I Finally Ditched Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom

I've been a user of Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom for more than 15 years when I bought my first DSLR, a Nikon D5200. I've since moved on to a Fujifilm X-S10 and a Pixel 8 Pro phone. When I started using Adobe's products the monthly subscription to Photoshop/Lightroom was a reasonable $10/moth. Eventually they raised it to around $15 and then last year to $25 (in Canadian dollar). 

That's a lot of money for a tool that I use only rarely. I have been shooting both RAW and JPEG on my Fujifim X-S10, (Fujifilm names them as RAF files) so using Adobe Camera RAW or Lightroom made sense. But Fujifilm's JPEGs are good enough that most editing can be done using JPEGs in free and simpler tools. 

I was also finding it harder to use Adobe's products. My vision has deteriorated over the last few years and I now find using Photoshop or Lightroom difficult because icons are too small and text and interface text lacks contrast. 

Last month I finally gave up after getting a renewal notice from Adobe. If I kept the subscription, I'd have to wait another year to cancel it or pay a substantial cancellation fee. So I cancelled my subscription. 

By that point, I had identified several free alternatives to Adobe's software.. Here I'm going to briefly describe several tools that I looked at. 

Adobe Express Photos (formerly Photoshop Express)

Adobe Express Photos offers a good selection of basic editing tools and limited AI functions including object removal. RAW files can be edited but have to be saved in another format, and there's no support for Fujifilm's film simulations. There is a mobile version. It's probably what I will use most for simple edits. 

Adobe Photos Express

Canva Affinity

Affinity has a similar interface to Photoshop and contains all of the tools I'm likely to need and more. However I find the interface difficult to use because of the small interface text and icons, although it's a bit better than Photoshop.  It can open and modify RAW files but the image has to be saved in a different format. I'm still going to play around with it, but it won't be my first choice of tools. 

Canva Affinity

Capture One Fujifilm RAW Converter

This is a free tool offered by Capture One to convert Fujifilm's RAF files to other formats. It offers a basic subset of the features in the full Capture One and support Fujifilm's film simulations. Unfortunately, the interface was unusable due to small text and icons. Finding no way to customize the interface for my needs, I uninstalled it. 

Fujifilm X RAW Studio

Fujifilm X RAW Studio is a bit of an odd duck as it uses your Fujifilm camera for processing RAW files with the camera connected to your computer by a USB cable. Processing is limited to whatever functions are built into the camera. The advantage of this approach is that it allows you to use film recipes (modified film simulations). For my purposes, it's easier to use Silkypix's converter. 

Microsoft Photos

Microsoft Photos is the built-in photo editor for Windows 11, offering the usual selection of basic editing tools, with a few extras like background selection and generative erase. There's a good selection of filters which also include a handy slider for controlling intensity. I find the icon-based interface awkward to use, given my vision. Still, it includes enough functionality that it may be all that many people may need. As for RAW files, you can open and edit them, but changes have to be saved in another format. 

Microsoft Photos

Pixlr Express

Pixlr Express is a web-based tool with free and paid subscription versions. Pixlr Express is a basic editor similar to Adobe Express Photos but with more features including some AI tools with 20 AI credits/month. (Subscription plans offer more AI credits). It won't open RAW files. 

Pixlr Express

Pixlr Editor

Pixlr Editor is a more advanced web-based tool with free and paid subscription versions. The interface uses a side panel and menus with a level of features comparable to Affinity or Photoshop. Given that it's web-based, I find easier to use. As with Pixlr Express, the free version includes 20 AI credits/month with subscription plans  offering more credits so you can use the advanced AI functions. It won't open RAW files. This will likely be my choice for more advanced editing of JPEGs. 

Pixlr Editpr

Silkypix RAW File Converter EX

Siklypix RAW File Converter EX is provided free to Fujifilm camera users. It's similar in features and functionality to Adobe Camera RAW. There's a full range of editing tools available and because it's made for Fujifilm cameras, you can access film simulations and modify camera settings. Changes to RAW files are saved in a separ .spd file. Skins are available for different monitor resolutions and I was able to find one that I could use. This will probably be my first choice for working directly with RAW files, although it's probably overkill for what I usually need to do.

Silkypix RAW File Converter EX

Summary

So to summarize:

• For simple editing of JPGs, Adobe Express Photos or Pixlr Express.
• For advanced editing of JPGs, Pixlr Editor or Affinity
• For direct editing or conversion of RAW/RAF files, Silkypix RAW File Converter EX

I may do more detailed write-ups on the programs mentioned above after I've had more time to use them.

