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Tip o’ the Week #259 – Manage your Christmas Cards in Outlook

Posted on (Updated by ewand

Happy New Year! For many of us, time to chuck out trees, and pack away any and all decorations, never to be seen again until December ‘15. Before you recycle the cards you may have received over the holiday season, here’s a quick way of using Outlook to make the job of sending your cards that bit easier.

It involves creating a new view and a couple of custom fields within the Contacts function in Outlook – as has been mentioned before on ToW, when Outlook views any item (an appointment, a contact, a task etc), all it’s doing is using a particular form to display a bunch of fields. It’s possible to easily extend those items with your own fields and there are form editing capabilities too, but we’re not going to use them today. This tip might look a bit daunting but it’s really quite simple, and it’s something you’ll only have to do once – it persists in your Contacts folder so is available on all PCs.

If you have multiple monitors, then it might help to put this email on the 2nd monitor as you may not be able to easily switch to read the instructions whilst you’re setting things up. Or maybe just print it out.

Create a new view

Firstly, go into the Contacts folder then select the Views tab, and select Change View, then Manage Views to see a list of views that apply to your Contacts folders. Click the New… on the top right.

Select Table as the type of view and give it a name like Christmas Cards, then click on OK to create and start editing the new view.

Click the Columns button and remove everything from the “Show these columns” list on the right hand side, except for Full Name.

Now, it’s time to create a couple of new columns which will be visible in the view and can be used to track interesting bits of info – like whether you sent a card to this contact, and if you got one in return. Click on the New Column button and for the name enter Got Card, then choose Type Yes/No and leave Format as Icon. Press OK to create, and repeat the process for the Sent Card field.

Now, select other relevant fields from the chooser on the left – try selecting All Contact fields from the “select available columns…” drop-down box, then pick some of the more esoteric contact fields that already exist – Spouse/Partner and Children fields will let you remember who to make the cards out to, and Home Address and Notes are pretty self-explanatory.

Once you’ve created the view, resize the columns as appropriate (elongating address, for example). Now, you’re probably looking at a contacts list that’s got 1,000 entries of people you principally do business with, and a handful of friends you might send cards to. The next trick is to filter out people you want to be in the list.

 

The nice thing about using the Table type view is that you can edit in-line, ie. you don’t need to open up the contacts forms to change the details. Since you’ve just created the Got… and Sent… fields, none of your existing contacts will have a value for any of these fields.

If you click on the Got or Sent fields, you’ll set it to be either yes or no. Try locating a few of your friends in the list and tick these fields, maybe fill in Spouse and Children while you’re at it (and now’s a good time to do that, as you’ll probably have all their names on the cards you received).

OK, now we have a quorum of contacts tagged with Got & Sent attributes, go into View Settings and click the Filter button, then switch to the Advanced pane. From the Field drop-down box, choose User-defined fields in folder and add Got Card.

Change the condition to exists and press Add to List.

Repeat the same process with the Sent Card field, then press OK. Finally, before saving the view, you might want to change the Sort order to Full Name.

Now if you press OK to save the view, you should see your contacts list filtered to show you only the entries that you have tagged as having some value for both Got Card and Sent Card.

If you want to continue adding contacts to the list, simply open your existing contact (maybe from the main Outlook contacts view), then click on All Fields, and select the fields from the user-defined fields in folder – you can then set Yes or No for each of the custom fields, and that contact will now show up in your Christmas Cards view.

 

If you want to ditch someone from the list, open their contact, look under All Fields, select from user-defined fields in this item (not user-defined fields in this folder!), select the field and Delete it.

So what’s the point of all this faffing about? Well, in 11 months’ time when you come to do your next round of cards, just select the view in Outlook and if you select File / Print and select Table Style, you’ll get a nice sheet or two of all the details and addresses you’ll need to write all your cards.

