World Motorcycle Day: 21st June

 

Motorcycles have a surprisingly long history, with the first one being created in 1860 by one Pierre Michaux in Paris. This early motorcycle was steam-powered and was one of a few varieties that would spring up in the ensuing decades. 1885 would see the invention of the first internal combustion powered motorcycle, and from there on out things would explode as this popular form of conveyance entered the public consciousness.

Today motorcycles are used for an increasing number of applications, including delivery driving, passenger conveyance, recreation, and even just daily commuting. This is due, in no small part, to the incredible gas mileage these vehicles get, and how compact and easy they are to store even if you live in an apartment. Whether you’re using your motorcycle to get around from day to day, or are an enthusiast or hobbyist who goes on long rides as part of your yearly vacation, World Motorcycle Day is for you.

The best way to celebrate World Motorcycle Day is to get out on the road and enjoy the freedom of riding on a motorcycle. There’s nothing quite like feeling the wind blow through your hair and wrap around you as you experience the complete freedom that is cruising beautiful roads from the back of a motorcycle. If you’ve been struggling with the costs of owning a car but have to have a way to get back and forth from work, then it’s time to look into becoming a motorcyclist.

The cost of a motorcycle along with the incredible fuel efficiency makes these vehicles perfect for the economically minded. On the other hand, if you just like the speed and power you can get out of one of these bad boys, then this holiday is your excuse to get out and tear up some pavement. Walruzoar

www.daysoftheyear.com

Dear Microsoft: stop it with Copilot, already!

Marc D Anderson Writes: Until recently, one of the easiest ways to get “into” Microsoft 365 was to go to Office.com. I’ll readily admit that I never spent any time on the page, mainly because most of my time in Microsoft 365 is spent building sites, pages, libraries, etc.

But Microsoft’s stated intent – stated many times, in fact – was to help you get right back to your work by going to Office.com’s home page. It showed the Office apps for which you were licensed, and more importantly to many people, the files with which you’d recently been working.

These days, we are redirected to https://m365.cloud.microsoft/chat/?auth=2, shown above. (It’s multiple redirects to get there, and in Edge it frequently fails for me, requiring a reload.) This is what it looks like with no Copilot license at all.

When you have a Copilot license, it looks, well, almost the same, but with a few additions. Can you spot them?

This has been bugging me since it happened, and today, I piled onto a LinkedIn post from Sympraxian Julie Turner (@julieturner.net on Bluesky) about it.

The fact that Microsoft is now forcing people to a page focused on Copilot shows a disconnect from a large portion of their user base. There are several important considerations here.

• First, many organizations simply aren’t ready to do anything with AI or Copilot. Putting Copilot front & center when they haven’t subscribed to Copilot at all is not useful for them.
• Second, this is a significant change to a landing page which Microsoft has touted for years as “the place to start your day”. That use case has been removed totally from the page. No recent documents, no apps, no waffle, etc. Sure, there’s an Apps link to the left, but it adds an unnecessary extra click to go where we want to go.
• Third, the only way to go from that page to something we’ve recently worked on is to search – encouraging people to use search where the Microsoft Graph was actually being useful before by showing recent work – or by asking Copilot. See my first point.
• Finally, by forcing agents on people, we are going to get yet another ungoverned mess. Plus, if you don’t have Copilot licensing or pay-as-you-go enabled, you very quickly hit a dead end with agents. It’s a solution begging for use to invest in it – which is NOT a good look for Microsoft. Forcing people into buying licenses to make a page useful was not the ethos we expected historically from them.

This change to Office.com just one example of Copilot being rammed down the throats of people who may not want it at all, while taking away features people actually used. READ MORE...

www.sympmarc.com

Reading for today: things that help us grow closer to God

 

A particular toy or a particular ikon may be itself a work of art, but that is logically accidental; its artistic merits will not make it a better toy or a better ikon. They may make it a worse one. For its purpose is not to fix attention upon itself but to stimulate and liberate certain activates in the child or the worshipper. The teddy bear exists in order that the child may endow it with imaginary life and personality and enter into a quasi-social relationship with it. That is what “playing with it” means. The better this activity succeeds the less the actual appearance of the object will matter. Too close or prolonged attention to its changeless and expressionless face impedes the play. A crucifix exists in order to direct the worshipper’s thought and affections to the Passion. It had better not have any excellences, subtleties, or originalities which will fix attention upon itself. Hence devout people may, for this purpose, prefer the crudest and emptiest ikon. The emptier, the more permeable; and they want, as it were, to pass through the material image and go beyond.”

By C. S. Lewis
From An Experiment in Criticism
Compiled in The Business of Heaven

A new video from Child of Hope Uganda. Please take 5 minutes to watch it

We love telling our stories through pictures and video. All these short films star our kids... part of what we want to achieve is to give them a voice. Enjoy!

Our latest 5-minute video shows the different aspects of our work in Uganda — all funded through the kindness of our sponsors and donors. This video includes a narrator - or if you'd prefer here is an alternative video using captions instead.

Please click here to find out more about child sponsorship and how you can be a part of giving a child a better start in life.

www.childofhopeuganda.org

Reading for today: building up our spiritual muscles - the practice of faith

 

Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods ‘where they get off’, you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.

The first step is to recognise the fact that your moods change. The next is to make sure that, if you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious readings and churchgoing are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed. And as a matter of fact, if you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?

By C.S. Lewis

From Mere Christianity

Windows 11 market share stalls ahead of Windows 10 cutoff

User adoption of Windows 11 is slowing down, with the operating system still lagging behind Windows 10 as end of support nears.

After an impressive start to 2025, the last few months have not seen the market share of Windows 11 expand, according to Statcounter. After cresting the 40 percent mark by March, figures released at the start of June put the operating system's slice of the pie at 43.22 percent. The previous month, it was 43.72 percent.

In comparison, Windows 10's market share currently stands at 53.19 percent, slightly up on the previous month's 52.94 percent.

Considering that only a few months remain before Microsoft pulls support for many versions of Windows 10 (14th October 2025), the apparent stall of Windows 11's adoption is a trend that must cause some consternation at Microsoft.

www.gs.statcounter.com

AI startup revealed to be 700 Indian employees pretending to be chatbots!

London-based Builder.ai, once valued at $1.5 billion and backed by Microsoft and Qatar's sovereign wealth fund, has filed for bankruptcy after reports that its "AI-powered" app development platform was actually operated by Indian engineers, said to be around 700 of them, pretending to be artificial intelligence.

The startup, which raised over $445 million from investors including Microsoft and the Qatar Investment Authority, promised to make software development "as easy as ordering pizza" through its AI assistant "Natasha." However, as per the reports, the company's technology was largely smoke and mirrors, human developers in India manually wrote code based on customer requests while the company marketed their work as AI-generated output.

www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Over the Rainbow

 

There are few natural wonders of Earth that can evoke joy and fascination more quickly than rainbows. These beloved phenomena occur when beams of sunlight pass through trillions of water droplets that linger in the atmosphere after a storm. When conditions are right, white light is refracted into bands of seven individual colours that form familiar arches over the horizon. 

But beyond their aesthetic appeal, rainbows are also vivid symbols of God’s compassion for human beings—and timeless reminders of his forgiveness and grace. Celebrate the splendour in this inspiring short video.

www.thejohn1010project.com