Paranoid Microsoftie Andrew Brook-Holmes went digging to see how to stop this behaviour, and thus inspired this tip. To switch off the display of your name on the login In the right-hand pane, you’ll see a long list of policy items, many of which won’t be configured but could conceivably be; there are options to hide or show elements on the login screen, but in this case we’re going to try not showing the last named user at all. Double-clock on the Interactive logon: Don’t display last signed-in, and you’ll have a simple Enable/Disable choice – in this case, we want to use a double negative – enable the fact that we’re not displaying. If you’d like a more detailed explanation of what it does, there’s another tab on the dialog showing exactly that. Now if you lock your screen (WindowsKey+L), you’ll see t If you use Windows Hello to sign in with your face, then you won’t need to do anything except present your boat race to the camera. If you decide you’d rather go back to normal for easier sign-in, just reverse the process you’ve done above.
Press WindowsKey+R – enter regedit – navigate to… HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System …and set the value of dontdisplaylastusername to 1. Log out to apply the change. |
Month: May 2018
Tip o’ the Week 430 – developers, developers, developers
Apple has its WWDC in California every year (for a long time, in San Francisco), and at its peak was a quasi-religious experience for the faithful. Other similar keynotes sometimes caused deep soul searching and gnashing of teeth. The Microsoft one used to be the PDC, until the upcoming launch of Windows 8 meant it was time to try to win the hearts & minds of app developers, so //build/ became rooted in California in the hope that the groovy kids would build their apps on Windows and Windows Phone. Now that ship has largely sailed, it’s gone back up to the Pacific North West, with the focus more on other areas.
With Azure Sphere, there’s a way for developers to build secure and highly functional ways to process data on-board and communicate with devices, so they can concentrate more on what their apps do, and on the data, less on managing the “things” which generate it. For all of the breakouts at Build and the keynotes on-demand, see here. Back in the non-cloud city, Google has adopted a similar developer ra-ra method, with its Google I/O conference also taking place in and around San Francisco, also (like WWDC and Build) formerly at Moscone. It happened this past week, too. Like everyone else, some major announcements and some knock-em dead demos are reserved for the attendees to get buzzed on, generating plenty of external coverage and crafting an image around how innovative and forward thinking the company is. Google Duplex, shown this week to gasps from the crowd, looks like a great way of avoiding dealing with ordinary people any more, a point picked up by one writer who called it “selfish”. Does a reliance on barking orders at robot assistants and the increasing sophistication of AI in bots and so on, mean the beginning of the end for politeness and to the service industry? A topic for further consideration, surely. |
Tip o’ the Week 429 – Windows 10 April 2018 Update
Windows watchers have been talking about this April update for months, as there are many notable updates within, some covered only recently in ToW (425 and 428). As well as Timeline, the Nearby Sharing
You can also right-click on files in Windows Explorer to Share them the same way, and it’s likely to appear in the Share experience of other apps too. The next-to-useless Windows 10 option previously known as Quiet Hours (as per ToW 414), has been given a revamp and a rename, now known as Focus Assist. The intent is not only to silence your machine at times when you don’t need to know stuff (who’s ever been woken at 6am to be reminded that it’s some random LinkedIn person’s birthday, or that there’s an all-day event in your calendar?), but also to control the blizzard of “toast” notifications that modern apps may otherwise throw at you. Note – traditional apps, like Outlook, can still throw up notifications, but if your machine is in a Focus assist mode For a full breakdown of everything else that’s new in the April update, see here. |
Tip o’ the Week 428 – Spring, April or the Edge of Summer
Developers also got a new preview of Edge DevTools, which opens the door to such excitement as remote debugging of another Edge instance. If you’re a hoopy frood, check it out here.
Still, there are times when the two cooperate behind the scenes. The Edge for Android app, for example, uses the rendering engine from the Chromium project, so is effectively running the same browser capabilities in a different shell which takes care of synchronising your favourites, passwords etc, between the Edge browser on your PC(s) and the one on your phone. Edge for iOS uses the native WebKit engine to achieve the same thing. There are updates on the way for the mobile versions of Edge, supporting Timeline too – so you could resume activities from your desktop on your phone and vice versa. Microsoft also recently launched a Defender Extension for Chrome, to provide similar protection to defectors that Edge users get natively from the SmartScreen filter technology (NSS Labs tested Edge, Chrome & Firefox, concluding that Edge blocks more bad stuff than either of the others). Even some surprised Chrome users recommend it. |
Tip o’ the Week 427 – OneNote roadmap update
Talking about OneNote can be confusing, though, as there are the two PC versions – OneNote 2016, the Win32 app that’s evolved ever since the first version shipped as part of Office 2003, and the shiny new codebase that is OneNote for Windows 10, the Store app which also shares a lot of its UX with the Mac, mobile and web versions. Differences are explained here. Major users of OneNote may have noticed that over the last couple of years, the traditional Windows app hasn’t received a whole lot of new functionality, but the Store version has had regular updates with extra features… though it is a much simpler app anyway, so there’s more to improve. The Recently, the OneNote team announced that there will be no further development of the traditional OneNote 2016 application, and that it won’t be installed by default in the next iteration of Office (though it will still be available as an option, in case you can’t live without it). New features are planned for the Store version – like support for tags, and what looks to To get the latest version of the OneNote app, first check it’s up to date, or join the Office Insiders program. Windows Insiders Paul Thurrott – an unashamed fan of the OneNote for Windows 10 app, preferring it to its elder sibling – also reported on the news. Paul points out that the UWP version has better support for ink, that syncing is faster, performance is better etc. Tech Republic has some further commentary too. To keep up with other news on OneNote, you could do well to follow William Devereux from the OneNote team on Twitter, as recommended by Windows Central’s “50 influencers” article. |