Tip o’ the Week #258 – The Network of Your Stuff

Posted on by ewand

As buzzwords go, 2014 has been a big year for the “Internet of Things”, or IoT. A term coined 15 years ago by a specialist in RFID, it was later refined in a paper as referring to a world where machines can share information (perhaps about themselves) with each other, to better manage the environment we live in. Let’s hope the sharing and acting doesn’t become too autonomous. Who knows where that would all lead?

The IoT industry (such as it is) comprises largely of companies making gadgets (sensors, controllers, chips that could be embedded into other devices etc), companies selling means of connectivity (like 3G or short-range wireless) and companies selling software solutions to either manage the whole shebang or to do something with the inevitable mass of data that results from it.

Analysts breathlessly predict gargantuan volumes of data (Zettabytes, man!), billions of things, worth trillions of dollars. And everyone’s trying to be seen to be taking part, and to brand the whole area with their take on it (Cisco keeps gamely plugging away, talking up “IoE” or Internet of Everything, Microsoft came out with the Internet of Your Things, though that term may have been put to bed…). There was even a recent event called the Internet of Good Things. Nothing to do with FYC.

Make it real, take it home

While we wait for IoT to realign the stars (or did you see the ISS on Christmas Eve?- #ItsSantasSleigh), we could start with a bit of home automation that is arguably bleeding into IoT, and it’s not ridiculously expensive. Here’s just one example of a fairly simple system, though no doubt readers will email in with recommendations of their fave gadgets. The reason for choosing the kit that follows was largely that this stuff has a reputation for being either expensive or unreliable, or both, and these choices are relatively cheap and cheerful. And won’t be a cause for an argument over Christmas if and when they stop working…

clip_image001First, you need a box

In order to do anything truly IoT-like, you’re going to need a box (a hub, if you will) that will talk to your things and then corral their data onto the internet. Your average smart sensor isn’t going to have the compute power or connectivity to talk TCP/IP to an internet endpoint, and if it does, that’s why it’ll be 3 times the price of every other one: just look at Belkin’s WeMo. No, what you need is something like Swedish company Telldus’ “TellStick Net”: £70 from your favourite Danish IKEA-like electrical store. Oh, sadly, it appears Tellstick isn’t officially available in the US. Too bad. Maybe it’s karma for all the apps and deals that are US-only…

The Tellstick Net talks to devices which use the ISM band at 433Mhz to communicate with each other; it’s a relatively short-range but low-power radio, and it’s pretty cheap. You may have devices which use this band already (wireless doorbells and the like) though you might not be able to automate much of what they do.

clip_image002It’s cold outside

One useful thing you could do with your new box, is rig the house and garden up with temperature and humidity sensors – indoors is probably OK, but if you have a garage or a loft, you might want to know that it’s not getting too cold or too damp. And it’s very handy to know exactly how cold it is outdoors, too. A multitude of different sensors are available that talk to the Tellstick box, such as this one (£10).

As a programming task (after you’ve done your Hour of Code, of course), you could rig up some software to keep a log of temperature in your area over time, and maybe cross reference it with a feed of weather forecasts. Here’s a starter for ten. Or just set up tellmon.net to do the logging for you.

 

clip_image004Remote Power

Do you have any devices where the power socket is out of reach? Like Christmas Tree lights (plug behind the tree?), or exterior lights that run from the garage? Well here’s a simple solution that can also be controlled by the Tellstick – you can switch them on and off discretely, see the current status and even schedule them to come on and off at set times.

clip_image005As with temperature sensors, there are loads of power switches which are compatible – like these (£15), which even come with a button-operated remote so you can switch them on and off without resorting to using a computing device.

The principal means of setting up Telldus Live (the cloud service which underpins the Tellstick Net device) is through your browser (try it out with username demo@telldus.com and demodemo as password), or you can use their free app for Android or iOS devices.

clip_image007There is a 3rd party app called SmartHome for Windows Phone and Windows 8, which is nicer and more featured, but does require you shelling out a quid.

