for many.
