Notes

I recently came across a post on How-To Geek about how the author gave Windows a serious shot as his primary operating system for two years, but kept coming back to his Mac:

I want to like Windows. It’s great for gaming and handles CAD software fantastically. But, for over a decade, I never seriously considered it as my primary OS—until two years ago. Now, after giving it another shot, I’m back on macOS… just like always. […]

A few years ago, I shifted gears professionally and started working in my woodworking and CNC shop full-time. This meant that I had to have a system that supported my CAD (computer aided design) software, which ran exclusively on Windows.

Yes, I could have used a virtual machine on my MacBook, and I could have just switched back and forth between macOS and Windows, but I decided to go all-in on Windows at that time. […]

I was honestly pretty happy with Windows 11, surprisingly even though I didn’t expect to be, I figured the experiment would go on for a few weeks or months, and I’d come crawling back to macOS, but that just didn’t happen.

I ended up living on Windows for just about two full years. I was able to use my CNC software just fine, and when I shifted gears from running my shop to writing full-time again, I was able to do those tasks well too. Video editing worked great, photo editing was great, and playing games was seamless. I had an always-on computer in the office and my laptop for when I was out. It really was a pretty great setup—except for Windows. […]

Truly, the main thing that drove me away from Windows this time was the integration with my iPhone (or lack thereof). If Windows integrated better with the iPhone, offering solutions similar to AirDrop and access to iMessage, I wouldn’t have left Windows. Hands down. I’m very aware that this is down to Apple’s closed-ecosystem approach, and that’s to say I guess it worked as intended on me.

How-To Geek

I’ve included a few snippets here that sum up his experience. While I don’t need CNC or CAD software, I do play certain games that only run on Windows which is why I ended up building my own PC. After having exclusively used Macs since Mac OS 9 was new (with a brief stint of having to use Windows 7 at work), my experience with Windows 11 was, surprisingly, much better than expected.

That said, every time I come back to macOS, it feels like coming home. So many years of Mac usage means I have my Mac-specific workflows and tools that just don’t work on other platforms. Then there’s the matter of stability.

It’s very rare that I have serious issues with my Macs whereas on my PC, I regularly experience the PC just giving up and restarting. I don’t get a blue screen of death or any other message, the PC just suddenly restarts. That is indicative of a hardware rather than a software problem and I believe it’s probably a thermal issue, but I haven’t had the time to really dig in and fix it yet. That isn’t Windows’s fault, but it still detracts from the stability and user experience since the OS is just one component of the overall PC.

In any case though, I find myself using my Mac for just about everything other than gaming. It’s just more comfortable for me and I am much more productive. In the end, a computer is a tool and that tool needs to work with you rather than against you. If I used Windows or even Linux long enough, I could probably get to the same level of comfort, but I’m happy to stick with my Mac for now since it does everything I need.

Good news for Apple users who care about privacy and use Safari!

9to5Mac writes:

Introduced for Private Browsing sessions in Safari 17.0, Advanced Fingerprinting Protection was also optionally available for regular non-private sessions. With iOS 26, it will be enabled by default. Here’s what that means.

Starting with iOS 26 (as well as iPad 26, and macOS 26), Apple is flipping the switch on Advanced Fingerprinting Protection for all browsing sessions, not just Private Browsing.

9to5Mac

As stated above, this feature has been available for a while in Safari and has been on by default for Private Browsing sessions, however, more technically savvy users may already know that you can already enable it for all browsing sessions in current versions of Safari. I’ve had it on for all browsing sessions for a long time on my Macs, my iPhone and my iPad.

If you want to know how Advanced Fingerprinting Protection works in Safari, then head over to 9to5Mac and read through the original article.

As a long-time Mac user, I find the lack of consistency in Windows’ UI utterly baffling, even in system applications from Microsoft. The latest update to Windows 11 just introduced a new search feature in the Settings application which is actually a good thing, but their choice to use an entirely different type of search bar compared to other Microsoft applications confuses me.

It is located in the center of the title bar much like the Microsoft Store, but instead of having almost square edges like every other search bar (and text box for that matter) in Windows 11’s standard design language, it has fully rounded sides like Mac OS X used to have for all of its search bars for years. Why? Just, why?

Just compare them below. Left is the Settings application and right is the Microsoft Store and File Explorer.

It might seem trivial, but details like this matter. They add up and even if most users don’t consciously notice it, they will on a subconscious level. Consistent UI makes for a smoother, easier user experience which is one major reason why macOS has such a fine reputation for user-friendliness.

I just wish Microsoft would stick to its own UI guidelines, but they won’t. Windows has a reputation for inconsistent UI even among first-party applications and it will continue happily moseying down that path. And, as my grandpa used to say, it will keep looking like the south end of a northbound donkey as it does so.

Washington Post:

Clifton Sellers attended a Zoom meeting last month where robots outnumbered humans.

He counted six people on the call including himself, Sellers recounted in an interview. The 10 others attending were note-taking apps powered by artificial intelligence that had joined to record, transcribe and summarize the meeting.