The observant will spot that the Fence sensor >> reckons it’s 71 degC outside… clearly a faulty device…

Other systems are available

Of course, there are hundreds of other means to doing home automation – there are proprietary, generally reliable (but expensive) things like Crestron or Control4, that could generally mean retrofitting a good bit of kit to your house, but may also do audio and video distribution, lighting control etc.

There are systems to do lights, like Philips’ Hue (great if you want to spend £50 on a light bulb), heating controllers like the Googly NEST or BG’s Hive, to other more entry-level systems like LightwaveRF, which is more expensive than the simple 433Mhz varieties, though offers more capability and is more attainable if you want to get into things gradually, when compared to the more professional type installations.

With Telldus Live, you could have the base system, 5 temperature sensors and 6 power devices all up and running for £150. Not cheap, but in the world of gadgets, that’s not too shabby.

Tip o’ the Week #256 – Clip Art clips off

Posted on by ewand

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Exactly 5 years after publishing the very first instalment (though it was internal only for a year before I started posting the tips on this blog), clip_image003Tip o’ the Week goes Old Skool: #256, or 28, the number of combinations possible from a single byte. If you want to join the retro-fun, Sir Clive is backing a new crowd-funded Speccy games console. Sinclair was a hero of the 1980s’ UK 8-bit computer market, before having to sell out to the-then un-betitled upstart Alan Sugar.

Time moves on. The oft-mocked and much-maligned Clippy died, aged 10. Not enough people wanted to write letters any more, it seems.

Other things change, too – the very idea of Clip Art within Office apps, for one. Word 6 from the early 1990s had a handful of clip art images, but later versions of Office had full libraries of pictures and vector-image clip art. But Clip Art is going the way of the dodo…

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clip_image007Microsoft announced recently that the Clip Art collection was being closed down, to be replaced by Bing Image searches.

To insert Bing images into Word docs or Outlook emails, just go to the Insert tab and look under Online Pictures.

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The Bing Image Search option shows pictures which are available for free use, licensed through an arrangement called  Creative Commons – so you should be able to use them without charge, though do bear in mind that the license to re-use may have specific conditions – select the desired image  and click on the link for more details.

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So, let’s raise our hats to Clip Art – even if it’s sometimes pretty naff, with images that are out of date and a bit cheesy.

If you don’t like the Bing Image options, you can always select Pictures from your own PC, or add your own collections to the “Online Pictures” list  – from online accounts such as OneDrive, Flickr or Facebook.

Tip o’ the Week #255 – Rating apps in the store

Posted on by ewand

The Store was a key innovation when Windows 8 launched, and continues to grow, both in terms of the number of apps published and the way popular and well-rated apps are surfaced. Earlier this year, Microsoft said there were over 150,000 apps in the Windows 8 store, though now the total reported is combined between the Windows 8 and Windows Phone stores. It’s said that Windows 10 will join the two stores together anyway, a process that’s underway already through the move to Universal Apps.

According to Microsoft By The Numbers, a neat external website that helps to show how large some bits of the company are (did you know that together, the Office for iPad apps have been downloaded 45 million times? Or that 40% of Azure revenue comes from startups and ISVs?), the total number of apps across both stores is 525,000. That’s rather a lot. Finding the good apps from the guff ones can be a challenge.

So, it’s more important than ever to make sure when you use an app you like, or one you don’t, that you rate it. Ratings and reviews will help other people choose your preferred app over some other one which isn’t as good, or has more annoying adverts, or nags you to buy the premium version all the time. In Windows 8.1, there are a few tricks to rating the apps you’ve used, and of sharing your favourite apps with others.

clip_image002Rate and review

As well as rating Windows 8 apps you use regularly, why not review those you feel work particularly well or particularly badly? Maybe the developer will read your review and improve or fix things that don’t work, or maybe people who are browsing will read your rave review and decide that’s the app for them.

