Year: 2025
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Roll Up! Roll Up!…
I would like to think that Marina Hyde’s withering contempt would actually count for something, but to a person with no apparent morals whatsoever, it clearly won’t..
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A Supply Chain Story
I’ve just purchased a Microsoft Surface Pro 12 and keyboard to replace my aging Surface Go 2.
The experience of buying the Surface tablet has been illuminating of just how complex, and data-driven, supply chains have become.
The Surface comes in three available colours: platinum, violet and ocean-blue. The online Dutch Microsoft store only offers the platinum version, with a black keyboard with the US International layout. Naturally, I wanted a violet Surface and keyboard… So I went looking for other online sources for that combination. All the alternative online stores in the Netherlands were only offering the same combination as the Microsoft store. The online German Microsoft store did have both items in violet – but the keyboard was the German QWERTZ version – not what I wanted at all.
I returned to the Dutch store and explained what I wanted to a Dutch support person via Chat and after some research he confirmed to me in an email that we could source the Surface from the German store (because it was 50 euros cheaper – special offer) and the keyboard from the Irish Microsoft store. The only snag was that the keyboard would be the UK layout, rather than US international, but at least it would be better than the German QWERTZ layout. I replied to his email confirming that I wanted to place the order.
I attempted to reach him again via Chat, but that was not working, so after I sent him my phone number, he phoned me. After verification checks, he proceeded to place the order via the German and Irish online stores on my behalf. I got email order confirmations for the tablet (in German) and the keyboard (in English).
Because we had placed the orders in two different EU countries from where I actually live (the Netherlands), I was expecting shipment and delivery to take at least a week. However, the following day I got emails from both Microsoft and the courier that the goods were on the way and would be delivered the same day.
Bizarrely, although the orders were placed in the online stores of different countries, they both turned out to be fulfilled by the Irish operation. Even more bizarre, there’s apparently a warehouse in Venlo (in the Netherlands just 80 km from here) that bears the title Microsoft Ireland Operations Ltd. That had the items in stock and so they were shipped locally to me…
And a coda to this story is that before I had even set up and signed in to the Surface with its keyboard, Microsoft knew that I had bought them and had included them in the list of my devices in my Microsoft account. I think they must immediately track their serial numbers from the moment of placing the orders.
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The Nobel Peace Prize 2025
I nominate Francesca Albanese for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. She deserves it. To award it to Trump would be an utter travesty.
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The Alan Turing Lecture 2025
Sandi Toksvig gave this year’s Alan Turing Lecture. I urge you to watch it. She is thought-provoking about the nature of bias and the creeping stultification of thought that seems to be pervading Western societies.
The Mappa Mundi Project that she is involved with is also very interesting. It has the simple but essential goal of telling the stories of women. There’s a Chinese Proverb (probably apocryphal) that “women hold up half the sky”, but women only account for 0.5% of recorded human history.
On a related note, the book “Half the Sky” by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn is worth reading…
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Is This Satire – or Reality?
Should Trump be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – Matt Green has the answer…
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The Aids Memorial Quilt
I remember visiting the warehouse in San Francisco where the Aids Memorial Quilt is stored in 1992, and then seeing the Dutch contributions to the quilt laid out in the Vondelpark in Amsterdam during the 1998 Gay Games.
I wept both times.
Now the UK Aids Memorial Quilt is being displayed in London’s Tate Modern museum for a short time.
Lest we forget.
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The Lesson of 1933…
Professor Marci Shore explained in a video Opinion Piece for the New York Times why she was leaving the US to teach in the Canadian University of Toronto:
The lesson of 1933 is – you get out sooner rather than later
What might have seemed hyperbole at the time of the video’s making seems to be becoming more grounded in the reality of events in the US. She expands on her views in this interview in today’s Guardian. Required reading, I would suggest…
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No Man Is An Island
I was born on the Isle of Man and grew up there. Fortunately, I was able to leave it and have a full life elsewhere. Not everyone was able to do that.
This documentary hits me hard and the final words are very powerful.
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RIP Edmund
Edmund White has died. He was a great author and biographer who chronicled our gay lives and times – and who gave us “The Joy of Gay Sex” as a handbook.
Time to take time to reread the books I have of his in the library and remember his stories in all their glory.
Addendum: If you’ve never read any of Edmund White’s 36 books and would like to know where to start, here’s author Neil Bartlett’s excellent guide to the books.
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Microsoft’s ICC Blockade
Techzine reports that Microsoft has blocked the email account of the International Criminal Court’s Chief Prosecutor.
This is an extremely worrying development and shows up the risks of European governments relying on Microsoft’s infrastructure services. Trump’s baleful influence comes in many forms.
