I have received a mail today that my phone will not be receiving further updates. Meh. Big meh.

To be fair, I've had it for more than six years now. Fairphone, the manufacturer, originally promised support for five years after launch, and that was two years ago, so there was an extra two years bonus afterwards. I'm still rather miffed, as the phone is still fine and I am very much not looking forward to getting a new one ever. (The camera is iffy, but I've gotten used to that, and also I really dislike phone changes.)

To be fair even further, I've done some reading on it and apparently it's not just the laziness of the fairphone folks but also the fact that the chip manufacturers stop their support at some time, and voilà, there you go, everything gets harder. 

For now, though, things will still work for a while. After that I will have to see whether I need to switch to LineageOS, and if yes if my bank apps will still work on that. In any case, it's very much a case of meh, and I'm a little disappointed and a little sad. 

So much for my plan to watch a presentation that was available online after the fact - in contrast to the announcement, it was not recorded after all, and is thus not available. It would have been something on backstrap weaving, but due to time differences, the real thing would have been at three o'clock in the night hereabouts. My love for textiles runs deep, but my love for sleep is at least as profound, so I would have passed even if I had known that it will not be recorded. 

Still, funnily, it makes a difference somehow to be disappointed because it's in the middle of the night and one will not join in, or to be disappointed because it was announced to be recorded and then be told it was not, after all. Not that the outcome is any different. 

I am not complaining, by the way - something may have happened, technical or otherwise, to have things turn out like that. What I'd rather complain about (well, among many other things that are of a more political or social nature, but I am planning to do other things this evening as well and will thus not even get started) is how much AI has made searching for stuff on the 'Net harder than before. Back a few years ago, when I was looking for something, there was the occasional thing that was repeated on a few websites. Mostly it was easier to identify and thus fairly quick to sort out - but now, searching is much more cumbersome just due to the sheer amount of copy-and-paste stuff, and repetitions of things quite clearly written by AI. Add that to the fact that some things are hard to search for anyways ("spindle" can mean way too many things, for instance, and some other terms are, well, not advisable due to NSFW reasons) and it gets unpleasant.

Unfortunately, that does not look like a problem that will go away any time soon. This AI stuff is here for a while, and will most probably continue to spew shitty hallucinated texts all over the 'Net, and then gobble them up again to feed itself with the basis for even more, even wilder hallucinations.

You can clearly tell that I'm no fan of the AI boom. Yes, I know that there are some use cases where it's a real help, and I am using AI assistance for those as well. Such as translation help, so you don't have to look up every second word in the dictionary, and yes, I am old enough and old-fashioned enough that there were texts in my life that I had to tackle like this if I wanted to read them. Or programming assistance when it's a common software and a problem that you can very clearly describe, and very clearly describe how you want to solve it. My guideline these days is that if I could find the solution written out by someone (someone real, human, breathing and thinking) on the 'Net somewhere, it's something that may be solveable by AI. If not... nope. With a little nope cherry on top. It's basically a very, very large cross-language dictionary, and that is, in my opinion, all that it's good for, and all that it will be good for. It also has the desire to please you, so chances are high you won't get any solid or sensible advice. Which means... it's a large dictionary with a bias.

In addition, all that "free" use of AI comes at quite a cost - because these servers don't run themselves, and there is a considerable amount of energy and logistics going into them these days. Especially the image generation eats up quite a lot of resources, and with a lot of that being, more or less, utter crap, and also a lot of it being just for fun... well. Meh.

So. Rant over. For now. I'll now go and have a nice, analogue, non-AI (maybe even non-intelligent) evening.

Honestly, it's a disgrace - both the insane price differences between plane and train at some points, and the also insane booking procedures in some cases.

Imagine that you'd like to go to, well, let's say Cambridge. That's a bit of a way, yes, but... it would be perfectly possible to do it by train. Quite nice, even, if you happen to travel on a day where you can catch a night train. I'd go to Munich in the late afternoon or early evening, catch the night train there, sleep my way to Brussels. There a little breakfast maybe, then onto the Eurostar to London St. Pancras, and after that it's just a half-hour hop to Cambridge with National Rail.

