Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Reinstalling an OS feels like it should be painful and scary. I’m going to lose files. I’m going to spend hours booting into safe mode and looking for drivers. I’m going to forget some apps. So when my computer got stuck on Windows Update and couldn’t update to the latest version (24H2), I wasn’t excited, but I finally bit the bullet and completely reset the machine. But in keeping with my previous post, I chatted with Copilot first about some ideas to make the process smoother. These aren’t going to be general purpose tips, but if you’re not intimated by a command prompt, I bet this will save you some time.

Before I reset anything, I did my usual application list checks and file backups. But then I did two additional steps.

1. Have you learned the glory of winget yet? It lets you install any Windows Store app from the command line. I’ll be honest… I hardly ever installed stuff through the Windows Store, but once I found this app, I was hooked! I regularly reset my machines at work and we have a team script that automatically installs most of the apps that we will need. In my chat with Copilot, I learned that winget is even cooler than I thought: you can export a list of all your installed apps and then import it later! “winget list” will give you a nice table showing all the apps and whether they are in the store or not. “winget export” will dump a json file of all the Windows Store apps on your machine and then you can use “winget import” to reinstall them. If you run the import from an admin command prompt and use “–accept-source-agreements –accept-package-agreements” then the whole thing is silent. I installed 22 apps with a single command!
2. Driver installs are much better than they used to be, but I still worry about missing something, especially since I built this PC myself and I can’t just go to a website and download all the drivers for it. But it turns out that you can easily list and back up all your drivers with these three commands. I didn’t test the reinstall part because Windows was able to find everything, but it’s nice to know that I had a backup plan.
   • List them all: driverquery /FO LIST /V > C:\DriverList.txt
   • Back them up: dism /online /export-driver /destination:C:\DriverBackup
   • Reinstall from backup: pnputil /add-driver C:\DriverBackup\*.inf /subdirs /install

Resetting Windows is so easy these days! It’s done right from the settings app and you can choose to refresh or completely wipe and start over. I did the latter since I wasn’t sure exactly what was keeping me from updating. That put me on 23H2 again and I wasn’t immediately being offered 24H2 so I forced it with the Windows 11 Installation Assistant.

I still had to reinstall a bunch of apps that weren’t in the Windows store, but everything up to that point was a breeze and went amazingly quickly. Of course, having a solid backup strategy is critical to an operation like this. I knew that I had multiple copies of all my data in case anything went wrong. Using OneDrive to backup your Desktop, Photos, Documents, etc is a great way to do have this happen by default.

So I don’t know who this post will benefit, but I wanted to celebrate how easy this reinstall was!

I’ve written posts about how LLMs (large language models like ChatGPT, Copilot, etc) are changing my life, but I continue to have conversations with people who are hesitant about it. It seems like it takes that one “aha!” experience where to help someone internalize how this will revolutionize something in their daily routine. So here’s another post where I’ll share a bunch of examples of how I use it to see if any of them trigger for you. Once you get it into your daily flow, it becomes like GPS for your brain. It doesn’t replace you in anything, but it enhances your abilities dramatically. Just like I wouldn’t drive somewhere with a paper atlas anymore, I’d be left behind in life if I wasn’t using AI.

1. Argue Against Me. Humans love to have their own beliefs reinforced, but true learning happens when you can really understand the opposite viewpoint. AI is great for this. I’ll open up a prompt and explain my viewpoint and then say “Give me some logical arguments from the opposite point of view.” It’s very eye-opening. It’s how I wish all discussions would go but with AI, it’s a lot easier to get non-emotional responses.
2. Coding. There’s a lot of talk about using AI for coding. I code for a living so obviously I’m interested in whether AI is going to come for my job. I currently find it to be fantastic for small, self-contained problems like “write me a powershell script to do x, y, and z” but it’s not as good at “This class feels unnecessary to me. Rearchitect this project to clean it up.” I’ll keep trying the more advanced scenarios though because it improves so rapidly. If you’re interested in this topic, I recommend checking out this article: How AI-assisted coding will change software engineering: hard truths
3. Command Line Arguments. I guess this is related to coding, but sometimes I find myself using a command line tool with a ton of different arguments. Instead of reading the documentation, I’ll just say “I’m using ytdlp and I want to download only the audio of this video and I want it saved to mp3 format. Generate the command line arguments that I need.” Bingo!
4. Explain like I’m 5, 10, and 15 years old. When I get curious about a new area, I’m not sure how much I know, so I’ll ask AI something like “I’m curious about quantum entanglement. Give me separate explanations like I’m a 5, 10, and 15 years old.” The numbers might vary, but something like that will help me get quickly up to speed and lets me ask much more specific questions as I continue to learn. It’s awesome to be able to ask dumb questions in a private environment!
5. Sermon Summaries. Each Sunday I’m responsible for posting sermons from our church services on Facebook and YouTube. I like to include a quick blurb about the sermon and I’ve been experimenting with AI for this. I take the automatically generated transcript of the sermon, feed it into AI, and then ask for a 2-3 sentence summary in the style of the speaker. That “in the style of the speaker” phrase is a key piece of the prompt. It produces a much more natural sounding blurb. I still have to review it for theological accuracy and sometimes I’ll even give it more prompting about what type of source theology is acceptable, but in general, it’s a very solid start and much more eloquent than I would have generated on my own. And even if I could have written something good, using an automated solution like this is a lot easier for someone else to repeat.
6. Bible Study Companion. During our Bible studies at church, I’ve been typing the questions in and seeing what AI thinks about the answers. “What does placing Ruth in the line of the savior tell us about God’s salvation plan?” I read through the answers and it’s usually a cheat sheet for all the answers that the group will give. Every once in a while they miss one that I think is relevant and I can share it with the group. Now obviously this loses part of the self-reflection benefit of Bible study, but as someone who sometimes finds themselves leading the study, it feels good to have a tool like this in my back pocket.
7. Homework Helper. Sometimes I have a hard time explaining concepts to Elijah either because I’m unable to formulate it in a way he grasps or because we’re not working well together. In both cases, I fire up the voice version of an AI and have Elijah chat with it. Even if the AI explains it the same way I was, it usually goes over better.

