Tip o’ the Week 433 – You can have the power

Posted on June 2, 2018 by ewand

With modern hardware and Windows 10, there is a great deal of flexibility in the way power (in the sense of AC/DC as opposed to Power Users) is managed.

As PC systems evolved over time, and Windows got reliable to the extent that you don’t need to reboot every day or even every week (Windows 7, realistically), the needs of power management also changed as the shift from mains-powered desktop to Lithium-Ion battery laptops gathered pace.

Sleep states defined what goes on under the covers in as a PC goes into a different power mode – whether that’s automatic (because of timing, or because the battery level gets to a particular point) or if the user chooses to sleep/hibernate, hits the power button, closes the laptop lid etc.

Most PCs could go into a low-power (S3) standby state, where the CPU was shut down but the contents of memory were preserved (still consuming power, but a lot less of it), so the machine can be woken up quickly and carry on as before. After some period in standby or at a point where the battery was about to run out, the PC might even wake up and dump the memory contents to a file on disk, then shut down completely (called hibernating), meaning a subsequent wake-up would take a few seconds longer as it would need to resume from hibernate, since the contents of that huge memory file will be read back in before continuing.

Windows 8 introduced the idea of “Connected Standby”, meaning that even when a machine was in a low-power state – to all intents, asleep, but with the CPU still able to run in a restricted manner – the system can maintain a wireless connection that means apps could remain up to date. This was a feature that only applied to modern/Store apps, allowing for synchronising contents in the background while the PC was asleep, so that when it wakes up, the app data and live tiles on the Start screen would be up to date.

As both hardware and software platforms have improved, the connected standby idea morphed into Windows 10’s “modern standby”. ToW 335 talked about managing battery states in Windows 10, and briefly discussed using a powerful tool to tweak the way your PC handles standby states.

Powercfg is a command line tool, run from an elevated command prompt (ie one with admin privileges – press WindowsKey+R, type cmd, then crucially, press CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER to ensure the command line is entered with the right level of privilege). If you don’t see “Administrator” in the title bar of your resulting command windows, you ain’t an admin, buster.

To check and see what power modes your PC can handle, try running powercfg /a; a more traditional, ACPI desktop will probably support S3 and Hibernate modes, but a modern laptop will likely be able to operate in Standby (S0 low power idle) – that’s “modern standby”.

You can get some detailed reporting on how your PC is behaving, by using powercfg with one of the following command line arguments: /energy, /batteryreport, /sleepstudy, /srumutil, /systemsleepdiagnostics or /systempowerreport.

SKYPE FOR SIGN OUT, OUTLOOK FOR DISCONNECT

Now, one side-effect of this S0 low power mode is that Windows 10 PCs will likely enter that mode shortly after the screen is locked (via timeout or by WindowsKey+L). Non-modern apps (ie Win32/x64 apps like Outlook, Skype for Business etc) won’t know how to deal with this effectively disconnected state, and will drop their connection.

This means that when you unlock a plugged-in laptop after being away for a while, you’ll see that Skype for Business is signed out, and Outlook might tell you it’s lost the connection to the server (and then immediately re-connects). If you find this annoying and would rather lengthen the time that elapses when your machine is plugged in, before it goes to connected standby mode, then powercfg to the rescue!

From an elevated command prompt, run:

Powercfg /setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_video videoconlock 3600
Powercfg /setactive scheme_current

Using the flag /setdcvalueindex instead will tweak the behaviour when on battery only. The value in the first command is the number of seconds before the screen will timeout when locked, so substitute 3600 seconds (ie 60 minutes) for a value of your choice. For further details of what Powercfg can do, see here.

Tip o’ the Week 431 – Hiding your name

Posted on May 18, 2018 by ewand

If you use your laptop on a train or in other public spaces, there’s always the concern that someone might be looking over your shoulder and reading what’s on your screen. With the GDPR bogeyman about to be unleashed, there’s never been more concern and focus on not leaking information.

You could invest in a screen filter to stop snooping, but a simple step to make you immediately more comfortable, is to not show your own name – have you ever felt self-conscious that random people in the wild can see your name, and maybe even recognise you?