Apps for Windows 8 let you Rate and review if you open the Charms menu (when you’re in the app, press WindowsKey+C or swipe from the right, or move your mouse to the top right or bottom right of the screen), then look under Settings.

clip_image004Taking this option fires up the Store app, and navigates directly to the review section where you can assign a 1-5 star rating and give some verbiage should you desire. If you’re going to slate an app that everyone else rates highly, or the opposite, then you really should explain why, so others can benefit from your wisdom or simply write your thoughts off as coming from a blithering idiot.

How many Amazon reviews have you read, that score a product 1 star because it took ages to arrive or the box was damaged on receipt? The case rests.

clip_image006If you want to rate apps without actually opening them, you can go into the Store app, select Account | My apps from the menu at the top, then select the appropriate filter from the drop-down boxes, then click or tap on each item to get to its Store page, which includes rating & reviews.

Sensibly, you can’t actually rate apps that you’ve never installed, but you can rate and review apps that you have only on another PC.

Sadly, there’s no way of showing your own ratings in a list – it would be handy to be able to see all the apps you’ve installed and how you rated each one – maybe there’s an app for that, or someone else will write it to share a way of doing so…

clip_image008Windows Phone ratings

Apps on Phone don’t have the same consistent mechanism to expose the ratings and review section of the Store (since they don’t have charms), though many apps will prompt you after a while of usage, to ask if you’d like to rate them.

From a PC, you can head over to the Windows Phone site and look at your purchase history, then rate from within there.

On the phone, visit the Store app to rate and review other apps you’ve used (again, you need to have actually installed them to be able to rate), and you’ll see on the same reviews tab that you can also Share the app, which sends a link via mail or numerous other messaging or social networking means.

 

Sharing on Windows 8.1clip_image009

Returning to Windows 8.1, if you want to share your favourite apps with friends, just go back into the Charms menu and you’ll see Share proudly offered – though its use will vary depending on what you’re doing with the app itself. If listening to Music (US only, sadly), you’ll share a link to whatever you’re playing. If you’re reading the News, selecting Share will send the headline and a link to the article you’re on.

To Share apps, follow the same steps as earlier to list your installed apps from within the Store, then open the details page for the app in question, but instead of rating or reviewing it, invoke the Share charm when at the same page.

If you don’t want to email links etc using the Mail client, perhaps preferring to embed the links into rambling missives from within Outlook, then check out the neat Clipboard app, which (using a “contract”) lets you Share something straight into the Windows Clipboard, ready to be pasted into another app of your choice.

Tip o’ the Week #253 – Using Cortana in the Car

Posted on by ewand

clip_image001There are many cool things that Cortana can do, which make using Windows Phone 8.1 a pleasure. Try asking the following, if you have Cortana enabled:

  • “Find the best nearby restaurants”, then…
  • “Which are open now?” …
  • “Traffic to the 3rd one” …
  • “Drive there”

After each command, following commands will work in context with the results from the previous one – though it might take a bit of practice to figure out what you can say, and what is going to reliably be interpreted by Cortana. If you say something she doesn’t understand (maybe she’ll start playing some music or call some random number instead, mishearing “Drive” for “Play” or “Call”) then you’ll lose context and will need to start from the beginning.

One smart function, though, is when you want to use Cortana in your car. The specific UI will vary greatly depending on what car you have, but the important thing is that it may possible to use the car’s own functionality to get at Cortana’s smarts (which will be better than whatever is installed in the car, almost certainly).

Assuming you have Bluetooth handsfree functionality installed, you may have the option of pressing a steering-wheel button to interact with the phone – generally relying on the car systems to recognise names as you read them out, and searching a list of contacts either manually-entered or possibly sync’ed from your phone. Be careful not to faff about with your handset whilst driving – you may be breaking the law. Even in (some) parts of the US.

clip_image003If your car has the ability to see your phone’s directory or phone book, then you should see a contact show up in the list (when viewed in the car – it doesn’t actually appear as a contact on the phone itself), called Cortana.

You may be able to set favourites on your car so that when you press a button, it will dial a particular contact or number – or maybe your car’s Bluetooth setup has enough capability that it will be able to recognise a “call Cortana” voice command.

