#70: Two Score and Ten years

50 years ago to this very day, a small company called Micro-Soft was formed. Over the last half-century it has grown unbelievably, touched many lives and at varying times has had legions of fans and detractors alike.

There has been a lot of coverage on Microsoft’s own social channels and on their special website, Cheers to 50 years – Microsoft Unlocked, which covers a lot of ground and tells some interesting tales. Other takes include last year’s Wired special, slightly less curated by corp PR, Microsoft at 50: An AI Giant. A Kinder Culture. And Still Hellbent on Domination.

Stories often help to define a corporate culture but also to explain it to outsiders too. Sometimes, they feature as a backdrop to something else entirely. Let’s look at one in particular, the rocket that took Microsoft into orbit: the original PC.

Project Chess came to town

Much has been written about IBM deciding it wanted a piece of the burgeoning early 1980s home/small office computer market, as defined by popular machines like the Trash 80 or the Apple II. Big Blue was worried that it might miss the bandwagon and at the same time was concerned that corporate customers could put a highly spec-ed Apple II on their desk and run financial analysis from there, instead of relying on the IBM Big Iron in the Data Processing dept. Finance Directors and accountants could get instant answers for a few $K with VisiCalc on their Apple II, instead of waiting for the wonks in DP to turn reports around in 24hrs.

An Apple II with 48K of RAM had a list price of over $2.5K (something like $12K in today’s money), but the cheapest IBM computer at the time was more than five times as much. When IBM brass gave the go-ahead for what was to be “Project Chess” – to build an IBM personal computer – one stipulation was that it had to be ready in 12 months, with a prototype to be produced in only 1 month, with a target cost of $1,500.

This compressed timeline, and the need to keep costs low, meant usual IBM practices of building everything in-house had to go. As much componentry as possible was sourced off-the-shelf – controllers, disk drives, etc – and when it came to choosing software, they beat a path to Bill Gates’ door for Microsoft BASIC. At the time, every computer needed a programming language, and that’s what Microsoft did – developer tools for hobbyists, essentially.

So the Suits came to Redmond, and licensed Basic (and other languages). They happened to also ask if Bill & co could point them in the direction of a suitable operating system. The popular CP/M was identified as a possible – in fact, Microsoft made a bit of hardware called SoftCard that could run CP/M on Apple II machines, so compatible apps were also available to Apple users. CP/M was produced by a company called Digital Research, which was rumoured might have merged with Microsoft at one point (and was later acquired by Novell).

That NDA

When IBM’s reps went the following day to visit Digital Research in California, the boss – Gary Kildall – was not around (there are various stories as to why, but they’re not important right now). IBM’s team slapped their standard and very one-sided Non-Disclosure Agreement on the table, but DR’s lawyer and COO wouldn’t sign it; it could be summarised as, “Don’t tell us anything confidential; if you do tell us anything and we act on it, you can’t sue us. If we tell you anything confidential and you act on any of it, we’ll sue you”.

After a protracted impasse with DR, IBM went back to Microsoft and asked Bill to sort out the operating system problem; Bill & Paul Allen had already worked with a guy from another small company in Seattle, to do the prototype of the CP/M SoftCard and as luck would have it, partly because Digital Research was dragging its feet on 16-bit CP/M, he had built a 16-bit OS for Intel chips. Microsoft bought it, hired its author, and then built PC-DOS and later MS-DOS for the IBM PC, which went on to be wildly successful.

For more detail on the IBM side of things, see this good summary from PCMag – Project Chess: The Story Behind the Original IBM PC.

IBM’s missteps opened the door

IBM’s management believed that their economy of scale meant that even if other companies tried to build a “PC”, they could never do it cheaply enough to be a threat. Over the next few years, other pioneers managed to consolidate the number of chips and other parts required, but IBM’s proprietary BIOS chip, whose software controlled how the hardware worked together, was the key to true compatibility. Even if you built an exact copy of the PC hardware, it wouldn’t run DOS or any of the other applications with 100% success, unless the BIOS looked and behaved the same as IBM’s.

