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Tip o’ the Week #245 – Podcasts on Windows Phone 8.1

Posted on by ewand

The topic of Podcasts was raised by a Tip reader some time ago, after Windows Phone changed the way it handled music synching onto the device (remember Zune?). Paul Thurrot suggested a workaround though it did involve using iTunes. Windows and iTunes are generally not Better Together: unless you have an Apple device to use with your Windows PC, you’re generally better seeking freedom from the clutches of AyeChoonz.

Fortunately, other Podcast apps appeared for the truly committed. With the release of Windows Phone 8.1, clip_image002however, a first-party Podcasts app is in the box.

It’s possible to stream or to download podcasts, you can use the built-in search clip_image004facility to find published episodes, or if you know the rss URL of a podcast, then you can just plonk that into the box and it will connect and (optionally) subscribe.

There’s the option of filtering audio and video podcasts, too; our own Channel 9 being one of the top video podcasts, and what better way to learn something useful while you’re on the move?

For more details on using the Podcast app, check out the guide here.

Tip o’ the Week #244 – Ticking away, the time of day

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002“Ticking away, the moments that make up a dull day” –  even if you choose not to fritter them away, the seconds and the sands of time slip by whether you’re having fun or you’re not.

Apple has recently unveiled their long-awaited smart watch, which for fanbois will mean that a Whole New Thing has been invented, and for everyone else, will mean there’s no point in buying any of the plethora of existing smart watches until the Apple one arrives next year.

Suddenly everyone’s talking about watches and what you can do with them; increasingly they’re not about being watches as much as about being worn on the wrist. (Like smart phones, perhaps, being less about talking on the phone, and more about content on the screen).

However you choose to tell the time – be it by looking at your phone, your wrist or your computer screen –  you’d like to think that in this day of technological marvel, you’d always be looking at the right time… well, you’re wrong.
Probably.

This thought occurred to me when I was sitting in my home office with 2 PCs, 2 watches and a phone all within a 90 degree view radius – and every one was showing a different time. How can this be?

PCs tend to get their time from “the network” – if  you’re using a corporate PC then that means when you connect to the company network, your machine will be told what the time is. This is less about making sure you know what the correct time is, and more about making sure (for synchronisation purposes) your PC knows what time everyone else thinks it is. Assuming the corporate environment is well run, it’ll be synchronising from an external source that is probably correct. Well, to a degree…

If you have a home PC, there’s an option to set it up to sync with an internet-hosted time service – a machine that’s probably connected to a super-accurate atomic clock which can tell time to a gazillionth of a second, so that it can clip_image004then be broadcast over the internet and with all the potential latency that might add. Still, it’s probably better than waiting for the pips.

To check if you’re synching properly, right-click on the clock in your task bar and choose Adjust date/time, then look to see if you have an “Internet Time” tab (if you’re running a company PC, you probably will not have this).

If you think your PC clock is off from others, it’s worth checking that you have it set up to synch with Internet Time, and that whatever it’s synching with is working OK. You can add your own SNTP time server if you’d prefer one other than the default list.

If you see an error in the Internet Time settings or if you think clip_image006your clock is adrift (the default time.windows.com server seems to be, clip_image008er, a little more variable in reliability than others), it may be worth setting to a different time server – just click on Change settings… and pick a different one from the list and click on Update now to check it’s working as expected.

If your PC is wildly off – like days or even years out of sync – then it could cause you problems even logging in, and it may be that your CMOS Battery has gone flat – meaning the PC’s clock has been reset to some date far in the past.

Finally, If you’d like to know a decent stab at what the correct time is, try www.time.is. And if you ever wonder whether it’s too early or late to call overseas, then enter the place name in the search box on that site and it will tell you the time in that timezone.

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Tip o’ the Week #243 – Parliamo Glasgow?

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002The great Stanley Baxter had a famous series of comedy sketches looking to help Sassenachs and Embrafowk understand how to navigate a conversation (at say, a Hogmanay party) in the city that recently hosted the Commonwealth, and was hitherto known as “Second City of the British Empire”, or just Glesga to its natives.

Navigating regional dialects (“zarramarraonrabarraclara?”) is one thing, but dealing with foreign tongues outright is another matter. Fortunately, technology has come to clip_image004rescue us – from the mostly marvelous Bing Translator app on Windows Phone to our Googly friends offering to translate foreign websites directly within their browser, without having to do anything else.