Featured Links - April 29, 2026

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

A calm day on the lake

• A Tale of Two Countries. "Two superpowers, one behaving pathetically." The contrast between China and the U.S. is stark. 
• Comrade Trump. The unintended consequences of Trump's policies are not what he intended. 
• Certain Nap Patterns in Older Adults Could Be a Warning Sign, Study Find. "Taking a lot of daytime naps, especially in the morning, is associated with higher mortality rates for older adults, researchers in the US found. This "excessive" napping may signal underlying or developing health problems, they note, and could represent a trackable metric for early detection."
• The new iPhones have a problem turning back on after the battery runs out. If you have an iPhone 17, you should read this. 
• This pitching robot has been a ‘game changer’ for the Blue Jays and its inventors. It all started in a Toronto classroom (gift link). "Twenty-eight MLB teams and many more around the world lease the Trajekt Arc, a baseball training machine that recreates a pitcher’s delivery."
• This exotic particle could finally explain why matter has mass. "A newly spotted exotic particle state could finally expose how the universe gives matter its mass."
• Linus Inside a PDF. Really. Some people have too much time on their hands. 
• The MAHA-MAGA Breakup. "The political marriage brokered by RFK Jr. was doomed from the get-go. And Republicans may pay a steep electoral price in November."
• Where to get the 2026 Hugo finalists. Links to all of the 2026 Hugo Awards finalists. Most of the short fiction and some of the other categroies are free to read online. 
• Peptides, explained: Answers to your top questions. "Catching you up on the flood online information." Reiable information on the latest wellness buzz.
• More Surveillance Demands to Come?: Government Admits Bill C-22’s Lawful Access Provisions Could Be Expanded. Canadians should be aware of what the govrenment is doing here. 
• Galileo’s handwritten notes found in ancient astronomy text. "Discovery sheds new light on how famed astronomer came to lead a scientific revolution."
• The Slopaganda War. "The Iran war isn’t over yet, but on the online battlefield, Trump has lost decisively.."

Featured Links - April 8, 2026

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

A choppy bay

• The Next Coup Attempt. "And How to Stop It." An unsettling post from historian Timothy Snyder. 
• The Artemis Earth photo is incredible – but the one thing that nobody is telling you about it will blow your mind. 'The famous "Hello, World" photo by astronaut Reid Wiseman isn’t quite what you think.' I didn't figure it out until I read the article.
• How to Find Thunderbird Profile Location in Windows 11, 10, 8, 8.1, 7. I needed to figure this out because Thunderbird moved the profile folder on my wife's laptop and my backup program couldn't find it. This is a useful article for anyone using Thunderbird on Windows.
• The Lancet: Long COVID and Risk of Incident Cardiovascular Disease. "A recent study (see PLoS Med.: Association Between COVID-19 Vaccination and Sudden Death in Apparently Healthy Younger Individuals) found no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines increase the risk of sudden cardiac death in young healthy adults, but they did find a strong link between recent COVID infection and an increased risk of sudden cardiac death." 
• Data Centres Are on Track to Wreck the Planet. Can We Stop Them? "They will guzzle more water and power than the world can afford—for an AI video of your cat as an astronaut."
• Any USB drive or cable you plug in might be a silent killer. "As if we didn’t already have enough malware to worry about, malicious hackers and state-sponsored cybercrime teams are turning ordinary-looking USB drives and cables into weapons that can infect or fry — within a single second — any computer or electronic component you plug them into."
• Experiments refute dark matter claim. "The results of her analysis, which have excluded the dark matter explanation with greater confidence, were published in Physics Review Letters ...". 
• Canadian couple shows how a $40 weekly food budget is possible. "Michelle Nijdam, 31, has been gaining a following online after she started sharing how she sticks to a strict $160 monthly budget (or $40 weekly budget) while living in Vancouver — one of the most expensive cities in Canada. On her YouTube channel, @MichellesHomemaking, she talks about the ups and downs of having a tight budget while sharing some handy tips."
• Gambling on War and Death. "Polymarket allows anonymous accounts to bet on everything — but with increasing attention to war. Will a tanker be seized? When will the next drone strike occur? Gamblers can even look at maps of Ukrainian villages and play the odds on which neighbourhood of innocent civilians will be hit. It is literally about making a killing on killing. And it is also about manipulating the market in frightening ways."
• The 51st State Fantasy Is Over: How King Charles and Mark Carney Put An End To Trump's Desire To Invade Canada. "How Trump’s annexation campaign collapsed against 200 years of history, one king, and a prime minister who played the long game."
• Art UK. "Connecting you to art. Art UK is a unique digital experience that connects everyone with the UK's public art collections. We digitally unite one million artworks from 3,500 institutions – museums, libraries, town halls, hospitals – as well as public art in our streets such as sculptures and murals."
• Why U.S. Gatling Guns Are Not Stopping Iran’s Shahed Drones. "In any discussion of drone defense, Gatling-type guns are often presented as a trump card. These rapid-fire weapons, originally developed to defend U.S. warships against sea-skimming missiles, can easily down bigger and faster threats than a 120 mph Shahed drone. On paper they look devastatingly effective, and news reports speak enthusiastically of their “shredding Iranian drones.” But they are not a magic wand to make all drones disappear, and some Shaheds are getting through."
• America forgot how to make a classified nuclear warhead ingredient. "The U.S. government forgot how to make a classified component of its own nuclear warheads, then spent $92 million figuring it out again. The material is called Fogbank, and almost everything about it is classified — its composition, its purpose, and how it's manufactured." Just think of all the money they could have saved if they'd had a documentation library,

Featured Links - April 1, 2026

 Things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Note:  There are no April fool jokes in the post.