A company called Phoenix first reverse-engineered the IBM BIOS and started selling their “compatible” version, allowing for companies like Compaq and Dell to spring up, building 100% compatible machines which were cheaper than Big Blue’s, and in time got the jump by adopting newer and faster hardware (like 386 processors) before IBM did. The genie was now well out of the bottle, and despite their attempts to re-assert control with the PS/2 system and OS/2 software, IBM’s grip on the massively growing ecosystem had slipped. 20 years ago, they bailed out of the PC business they had invented, selling up to Lenovo.

The best deal in corporate history…

When IBM agreed to buy the operating system for that first Personal Computer 5150 – “PC Disk Operating System”, aka PC-DOS, the initial offer was to pay Microsoft to develop it but to give IBM all the rights. Bill pushed back and said Microsoft wanted to have the rights to sell a version – MS-DOS – to other companies too.

IBM was in such a hurry to do the deal – and thinking that nobody could build a cheaper, compatible machine anyway – agreed to let Microsoft have rights on MS-DOS.

Without this decision, it’s almost certain that the PC industry would not exist. There would be no Windows; maybe OS/2 would have been the GUI on the high-end, only-available-from-IBM PC (such as the strategy was behind the PS/2). Apple might have dominated with the completely proprietary Macintosh, and would that have evolved as much without the competition from hundreds of PC vendors? Would something else have come along instead?

The availability of a Phoenix BIOS and MS-DOS meant anyone could build a compatible and competitive machine. By the mid-1990s, over 200M PCs had been sold, though IBM had only around 8% of that market (Compaq overtaking it to be the largest single PC vendor in 1994).

Thanks to that one business decision made by IBM, Bill Gates & co, a multi-trillion dollar industry grew up.

Microsoft revenues from 1984 – 1999


Further Reading & Listening

If you’re interested in these snippets from the history books, there are many other sources of information.

Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy – a 4-hour magnum opus podcast covering many points in the story of Microsoft. They talks about Project Chess and some of the points made above (from about 1h20m into the podcast).


Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace

One of the earliest chronicles of Bill Gates’ story and how Microsoft came into being, published in 1992 – so 17 years after the company came from nothing, and a little more than a decade after IBM launched the first PC. Lots happened since then, but this is a compelling account.


Arguably the best telling of the history behind lots of the early personal computer industry comes from ex-InfoWorld columnist, Bob Cringely. Accidental Empires (from 1992 before revisions) is entertaining and compelling – a must-read for anyone interested in this period. The chapter, “Chairman Bill Leads the Workers in Song” talks about what made BillG tick. The section on Steve Jobs, “The Prophet” (itself prophetic, as the book was written before Jobs came back to Apple and saved it from certain death), starts, “The most dangerous man in Silicon Valley sits alone on many weekday mornings, drinking coffee at II Fornaio, an Italian restaurant on Cowper Street in Palo Alto”

Cringely (or, rather, his real persona, Mark Stephens) produced a video series, “The Triumph of the Nerds(also pre-Jobs-as-Lazarus) which is basically a summary of the book, and is well worth watching – episode 2 covers the PC history; ep1 deals with the origin story of MITS and Apple, while ep3 covers the Apple Mac and Windows rivalry.

It’s absolutely brilliant. If you only read one book on the backstory of Silicon Valley and the PC industry which grew out of it, make it this one.


Showstopper! was an exceptional under-the-covers story of how Microsoft went from relying on a pretty flaky Windows-built-on-DOS offering, to building out a “proper” operating system which initially went into serious and professional environments. Guided by legendary ex-DEC operating system guru, Dave Cutler, Windows NT was fundamental to Microsoft’s push into the enterprise, finished off Novell on the server estate, went toe-to-toe with Unix in Workstations, and subsequently underpinned Windows XP and every Windows version since.


The first chapter of Microserfs started as a series of articles in Wired, before being published in a book in 1995. It charts a story about a software startup which grew from Microsoft; that first chapter starts by talking about Bill like some kind of mythological figure. The book name-checks lots of mid-90s references in the Redmond area, building numbers, local food outlets and so on. Anyone who was familiar with that region at that time must read this book.

