#63B: It’s Your ISP

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Following on from last week’s missive on finding problems in your home network, this one turns its attention to network of the internet service provider (ISP) itself. Just like any other utility provider, there is a lot going on behind the scenes before the pipe or cable that shows up at your property delivers its stuff. As UK Gov CTO David Knott says, the simpler something looks, the more complex it probably is.

If you think there are problems with your internet connection’s speed or reliability, and it’s not your fault, there are a few things you can do to try and pinpoint where the cause lies. Being quite specific can also help short-circuit the early stages of the supplier’s support desk, where they’ll be getting you to clear your cookies and restart your browser.

Let’s assume that any WiFi devices are working and the home router itself is connecting OK – the lights on your device are behaving like they should be connected.

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I bet none of you losers has their own named port on their broadband router

Sometimes the connection to the ISP might be ropey – even if the lights are on, it could be worth logging into the admin page on your router to see if there are any tell-tales or warnings. There’s probably a log of events that might show repeated disconnect/reconnect loops, or other tell-tale errors. If you have a fancy-pants NAS device or similar, you might even be able to collect the logs and give better reporting.

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It’s worth checking a public speed test site, like www.speedtest.net, to see if it thinks you should be getting decent performance. Pay attention to that Ping ms number – as mentioned previously, latency is the enemy of anything that needs real-time communications like a Teams/Zoom meeting or online gaming. Streaming video can often deal with poor latency since it will buffer at least a few seconds in advance, though if it gets really bad then it might still be unworkable.

HOW NETWORKS WORK

Without grossly oversimplifying things, when you try to connect to a remote resource (say, www.google.com), your computer will use the magic of DNS (short for the Domain Name System) to figure out what is its actual address on the internet, then will attempt to reach it.

Imagine going on a journey with tens or hundreds of junctions along the way; at each turn you don’t need to know all of the directions to the destination, only that it’s further along this road rather than the other way. When connecting to a remote internet site, there will be many “hops” that your data will take – and the connections between each of those points could be a cause of problems.

Given that the internet was conceived to survive a nuclear war, traffic should find a way but sometimes there’s a single link that can throw everything off. If a single website is slow but everything else works, it’s probably that site. But if everything seems slow or unreliable, it’s more likely there’s a problem with your ISP’s network, or possibly the network it connects to.

To test a single connection, there’s a built-in command (again, on Windows, press Win+R an enter cmd) called tracert, which will basically ping everything between you and that remote site:

In this case, it sends 3 requests and measures the round-trip time of each; sometimes you’ll see an isolated spike or a drop out but that’s not unusual. In many cases, for popular sites like Google or Bing, you’ll only really be connecting to a nearby node anyway. Look up the IP Address on whatismyipaddress.com and you’d see, in this instance, that Google.com lives in a Datacenter in London, but if the same experiment was repeated from a PC in LA, the IP address and therefore final destination that corresponds to www.google.com would be different.

If you think your network problem is a bit more transient, you could try an old bit of Windows software called WinMTR (or a lightly refreshed version called WinMTR Redux). This will repeatedly run TraceRT probes and show you the results over time; if you see one particular hop which spikes a lot and it looks like it’s part of your own ISP’s network, then it could be worth sharing this info with them in the hope they go and switch that router off and back on again…

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In this instance, the first hop into the ISP network – 217.47.72.122 – appeared to be the problem as it and everything later had terrible latency (almost a whole second where you’d normally expect a few milliseconds). This above example was presented to a well-known UK national telecoms provider some time ago, as proof that the problem was with them, and to stop ordering the end user to faff about with ADSL microfilters or get engineers out to test the phone line.

Another example shows that while there’s no cataclysmic issue, there appears to be a delay in some of the connections further up the line – probably not worth escalating but it might explain why some sites feel slow while others don’t:

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The nice thing about WinMTR is that you could save it to OneDrive / Google Drive and run it directly without needing to install anything. If you’re happy to add some troubleshooting software in advance of having a problem, another alternative could be PingPlotter:

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WHAT IF IT’S DNS?

Ask anyone who has worked in IT support and at some point, the DNS infrastructure or your connection into it will be the thing that breaks everything else. Moving everything off-premises to a cloud-based environment merely means that DNS is someone else’s problem, but if you can’t figure out how to connect to the cloud, it’s yours.

Stack of blocks below text 'All modern digital infrastructure' made precarious by single small block near the bottom labelled 'DNS'

Normally, when your ISP gives you a connection, they also provide the address that your computers will use to make DNS queries. Your broadband router might act as a proxy, so the devices on the home network just ask it to resolve DNS queries, then it will connect to your ISP’s DNS service and relay the response back.

If everything else appears to be working but your connection is still flaky and slow, it may be that your ISP’s DNS service is stuffed. To the end user, you’d try to connect to www.google.com and it would spin for a while and eventually get an error saying it had timed our or could not be found; this could just be that your PC asked the router, which passed through the request to the ISP’s own DNS server(s), but if there’s a problem connecting or they’re not working properly, then a reply might not come.