Paranoid Microsoftie Andrew Brook-Holmes went digging to see how to stop this behaviour, and thus inspired this tip.

To switch off the display of your name on the login or lock screen, first go into the Local policy of your machine – the quickest way is to press WindowsKey+R then enter gpedit.msc, then expand out the local policy to Security Options as shown on the right.

In the right-hand pane, you’ll see a long list of policy items, many of which won’t be configured but could conceivably be; there are options to hide or show elements on the login screen, but in this case we’re going to try not showing the last named user at all.

Double-clock on the Interactive logon: Don’t display last signed-in, and you’ll have a simple Enable/Disable choice – in this case, we want to use a double negative – enable the fact that we’re not displaying. If you’d like a more detailed explanation of what it does, there’s another tab on the dialog showing exactly that.

Now if you lock your screen (WindowsKey+L), you’ll see that it’s already in effect. It might be annoying depending on how you’ve got the machine set up, as you’ll probably need to enter your username as well as PIN/password etc every time.

If you use Windows Hello to sign in with your face, then you won’t need to do anything except present your boat race to the camera. If you decide you’d rather go back to normal for easier sign-in, just reverse the process you’ve done above.

If you can’t find Local Computer Policy (as home edition doesn’t have that capability, for example), you may need to use the Registry instead…

Press WindowsKey+R – enter regedit – navigate to…

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

…and set the value of dontdisplaylastusername to 1. Log out to apply the change.

Tip o’ the Week 430 – developers, developers, developers

Posted on May 11, 2018 by ewand

This week has seen the Microsoft developer conference, called //build/ in its current guise, take place in “Cloud City”, Seattle (not so-called because it rains all the time – in fact, it rains less than in Miami. Yeah, right). Every major tech company has a developer conference, usually a sold-out nerdfest where the (mostly) faithful gather to hear what’s coming down the line, so they know what to go and build themselves.

Apple has its WWDC in California every year (for a long time, in San Francisco), and at its peak was a quasi-religious experience for the faithful. Other similar keynotes sometimes caused deep soul searching and gnashing of teeth.

The Microsoft one used to be the PDC, until the upcoming launch of Windows 8 meant it was time to try to win the hearts & minds of app developers, so //build/ became rooted in California in the hope that the groovy kids would build their apps on Windows and Windows Phone. Now that ship has largely sailed, it’s gone back up to the Pacific North West, with the focus more on other areas.

Moving on from the device-and-app-centric view that prevailed a few years back (whilst announcing a new way of bridging the user experience between multiple platforms of devices), Build has embraced the cloud & intelligent edge vision which cleverly repositions a lot of enabling technologies behind services like Cortana (speech recognition, cognitive/natural language understanding etc) and vision-based products such as Kinect, HoloLens and the mixed reality investments in Windows. AI took centre stage; for a summary of the main event, see here.

The cloud platform in Azure can take data from devices on the edge and process it on their behalf, or using smarter devices, do some of the processing locally, perhaps using machine learning models that have been trained in the cloud but executed at the edge.

With Azure Sphere, there’s a way for developers to build secure and highly functional ways to process data on-board and communicate with devices, so they can concentrate more on what their apps do, and on the data, less on managing the “things” which generate it.

For all of the breakouts at Build and the keynotes on-demand, see here.

Back in the non-cloud city, Google has adopted a similar developer ra-ra method, with its Google I/O conference also taking place in and around San Francisco, also (like WWDC and Build) formerly at Moscone. It happened this past week, too.

Like everyone else, some major announcements and some knock-em dead demos are reserved for the attendees to get buzzed on, generating plenty of external coverage and crafting an image around how innovative and forward thinking the company is.

Google Duplex, shown this week to gasps from the crowd, looks like a great way of avoiding dealing with ordinary people any more, a point picked up by one writer who called it “selfish”.

Does a reliance on barking orders at robot assistants and the increasing sophistication of AI in bots and so on, mean the beginning of the end for politeness and to the service industry? A topic for further consideration, surely.