Easypeasy. Except... well. I can even find the connection I'd like via the bahn.de portal (that is not always the case with more complicated connections), but I can't book it, probably because they are out of contingency tickets for either the ÖBB nightjet or the SNCF Eurostar. So I'd have to book everything separately, which means there's no automatic possibility to take a later train if one of the booked ones is delayed.

It also means making accounts at four different companies, and booking everything separately, which is probably (though not guaranteed) more expensive than having a single thingie. 

While on the other hand, if I'm to book a flight... that is done very quickly, very easily, even if it were with a change somewhere. And it is still ridiculously cheap (thanks to the still ridiculous minimal taxing done on some of the flight stuff). 

So not only is the plane much faster in this case, it is also cheaper, and you have actual hassle and trouble to book a train. Grrr. 

(As you can tell, I am not amused. Even though, in this case, it will probably end up being the plane anyways because of it being much faster, I would really like the two possibilities to be a little more evened up, regarding the ease of booking and the price.)

If we're looking for the current pig being chased through the (global) village (and please excuse my crude translation of "die neuste Sau durchs Dorf treiben", a German phrase to point out the current big thing that's being made the Biggest Thing Ever and gets mixed in everywhere) - I'd say it's certainly AI.

Personally, I'm very, very torn on that topic. Yes, it can be a great help, and very useful in specific instances. But then there's so many not-so-good things about it. 

For once, I look with a shudder on the immense amounts of energy that go into generating, running, and using AI. It's slowly approaching a whole percent of global energy consumption, at a time where we'd all profit from dialling down a bit and trying to reduce what we use, so that we can stay within sustainable limits.

Then, a lot of it is just... bad. It already starts with the high-handed decisions of the AI trainers to just use anything that is there to train their models, regardless of copyright. Books, images, music, you name it. I have had issues with piracy of the book I wrote together with Gillian Polack (The Middle Ages Unlocked), which did cost both of us a good chunk of potential royalties income. This AI training - it''s piracy on a whole new level.

Artists complain as they are getting pushed out of their jobs, understandably so. A lot of people seem to think that AI will solve all their problems in the future, and make things, and better plus quicker than people. We will not be able to turn back time and go without AI, so my personal opinion is that it's smart to keep an eye on the developments and not reject all of it in every case, across the bank (even if personally, I'm a little tempted to do that, and please don't ask me why). In some cases, I have used AI to assist me, and I have found that it can be very helpful in some very specific situations. Like when I have a text in a language that I don't really read fluently, and I get translation assistance. (Quality differs between models, and it's always necessary to stay alert to possible hallucinations and mis-translations.) Like when I have a small, very well-defined programming issue where the language and (best case) the problem are rather well-known and have been handled and solved on the Internet somewhere, in some obscure corner, before, and I can describe in detail and very exactly what I need to have done, but am not able to just write out the code. Basically, another translation/language problem with a large pool of knowledge accessible in general. Or when I have a large, multi-page website and I need to find one specific bit of information on it (the case was a search for a VAT number that was not in the imprint). 

In these cases, it has served me really well to use AI. Regarding the translation, it's a really helpful tool for me that aids me a lot, and makes reading texts that I'd stumble on and spend a long while leafing through dictionaries (or typing words into online dictionaries) much quicker and much more painless. In other cases that were close to my successful use-cases, but not quite as specific and well-documented, well, I tried, and it tanked spectacularly. Which means that now I am very motivated to be very specific, and think hard about whether it is an AI-solvable problem, or probably not.

If I could wish for something, it would be people using AI like ChatGPT less for everything. You really don't need it to generate you a recipe for Butter Chicken, there's plenty of them on the web already, written by humans, just use one of those. You can just, well, use a search engine (preferably one with the search function turned off). And while I can somehow understand the temptation of having AI render a photo of you into an action figure, or a cartoon character, or whatever else... I'd wish people would not just use it so freely. It has a high hidden cost, and at some point, the price will have to be paid.