Fortunately, there is an option to sidestep this – temporarily, maybe – and use somebody else’s DNS service instead.

Google operates a free, public DNS service, on addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. If your ISP’s DNS is not responding well, try substituting the default automatic provisioning of DNS server addresses that your machine will likely have, with hard-coding Google’s DNS – see Get Started  |  Public DNS.

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If all else fails, you might just have to endure the ISP’s support desk to get someone to check the connection back to you, or just give up and go outside instead.

#63: Trouble with your network?

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We’ve all been there. Just when you need it to work, your home internet connection goes down or huffs off in go-slow mode. You’ll have seen others who, even 5 years after enforced home working, haven’t quite figured out how to make their networks, er, work. Or the colleague who always appears to be having trouble with their internet, so they can’t switch on the camera…?

What to do if your network appears to be up the swannee?

STEP ONE – THE THREE-FINGERED-SALUTE

If you’re lazy and uninterested in the root cause of a problem, then a quick way to resolution might be the have-you-tried-turning-it-off-and-on-again trick. Most broadband routers have a button to reboot them, or even just pull the power for 10 seconds and then put it back in.

Sometimes, service providers will tell you to reboot your router if you are getting an error – streaming apps on smart TVs appear to be adept at this. Technology gurus will scoff that there’s no way that could be the problem, it must be something with the app provider (until they reboot the router as a last resort, and the app starts working).

The original “Three Fingered Salute” was a moniker applied to CTRL+ALT+DEL, the unmaskable hardware combination on early PCs which forced a reboot. Nowadays, Windows handles it with more grace.

STEP TWO – CAN YOU SEE OUTSIDE?

Once you’ve waited 5 minutes for your broadband router to restart (and assuming that hasn’t fixed the problem), the next thing to check is if your computer can talk to the outside world. If not, that means the problem is somewhere between your keyboard and the internet service provider that the modem connects to. Trying to log a fault with your provider’s support desk will generally mean they’ll make you try unplugging and restarting everything in your house first, so be prepared.

Make sure you’re actually connected to the network and have a valid address; in Windows 11, go to Settings / Network & Internet and look at Properties of whatever the connection is. You should see the local network address of your machine, and the gateway through which everything is sent and received. The format of the numbers might vary but should look something like:

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[If you’re getting a 169.xxx.xxx.xxx address then something is going wrong with your computer and getting an IP address; if it’s in your house, try removing and replacing the network cable, or rebooting the PC and/or router. If it’s in a hotel or public wifi area, give up and set your phone up to do Tethering].

PING!

Now, fire up a command prompt (press WindowsKey+R then enter cmd) and enter ping 192.168.1.1 (or whatever address your default gateway is).

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The ping command literally bounces a short piece of data at the address you’re looking for; if that location is available (and not being blocked by some firewall or other) then it replies, and the fact that you got a response and the speed it took are displayed.

If you’re going to be playing with cables and stuff, you could enter ping -t 192.168.1.1 – the -t flag makes it continue pinging until you close the window or press CTRL+C. If you’re getting a reply at all, and the latency (time<1ms) is stable and low, then your connection to the router is just fine.

Latency is the enemy of a stable and reliable connection – when you see people having problems with Zoom/Teams meetings and their audio or video is garbled and choppy, that’s almost always a latency problem, either within their home network or somewhere further up the chain. Some networks suffer from it inherently – satellite connected, like in-flight WFi, are a good example – and anything that needs a stable, real-time connection (video calls, multiplayer gaming etc) is best avoided.

STEP TWOa – ARE YOU WIRELESS?

If you’re using a wireless network, it’s worth checking that something isn’t getting in the way unexpectedly. IT bods troubleshooting a problematic early business WiFi network found that it kept dropping out randomly, but more often around lunchtime – until they realised their neighbour in the office block had a kitchen on the other side of the wall, with a microwave oven that nuked their WiFi whenever it was used. Some home electronics could do the same, or even things like wood burning stoves.

Maybe your household is near other users who could be getting in the way? Try scaring them for a laugh but it’s also worth making sure your WiFi network isn’t clashing with theirs. It could be worth trying the ping -t trick above and move the machine around the place to see if there are some spots where you’re getting really high latency numbers, or to see if the ping reply doesn’t come back at all.

Try the WiFi Analyzer app from the Windows Store (if you’re on a PC; there are many others for iOS/Android and Mac):

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This app will show you all the neighbouring networks and which channel they’re operating on; if you’re sharing the spectrum with too many others then it might be worth reconfiguring your WiFi network to lock to a different channel; time to RTFM for the router.

An alternative to WiFi Analyzer is the long-established inSSider. The latest version needs you to register for an account, but the old one – which still gives a lot of useful info – is still available, if you’re careful to dodge the many links to other unwanted stuff:

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IT’S NOT ME, IT’S YOU

If the internet connection is still not playing ball, but initial signs are that the local network is OK and you’re fairly confident you don’t have sporadic hardware problems or similar, then it’s pretty likely the fault lies elsewhere. Get ready to face the inertia of service provider helpdesks who will assume that the problem is at your end… to prevail, we must arm ourselves with evidence and above all, keep calm.