Carole Cadwalladr’s prediction of a digital coup would seem to be spot on.
Addendum: John Naughton’s article on the whole affair is worth reading – he may well be the canary in the coalmine of what is to come.
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Drawing A Red Line
Yesterday, 100,000 people gathered together in The Hague to protest against the Dutch Government’s refusal to “draw a red line” in its relations with Israel.
The furthest that Premier Schoof has dared to go up until now was to say that he found Israel’s activities in Gaza “zorgelijk” (worrying). Clearly that has not bothered Netanyahu one tiny little bit.
Whether yesterday’s demonstration will have any effect on Schoof remains to be seen.
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A Force For Good
The death of Pope Francis is a loss to the world. He was a radically different Pope to the authoritarian Pope Benedict and brought compassion to the papacy.
He was not afraid to speak truth to political power and clearly viewed Trump as a force for evil, decrying Trump’s deportations of migrants. He wrote, in an open letter to American bishops, that he had “followed closely the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations,” adding that any policy built on force “begins badly and will end badly.”
So now the process of choosing his successor begins. As an atheist, I obviously have no skin in this game, but I would hope that his successor will carry the torch of Pope Francis’s moral authority forward and not be a Pope that returns to the attitudes of Benedict.
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A Digital Coup
Carole Cadwalladr has a warning for us all…
Addendum 21 April 2025: And in this piece for the Observer newspaper, Carole gives the backstory to that TED talk. It’s worth reading, but depressing in that, once again, it shows that AI is being driven by Careless People*.
*From the Great Gatsby:
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
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Normal Service Will Be Resumed ASAP
Long-term visitors to this blog will probably have noticed some changes in the past couple of days. Namely that whilst the content remains the same, the look of the blog has radically altered.
I’ve been using the same WordPress theme since 2010, and I thought I would freshen up the blog by replacing it with the 2025 version.
Alas, there’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip…
The new theme uses a completely different way to display the site. The old WordPress “Widgets” have been replaced by WordPress “Blocks” and there is now a “Site Editor” to manipulate them. So the “Comments” widget has been replaced by the “Comments” block.
Unfortunately, I can’t get the Comments block to work properly. At the moment, on the Homepage, all posts that had comments from people earlier are displaying those comments, but the “Leave a comment” link to add new comments is not working – it’s just text without the comments form.
If you want to add a comment to a post, you can’t do it on the Homepage, you will have to open the post in its own page and then you can add a comment there.
I’ve tried to resolve this by having a dialogue with the WordPress chatbot without success. Eventually I got hold of a human via chat and he/she promised to check out my Homepage template to see if it can be fixed. That was four hours ago, and I’ve heard nothing since.
So, comments on the Homepage are broken for the moment. We’ll see whether Support can fix it for me. In the meantime, as I say, if you want to add a comment to a post, open up the post into its own window and do it there.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Addendum 21 March 2025: As I still hadn’t heard anything further from Support, I tried the Support Chat again and got connected with a human. They investigated my Homepage and found a bug that prevents the Comment Form from being displayed.
The issue will be escalated within WordPress and hopefully a fix will be forthcoming at some point. In the meantime, I’ll see if I can add a workaround text to the Homepage Template that asks people to open the blogpost in a separate page if they want to leave a comment…
Addendum 18 April 2025: Well, I think it has been fixed – the Comments Form block now seems to be working correctly on my Homepage. Hurrah!
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OneDrive Is Now Useless For My Photos
I’ve been using Microsoft’s cloud storage service to hold a copy of my photo library since 2007. In those days the service was known as Windows Live SkyDrive. As a result of a lawsuit brought by the British television broadcaster Sky UK, the service was rebranded to OneDrive in 2014.
While the PC application, Windows Photo Gallery, supported photo metadata tags it wasn’t until 2015 that OneDrive also supported them.
At that point, the combination of Windows Photo Gallery and OneDrive was useful – I could search my photo library using tags in both and both supported using geo tags. The road to get there had been pretty bumpy, Windows Photo Gallery in particular had some bugs that caused havoc to my library and its metadata, but the issues were eventually (mostly) resolved.
Alas, Microsoft dropped Windows Photo Gallery in favour of the Photos app that was first introduced with Windows 8 in 2012. The Photos app, to this day, does not support photo metadata tags, which meant that searching my photo library using tags could only be done in OneDrive.
Since the Photos app is useless, I’m using Photo Supreme from IDimager on my PC as my digital asset management application for my photo library. It supports the industry standard photo metadata schema published by the IPTC. I can manage technical (Exif) tags, descriptive tags, geo tags and region tags (for putting names to faces) using Photo Supreme. The resulting photos are then synchronised with the copy of my photo library held on OneDrive, where the technical, descriptive and geo tags in a photo can be displayed (region tags are not supported in OneDrive).