There’s a Bing web page you can go to, or to translate blocks of text on a web page using IE, you could use the Accelerator to selectively do so.

clip_image006To add a powerful translation capability native to IE, visit http://labs.microsofttranslator.com/bookmarklet/ then right-click on the top of the IE window if you don’t already have your Favorites bar showing, and click on the option to display it. Once you see bar below the address, just visit the bookmarklet link above, and drag/drop the clip_image008“Translate” link from the web page and onto the toolbar. Now you’ll have the ability to translate any web page to your language, with a single click on that toolbar.

clip_image010There’s also a Bing Translator app for Windows 8 which can translate blocks of pasted text and can download language packs so you can do it when you’re offline, too.

Right. Ahmaffdoontheboozerfurraswifthauf. Anyone else coming?

Tip o’ the Week #242 – File favourites and Explorer

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002Office365 offers a great way of hosting documents in the cloud, using SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business (which is really SharePoint under the hood) as its publicly facing storage offerings.

Office apps themselves are well versed in supporting SharePoint as a location to open and save stuff to, however other clip_image004apps – and websites – are not always so supportive.

If you’re lucky, applications will offer you a newer file dialog box >> which at least lets you navigate to shortcuts that can take you to your fave places – even good ol’ Notepad lets you pick from a Favo(u)rites list, and can access other groups of links to your PC or the network to which you’re connected.clip_image006

You could choose to disable the “OneDrive” tree from this file chooser (see the instructions, here). It’s a pity that OneDrive for Business – where you should be storing all your work-related files, vs OneDrive for your own personal stuff – can’t be exposed as an expanding tree. Oh well, there’s always Threshold…

Well, if you want to make your favourite SharePoint sites show up in file dialog boxes, there are a few simple steps you can take…

  • clip_image010Navigate to your SharePoint library of choice in the browser, then click on the library tab, then on the Ribbon clip_image008which appears, click Open with Explorer… which will open said SharePoint library as if it was just another file share using Windows Explorer.

    Now, the road is rocky here if you are not using a domain-joined PC to access the library – for Windows to authenticate you automatically to open a library in Explorer, if you’re on a home PC, you may need to make sure you’ve appropriate saved the password (clicked Remember Me in authentication dialogs, even though they rarely do, etc).

    clip_image012It’s also worth adding the website to your intranet sites if you’re on a non-corporate machine – in the desktop Internet Explorer, first copy the site URL to the clipboard, then go into Tools | Internet Options (by pressing the ALT key to show the menu bar) and add the site to your Intranet zone by clicking the Sites button, then the Advanced button, to paste and include this site in your Intranet zone. You don’t need to do this is on a corporate, domain-joined PC.

  • clip_image014Now, once you have the requisite Explorer window showing you the contents of the SharePoint site (just click on the address bar if you’re in any doubt as to clip_image016whether it’s coming from SharePoint or not), then try right-clicking the Favorites menu in Explorer and adding the current location to Favorites. Now, it’ll show up in the list and can be renamed by right-clicking it, perhaps giving it a more uniquely identifiable name than “Shared Documents”, for example.
    Once you’ve created the shortcut in your Favorites, you could try jumping to your preferred text editor (or paint program, sound recorder etc) and try to open or save something – you should see your newly-created shortcut showing up.

There are numerous other ways of getting your favourite sites to appear in common-or-garden dialog boxes; from the library tab as above, you can choose to Sync SharePoint sites (and they’ll all show up under the SharePoint favourite), or if you copy the clip_image018URL/UNC to the clipboard, it can then be added to clip_image020Network Locations by right-clicking on This PC within Windows Explorer and choosing Add Network Location to make the link show up in that group of shortcuts.

Even the oldest binary apps and websites tend to support a file picker that will let you choose from This PC, and you should be able to navigate down to your new Network Location shortcut.

All of these tips are relatively self-explanatory for tech savvy folk like Microsofties – even if relying on old-fashioned style Explorer shortcuts might seem a little backward. If you’re helping to set up Office365 for a family member to use, however, this kind of short-cuttery could make the transition much smoother, and could be the difference between you getting asked numerous times how to save files, or being left blissfully alone.

Tip o’ the Week #241 – Where did that email come from?

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002Most people don’t really pay much attention to where emails originate from or how they got to be in your inbox. This is clearly exploited by scammers and spammers of all sorts, as many consumers will happily click on a link in a genuine- looking email and not think twice about the fact that it might not be all it seems.

Anti-spam technology has improved a lot in the last decade, so a lot of the obvious junk mail is filtered out before it arrives, or if it makes it as far as your mailbox, it’ll be dropped into your Junk Mail folder. But even though the crooks have gotten more sophisticated, sometimes fishy-looking email is still delivered, but clearly marked as probably not safe, as there are tell-tale signs of it not being genuine.