The rite of spring

• The broligarchy's war on journalism. "The capture of US media by Trump allies is accelerating and the UK is the next in line. Plus: the mystery money behind my old newspaper." The financial shenanigans described here are quite remarkable. If you read The Guardian or The Observer, you should read this. 
• When is an alien invasion not an alien invasion? "Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's alien invasion novel is a time capsule from the Cold War, and a reminder that the threat of nuclear annihilation isn't ancient history." A good review of one of my favourite books from the 1980s that places the book in a wider historical perspective. 
• Endgame for the Open Web. "Now, the centibillionaires have begun their final assault on the last, best parts of what's still open, and likely won't rest until they've either brought all of the independent and noncommercial parts of the Internet under their control, or destroyed them. Whether or not they succeed is going to be decided by decisions that we all make as a community in the coming months. Even though there have always been threats to openness on the web, the stakes have never been higher than they are this time."
• ‘Truly spectacular’ drug for sleeping sickness simplifies treatment, raising hopes for eradication. "European regulators greenlight new one-dose compound that could help African countries get rid of an ancient burden." 
• ‘Canadians don’t want to come here any more’: anger over Trump squeezes US border businesses. "Shops and restaurants once bustling with tourists now struggle for survival as Canadians think twice about crossing the border." It's not just anger over the tariffs; people do not want to deal with the increasingly obtrusive border searches and the risk of ending up in an ICE detention centre. 
• Computer finds flaw in major physics paper for first time (archive link). "A computer language designed to robustly verify mathematical theorems and expose logical flaws has been turned towards a physics paper – and spotted an error. The discovery raises questions about how many other papers may harbour similar issues."
• How to Home. From Recomendo: "a YouTube channel with excellent videos that demonstrate how to complete common household repairs, such as wiring switches, fixing faucet leaks, and threading wire through walls and ceilings. Unlike many DIY videos, these feature high-quality audio, are well-lit, and aren’t blurry."
• How Alberta’s Separatist Movement Could Shake North America. "The resentments, politics, and risks behind their push to leave Canada." The separatists in Alberta are a small minority, but they are very committed and have ties to the US right. 
• The Hunt for Mr. Deepfakes. "A Toronto-area pharmacist is accused of being the internet’s most prolific peddler of deepfake porn. He’s just the beginning."
• This Week’s Small, Furry and Wet Reminder, That Repair is Still Possible. "Some hope for humanity, brought to you by beavers, with no consultants, no ribbon cuttings, just the ancient art of fixing what we keep breaking." Today, the UK. Tomorrow the world!
• Silicon Valley Giants Finally Face the Music. "Is this the Big Tobacco moment for the tech bros?"
• America and Public Disorder. "You can learn more about the U.S. by traveling overseas and comparing, and five years of that has taught me we accept far too much public disorder. We are the world’s richest country, and yet our buses, parking lots, and city streets are filthy, chaotic, and threatening. Antisocial and abnormal behavior, open addiction, and mentally tortured people are common in almost every community regardless of size."
•  The life and times of Grateful Dead icon Bob Weir. "We salute the Grateful Dead original, who – in the last 30 years of his life – stepped out from Jerry Garcia’s considerable shadow to emerge as a guitar hero in his own right."

Featured Links - March 18, 2026

Things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Birds wintering on the Bay

• Please drive carefully: scientists plan to transport volatile antimatter for first time. "Cern researchers are testing traps capable of moving antimatter, which explodes into energy as soon as it comes into contact with regular matter."
• War on Iran may provoke a terrorist attack in US – and that may be the point. "‘Of course there’s going to be retaliation,’ says one expert. ‘It may be that this is what Trump’s interested in’"
• When you’ve been told to find new ways to use AI in technical documentation. "Some Documentation Managers and Technical Authors are now being asked to demonstrate how they are using AI and to quantify the benefits. Here are some suggestions on how to approach that challenge." In this article, I saw several uses for AI that would have potentially improved my productivity in my last job. 
• The man who proved rockets could reach space was mocked in his time. "One hundred years ago, Robert Goddard’s invention of the liquid-fueled rocket changed space exploration." This week was the 100th anniversary of Robert Goddard's first launch of a liquid fueled rocket. We've come a long way in a 100 years. 
• Forget Google Docs, Canadian-made cDox could be your new place to write. "cDox stores your data in Montreal, and promises not to train AI on it." A Canadian alternative to Google Docs.
• Dish drive (gift link). "Hundreds of antennas take root in B.C.’s Okanagan Valley for an ambitious project to monitor signals from space."
• Wireless eye implant helps blind patients read again. "Now researchers have shown that a tiny wireless eye implant may help restore some of that lost central vision. In a clinical study, many blind older adults who received the implant regained enough clarity to recognize letters and short words. While the device does not restore natural sight, it helped several participants read again after years of irreversible vision decline."
• The “dumb” TV pivot: why your next screen shouldn’t be smart. "Reclaim your living room: screens without smart TV bloatware." We have a smart TV but hardly ever use any of the built-in features, preferring to stream through our Chromecast. 

Musicolet Music Player for Android

I've been struggling with using VLC as a music player on my Pixel phone. While it's very versatile and will play almost any format, the interface is clunky and it lacks some basic functionality, like easily playing all songs in a folder or an album.

I've found a good alternative if you are looking for something to play local file, IOW files that you've transferred to your phone. Musicolet is fast, has no ads,  a clean interface, all the options you are likely to need for playing music, and it's free. 

About the only thing I've found missing is an option to increase the text size in app. That aside, it's exactly what I was looking for. 

There's no IOS version, so iPhone owners are out of luck.

