#28: Recalling history

tl;dr – press WindowsKey+V on your Windows 10 or 11 PC. If you don’t have Clipboard history turned on, enable it. You’re welcome.

Microsoft unveiled a new range of Surface laptops recently; the foghorn headline is they’re not just PCs, they’re Copilot+ PCs with lots of AI goodness. There was also a lot of news from the Microsoft Build conference this week – Copilot might have mentioned once or twice, but I think they got away with it.

clip_image002

The really big news for PC watchers is concerning the most recent attempt by Microsoft to move away from Intel to ARM processors; tried before with the Windows RT and Surface RT cul-de-sac, then later the Windows 10X project and the Surface Pro X which was ultimately superseded by an Intel-powered replacement.

clip_image004

Apple showed that it was not only possible but desirable to move from power-hungry Intel to lightning fast ARM chips, delivering huge improvements in battery life at minimal expense of application compatibility. The new Surface Laptop 7 purports to deliver power and performance that will finally take the fight to Apple in-house ARM silicon.

As well as flashing the new hardware, Microsoft also announced a bunch of new capabilities coming to Windows, delivered by snazzy new hardware and the Copilot Runtime which will allow advanced AI computation to take place locally on the device, without having to round-trip to the cloud.

One such AI-powered feature is “Recall”, which captures what the user is doing on the PC over time and will use a local AI model to analyse the data, so you can ask it to bring back whichever document, web page or app you might have been using when you were doing or thinking about something.

So far, the use cases being discussed are a little basic (like “I saw a recipe for a goat’s cheese pizza but can’t remember where it was”) but it could prove really useful when in the wild.

clip_image006

Remembering history

There are plenty of other places where history is recorded as you do your thang on a PC. Office apps remember documents you’ve been using in the past either by presenting the Most-Recently Used (MRU) list or letting you search across common document areas.

clip_image008

Outlook will cache the email addresses you’ve sent to before, browsers like Edge have an extensive and searchable history of pages you’ve been to, and even Windows Explorer’s Home tab shows you all the documents you’ve opened recently alongside ones you might have pinned as favourites.

One history feature which is presumably switched off by default due to some sort of privacy worry, is one where when you start using it, you wonder how you’ve lived your life to date without it: Clipboard history. In a nutshell, CTRL+C and CTRL+V have been widely-used shortcut keys for copy & paste since before Windows was an apple in its creators’ eyes. Using WindowsKey+V to initiate a Paste, will present you a list of the last few things you put on the clipboard.

clip_image010

It was covered in Old Testament ToW #670.

Remember Windows Timeline? It was a feature which recorded what the user was doing across many apps, browser sessions and different devices (even on mobile), synched to the cloud and presented in a logical, searchable timeline view. While it still exists in Windows 10, it wasn’t part of Windows 11 and since it relied on Cortana (RIP), the feature which remains has very much had its wings clipped.

“Recall” Chicken Licken

The old fairy tale of the chicken thinking the sky is falling (originally an Indian story about a hare, not a hen, and known by a variety of names around the world) was revisited in relation to Microsoft’s “Recall” feature which is part of this new range of Copilot+ PCs, enabled by the additional NPU chips (and not to be confused the Outlook’s “Recall” feature which purports to un-send a message but rarely works as expected, especially if sending to a lot of people).

The story behind the new Recall is that the PC will keep a history of everything the user does by screen-grabbing every few seconds, so that the user can later ask Copilot for help in remembering what they’ve done previously.

clip_image012

Cue, heavy breathing from all sorts of commentators who’ve never even laid eyes on this thing being used. The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office – the Gov data watchdogissued a short statement and was widely reported as “looking into” the potential privacy concerns, however Microsoft was clear to point out that:

  • Recall will (initially) only work on these new (ARM) Copilot+ PCs and is in preview. Other PCs with Intel CPUs and Neural Processing Units (NPU) hardware will get the feature in time.
  • Recall will be enabled on initial PC or user setup, but can be switched off using the Settings menu and sys admins can centrally disable through policy; ditto, the length of time Recall will store data for can be tuned (and the amount of storage it uses).
  • Specific apps (and InPrivate browser windows) can be excluded from the screen-grabbery
  • It holds all the data in an encrypted store on the local PC and is only accessible by the user (i.e. not synced to the cloud, not readable by Microsoft or by any company administrator).

#27: Lookup Image Reverse Using

With all the fuss about AI in recent months (the latest being OpenAI teasing some futures with GPT-4o, and potentially raining on Google’s I/O parade that followed the next day), it’d be easy to overlook that elements of artificial intelligence have been infusing the software and services we all use every day, for years. Google are even revisiting an old Microsoft brand too

Text, handwriting and speech recognition, language translation, cognitive understanding – they’re all milestones to what people might think represents true AI, and using elements in conjunction with massive amounts of data has given us some incredibly useful capabilities.