I won't go into any speculation on whether liking to use old programmes is somehow linked to being an archaeologist or not (it might just be me being cheap and lazy, after all), but, well... I did the jump from Windows7 to Win10, which should tell you a lot already.

Now the end of support for Win10 is approaching quickly, and I'm here with a still perfectly functional computer that is, as the Win11 evaluation programme tells me, not good enough to run Win11. 

This, as you may have guessed already, irks me quite a bit. And not only for me and my system - after all, I bought this machine refurbished four or so years ago, which can be considered as quite a while in IT terms - but also for all the millions of computers that are now forced into obsoleteness. The amount of unneccessary trash that makes, it's mind-boggling.

For a bit now, I had already decided to draw out any change or upgrade to the OS for as long as possible. Today, I looked into possibilities of extended support, at least for security patching... and found some interesting things.

Firstly, if you have the latest version of Win10 installed, you might even be eligible for free extended-life support by Microsoft. This life extension with security updates was offered on previous versions of Windows, but usually just for companies, and at a price (quite hefty, too). It looks like they are now offering it to everybody, and in some cases for free. The some cases are either using Microsoft Rewards points, or syncing your Windows backup to OneDrive (5 GB are free). I have not found out if the sync option means you have to backup everything there, or just the Windows settings, but either way it's not an option that I personally find attractive. You can read more about the MS extended support here or here. The extension is planned for at maximum three years, although there seems to be a plan to extend Win10 support for some companies until 2032. (Don't ask me how you get this, I have no clue.)

In case that all doesn't sound attractive enough for you, I also learned that there is a company specialising in security support for outdated programmes and operating systems. It's called 0patch (pronounced zeropatch) and they have adopted Win7 before, and still provide it with security patches so the machines are safe to use. Now they will be offering the same for Win10, and their plan is to do that for at least five years.

I will definitely look into this!

Yesterday was too hectic to get a picture in here - but now you are getting a view of the catproofed hedgehog restaurant: 

The stone goes on top of the roof/lid for the night, otherwise at least one of the cats will lift it off. (We saw him trying on one of the videos. Before he gave up on that method and contorted himself in through the door opening.) 

And this is how the inside looks:

I'm still impressed that the cats managed to squeeze around that corner. It's only about 11 or so cm wide, after all. 

The center space should be large enough for two hedgehogs to turn around each other (which should be possible here), and the food houses need two separate entrances so there's always a way to flee, in case there are disagreements about who is supposed to be in there, and who is not. That makes those food houses surprisingly large. Instead of adding the two sewage tube knees, some plans recommend closing off the entrance labyrinth paths on top, making them only about 12 cm in height, so it's more like a tunnel. We considered that option, but went for the knees - as we did not trust the cat burglars to get stopped by a little bit of a height inconvenience.

And yes, what you see in that dish is no more food, and some hedgehog droppings instead. They have a weird way of saying "thank you for the food", those guys! 

One of the things you hear again and again these days is that less meat in the diet is better - for both health (generally speaking) and the environment. 

That is all well and good; however, what I don't really get is the many fake meat products. Usually heavily processed and full of stuff to make the result more or less seem like a meat sausage or whatnot, they are also generously packaged in lots of plastic and usually at least at the price point of actual meat products... even if you buy organic.

As a rule, I don't go for these stand-in products unless there's an opportunity to try a tiny little bit of it. And until now, I have not found any of them to really come close to the stuff they are trying to copy. Even if the texture of some fine-ground sausage is actually quite close to the original, the taste just is... off. It lacks the taste of meat (which is logical, but, well, if you eat it because you like the pork taste... it's lacking). 

Apparently it's also really difficult to emulate the structure of meat by processing and mixing other things. There's a paper about this (from Physics of Fluids, interestingly), that is freely available. So if you're interested in a very close look at Veggie sausage compared to the meaty stuff... enjoy.