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Even though we increasingly stream films from online services rather than watch them on DVD or Blu-ray discs, there is complexity in the licensing (where movies come in and out of various windows of availability on streaming services), so if you decide you want to watch a particular flick at any given time, there’s a chance it might not be available, or may only be offered for sale rather than for rental. As many of us have a stash of old DVDs and Blu-rays, it can be worth looking at how to turn those media into digital files that can be copied to mobile devices and streamed across the home network – it is worth noting that it’s probably illegal to rip music or movies from discs (at one point, the UK allowed it, but a somewhat vexatious challenge prevailed and it once again became illegal), but if you have the original media and are backing up and converting for your own pleasure rather than for onward redistribution, then nobody’s going to come after you. If you want to veg out over the festive season and take comfort in old movies from your possibly-forgotten collection, then start turning them into digital files now, so you can avoid Mrs Browns Boys.
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Category: Windows
Tip o’ the Week 406 – A path! A path!
 One issue that’s plagued the user experience of computer application design, is the traditional need to force the end user to understand the file system of their machine. In a nutshell, the hierarchy that operating system designers decided was a necessary way of storing or at least referencing files (and it is generally a Good Thing) can be a bit confusing for users who don’t need to know how the internals of their OS work. They might tinker with the contents of the C:\Windows folder too, thinking that it takes up rather a lot of space… Fortunately, Windows now provides a few layers of protection to stop users from knackering their own machines, so that’s less of a problem now.
Allowing users to save stuff to their local hard disk was also often a good way of helping them lose data, as there probably won’t be a backup of the most important files that the user has stuffed somewhere in their own twisted hierarchy of files & folders. There are numerous ways for users to be blocked from saving stuff to their own PC, forcing them instead to put data onto some networked share. App designers – especially “modern” apps in Windows, or mobile apps meant for other platforms like iPad or Android – may present a simplified UI to guide users to put stuff in commonly referenced folders by default, and hide access to any off-piste areas too. Fortunately, with file synchronisation systems like OneDrive When dealing with any files that are also synched somewhere, it’s often handy to get the path that either points to the location of the file (to save you clicking through the hierarchy to arrive at it), or indeed directly to the file itself…
Still the most useful hidden command, some say, is the Copy as path option. Right-click a file in Windows Explorer, and you’ll see a bunch of context-sensitive stuff you can do.
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, it’s very easy to both write data to the local machine and also to sync it with the cloud, more-or-less immediately. These solutions mean you put stuff on your own PC’s file system, but nothing you write to it will be orphaned there – so if you move to another PC, or your machine gets wiped or lost, you’ve still got access to everything.
Right-clicking within the most-recently-used files list from the File menu in Office apps often gives you the chance to open the location of the file or copy 
its path to the clipboard, for later consumption, like pasting a link into email (though with the Attach File option in Outlook now offering a most recently-used files list, it may be unnecessary to grub around looking for where the file is – just click the list to add it).
Hold SHIFT while you right-click the file, and you’ll get an extra option to copy its path (in fact, the full filename including its path) to the clipboard, for future use. Once you remember this neat shortcut, you’ll use it far more often than you’d think – especially if you deal with inserting images into web pages, emails etc.Tip o’ the Week 400 – Shake your Groove thing
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Groove Music Pass (which was Xbox Music Pass before that and originally launched as a service for Zune music players), is/was an arguably equivalent service to many others out there… but despite having similar catalog and pricing as other, newer services, never really got the momentum to be a big success, at The Groove app itself soldiers on, as the default music playback app in Windows, and it’s a great way of playing music that you’ve uploaded to OneDrive on a variety of devices. Rumours abounded a couple of months ago about imminent feature updates coming to Groove, so there may still be development to come – time will tell. On the other side of the coin, the surprisingly successful Amazon Alexa gained a new skill – courtesy of Sonos, it’s now possible to control your Sonos kit using another device, like they entry-level Echo Dot. Sonos also unveiled a new speaker which has a built-in mic for using Alexa with, so despite Amazon bringing multi-room audio to the larger Echo device, the two companies are working together for the benefit of their mutual end users. (applause) You can still stream your Groove music collection and playlists to your Sonos, controlled by Alexa, at least until the end of the year, when the Groove Music Pass will cease to be. Spotify integrates into Sonos too, but only if you buy the Premium offering. Amazon’s own Music Unlimited service is worth a look if you’re already a Prime customer, as you get money off every month, so it could be the cheapest of the main streaming services out there, and is the first (& only, so far?) streaming service that can be voice controlled using Alexa but played back on Sonos. Spotify support is supposedly coming soon. |
Tip o’ the Week 399 – What’s in Store?