Here’s an example of a typical “phishing” email that’s trying to lure the recipient into clicking a link to a website they think is their bank, Ebay, PayPal etc. etc.

clip_image004In this case, the URL is shown at the bottom of the window by hovering over it (the mouse pointer doesn’t show up in the screen capture, but it was over the “Update” button). This doesn’t look like a genuine URL; ditto, anything that is displayed in the text as (for example) https://login.youraccount.com but when you hover, you’ll find it’s some other URL. Some scammers are increasingly using TinyURL, Bit.ly or other URL-shortening services to try to hide their obvious dodginess.

Many email programs (like the standard Windows 8 Mail client) try to hide complexity from end users, but if you hover over a link, it will show the URL in a pop-up.

There are other scenarios, though, where the sender isn’t purporting to be a large institution or other supposedly trustworthy source. Maybe you’re selling something and a potential buyer contacts you to offer a quick cash purchase, sometimes in tandem with an overly complicated arrangement of an agent coming to collect your goods, in exchange for some online means of payment. If your Spidey-sense doesn’t pick up a slightly iffy premise to these kinds of offers, then there might be other ways of tracking down the sender.

Every email comes with an “envelope” – it’s actually like a routing slip attached to the block of data that makes up the main body of the message, and every time a computer (like an internet mail server) handles the message, it adds some kind of marker on the routing slip. The most recent markers on the message “headers” are at the top, so to find out where it really came from, parse down and look for the earliest point in the header that shows where the message originated.

clip_image005To see the detail on a message, you’ll need to use a mail client such as Outlook or Windows Live Mail (if you’re using Outlook.com/Hotmail etc, or Gmail), and look at the properties of the message.

In Outlook, open the message in its own window, then go into File / Properties and you’ll see Internet Headers – if the message came from outside the company, this is the key to your sleuthing. Select all the text and  clip_image007right-click to copy it into the clipboard, and paste it into Notepad for easier viewing.

The header information might be incomprehensible (there are plenty of guides online that can help you make sense, if you’re all that interested), and in fact, much of the text could be faked – but it often gives some interesting breadcrumbs.

Above is the header of a message that’s a tad suspect – viewed in Windows Live Mail (open the message, look in File clip_image009/ Properties and look in the Details tab). Looking down the headers, we can see the message originally was sent to Yahoo, and it was handed over to the Yahoo mail service by the IP address listed: 

Received: from [41.220.68.62] by web172005.mail.ir2.yahoo.com via HTTP; Wed, 09 Jul 2014 13:19:54 BST

The sender, who’s offering to buy a car in this case, purports to be in Aberdeen. Now let’s just see where this address is by pasting the source IP address (41.220 etc) into the box on the top right of www.whatismyipaddress.com – or put the IP address into the URL, like here.

Doesn’t look a lot like Aberdeen, does it?

Tip o’ the Week #240 – Word Flow on Windows Phone 8.1

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002Another week, another Windows Phone 8.1 (aka Nokia Lumia “Cyan”) tip.

Still no word from HTC about when 8.1 will roll out to 8X and 8S users, though there has been some news regarding the release of the already-in-testing “GDR 1” update for WP8.1, in relation to HTC handsets.

A developer/test build of the GDR 1 update is now available (if you have a kosher Windows Phone 8.1 phone and you install the Preview for Developers app, having first registered as a developer – just start a new project, sign in, accept the Ts&Cs and boom, you’re a developer – then you’ll get updated to the GDR1 build, which also means Cortana is available outside of the US).

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Lumia 1020 owners are now getting WP8.1 in droves; UK toters of 920s are getting it via O2 and Vodafone, but sadly not yet on “Country Variant” or EE.

However you receive it, one of the smartest updates to Windows Phone 8.1 is surely a feature called Word Flow. It is an uncannily-accurate way of drawing a shape on the keyboard which covers (more or less) the letters you’d otherwise be typing by tapping – see here for a back-to-back comparison.

Using Word Flow is likely to be both more accurate but also quicker than hunt’n’peck typing – it’s even been put to use in setting a world record…

There’s no need to switch anything on – if you have WP8.1, just start swiping whenever the keyboard appears. The software will automatically add a space to every word you keep, and if you want to add further punctuation then try:

  • capitalising the first letter of the next word you swipe, by first tapping the ? key
  • add a period to the end of the previous word, then a space, then capitalise the next word’s first letter, by quickly double-tapping the space bar
  • Adding commas/colons/etc by tapping the appropriate key (eg &123). NB: Word Flow doesn’t do anything on the numbers/symbols key page…

So, if you’ve got 8.1 already, now is the time to fully embrace Word Flow. Type no more.