VLC Is Getting Dark Mode - UPDATE

UPDATE: Finally, VLC has dark mode. It's been added to the Preferences dialog in version 3.0.23 and seems to be working fine.  This is good, because the hack that I mention below stopped working and VLC has been a real strain to use without dark mode. 

I generally use VLC for media playback but it's been a struggle because it doesn't have dark mode, which with my vision problems is essential. Well, it does now if you download the latest nightly build, version 3.0.22. 

The current stable version seems to be 3.0.20, which the  Check for Updates option says is up to date. Version 4.0 is in development but I'm not going to try that one for now..

Instructions on downloading it are in this blog post by Gordon Glas. Note that Windows Defender will probably give you a warning about installing it, but considering it's coming from the developer's website, you can ignore that. 

Given that the build is still under development, it may not be stable, but so far I haven't noticed any major issues. The dark palette could use some tweaking for better contrast in places like the Help > About dialog and the playback buttons , but it's still far easier on the eyes than the previous version. 

Featured Links - November 11, 2025

 Things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Model of the Edmund Fitzgerald at the Shipwreck Museum in Michigan

A Ghost Fleet of Tankers Is Keeping Russia’s War Machine Afloat. The West Can’t Stop It. "How Putin outsmarted the oil sanctions."

Still Haunted by the Edmund Fitzgerald. "50th Anniversary Tribute". Seems appropriate that we are getting our first winter storm on Sunday. 

 Google Docs Gets Smarter. "Audio narration, AI help, and 40 new templates." Many of the new features require an AI-enabled plan, but there are some, like document tabs, that could be quite useful for longer documents.

The Florentine Diamond Resurfaces After 100 Years in Hiding. "A legendary jewel of the Hapsburg dynasty — not seen since 1919 and thought lost, stolen or recut — has actually been safe in a Canadian bank for decades." This is quite a story. 

‘Frankenstein’: How Close Is Guillermo del Toro’s Film to the Original Novel? A Mary Shelley Expert Answers Our Burning Questions. "So, just how well does del Toro’s version stack up against Mary Shelley’s original novel? We asked Julie Carlson, an English professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and an expert on the British Romantic period and the Wollstonecraft-Godwin-Shelley family, for her thoughts." I enjoyed the movie, though I did find it hard to watch in places (many very dark scenes). 

Find cancer clinical trials in Canada. "Helping people living with cancer and healthcare professionals navigate cancer trial options." It's good that Canadians have an alternative to looking in the US for information. 

New laser treatment could stop blindness before it starts. "A new laser treatment may halt dry macular degeneration by using controlled warmth to trigger the eye’s self-repair mechanisms." Of course, it will be years before this becomes widespread, assuming it works. 

I’m never going back to Microsoft Word after mastering this open-source self-hosted tool. "Enter HedgeDoc, the open-source web-based collaborative markdown editor that has changed my writing setup. By running it on my server, I achieved true data independence that Word could never offer." Ten or fifteen years ago, I would have jumped on this, but at this point in my life, I just can't be bothered.

Featured Links - November 4, 2025

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Autumn Leaves

My Non-Fossil Car Experience. "Very few EV drivers ever go back." Our next car will probably be a hybrid. I don't think we're ready for a full EV yet. 

Photoshop's biggest rival is now free, with one big exception. I'm going to have to download Affinity and have a good, hard look at it. I don't need the (mostly AI) subscription features for the limited editing I do. 

A Review of Grokipedia, Using Myself as Test Subject. John Scalzi explains why you shouldn't trust Grokipedia and LLMs in general. 

Why time feels like it’s speeding up, and how to slow the pace. "You’re not wrong to think time is running away from you. Experts explain the strange phenomenon and what to do about it." 

We’re Number Two! "How Trump ceded the future to China." In less than one year, the Trump regime has set the US into a decline that may take a generation to recover from, if recovery is possible at all. 

Please stop using NotebookLM as a note-taking app. "At its core, NotebookLM is a research assistant. Not a note-taking tool." Here's a contrast POV to the article I linked to last week. 

Can You Use a High-End TV as a Computer Monitor? "A high-end TV can be an affordable way to get more display real estate for your computer setup—but there are some essential considerations before you replace your monitor with a massive OLED or QD OLED TV."

Featured Links - August 5, 2025

Things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about. 

A farm north of Oshawa

• The 10 apps I can't live or work without - on Windows, Mac, and mobile. I've been reading Ed Bott's articles and listening to him on podcasts for years. You can trust his research and his opinions. You might also want to read this article he wrote about the comments section for the article. 
• Midcentury Dreams. "Chesley Bonestell and Willy Ley's The Conquest of Space". I remember that book fondly, and the movie that was based on it.
• Flourishing chemosynthetic life at the greatest depths of hadal trenches. Life at 9 km. deep in the ocean. This might bode well for the prospect of life in the outer icy moons of the solar system. 
• A perfect storm (gift link). "As wildfires and storms fuel climate worries, the rise of weather content on social media shows there's a fine line between preparation and obsession."
• I Trusted Gemini With a Web Search and It Sent Me Straight to a Scam. "AI is creeping into more parts of the internet, answering search queries, recommending downloads, and even deciding what emails deserve your attention. But just because it sounds helpful doesn’t mean it always knows what it’s doing."
• Dennis McNally’s Last Great Dream: Memories of Working with the Grateful Dead, Tracking Kerouac and Exploring How Bohemians Became Hippies. I definitely want to read this.
• De-Google Project Update. "I introduced this family project in the spring of 2024. I won’t reproduce those arguments for why we’re working on this, but in the current climate I feel like I hardly need to. Since that post, our aversion to Google dependency has only grown stronger. Progress has been non-zero but not fast."