After 2015, I could also use OneDrive to search my descriptive tags (for example, display all the photos that have been tagged with the name of our dog “Watson”). However, I got a nasty surprise in October last year when I discovered that searching for tags in OneDrive no longer worked.
The reason appears to be because Microsoft has drunk the AI Kool-Aid. OneDrive uses AI to tag your photos. There’s an option switch to enable this:
You will note that it says “You can also add tags to your photos manually to organise and find them more easily”. Originally, this switch just turned on the AI tags function – my tags were always being indexed by OneDrive’s Search engine independently and I could search them.
Now, it appears that Microsoft has tied the indexing of my tags to this option, so I have to turn it on to enable searching of my tags. I don’t want to do this for two reasons:
- I don’t want to use Microsoft’s AI tags; a) they are too error-prone and b) they would pollute my controlled vocabulary of metadata tags.
- I discovered that with this option turned on, as OneDrive was assigning AI tags to my photos, it downloads versions of those photos with no tags at all to my PC. This is a complete turnabout to the old OneDrive, which preserved tags in downloaded copies.
I am a strong believer in the adage “The Truth is in the File” – that is, that an image file must contain complete and accurate metadata. For OneDrive to deliberately strip out my metadata from my image files is a complete showstopper for me, so there is no way that I’m going to turn this new incarnation of the Photo Tagging option on.
With the option off, then the Explore page is useless to me, because OneDrive will not display either my descriptive tags, nor will it read my geo tags and show me “Places”. I simply get, what is, to all intents and purposes, a blank page:
Thanks, Microsoft – you’ve destroyed OneDrive as far as I am concerned.
Addendum 29 July 2025: Well, good news – it appears as though Microsoft has reinstated the indexing of our own tags. So now I can search my photo library once again. Pity that Microsoft didn’t bother to tell us.
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Looking At Women Looking At War
That’s the title of the book written by the novelist, poet and human rights activist Victoria Amelina. It has the subtitle: A War and Justice Diary.
Reading it is a sobering experience. She documented the war waged by Putin’s Russia on Ukraine, photographing the ruins of civilian buildings and recording testimonies of survivors and those who eye witnessed Russian war crimes.
She became the chronicler of women such as Evhenia Zakrevska, a prominent lawyer turned soldier, and Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine, who documented tens of thousands of war crimes. The Center for Civil Liberties was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022.
Victoria Amelina was only 37 when she died in the evening of the 1st of July 2023 from injuries sustained in a Russian missile attack.
The book was incomplete at the time of her death, but has been published by her editors to include her notes and field reports. The Foreword is by Margaret Atwood and contains this judgement on the war:
In this war, Russia is fighting for greed – more territory, more material resources – but Ukraine is fighting for its life; not only its life as a country, but the lives of the citizens of that country, for there is little doubt about what the outcome of a Russian win would be for Ukrainians.
The massacres, the wholesale pillaging, the rapes, the summary executions, the starvation, the child stealing, and the purges do not need to be imagined, for they have happened before. Russians claim to be the “brothers” of Ukrainians, but Ukrainians reject the kinship. Who needs a “brother” who is a homicidal psychopath and is trying to kill you?
Looking at the events, this is totally understandable but it could have been so different without Putin whipping up the psychosis. As Alexei Navalny (who identified as half Russian and half Ukrainian) said when asked whether he identified more as Russian or Ukrainian, “It was like being asked who you loved more, your mother or your father.”.
Read the book, it is a powerful document.
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An Embuggerance Revisited
Back in 2021, I blogged about an embuggerance that had emerged with me: prostate cancer and Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma. As a result, I was put on active monitoring of the prostate and underwent a course of chemotherapy for the NHL. The chemo was successful, my lymph system seems under control. However, the graph of PSA readings for my prostate has turned into a “hockey stick” graph, with the uptick happening last year.
So it’s got to the stage where I’m scheduled to have a RARP (robot-assisted radical prostatectomy) next week.
Time to fasten the seatbelt once again…
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The White House Jerry Springer Show
It seems as though the Jerry Springer Show found a new home in the Oval Office of the White House yesterday. Truly shocking and disgusting scenes of Trump and Vance berating Zelensky. Trump is increasingly behaving like a mafia boss, rather than a President, with Vance as his lieutenant.
It’s increasingly clear that Trump and Putin are chums, and that Europe is out in the cold as far as they are concerned. The office of the Leader of the Free World is empty.
As David Smith writes in the Guardian: Diplomacy Dies On Live TV.
And the analysis by Andrew Roth of how these events have been orchestrated to set up Zelensky as the fall guy is worth reading as well.
Geoff Coupe's Blog 