The main character is Dan Underwood, and a few pages into the book he says “I am danielu@microsoft.com”. Years later, there really was a danielu and he used to get several emails a month saying things like “I read your book…”

He’s not there any more so don’t bother (or maybe he got MSIT to change his alias).

You had me at EHLO


Others worth a look

Barbarians Led by Bill Gates by Jennifer Edstrom – from 1998, just as the anti-trust heavies  were getting involved. This is a warts-and-all hatchet job from people who were inside at the time, or connected closely to the top brass.

Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace by James Wallace – A follow up to “Hard Drive”, dealing with Microsoft in the Netscape era.

Other recommendations from ex-Microsoftie David Gristwood


Oh, and for the real origin story, check out Celebrating 50 years of Microsoft from Bill Gates himself, charting how he and Paul Allen were inspired to found the company to write BASIC for that original 1975 computer, the MITS Altair 8800. The Personal Computer industry began 50 years ago, and marked a profound change from being mostly dependent on hardware innovation – as previous computers did – to one being all about the value and magic of software.

Happy Anniversary, Microsoft! Many of us were lucky to fall into the ecosystem you created, and have built happy and successful careers working with brilliant people ever since.

#26: Further Outlook Calendar Fun

Following on from last week’s tip on New Outlook and its addition of the “In-person” switch to designate a meeting as taking place in actual 3D, here’s a quick look back at another calendary thing that’s been in Exchange and Outlook since the year dot – the meeting status.

When you create an entry in your calendar, you can set whether it shows you as busy or not – the original status choices being free/tentative/busy/OOF. Microsoft added the new “Working elsewhere” more than a decade ago, though it never really took off. It wasn’t helped by the lack of support on some clients, and an initial gnarly bug in Exchange 2013 which meant Working Elsewhere appointments sometimes disappeared. It does work pretty well now, though – Think of it like a soft Out of Office which doesn’t get in the way of people booking time with you, but it does signify that you’re not physically in the office. That’s a lot more likely these days than it was 11 years ago.

Showing your actual availability is a bit more nuanced than it was when Outlook was launched in 1997; you might be technically Out of Office but still able to be contacted in some ways. You could set a status message in Teams to add context to where you are or how available you might be.

Of course, making sure other people can see your calendar (at least sharing the high level view of where you are and what you’re doing) will help, and do tell people to use the scheduling assistant in Outlook when trying to book meetings with you. Maybe also set your Work Hours to make it clear if you habitually work at different times to your colleagues, take Friday afternoons off etc.

If you have a group of people who work closely together, you could try using a variety of other tools to track whereabouts and make it easier to meet – check out TeamLink, a free Power App that runs inside of Teams, or perhaps the supposedly forthcoming feature set formerly introduced as Microsoft Places.

Finally, there are two stages of Out of Office – there’s the automatic message you might set to respond to emails to say you’re away; the best OOF messages might just apologize that you’re gone so will probably never read these emails. Alternatively, you could set the status of your appointment to show OOF and then people who can see your calendar will know you’re just gone for a while, such as away for the afternoon, but you haven’t gone to the extent of setting up an auto-response.

Both of these can also help with voice messaging, either external telephone calls if you’re using Teams Phone or just “calls” directly into Teams from colleagues or other external contacts. Look in Teams settings, and you can set up how you want to handle calls that go unanswered. You can record your own greeting, or just type in a message and have the system say that to the caller.

Note the granularity where you could have a message played only during times when your calendar is showing Out of Office.

#18: Linking Phones and PCs

If you’re using a PC with Windows 10 or 11 and you have a smartphone, it’s worth exploring the Microsoft Phone Link app which lets you interact with the handset from your computer.

Microsoft has made several attempts to link phones and PCs, from the Continuum feature at the twilight of Windows Phone’s life (before it was knifed) to a variety of bespoke apps for Samsung devices and ultimately “Your Phone”. The latter has now evolved and expanded to be “Phone Link”. The array of features varies slightly depending on what OS your phone is using, and which manufacturer it originates from.