To avoid over-doing things, we’ll pick that one up next week.

#62: Will the web become exclusively mobile?

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Looking back over the last 50 years of technology progress, the internet must surely be the most significant change enabler. When the developing ARPANet adopted TCP/IP in January 1983, the ‘net as we know it started to really take shape. TimBL wrote up an idea of how to connect pages of info together, and within a few years the Worldwide Web started on one of Mr Jobs’ NeXT machines.

As the web evolved to become more consumer-centric and people got PCs in their home which could connect, life started to shift online, especially when broadband replaced dial-up in the early 2000s. Laptops and WiFi helped to unshackle people from their desks and enabled working and playing from nearly anywhere. Coffee shop owners of the world rejoiced; up to a point.

But the most significant trend has surely been mobile connectivity – initially providing access to the same stuff just on a smaller screen. Now, we’re beginning to see the web and info on it become desktop-free zones. The decline in relevance of the desktop or laptop computer has been coming a long time, as smartphone usage around the world exploded. In the future, we’ll potentially be forced to use phones where a better user experience could well be delivered on a big screen, as service providers try to reduce costs while trying to provide a secure, easy to use experience.

Desktop falling behind

Even in 2014, Windows accounted for nearly 2/3 of web traffic at the start and a bit more than half by the end of the year. Android was taking an early lead over iOS and the Mac had a steady-ish 5%.

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Data from statcounter.com

Contrast to the end of 2024 and two-thirds of all traffic is from Android and iOS, with Windows & Mac together just over 30%.

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Looking beyond which mobile or desktop OS you use, Chrome is the default browser cross-platform with two-thirds of all traffic, while on the desktop, Microsoft Edge has about 13%. Looking at mobile only, Edge has less half of one percent of usage (beaten slightly by Firefox, and Opera has 4 times the usage) though it’s available for both Android and iOS. You have to wonder when Microsoft will pull the plug, even if the mobile Edge browser is a decent effort (especially so if you use Edge on Windows PC too).

Apps taking over, not always for the better

It’s not just that content is moving to be more mobile-oriented; increasingly, stuff that used to be available on the web can only be done via using an app. To a degree, this could be part of an ongoing enshittification process – a topic we’ll delve into in a future ToW.

As an example, Google has removed the “Timeline” feature from Google Maps online. Discussed briefly in ToW #638, this was a great way of checking where and when you were – handy for doing stuff like mileage claims or remembering how long it’s been since you’ve visited someone.

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This particular change has some solid reasoning behind it; rather than The Chocolate Factory storing data about where you’ve been on its servers, they announced that the data would be held securely on the device instead. Is this Google being altruistic and privacy-sensitive, or just trying to avoid being held to account for something down the line? … You decide.

From an end-user perspective, losing access to Timeline in the browser is a bit annoying and too bad if you want to share your history across multiple devices – the data is local to one device only and that’s that. Just in case your phone gets lost, you might want to back it up now

Un Appy with Online Banking

There are many other examples of websites trying to push you to use their apps (click a link on a mobile browser and it often will try to redirect you), but the biscuit is surely taken by at least one UK credit card provider.

Early digital banking services might have required special hardware or bespoke PC applications, but gradually all went into the browser, with some requiring a hardware token or other device to be used when signing in. Now, it’s very common to need some form of Multi-factor authentication like receiving a one-time SMS message to be able to login; even making a one-off purchase generally requires Strong Customer Authentication.

Users of Virgin Money credit cards have no web-based view of their account, with the options being to use the app or do everything another way. Viewing and download statements can only be done on the phone; the only alternative is to request a paper version be posted.

The in-app help used to advise that if you wanted your statements on a proper computer, then download the PDFs to your phone and email them to yourself. Fortunately, that advice has since been removed…

Happily, if you’re an Android & PC user at least, you could use the Phone Link app to browse the file system on the device when it’s connected. The phone will appear in the left pane on Windows Explorer…

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… and if you navigate to Phone Name > storage > Download, you’ll be able to view, copy elsewhere on your PC, and even delete the file from the phone storage.

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If you’re using OneDrive (the consumer version) for your personal files, you might want to enable the Personal Vault and put potentially sensitive stuff in there.

#61: Adios, Office!

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Microsoft is seemingly ditching it’s “Office” brand, which first appeared in 1990 to describe the now-familiar bundling of 3 apps – Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Along with numerous other apps and services being added to the family, for some time the company has been pushing the online versionOffice 365 then Microsoft 365 – as the default. Despite this, there is still an on-premises, discrete licensed bundle of the latest apps – Office LTSC 2024 if you really must.

Users of M365 – either personal, family or corporate bundles – can go to office.com and sign in to access all the software, services and data associated with it. This has now been renamed to cloud.microsoft and the accompanying Office / Microsoft 365 app (which is really just a PWA, a web app hosted in what looks like a Windows application) is now Microsoft 365 Copilot, in the headlong rush to call everything Copilot even when it isn’t.

