Microsoft
@ramenjunkie.bsky.social - Ramen Junkie Leaving Google
Ramen Junkie I’m not going to go into a ton of detail, because I am sure I have rambled about it before, but I have had a pretty downward relationship with Google. There was a time when I was an enormous Google fanboy, and that slowly started to decline as they started just, removing services and features, and the core turn happened when they dumped Google Reader. Over the last ten years or so I’ve slowly migrated things away from Google, though I never quite outright left Google. In fact, technically i still and not quite “leaving” Google.
This is the problem with a company like Google, you can never quite “leave”. Most of what I use though wasn’t super due to choice. I use YouTube, because there isn’t really an alternative, for example. I also continues to use Gmail and Calendar, because I had a free Legacy G-suite account, that allowed me to use my domain for my email. I do also have a Legacy Gmail account, from when things were Invite Only as well. I don’t really use Docs or drive, except for a few annoying services that don’t offer alternatives. I sort of used Photos, but more as a backup to my backup to my backup, never as a primary, and I stopped when they discontinued the Unlimited Storage.
I have a variety of reasons I dislike Google, but I’m not going to get into all of that here and now.
However, it recently came to my attention that Google is discontinuing it’s free tier Legacy G-suite accounts. Previously these accounts were grandfathered, but now they are going away. This is an enormous problem for a lot of people who use this as their Primary account, central to their work flow. Thankfully, in my case, I have mostly stopped using Google for my workflow, but this is definitely giving people a bad time. The only option is essentially to pay to upgrade to a regular account, at $6/month on the lowest tier.
Part of my annoyance stems from having to hear about this from a Podcast, talking about Microsoft offering a discount to people who switch. I didn’t get the email, as the email went to my admin account, that I never check and forgot existed. Granted that is on me, but I wonder how many others are going to get screwed by this.
My only worry at the moment is what will happen to my Play Store purchases. It appears that my account will be able to downgrade to an Identity Account, which will allow me to keep my Play Store purchases. It also seems to keep YoutTube data as well. but to be safe I’m shuffling that around as well (more in a bit).
So what do I, personally, need to do about this?
The main issue is email. I use my domain email on Google a lot. It’s one of two Primary Email addresses, and it’s the top one of those two. Fortunately, I already run an email server for some secondary domains. I was planning to get rid of that email server, but it could wait for a bit while I wind down my Primary Email as well.
Fortunately, I didn’t need to go this route. I pay for Microsoft 365. I suppose it’s worth mentioning, my problem with what is happening with Google, isn’t the paying. The $6/month tier at Google is just not worth it for me. I dislike Google as a privacy nightmare for starters. The search results have been shot for years, they push a lot of weird lock ins. Docs/Sheets sucks next to MS Office as well, and you get a LOT more space with One Drive than Google Drive. The lowest tier of Google’s offerings is $72/year, and I pay $99/year for Microsoft 365, for SIX accounts, which I use across my family.
Anyway, Microsoft 365 offers the ability to use a custom domain email. The set up is designed to be simple, and uses GoDaddy, which I don’t use, but there is an easy work around to use any domain registrar. It’s all just DNS records. If you are capable enough to set up DNS records, you are capable of following this helpful guide on Reddit. You may need to massage things a bit, for some reason the guide has a 0 leading the @ entry which I didn’t need. Though I did need to set the Priority to “0” (Zero) before it took, over on Cloudflare’s DNS. I followed the guide, and around 24 hours later (probably would have been sooner but I had Priority 5), the email was coming in to my Outlook account instead of my Gmail account.
The biggest hurdle was out of the way.
It’s worth mentioning, that Gmail will still contain the older emails. It may be EASIEST, to clean out those emails BEFORE transferring the domain. You can probably still connect the old account to something like Outlook or Thunderbird, but to be sure, either make sure you already set up the Gmail account in a client, before the transfer, if you go this route. This suggestion is honestly, for any 3rd part email provider. You can do a Take Out request, but it’s much easier to just use a client, then drag and drop emails.
In my case, I already had MOST of my emails cleaned out. I keep a local email server on my Synology NAS, with a sorted archive of all my emails. If you really want to be thorough, once you have copied the emails off, go back to the Gmail web interface, select “All Mail”, then use the “Select all” button at the top of the list to delete everything.