The app is likely pre-installed on Windows; make sure it’s up to date. It then needs to pair with a companion app called Link to Windows on your phone – either Android or iOS. For step-by-step instructions on how to set it up, see Sync Your Smartphone to Your Windows Computer.

For Android users, arguably the most compelling quick win is being able to easily access Photos without requiring them to have synced to Google Photos or OneDrive first – while the phone is connected to the PC either via Bluetooth or through the same WiFi network, you can interact with the last 2,000 photos on the device’s camera roll, so copying and pasting them into other apps is a snap.

iPhone users will have to use other means to get their hands on pics, at least for now.

The Phone Link app allows notifications on the device to be seen and managed on PC, which sounds more useful than it really is. It can also set the PC up to use the phone to make and receive calls (think of it like the PC is a smart Bluetooth headset), though some handsets might be a bit flaky. It seems even new phones don’t always provide the right level of support for some features to work well, such as Google nobbling the ability to output to an external display over the USB-C port on Pixel phones (a behaviour which will be fixed, at some point).

Some Android devices will allow you to display and control phone apps on the PC itself (or even mirror the whole phone screen) – which can be very useful, especially if you’re having to input a reasonable amount of text. It’s pretty much always going to be quicker to type on a keyboard than tap on a screen. Other options do abound, though, depending on the apps you use – there’s a native WhatsApp client for the PC, for example, so you could use that rather than relying on Phone Link.

You can use the PC to work with text messages on the phone, even supporting iMessage for Apple devices. Arguably the handiest part is when you get a text message as part of a multi-factor authentication sequence like logging into a bank account. The notification which Phone Link displays includes a “copy” shortcut so you can easily grab the code and paste it into the waiting logon page… even if the phone is on the other side of the room.

#12: Should I pay the (co)Pilot?

Microsoft has a habit of over-pivoting to use the same terminology for lots of different things, sometimes even giving the same name to related but quite specifically different things. Think OneDrive / OneDrive for Business, OneNote / OneNote for Windows 10, Skype / Skype for Business, Teams and Teams (work account) etcetera. At times in the past, everything was seemingly appended with “.NET”, or given a name starting “Windows…” “Live…” or “One…” (or all three).

Here’s the Copilot

With all the hoo-hah in recent months about “Copilot”, it can be confusing to pin down exactly what it is – a search engine, chatbot, a tool to write code, or something that will draw pictures while summarizing your email?

There are whole standalone experiences like the Bing search which was originally Chat but has now been renamed Copilot …

… and the Edge browser integrated Copilot panel, activated by the icon in the top right. Preview versions of Windows have a Copilot button on the taskbar with the ability to tweak things inside the operating system. New PCs will soon have a Copilot button on their keyboard.

There are other “Copilot” things coming out all the time. Want some help in writing a Power Automate cloud flow to integrate stuff between systems? If you’re a salesperson, Copilot in Dynamics Sales lessens the drudgery of keeping CRM up to date. Or if you’re a developer, Github can help you write better code, more quickly. Some are free and some need you to subscribe to.

It’s very likely that these things come from different sets of technologies under the hood, though Microsoft is increasingly talking about there being a “Copilot platform” behind each of these experiences. Things are certainly moving quickly – as BizApps MVP Steve Mordue commented in his chat with Charles Lamanna. Expect the effect of AI on regular applications to move from being an addon or a side panel, to fundamentally changing the apps we use – why build a BI dashboard if you can just ask the questions you need or even have the information suggested to you?

Copilot Pro and Copilot in M365

The recently-launched Copilot for Microsoft 365 integrates priority access to some of the public web services (akin to ChatGPT Plus), and adds in-app integration with Microsoft 365 and Office applications, promising also to be able to put the back end magic to work across your own organization’s data too. It’s been in preview for a while, for certain customers – initially it was invite-only for some of the biggest (who still had to pay for it) but recently has been extended to anyone with a Microsoft 365 Business subscription.

Somewhat confusingly, Microsoft at the same time announced “Copilot Pro”, which is really for individuals and integrates with Microsoft 365 personal or family subscriptions, for a monthly fee of $20 (or £19 – forex, huh… though the USD amount doesn’t include tax whereas the GBP one does).

