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Tip o’ the Week #212 – Filing and piling of email

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002The topic of filing vs piling of email has been had on ToWs passim (here & here), but this week’s gem comes courtesy of a recommendation by productivity guru Tim Pash.

Tim says he couldn’t live without a cracking utility which plugs into Outlook, called SimplyFile. The premise is very simple – it helps you file your emails in tidy little folders. Whoever has time to manually file all their email, eh? Using keywords it can derive from a message you have selected (combined with previous behaviour), it suggests a folder (or a number of folders) that you might want to file the mail into with a single click.

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There are a couple of ways to actually invoke the filing addin – you could select a message and then look to the Outlook toolbar, where the most likely folder is displayed in super-size, you can do some pretty funky filing of entire threads or even all messages within a given folder, where it will prompt you for each one. The tools for selecting folders etc are brilliant, and a model for speedy efficiency.

clip_image006Another option is to just right-click on a mail in a list and use the File In > pop out menu. The software promises to learn as you do more and more filing, but even on the first run it seems to have a fairly decent stab at the right place to put stuff. There are no rules to configure, no wizards to run – remarkably, it seems to just work. You might want to switch off the default filing of everything you send, though – that could be a little annoying.

There are a couple of gotchas – one being that if you have an Archive PST (or a 2nd mailbox into which archive content is dumped) then you might well have multiple folders with the same name (such as the name of a particular client or partner), which could make things a little trickier: SimplyFile might well identify the archive as the place to dump current content instead of the fresh and mostly empty folder that’s still in your Inbox. If you grow to reply on the software, it could be worth coming up with a naming convention for your archive folders to avoid confusion.

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Most of us probably have a strategy for arranging folders in Outlook’s hierarchy and giving them names anyway – in fact the two are sometimes linked, with names like zz-Archive that would historically have forced a folder to the bottom of the sorted list, or _ Important that would force it to the top. Did you know that in Outlook 2013, you can manually drag and drop folders around in the tree hierarchy to arrange them in ways other than alphabetically. Quite handy, really…

Oh, the second SimplyFile gotcha – it costs $50 of hard currency but like all the best addictive experiences, it’s available for free for a 30 day trial. Have a go, what’s the worst that can happen?

What is this “Internet of Things” thing, anyway?

Posted on by ewand

I’m going to start the odd bit of blogging aside from the weekly Tips that will carry on making their way onto this blog. Here is the first in a short series looking at the Internet of Things.

The term “Internet of Things” (or IoT) has achieved buzzword fever pitch in 2014, thanks in part to a slew of product announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Combined with high-profile acquisitions (such as Google’s purchase of smart home technology company, Nest), there have been many news stories which associated the subject of the piece with the Internet of Things.

imageEven people who work in the IoT world sometime struggle to articulate what it actually is. There are several ways of looking at IoT, however, and some of the scenarios are only being developed now and will become both significant and disruptive in ways that we probably don’t yet understand. There are, in fact, numerous types of “Internet of Things” application.

The consumer market provides plenty of examples of devices measuring and reporting data back to some kind of service that allows users to use that data for some purpose that would otherwise be difficult or impossible without this technology. “Wearable technology” is a category that typifies this approach.

Industrial Internet of Things applications have often existed for years, just under different names – M2M, SCADA, telemetry of numerous sorts – though are being combined in new ways and with new variants of technology, to open up new scenarios such as telematics. Industrial uses could mean using IoT technology to control a manufacturing process, to monitor complex machines in the field, extending even to remotely monitoring cars for the purposes of insurance, road tolling, safety and performance improvements.

Finally, companies will find a way to use IoT technology inside their own environments, offering up data that is consolidated from other systems and collected using sensors, to be combined with customer relationship management systems, building control systems and a host of other uses.

