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News just in, though, is that 2016 saw a resurgence in sales of vinyl LPs; in the UK, over 3.2m LPs were sold, up 53% from the previous year and the highest for 25 years. Why? A few major releases from the likes of Bowie & Prince, but even new music is being released on vinyl at a rate unheard of a few years back. Amazingly, a high proportion of the LPs sold never get played – they’re objects to collect and to admire, while listening to the music in digital format. Maybe even bought by people who don’t own a record player. Still, the burgeoning trade in big plastic discs is only 5% of the market and makes up the 41% of overall sales attributed to physical media including CDs. It seems streaming is the way most people consume music now, and the eventual outright demise of the digital download is being predicted in its favour. But which of the many paid-for streaming services to use? Groove
Amazon Music Unlimited
If you’ve an Echo or Echo Dot device, ask Alexa if she’ll open the pod bay doors. And many other stupid things. There’s an app for some mobile platforms (not Windows Phone, obvs) and a fairly decent Windows desktop app, too. Integration with Echo/Alexa is great, and there’s a promise of being able to use your Echo to control playback of Sonos devices, later in the year. This opens the somewhat tantalising prospect for existing Sonos users, of having a relatively cheap Echo Dot providing basic Alexa type services while controlling the music on the better-sounding Sonos. The Amazon Music desktop app plays back local music and stuff that’s streamed, even offering the ability to upload your own tracks to the cloud service so you can consume them when mobile, though you need to pay extra if it’s more than 250 tracks. Spotify
There’s little more to say about Spotify other than it’s the service synonymous for most people with the act of streaming music, just like YouTube is for video or Skype is for video chat (unless you’re an Apple user, of course)…
One potentially infuriating thing about Spotify, though, is that its desktop app won’t play back local files encoded in anything other than mp3 / mp4 / m4p – so if you have a huge library of existing media all neatly encoded and tagged in FLAC, then too bad. See comparison with the Amazon Music, here… All the others Meh. Some people like them, there are plenty of up & coming streaming services that think this is the year they’ll break through, but Tidal, Deezer, iHeartRadio, Pandora; whatever. YouTube is still the most popular music streaming service, for copyright-dodging tightwads who don’t want to pay for content and are stuck in 2002. Switching One of the hardest things to do is to switch from one service to the other – what if you want to try out the new service but don’t want to rebuild all the playlists you may have made already? Try Soundiiz, a free web-based playlist sync & export tool, which supports a lot of the popular services including Spotify and Groove, but unfortunately not Amazon, Google or Apple’s offerings. Still worth a look, though it’s been in beta for a long time… |
Tip o’ the Week 360 – Seasonal online goodies
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EMEA-based ‘softies can get an online equivalent of the North American retail Microsoft Store “Doorbusters” and the now-finished online “12 days of deals”, through their online employee store. The shelves are looking pretty empty, if truth be told, but you might still snag a 12- or 24-month Xbox Live Gold subscription for a bargain; you just get emailed the code, and it can be added to either a new (free) Xbox Live account to upgrade to Gold, or can be used to extend an existing one. If you’re not an Xbox Live subscriber already, you could get the first month for only £1, and then apply the above code later should you wish. The public-facing “Countdown” promotion (running as of 22nd December all the way through to the other side of the festivities) has a load of other offers available, especially if you’re also an Xbox Live Gold member. Remind yourself how rubbish 1970s arcade games were for only £3, for example.
There’s a Countdown sale on digital content, too, for when you realise the Christmas telly schedules are full of stuff you don’t want to watch, and your Sky Q box is up the swannee and taking an hour to reboot.
Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, see you all in January! |
Tip o’ the Week 359 – How to win at auction
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Auctions are big business, and seemingly growing It’s never been easier to both lose your shirt and end up with something you didn’t want, at the same time. Auction houses offering online services often go through aggregators like The Saleroom or i-bidder, which let you search across many sources for the thing you’re after, even emailing you when it shows up. Looking for 1970’s Lladro figurines or a 1960’s Rolex? Roll up, roll up. Auctioneers do charge handsomely for the process, though – often levying 20% buyer’s premium on the hammer price, plus VAT on the buyer’s premium, then some have a 3% internet surcharge (plus the VAT, of course) and you might need to pay a good chunk to get a courier to uplift your item and send it to you, should the auctioneer be on the other side of the country. So, a £100 bargain purchase could soon end up being £150+. Sellers usually pay fees too (maybe 20% of the hammer price), meaning that the only winner in the whole cycle is the auctioneer. The obvious auction site to think about when considering online trading is eBay (or colloquially, The Bay or Fleabay). Buying on eBay takes a bit of practice, if you’re looking to source the kind of last-minute Christmas pressies that you can’t afford to be fake, inoperable or just not turn up at all. A lot of the same tips apply ot other online auctioneers, though.
One entrepreneur-in-disguise set his teenage kids a challenge one year, where they got some surplus guff out of the loft, and told the kids they could keep half of whatever they achieved on eBay – which set them in action, spending hours figuring out how best to describe the items, looking at what others were selling for to help set pricing, taking decent photos etc. They made a small fortune. Let’s assume you’re thinking of buying something at auction that’s valuable enough to make you want to put a bit of effort into it (ie it’s no USB charging cable coming from China)…
Do your research Sounds obvious, really, but when deciding if you want to bid on an item, you should know as much as possible about it – so you can be sure that the one you’re buying is genuine, in good condition and fairly priced. Look on internet forums (where people who do know about the things often share advice on where to get the best deal when buying new, or trade them in “for sale” sections amongst themselves, with no fees and maybe a better feeling of legitimacy). When buying new on eBay, lots of traders will inflate their prices a little to cope with the fees they have to bear, so do make sure there’s not a cheaper or better option. On the ‘bay, if something looks like a bargain, is that because the seller doesn’t know what they’ve got (which could be great news, or really bad news) or, do they know it’s a dud, and the reason there’s no other interest in it is because everyone else does too? Similarly, on Gumtree (home to even higher percentages of charlatans than eBay), if someone’s selling a brand new item at 1/10th of it’s real value, then it’s very likely not completely Chicken Soup.
Set your maximum ££ and stick to it
Many online auctions – and eBay – let you put in a bid in advance (up to a maximum amount), where you will automatically bid on an item and its price will go up in set increments until nobody is prepared to bid higher. Again, if you set the maximum and you’re outbid by only one buyer for just £5 more, then you might wish you’d put a bit more on the maximum, but the other buyer could have set a much higher threshold and all you’d have done is escalate the price.
eBay supports a particularly sneaky way of buying, using a sniper service. These are, in short, third party sites that log into eBay using your supplied credentials, and inject a bid right at the last few seconds of an auction. Using snipers might seem like cheating a bit, but if it means you outwit all the others who’re sitting at their screen in real-time trying to bid, and you don’t cause excessive price inflation by bidding-up early on, then you’re the dog and they’re the sheep. There are some fairly detailed advice articles on when to use a sniper to best effect; the tl;dr version is that if there lots of people watching an item, and you see a lot of bidding activity way before the auction is due to complete, then sniping may not be all that effective, especially if it looks like 2 or 3 bidders are constantly outbidding each other. Even when sniping, you’re in competition with everyone who’s set up an autobid in eBay already. Having said that, there’s no sweeter feeling than swooping in 2 seconds before an auction ends, and scooping something up for less than the maximum you were prepared to pay (since the snipers let you set a max bid too). Buy the seller It’s never more important than when trying to buy something that is going to cost you a chunk of change, and especially if it’s something you expect to retain value and possibly be resold in future (moreso cars, jewellery, artworks etc, than relatively disposable or quickly depreciating things like clothing or consumer electronics). If buying from an online auctioneer, how established are they? Look at their past sales (most let you browse their catalogues to show previously achieved prices, or the auction aggregators may show that too) to see if they sold things at a premium compared to others or if they looked like they were happy to flog shonky gear. You’d be amazed at the Frankenwatches that some supposedly reputable auctioneers punt onto unsuspecting buyers. On eBay, check out the seller – look at their previously sold items, and their seller feedback. Have they got plenty of history of buying and selling? If they’ve just registered with eBay, have no feedback and are based in some far-flung place, then proceed with the utmost caution. Smarter con artists will try to cover their tracks by registering an account, and racking up loads of small trades to get history and good feedback (maybe they’ve got dozens of accounts that are all busy selling things to each other and saying “A+++ buyer” with positive feedback on each one…). If they don’t look like they’ve got history of selling expensive stuff, then your spidey sense should be on maximum attack. If the seller has an external website and trading presence, check that out too – if they’re a UK limited company then they’ll be registered at Companies House, where you can get company details but often also the home address of the named directors. Plonk the address into Bing Maps and think, does this look like the house where someone trading in £2,000 handbags might live? Find out how much “Best Offers” went for on eBay eBay doesn’t make this easy – you can easily search for previously sold items to see what they went for in open auctions (using the Advanced Search, check the box for Sold, though the Completed Items check box can be useful as it shows things that reached the end of their auction and were not sold). If the seller set a fixed price yet allowed a “best offer”, it’s quite possible they ended up accepting a figure a long way short of their asking price. That’s worth knowing if the seller regularly shifts the same thing (like garden furniture), or when you’re trying to guage the real price for something.