If you’re not a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscriber you won’t see a lot of the value which Copilot Pro adds, on top of the GPT-4 Turbo and DALL-E 3 usage. If you are already using a M365 home subscription, then for your £19/month you’ll see Copilot functionality showing up in the desktop and web versions of the Office apps. (NB – that’s £19 per user; note that the £8/month you might pay for M365 family gets you up to 6 people… they’d each need to be enrolled into Copilot Pro if you wanted all to get the benefit, so it could work out quite expensive).

Select a block of text or a page in OneNote and you can summarize it or build a To-Do list on what actions it might contain. Word shows a little Copilot icon on the left of the text editing block, and will offer to draft some text or rewrite what’s already there.

 

Excel’s analytical Copilot is still in preview (and works on files already saved in OneDrive/Sharepoint only), while PowerPoint offers some frankly amazing abilities to generate fluff from thin air, or jazz up the dreary text-laden slides you might already have.

Buying and deploying Copilot for Microsoft 365 business users – available to small business users on Business Standard or Premium, or Enterprise users who have E3 or E5 licenses – is something an organizational admin would need to control, so if you’re an end user then you’ll need to wait until they decide you’re worth it.

The business version (priced at £30 per month, inc VAT) gives you everything that Copilot Pro does, and also access to your own organization’s date, and, integration with Teams, where Copilot can prepare summaries of meetings you have, or offer a chatbot that can find other information in different sources.

Should I buy it?

If you’re an Office apps user and have a M365 family or personal subscription, then it’s worth taking a look at Copilot Pro – the first monthly subscription of £19/$20 will give you a chance to have a proper play with Copilot functionality, and then decide to keep it going or cancel the subscription and it’ll expire at the end of the month. It might even give you an idea – as an end user – what Copilot for M365 could give you, and thus petition the powers that be to enable it for your M365 org.

One downside of the M365 business Copilot licensing model is that, although it works out at $30/£30 per month (give or take), it’s an annual commitment which must be paid up front. So if you’re looking to kick the tyres, try the $20/£19 a month Pro first.

 

 

 

 

#9: Go for a walk

Hello, ToW readers! It’s been a few couple of months now since the recent yet erstwhile host of “Tip of the Week” was acquired and their new owner has thus far not completed the repurposing of their content, and therefore not given me confidence in writing any more for them, for now. In the meantime, I’ll continue to dribble this stuff onto LinkedIn each Friday (as Tip o’ the Week always was, in the days when it was a Microsoft internal email), following from the restarted numbering system as at the time it changed from Tip o’ to Tip of.

I do hope you enjoy. Yay.

Now that we’re finally in the grip of the New Year, some NY resolutions might have been sacrificed already; eating less, moving more, not drinking too much and the like. If you’re still keen, maybe each weekend, why not get out into the great beyond and go for a walk?

Step 1 will be to decide where you’re going to walk to. Technology provides lots of help in that regard – from local website guides offering “10 great winter walks to take in your area” type articles (typically stuffed with clickbait and stupid advertising, though), to mobile apps and web sites like MapMyWalk, AllTrails and Visorando. Community enthusiasts might post their favourite routes on these and other fora, possibly with reviews to tell you how muddy they are / how many angry bulls you might encounter etc.

Screenshot 2024-01-12 134756If you like the good old method of staring at a map and making up your own way, there are all the usual mapping tools available too. Google Maps clearly has a market share leadership position, and offers handy offline capabilities and walking directions, which sometimes include off-road footpaths as well. Not bad if you’re mostly in a built-up area, but once you’re in the sticks, you might be better off with more tailored alternatives. If you’re walking in London, check out Footways – a site showing a curated set of suggested “quiet” routes from A to B.