Featured Links - July 22, 2025

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Sunset along the 401

• Five days, 65 km, 86,000 steps — and one restless city: I walked all the way across Toronto. This is what I saw (archive link). I am waiting for the Eglinton Crosstown to open and plan to ride it across Toronto, perhaps with stops at some of the stations on the underground part of the line. 
• A Juicy Chronicle of the Fat Decades at Condé Nast (gift link). Empire of the Elite, by Michael M. Grynbaum, is a story of (mostly) insider-outsiders who helmed the glossiest American magazines in their heyday." I miss magazines and browsing the racks in stores like Lichtman's, now sadly defunct. 
• Why Did the Rich Pull Away from the Rest? 'This is Part I of Stone Center Senior Scholar Paul Krugman’s series “Understanding Inequality,” which originally appeared on his Substack newsletter.' This is an important series of articles and worth the time to read.
• Published Via Desktop. 'A list of programs from the all-too-brief golden era of desktop publishing that “didn’t make it.” The GUI’s killer app didn’t slay forever.' Out of the 10 programs listed in the article, I used two: Aldus PageMaker and Venture Publisher. 
• The Peptide Craze. "The Surge in Use of Off-Label and Non-FDA Approved Peptides." TANSTAAFL. 
• Terry Gilliam Reflects On ‘Brazil’ As Film Celebrates 40th Anniversary & The Challenges Of Getting Movies Made Today: “I Really Don’t Want Any More Fights” I really must rewatch Brazil; it's one of my favourite movies. 
• Alberta’s Book Ban Is a Blatant Act of Cultural Vandalism. "The push to sanitize school collections erases what literature is for: knowledge, discovery, the freedom to think." I am sad to see this happening in Canada. 
• The Em Dash Responds to the AI Allegations. "I would like to address the recent slander circulating on social media, in editorial Slack channels, and in the margins of otherwise decent Substack newsletters. Specifically, the baseless, libelous accusation that my usage is a telltale sign of artificial intelligence."
• Radical New Theory Rewrites the Story of the Earliest Universe. "A new theory promises to simplify our approach to the universe's earliest moments, but some cosmologists say further mathematical scrutiny is warranted." Simplification is good. 

Featured Links - March 24, 2025

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

The of winter's snow (I hope)

• American Democracy is not in Decline, it's Dead. "We need to get beyond our own disbelief at how quickly the Trump regime has dismantled the vestiges of a liberal democratic order and implemented an authoritarian regime. We need to recognize reality for what it is. It is no longer appropriate to speak of the United States as a democracy under assault from within, or in decline. The United States is no longer a democracy."
• How Should We Think About the Economics of AI? A conversation between economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Paul Krugman. This is quite interesting. 
• What to know about the bird flu outbreak in wild birds and what it means for backyard bird feeders. "Take precautions around sick or dead wild birds, experts recommend. But you can keep your bird feeder up. Despite the spread in birds and other wild animals, scientists say the threat to the general population is currently low."
• Democrats Fighting Wrong Battle Because Trump Is a Symptom of a Huge Societal Problem. "Basically the Democratic Party needs to focus on how to make people's lives better. Some of that involves regulating technology--like banning the use of artificial intelligence in the college admissions process, banning the posting of fake jobs, prohibiting the use of AI to review cover letters and resumes, perhaps putting hard caps on the percentages of international students at American Universities, limiting the use of H1B Visas, and on encouraging people to disconnect."
• Stupidification. "It's getting worser." A light take on a serious problem.
• The Language of Surrender. "How Euphemism and Distortion Are Making Resistance to Authoritarianism Unspeakable."
• ‘All the birds returned’: How a Chinese project led the way in water and soil conservation. "The Loess plateau was the most eroded place on Earth until China took action and reversed decades of damage from grazing and farming."
• You Can Remove DRM From Your Digital Books, but It's Probably Illegal. "There should be a legal way to back up the books and audiobooks you've purchased."
• 'The universe has thrown us a curveball': Largest-ever map of space reveals we might have gotten dark energy totally wrong. "Findings from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) suggest that dark energy could be evolving over time. If they're right, cosmology will need a new model."
• These identical house designs could soon appear all over Ontario. It's a small step in dragging the construction industry kicking and screaming into the 21st century. 