Tip o’ the Week 429 – Windows 10 April 2018 Update

Posted on May 10, 2018 by ewand

Somewhat predictably, this week’s tip concerns the slightly-delayed but at least now officially-named, Windows 10 April 2018 Update. April gave way to May before the update began rolling out widely: if you haven’t seen it show up in Windows Update, check here.

As an alternative, get the Media Creation Tool and use it to download an appropriate ISO disc image; useful if you fancy doing a clean install of Windows and all it contains, by wiping your current PC and starting from scratch.
Proceed down this road with caution, however – back away if you’re not sure.

Windows watchers have been talking about this April update for months, as there are many notable updates within, some covered only recently in ToW (425 and 428).

As well as Timeline, the Nearby Sharing feature is pretty cool – use it to send a link from within Edge browser by clicking the Share icon on the toolbar, and as long as your nearby PCs have Nearby Sharing enabled within Settings. To check, press WindowsKey and type nearby then click on Change shared experience settings.

You can also right-click on files in Windows Explorer to Share them the same way, and it’s likely to appear in the Share experience of other apps too.

The next-to-useless Windows 10 option previously known as Quiet Hours (as per ToW 414), has been given a revamp and a rename, now known as Focus Assist.

The intent is not only to silence your machine at times when you don’t need to know stuff (who’s ever been woken at 6am to be reminded that it’s some random LinkedIn person’s birthday, or that there’s an all-day event in your calendar?), but also to control the blizzard of “toast” notifications that modern apps may otherwise throw at you.

Note – traditional apps, like Outlook, can still throw up notifications, but if your machine is in a Focus assist mode, at least the notifications can be silenced. To check the current status, or to switch on Priority only or Alarms only manually, look in the Action Center on the taskbar, or press WindowsKey+A to show.

For a full breakdown of everything else that’s new in the April update, see here.

Tip o’ the Week 428 – Spring, April or the Edge of Summer

Posted on May 3, 2018 by ewand

The intent was to release the latest update (“Redstone 4” or “RS4”) to Windows 10 during early April, though a late “blocking bug” delayed the release. The name of the update was late to be officially confirmed, too – it was rumoured to be “Spring Creators Update” (since the Fall Creators Update happened last year, though the “Creators Update” appeared around a year ago, in April 2017)… but was also thought to be simply, “Windows 10 April Update”. The Reg forecast a wait of weeks to be sure.

There are lots of small improvements in the update, as well as some biggies like Timeline (which is showing up in other apps, too – like Photos, as seen to the left), and the Edge browser is getting a slug of new functionality – take a sneak peek at some of the Edge goodness, here.

Developers also got a new preview of Edge DevTools, which opens the door to such excitement as remote debugging of another Edge instance. If you’re a hoopy frood, check it out here.

It seems that Edge, even though it’s the default browser in Windows 10, doesn’t appear to be everyone’s favourite, with many users installing Chrome as one of their first tasks on a new machine. Both browsers and the respective web services from their creators seem insistent on nagging their end users to switch…

Still, there are times when the two cooperate behind the scenes. The Edge for Android app, for example, uses the rendering engine from the Chromium project, so is effectively running the same browser capabilities in a different shell which takes care of synchronising your favourites, passwords etc, between the Edge browser on your PC(s) and the one on your phone. Edge for iOS uses the native WebKit engine to achieve the same thing.

There are updates on the way for the mobile versions of Edge, supporting Timeline too – so you could resume activities from your desktop on your phone and vice versa.

Microsoft also recently launched a Defender Extension for Chrome, to provide similar protection to defectors that Edge users get natively from the SmartScreen filter technology (NSS Labs tested Edge, Chrome & Firefox, concluding that Edge blocks more bad stuff than either of the others). Even some surprised Chrome users recommend it.

