Microsoft's AI price hike

 If, like me, you have a personal Microsoft 365 subscription you'll have received an email telling you that the cost of your annual subscription was going from A$109 to A$159.

(Actually I didn't get the email, not right away, it was only when J told me about her price increase email I went looking and found that Outlook - bless its little cotton socks - had classified the email as junk - go figure.)

Well, I hissed and swore, but I had expected an increase in part to our dollar doing one of its periodic nosedives in value. I did think an A$50 increase a bit steep, but I guessed that Microsoft had been listening to some of these catastrophising exchange rate analysts - the same ones that told us last year that our dollar would go up in value - and decided to hedge its bets, and I must admit I didn't really read the email properly.

Now, I need Microsoft 365.

I use One Note extensively - while I used to use Evernote to manage my research material I've moved over to One Note as a note management tool, and the 1TB of storage comes in handy given I've a vast number of photographs of artefacts.

And I've found that while Libre Office will happily do 95% of everything you can reasonably do with Office, it doesn't cope that well with weird macro dominated data recording spreadsheets and grant application forms using equally weird templates and mandating strange fonts.

So, Microsoft 365 it is - and that's why both my desk and work laptop use windows despite my liking for both linux and parsimonious solutions to recording data in the field

But when I read the email carefully, I saw that part of the increase was to pay for the AI features Microsoft was building into its applications.

Now, I'm a cynic about AI, and a lot of it seems quite immature and singularly useless.

It certainly doesn't need to be everywhere, and being offered the option to generate a summary of my credit card statement or an email about a nineteenth century coronial inquest is not helpful.

However, I will admit that while the little search summaries sometimes generated by Google's Gemini a few months ago were useless, recently, they've improved, and when researching nineteenth century medical instrument manufacturers they've been reasonably useful, providing you read critically and are alert for the odd howler.

I havn't used Microsoft's equivalent product, but I have no reason to believe their products have not followed a similar trajectory, and may prove useful to me in what I do, which does involve quite a bit of web based research.

So, while I'll hiss and groan, I'll put up with it.

I suspect that most users of Office don't really need the brave new world of AI, but then it's always been the case that 90% of Office users only use 10% or the features - the problem has been guessing which features are the key 10% - so no change there.

What does worry me are the  adverts appearing on TV (it'll soon be the start of the school year here in Australia) about how CoPilot and CoPilot based PC's will help students power through assignments, and in one advert, the actor playing a uni student is shown asking CoPilot to cite her sources.

I'm sorry, if you want to do research oriented work, you need to learn to do research, learn to critically read your sources, and weigh up their validity, in short you need to learn to think for yourself.

AI is a tool, not a panacea.

 And as for the students and their clever PCs, I keep on thinking about when I learned to sail yachts and they made us learn to do some very basic astronomical and solar navigation, because, as the course tutor said, when you're out on the ocean and the electrical system has died taking out the GPS, how are you going to find your way home?

The same goes for outsourcing your thinking to a machine ...

More on Google Lens and object identification

 I've written before about my experiences with Google Lens as a tool to identify nineteenth century artefacts.

Earlier this week I had quite a productive day at Lake View, working on a collection of nineteenth century surgical instruments.

Most of them I photographed using my cheap Temu lightbox which I powered from a powerbank to save trailing extension cables everywhere, which worked well as a solution

Working on the instruments had its problems. I didn’t know what some of the instruments were, or what they were called, so when I didn’t recognise them I used Google Lens to help identify them, with mixed results.

Specialised, unique looking instruments such as a fistula director or a nineteenth century tonsil cutting tool were easy to identify with the aid of Google Lens, often turning up examples in the collection of the UK Science museum, but more generic looking items, such as a tubular surgical probe, were sometimes  mistaken for car fuel system components, and this I think shows a problem with Google Lens - when you are trying to identify something fairly unique it’s quite good, as there are not a lot of possibilities, but where your object looks like a lot of similar looking more commonly searched for objects the results tend to be weighted towards the more common objects.

Nothing wrong with that, in fact in most cases it’s what you would expect the application to do - give you the most common result, but it does mean that when you review the results of the search you should do so critically ...

I bought a (refurbished) ipad...

 

Why, you might ask, given my antipathy to Apple's walled garden?

And the answer is purely pragmatism.

When I did my blog post about my use of technology in 2024, I mentioned that my Huawei pandemic era android tablet was stuck on an old version of Android and that among other problems some apps had stopped working.

Well I wiped it, and that stopped it complaining that it was out of storage, and am now running with a limited set of apps, basically wikipedia and some news apps.

And that's fine for catching up on the news and some basic fact checking, but doesn't get around the problem that one of the apps that has stopped working is Evernote.

If it wasn't for the fact that I have a lot of material stored in Evernote, I could simply have used the web version to check a document, but just because of the sheer volume of material that I have in Evernote, it's a pain.

I could have bought myself a new high quality Android tablet, but they are not exactly cheap, and even a reasonable mid range one was going to cost me in the region of four hundred bucks.

Given the problem of some apps not working on older versions of Android, second hand wasn't an option.

And then I found a refurbisher I've bought quite a few machines for use with Linux and/or fieldwork from had some 'as new' refurbished iPads for sale at under $200.

While it is an old model, it runs the latest version of Apple's operating system, and comes with Apple's 'niceness' baked in, and will hopefully be supported for another couple of years, and as I've found with the old iPad Mini I still use as a note taker, it's perfectly possible to keep using an iPad long after it's fallen off support, as always it is access to the applications that counts.