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Somewhat confusingly, if the “Copilot for Microsoft 365” service isn’t available the following explanation is given on the support page for the app’s transition:

What about regions where Copilot is not available?

For regions without Copilot availability, the Microsoft 365 Copilot app will remove the Copilot tab from the Home screen across web, desktop, and mobile app endpoints. However, the app name and icon will remain the same as Microsoft 365 Copilot for branding consistency.​​​​​​​

… so, it will still be called “Copilot” even if the actual Copilot functionality has been removed.

M365 Personal / Family subscriptions

As well as being corporate fodder, Office Microsoft 365 has had a consumer variant for a decade: Microsoft 365 Personal gets you a single user who can have up to 5 devices where you have the Office apps installed (as well as the use of web versions), 1TB of cloud storage in OneDrive, and you get Outlook.com email without any ads. The Family subscription is around 20% more expensive and gets you the same as Personal, but for up to 6 people.

Former Microsofties can receive M365 Family for free if they’re in the Alumni Association, and with membership being less than half the price for M365 on its own, it’s worth joining if you’re eligible. If you know someone who is a current Microsoft employee or who’s an Alumnus, they might be able to get you a Friends & Family login to the eCompany Store, which lets you buy activation codes for M365 Personal or Family at a significant discount. And here’s a trick: you can stack the codes (ie. buy 3 of them for less than the cost of a regular single year’s subscription, then just apply them all to your account to kick the renewal date forward into the long grass).

Speaking of cost, M365 Personal & Family have risen in price quite a bit recently; partly because they include a load of new AI features and those cloud-based GPUs don’t buy themselves.

Welcome Copilot Users!

At the same time as potentially naming something Copilot that isn’t, Microsoft has rolled out some basic Copilot capabilities for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family users. See here for the details of what’s included and how, though if you’re really not on board with all this AI nonsense, you can opt to stay on “M365 Family Classic”, which is the same as it was before without the Copilot and Microsoft Designer guff.

You’ll be shown lots of Copilot banners if you log in to any Office app with a M365 Personal subscription or the primary user of a Family one (only the owner of the subscription gets the extra sauce, at least for now). There are ways to disable it should you want to, though not everywhere – Outlook.com displays a banner at the top of every email offering to summarize it for you…

Predictably, the User forums are full of “HOW DO I SWITCH THIS OFF” type questions. The short version is you can’t; click the X on the right to dismiss the banner but you need to do that for every. single. email. Or just learn to live with it.

And Microsoft wouldn’t be true to form if branding and packaging was simple… there’s still Copilot Pro, which gives additional capacity or the paid-for Microsoft 365 Copilot addon to business Microsoft 365 subscriptions. And Copilot functionality in Business Applications, Security, GitHub and doubtless many more…

#60: The problem with coupons

Lots of online shops have promo codes that can be entered as part of the checkout process, to get a discount, free shipping or similar. Sign up to their newsletter and get 5% off your first/next order, they might say. It’s usually a reward for or enticement to repeat custom, or if you believe in more sinister motives, a ploy to get you to hand over your data and expose your very living soul.         

Use one of the many “coupon lookup” sites and you could easily find codes that can save significant amounts of money, especially if you’re buying expensive stuff. To the end user, it looks like free money but there’s a deeper and darker subtext. As we’ll learn, there’s never really such a thing as free money.

Don’t click the bottom one…

Sites like Coupert, Vouchercodes and more sometimes tell you what special offer codes are currently active; be wary of any which offer to “automatically apply all codes” or you’ll end up installing a browser extension, which you almost certainly don’t want to do.

1st party coupons

Microsoft has shoehorned “shopping” into Edge (similar to what Google does with Chrome, though Edge’s is a bit more internationally inclusive and somewhat easier to use), and has a Bing shopping site that’s similar to Google Shopping too.

If the feature is enabled in Edge, you’ll see a little shopping label icon in the address bar when you’re browsing something that the browser might have more insights on, and possibly be able to keep a track on the price too.

Both browser tools are convenient way to find coupons and codes, alongside price comparisons, price history etc, even if you could probably find keener deals and info by looking around yourself.

For vouchers and deals, the browser is basically scraping other sites which purport to offer them, though anyone who has tried such sites previously will probably find out many of the codes don’t work anymore.

Margins to share

Retailers typically have a high markup on stuff they sell, expressed often as a margin – if a clothing outlet sells a shirt for $100 and they are buying it from their supplier at $40, then they have a 60% gross margin. That seems a lot relative to the cost of the actual goods, but then the retailer has to run premises, pay staff, deal with returns and annoying customers – all of which will eat into that margin and give them a much lower %age of profit. So far, so good.

When dealing with online transactions, especially if the delivery cost is charged additionally, the overheads will be a lot lower and therefore the margin could afford to be less – that’s why many online-only retailers can sell the same things at a lower price than you’d find in the shops. But at least in trad. retail, customers might be browsing – they could be wandering through a mall and decide to drop in to a store and end up seeing something they didn’t know they wanted. In online retail, that’s so much less likely, therefore they try to attract buyers in other ways.