The interesting thing is, the majority of these examples won’t connect the many things to the Internet at all – maybe the devices and sensors at the very edge of the system will be individually addressable, but they almost certainly won’t be directly connected to the internet. Other groups have tried to establish alternative definitions – some talk or a “Sensor mesh” or a “Network of sensors", and Cisco, for example, talks about the “Internet of Everything” (and has some other, intriguing ideas such as Fog Computing… it’s like Cloud Computing but nearer the ground). It looks like the term IoT has stuck, at least until we stop talking about it as if it’s something special or something different, rather than just the normal way that these things work.

The definitive definition of the Internet of Things

The term “Internet of Things” was coined in 1999 by Kevin Ashton, from Proctor & Gamble, then at MIT. He later wrote, in 2009:

“Nearly all of the data available on the Internet were first captured and created by human beings—by typing, pressing a record button, taking a digital picture or scanning a bar code. The problem is, people have limited time, attention and accuracy—all of which means they are not very good at capturing data about things in the real world. If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best.

The Internet of Things has the potential to change the world, just as the Internet did. Maybe even more so.”

Analysts express differing views as to the exact scale (IDC reckons 212 billion devices with a market value of nearly $9trillion in only 6 years), but all estimates of the future size of the Internet of Things business are extraordinarily large. If even the lower end forecasts are out by a factor of 10, there will still be billions of connected devices within a few years, and the reason those devices are connected is because they have something to communicate.

What’s Microsoft got to say about this Internet of Things? Well, there are lots of things out there which read data and send it for further processing, and those things are probably not going to be running anything like a Windows OS. There are going to be devices which these sensors talk to, which collect the information and process it to some degree (validating it, packaging it for onward delivery, maybe issuing commands back to the sensors on the basis of what the data says). These devices may well be running a more functional OS, something akin to Windows Embedded and forming part of what we could call an Intelligent System. Then there’s the cloud platform that will tie everything together – boy do we have one of those… called Windows Azure. 

Next time, I’ll explore a few thoughts developed by some Microsoft experts and collected by talking with partner companies active in this area.

For further reading in the meantime, check out a couple of articles on the MSDN Magazine site (here and here), which shows some practical examples of how to use the Azure Service Bus to build an IoT application.

Tip o’ the Week #211 – Manage your battery on WP8

Posted on by ewand

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The world – at least if you listen to ex-PayPal squillionaire Elon Musk – is destined to move from fossil-fuel-fired transport to electric vehicles that might be charged by the power grid rather than carrying around their own means of energy conversion. Some say that centralised generation (in the form of power stations) is more efficient than hydrogen fuel cells or petrol/hybrid,  and even coal-fired power stations are ~60% efficient, says the Hyperloop space cadet. We’ll see.

Hyperloop: Near-supersonic travel in a driverless capsule fired along a vacuum tube suspended monorail style, over-ground along the San Andreas fault. What could possibly go wrong?

Whatever, the current generation of plug-in electric cars – some of which are expensive and impractical hairshirt statements, some (like Musk’s Tesla S) a genuine move forward to a new world – brings a new phrase into the lexicon, which is also recognisable to many other technology users – range anxiety. In other words, the fear that there just isn’t enough power left to get you home.

Users of any smartphone will be familiar with the idea that you’re only a few steps away from running out of power, particularly the times when you are using it – and maybe need it – the most. Like when you’re travelling on trains, hanging around at airports etc. You have time on your hands, you’re reading and writing emails, maybe you’re listening to music or using your phone’s navigation, ergo the phone gets drained more quickly.

clip_image004Laptops have nice big batteries, at least in comparison to phones. Laptops need bigger batteries, but if the laptop is in your bag, did you realise you might be able to use it to recharge your phone, even if the laptop is asleep or even powered off? Look on the back of your machine and you may find a small electric flash symbol next to the port – which signifies you can charge devices using this port when the PC is not running.