Tip o’ the Week 426 – You’ve been PWAned

Posted on April 13, 2018 by ewand

Both the Windows/Microsoft Store app marketplace and the kinds of apps it contains have had a number of generations, from phone apps (designed for Windows Phone), through Windows 8’s so-called “Metro” apps, to the later Universal Windows Platform apps ushered in by the Windows 10 platform. The goal of UWPs is to allow a single code-base to run on multiple Windows 10 based environments, such as tablet/PC, phone, HoloLens and Xbox One.

The inconvenient truth with the UWP model is that, for most people, apps are used primarily on their phone and on smaller tablet devices. With the demise of Windows Phone, and the tablet market consisting largely of cheap Android tabs, expensive iPads, and Windows “2 in 1” detachables rather than straight-up Windows 10 tablets, there are arguably few compelling reasons for app developers to support UWPs, unless they feel a particular need to also target relatively niche devices like HoloLens, Surface Hub and Xbox.

Devs could turn to an app framework like Xamarin, which would let them support multiple device types and OSes, generating UWP apps alongside their Android and iOS counterparts.

When the vast majority of their addressable market is someone sitting in front of a PC, not a phone, if you’re an app developer who already supports Windows, then it might be easier to wrap your existing PC app using the Desktop Bridge, allowing for distribution through the Store but without needing to completely rewrite the app as a UWP one, as both Spotify and Amazon Music have shown.

One tell-tale of an app that’s probably been packaged with the Desktop Bridge, is that if you look at it in the Store, you’ll see that it’s available on PC only.

The latest chapter in the Store story, though, is that of PWAs, or Progressive Web Apps.

In a nutshell, PWAs are web sites built to behave more like dedicated mobile apps, with features like caching, notifications & more, so a mobile version of an existing web site could obviate the need for building an app as well. Developers could build a specific app for the remaining mobile platforms (natively, or with frameworks like Xamarin or – check out this excellent intro – Google’s Flutter), alternatively they just put their efforts into a PWA, which can run on any modern browser, mobile or otherwise. There’s a lot of love for PWAs in some quarters of the mobile developer world.

It’s still a relatively new frontier, but there are already various collections of PWA apps that can be quickly sampled.

As highlighted by Windows Central, PWAs are now appearing in the Microsoft Store, potentially giving top tier app developers a way of supporting Windows, even if they haven’t decided to specifically build a dedicated Windows app.

To quickly find the list of all Microsoft-published apps, start with Skyscanner, and you’ll see the publisher is “Microsoft Store” itself – scroll down to the Additional information, click on that link and you’ll find the others that have been published at the same time. Or search the web.

Of course, publishers may well choose to proactively put their own apps into the Store, or if they publish PWAs elsewhere, then the best of them may get hoovered up and added to the Microsoft Store on their behalf.

Tip o’ the Week 425 – Windows Timeline

Posted on April 13, 2018 by ewand

It’s amazing how many Windows users still don’t really get the idea that you can switch between windows without minimising them. Every support professional who’s ever done remote assistance knows that out there, some end users will want to save their document and close an application before even switching to another one.

One of Windows Vista’s touted benefits was the amazing Flip 3D technique, but beyond demo-ware, few people ever used it. For nearly 30 years (since Windows 3.0) the ALT-TAB key combination has been an option to switch between running applications and windows, and over this time, its behaviour has evolved a little, though not revolutionarily so.

For example, if you hold CTRL as well as ALT-TAB, the dialog persists until you select a window (click, tap or press Enter) or Escape to go back.
Not a lot of people know that…

Windows 10 users can also click the Task View icon, on the task bar near the Windows logo by default; that has the effect of showing a tiled view of running windows, and also is the entry point to using multiple virtual desktops (as discussed previously on ToW #279).

The soon-to-be-released “Redstone 4” update for Windows 10, still officially unnamed but being widely referred to as the Spring Creators Update, will tweak the Task View again, replacing the logo with one that hints to a more dynamic layout of tiles, and introducing the long-awaited “Timeline” feature. Like the Task View in earlier versions of Windows 10, you can invoke it using the WindowsKey-TAB method.