Online retailers find it sometimes helps to share the margin they make; hence the deals with cashback sites or credit cards, and by issuing voucher codes to incentivise customers to buy now while the deal is there. They may also have referral codes or links that give a small discount to the end purchaser and a kickback to the referring source as well.

Influencers and other “content creators” can earn money by talking about stuff and linking to places where you can buy it, potentially earning $thousands for driving extra buyers into the waiting arms of the online sellers. Sometimes they’ll have a voucher code that gets money off (and which the retailer can track so they know how much extra business is coming from that source). Sometimes the code is built into links on the blog or website, that when you click through (and subsequently buy), will share some margin back to the referrer.

Honey: The sweetest deal?

Along with the features browsers have built-in, there are loads of addins which can be used to help the shopping experience. Honey was a pioneer, so much so that PayPal shelled out a cool $4B a few year back.

Recent investigations have shown Honey’s business model to be on thin ice, though – ostensibly telling users that they can find the best deals with Honey, while getting retailers to pay them to offer only a limited set of the deals which might otherwise exist… so instead of Honey telling you of a sweet 10% deal you could get, they might be taking 2% off the retailer and showing you a 5% code.

Addins like Honey also sometimes pay to have their offering promoted – including paying money to influencers to have the Honey extension featured. To the chagrin of some – even leading to legal action – it appears that Honey has also been rewriting the referral links from other sites too.

So, Honey pays Spongebob Influencerpants to say nice things about them and feature on his site; all Sponge’s users run off and install Honey and are happy they’re getting something for little effort.

Later, when a user clicks on a link to buy some tat in the description text of Spongy’s latest video, instead of him getting the kickback from the retailer, the Honey addin is intercepting and rewriting the URL and pocketing the referral fee for itself.

Even if you think most influencers are gopping eejits, do check out Marques Brownlee – who is one of the smartest and most balanced of the oeuvre – and see what he says about the “Honey Scam”. Unsurprisingly, he recommends uninstalling the Honey addin with all speed.

Whatever the reality of this situation is, it’s certainly not cricket.

#59: Emulation of things past

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Many people of a certain age (men, mostly?) may have spent a good amount of time over the holiday season indulging in a recherche du temps perdu, harking back to their own childhood or teenage years. Late in 2024, a company called Retro Games brought out a faithful-looking £90 / $100 replica of the 1982 Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

The “Speccy” was the first home computer in the UK to really take off; worldwide and across several iterations, it went on to sell 5 million units, way before the advent of home PCs or modern gaming consoles (apart from the earlier cartridge types like the Atari 2600). More importantly, the Spectrum was hugely influential in launching careers of thousands of technologists who got their first taste of the computing world at the hands of its dead-flesh rubbery keyboard. They even made a film about it.

This new machine dubbed “The Spectrum” differs from the original in a number of key ways – powered through a USB-C port and with HDMI output to a modern display in place of the old RF out to a portable telly, and it comes with 48 built-in, licensed original Spectrum games to enjoy. But it looks and feels very similar to the original – making erstwhile fans somewhat weak at the knees.

Pump the garish, blocky colours and frankly horrific opening-screen soundtrack to Manic Miner through a big TV and you might wonder what the fuss was all about, but persevere and you might recall just how fiendishly addictive and difficult some of these games were. There’s even a “CRT mode” to make the graphics a bit more blurry for extra vintage feel.

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You can add other games via the huge archive at World Of Spectrum, by copying them to a USB stick. Thankfully, most of the programs will start in a blink of an eye rather than the several tedious minutes of loading from a finicky tape player. It’s amazing what clever programmers could do in 48K of RAM; that the image of Eugene’s Lair above is 4 times the size of the whole of the Manic Miner game.

The Spectrum starts up in a kind of home screen allowing for easy selection of what you want to run, though for true Old Skool vibes, you can revert to the original blank screen / BASIC programming UI..

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Hardware

The original ZX Spectrum had a total of 64K of memory (16K reserved for the system, hence why 48K was available for use) and used an 8-bit Zilog Z80A processor running at 3.5MHz. The Spectrum is based around an ARM chip (isn’t everything?) and emulates the original Z80 and the custom silicon chip (the ULA) which hung it all together.

An emulator basically translates – in real time – between the environment the software thinks it should be running in, and the hardware which is actually available today. It’s not unlike reading a book in a foreign language, translating each word into English by looking it up in the dictionary then figuring out if the phrasing of the sentence needs to be rearranged… all in real time.

Emulation used to be seen as a poor way of building compatibility as it is quite expensive in compute terms, as the resulting programs will be slower than they would be otherwise. When Apple moved the Mac from its original Motorola 68000 architecture to PowerPC, a built-in emulator made sure that most old programs would still run, and even though they were slower than if they had been developed for PowerPC, the fact that the new machine was more powerful than the old, made up the difference. In this kind of instance, it is translating one radically different hardware architecture to another.