[…]

Experiences like Sellers’s are becoming more common as AI tools gain momentum in white-collar workplaces, offering time-saving shortcuts but also new workplace etiquette conundrums.

[…]

Major workplace tools such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet offer note-taking features that can record, transcribe and use AI to summarize meetings a person is invited to but doesn’t attend. A profusion of smaller companies, such as otter.ai, offers apps that workers can use to send AI meeting agents to capture calls in a similar way. OpenAI’s ChatGPT recently added a record mode that can function as a meeting note taker. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)

Participants can’t send their note takers to present to a meeting on their behalf — yet. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan has said the company wants to allow users to create “digital twins,” or AI assistants, that can eventually attend meetings for people and take action in their place.

Washington Post

Where can I get one of these?!? That’s my first reaction as meetings tend to be my least productive time. However, I will also admit that the regular contact with the rest of my team that meetings provide has become much more important while working remotely. In a way, the regular meetings and discussions have become the glue holding the team together.

Of course, there are also the privacy implications of AI note-takers:

Sending an AI bot to experience things in your absence could be the next logical step after social media and smartphones created the expectation that anything that can be recorded, will be.

“We’re moving into a world where nothing will be forgotten,” Allie K. Miller, CEO of Open Machine, which helps companies and executives deploy AI, said in a phone interview last week. Always-on recording is changing human behavior, she said, from college parties to corporate boardrooms.

[…]

She advises people to remember that there’s no medium — on or offline — that means you’re safe from being recorded. And if someone skipped a meeting and sent an AI note taker instead, consider that the person may later read or hear anything you say in their absence.

Washington Post

I wonder what EU law has to say about it given that I live in the EU and this article is from American media.

Here’s the original article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/07/02/ai-note-takers-meetings-bots/

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote up some of my thoughts on AI replacing traditional search on the internet. My main fear of it is that it would devastate publishers who rely on traffic to earn money from their content and thereby causing the whole industry to essentially collapse.

Fortunately, I’m not the only one to see the problem and, even more fortunately, someone in a position to do something about it has also realized it and has committed to do something about it. It turns out Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, has introduced a new Cloudflare feature to help publishers:

Cloudflare is now experimenting with tools that will allow content creators to charge a fee to AI crawlers to scrape their websites.

[…]

Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, said the feature would ensure that the Internet as we know it will survive “the age of AI.”

“Original content is what makes the Internet one of the greatest inventions in the last century, and it’s essential that creators continue making it,” Prince said. “AI crawlers have been scraping content without limits. Our goal is to put the power back in the hands of creators, while still helping AI companies innovate. This is about safeguarding the future of a free and vibrant Internet with a new model that works for everyone.”

Some participating publishers expressed optimism in the press release that Cloudflare’s pay-per-crawl feature could potentially stop the endless scraping that publishers defending copyrights have alleged represents wide-scale theft.

Ars Technica

I think this is a fantastic idea. Cloudflare is in the unique position to make an initiative like this a success and perhaps even the standard. Publishers do need to get paid in order to continue to produce content.

You might think that AI firms might be against such a thing, but some are even on board with it:

For Cloudflare’s plan to work, AI companies must sign up, too. However, while some AI companies may not see the incentive, Cloudflare has confirmed that it has partnered with AI companies on the initiative, which may benefit from having a simple interface to negotiate with content creators.

Cloudflare suggested its AI partners benefit from “long-term collaboration” with creators whose updated content will help AI products stay relevant. They also can stop wasting money scraping poor quality data sources, a Cloudflare blog said.

“Without ongoing contributions from content creators, AI systems risk becoming outdated, biased, or less reliable—ultimately diminishing user trust and the value of AI products,” the blog said. “Cloudflare is working with AI companies to give them more signals, and ultimately improve the quality and relevance of content they can access. A healthy, sustainable ecosystem of original content is critical for AI innovation and relevance.”

Ars Technica

The emphasis is mine. It seems that at least some AI companies see the benefit of being able to negotiate access to publisher’s content through one channel rather than with each publisher separately. Aside from that, I can also imagine some AI companies are interested in preventing the onslaught of copyright violation lawsuits that have been working their way through the court systems of multiple countries.

Overall, I’m excited to see where this goes, if anywhere. It’s still very early with the process of trying to figure out where this is all going, so concepts like this will come and go and the ones that stick around will evolve.

There is plenty more to read about the topic on Ars Technica which I have quoted above. I can recommend it.

Otherwise, if you are a Cloudflare user and interested in the program, here is the link to the signup form for the beta: https://www.cloudflare.com/paypercrawl-signup/.

How-To Geek writes:

Dolphin is the default file manager on the KDE desktop, helping you navigate and browse your local and cloud files. Even though it’s usually discussed as a Linux application, you can actually install it on Windows as an alternative to Microsoft’s built-in File Explorer.

Many KDE applications are available and fully supported on Windows and Mac, such as the Kdenlive video editor and Krita digital art creator. Dolphin is also in that category of cross-platform KDE apps, though the Windows version is more of an experimental project. You have to download the latest daily version from KDE’s build server. After installation, Dolphin is available in the Start menu.