Next step was calendars. This was fairly simple. I opened Outlook’s calendar and Google Calendar in tabs side by side. I copied the URL for any web calendars I was subscribed to (use the ical URL) over to Outlook. I then took a moment to sort out the events on my remaining user created Google Calendars, before exporting and importing them to Outlook. Lastly, Google Calendar lets you create tasks and reminders, I manually copied those all into Microsoft ToDo, (which I also, already used). The remaining task, my wife has a Google Calendar from her Gmail account that we share. I’ll transfer my half of that from my Gsuite account to my Gmail account and be done there. I’d convince her to convert it to Microsoft but frankly convincing her to do the shared calendar int he first place was enough of a hassle.
After the Calendar we have Docs, well, Drive, and mostly Sheets. I honestly could never quite get Google’s naming for it’s office suite. I don’t keep much in my Google Drive, some PDFs I had clipped and a few shared docs I had saved off. I simply downloaded everything and sorted the files out to other places in my archive structure.
Photos is tedious, but not hard either. I already have better back up systems in place for my photos, using some USB drives in a safe and One Drive in the cloud through my NAS. I did have thousands of photos uploaded to Google Photos however, from around 2005 through 2019. Mostly I am just going through periodically and deleting them all out, downloading a few here and there just to make sure that I have them saved locally, which I probably do. These “here are there” things are more like, scanned photos, some random work photos, some screen shots from my phone. Things that may have been direct uploads basically, instead of pushed up by the old Photo Uploader from my archive.
The last real potential issue is YouTube. I have several channels on YouTube, though I don’t use them a lot for posting, I do use them for different things. 3 of the 4 channels are “Brand Accounts”. I had previously converted them to Brand Accounts to consolidate ownership under this Gsuite account. This also makes it easier to shuffle ownership back to my Gmail account. I have a 4th channel that is just a regular YouTube account, that I will likely convert to a Brand account and shuffle over to the Gmail account as well. I may also just copy it’s playlists over and call it good.
The last worry, I mentioned before, is my Play Store purchases, mostly Apps, I don’t care about books and movies or music as everything I have gotten there is free. I suspect I will continue to be able to use this account as an ID account, connected to those app licenses. Ideally, I would love to transfer ownership of everything to my Gmail account, but I don’t think that’s going to be offered as an option.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Skype Preview, now with Skype Bots!
As part of the recent Windows 10 Anniversary update, Skype was updated to Skype Preview. Part of the preview is the new Skype Bots system. Bots are the new Apps, which are the new Websites, or something… Everyone is doing Bots these days. These early bots are about what you might expect, simple interactions that may or may not be useful. I did some testing with some of the bots.
There is also an If This Then That Bot, which I’m not going into detail on here. I think it would be better served with it’s own separate write up.
Big News Bot
Simple enough, enter a topic, it returns 3 news stories related to the topic. It seems to be pretty good about returning newer stories as well, though in some cases a bit repetitive. I did a test search for the following…
Halt and Catch Fire, because I’ve been watching the show. I got 3 results, all behind the scenes write ups, but all different angles on it. They clearly invited people by to build up buzz for Season 3
Gene Wilder, because he passed away today. It’s possibly the biggest story of the day. I got 3 stories returned, all about his passing.
Pana, IL, because it’s where I live. We don’t get a lot of news around here relating to the town, but it did return a story that was in the news recently. As well as a couple of others that were more just “area news”.
Taylor Swift, because she’s in the gossipy news a lot. I received three stories about her reporting for Jury Duty. This topic and the Gene Wilder results kind of give an idea of the sameness problem. I don’t really need the same story three times. There isn’t any obvious sources listed wither so it’s not as if you can choose your preferred source. Clicking a headline is a blind shot for where you’re going.
Honestly, I’m not sure how useful this really is. Chances are you’re looking for news on a topic because you already know what the news is, ala Gene Wilder dying. Otherwise, you’ve probably seen it already on some social media.
Bing Image Bot
Similar to the News Bot except it returns 3 images. I did a test search for Cats. It doesn’t even return the images, just links to the images. You’d be way better off just going to images.bing.com and getting all the results, in a nice visual grid.
Trivia Master
Moving on to some of the game bots. Trivia Master is just as it sounds. You tell it to start, it asks ten trivia questions on a topic, then gives a score. The answers are multiple choice, so you don’t have to worry about spelling or exact wording.
It’s alright, but kind of a one trick horse that’s old as the hills. The individual scoring flies by too fast as well, meaning you’ll have to keep scrolling back up to see if you were correct or not. This problem is compounded by all of the wasted space in each of the message boxes. It would make for a better party game or maybe some sort of back and forth with another Skype friend.