Even if the car has a less advanced system, it’s generally possible to have a short dial or some other kind of saved contact that’s manually added. If you create a contact in your car’s directory with the number 555-555-9876 and try to call it using the car’s UI, then you’ll see Cortana spring to life – in other words, the phone won’t actually dial that number, it will activate Cortana and will use the Bluetooth functionality in the car to be the mic and speakers for the phone. Don’t worry that it looks like a US phone number – it works on international handsets too.

If you type that number into your phone, then it will attempt to dial – but if you call that number using the car (either by adding a contact or just by entering the number) then you’ll see if the car wins Cortana’s favours or not

Tip o’ the Week #252 – Web browsing on WP8.1

Posted on by ewand

clip_image001Many of us will be familiar with using the web browser on our phones – unkindly, one might say that it’s partly due to the fact that Windows Phone users sometimes don’t have a choice, whereas iOS and Android devices might be redirected to install some native app rather than using a browser to view the content.

The upgrade to Windows Phone 8.1 may have slipped by without you noticing every single aspect of it, one such being the fact that the mobile browser used in Windows Phone is IE11. Not, it is said, just IE for the phone that happens to be the same number as the desktop version, but a richly-featured modern browser which shares a lot of functionality with its big brother.

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clip_image003Reading View is one particularly neat usability feature, which changes the way the browser displays pages (and is indicated as available by the same book icon as the Metro modern IE browser on Windows 8.1). Tap the little book and the content on the mobile browser goes full–screen and can also be set to show a particular size of font or background colour too – check the Advanced Settings (found by tapping the ellipsis on the bottom right, then settings and then the advanced settings button at the bottom).

Phone IE11 also gives you more control over privacy settings, so you can turn on the equivalent of the desktop InPrivate settings (like choosing whether sites can track you, put stuff on your device, use cookies etc etc). There’s no “new InPrivate tab” function though, it’s a setting that applies to all browser sessions. See here for more details on privacy settings.

Windows Phone 8.1 also promises to make your life easier by synchronising IE data between your phone and your PC – remembering URLs you’ve visited, usernames you’ve used and more.

However you use it, the browser in Windows Phone 8.1 is now fast, safe, really functional and is a mostly a joy to use. So not being forced to install some ghastly local app for every site you want to visit, maybe isn’t such a hardship after all.

Tip o’ the Week #251 – Toasting a new email message

Posted on by ewand

You got a new email – hurray! Back in the early days of using email, it was expected practice for your email program to play you a little fanfare, pop up a message box to tell you that you’ve got mail, put an envelope in your system tray etc.

In the last decade, nobody in most companies needed to know they got a new mail. We all get far too much of it, and yet most email programs notify you by default. Stop that, it’s silly.

The inspirational Prof Randy Pausch advised switching this off: he delivered a great talk on Time Management, and watching it is a better way of spending 90 minutes than pretty much any other productivity-enhancing measure. Children of the 1970s and 80s in the UK will remember Why Don’t You?, with its somewhat perverse advice to “switch off your television set”.

Well, stop reading this email now and go and watch Randy’s Time Management video (same link as above you click junkies).

Still here? If you’ve never heard of Randy, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2006 and sadly succumbed less than 2 years later. In the interim, he delivered “The Last Lecture”, an awesome (and we’re not talking Microsoftie, “hey, that was super-awesome!” kind of awesome, more the laughing-out-loud, tears-welling-up and rapt-attention kind) lecture on achieving his childhood dreams. Make time to watch The Last Lecture video if there’s only one video you watch this weekend.

Anyway, this tip reprises the topic of the very first tip of the week – but this time instead of switching off a pop-up in Outlook, it’s about disabling the “toast” that appears in the top right of the Windows 8 screen to tell you that you’ve got new mail.

In Outlook 2013, go into File | Options | Mail and look under the Message arrival section then un-check the Display a Desktop Alert option.