Windows Timeline has been a while coming due to the back-end support that’s required to make it compelling – in a nutshell, when applications (such as Office apps, or the Edge browser) support activities as part of Project Rome, then those activities can be recorded and made accessible across devices – so if you have multiple PCs or even apps on other platforms (like using the Edge browser on your phone), you’ll be able to get a single view of what you’ve been doing and be able to jump back to the page, document or other activity. Even on a single machine, it’s useful to be able to scroll back through history to see what you’ve been doing and when.

You can even use Timeline to search through your browsing history, something that’s still not possible using the Edge browser’s History feature; it’s an often requested addition (since it was in Internet Explorer and is also in other browsers) that will hopefully make its way into the Edge browser at some stage. Just ask Bing.

Tip o’ the Week 421 – Mind your passwords

Posted on April 13, 2018 by ewand

Passwords are a bane of IT usability – everyone chooses a password that’s too simple, until the systems make it too hard, and even the process of password entry is difficult.

So you write your passwords down (srsly, don’t do that), sometimes in an obvious way – there’s a (probably apocryphal) story of a senior healthcare professional who left their laptop (with lots of sensitive data on it, obviously) in a taxi… the standard disk encryption neatly foiled by a Postit note stuck to the lid with their username and password on it…

Corporate domain passwords will generally enforce a certain degree of complexity, frequency of changing, and may even add certificate or token based authentication that needs to be used in combination with other forms – so called secondary or multi-factor authentication (2FA/MFA. It’s getting pretty common now for web sites to offer or even force 2FA, achieved via texting a one-time login code, or using a mobile app to authenticate you. ToW #371 covered how to enable 2FA for your Microsoft Account (MSA) – you really should switch that on.

For most people’s private credentials (used for logging into websites concerned with personal lives rather than work), usernames & passwords – with the odd secret question thrown in – are the main way they’ll access sensitive information from their phone or PC. And forcing the changing of passwords on a very regular basis can be a bad idea, too, as people are more likely to use easily-guessable passwords that are in turn easy for them to remember.

Source: xkcd

The average person, apparently, is many times more likely to fall victim to some sort of computer-related incident than a more traditional robbery. You might be hoodwinked yourself, or through your lax credentials, your account might be compromised and used to scam other unsuspecting punters – as happens regularly on eBay.

The Man on the Clapham omnibus is also likely to use the same username & password for every website or other system they can, even though many know they shouldn’t. It’s easy to recall the same few sets of credentials, rather than having to go and look something up every time. Don’t do this.

If you want to scare yourself into action, have a look on https://haveibeenpwned.com/ and see if your (consumer) email address is on there; chances are, it might have leaked from one of the many high-profile data breaches that have happened over the years. Try entering a common password you might use on https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords and it’ll tell you if that password has ever been leaked… and advise you never to use that password again.

Password managers are a way to help combat the issue – so you could have a different password for each site, sometimes even a random password that the password manager itself will generate for you. Examples include 1Password, LastPass, KeePass, Dashlane, eWallet… many will be browser based or have extensions (even for Edge!), so you can log in easily despite the complexity of your passwords. If the password manager has a cloud-storage vault, make sure it’s encrypted and there’s no way it could be compromised … and make sure you use a suitably complex but easy to remember password to unlock the password manager vault. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

If you use a password manager already, it may even have a report you can run to see how well protected you are…

Zoinks!

Summary

Use a different password on every website
Generate passwords that are long and complex
Use a password manager to keep track of the passwords for different websites you use
Use 2-Factor Authentication on every site that deals with sensitive or financial information

Tip o’ the Week 419 – What’s the time?

Posted on February 23, 2018 by ewand

The subject of time has featured on a few occasions on ToW – #301, #314, #325, #388 … but there’s always more scope to talk about it.

Windows 10 tweaked the way time is presented, from showing the calendar and the agenda (sourced from whatever is synced into the Calendar app), to the Alarms & Clocks app which offers visual wakeup alarms, daylight maps, and timer/stopwatch apps.

In the Windows Insiders builds of the last few weeks – currently 17101 (which is now in the Fast Ring), there have been changes that bring the clock further forward too – the Game Bar has been updated to include the clock on the left of the bar, for one thing.