Candy Escape
Probably the most complex bot that I tried out was Candy Escape, a game that is reminiscent of the old Interactive Fiction games (ie ZORK). You must solve puzzles and escape the candy prison. You are the Walking Meat imprisoned by Candy. It’s mostly pre-definined choices based, though not entirely. For example, I was asked “What is the password”, which was just typed out with no choices offered.
It’s not without it’s quirky bugs though. Early on I retrieved a rope from a skeleton after examining it. Later, upon a second examination, the rope was gone from the image shown, but there was still an option to take it. I also seemed to get stuck in a loop and the game’s hint wasn’t helpful at all. I needed to escape from two guards, but my only option was to tell them to leave, which they refused to do, or to remove the crown, which just gave me the option to put the crown back on during my next choice, which brought me back where I started.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
One Month on Windows 10
I held off a bit on the whole “Free Update to Windows 10” thing. I’m still a bit apprehensive on the whole issue, it feels like there might eventually be a “catch” of some kind. There probably isn’t, more likely, it’s just an attempt to get everyone on the same page so to speak. It makes everything better and easier for them. Easier for security, easier to maintain, easier for developers to make apps they “know” will work.
It’s part of the beauty of phones, on some level, they are all mostly the same. Except of course for the 50 different versions of Android floating around due to manufacturer cruft and skins and carrier differences and phones that don’t get updated, etc etc. Still, even if 50 wasn’t an exaggeration, it’s a small fraction of the potential different versions of Windows out there from XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, Monthly and weekly patches, Service Packs and updates.
So, anyway, it’s been about a month since I did the upgrade on my Windows 7 desktop. I’m generally happy with it all around, aside from my one major issue.
The Good
It’s not Windows 8. Windows 10 has a lot of the best features of Windows 8, but it doesn’t have the annoyances. The goofy full screen start screen mostly, I have no idea how that would work on my multi monitor set up. It doesn’t have the annoying charms bar or crap popping in and out all over on the edges. It does have the live tiles and all that jazz.
It runs just fine, I haven’t really noticed an increase or decrease in performance honestly.
It also has the store, which is a nice optional way to get programs and apps and other things.
The Bad
Apps and live tiles are great, if they work. They don’t seem to work very smoothly at all. Most of the time they just show their basic icon. On the other hand, it’s kind of frustrating when they have a live tile photo of some kind because now the app isn’t obvious. I don’t know how many time I went looking for the Facebook app because it had someone’s profile photo on it.
Groove Music is a horrible piece of crap. This is Microsoft’s music store/player. I had similar issues on my phone with Xbox Music. I have a decent collection of music, from the free promo Microsoft ran last year to the 10 cent sale they ran this year, I have quite a few albums. The thing is, I also have music from Google, and a lot fo music from Amazon and some ripped from CDs. I manage all my music as local files, or with the Synology Music player on my NAS. This means downloading the files, which you can do with Groove music, when it doesn’t time out or fail, or reload thinking it hasn’t downloaded any files yet. There also isn’t any way to manage the download Queue at all, even basic controls like a pause function would be nice. Instead, I can start some downloads, then walk away, but if I want to halt things to clear up bandwidth, I have to close the program, which screws everything up again.
The Really Really Ugly…
I don’t know the root cause, I new will, but the Windows 10 November Update totally screwed up my machine. In searching for the fix, I found others had had the same issue and it’s a relatively special case.
I dual boot Ubuntu Linux, which means when the machine boots, it brings up the boot loader, GRUB, which has configuration files on the Linux partition. I rarely actually use this other OS, especially since I get my Linux fix on my Laptop these days, but it’s there. Honestly, part of the reason I still keep it around is because I don’t want to hassle with removing GRUB.
This update, apparently messes witht he partition tables, and potentially the partitions themselves, because during the update, my machine became unable to boot. It restarted and I got an error in GRUB that it couldn’t detect any OSes. I went and found a boot repair tool from Ubuntu, but the tool did nothing. Eventually I opted to simply reinstall Ubuntu, thus reinstalling and restoring GRUB, and I found what seemed to be a large chunk of “Empty Space” on my main drive. I reinstall Ubuntu into the hole, ran the repair tool, which fixed the base install since it could now see an OS, then reconfigured GRUB to see Windows.
I fixed it, but it was a massive hassle, one that shouldn’t have been an issue.
I seriously hope this doesn’t happen with any future major releases, the next should be in 2016 with Redstone 1.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.