USB ports will one day be able to drive up to 100W of power supply to other devices, but you might find the ports on your laptop today aren’t labelled yet one of them can power USB devices when switched off – trial and error may prove useful…

Another option is to control what’s happening on your phone itself – you could check that the background tasks section in settings / applications / background tasks and disable and apps you don’t want to run in the background (which inevitably drains battery life). A great tip (if slightly more drastic) comes from ToW regular Simon Boreham:

If one is more interested in battery life than Facebook & Twitter updates, etc. you can go into the Data Sense app, and under settings set restrict background data to always.  The results are amazing  ~70 % battery still left at the end of the day!  Incidentally I found out about this whilst traveling, there is an option to set it when roaming and clearly there are data volume advantages to setting it as well as battery life.  Obviously this restricts live tile updates etc, but it is a trade-off.

Whatever, keep a micro-USB cable on your person all the time. You never know when you’ll need it.

Tip o’ the Week #210 – Beam me up!

Posted on by ewand

In the last few weeks, Nokia has shipped the Lumia Black update and it’s widely available. There are some cool additions that the Finns have made to the Phone platform, some new and synched with Black. Nokia now publishes loads of addons (some available for other phones, many only application on Nokia handsets), under both the Nokia and Here brands.

Beamer

This is an evolution of the PhotoBeamer app that came out a while back, except the Beamer app lets you share your screen, the map of where you are, or the output of your phone camera, to many internet connected devices simply by visiting http://beam.nokia.com and scanning the displayed barcode on your phone. Hello Computer?!
(Great typing skills, btw, Scotty)

Focus, Focus, I think he’s trying to Focus

Many a gadget fan and itinerant story teller couldn’t wait to sample the Lytro camera, which promised to capture enough of a digital photograph that it would banish the problem of focus being in the wrong place.

Now, Nokia has launched the Refocus app (as usual, if you’ve a Nokia handset…) and a website to allow non-Nokia users to have a play. Here’s one I made earlier – all in the interests of research, y’understand.

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Very nice. Now there’s at least half a dozen different camera apps on my phone.

Tip o’ the Week #209 – Shhhhhhhh!

Posted on by ewand

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How many times have you been awoken by your phone, tablet or PC blaring an alert first thing in the morning, telling you it’s someone’s birthday (worse, someone you hardly even know)? Or reminding you it’s time to go to an optional conference call in the middle of the night (your time), that was sitting unnoticed in your diary?

As mobile platforms have evolved, sometimes favoured functionality in old versions gets sacrificed in the name of quick progress, and may be eventually added back in future. The Windows Phone 7 journey is a great example – compared to Windows Mobile 6.5, there were lots of features which didn’t exist yet most people either didn’t notice, or they did notice but quickly stopped whining, dried their eyes and got on with the rest of their lives.

Windows Phone 8 misses one feature that was present in many old mobile phones, (including that first “Stinger” phone, the Orange SPV, which showed up more than 11 years ago), namely the idea of sound profiles – you could set up several named settings (Meeting, Silent, Outdoor, Normal, etc), and easily switch between them, maybe even automatically. Later versions of Pocket PC-based phones had an array of 3rd party software that could not only create & manage profiles – a feature that didn’t exist on the PPC platform – but could even switch profiles on a schedule, so when you went to bed, the phone went to quiet mode but came back to life in the morning so the alarm still worked.

Windows 8.1 and Quiet hours

clip_image004Here’s a handy added-feature to Windows 8.1 which could be particularly relevant to hypnagogic tablet users, namely the ability to shut the machine up for specified periods of time. It’s even enabled by default.

To set up your preferred Quiet hours, either navigate through settings (Settings charm | clip_image006Change PC Settings | Search and apps | Notifications) or save yourself a lot of clicking or poking, by typing quiet hours at the Start screen, and select from the search results.

Maybe we’ll see the same Quiet Hours functionality built into the next generation of Windows Phone…? In the meantime, at least you can quickly switch between ring mode and silence by just pressing one of the volume controls on the side of the phone, then tapping the sound icon on the top right of the screen.

