Tip o’ the Week 382 – F…F…Feeds in Edge

Posted on June 30, 2017 by ewand

If you use the Edge browser in Windows 10 as your default (presumably by ignoring prompts on any Google property, to install and default to Chrome) then you may be familiar with the default tab behaviour, which helpfully shows you most-visited sites and also displays some “news” content below.

This “My feed” section can be a neat way to get news items of interest without having to do anything but fire up a new browser tab when you were planning to do something else anyway. Maybe distracting, though, unless you’re careful, and as well as the news, there’s plenty of click-bait garbage in there that can do just that. Who couldn’t resist naming these forgotten 1990s movies, or those car badges you don’t see any more? Or wonder what it was that happened next that shocked everyone?

There isn’t a lot of fine-tuning that can be achieved with My feed, however; a fact that’s driving people nuts on feedback forums and on the sometimes preposterously-named “Answers” forum (“please clear your browser cache, reboot, stand on one leg and rub the top of your head – that should fix it”).

Some of the feedback, though, and particularly the responses to it on the Insiders-only Feedback Hub, can be quite amusing….

The main degree of customisation you can do is to tweak the settings for what you prefer – click on the gear icon in the top right (above the Top Sites section), and choose whether you want to switch off the feed and just show Top sites or nothing. Some lanugages (not US English, oddly) allow you to choose what your favourite topics are, though deselecting some (and making the surrounding border disappear from the topic) doesn’t actually remove it from your feed – it just makes it a little less prevalent, and not quite immediately.

If you have US English set as your language, you will get a list of topics across the top of the feed to filter its contents, but in every other language it seems to be pre-sorted.

The gripes being exposed online about the feed tend to be around the nature of the news itself or in the tone and volume of the adverts (like, in the UK, do I really want Microsoft to push dodgy-sounding $30 TV antennae?).

The most annoying ads appear to be served up by Taboola and there doesn’t appear to be a way of blocking them – unless you know differently; then please write up what you did and share the info with me, whereupon kudos will be bestowed in great quantity – so if you don’t want to put up with intrustive click-bait, then your only current option is to basically switch off the feed and go somewhere else for your news (research shows many are using social media as their preferred way of hearing news, though the tide may be turning).

Maybe use a proper news web aggregator site, e.g. Bing news or this little-used one, both of which would let you filter and customise your news sources, or rely on a news app to provide you with even more control or detail (such as MSN News or Feedlab if you’re after getting your news up the RSS).

The challenge with any news feed is filtering out the fake news. Still, there’s still the odd bit of truth out there.

Tip o’ the Week 381 – Send to OneNote

Posted on June 30, 2017 by ewand

OneNote is a favourite app for many people, especially if you like taking notes using a pen. With the Surface Pro announcement, it’s apparently even better with inking, even if the groovy new pen isn’t bundled with the package and only a third of existing Surface users ever pick their pen up.

There are some updates rolling out to the mobile & web versions of OneNote, that will improve a bunch of navigational and creative features, and will appear in the modern Windows app version (though OneNote 2016 will be unaffected).

As well as being a place to collaborate and store information, OneNote is a great place to dump all sorts of stuff you want to keep – from the business cards or expense receipts you might get from Office Lens, to emails or other documents you may want to associate with notes around a given topic.

If you have OneNote 2016 installed – via Office365 for example – then you’ll have a “Send to OneNote 2016” options visible in the print dialog from any application – but there’s a new Store app called Send to OneNote that does the same thing but for the modern Windows App once installed, you have another fake printer available for any app to drop a printout into OneNote.

Of course, there are other ways of getting content into OneNote – from the Share to method that was covered recently in ToW 378, to the OneNote Clipper browser extension, or even the direct email to OneNote function… all of which may both provide a more useful sharing/clipping experience, but are only usable in certain applications or ways.

The modern OneNote app keeps getting minor updates that both bring it more into line functionally with the traditional desktop OneNote 2016, but also give it a fresher UI in some respects, especially on touch or pen-friendly devices.

Tip o’ the Week 380 – Hey Cortana, take flight!

Posted on May 30, 2017 by ewand

With the news that Cortana is coming to a consumer audio device near you, it’s worth revisiting a few things that Cortana on your desktop can do for you. If you have a Windows 10 PC with a microphone, then you may be able to enable “Hey Cortana”, which lets you talk to your machine and ask it stuff. See what’s new with the Blue One in the Creators Update.