One such is being able to do a reverse image search – the idea that if I have a thing, or a picture of it, how can I find out more about it, or where it’s being used elsewhere online? Copyright holders might want to search for unauthorised use of their materials, or we can even use the technique to tell us more about what our phone camera is looking at.

clip_image002Visual Search

The Bing search engine has had a visual search feature for many years – that’s right, some people do still use it, even by choice rather than because it’s the default or due to a nag screen.

The simplest way to use Visual Search (if you’re using Edge browser and Bing is your search default) is to right-click on an image and choose the Search the web for image option, which feeds the picture into the visual search page.

clip_image004

This will show you other places on the web that feature the exact same image (and in different sizes, too) as well as displaying other, similar images.

clip_image006

If the pic you started with is a recognizable place or person, it may offer a suggestion of what/who it is, with links to further info..

clip_image008

If you’re not using Edge and/or Bing isn’t your default, you can use it by copying the image you want to the clipboard (or grabbing a portion with the Snipping Tool), the go to the Bing homepage and click on the Image search icon.

clip_image010

Just paste your image in from the clipboard (press CTRL-V, or if you’ve switched on Clipboard history, WindowsKey-V will let you choose from previous ones too) to run it through image search. You can, if need be, adjust the area being searched for, by clicking the Visual Search icon towards the bottom of the main image, then dragging the handles to crop the area you want – picking out a single person in a group photo, for example.

clip_image012

Google offers the same kind of functionality, too – from Chrome with Google search as the default, choose Search image with Google,

clip_image014

… or try search by image from the homepage…

clip_image016

… and paste the selected image in there.

You’ll see slightly different results from the different search engines, so it’s definitely worth trying both out. The Bing user interface is arguably nicer than Google’s but in the end, it’s the results that count.

Mobile apps

When it comes to dealing with the real world rather than online photos, smartphones clearly provide a great starting point. The main Google app has the same initial image search UI as the web site but lets you point your phone camera at something and extract text from it, identify what it is and find out more. The Bing mobile app (and Microsoft launcher on Android, if you use that) does similar things but nowhere near as effectively, judging by the results it returns.

clip_image018

There are many specialist mobile apps for identifying specific things, like differentiating between a plant or a weed, but it’s worth trying the Google app first.

clip_image020

The Bing mobile app purports to do similar things, too…

clip_image022

Nul points

Coming back to looking for pictures, if you don’t get any meaningful results from search engines when trying to match an image, there are specialist services like TinEye, which offer deeper reverse image search.

Take this image from a blog post many years ago, before mobile video calls were really a thing*. Searching Bing/Google for it brings nothing of note, but TinEye found various sites which took part of the image and repurposed it – various nutjobs used the image in “news” that the next gen iPhone was going to have video conferencing capabilities, neatly overlooking the fact that the main subject of the photo had a curly-wired handset to his ear…

Screenshot 2024-05-16 160755

* in fact, Orange launched the SPV M5000 smartphone – aka HTC Universal – in 2005,

clip_image025

and it was the first 3G “phone” which had a front-facing camera for doing video calls. It wasn’t very good.

#26: Further Outlook Calendar Fun

Following on from last week’s tip on New Outlook and its addition of the “In-person” switch to designate a meeting as taking place in actual 3D, here’s a quick look back at another calendary thing that’s been in Exchange and Outlook since the year dot – the meeting status.

When you create an entry in your calendar, you can set whether it shows you as busy or not – the original status choices being free/tentative/busy/OOF. Microsoft added the new “Working elsewhere” more than a decade ago, though it never really took off. It wasn’t helped by the lack of support on some clients, and an initial gnarly bug in Exchange 2013 which meant Working Elsewhere appointments sometimes disappeared. It does work pretty well now, though – Think of it like a soft Out of Office which doesn’t get in the way of people booking time with you, but it does signify that you’re not physically in the office. That’s a lot more likely these days than it was 11 years ago.

Showing your actual availability is a bit more nuanced than it was when Outlook was launched in 1997; you might be technically Out of Office but still able to be contacted in some ways. You could set a status message in Teams to add context to where you are or how available you might be.

Of course, making sure other people can see your calendar (at least sharing the high level view of where you are and what you’re doing) will help, and do tell people to use the scheduling assistant in Outlook when trying to book meetings with you. Maybe also set your Work Hours to make it clear if you habitually work at different times to your colleagues, take Friday afternoons off etc.

If you have a group of people who work closely together, you could try using a variety of other tools to track whereabouts and make it easier to meet – check out TeamLink, a free Power App that runs inside of Teams, or perhaps the supposedly forthcoming feature set formerly introduced as Microsoft Places.

Finally, there are two stages of Out of Office – there’s the automatic message you might set to respond to emails to say you’re away; the best OOF messages might just apologize that you’re gone so will probably never read these emails. Alternatively, you could set the status of your appointment to show OOF and then people who can see your calendar will know you’re just gone for a while, such as away for the afternoon, but you haven’t gone to the extent of setting up an auto-response.

Both of these can also help with voice messaging, either external telephone calls if you’re using Teams Phone or just “calls” directly into Teams from colleagues or other external contacts. Look in Teams settings, and you can set up how you want to handle calls that go unanswered. You can record your own greeting, or just type in a message and have the system say that to the caller.