Tip o’ the Week #204 – Mirror, mirror, on the big screen

Posted on by ewand

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Many people who’ve had a new laptop in the last year will have experienced the frustration of showing up in a meeting room, only to find that you have no means of projecting onto the screen – there are at least 5 different types of connector that could go into the laptop, and 2 or 3 that might be supported by the screen in the room.

clip_image003Wireless projection has been promised for years, with a series of proprietary and clunky technologies that never really took off. All this is set to change, using a technology which started as a consumer function on high-end TVs, yet is filtering down to £200 tellies and will be mainstream on projection systems going forward. Maybe. For now, we have to live with a profusion of dongles while projecting at work, but what about in the home? Ever fancied delivering a PPT presentation to the gathered family?

“Miracast” is a standard which allows devices – PCs and Android tablets, mainly (Apple does not support Miracast, preferring their own proprietary technology) – to replicate their display and sounds onto a remote device. Windows 8.1 now supports Miracast, and if your home TV is new, then you might well find it enables the screen mirroring technology too.

There are third-party Miracast devices which can bring wireless access to your “legacy” TV and sound system, potentially – EZCast HDMI WiFi adapters or the Netgear PTV3000. Maybe it’s worth treating your living room to some remote projection goodness?

A few things to check:

  • You can only use Miracast over WiFi – it’s not applicable using wired connections, and some WiFi networks won’t support it either.
  • Even if you’ve got an appropriate telly and a Windows 8.1 machine with the right kind of WiFi adapter, you may still need to get an updated display driver (either from your PC manufacturer or from Intel directly).
  • clip_image004Surface RT currently does not support Miracast even though the Nvidia Tegra 3 SoC that powers the original Surface, does. Surface Pro and 2 should be OK.
  • You’ll need to add the TV to your PC, akin to pairing a Bluetooth device – a one-off process that is pretty self-explanatory, though if it doesn’t go smoothly, return to the “update your driver” section.
  • As you may see, this is still not exactly Plug & Play…

Having said that, when it works – it works well. Think of Miracast as like HDMI over WiFi, so could be a way of streaming music to a TV connected to a sound system. Hello Xbox Music Pass, bye-bye Sonos?

To find out more, here’s a step-by-step guide on how to project and some more details on how it works, here.

Tip o’ the Week #203 – Remote control of Office

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002Anyone who regularly presents will have had the occasion when there’s a need to wander around the stage, or instead be marooned behind a lectern on the side, yet if there’s no presentation “clicker” provided, it’s difficult to control the flow. A/V professionals complain that they can never keep hold of clickers as they grow legs and walk, so unless you bring your own, you might be out of luck.

There have been any number of attempts to build remote control software for Pocket PCs, Stinger smartphones, but none have been altogether successful – usually requiring faffing about with esoteric networking to make them work. There was also the snappily-named Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000, which could be flipped over from its primary rodent function, to expose PowerPoint clicker type buttons below. It’s so bulky, maybe the mouse’s best use in retirement is to torment cats with its laser pointer.

clip_image001Enter Microsoft Research, who recently produced Office Remote – and a means, with your Windows Phone in paw, to remotely operate Office apps using a Bluetooth connection direct to the PC.

Frankly, controlling a remote Word doc (by jumping around the structure of the document, zooming in/out etc), or Excel (moving about, using Slicers/Filters/Pivots, as well as the jumping/zooming around) is something of a novelty. How many cases will you find yourself where you’re looking at a screen showing your document from your PC, but you don’t have the means to control the document directly?

Where the remote control really comes into its own, however, is with PowerPoint. You can read speaker notes and even use your phone screen as a virtual laser pointer on the main screen – as well as swiping back and forth to move through the slide being shown on the main PC.

There are two routes to go about installing the software – there’s an agent that needs to run on your PC, and an app on the clip_image003 phone. If you run the Setup app on your PC, then look under the “OFFICE REMOTE” tab in your Word/Excel/PowerPoint apps, you can remotely install the controller app on your phone. Or start with the phone install first.

Simply install the app on both PC (running Windows 7 or 8.x) and on your mobile device, bond the two together in Bluetooth settings (part of the setup to add a new device) and you’re off. Simple, effective and free. Thanks to Simon Boreham, Ant Austin, Rina Ladva and others for recommending the application.