It’s possible to disable all “toast” notifications in Windows 8, but that’s something of a lumphammer to crack a pine nut. If you want to do it, see here… otherwise, it’s best to control things within individual applications. Within the same menu, you can selectively toggle each app’s notifications setting.

If you’ve configured the Windows 8.1 Mail app to connect to your company email, then you might have the weird experience of seeing an incoming toast from both Outlook (represented as the upper one in the screenshot above, with the fizzog of the sender as represented in the GAL) and within the Win8 Mail app, shown by the different toast below (and possibly a different picture, depending on how the sender is represented in your contacts).

To disable the toast from the Mail app, go into the app itseld and bring up the Charms (press WindowsKey+C or swipe from the right if you have a touchscreen, or put your mouse in the top right of the screen). Now select the Settings charm, then Accounts, then go into the account you have set up to your corporate emai (since you can set notifications differently per-account).

The “Show email notifications” dropdown allows you to select that you want to allow all email to notify you (bad) or perhaps only to show you mail from your Favourites, as defined in the People app.

Or, of course, to switch off altogether.

Tip o’ the Week #250 – Xbox One updates

Posted on by ewand

It’s been a busy few weeks and months for Xbox Oneclip_image002, as it approaches its first birthday. The console started shipping a little while back in a new, Kinect-less (dis-Kinected?) package (even if some thought that was a bad move), and there have been a few software updates to as well as numerous announcements from Microsoft and from app partners.

clip_image004The October update which rolled out in the middle of the month was quite a big change to how some of the fundamentals of the console work – like Snap, which got a whole lot more useful by being easier to manipulate.

Try saying, “Xbox Snap” (don’t try this on a Kinect-free setup or you’ll feel a bit silly) then say the name of the application you’d like to snap to the side (eg Music). You can say Xbox Switch to flick between the snapped application and the main app (the game, TV, video etc) and Xbox Unsnap when you’re all done and want to go back to full screen on the main app.

For more details on the October release, see Major Nelson’s post, here.

You can check you have the October update easily, as it adds a new clip_image006“Friends” section to the home screen.

There’s also been some coverage of what’s coming in November (deeper Twitter integration, so you can chat with friends whilst watching The Apprentice), amongst other things. See more here.

There’s also been the announcement of the release of the Xbox One Digital TV Tuner, due in select European countries any day now. The Tuner allows the Xbox to receive DVB-T signals (SD and HD, where available), integrates with the OneGuide functionality and delivers DVR-type functionality allowing you to pause live TV, watch TV on demand etc. There are also a bunch of updates to the SmartGlass software for mobile devices which will allow you to stream live TV off the Xbox tuner and watch on the device, even if the Xbox is being used for watching video on demand or playing games. See more here.

There’s even been some talk over what will and won’t be in the Xbox One’s December update, too.

3rd party apps have been coming thick and fast for the Xbox One, depending on where you live – there’s Vine as well as a bunch of Major League sports apps and VH1, all recently released in the US, MyVideo & Watchever (in Germany), Ludo (France) and many others. To see the apps list in your region (other than looking on the console), check here.

Tip o’ the Week #249 – Sync your Desktop

Posted on by ewand

clip_image001This week’s tip comes as a direct result of a conversation had over a glass of wine and a plate of food, with Content & Code’s supremo, Tim Wallis.

Most of us who’ve been using PCs for years will have picked up or held onto habits that are probably not ideal, at least not as the designers of the latest software might have in mind – but as the customer is always right, if we want to be backward, then the system should accommodate that, right?

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Windows users of old: at which point did you finally accept the default, and stop disabling the Hide extensions for known file types setting in Windows Explorer? Let hidden files stay that way? Or do you still switch these options on?
Are you holding on too tight?

And do you still think of directories or have you embraced folders? Do you still want a D: drive to put all your data on?

Well, many of us will habitually drop stuff onto the Windows desktop because it’s generally easy to find (press WindowsKey-D and, tada!, there it is) – though it’s always possible to go over the top.