 

Featured Links - March 17, 2025

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Swan on the ice

• Anonymous sources: Starship will need a major rebuild after two consecutive failures. That much is obvious. The question is how long it will take. 
• The Magical Humanism of Sir Terry Pratchett. "Ten years mourning the loss of a great human". I have not read any of Pratchett's books, something which I may remedy one of these days.
• The Discworld on TV/Film,—Live-Action. I have seen three of the series mentioned in this article and enjoyed all of them. 
• How Worried Should We Be About the Economy? "A conversation with Neil Dutta." Two economists discuss the odds of a recession. 
• Blame Canada. An article from historian Timothy Snyder in which he talks about Trump's Big Lies about Canada. (Trump being Trump, there's more than one.) Snyder is always worth reading and this is especially so.
• Earth’s Orbit Is Filling Up With Junk. Greenhouse Gases Are Making the Problem Worse. "By the end of the century, a shrinking atmosphere could create a minefield for satellites."
• Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup’. "Musk’s loyalists at DOGE have infiltrated dozens of federal agencies, pushed out tens of thousands of workers, and siphoned millions of people’s most sensitive data. The next step: Unleash the AI." A major investigation by Wired. 
• Pocket Casts is Now Free on Windows, Mac, and Web. The best podcast app has gotten even better and the price is right.
• Unraveling the mystery of high-temperature superconductors from first principles. "The mysteries of high-temperature superconductivity have not been fully solved—but we are now closer than ever to understanding them at their most fundamental level. This journey is just beginning, and I'm excited to see where it takes us next."
• Mapping the U.S.-Canada Energy Relationship. "The United States and Canada are each other’s largest energy trading partners as measured by the value of energy commodity trade, which in 2017 stood at U.S.$95 billion. The energy relationship between the two countries extends beyond just the trade of commodities, encompassing a variety of common, though not always identical, economic, security, and environmental priorities."

Backing Up Mozilla Thunderbird on Windows

If you are using Mozilla Thunderbird for your email in Windows 10 or 11, and you have installed Thunderbird from the Microsoft Store, you may want to look at this article. 

I spent about three hours on Saturday trying to find the location of Thunderbird's data files on Nancy's laptop, after I realized that the files in the default location were out-of-date and not being updated. This made no sense as Thunderbird was running perfectly. It also meant that I did not have a current backup of her email, as I had just been putting the standard location in my Free FileSync program and assuming everything was OK. 

It turns out that if you install from the Microsoft Store, it puts the data files in a non-standard location. Instead of being in

C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird

they are in 

C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\packages\MozillaThunderbird.MZLA_h5892qc0xkpca\LocalCache\Roaming\Thunderbird

(I think that the .MZLA_h5892qc0xkpca portion of the directory name may vary by machine).

It's been 18 months since I set up Thunderbird on her laptop. I remember having trouble getting it to find the files from the previous PC, which I had copied to the default location. I'm not sure how I got it running in the first place, but I did get the mail from our desktop PC into Thunderbird. I made the mistaken assumption that they were now in the standard profile location, and those were the ones I was backing up. 

Incidentally, in this situation, Thunderbird will give you an error message if you try to open the Profiles directory in Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profiles Folder. The error message does show the correct path of the Profiles directory, but it won't open it.

Looking at the AppData\Local\Packages directory containing the Thunderbird files leads me to suspect Windows is using this directory for other programs as well. 

Featured Links - January 13, 2025

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Birds on the ice

• Why I’m disappointed with the TVs at CES 2025. "Op-ed: TVs miss opportunity for real improvement by prioritizing corporate needs." The enshittification of technology continues. 
• See how a small fire in L.A. turned into a monster, hour by hour (gift link). The speed with which the Palisades fire developed is absolutely terrifying. 
• The Steampunk Explorer's Expanded Calendar Listing. "We maintain a database of approximately 1,200 events that take place each year. In addition to steampunk gatherings, they include science fiction conventions, anime conventions, comic cons, Renaissance fairs, book fairs, and more."
• Why a Canadian director’s documentary on Amazon’s labour unrest is striking a chord. And why you can only watch it until the end of the week on the filmmakers' website. 
• Have a Highly Trustless 2025. "Blockchain, accelerating obsolescence and the perils of writing near-future science fiction." An insightful article by SF author, Karl Schroeder, who discusses the topics in light of his novel, Stealing Worlds. (On my TBR list, and I will probably have a review in a few months). 
• The School Shootings Were Fake. The Terror Was Real. "The inside story of the teenager whose “swatting” calls sent armed police racing into hundreds of schools nationwide—and the private detective who tracked him down." 
• The Physicist Decoding the Nonbinary Nature of the Subatomic World. "Inside the proton, quarks and gluons shift and morph their properties in ways that physicists are still struggling to understand. Rithya Kunnawalkam Elayavalli brings to the problem a perspective unlike many of their peers."
• Linguists Speak Of A New Language Dialect Evolving In The US. "A unique Spanglish cocktail has been emerging in Miami over recent decades."

Some Newsletters Worth Reading

I'm finding that reading email newsletters is a better use of my time than browsing the web looking for news or especially, analysis of current affairs. (Also better is using an RSS reader like Feedly, but I'll save writing about that for another time).

These are some of the newsletters that I subscribe to. They are all free, though some have a paid tier for more posts or features. 