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The original idea behind the Apps that were to be distributed via the Store was that they would be easy to install and share, but perhaps most importantly, heavily sandboxed so they couldn’t hog the performance of the machine, couldn’t be a vector for attack by spreading malware and the likes or drain the battery of the laptop (or phone) through excessive background execution. Anyone who’s ever looked in Task Manager on their PC and seen Runtime Broker run amok might disagree that it’s worked out, but ‘tis still a noble aim. The idea of Windows Store apps evolved into Universal Windows Platform apps in Windows 10, the plan being that the same app could run on PCs, Hololens, Surface Hub, phones, Xbox…
There’s nothing obviously new in the Store app yet, but MJF reports that Progressive Web Apps will be featured in the catalogue of apps in future. In other news, the bricks’n’mortar Microsoft Store is coming to London. |
Tip o’ the Week 398 – New Dimensions in Sound
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High fidelity sound is delivered via a combination of lots of overlapping but distinct technology; from the quality of the original recording equipment, technique and media the sound was recorded onto (if analogue), or the bit-depth & format used to encode all the way from the point of recording to the moment of consumption (if digital), and all of the equipment used to turn the sound recording back into vibrating air. Many words are written on the merits of this bit of kit, or that piece of cable – YMMV. Lucasfilm realised in the late 1970s that despite going to great lengths at the point of production to assure the quality of video and audio, there was little way of guaranteeing that cinemas showing films had anything like the quality of AV reproduction kit required to render the experience for the movie-goers. As a result, they came up with THX – a certification system rather than a specific recording technology, though many viewers confused the two; maybe because of the various THX idents that preceded popular movies, starting in 1983 with Return of the Jedi, through other mainstream hits like Terminator 2 and even a spoof-turned-ident Simpsons special.
You may have seen some of their idents before… like here and here. And if you’ve bought an Audio-Visual Amplifier in the last 20 years, it probably came festooned in stickers proclaiming all the certifications it had. Dolby Atmos is one more recent development of surround sound encoding & reproduction technology; originally designed for movie theatres with hundreds of speakers and able to precisely position a pin-drop anywhere in the auditorium. There are a growing number of Atmos-equipped cinemas around, but the curious would still need to go out of their way to find both a suitable location and the right content to watch and listen to. Predictably, there’s an Atmos consumer version aimed at enticing AV users to upgrade their existing 7.1 system to a fancier setup. And there’s also a version of Dolby Atmos for the PC, too – maybe most useful for headphone users, and delivered to Windows 10 users via the Dolby Access store app. It costs cash money to use, but you can trial for 30 days free of charge and make up your mind if it’s worth the $15 to keep it going. It won’t turn your 2-channel headphones into a 64-channel Atmos theatre, but it does provide some interesting software-driven tuning, akin to several other 3D software sound systems. Interestingly, it also runs on Xbox One, showcasing the benefits of the Win10 PC and Xbox sharing the same base OS. There’s the free Windows Sonic that might give you a similar experience.
A note from intrepid reader, Peter Martin – if you have some Carlos Fandango Bose wireless noise cancelling jobs (as worn by frequent flyers as if to say, “I travel so much, I carry these $400 cans that take up half my hand luggage, because they’re Just Better”), then it’s worth heading to Bose’s firmware update page and installing the software to check and update your chunky funks. Pete also says:
For some cool sounding audio effects, check out Windows Sonic and Dolby Atmos settings. Also, if you’re looking for a more robust sound, enable the enhancements on the Headphones device. Note that the enhancements can be a bit over the top, especially on bass, so play around to your liking…
When connected, if you hear audio dropouts during audio calls, try disabling Signal Enhancement on the Hands-Free device setting…
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Tip o’ the Week 395 – Resizing pictures in Windows 10
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This is especially the case if you’re sharing pictures with others – though it does rather depend on how. Email programs usually have ways to reduce the size of images, varying in method but increasingly very integrated to the sending process, and often with little real control of what’s going on. This doesn’t make the image smaller in the number of bytes it takes up, however – so you might think you’ve made your massive picture a nice thumbnail, only to find it’s still actually 7MB in size. In order to make the image data size get smaller in Outlook, select it by left-clicking, then from the Picture Tools | Format menu, you’ll find a Compress Pictures com mand that lets you make this image (or every other one in the mail), smaller.
The same thing happens in PowerPoints as well – tiny little watermarks on the background of a presentation making the file too big to ever email to anyone. A similar process can radically reduce the size of your presentations by compressing the size of images before saving. Files If you have pictures in the file system, there used to be a variety of ways for Windows to offer resize capabilities – one of which was to install the now-defunct Windows Live Photo Gallery, which had a nice wizard to resize images to standard sizes. Now, in Windows 10, there’s no easy, out-of-the-box way of doing it, as the Photos app doesn’t offer resizing and nothing shows up in the desktop / file system mode. If you have a habit of uploading photos you’ve taken to online forums and the like, some of them will deal with resizing for you (as does Facebook, Yammer etc too), but if they don’t, you may find you’ll need to radically reduce the dimensions of your pic before you can share it.
Afterwards, right-click within Windows Explorer on your chosen image – or select several and do the same – and resize the image(s) to a given set of dimensions in a trice. Then you’re ready to upload the resulting new pics to your online forum of choice.
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Tip o’ the Week 394 – Change your lock screen
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As any fule kno, good corporate typ
The default Windows spotlight option shows some lovely images downloaded from Bing – if you like seeing those, then by all means leave it as it is, and if you want to grab those image files for other purposes (setting your desktop image, maybe), there’s a handy tutorial here. If you have your own photo or folder(s) of photos you’d like to show instead, then just choose the appropriate option under the background drop-down, and point Windows to where your files are. You need to ensure your photos fit on the screen properly, though, as they might be a different size or orientation, and you won’t want to cut key features of your picture out. Fortunately, there’s a quick & simple way of doing so using the Photos app. Start by copying all the images you’d like to use for your lockscreen into a new folder (to make it easy to point the at them if you’d like a slideshow), and then open each one in Photos.
These options will show you a window over your photo, you then drag the picture around underneath so as to line up the features you want and when you’re happy with If you’re just doing one picture, click or tap Set as >, and you can quickly make the pic your lock screen or background. |