If the refurbished ipad lasts for over two years the cost of ownership will be about the same as my Huawei tablet, so in a sense, apart from yet more devices cluttering things up, I won't lose anything...

A win for Lubuntu

 As I've written elsewhere, we've been without the internet and all the conveniences of modern life it brings for a few days.

Very much a first world problem but extremely aggravating none the less.

And, because of our connectivity problems, I've been using the town library's free wifi to check my email etc.

The first time I did so, I used the HP windows laptop I bought second hand as a travel computer earlier this year.

This turned out to be a mistake, because it of course, after being powered off since our trip out west to Lake Tyrell, and being windows it of course wanted to download squillions of updates, sync onedrive, and the rest. Normally I power it up once a month to sync itself, and before we go on a trip turn off Windows update and the rest. As luck would have it that was something I was going to do the afternoon our router died.

So, let's just say the windows laptop wasn't a good choice of device, especially as the library's wifi isn't the fastest.

The other time I used the library's wifi, I used my Lubuntu machine. (I could have used the distraction free machine, or my old Ideapad 1, but I'd shafted myself as the distraction free machine is barebones and doesn't have an email client installed, and my Ideapad had software to connect to Google drive and sync installed. What I needed was a machine that had all the tools but no dependencies, and the Lubuntu machine fitted the bill.)

So, up to the library.

Our town library has two public wifi networks - one called 'Public' which is 2.4GHz and a 5GHz service called 'Public-5g', which is less used, in part because some people confuse it with a 5G phone service.

So, power up, connect to the 5g service, open Thunderbird, and it flew - which is pretty good for what after all is a nine year old laptop.

The lack of dependencies on external services, as well as a lightweight but efficient operating system meant that it simply did its job, and did it well.

And what it shows is that (a) Linux really does help you get the best out of old hardware, and (b) all the syncing and background download slows windows down, especially as Microsoft increasingly position it as both a cloud centric and cloud dependent environment ...

Parsimonious documentation

 Today, down at Lake View, I've been documenting the contents of a large nineteenth century display cupboard which has been dressed with a selection of plausible looking willow pattern dishes and some big heavy nineteenth century religious texts, plus the collected works of Sir Walter Scott.

Even though these books are props with no real connection to the house, one doesn't want to damage them by opening them and stressing the spine to photograph the title page.

The standard solution would be to use a book pillow. These usually are made of Tyvek or something similar with an inert filling and are quite pricy at around $75-80.

I don't happen to have one, don't particularly want to buy one, and anyway it would would take too long to come in the post, especially as we are getting close to Christmas.

I needed an alternative solution.

Given that the books are not intrinsically valuable, all I needed was something with a washable cover that I could stack to make a support.

And I hit on a solution - a box of kid's beanbags from K-Mart

for a little under $7.

Just the right size to stack to support a book cover

and because they are designed for little kids to play with, they have washable covers, very useful in case an old book sheds something, and if they get really mucky, cheap enough to throw away...

 

Of prayer books and penises

 As I mentioned elsewhere, one of our tasks at the Athenaeum is to decide what to do with a pile of tatty, mouldy, broken spined bibles and prayer books we have inherited from various local deconsecrated churches.

The books themselves are in a sorry state, some have lost one or other of their covers, some have pages missing and some have evidence of white mould.

They're not unique, and they are are not even very valuable as objects, however, in a family history context they can be valuable as they have the names of an owner and possibly even a date inside, which gives an anchor point to say that the owner was in the Stanley area at such and such a date.

Others have more indirect clues - one, undated, has a drawing of the Athenaeum wall clock, and we know that the Athenaeum was used for Sunday schools in the 1860s, and another, a drawing of a famous prize fight, and others, quite good caricatures of what I assume were members of the congregation of the time, and yes, I did open one book to be greeted by a drawing of a penis, showing that not much has changed in the intervening 150 years.

But what to do with the books?

Many are in such a poor state it would be difficult to justify the cost of conservation, and nineteenth century prayer books are hardly unique.

So our strategy is to photograph and record the names, the scribbles, and the caricatures and where they were found, and only to conserve the books which are particularly rich in graffiti and caricatures, as well as retaining some of the prayer books and bibles in better condition for use as props to illustrate aspects of nineteenth century life.

The rest will simply be disposed of, although we have had a left field suggestion that we ask a local arts society if they are interested is using them as the basis for artworks on life in the nineteenth century.

Otherwise the mouldy covers will probably be incinerated and the paper shredded as bedding for chickens, before eventually being composted ...

Using google lens to identify an object

 Down at Lake View today I came across this

basically it's a cane covered glass bottle with some weird apparatus on top and the inscription 'By Royal letters patent No. 2'.

I knew I'd seen one before somewhere and had an idea that it might be something to do with soda, as in aerated water, but I was absolutely buggered if I could remember where and what.

So, I pasted the image into Google Lens to do an image search, and it came back with two results, one from the PowerHouse Museum in Sydney, and one from the Sparklets Collector's site - apparently there are people out there who collect old soda syphons.

Crucially the Sparklets Collectors site mentioned that the P01/WK model, made from 1897 to 1913 could have either By Royal Letters Patent No.2 or No.5, as in the PowerHouse museum examples.

Incredibly useful and undoubtedly saved me a bit of head scratching.

I'd previously used Google lens once or twice to help identify the source of an image, and have been impressed by its image finding capabilities, but I'm doubly impressed by the effectiveness of this slightly left field technique to identify artefacts ...