Another good example is how Microsoft allowed the Xbox One to be able to run Xbox 360 games, even though Xbox One was based on an Intel chip and Xbox 360 on PowerPC. Since the Xbox basically runs each game in a custom version of its own operating system, every “backward compatible” game needs to have a package built specifically to emulate not just the 360 hardware but the version of the OS that it would normally expect.

There are a list of Xbox 360 and even Xbox Original games (the OG ones are mostly Star Wars ones, tbf), and in some cases they have been enhanced to take advantage of later hardware; the game thinks it’s talking to an Xbox 360 and asking it to draw graphics at HD resolution, but on a Series X it could be up-frame-rated and upscaled to 4K.

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Run on your existing device

The romance of “The Spectrum” is really all in the classic package; in reality, you can run a free Spectrum emulator and all of its software on your phone, PC, Mac, build your own on a Raspberry Pi or even run in a browser.

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Since most of the games for early consoles and computers were either ripping off an arcade game (see Hungry Horace vs Pac-Man) or were licensed versions which were nothing like as capable, what about emulating the original arcade machines on modern hardware?

MAME

Originally “Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator”, the MAME project set out to build an emulator platform that could take on any number of arcade machines from the 1970s – 90s and maybe beyond. Since arcade games were essentially bespoke hardware in the early days, there’s a lot to do to emulate whatever processor and other chips each one might have come with, but again, modern computing is way beyond what a mid-1980s arcade machine could muster. MAME is an open-source emulator platform which aims to be able to preserve any kind of old computer and its software.

Find out more about MAME; there are even ports to run in a browser too, so you can relive the original Space Invaders in your morning coffee break.

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#58: Tales of Yuletide cheer

A tradition of Tip o’ // of the Week at the end of each year, has been to post some completely non-tech related stuff to help transition from “work” mode into the general lethargy of the festive season. Here’s something of a greatest hits, along with some new nonsense. Top tip if you’re reading this on LinkedIn: hold the CTRL key as you click on links, to pop them into a new tab rather than lose your place on this post.

Drink!

As if the festive season doesn’t present enough opportunities to over-indulge, making some cocktails to ease into the evening can be an effective way of doing it. Clearly, drinking responsibly is to be advised or you never know where that might lead.

One of the most popular of all Tips arrived 2 years back; it was certainly the most fun to write.

A martini glass with a drink in it

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662 – How to make the perfect martini

Some of the ingredients to the ideal martini might take a bit of sourcing, so you may need to stop reading this immediately and go shopping. Recommended gins include Berry Bros no 3 or Tanqueray 10, vodka is Grey Goose or Belvedere, use Dolin for vermouth or Lillet Blanc is you’re Vesper-ing (with a few drop of Angostura bitters too).

A group of bottles on a table

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The two brothers who took over the Angostura bitters company decided it was time to rebrand; one designed the bottle, the other the label. They didn’t think to consult each other and the label was too big. 150 years later, it still is.

For espresso martinis, fill a cocktail shaker of glass with ice cubes and add one measure of vodka (even cheaper stuff – save the Grey Goose for better cocktails), one measure of coffee liqueur (Kahlua is OK, if a bit sweet; make your own if you have time, or Mr Black’s if you can find it). Just before serving, add the same measure again of hot, strong espresso and shake it like crazy. Pour into waiting glasses to get a nice crema. Top with a few coffee beans (three: definitely not an even number).

IMG_20230604_183317For more cocktail related fun and games, check out Richard Godwin on Substack.

Eat!

For delicious snacks to go with your cocktails above, try roasting some spiced pecans – in fact, they make a great accompaniment to a small salad with pear and blue cheese.

Spiced pecans

  • Pre-heat oven to 200C / 400F / Gas Mark 6
  • In a bowl, mix up 1.5 tsp of salt, 3 decent pinches of cayenne pepper, 3 tsp of Worcestershire [pr. Wooster] sauce and a good slug or 3 of Tabasco.
  • Add 225g of pecans and toss them well with the mixed goo.
  • Pour onto a baking tray and arrange in a single layer
  • Bake for 5 or 6 minutes, turning halfway through so they don’t get burnt on one side
  • Try to not to eat them all before they’re cooled. Put what’s left in an airtight tub and they’ll keep until the New Year (hah).

The above also works well with almonds or a mixture of the two. That way, you can save the pecans for…

Maple roasted pecans

  • Pre-heat the oven to 160C / Gas 3 / 325F
  • Mix 170g pecans with 2 tablespoons of maple syrup and 1 tsp of almond essence
  • Pour onto a tray and arrange in a single layer
  • Bake for 12 minutes, turning halfway

A couple bowls of nuts

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Green soup

For something more healthy, perhaps a starter on a big-meal day or a quick turkey-free lunch before the port and cheese of betwixtmas, how about a simple 3-ingredient green soup from a blue-mouthed celebrity?

A bowl of green soup

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658 – Sweary 3-ingredient soup

Chef Gordon Ramsay covered this simple recipe back on a show called F-Word (F for Flash…?) but the online videos showing you how to make it in 5 minutes have been taken down. He published it in the book, Gordon Ramsay Makes it Easy too. Or just follow the approach above; combine with a bit of goat’s or blue cheese for unctuousness and a couple of bits of walnut or pecan for extra texture.