Tip o’ the Week #202 – Screen grabs, reprised

Posted on by ewand

clip_image004Previous ToWs have covered how to capture the screen image on Windows, but things have moved on a little of late and it seems like a good time to highlight how to take an image of the screen on a number of devices. Props to Liam Kelly and Rachel Peck for inspiring this discussion.

There are any number of 3rd party screen grab utilities but here are some integral ways of doing so. Snap, Snap, Grin, Grin…

Windows 8.1

ToW #183 uncovered a hack to replace the WindowsKey+S combination OneNote used but which was appropriated by Windows 8.1 preview, meaning that Win+S snappers were left with no easy way of capturing areas of the screen.

GREAT NEWS! The RTM of Windows 8.1 (or is it an update to OneNote?) has restored the ability to capture areas of the screen, this time by using WindowsKey + SHIFT + S. This method has the benefit of being able to screen grab parts of the Start screen and of modern apps too.

Windows 8.x devices

To quickly add the whole screen (or a combination of all of your displays if you’re running multi-mon) to the clipboard, just press WindowsKey + PrtScn.

If you want to capture the whole screen and find yourself lacking a PrtScn button (eg on the Surface) or in fact with no keyboard at all (eg tablets aplenty), you are able to grab the screen(s) by holding the volume down button and pressing the hardware Windows logo, at the bottom of the screen. The screen dims momentarily in both of the above methods, to let you know that the image has been dropped into the clipboard, ready for pasting into Word, Outlook or your favourite image manipulation app. Or MSPAINT.

Windows Phone 8

Simple – lightly press & hold the power/standby button and quickly press the Windows button on the front of the phone. The screen flashes briefly, the camera shutter noise may play (so careful playing with this feature in any situation where you wouldn’t want to look like you’re taking a photo…) and the resulting image is saved to the Screenshots folder within the Pictures hub.

Tip o’ the Week #201 – Multi-monitors with Windows 8.1

Posted on by ewand

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One of the best presents you can buy your PC is a second monitor. There have been a few ToW’s past that have explored the delights of running a second screen, where even just plugging your laptop into a desk monitor can make a really noticeable difference to the way you work.

The basics are all there – use WindowsKey + SHIFT + Left / Right to move the current window between monitors (though do try to remember that most desktop monitors don’t have touch input, or you might look like you’re from the Far Side). Windows 8.1 adds extra functionality though, including using the same key combo to move the main Start Screen around.

Andrew Warriner has a neat tip to maximise real estate on the 2nd screen –

Remove the task bar on a second screen.

How often do you use a second screen for presenting or running a demo and the task bar uses up valuable space along the bottom of the screen?  To remove it, simply right click on your taskbar and select Properties then toggle “Show taskbar on all displays”.

clip_image003Obviously, you can drag windows between monitors, and if you right-click on the desktop and select Screen Resolution then you can even position the two monitor icons in such a way that they reflect the physical arrangement of the screens, to make it easier to move the mouse around, and even position windows spanning the two (if you like to be really perverse).

Windows 8.1 adds some further goodness, such as the ability to adjust the scaling on individual screens – if you have a new laptop with a full HD quality screen then you may already be familiar with the fact that the pixels are really tiny so therefore everything looks small – but if you plugged your machine into an old fashioned 4:3 ratio 17” monitor, the screen resolution and pixel density would be a lot less, so windows will look larger in comparison.

If the mix is wrong, then a window that moves from one screen to another will be small on one and dis-proportionately huuuge on another – an effect akin to Billy Connolly’s Prescription Windscreen. The other side of the scaling tweak is that as we get higher resolution monitors (with 4K monitors on the horizon, even if the technology is still a little on the expensive side just now), then this will be more of an issue going the other way – an app that takes half the physical screen on a 17” widescreen laptop, would be postage stamp sized on a large high res external display.