How-To Geek

The title already says it all: It’s weird.

That said, Dolphin also offers a number of features that File Explorer doesn’t such as split screen views and the ability to start a terminal session from any folder. The latter may not be as relevant for Windows as it is for Linux, but it’s still convenient for power users.

Windows Central writes:

Earlier this month, a report emerged that the Denmark Ministry of Digital Affairs would shift away from using Windows and Microsoft Office in favor of Linux and LibreOffice. Now, it appears the ministry will only shift away from Office but continue using Windows.

Politiken, which reported on the situation, has amended its original piece, as spotted by PC Gamer. The Denmark Ministry of Digital Affairs will migrate from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice gradually over the coming months.

Windows Central

It’s nice that they’re at least moving to LibreOffice, but it’s still disappointing that they’re sticking to Windows for now.

At this year’s WWDC, Apple announced that they are changing all versions of their different operating systems to be the number 26. As they mentioned, this is based on the year that they will be in service for longest and is inteded to unify the version numbers between all platforms.

As such, this year’s OS releases will include:

• iOS 26
• iPadOS 26
• macOS 26
• watchOS 26
• tvOS 26
• visionOS 26

For anyone following tech news, this won’t be new. As a long-time Apple user, I do, however, have a few things to say about it.

My feelings are mixed. I’m the type of person that needs order. Call me slightly autistic or OCD, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the fact that Apple has mostly been consistent with its versioning when it comes to its software. I do wish they had stopped with the Mac OS X 10.x nonsense sooner and moved on to Mac OS 11, but at least it was still in sequence.

Contrast that to Microsoft’s chaotic and nonsensical versioning system for Windows. I realize that, internally, Windows NT is still versioned sequentially, but you don’t see that anywhere unless you know where to look.

As such, I am a bit dismayed that Apple made such a huge leap in version numbers.

That said though, I understand why. It makes absolute sense to unify the versions across their multiple platforms so that both consumers and developers know which feature set to expect. Since Apple already indicates Mac models by the year they were released, this makes sense to do on the software-side as well. Now, they just need to carry this over to their iPads, iPhones, Apple Watches, etc.

Ubuntu has been using a YEAR.MONTH versioning scheme for their OS releases from the beginning. This has never bothered me because it was logical and sequential.

It will take me a little bit of time to get used to Apple’s new versioning, but as long as they stay consisent and avoid Microsoft’s versioning follies, I think it’s for the better. In the end, it’s just a number that indicates a specfic release of a piece of software and version numbers don’t really matter. They are just labels to identfy a specific piece of software.

This can speak for itself:

The word is lessons

Here’s the scoop

Using separate language allows for separate behavior.

When a person speaks a corporate language instead of regular-person language, they behave in corporate ways instead of regular-person ways.

Which means they’d do things and accept things as a corporate person that regular-person they would not accept.

Here’s the request

Stop contributing to this system! Use the word lessons instead of learnings.

P.S.

Learnings makes you sound like a damn clown. Even if everybody says it — they all sound like clowns.

No Learnings

I don’t know how many times I’ve advocated for people to finally drop the “learnings” crap. I’ve hated it since day one, but have had to listen to it for years. I just wish I had had the idea to create a website like this. Someone else did it, though, and that makes me happy.

Axios writes:

Publishers face an existential threat in the AI era and need to take action to make sure they are fairly compensated for their content, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told Axios at an event in Cannes on Thursday.

Why it matters: Search traffic referrals have plummeted as people increasingly rely on AI summaries to answer their queries, forcing many publishers to reevaluate their business models

Axios

This is something I recently wrote about on my personal blog. If I had to rely on any of my blogs for income, I would be panicking about now. My biggest fear is that AI and the handful of companies that are working on it are going to irreversibly change the internet so that most people stay in their walled gardens. As someone who has been a web developer since the beginning of the internet, that worries me.

It would appear that the privacy laws in the EU continue to pay off.

9to5Mac writes:

Earlier this week, Meta officially flipped the switch on in-app advertising for WhatsApp users worldwide, marking the first time ads have appeared inside the messaging platform. But if you’re in the European Union, there’s now an important update: the rollout won’t be happening for you… yet.

Europe’s privacy guardrails hold yet again

In comments to reporters today (via Politico), Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) said WhatsApp has informed them that the new ad model won’t go live in the EU until next year at the earliest. Previously, Meta had stated that they would be “rolling this out slowly over the next several months”, with no mention of the European rollout timeline.

[…]

To nobody’s surprise, that cross-platform data-sharing element in particular raised immediate concerns from European privacy advocates and regulators.

9to5Mac

I generally try to avoid Meta’s products because of their abysmal attitude towards user privacy, so I won’t be terribly affected by it when it does come to the EU. I only use WhatsApp for the two or three people I know who don’t have anything else. Otherwise, it’s Apple Messages or Signal for me.

I’m definitely glad I live in the EU.

Yesterday, Trump wrote a post on his social media platform that could only come from someone who is used to being in upper management:

I’ve scratched my head at Trump’s antics so much in the past half year that I’m beginning to have a bald spot.