Apple pushes their alternative mapping software for Fruity device users, however if you follow a link to an Apple Maps location – eg https://maps.apple.com/?q=47.641944,-122.127222&t=k – and you’re not on an Apple device, it will send you to Google Maps instead. DuckDuckGo lets you view the map using another browser – eg https://duckduckgo.com/?q=47.641944%2C-122.127222&iaxm=maps – in case you feel like you’re missing out. [You’re not, btw]

If you’re planning a walk in the UK countryside, you’d do well to look at Ordnance Survey, a government funded department which publishes maps at varying scale and with key attributes highlighted. The organization dates back to the 18th century, set up to accurately map England in order to counter military incursions from troublesome neighbours. They still produce not-insignificantly-priced paper maps, however pinch-to-zoom is somewhat problematic on such offline media, so a mobile subscription based app with route planning, offline guidance and the like might be more fitting (and they have a 30% offer on annual subscriptions right now).

If you’re not inclined to subscribe, there is one alternative that’s useful when planning walks, even if you need to print the map out (or screen grab it to save the image to your phone): use Bing Maps.

Screenshot 2024-01-12 144611It’s easy to forget about Bing Maps (jump to bingmaps.com in a browser to get there quickly) since there’s no workable mobile solution, so most people will rely on the other main platforms. If you’re in the UK, however (and you set United Kingdom as your region in the hamburger menu on the top right) then you’ll be able to access Ordnance Survey mapping for free.

Look at the “Style” icon near the top right and you can choose road maps, satellite view and more, including Ordnance Survey. If you don’t see that option, you will need to play some more with your location settings. Zoom in or out until you get the right level, and you’ll see Explorer (slightly more detailed) and Landranger map views, showing key attractions with public footpaths marked.

Screenshot 2024-01-12 144928

Screenshot 2024-01-12 150614It’s brilliant. Right-click the map to use the measuring tool to draw your walk and calculate the distance. Screen-grab (WindowsKey+S) the section you want, and you could highlight your route from within the Snipping Tool before printing it out, nice and big and easy to read.


688 – This IS the End

The first Tip o’ the Week was sent on Friday 4th December 2009, starting life in response to the Microsoft annual employee survey, where team members could give feedback on how things are going. One common complaint was that tools they had to use – internal, mostly – were less than ideal, so a local task force was formed to decide on how best practices could be shared amongst a wider group of 50 or so people. “Why not a weekly newsletter?”

Quickly, ToW evolved into sharing productivity tips and news about (Microsoft, mainly) technology. Membership to the newsletter spread organically until thousands of people received it every week. The “Best Practice Tip o’ the Week” lost the “Best…” bit by #87, and at #100 became part of an internal Microsoft “Love it” project (and outlasted said project by some years). When it turned #300, ToW gained Bill Murray’s endorsement. Eventually, it went online and onto LinkedIn.

In all of this time, the fourth wall was rarely broken.

clip_image001

No longer. This IS The End. This is the last ToW. It is time to rest.

ToW has never been about me, it’s always tried to find and share some hopefully useful tips and tricks, often aided by suggestions from readers or even a few who wrote up the sollution themselves, presented in an informal and somewhat irreverant format.

It is now over. It’s been a blast, mostly. Sometimes, more effort went into the side-eye links than the topic in hand.

The best ToWs? Well IMHO, they are (in no particular order):

clip_image003The most fun was probably 662 – How to make the perfect martini, for obvious reasons. One I use every day? 406 – A path! A path!, though now Copy as path is built-in to Windows Explorer on the right-click.

The emails might be finishing but keep an eye on Tip o’ the Week on LinkedIn as, one day, it might resume.

In the meantime, thank you all!

STOP.

648 – F’ing Home Networks

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The profusion of wireless devices – from PCs and phones, to all kinds of internet-of-stuff, has exploded in recent years.

IoT reached peak buzzword in 2014/5 and analysts predicted 200+ billion t’Ings would be internet-connected by 2020. Unsurprisingly, they were wrong by a factor of 5 or maybe 10.

Still, few people probably imagined they’d have dozens of electronic devices in their own home which connect themselves to the internet. Do you know how many things you have? Careful people might have a separate network isolated from the rest of their house just to host all their connected stuff, reducing the risk of attack from the unknown services that sit behind their internet-connected radiators, washing machines or home automation rigs.

clip_image003You probably have a lot of Wi-Fi enabled kit, using TCP/IP to connect through your home router. Do you really know how many there are? If you log onto your own router’s admin page, you can probably see everything that has been given a network address – maybe you’ll see the IP address assigned, and the unique MAC address which the device has presented to identify itself.