Note the granularity where you could have a message played only during times when your calendar is showing Out of Office.

#25: Where shall we meet again?

Designer (4)

If you are of the 400 million or so users of Microsoft 365, you probably use email as one of the key services, provided by Exchange Online. A little more than 28 years ago, Microsoft released Exchange Server, its first proper server product* and a key progenitor of Active Directory, an enabler of pervasive use of email in business and even standardising the means to deliver mail to your mobile.

Though its main usage is email and calendaring, Exchange was designed in an era when “groupware” was the next big thing; the idea was that the server would be a database of loosely structured data that end users would interact with using forms to display and edit those data. As it happens, an email message is just a bunch of data items like the recipients’ names, the subject and a whole load of hidden fields used in routing, storing and managing that message. When you open that message in Outlook, it uses a form which looks like an email to interpret the fields.

clip_image002Outlook 97 and its numerous successors all feature a form editing capability – right-click on the toolbar, choose Customize then on the resulting dialog, you’ll see a hidden “Developer” tab.

Tick that box to unveil it and you’ll see a new ribbon tab with all kinds of functions, one of which is to choose a form from various libraries, or even design a new one (based on an existing form, such as an email or a contact card).

clip_image004

A relatively simple use of this kind of thing would be to add a custom field or two to an existing form; it might be easier to use categories but if you wanted to include some more structured information to a contact form, for example, you could put additional data fields with validation logic behind them. Essentially what you’d be doing here is adding some custom fields to the database, and you’d also be customizing the form which is used to view and edit that newly extended data structure.

For one practical application of this technique, see ToW 259, which shows you how to track who you sent and received Christmas cards to/from, by modifying your contacts form.

The downside of customizing a form is that you need to distribute the newly extended form otherwise people won’t be able to see the additional fields – that’s essentially an automatic process when using Exchange and Outlook within a single organization (the form is published on the server), but it becomes a whole lot messier when dealing with external parties. And it doesn’t work at all on web, or mobile, or the “New Outlook” (which is basically the web client wrapped up to look like an app). So, it’s super useful these days.

New Outlook, new Meetings

clip_image006One of the subtle changes that New Outlook introduces to anyone who switches from Old Outlook, is a change in name to a key part of its functionality. In Outlook, you have appointments (which are things you put in your own diary) and meetings (which are appointments to which you invite other people or resources – or have been invited by the organizer – and that changes the form which is used to interact with the calendar entry).

New Outlook simply has “Events”, which essentially combines the previous two concepts in one. As well as a different UI, New Outlook adds some other functions, like the “In-person event” button, which lets you make the point that a meeting is taking place IRL rather than only virtually.

clip_image008

This same functionality is not available in Old Outlook or in mobile versions, only in Web App and New Outlook – but that doesn’t really matter too much, as all the “in-person” switch does is to append “[In-person]” to the end of the Title line.

Clearing the switch removes the text, though it’s just searching for that string and hacking it out (set a Subject line of I like people [In-person] [In-person] [In-person] and then toggle the switch back and forth a couple of times to observe). A more elegant way of building this would have been to make a new field on the Appointment / Meeting object called “in-person” and then had Outlook et al flip that switch, rather than just tagging a bit of text on. Oh well

If you’d like to explore what lies beneath your favourite Outlook form, try opening the item (Contact, message, Task etc) in Old Outlook, and if you don’t see a Developer tab, repeat the exercise from earlier and right-click / customize / enable Developer. You’ll then see a “Design This Form” option, which flips your current item into developer mode, exposing hidden regions. Look in the “all fields” tab, and you’ll find every property that has been set on the item.

This trick can be useful for finding out when an appointment has really been created in someone else’s calendar (if they share their calendar) – if they are suddenly unavailable to meet, you could see if they had that blocking appointment in there already or just created it after you’d asked…

clip_image010


APPENDIX

Email was first invented in 1971, and by the mid 1990s it was in common use amongst people who worked on terminals or desktop computers as a large part of their job. While standards like X400 and SMTP existed for exchanging email with other entities, you weren’t going to be emailing your bank manager or booking a doctors appointment. For some reason, X400 never really took off as intended – who knows why? Most companies which used email relied on it for internal communications – IBM’s NOSS internal system (a PROFS implementation) had over 350,000 users by the end of the 1980s, with no easy way to send email to external parties.

As dial-up services like AOL and ComuServe started gaining popularity amongst home users, and those walled-garden opened up and allowed exchange of email over the internet, companies began to adopt email more widely and people would start to put their email address on their business cards (alongside their fax number).

*Exchange was arguably Microsoft’s first proper server product, apart from Windows NT Server on which it ran. There were other back-end products which pre-dated Exchange, like SMS (systems management software), SNA server (for communicating with mainframes) and the early NT variants of SQL Server which had been based on Sybase’s SQL Server. These and Exchange had been bundled together as Microsoft BackOffice for a while. Exchange was the first Microsoft server product that most end users would interact with.