Steak

The most popular (by some margin) post on an old TechNet blog called “The Electric Wand”, was how to cook a perfect fillet streak (and applies to other types too), later repurposed to the ToW hosting siteHow to cook the perfect fillet steak.

In short, get the meat to room temperature, dry it with kitchen paper, apply oil and seasoning to the steak directly then cook it quicky on a searing hot pan for a short time on each side. Let it rest on a warm plate for at least as long as it cooked.

Rest

That’s it for Tip of the Week in 2024 – have a Merry / Happy whatever-you-call-it, and see you in the New Year!

#57: Excel-lent Conditional Formatting

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A theme of previous ToWs has been that applications often have lots more functionality than users either know or care about enough to utilise. Two of the simplest yet most impactful ways of handling data in Excel (and in Google Sheets, LibreOffice / OpenOffice etc, which basically copied the functionality) is to create tables from data, and to use conditional formatting to help them stand out.

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Select a block of data – and for the purposes of these examples, we’re going to use some sample sales data – and on the home tab, it’s a few clicks to Format as Table. Even if you don’t intend to use more advanced formulae and get into naming tables and ranges, just doing the simple formatting and declaring the top row as headers gives you great ability to sort and filter the data quickly.

If you’re lucky, the table may automatically interpret the contents of your data, too – like understanding date fields. As we’ll get to later, you can even sort and filter by the appearance and not just the actual contents.

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Users working on data in Excel which is clearly tabular but has not been defined as a Table, should almost be considered criminals.

Conditional Formatting made easy

Back on the Ribbon, the neighbouring Conditional Formatting control lets you add more pop to an existing Table or any other data. Select whatever cells, columns or rows you want to apply it to, and on the flyout menu you’ll have access to hundreds of options to visually distinguish certain data.

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For simple “how to” and a cheesy video, check out the help on Use conditional formatting to highlight information in Excel.

If you need to do stuff that’s more complex, there’s also the option to write a formula but it’s quite different to regular Excel formulae – and can take a bit of working out, especially if it’s more complex. See the “Use a formula…” further down that previous help page.

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Fortunately, there’s an easier way if you’re a Copilot user (and if you’re not, Microsoft has started pushing a free 1-month trial – just make sure you put a reminder in your diary or you’ll fall into the trap of subscribing to stuff you might not want). Rather than trying to write a formula and figure out the logic of it, you can just ask Copilot and it will comply…

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After it has been applied, you could edit the rule to change its range, tweak the formula or adjust the formatting by going to the Manage Rules option under the Conditional Formatting menu. Make sure the “Show formatting rules for:” filter is set to the right area so you’ll see this and any other rules which may apply.

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These rules are very useful for highlighting things that stick out – like due date on a pipeline report which have now passed, or a number that’s radically out of kilter with all the others in an export from a credit card account. If you’re dealing with very large sheets of data, you could filter the view not just by the values but by the colours that your formatting has set:

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… thus temporarily hiding any of the rows which are not of interest.

Finally, you can interrogate data within Copilot without having to mess about with filters and the like, for example:

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To validate that this is actually true, a pivot table can show the data by different dimensions and allow totalling, sorting and filtering: in this case, sorting (descending) by the sum of all orders:

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Pivot Tables are some of the best magic that Excel delivers; it’s been a while since they’ve featured in ToW – leave a comment if you think that needs addressing. See here for more examples of Copilot prompts in Excel.

#56: Hey kids, look who’s back!

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When does old become retro, and how does fashion decide when something uncool becomes drip? Brand equity rises and falls all the time; some just go out of date and are left behind, while some try to reassert themselves to speed up the cycle – see Jaguar / jaGuar’s recent hoo-hah and “Copy Nothing” brand rehab…

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[Richard Ayoade in IT Crowd c 2006, Jaguar deleting ordinary in 2024, Reeves & Mortimer c1993]

(Eddie Izzard has some mildly sweary thoughts about the whole “Looking cool…” cycle).

Retro tech

It’s amusing when old tech becomes cool again – from hipsters rocking LCD digital watches, to GenZers toting feature phones like it was the 1990s. Some brands were never fashionable, like AOL: using an aol.com email address even 20 years ago was a marker of technological unsophistication. Amazingly, you can still sign up for an aol.com address today if you feel like sending email from the past.

Many other products and services were all the rage, then just weren’t – and one good example is Microsoft’s MSN, which now seems to be coming back from life support. Well, certain elements (which are not yet part of the revamp) were very pervasive and cool back in the day … remember MSN Messenger, before Microsoft bungled it into Skype? It was so down with the kids, even a youthful Stormzy was using it (and that’s how he got his name).

The Microsoft Network

MSN first arrived 30 years ago as part of the Windows 95 (“Chicago”) beta program; it was a “walled garden” network service providing proprietary content through a dial up network. Market leaders AOL and CompuServe had similarly restricted services – using them wasn’t really “being on the internet” other than you could browse pages written for those services, use email and later, instant messaging. Win95 initially didn’t even have a TCP/IP stack built-in, so without 3rd party software, you couldn’t be directly connected to the ’net.