You can leave yourself voice notes and Cortana will stick them in the Quick Notes section of OneNote – using the Modern App version of OneNote, look under Settings -> Options -> choose a notebook for Quick Notes to set the default location.

Even if you don’t talk to your PC, pressing WindowsKey+Q will launch Cortana, as a quick way of searching for apps or documents on your machine, or answers on the web – just type in your query, then filter by the icons on top of the window as appropriate.

Cortana can do a lot more than just be a shim for Bing search; she can offer immediate advice, like what the time is in a different location, what’s the weather for tomorrow, and more. Type a flight number to see its current status, a stock symbol for a quote or a couple of currency symbols for an immediate exchange rate estimate.

While many of these commands work when you type them (eg type, time new york, as on the left), some will only work when spoken and some will give a better UI and/or more detail when voiced rather than typed (such as the “Hey Cortana, what’s the time in New York” query on the right)…

Of course, there are plenty of stupid things you can ask Cortana – open the pod bay doors, sing me a song, knock knock, who let the dogs out, etc etc. Just like Alexa or Siri, there are many built-in Easter Eggs.

You can sometimes string some interesting productivity commands together, too – some could be useful in context, like reminding you to buy milk next time you’re in a supermarket (whereupon your phone will trigger a reminder when it knows you’ve just walked into a supermarket, based on GPS) or next time you talk to a particular contact, to remind you to ask them something (where it will pop up when you next speak to them, exchange emails etc).

You can issue some pretty complex instructions to add reminders – eg. “Hey Cortana, add Pink Floyd exhibition Their Mortal Remains at the V&A to my calendar for tomorrow at 3:45” … and Cortana can put it on your calendar, or just maintain a list of reminders in her own Notebook.

(NB: screen shot to the right was not faked up, although it did take more than one attempt …)

Cortana’s getting skills, too, from Graph to bots to Rome.

Tip o’ the Week 379 – Delay mail, revisited

Posted on May 26, 2017 by ewand

A couple of years ago, ToW #282 covered how to delay your mail from being sent, by forcing Outlook to work offline, by selectively delaying individual messages or even adding a rule to ensure that every one is held up. It’s a very useful thing to do, sometimes – a great way to prevent accidental mail sending, or give you a chance to revise stuff you’ve sent after maybe reading newer emails in your inbox.

This tip presents a refinement of the process as there is a downside to automatically delaying everything – namely, if you’re in a hurry to go somewhere but you need a mail to be fired off beforehand, it can be annoying to have to hang around for the enforced delay to expire before you can safely pack up and head out.

You will need to do a bit of digging around inside Outlook dialogs, so it may help to park this on a 2^nd screen, copy to a Word doc or something…

What we’re going to do is set up a rule to delay all outgoing email – except mail with a particular category assigned to it, so that will be sent immediately. If you know you want the mail you’re about to send to go right now, then you could manually set the category before you hit send, and it will leave straight away.

Go into Rules in the main Outlook window (either from the menu, or just search for Rules in the “Tell me what you want to do” box), and select the Manage Rules & Alerts option.
To create a new rule to delay mail (if you’ve already got one as per Tow#282, then edit it to do the same) try adding one that applies to messages you send, then don’t choose any conditions (and accept that it will fire on all messages), then when asked for exceptions, set a condition so that it won’t apply if a particular category is set (eg create a Category called NODELAY or SENDNOW or something). The categorisation will still be visible in your Sent Items folder, but the recipient won’t see it.
Set the delay time (in minutes) and apply the rule; try it out with a blank, uncategorised mail to yourself and you should see it sit in the Outbox folder for a few minutes before being sent. Now try to send another message and set the category manually, and you should see it arrive quickly. To set the category on an outgoing message, look in the message properties before hitting send – either from the Tags group in the ribbon, or File | Properties on the menu of the message window.