• Field Notes is a weekly newsletter of urban nature writing and photography from author Christopher Brown. His latest book is A Natural History of Empty Lots which incorporates some material from this newsletter.. He has also written three dystopian, near future novels, including Tropic of Kansas, which I recently read and recommend. 
• Letters From an American is a daily newsletter from historian Heather Cox Richardson. She is especially good at putting current events into their historical context. This newsletter is my main tool for understanding what's going on behind the daily flood of US political news. 
• Ground Truths by Eric Topol, a cardiologist, still practicing, with some expertise in genomics, digital and artificial intelligence, at the Scripps Institute. Weekly, mostly about medical topics, including COVID-19.
• The Status Kuo by Jay kuo, a lawyer who takes "a deep dive each weekday into important political and legal topics, broken down in plain English and easily digestible morsels." He also writes for The Big Picture.
• The Big Picture, founded by George Takei publishes two in-depth articles a week on social and political issues. 
• The Munro Report by Alasdair Munro, a senior clinical research fellow in paediatric infectious diseases in the UK. Topics include child health, clinical research, and infectious diseases. 
• betakit, a weekly newsletter about Canadian startup and technology companies. If you're interested in Canadian tech news, betakit is the site to go to.
• Thinking About.... by Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale and author of the books On Tyranny, Our Malady, and most recently On Freedom. This is a good complement to Letters From an American.
• Transfer Orbit by Andrew Liptak, an author and historian who writes about cosplay and science fiction and fantasy. 
• Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy, by Phil Plait, astronomer and author of Death From the Skies: The Science Behind the End of the World. "Everything, the Universe, and Life".
• Your Local Epidemiologist by Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, an  an epidemiologist and data scientist. The newsletter covers a wide range of medical topics including the pandemic and other infectious diseases. Of all the medical newsletters I read, this is the best. 
• Unapocalyptic by Karl Schroeder, a professional futurist and science fiction writer. His goal is to provide "a community of dedicated people putting their heads together to find out how to use one to amplify the effect of another—to turn a jumble of ideas into a system for change."

I get several other newsletters, but most of those are published by the newspapers that I subscribe to and provide links to daily news stories that they want to promote.

How a Bad User Interface Almost Wrecked a US Destroyer

A bad user interface can make a website hard to navigate or a software program hard to use. But in the real world of physical things, a bad user interface can have more serious consequences. This article by Adrian Hanft describes how bad design contributed to the collision that killed ten sailors and wrecked a destroyer. 

Two years ago a Navy destroyer was ripped open by the nose of a Liberian tanker. Ten sailors were crushed or drowned as their sleeping quarters filled with water after the collision.

At the heart of the tragedy is a single checkbox on a touchscreen. This is the untold story of how bad design caused a crew to lose control of the $1.8 billion John S McCain destroyer and the mystery around how designers manage to avoid blame when their creations cause death and destruction.

Before going any further, I want to make it clear that I am just a civilian piecing together this story from whatever information I can glean from the internet. I have trudged through hundreds of pages of technical documents and dense reports. Much of this documentation is intentionally vague, some of it has been redacted, and all of it has undoubtedly been scrubbed by lawyers and PR professionals. As a result, there are probably errors in my analysis and conjecture. However, with that disclaimer in mind, I believe the following story may be the clearest, most human-readable account of the McCain accident that you will find anywhere. It may also be the first and only public source of real design criticism ever written in the two years since the accident. I am not sure how the responsibility fell to me, but I am happy to describe the role that design played in this tragedy.

WordStar 7.0 Archive

WordStar is probably responsible for me sitting here today at a computer typing a blog entry. Sometime in late 1983, I visited friend and fanzine publisher (at the time, now a full-time writer and editor) Robert Runte. He had an Obsorne PC with WordStar. The computer was clunky and the screen microscopic, but I took one look at WordStar and that was it; I had to have it. Later that year, I bought an IBM PC with WordStar. Eventually I moved on to WordStar 2000 (which was a mistake on both the company's part for making it and mine for buying it) and then Microsoft Word for DOS and later Word for Windows. 

But WordStar has a place in my heart as it led directly to my career as a technical writer. 

WordStar hasn't been published or updated in more than 30 years, but still has a small cadre of devoted users, among them several successful writers, including George R. R. Martin and Robert J. Sawyer. Now Sawyer has taken it upon himself to assemble and publish an archive site for WordStar 7.0, collecting the program, along with documentation, and useful tools in one place. 

Says Sawyer:

I wanted there to be a monument to this, the finest word-processing program ever created. As Anne Rice said, “WordStar was magnificent. I loved it. It was logical, beautiful, perfect. Compared to it, Microsoft Word is pure madness.”

And, I suppose I’m thinking a bit about my legacy, too. Once I’m gone, my literary estate will need to deal with my electronic manuscripts, and my executor should be able to work with them on her own computer rather than just mine. Also, there are countless other writers who are no longer with us who wrote with WordStar, including Arthur C. Clarke; I hope this archive I’ve created will be of use to scholars.

Anyone can have WordStar for DOS 7.0 up and running on a Windows computer in a matter of minutes using this archive; with just a little bit more work, WordStar for DOS 7.0 also runs just fine under Linux and Mac OS.

The Register describes the history of WordStar in more detail in its article about Sawyer and the archive.

WordStar has a long and exceptionally involved history, as the Wordstar.org fan site used to chronicle. It started out on CP/M, was ported to DOS, multiple incompatible programs of the same name launched, and later still ported to Windows. The last ever release was part of an obscure office suite. Sawyer is correct: the final DOS version really is the true classic.

MicroPro, the company behind WordStar, was repeatedly acquired. At one point it was part of SoftKey, which was acquired and became the Learning Company, which was bought by Mattel in what BusinessWeek called "the worst acquisition of all time." As a result, the software business was spun off again and bought by Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep.

Kudos to Robert for taking the time to help preserve a piece of our computing history.  