Figuring out what is what can be one of the minor annoyances that leads people to such crazy actions as not renaming their home router SSID or changing its default password.

clip_image005If you’re not all that interested in managing addresses on your home network, you may still want to peer into what is on it and why. Never mind joining your laptop to a guest network – what else is there, too?

A neat app called Fing has been listed in the Windows Store, which gives an analysis of your network, using a source database to tell you what other machines are there. The unique physical address that each device presents usually contains a reference to its manufacturer, and Fing has some logic to figure out which is what, so you’ll get a description for most or all of the devices, with unknown ones flagged as worthy of investigation.

You do need to sign up to use the app, but once you’ve done so, it will show an intersting view of your network. Some premium paid-for features in proactive security monitoring and in-depth reportingmay tempt you to spend a few montly £ to see what they could do for you.

clip_image007There are lots of other freemium tools in the Store which can help understand or even troubleshoot the network(s) you have at home – WiFi Analyzer, for example, will show you lists and graphs of all the wireless networks it can see in your vicinity.

515 – Whiteboarding Teams

Microsoft Teams continues to attract more fans, as Office 365 licensees deploy it and end-users embrace and enjoy Teams as another way to other communicate and collaborate. As part of a blog post in November, some best practices and references were shared, as was the widely-reported figure of 20m active users.

After a while, Teams becomes prevalent as a way of managing online meetings: handy, for example, when the usual seasonal rain in Seattle gives way to the odd bout of debilitating snow.


If you’re having meetings with Teams, there’s always the chance you’ll want to collaborate on a virtual whiteboard, something that was discussed a bit back in ToW #440.

Just go to the Share control within the meeting and scroll over to the right – past a list of PowerPoint files you have recently opened; yes, it is possible to display PPT content without sharing your whole desktop – and you’ll see Whiteboard as a category.

The Microsoft Whiteboard that is listed within is a simplified version of the main application; as used in Teams, you get less control and fewer pens etc. You could just start then share out the main Whiteboard application, but as it would be a single-user application being displayed, you wouldn’t have the same fidelity of multi-user interaction.


It is possible, however, to open up the Whiteboard canvas associated with a Teams meeting, back in the separate Microsoft Whiteboard app. So, if you want to use the groovy tools like highlighter and ruler, start Whiteboard, then look in the gallery of existing whiteboards you’ve used.

One of them will be the Whiteboard from the meeting: open it up in the main app and you’ll also be able to interact in real-time, even if the meeting is still taking place with others contributing.

Whiteboard is available as a Windows app, an iOS app, and also as a web apphere – and the web app provides the same kind of slightly more basic functionality as the Teams version. Who knows, they might be related…?

There’s also an even-more-capable whiteboard app that needs you to sign up for a free account and provides a commensurate web experience – Freehand by InVision. The Teams app basically embeds the web UI of that app too, but it provides a wider choice of features (like holding ALT down to force your freehand shapes to snap to real ones, or press SHIFT to force a straight line even if drawn with a mouse or a pen) and some additional organisational control. It’s worth looking at both Freehand and the simpler Microsoft Whiteboard.

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Tip o’ the Week 471 – Buying stuff at auction

clip_image002As the web turns 30 and its role in the End Of the World As We Know It starts to become more clear, it’s worth reflecting on how the technology has disrupted more traditional businesses, sometimes ironically turning them on their head before turning into them.

One literally dusty and old-school business that is reinventing its traditional method, is that of the auction house. As any Brit hooked on Bargain Hunt or Cash in the Attic might attest, the auctioneer will let any amount of old toot pass under their gavel on the basis that they’re making some commission from the seller and gathering a not-insubstantial buyer’s premium from the successful bidder, too.

ToW#359 covered auctions a while ago, and covered some strategies in making sure you get the best deal.