There are other tools out there like Goofbid’s Best Offers Tool that will show you, based on the seller’s ID, what offers have been made and whether they were accepted or not. Pay with care Finally, if a seller gives you any reason to pay them by direct bank transfer or means other than PayPal, be very careful, the only arguable exception being if it’s cash on collection, where you’re actually meeting them and get to inspect your item before handing over the cash and taking it away. If you bank wire someone the money to sell you something, and all they ship you is an empty box, you may find it very hard to get your money back… |
Tip o’ the Week 358 – MSPAINT becomes Paint 3D
Some Windows apps have been around, in one form or another, for donkey’s years. If you press WindowsKey+R to bring up the Run command, you can delve into some real 1990s history with the likes of CALC, NOTEPAD, WRITE and until recently, MSPAINT.
Budding artist and man of culture, Andrew Fryer, has more to say about Paint 3D…
Paint hasn’t changed too much since it got the Office-style Ribbon back in its Windows 7 iteration.
About the only time I use it is to quickly resize images, and a few other things – like using it to arrange screen grabs from online maps that are too big to fit on one screen. Otherwise, it has been languishing on our desktops unused and unloved.
That is about to change – in the latest Creators Update for Windows 10 announced at Ignite we got an early look at its successor, Paint 3D (not to be confused with 3D Paint!).
This is now publicly available for free in the Microsoft Store provided you have the creators build of Windows 10 – i.e. Build 14800 or greater. Note this does replace Paint ,so be aware of that if you are a fan of the old version. There are a couple of hacks to be able to restore the original MSPAINT if you don’t like the new-fangled 3D one, but let’s jump in with both feet.
The new design surface brings new brushes and finishes, along with a nice, modern UI that’s mouse, touch and pen-friendly.
Here, I’ve used each tool except the eraser, but notice that reflection of what I have done at the bottom of the screen – as though the page I am using is standing upright on another surface. This is the first clue that we are in a 3D world and if I select the cube on the toolbar at the top of the screen I get some 3D models. At the moment there only a few of these, some primitives like cubes and cones and some real world objects like fish..
The handles allow us to spin the fish and move it closer to the background it is in front of…
If I go back to the painting options, I can quickly paint the object; clever, as it’s applying paint to the 3d surface of the fish not the background.
Here I am trying to make a well-known clown.
It can be tricky to paint eyes with available tools, but there is also a stickers function, which allows me to add from a palette of predefined stickers or can be imported from any existing 2d image (.png, .jpg etc.).
These can be resized and stuck on to the 3D object. I then play spin the fish to paint and decorate the other side.
Stickers, once positioned, can be stuck with the stamp tool so they move with the object. Now I can change the mood with the lighting tool on the top toolbar.
Now I can share my work or I could find some friends for my creation by going to the community site…
When I am done I too can share my work from the application menu, which also allows me to print if I have access to a 3D printer, and the save options allow me to output to a variety of other 3D formats and as a traditional 2D picture.
As ever with these preview tools it’s essential to give feedback so we get the options we want in future realises.