Tip o’ the Week #239 – OneNote templates

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002As we’ve covered on ToW before, OneNote is an application that attracts legions of fans like few other productivity apps. The average user probably snips and clips, pastes and types into their OneNote notebooks, but may not realise the depths of functionality only a menu or two away. Surface 3 users even experience magic.

One simple yet really powerful feature is the ability to have OneNote templates – either self-created or downloaded from elsewhere. It’s easy to assign a template to a specific notebook section, and set it so that every new page follows that template. Doing interviews? Qualifying sales leads? Researching cars to buy? Then this could be just the cut of your jib.

Creating a custom template for a section

Start by laying out how you want to capture information – once you have it to your liking, go to the INSERT menu in clip_image004OneNote and select the Page Templates option.

You’ll see a pane appear on the right-hand side of the main OneNote window – this lets you pick from a predefined list of templates or search from ones already published online.

clip_image006Frankly, most of the in-the-box templates looks nice, but they’re a bit rubbish, really. You’ll always have to customise a template to capture just what you want, and do you really need a fancy graphic on the background of every single page in your notebook? No.

Once you have your own less-groovy but more useful template sorted out, just click on the “Saveclip_image008 current page as template” link at the very bottom of the task pane, and it will prompt you for a name, and ask if you’d like to save it as the default for the section.

Once you’ve saved your fave template, then you’ll need to apply it section-by-clip_image010section to the bits of your notebook you want – by navigating to each section, then going into the Page Templates section as above, and using the Always use a specific template drop-down option at the bottom of the same pane.

Now, when you create a new page in said section, it’ll use your new template. The template is local to your own PC, so if you use OneNote on another machine it will still be applied to new pages, but you won’t be able to set it to be the default for new sections – unless you repeat the process above by creating a new page (using the old template) then save that as a template on your 2nd PC, and apply it to the new section.

There’s no way to retrospectively apply a template to existing pages, but there are some tools in the awesome OneTastic addin that might help to tidy up formatting in bulk.

Tip o’ the Week #238 – quiet hours on Windows Phone 8.1

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002The time of year has rolled around where many of us are travelling – maybe time for a last, late Summer Holiday. Now, if you take your phone on vacation, you’ll know how important it is not to have colleagues phoning you up in the middle of the night to ask where you are.

Even if you’re not on holiday but you’re in a different time zone, it’s uniquely annoying when trying to deal with jet lag, that people phone you at 9am where they are, when that’s 4am in your locale – especially if you forget to turn your phone off. Even if you switch to silent mode, the blast of light from the phone screen in your darkened hotel room could be enough to wake you up…

ToW #209 covered an addition to Windows 8.1 that lets you set a time window for the machine to stop making noises at you.

Well, here’s another reason to upgrade your handset to Windows Phone 8.1 – as well as giving us sassy Cortana for searching and providing us with information we didn’t know we needed, The Blue One also has the capability to not just silence the phone at set times but to allow certain people to manage to breakthrough. Far out.

The options are all pretty self-explanatory; the inner circle settings will suggest contacts you might want to add, though it’s worth steadying the hand on adding too many.

Whenever quiet hours is active, the phone will not ring, and there will be no notifications (i.e. no switching the screen on, showing notification dialogs, or making any sound). Calls go straight to voice mail – just as if the phone is switched off. Text messages arrive silently and if you set it up, the texter gets told you’re busy and won’t be texting back.

If someone on your inner circle calls, then it will ring – ditto texting – and if you have the Alarm app set to wake you up then it too will do its thing, scientifically designed soundscape and all. The quiet hours setting will only show up on your phone if you have Cortana enabled, and is also off by default.

For those readers outside of the US, enabling Cortana either means switching the phone (after upgrading to WP8.1) to being English US language & locale, or else waiting until Cortana is localised and arrives on the phone naturally – it’s being reported that UK, China and India (with variants for Australia and Canada too) will get their own Cortana versions in the first update to Windows Phone 8.1, which should be out in the wild “soon” . Developer versions are now available.

However you get her in your life, Cortana is going to be a killer app for Windows Phone 8.1 and beyond, and quiet hours/inner circles is just one of the key components.

Tip o’ the Week #236 – Lumia Cyan on the way

Posted on by ewand

Nokia took to packaging updates for Windows Phone and clip_image002referring to them by a code name – Lumia “Black” being the last biggie for Windows Phone 8. The packages are a combination of operating system upgrades (that will be made available to all handset manufacturers) along with Nokia-specific upgrades, which may improve the way their handsets function, either in general or somtimes specific to the new OS version.