It seems that the auction market is growing, and not just in high value art or fancy motoring. If you go to the saleroom of a bricks & mortar auctioneer these days, there is likely to be at least as much bidding action coming in online as there is in the room, but it’s all dealt with in real-time by a real-life master of the hammer, even if at some places and times nobody knows what they’re actually saying.

So, as well as perusing the ‘Bay for used stuff to fill your abode, and looking on Gumtree / Craigslist for clutter that’s not only cheap but nearby, it’s worth searching on some sites who provide aggregation services to real auctioneers, listing their catalogues online and providing real-time online bidding too. For a small fee, of course. Examples include The Saleroom, EasyLiveAuctions, iBidder or Invaluable.

You may want to look for your quarry on any one – or all – of the platforms, find an item you like, have a look at the photos etc, then go straight to the auctioneer’s own website and make a commission bid. These are entered on your behalf by the auction house, supposedly only high enough to win the auction unless you’re outbid. In practice, if you put a commission bid of £200 for something because you can’t attend in person or be online live to watch & interact with the auction, then be prepared to secure the item for £200… plus maybe 28% buyers premium, and a hefty charge for post and packaging if you’re not nearby enough to collect in person. Still, you might save the 6% or so that an aggregator would charge on top.

In truth, buying most things at auction is a bad idea: there’s little to no legal protection and if the thing you’ve bought it a dud, then it’s on your head to fix it. Many bidders at auctions are dealers themselves, and they’ll have a canny eye for what to get and what to avoid – and their “good” stuff will end up in their antique shop, with a 100% mark-up, or it’ll be cursorily cleaned up and shoved on eBay.

You’d be better off finding the people directly with things to sell if you can, or ferret around in a charity shop; for some goods, like watches, there are free aggregators (the likes of WatchRecon or WatchPatrol) who scrape all of the private “for sale” ads and let you deal directly with the vendor, rather than going through a middleman like an auctioneer or eBay. For cars, there are both free and paid-for advert platforms (eg ClassicCarsForSale, PistonHeads) that make it easy to find either the dealer or private owner who’s selling up.

clip_image003Selling via auction doesn’t make too much sense a lot of the time, either – you’ll pay fees and you’ll be reliant on them bothering to describe and photograph your item properly, and put some effort into talking it up on the day.

Here’s an example of a consignment to an auctioneer – a box of books, with titles like “A Fortune in your Attic” or “Treasures in your Home”.

The box sold for £2.

So, if you’re buying cheap rubbish, then don’t think twice about which platform you use.

If you’re buying Paul Newmans, though, it could even be worth flying in and doing it in person.

Tip o’ the Week 435 – Symbols, reprised

clip_image002When the late purple paisley musician Prince restyled himself as a squiggle (or “Symbol”), nobody knew quite how to reference him or his work, so he was given the monicker “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince”. The new “Love Symbol” logo that represented his “name” was not a regular symbolic character, and after first trying to get everyone to download a special font file that had that character in it, eventually he relented and rebranded back to Prince again.

Working with special symbol characters was covered back in ToW #362; there are lots of less esoteric characters that are in regular use: but have you ever stopped to think how they came to be?

The Ampersand (&) has been around for 2,000 years, starting as a single character to join the letters e and t, ie the Latin for “and”. It’s a surprisingly common symbol, often used in company names and logos … but not universally loved by writers, or the odd legal secretary in days of dictation typing (the lawyer doing the dictation might record the company name as “Smith & co” since that’s the legal name, but more than one typist has produced the letter addressed to “Smith Ampersand co”…)

What about the @ symbol? Popularised by accountants and keepers of ledgers, the “Commercial At” (short for “at the rate of” – eg. meaning 10 units at the price of 1 shilling – 10@1s), was part of the relatively limited character set of a standard typewriter for over 100 years. It’s arguably called the Asperand though has many other names; contemporary usage has meant the symbol is either the key conjunction in an email address or the start of a digital invocation in the way of a mention.

The Asperand has nearly as many alternative names as the Octothorpe, though modern users wouldn’t necessarily think about the history of the symbol, even though it has variously been used to denote “number”, to be “pound” on your telephone keypad, or the “hash” symbol (a corruption of hatch, as in the hatching pattern) and hence, hashtag.