There are some tutorial videos if you’d like some further tips on Paint 3D.
Tip o’ the Week 357 – Launching Windows Apps
How do you like to start your applications?
In Windows 3.x days, you double-clicked on an icon in Program Manager (or PROGMAN aka Program Mangler) and you got to manage groups of icons to help you organise your applications. There was an accompanying File Mangler too, that might still be usable on modern OSes if you fancy it, and you’ve decided that you have too much time on your hands.
Most normal people these days will start applications from the Start menu, or the programs list that shows up when you press the Windows Key or click the Windows logo on the task bar. The app list has evolved somewhat, so now shows most-used apps near the top, and if you start typing a name (like outl) then you’ll be shown the relevant shortcut for that particular app.
If you know an exact app command that you want to execute (eg outlook /safe to launch it with no addins), you can run it by pressing WindowsKey+R and entering the 
command, but you get little in the way of help in finding the right thing to type. Simply pressing the WindowsKey and starting to type will show you a load of options for a simple app launch that you might be looking for.
Another option could be to follow a process familiar to Windows Phone users, though with a slightly different mode – if you click on one of the letters or symbols that show up at the top of each group of applications, you’ll get a grid of letters just like on the phone – tap or click on one of those to jump quickly to the right group of apps within.
The same approach shows up in some other Windows apps too – like in Groove, where you can select the list of artists or albums etc, based on the letter, rather than scrolling up & down.
This is redolent of the much-vaunted Semantic Zoom feature in Windows 8, which seemed like – and was – a truly great idea at the time, but was fairly poorly implemented by mainstream app publishers who just wanted to port mass-grid iOS and hamburgerised Android apps to Windows. Oh well, back to the day job.
Tip o’ the Week 356 – How not to send mail accidentally
An ohnosecond is the small measure of time between a luser doing something seemingly innocuous, then realising the true magnitude of what you’ve done.
Frobbing a scram switch without knowing. The dawning reality that a protest vote might actually result in that thing actually happening. Sending an email to someone you didn’t mean to, that kind of thing.
Fortunately, most of us have a limited ability to truly mess things up (leaving aside Darwin Awards candidates), but something that most of us will have done at some point, is that unintended sending of mail. The situation could come up for a number of reasons:
- Someone is copied on the mail that you’re replying to, and you either don’t realise or you intended to remove them from the list but forgot. Maybe you went on to theorise about their capability or speculate on their intent. Normally just embarrassing, could be career-limiting.
You accidentally add someone to the TO: or CC: line of a mail, intending to remove them, but don’t. This is basic carelessness which can be avoided by not adding people to the TO: or CC: lines of your email unless you genuinely intend to send the mail to them… [coming to a Bedlam expansion pack sometime]- You Reply-All by default to emails, maybe asking to be removed from the mailing list. Don’t do that. Seriously.
- You send an email then just after, realise that a later message has changed the conversation and that, if you’d read that first, you either wouldn’t have replied, or if you did, you’d say something different.
There are a couple of easy things anyone can do to avoid these issues, apart from thinking before sending and maybe re-reading all of what you’ve written before sending it to what you know to be a large group, or with important people on the list.
- DON’T put people on the TO: or CC: line as a way of looking them up in the address book; it’s an easy trap to fall into; maybe you just want to check how someone’s name is spelled, or find out who their boss is, etc. If you want to do that, go to the main Outlook window (ie not the email editor, if you happen to have that as a separate window), and just press CTRL+SHIFT+B to bring the address book to the fore. Or, click the Address Book button on the Home tab, or just type the name into the box above it.
- Try delaying the sending of new messages – in principle, keeping outbound mail in the special “Outbox” folder on your PC until some period of time before actually pushing the message out to the recipients.
One option might be to delay specific messages, probably more for impact – if you want people to receive mail at a particular time (following an announcement that you know is going to happen at a set time, for example), then you can force that message to sit for a while – an extended time, maybe – before being put into the sending queue. See the Delay Delivery icon on the Options tab within the message window.
One downside to putting stuff in the Outbox is that when you’re running Outlook in the default “Cached” mode, then the Outbox is a special folder on your PC – so if something is sitting there waiting to be sent, and you put the PC to sleep or it goes offline, then the message will stay there until the next opportunity presents itself when your PC wakes up and is online.