MSN’s late 90s paid-for dial-up service became a regular ISP and there was a Premium subscription available to netizens who wanted additional security and the likes.

From that closed offering, the MSN brand morphed into something applied to lots of Microsoft’s consumer-oriented web experiences – from the Yahoo!-like attempt to establish a homepage, to in 2001 rebranding the first mass free email service which Microsoft acquired 5 years earlier, as MSN Hotmail.

Legacy users of the Win95 MSN service were ported over to Hotmail and given short @msn.com mail accounts. Other users could at one point choose a variety of domain names when signing up for a Live ID / Hotmail account, including @msn.com and @msn.co.uk. These have long since gone away and the only options now are outlook.com and Hotmail.com.

At one point, there were numerous “MSN …” apps for Windows and mobile devices, from MSN Travel to MSN Money. Most of these were subsequently killed off or renamed to something else, like Microsoft News.

Amazingly, you can still buy MSN Premium today – for £7 a month you get, er, lots of stuff that’s available, better and/or for free from other places, including other bits of Microsoft itself.

clip_image006Today, many of the buttons on the MSN Explorer app either don’t work, or redirect to a page about how Internet Explorer isn’t supported anymore. One of the purported benefits of MSN Premium is that it’s possible to sign up an additional 9 users for an @msn.com email address; given the number of users complaining that it no longer works (and getting radio silence from support), it seems that loophole has now closed.

Microsoft Stop Start

At one point, Microsoft appeared to want “Start” to become the new MSN brand; the homepage for Edge browser (unless you do yourself a favour and set it to something else) was “Start” and the single mobile app which merged MSN News, MSN Money and more was just “Microsoft Start”.

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Now the Start apps have been renamed to just “MSN” on mobiles, alongside MSN Weather and MSN Money which avoided the previous cull; PC users don’t have an “MSN” app but might expect to see the same content on Edge homescreen or on the Widgets on their taskbar.

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Sadly, renaming the app and service doesn’t appear to have done much for the quality of advertising or the myriad click-bait “news” providers, though it does appear to have gotten less insidious and you can at least hide sources you don’t want to hear from again.

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The daily email newsletters are not bad – see https://www.msn.com/en-gb/personalize/newslettersignup to manage your subscriptions. Let’s see if Microsoft starts to re-launch other MSN services in due course…

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#55: Quick access to fave notes

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A few themes have re-appeared on Tip of the Week over the years … saving time by using keyboard shortcuts, finding useful but somewhat hidden bits of Windows or Office apps, etc. One of the most prominent seams to mine, however, has been an undying for Onay-no-tay.

The UX Paradox of Office Apps

Usability research into Office applications once found that 87%* of the new features users asked for, were already in the product – they just didn’t know how to find them. As more and more features were added to apps – Excel particularly, it seems – end-users just didn’t know how to “discover” them. By Office 2000, dynamic “intelli-menus” basically hid options which were more obscure or which an individual just didn’t use, and while it made things look simpler and less cluttered, it made the problem worse.

A wholescale UX rethink in Office begat the “Ribbon”, which is now pervasive in other apps; if you’re interested in such things, check out Jensen Harris’ 2008 presentation on what led to the Ribbon being conceived. The talk offers a great historical perspective but also goes over the thought processes on how these things come about.

* statistic is made up but the story holds true. Who cares if facts and figures are correct as long as the lies are well presented? How do you think Excel charts and PowerBI got so successful?

Not Just Another Toolbar

Even with the Ribbon to make things more ordered, sometimes it’s good to be able to jump straight to a feature you use commonly; the customizable Quick Access Toolbar on the top left of many apps gives you the ability to pin certain commands, and can be an invaluable way of getting to functions you like without delving into Ribbon tabs and menus.

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Click the down-arrow to the right of the toolbar and you can pick from a set of suggested functions, or by customizing it, you can delve into any part of the extensive menus and pin just that one feature there. There are commands which are not even on the Ribbon, but you could pin them to the QAT if you like them…

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The QAT is present in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook (classic) – but not New Outlook, to some users’ chagrin. It’s not uncommon to find a similar UI feature in 3rd party apps from the mid-2010s.

OneNote Favo(u)rites (again)

New Testament Tip of the Week #39 covered saving Favourites in OneNote: #39: OneNote Shortcuts, Favourites and Pins. Despite some of the guff being taken up with browser and mobile favourites, the good stuff in that tip was in (once again) recommending the fantastic OneTastic.

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As well as providing an extensive macro capability, the OneTastic addin lets you pin a page or section to “Favorites”, and you can later go back to the same menu used to manage the pining, in order to access your previously pinned pages.

For extra goodness, try customizing the QAT and looking for Pin to Favorites…

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Select it, click Add >> and hit OK. Now you’ll be able to access the drop-down for Favorites right there from the top left corner…

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Happy Friday!