Deep geek

Coming back to my laptop after a break of some hours yesterday, HP started sending me a stream of irritating pop-ups about cameras bottom right. I didn't seem to be able to stop them.

Restarting the laptop was one answer, but asking Gemini was another. He promptly gave me a stream of deep-geek, in among which I noticed something about the hinge of the laptop. I tried moving the screen around a bit and the pop-ups promptly vanished.

Gemini explained that this was likely something to do with the wires connecting the stuff going on  in the screen - including the camera - to the computer proper in the body of the laptop. Wires which have to run through the hinge. Suggestive of a hardware problem, in particular pinched or even damaged wires. What a pain, with the (HP Envy)  laptop not being much more than a year old.

I don't make much use of the camera, but I do have the occasional healthy meeting on Microsoft Teams - which I might say I find impressive. So maybe I ought to test the camera and microphone. Maybe the microphone lives in the screen part of the laptop too.

Gemini helpfully explained how I might do this. The screen and microphone did indeed work and I now know that there is a whole elaborate camera application out there. Hopefully I will never need to use it again.

And I am pleased to be able to record that I was able to find one the resultant snaps - flipped from left to right - without Gemini's help.

I might add that along the way, Gemini offered to find a geek near me whom I could pay to come and sort this out. So perhaps we are heading for a world in which local tradesmen - plumbers, gardeners, geeks and so forth - are going to have to make themselves known to the popular AI assistants if they want to stay in business. Checkatrade out, Copilot in! Maybe Bing and his friends will retain the model whereby you pay them to get up the hit list.

PS: there is also the consideration that AI assistants may well reduce the demand for geeks, rather as YouTube has reduced the need for plumbers. Small jobs are back within the reach of the householder and one doesn't have to go through the whole tiresome business of finding someone to do them for you. And then there is the puzzle of why the big companies are not moving into the geek business, in the way that they have moved into household maintenance, in the way of British Gas with their HomeCare product. BT used to offer rather a good telephone service which I used for a while, before they pulled it: presumably it did not pay. I associate to a product called Citrix - although I did need Gemini to tell me what it was called! See references 3 and 4.

References

Reference 1: https://www.checkatrade.com/. I see their name about, even if I do not make much use of it.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/errand.html. Purchase of the laptop in question.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/07/limitations.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/03/windows-8-resumed.html. From the days of Windows 8.