What is time?

Existentially, time is relative. If you ever find that your Windows PC isn’t keeping time accurately, you may want to check that you have it set to get its time automatically (check Settings -> Time & Language – > Date & time), or go into the old-fashioned Control Panel, search for time and look at the settings in there, especially under the “Internet Time” tab to see where it’s syncing the time from: time.windows.com is probably the default.

Windows Time is also a thing – the number of milliseconds since the machine was started up, and also the name of the service that controls the time synchronisation. Unix time is also a concept, measuring the number of elapsed seconds since 1^st January 1970, and may present another millennium bug style problem in 20 years, if anyone is still using 32-bit *nix by then.

Back to simple relativity, though – what is the actual, real “time”? If you have multiple clocks, watches, phones & PCs, it’s a fair bet that they’ll all be divergent, unless they’re all being synchronised by some external device (your broadband router, maybe). If you’d like to find out exactly what the time is and don’t have access to an atomic clock or similar, there are a few online resources that might help… and you could even try asking Cortana, as she knows about time zones and stuff.

But the best time site is http://time.is. Try it from any device and you’ll get the time right now; some allowances need to be made for network latency but the operators have tried their best. It tells you the time in your location (or one of your choice), and calculates the offset between your computer’s clock and the time.is service.

For an illustration of what latency (as ultimately governed by the speed of light) means when accessing nearby vs far away websites, check out www.azurespeed.com, which measures the time to connect to storage services at Azure datacenters. Some variance could be explained by performance spikes and so on, but the main impact is network latency due to distance travelled. The results can sometimes be surprising.

Tip o’ the Week 418 – Preview Apps on Windows 10

Posted on February 16, 2018 by ewand

The Insider Program for Windows 10 is one of the largest public beta program in software development history with over 10m active users. There are various options for how much on the bleeding edge you’d like to be (eg how much pain are you prepared to tolerate, in order to get to play with stuff long before everyone else?) – and the “hit me baby” version, called Skip Ahead, is already now testing the next update to Windows (RS5) that will come after the one that’s due for release in the spring (RS4), which is still in the rest of the test branches. Capiche?

Way down in the text of the latest announcement, there’s mention of a new “App Preview” program which lets the quick & the brave get access to cool but maybe unfinished updates to Apps they like, but maybe aren’t as dependent on, as the stability of the whole operating system.

The first wave of apps that are Preview-enabled, will let more cautious Insiders experience the latest versions of …

Feedback Hub
Microsoft Photos
Microsoft Sticky Notes
Viewer

Microsoft Tips
Paint 3D
Windows Alarms & Clock
Windows Voice Recorder

Windows Calculator
Windows Camera
Windows Mixed Reality

… by opting in, through going into the Settings within the appropriate app and choosing to join the fun. The app will update in the background, and may change the app title & version number…

There are regular updates to the core apps for every Windows user, not running an Insider build. If you’d like to check, just go into the Store, activate the “…” ellipsis on the top right, and choose Downloads and updates, and review the list to see what apps have been updated and when, or hit “Get updates” to check for published updates to other apps.

The Photos app has a new opt-in feature, in conjunction with a test app that is designed to make it easy to share Photos from a phone to a PC; even if you’re not running an Insider build, you can turn on the mobile import…

The “Photos Companion” test app makes a point-to-point connection between phone & PC (ie they need to both be on the same network), and by going to the Import menu within the PC Photo app, a QR code will be displayed on-screen.

Start the app on your phone, point at the QR code and you’ll quickly be able to send the selected photos from phone to PC.

Of course, you could use OneDrive on your mobile device to automatically sync photos to a Camera Roll folder in your cloud storage location; it has a bit of latency, usually, so you might find it takes a few minutes before the photo you’ve just taken has uploaded and is ready to be accessed or shared.

The Import over WiFi feature is handy to share right away, or to share with PCs that aren’t set up with your OneDrive, such as a friend’s PC, or if you’re working on a project where you want to collect photos from a group of people in a short space of time – maybe doing a collaborative video or something similar?