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.
, as it approaches its first birthday. The console started shipping a little while back in a new, Kinect-less (dis-Kinected?) package (
The 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. 
“Friends” section to the home screen.
This 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, 
Find the OneDrive logo in the Windows 
Right-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… 
Now, 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. 
Sense the network: 
In 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 
needing 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 
Adverts. The economy of much of the web is dependent on them, as evidenced by where 
Sometimes you’ll get ads targeted that you definitely don’t want, or that the advertisers wouldn’t want to juxtapose with the adjacent content or other ads. Of course, this doesn’t just happen in online ads – print 
If you've used other browsers – yes, incredibly, there are alternatives out there – then there's a good chance you may have experimented with ad blockers to eradicate the worst offenders from your favourite sites. My personal browser of choice used to be Firefox with Adblock plus configured, with IE used at work. The main reason for not using IE all the time was the lack of an effective ad blocker. I tried Adblock plus, which has an Internet Explorer version: it didn't work well for me, causing issues with some sites not loading, and frequent hangs or crashes. I was hopeful for 
Hands up everyone who knew Internet Explorer has an ad blocker built in? Oh, that many? Keep your hands up if you knew it works brilliantly? Ah, so it's not just me who didn't know about this… It's in the "Tracking protection" functionality. Obviously. 
I've found EasyList and Privacy Choice do the job, and Privacy Choice was the one that removed Taboola from my favourite sites. 
Thanks to Nick for such a neat trick – let’s put it to the test. First, let’s look at a 
There's a 3-day conference called "
The computer keyboard will probably be with us for many years to come – it’s just such an efficient way (
mouse, though can be followed up with other keys to quickly perform functions that might otherwise need a few clicks or menu commands. 
however, a first-party Podcasts app is in the box.
facility to find published episodes, or if you know the rss URL of a podcast, then you can just plonk that into the box and it will connect and (optionally) subscribe.
“
then be broadcast over the internet and with all the potential latency that might add. Still, it’s probably better than waiting for 
your clock is adrift (the default time.windows.com server seems to be, 
er, a little more variable in reliability than others), it may be worth setting to a different time server – just click on Change settings… and pick a different one from the list and click on Update now to check it’s working as expected. 
The great 
rescue us – from the mostly marvelous 
To add a powerful translation capability native to IE, visit 
“Translate” link from the web page and onto the toolbar. Now you’ll have the ability to translate any web page to your language, with a single click on that toolbar.
There’s also a 