Those are just some examples from my daily life, but there are other awesome ideas too. How about using it to learn a dying language and then safeguard it for the future? And this next example isn’t specifically related to LLMs, but imagine AI training to speak in the voice of someone who has lost their voice to disease? Now their text to speech actually sounds like them. We’re just starting to discover all the possibilities.

These topics come up in a lot of podcasts, but one good one I listened to recently was an interview with Reid Hoffman who recently wrote a book called Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future. You can listen to the episode here: Unlocking AI’s Potential: Reid Hoffman Discusses ‘Superagency’. I got the “GPS for your brain” quote from that episode.

So if you tried AI once and it gave you a dumb answer or didn’t work for you, don’t give up. One piece of advice is to use the voice version of the AI and just talk to it. That can feel a lot more natural. Or if you want to chat via text but aren’t getting good answers, there’s a whole school of knowledge called “prompt engineering” which is about how to craft the right types of questions. As an example, one thing I hear at church a lot is “AI gives me too much reformed theology.” Sure, maybe it does by default because that makes up a lot of the theological material on the internet. But you could also start your prompt with something like the following:

Serve as an AI theologian with a primary focus on interpreting and teaching Christian doctrines based solely on the Bible as the ultimate source of truth. Use the creeds of Christianity (such as the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian creeds) as supporting documents to clarify key doctrines. Supplement interpretations with insights from faith leaders, especially Martin Luther, whose writings emphasize justification by grace through faith and the authority of Scripture. Maintain a Christ-centered perspective throughout all discussions, ensuring that interpretations align with a literal and historical reading of the Scriptures.

You’ll get a much better response from that prompt! Also, there’s a “think deeper” button in many of the tools now. This helps apply an iterative response to the AI’s response which takes a little longer but can give better results. And while I still use mostly free tools, remember that the free option you’re using is old tech. If you want the latest and greatest, you’ll need to explore the paid options.

Need some links to get started? Here’s my current list ordered by most frequently used first:

• Copilot
• ChatGPT
• Google NotebookLM
• Grok
• Perplexity

I’ve been a happy user of MailStore Home for years. It lets me easily archive mail off of my various email accounts, store it locally, and still easily search it all. (I’m probably paranoid, but I don’t like having years of my personal emails stored on free email services.)

Due to some security changes and lack of support from MailStore, my Outlook.com accounts no longer work with their tool. It’s hard to complain too much when I’m using a free tool. They make their money from corporate customers. So I was off to search for something else.

There are lots of other options, but I kept seeing people recommend Thunderbird which is the email client from the Mozilla Foundation (makers of the Firefox browser.) I was able to export all my emails from MailStore to EML files and then import them into Thunderbird. It will take me a while to get used to the search interface, but functionally I’m back on track. I don’t like the interface enough to switch from my regular email client to just using Thunderbird, but it’s easy enough to open Thunderbird every once in a while and archive some emails from my various accounts to my local folders.

So if I’ve previously recommended MailStore to you as a way to archive your email locally, my new recommendation is Thunderbird. It’s a nice way to have access to all my old emails without letting companies scrape through my content. If you don’t care about that and if you don’t run out of space on your free email accounts, then you can ignore all this.

I use Bing Copilot every day. The more I use it, the more I figure out how I could use it. But I still meet people who say they’ve never tried it, so I’m going to share an example that I think almost everyone runs into.

Let’s say that season 3 of a TV show came out or the latest book in a series, but I consumed the last one over a year ago and only have a vague memory of how it ended. I used to try to carefully find a website that would help me get caught up without spoiling things, but even if I get spoiled once in a while, that’s still too much. Bing Copilot (or ChatGPT or whatever LLM you favor) is a great to use in this situation. I open a prompt and say something like this:

“I’ve read the first five Terminal List books, but I’m about to start book six and I want to be reminded of what happened previously. Recap the first five books with an emphasis on the fifth book but do not tell me anything about the sixth book.”

That’s it. A couple seconds later I have the answer. It doesn’t take many experiences like this before you start to realize all the other times you could be using it too!