This is all very well if you remember to go in and set the category before you his send. If you regularly have an Outbox full of stuff waiting to go and you’re truly adventurous, you could add a Macro to Outlook to automatically flush the queue. Press ALT+F8 to get to the Macro settings; if prompted to run or create a macro, Create a new one called SendNow, paste the following into the code window:

Sub sendNow()

    Set CurrentFolder = Application.ActiveExplorer.CurrentFolder

    Set Application.ActiveExplorer.CurrentFolder = _

        Application.GetNamespace(“MAPI”).GetDefaultFolder(olFolderOutbox)

    Set omsgs = Application.ActiveExplorer.CurrentFolder.Items

        For Each omsg In omsgs

            omsg.DeferredDeliveryTime = Now() – 1

            If omsg.Categories = “” Then omsg.Categories = “NODELAY”

            omsg.Send

        Next

    Set Application.ActiveExplorer.CurrentFolder = CurrentFolder

End Sub

After saving/exiting from the Macro editor, you might want to add a shortcut to your new macro to the Quick Access Toolbar in the main Outlook window. When you add the command to the list on the right hand side of the dialog, you can modify the button to give it a snazzier icon and a name that means something.

Tip o’ the Week 378 – Sharing, caring

Posted on May 24, 2017 by ewand

One of the Charms in Windows 8 promised to make it easy to share content between applications – rather than copying & pasting, maybe it would be better to allow the source application to provide some extra context to the destination app. When it works well, app-app sharing is really useful, but it maybe didn’t take off quite as much as expected.

The Sharing icon from Windows 8.x and early Windows 10 versions was the 3-blobs-in-a-circle which does looks a lot like the Ubuntu logo for some, and doesn’t necessarily convey the meaning of sharing to others. One of the tweaks in the Creators Update was not only a newly-designed icon, but a new Sharing UI that aims to simplify the process further.

If you are using a suitable Windows app (like Edge or Photos, for example), which touts the new sharing icon (the one with the arrow leaping out of the box), then when you choose the Share action, a UI will show up that lists all the apps that could be the target for Sharing, and a link to the Store to find more.

Click or tap on the destination app, and depending on what that app can do and what data the source is providing, you may see more content than simply sharing the URL or copying the file.

Sharing a page from Edge to OneNote, for example, will put a thumbnail image if available, a description of the page, and will let you add your own verbatim notes before saving the content as a new page in your notebook.

There are a few Clipboard apps which can be handy for sharing content so you can paste it into an old fashioned app that doesn’t support the Share method. Some “traditional” Windows apps – like the venerable Windows Explorer – are Share enabled, even though their icon may still be using the old design for now (and some Store apps have the same design lag – the Store App itself being one of them…)

Tip o’ the Week 377 – Windows 10 Films & TV

Posted on May 22, 2017 by ewand

In a culturally-sensitive and relatively unusual sort of localis(z)ation, Windows 10 has an app called Films & TV. Or Movies & TV, depending on where you are in the world. Whichever, it’s the de facto video player in Windows 10, unless you start by installing your own.

The naming may only be skin deep but in Blighty, still, Kermode & Esler host the Film Review and dear old Barry Norman (and why not?) fronted the Film… franchise for 27 years, keeping sign-writers and logo creators busy as the program name changed annually.

The Films & TV app got a nice refresh to coincide with the Creators Update, recently – so if you haven’t played around with it much, then it’s maybe worth another look.

Films & TV can show off your local video files, or let you explore stuff to rent or buy as well as access previously bought video content. In an ideal world, it would be nice to allow apps to be able to retrieve content from any source, similar to how devices like Sonos can support multiple music sources (Spotify, Groove, Amazon etc). Sadly, for now at least, you can only see content that you bought through the Films & TV (previously Xbox Video) store.

Still, there are some cool touches to the app UI – like the ability to play back video on a Miracast-enabled device, so you can source the file from your laptop yet watch it back on your monster telly.

Assuming Miracast works, that is. Russian Roulette would give you better odds than with some supposedly Miracast supporting gear, but let’s move on…

The new “Explore” section in F&TV lets you see film trailers and recommended movies & TV series, as well as some highlighted 360° videos from sources like GoPro. Check out the Indy cars driving across the Golden Gate Bridge – Monaco it ain’t but it’s still quite impressive.

You can set the playback to a mini player mode which lets you carry on watching something more interesting than whatever you’re supposed to be doing, as the mini player stays on top of other windows.

When playing back ordinary video, you could choose to play it back as 360° video instead – a relatively freaky experience that’s presumably included because you might happen upon 360° video encoded as regular MP4 or whatever, and want to experience that as intended.