To change the scaling on an individual monitor, go into the Screen Resolution settings, and look under Make text and other items larger or smaller – by selecting the monitor first, you can change the scaling for each individual screen, to get something a little more even.

clip_image005Windows 8.1 also allows the running of “Modern” (aka M***o) apps on multiple screens too, even combining them with the desktop environment, so you can mix & match. This fellow’s got interesting taste in apps, combining Python development with looking at puppies, alongside food, maps and pictures. Riiiight. There’s more detail on how, here.

Tip o’ the Week #200 – Top Ten Greatest Hits

Posted on by ewand

clip_image001If I was to ever write a style guide for these Tip o’ the Week emails, it would say to never use the first person, and to maintain a degree of relatively irreverent humour that hopefully makes it easy to read and not get in the way of the content. When I was thinking about what to write for the ToW #200, a few areas were considered…

Rob Fraser suggested some intriguing but frankly unprintable ideas.

I considered writing an off-piste article such as “How to wash your car properly”, or “How to cook the perfect fillet steak”, amusingly the most popular (by a factor of x10) old post on my blog.

All old externally-relevant ToWs end up on the blog, so if you want to send this stuff to your customer then by all means forward the emails, or just point them at the blog.

But no. After thinking about 4 years’ worth of Tips o’ the Week, some of which are now superseded by new product releases or defunct intranet or external web sites, I decided to showcase my favourite ten, presented here in no particular order. Some are a little out of date now (eg the steps to follow changed due to a new release) but the core principle still holds up and is easy enough to figure out.

#1 – Hide Outlook New Mail Notification. In Outlook clip_image0032013, go into File | Options | Mail and look for the Message arrival section. Switch off particularly the Desktop Alert and the sound – you don’t need to know you have a new mail, and it’ll still be there next time you go to look.

#45 – Focus! Silence the interruptions! Featured a brilliant application which puts Outlook into offline mode and Lync into Do Not Disturb, for a period of time… to let you do your day job without interruption. Sadly not available externally, but you should check out the principle of the Pomodoro technique for time management.

#19 ­–­ Navigating multi-sheet Excel workbooks. Particularly useful when you’re using Multi-monitor setups (a scenario first covered in ToW #39, and updated for Win8.x in ToW #115).

#101 – Finding files for dialogs. The Copy As Path method of clicking on a file somewhere and adding its full file name and path to the clipboard is such a useful tip, it saves me practically several minutes every week. Hey, every second counts.

#71 – Formatting tips for Office apps. Introducing the “Magic Office Key no-one knows about”, F4. Not useful very often, maybe, but when you do need it, you’ll be singing praises to the Office product group.

#5 – Contact number formatting. Install this little utility into Outlook and it will live forever in your mailbox, so never needs to be re-installed. Run it to sweep your Contacts folder for number formatted 0118 etc and it will tidy them up as +44118 etc, so you can click to dial from Lync. It’s UK specific but easy enough to modify for other country codes if you’ve got any VBScript coding skills in you.

#175 – a ‘tastic OneNote add-in. The great OneNote addin “OneCalendar” has featured in a couple of ToWs, it’s so good. This is the latest incarnation, either as a standalone addin or as part of the OneTastic suite.

#102 – When did someone really put something in their calendar? I really wondered whether to “out” this technique for sneaking a look at another user’s calendar, to see how long ago they created a meeting that they are now saying conflicts with the thing you’ve already invited them to.

#105 – Productivity? Learn to type! By far the best thing you can do to increase your productivity, is to learn how to use your keyboard properly. That’s all.

#125 – Ban the Mail Bomb. Another internal-only Tip, aiming to Stop Reply-all madness. It doesn’t just affect Microsoft, though. Me too!
You could employ the great and simple addin to Outlook courtesy of Microsoft Research, which disables the Reply All functionality from any subsequent emails, without having to rely on Rights Management. See here for a description, and here to install.

Hopefully these may be a useful refresher for regulars or a new discovery for recent additions to the ToW list. Here’s looking forward to the next 200 tips – remember, keep the ideas and the feedback coming! Thanks,

Ewan