There is a slightly more convoluted way of putting delayed mail in the Outbox on the server – see veteran ToW #30.
To delay every message for just a few minutes, to give you an opportunity to yank them from the Outbox, then create a rule… - On the Home tab in main Outlook window, try creating a new rule by going to Manage Rules & Alerts then, and
choosing New Rule, then under “Start from a blank rule” choose “Apply rule on messages I send” - On the new rule dialog, select “Next” to apply the rule to every message sent (on the “Which condition(s) do you want to check” tab), then on the “what do you want to do with this message” page, select the “Defer delivery” option and choose the number of minutes, then hit Finish / OK to apply the rule and return.
Now, when you send a message, it has the property set that delays it for however many minutes you wanted to wait – if you need to send it quickly (so you can disconnect or shut down, for example) you can go into the Outbox folder, open the message, change the “Delay Delivery” option on that individual message and press Send again.
Tip o’ the Week 354 – Alone in the Dark
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There’s a school of thought that it’s easier to read light coloured text on dark backgrounds than the other way around, even though we’re conditioned to have black text on white paper. It’s largely a personal preference thing, so might be worth having a play with a few options within Office & Windows (and a few other apps) to see how you fare.
Go into Settings -> Personalization -> Colors to tweak the app mode on your PC. The Edge browser inexplicably ignores the app mode on the main settings page, but does implement its own light/dark theme, accessed via the Settings (click or tap the … in the top right, then Settings).
Users of Visual Studio and the Azure Portal probably know this already but they also feature dark themes…
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Tip o’ the Week 355 – How to buy a FBTV
| Tip 355, eh? This week’s tip is quite timely so we’ll skip over 354 and come back to that later.
[Warning: these next 2 links are a bit racy – don’t click on them unless you’re familiar with Danny Boyle’s controversial film of 20 years ago…] Trainspotting is coming back, after all. Like every technology which moves on, buying flipping big televisions can be a minefield. Time was, you got the biggest you could afford and accommodate, and that was it. But now, a blizzard of new logos and features means you need to know what you’re doing otherwise a savvy sales person might tuck you up with a set that’s obsolete immediately. Does anyone still watch 3D TV? The Dawn of 4K At the beginning of the HD wave, TV manufacturers were selling “HD Ready” sets, which had no means to receive High Definition broadcasts and only natively supported 720p (ie a resolution of 1280×720) from external sources like Blu-Ray, so a step up compared to standard definition (which had a resolution of up to 720×576), but not quite as much as Full HD 1080p (of 1920×1080). The 4K revolution – otherwise known as Ultra-HD or UHD – promises resolution a of 3840×2160, meaning a Full HD picture would fill only one quarter of a 4K screen, even if 3840 isn’t exactly 4K (as that would be 4096)… 4K content is available in some areas, now – via cable or satellite (like Sky Q for UK users), but mostly through on-demand services such as Netflix or Amazon, or even streaming from YouTube. Since most 4K TVs are “Smart”, the various apps for those services are likely to be built-into or at least downloadable for the TV in question. Do check the apps you need are available for the screen you’re thinking of, and don’t be disappointed if existing apps don’t feature 4K content, yet – Planet Earth II’s cutesy animals & stunning visuals don’t show up on 4K, sadly. HDR If you’re going to buy a 4K set, make sure you get one that supports High Dynamic Range, or HDR. Photographers may know about HDR already – essentially, it’s a process of taking several photos with different exposure settings and combining them together to make one image that’s detailed and bright. Here’s an illustrative example:
HDR on moving images means you can combine the detail and contrast of a low-exposure shot with the brightness and definition of a high-exposure one. Here’s a discussion about HDR TVs and why, basically, you shouldn’t buy a 4K TV without it. Arguably, HDR will have a more positive impact that the extra resolution of 4K. There are 2 different HDR standards, and that introduces some confusion – there’s proprietary Dolby Vision, and open standard HDR10. Dolby Vision isn’t part of the Blu-Ray specification per-se, and if you buy a 4K Blu-Ray player then it most probably won’t have Dolby Vision support. It’s arguable about whether 4K Blu-Ray is even viable – paying a premium for a higher-definition version of a format (Blu-Ray) that may still be growing, but not as fast as its predecessor (DVD) is shrinking: good luck with that. The future’s all about streaming, really.