If you want to drag an attachment from Outlook and upload it to a SharePoint site, for example – you’ll need to copy the file to somewhere on your PC and then upload from there. And the desktop can be just the simplest way to do that (press WindowsKey and left or right arrow key to snap Outlook to the side, potentially exposing the desktop beneath… a perfect target for dragging & dropping files onto).

Syncety Sync

What Tim was musing over, however, was the scenario when you have multiple PCs and you drop a document (or folder full of them) onto the desktop – wouldn’t it be nice if OneDrive could replicate the desktop onto the other machine(s)? Windows 8 makes it easy to roam lots of settings (the Start menu layout, the desktop backdrop etc) between machines, but it doesn’t sync the actual contents of the desktop out of the box.

Worry not: it’s possible. Firstly, you need the OneDrive software on every PC (it’s installed by default on Windows 8.1, including Surface RT), then you’ll re-point the Desktop to a location that OneDrive can sync.

To set up sync, for the purposes of just backing up one PC or for sharing the same desktop content with several:

  • clip_image004Find the OneDrive logo in the Windows System Tray Notification Area
    (NB: if you have OneDrive for Business installed, you’ll want to make sure you pick the white consumer OneDrive icon, rather than the blue business one…)
  • clip_image006Right-click the icon, then open the OneDrive folder using Explorer, right-click in the resulting window and create a folder where you want the Desktop contents to be. It might help to copy the location of that folder to the clipboard, for use shortly…
  • Hold the SHIFT key, and then right-click on your new folder– and use the phenomenally handy Copy as path option that only appears when you hold down SHIFT.
  • clip_image007Now, in the same Explorer window, scroll down in the folder list to see the This PC section and right-click on Desktop, then Properties, then look to the Location tab.
  • Now click the Move button, paste the contents of the clipboard (the path to the folder you created in OneDrive) into the dialog that pops up, Select Folder then confirm that you’d like to move the contents of the desktop across.

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Now, any folders or files you drop on the desktop will synchronise to other PCs if you repeat the same process as above. If you have lots of folders full of stuff, you’ll need to wait a little, while OneDrive syncs them for you. Right-click on the OneDrive icon in your system tray again, and click Sync if you’d like to see the status.

Tip o’ the Week #248 – Sense the WiFi

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002Sense the network: Use the Force.

One of the cool new features in Windows Phone 8.1 is “WiFi Sense” –  it’s enabled by default and, in a nutshell, is used to let other people access WiFi networks you already know about, without them having to type in the network password. It also lets you connect to known open networks or secured ones shared by your friends.

If you connect to a network and put in a password, and you’ve allowed WiFi Sense to do so, then your contacts of a given type (who also have WP8.1), will be able to connect to that same WiFi network without needing to know the password. The actual passcode itself is not shared with the contact directly, but it is sent to their phone in a hashed way that means it can be presented to the network for access, without their phone even knowing what the password is. If you’ve only just shared your home network, it could take a couple of days for it to percolate through the WiFi Sense system and show up on your friends’ phones, so take it easy and give it some time.

clip_image004In practice, this means that if you set a password on your home WiFi, your pals who have WP8.1 will be able to use your home network without clip_image006needing your password (or, in fact, your permission – they’re your friends, after all…). If you live in an apartment block in the city, you might want to be careful about this as you could well have neighbours you know leeching on your broadband, but if you live in a more rural location then perhaps you can trust that the only people within range of your network will be those that you invite onto your property.

The benefit of having WiFi Sense turned on is that your phone will automatically connect to known networks, and use them instead of racking up bandwidth charges on your phone bill (especially handy when travelleing).

The service not only lets you connect to networks enabled by your friends, but open networks are shared by everyone with WiFi Sense switched on (via a crowdsourcing arrangement), and are connected to automatically, accepting T&Cs, providing details like your name & phone number etc. As it happens, the phone comes with a usefully vague set of default information (check it out by going into WiFi settings / WiFi Sense / edit info).

WiFi Sense is available in most countries – for more details or to see more info on how it works, check out the WiFi Sense FAQ.