The much-awaited upgrade to Windows Phone 8.1 is now rolling out for Nokia users, combined with an array of tweaks, and is going under the name of Lumia Cyan.

clip_image003Cyan isn’t a colour that the Man on the Clapham Omnibus is likely to have knowingly encountered, but Speccy geeks of all ages may have come across it either on their computer or as part of a CMYK printing process. Mixing colours to create other shades is as old as cave painting, but in the modern world there are essentially two processes – adding colours together in light (assuming you start in darkness), you could project blue, green and red in varying combinations to make all colours (where R+G+B is white), and in printing or dyeing colours and where the starting point is white, then the process of mixing a different set of primary colours – Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black – has the effect of absorbing light to leave the desired colour behind.

Anyway, for more information on the mondo-update that’s jazzing up the Lumia WP8 range, see  Nokia’s Lumia Cyan website for more detail. The site also lets you check the global availability of Cyan (see here for Europe, then click on the main body of the page and press the END key to jump to the bottom if you’re a UK user), since it is rolling out by country, by handset model and by mobile carrier.

If your country/handset/carrier combo shows up as “Under Testing”, hold tight – it may take a few weeks to complete the process and make the update available for everyone. Check for updates by going into the phone settings | system | phone update.

UK users: you may need to wait for the first update to WP8.1 in order for Cortana to show up, unless you want to set your phone to be a US region handset. Or install the GDR1 preview by using the Preview for Developers program.

Tip o’ the Week #235 – Present on Lync

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002Tip o’ the Week #111 covered how to present within a Lync meeting. Given that it was 2+ years ago and many things have changed in that time, not least the version of Lync many of us use, here’s a chance to revisit the topic.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that PowerPoint is the most-shared application via Lync – the dreaded words, “Let me Share My Desktop”, followed by a scene (often at massive screen resolution) of the presenter’s own active Lync session, PowerPoint in a window, Outlook, etc. On a slow network connection, you might also have the joy of delayed screen refresh as the presenter moves their windows around, resizes them etc.

Presenting (on Lync, or anywhere, really) is like parking – few people would admit they aren’t very good at it, but anyone who is accomplished at it will witheringly spot a less than polished performance.

clip_image004Here’s a screenshot from a recent Lync call – the presenter (whose anonymity has been maintained by blanking out both the content and some other details) shared out the screen to show a dense slide full of charts and small text annotations.

If you do need to share your desktop in a Lync meeting (you’re doing a demo, for example, and … er… that’s about it) then you should hide the “Currently presenting…” toolbar at the top of the screen so it doesn’t distract or obliterate part of the content  you are trying to show. Just click the push pin on the right side of the bar clip_image005to hide it.

In the screenshot above, the blanked-out grey square is the content which was being presented – at first glance, it doesn’t look like too much of the screen real estate is wasted, does it? In fact, pixel count measurement shows the active slide was taking up only a little more than 60% of the overall screen area – meaning the presenter was showing off 40% of wasted space just because they didn’t share the content properly. Imagine an MYR slide on only 60% of the screen…

If you have to present on Lync by sharing your desktop (e.g. you’ve been dropped in it at late notice), please, at least, start the PowerPoint presentation in full screen – fish about with your mouse, and click on the little presenter icon in the bottom toolbar on the PowerPoint app, like most amateurs and Mac users do. Or quickly press clip_image006F5 like-a-PC-Pro to start a presentation from the beginning, or press SHIFT-F5 to present from the currently selected slide in all its animated, full-screen glory.

The downside is you won’t be able to read the comments coming in on the Lync conversation unless you’re using multi-monitor and can share the primary desktop whilst having the Lync window itself parked on your second screen.

clip_image008What’s generally best, of course, but needs a little preparation (and why would anyone want to prepare in advance of a presentation? Answers on a postcard, please), is to upload your slides to the Lync meeting and allow yourself to see your content in a window alongside all the comments coming from the attendees.

All it takes is to drift a couple of icons to the right of the “Duh, Present My Desktop” icon, and instead select PowerPoint. The next step will ask you for the location of the presentation file you want to show – if in any doubt, just clip_image010jump back to PowerPoint, open the file you’d otherwise be presenting, then go to the File menu and look for the “Open File Location” link at the bottom right. Right-click on it to Copy path – which will put the location (but not the filename itself) into your clipboard, ready for pasting into the Lync dialog, so you can then upload your slides straight into the meeting.

Do it this way – and nag every colleague who lazily just shares their desktop – and you’ll have a better Lync experience as a presenter, and you’ll present a better experience to the attendees. Unless you’re basically a rubbish presenter, that is.