OLED vs LED/LCD Another decision matrix when choosing the screen, is whether to go for the newest OLED display (which still attracts a pretty premium in the price), or to get a more established – and perhaps, more refined – technology such as LCD with LED backlighting? See an in-depth discussion about the two technologies here. Ultimately, if you buy OLED now you may get a better screen but in a year’s time, you could probably get an even better one at the same price as an LCD screen costs today. Entry level 55” OLED screens will skin you the best part of two large, whereas you can get a similarly-featured 55” LCD 4K with HDR, for little more than a monkey. Right, now that’s that done. Off to watch that new Top Gear in 4K. And on that bombshell… |
Tip o’ the Week 353 – Killing me Softly, part II
 Back in the day, when it was an ambitious plan to have a PC on every desk and in every home, one frontier that was foreseen was the battle for the living room. Before the advent of cheapo streaming sticks, the only way to consume media on your big telly (apart from stuff broadcast to it or recorded already) was to invest several large in a dedicated Home Theater (sic) PC, or htpc.
There was also the promise of being able to tune your htpc into broadcast TV signals and use it like a PVR, though this took a long time to be realised internationally, what with the Windows Media Center was a standalone version of Windows XP, then an optional features in premium versions of Vista and Windows 7, before being put to the sword in Windows 10. RIP WMC. What now? Well, the fashion for having a full-size, fan-blaring PC in your living room is largely done away with, as games consoles and the aforesaid streaming devices (along with built-in SmartTV functionality) largely make the idea redundant, but for some uses (a student bedroom maybe, or a PC in the den) it could still be a smart idea to be able to watch and record TV signals, for which there are a profusion of freely available alternatives to WMC. Let’s look at one of the most widely used.
· UK users might choose all manner of tuner hardware, but you could try getting a £20 USB cheapie tuner from your favourite bookstore, or any other DVB-T2 tuner hardware (T2 includes Freeview HD, whereas simple DVB-T is just standard definition). · · It’s quite possible that if you install NextPVR and it doesn’t work properly, you’ll need the right codec software, such as the LAV filters – get the latest installer from here. It’ll also allow DVD playback. It’s even said to be possible to stream UK Freeview channels to a Kodi addon running on machines that don’t have their own tuner hardware, and non-UK types may be able to receive those channels away from Blighty. Apparently. |
Microsoft’s early entrance into this market was a project called “
proliferation of delivery methods, formatting standards for TV channels, means of describing the program guide etc.
Kodi.tv
Install Tip o’ the Week 352 – Skype for Business Custom Presence
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Many years back, OCS added the capability to present different custom states too – but it’s always been a bit of a faff to achieve consistently. Skype for Business doesn’t make it a great deal easier, but thanks to a few enterprising types, it is still possible to enable without too much trouble. Custom presence allows users to have up to 4 custom status fields defined, in the status of Online, Busy or Do Not Disturb, which can be used to show even more context – like I’m in a meeting but can IM, or I’m busy presenting with customers so don’t disturb. There are a couple of ways to achieve said nirvana…
The downside is that the Presence Tool starts with 4 blank presence states, so you can’t easily modify what you have already – and setting 4 empty entries will clear all custom presence from the client. Also, it only lets you choose online or busy as the available status. A more complex but more comprehensive approach would be to use a technique developed by MVP Ståle Hansen, to use a PowerShell script to create the config file which sets presence states. It’s relatively straightforward if you follow these steps:
The benefit of using this script rather than manually configuring everything is that it can be easily shared with others, or just re-run across multiple PCs so you have a consistent set of presence options. Now look at your friends in Skype for Business to see who has the most creative custom state …
NB: If the above doesn’t work (and you’ve checked the registry entry points to a correctly-formatted XML file etc etc) then it may be a policy on the server that’s preventing it. One possible solution would be to host the XML file on a suitable web site that lets you reference it directly using https:// and point to that in the registry instead. |