Featured Links - April 29, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about:

The marina has yet to wake up

• How AI mathematicians might finally deliver human-level reasoning (archive.ph link). "Artificial intelligence is taking on some of the hardest problems in pure maths, arguably demonstrating sophisticated reasoning and creativity – and a big step forward for AI."
• Here's the latest on H5N1—avian flu—and some resources tracking the virus. You may want to bookmark some of the sites mentioned in this article.
• SpaceX making progress on Starship in-space refueling technologies. "NASA says SpaceX is on track to demonstrate in-space refueling of Starship next year, a critical technology for returning humans to the lunar surface using that vehicle."
• The unspoken obnoxiousness of Google’s Gemini improvements. "Google's Gemini chatbot is seeing all sorts of upgrades on Android this week, but those advancements reveal a darker underlying reality."
• ‘In the US they think we’re communists!’ The 70,000 workers showing the world another way to earn a living. "The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the globe’s largest industrial co-operative, with workers paying for the right to share in its profits – and its losses. In return for giving more to their employer, they expect more back."
• Urbanist draws attention to city's design monstrosity in local community: 'So tired of pedestrian-hostile areas'. "A corner of TikTok is having a field day over a video bemoaning low-effort city planning, making life dangerous for pedestrians. The online community, especially through hashtags like #cityplanning, has been paving new avenues of communication for unsatisfied urbanites, especially in the United States."
• Restoring sight is possible now with optogenetics (gift link). "People suffering from macular degeneration, along with other diseases that impair sight, may soon benefit from gene therapy." I will have to talk to my ophthalmologist the next time I see him. It's probably too far down the road to help me though. 
• Plato's Burial Place and Details of His Last Night Revealed in Carbonized Scroll From Herculaneum. "Scientists have deciphered a document lost in the 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius, using AI to read ink invisible to the naked eye."

How the World Dodged a Linux Bullet

A couple of weeks ago the world dodged a bullet. Not a giant asteroid or a super-sized solar flare, but hidden backdoor in a widely used Linux software program. If it hadn't been detected by an eagle-eyed Microsoft software developer, virtually every Linux-based computer in the world could have been at the mercy of a hacker or hacking group.

Steve Gibson, host of the long-running Security Now! podcast, discussed the exploit at length in episode 968. This is just a bit of what he had to say (from the show's transcript):

So the runner-up title for today's podcast, which I decided, I settled on "A Cautionary Tale," was "A Close Call for Linux" because it was only due to some very small mistakes made by an otherwise very clever malicious developer that the scheme was discovered.  What was discovered was that by employing a diabolically circuitous route, the system SSH daemon, which is to say the SSH incoming connection accepting server for Linux, would have had a secret and invisible backdoor installed in it that would have then allowed someone, anyone, anywhere, using a specific RSA public key, to authenticate and login to any Linux system on the planet and also provide their own code for it to run.  So to say that this would have been huge hardly does it justice.

In other words, had the exploit not been discovered and gone into widespread distribution, the owner of the exploit could have shut down every affected computer on the internet with a single command.

The exploit was serious enough that it rated coverage in the New York Times. 

The saga began earlier this year, when Mr. Freund was flying back from a visit to his parents in Germany. While reviewing a log of automated tests, he noticed a few error messages he didn’t recognize. He was jet-lagged, and the messages didn’t seem urgent, so he filed them away in his memory.

But a few weeks later, while running some more tests at home, he noticed that an application called SSH, which is used to log into computers remotely, was using more processing power than normal. He traced the issue to a set of data compression tools called xz Utils, and wondered if it was related to the earlier errors he’d seen.

(Don’t worry if these names are Greek to you. All you really need to know is that these are all small pieces of the Linux operating system, which is probably the most important piece of open-source software in the world. The vast majority of the world’s servers — including those used by banks, hospitals, governments and Fortune 500 companies — run on Linux, which makes its security a matter of global importance.)

Like other popular open-source software, Linux gets updated all the time, and most bugs are the result of innocent mistakes. But when Mr. Freund looked closely at the source code for xz Utils, he saw clues that it had been intentionally tampered with.

In particular, he found that someone had planted malicious code in the latest versions of xz Utils. The code, known as a backdoor, would allow its creator to hijack a user’s SSH connection and secretly run their own code on that user’s machine.

I highly recommend listening to Gibson's podcast, or at least the last half, where he discusses the exploit and some of its implications. They're not good.

What has just been discovered present in Linux demonstrates that the same asymmetric principle applies to large-scale software development, where just one bad seed, just one sufficiently clever malicious developer, can have an outsized effect upon the security of everything else.  Okay, now, I'm going to give everyone the TL;DR first because this is just so cool and so diabolically clever.

How do you go about hiding malicious code in a highly scrutinized open source environment which worships code in its source form, so that no one can see what you've done?  You focus your efforts upon a compression library project.  Compression library projects contain test files which are used to verify the still-proper behavior of recently modified and recompiled source code.  These compression test files are, and are expected to be, opaque binary blobs.  So you very cleverly arrange to place your malicious binary code into one of the supposedly compressed compression test files for that library, where no one would ever think to look.

I mean, again, one of the points here that I didn't put into the show notes is unfortunately, once something is seen to have been done, people who wouldn't have had this idea originally, you know, wouldn't have the original idea, they're like, oh.  That's interesting.  I wonder what mischief I can get up to?  So we may be seeing more of this in the future.

Let's hope he's wrong.