Still. ~~Movies~~ Films & TV is a nice, simple video player which is Tip o’ the Week 377 – Windows 10 Films & TVworthy of consideration, even if you do end up installing VLC.

Tip o’ the Week 376 – Toodle-oo, Wunderlist!

Posted on April 28, 2017 by ewand

Toodle-oo (like it’s synonym, toodle pip) is, if you’re not otherwise familiar, a charming and olde-wurlde English way of bidding farewell. It seems somewhat appropriate, as Microsoft announced plans to retire Wunderlist in favour of a new app that’s been in the works for a while, with the codename Project Cheshire.

Reviewers who had an early look at Cheshire around a year ago, commented on the fact that it’s kinda similar to Wunderlist, in that both are trying to achieve the same sort of thing. As the product now called Microsoft To-Do was announced, it became clear that the team behind Wunderlist has been working to evolve some of what they’d done before, bringing tighter integration with Office 365 and the promise of more groovy features to come.

Right now, To-Do (to hyphenate, or not to hyphenate?) is in Preview, which means it’s not fully featured (eg sub-tasks that you might use in Wunderlist haven’t made an appearance yet), and as well as a web version, there are Windows, Android phone & iPhone apps – others are due though we’ll see whether the same breadth of coverage as Wunderlist provides is maintained. The Preview nature also means that Wunderlist isn’t going away soon, but it will eventually give way to To-Do, or http://todo.microsoft.com

Start by signing in, and looking in the top left menu – if you have used Wunderlist before, it can import your existing tasks, thought it might take longer than you think. It’s a one-way process, so try to make sure you don’t keep adding stuff into Wunderlist, though you can choose to sync only selective task groups, so you could potentially re-import to get only new stuff. Be careful when running an import for the 2^nd time – the process doesn’t merge sections that already exist, so if you’ve imported already, you might end up with lots of Project (1) type lists and tasks.

The preview version of To-Do also supports importing from the alternative todoist. The web client has an import command from the context menu under the user, but you may need to go to the Settings pane in other clients, or else just go to https://import.todo.microsoft.com/ and be done with it.

If you sign in on a machine that’s already set up for Office 365, your default login to To-Do will be your O365 credentials, and it will automatically show you Outlook Tasks as to-do items… and synchronizes with Tasks as the back end for To-Do is Office 365.

You might need to play around a bit if you also use To-Do with your Microsoft Account – the one you maybe logged into Wunderlist with, for example…

Tip o’ the Week 375 – Edge improvements in CU

Posted on April 22, 2017 by ewand

Now that the Windows 10 Creators Update is generally available, it’s worth looking at some specific new features that may delight users who are upgrading. The Edge browser has been given a bit of an overhaul, so that’s a good place to start.

Battery improvements – as mentioned in ToW 335, Edge browser has been deliberately tuned to work better on battery-powered laptops or tablets, compared to other browsers. Well, following the Creators Update, a further test was run to stream videos until the identical laptops drained all their battery – with Edge outperforming Firefox & Chrome handsomely. YMMV but it’s worth looking at browsing with Edge if you want to get the best out of the time on your laptop.

Extension support – there are more and more extensions coming out for Edge, featuring translation, password management, tracking & ad blocking and more. See them here.

Tab handling has had some further tweaks, from the ability to set tabs aside for later (and be able to bring them back individually, or all at once), to the enhanced view showing tab previews. Did you know, also, that if you click on a tab and drag it off the window your browser is in, it’ll create a new window with just that tab in it? Handy if you want to have the equivalent of a “boss view” with all your social guff in one window, and all your boring work stuff in another.

Security – there’s some underlying improvement to the way that Edge protects the user from nastiness (well, some of the nastiness) on the internet – see more about it, here.

There’s a summary of changes in Edge within Creators Update here. And there are more tips, here.

Tip o’ the Week 373 – Copying Images for emails

Posted on April 17, 2017 (Updated December 10, 2021) by ewand

A picture tells a thousand words, etc etc etc. We all know the power of adding images into presentations, documents, emails and the like… even forum posts into external discussions often feature reference to pics that exist elsewhere on the internet.

If you want to use someone else’s imagery, especially if it’s something you plan to disseminate, then you really ought to ask, or else pick imagery that’s appropriate licensed. One way is to source your image content from a pre-licensed source – like public domain (fill your boots) or Creative Commons, where some rights are reserved by the creator but others are often waived, meaning you’re free to use those images within certain constraints.

Bing.com has some nice image searching tools which let you find content and then filter based on the license type – just click on the filter logo on the far right, and then choose the requisite license type from the drop-down box.

Once you’ve found the image content and you’re happy that it’s OK to use it as per the license (or you don’t really care), then you can copy & paste in a number of ways.

If the destination for your image-based plagiary is some Office app, then you can usually copy & paste, or do some sort of Insert from within the app ; Outlook gives you an easy way of finding content that’s Creative Commons by default, and plenty of warnings to boot. Here’s a screen shot of the warnings and stuff, probably in flagrant breach of the actual rules…

See earlier comment. Whatever.

Anyway. There are a few other ways of pasting in found content – in Facebook, for example, if you have a picture in the clipboard, you can paste it straight into a Post and it will be uploaded. The same thing is true of some online forums (watch nerds, look away now), whereas most will want you to find a URL for your photos before you can embed them in the post you’re making.

There are some different approaches to grabbing the URL of an online photo, should you need to – Google’s Chrome browser lets you right-click on an image, and you can copy it to the clipboard, copy its URL or even search Google for similar or different-sized versions of the same thing.

The Edge browser usually works a little differently, though – you could share the image to another app that supports that ability, but with Edge (updated in a number of ways as part of the forthcoming (on April 11) Creators Update), there’s a simplification in that if you just Copy an image, it will copy & paste the URL that points to that image, and/or the image itself. If you want a URL (for example, you go to the Insert Image option in most online fora, where they expect you to point to an external picture rather than host a copy themselves) the clipboard just contains a hard link to the image in question.

For applications that support directly inserting an image (via pasting), then the image will be pasted instead of its URL. Try it with any image you find online – Copy in Edge, and if you paste into MSPaint, you’ll get the image itself, but if you paste into Notepad, you’ll just get the URL. Some apps – like Outlook or OneNote – will let you choose which you want; when pasting an image, you could choose to leave it as such, or pick the “text” icon on the right, to paste the URL instead.

Asking Cortana will tell you a bit about the image, too, which is nice…

Finally, don’t forget that if you’re grubbing about in Windows Explorer (WindowsKey+E, remember), you can right-click on any local or network-located file, while also holding shift, and you’ll see a Copy as path option – which will copy the name & place where that file is (the fully qualified filename, to be precise), to your clipboard.

So, if you’re a good girl or boy, you can share your own content from your PC, easily uploading to appropriate services by copying the path to any file on your machine and pasting that path into the dialog to attach, upload or insert a file.

In fact, that’s probably the most useful tip in this whole mail. Done.

Tip o’ the Week 374 – Creators Update arrives

Posted on April 13, 2017 by ewand

this tip was originally sent in email inside Microsoft, on 7th April 2017

“Redstone 2”. That’s the codename given to the latest update for Windows 10, which itself was codenamed “Threshold”. Following the previous updates TH2 (aka the November Update) and “Redstone” (the Anniversary Update, released about a year ago), RS2 is the latest – called Creators Update – which will arrive next week. More detail on what to expect in the update, here.

If you’d like to get access to the Creators Update before Tuesday next week, then you can download it in a number of ways beforehand – some home PC work for the weekend, perhaps?

Run the Update Assistant on your PC – head over to the Download page and click the Update now button to download and install the update to your PC. This is the option to take if you’d like to keep everything as-is, but with the latest software.
To install on a new PC, or to flatten and reinstall on your existing machine, download the Media Creation Tool from the lower Download tool now button on the same page. This will allow you to either put the Windows installation on a bootable USB stick or else download an ISO file that could be burned to a DVD for installation. You may also be able to download & open the ISO file as a disk drive, and run the update from there.

If you’d like to know where you’re at with your current Windows installation, try running (press WindowsKey+R) winver and you’ll see the version and build – the resulting RH2 release is version 1703, build 15063 and there are a variety of subversions which will increase in time, probably quickly, as minor updates are pushed out through Windows Update.

As you’d expect, there are further major updates being planned – RH3 is already being rumoured, and Windows Insiders will start getting post-RH2 builds fairly soon now. If you’ve been checking out RH2 on the Insiders program, make sure you know what’s coming, and decide if you want to stay in the program.