Tip o’ the Week 369 – Edging forward?

clip_image002There was a time when browser wars raged; different companies felt that if end users ran on their browser, they’d have control over the way the user got access to the web. The browser landscape is radically different today, though.

It’s easy to think that everyone does most of their browsing on mobile devices but that’s not quite the case, yet – though it’s now more common to use a mobile than either a PC or a tablet.

Still, if 45% of all browsing is still being done on a desktop machine, it’s interesting to see the spread of usage – here’s the UK’s desktop browser market share since Windows 10 was released:

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So, it’s pretty clear that Chrome (in green) is the de facto browser. IE (dark blue) has dropped 11% and Edge (light blue) has crawled up to 7.5%, with Safari and Firefox oscillating one or two points up and down but more or less holding station. Expanding the view to worldwide, shows that Firefox is more popular overseas (it’s the most popular browser in Germany, for example). Have a play with the chart above until it shows you some data you like.

InfoWorld published a recent report citing “13 reasons not to use Chrome”, some of which are pretty bogus but others may warrant attention:

  • Malware protection – as the traditional means of infecting computers with malware has changed (from sharing files on floppies or USB sticks), the most likely way of picking up something nasty is through your browser. A recent NSS Labs report showed that Edge was best at blocking phishing attacks, and another on “Socially Engineered Malware” – the kind of sites or pop-ups that dupe a user into installing things they shouldn’t – shows that Edge blocked 99% of them, whereas Chrome managed 86% and Firefox, 78%.
  • JavaScript performance – Chrome isn’t necessarily the best; Edge outperformed it in a couple of benchmarks and was beaten in a couple more, here. Regardless of whether you care about JavaScript or not, you should watch Hanselman’s pitch, if only for the GIFs and side anecdotes.
  • Battery life – Microsoft released a report saying that Edge would improve your Windows laptop’s battery life compared to other browsers. Opera took issue and said they were the best. Paul Thurrott didn’t agree, said he was switching to Edge but apparently has reverted back to Google’s Chrome.
    Mactards may want to use Safari vs Chrome for the same reasons.

Of course, preference plays a big part in why people use any tool versus another. Why not try something different, though? You can always revert back if you try a browser and decide you don’t like it.

Edge is getting better with various releases, with more to come in the next couple of months with the Creators Update. If you fancy trying Edge out as your default, check out WindowsCentral’s excellent guide.

Tip o’ the Week 368 – Mail and Calendar apps mature

Ever since Windows 8 came out, theclip_image002re were simplified Mail & Calendar apps built-in. Reviews were initially fairly mixed – and even after a bunch of improvements and a refresh when Windows 10 arrived, it could be argued there was still work to do.

The Mail & Calendar apps are essentially joined now – though you still have “Mail” clip_image006and “Calendar” appearing in the apps list once installed, and starting either from clip_image008the appropriate icon jumps into the requisite section within the single Mail clip_image004and Calendar application. “They” show up as a single app within the Store (bearing the same icon within its Store entry as full-fat Outlook, no less, though the apps are different). Increasingly, new functionality is appearing within the Mail and Calendar app which is common across regular Outlook and also the Outlook mobile versions.

clip_image010There’s been a recent update to the Mail and Calendar app – to check if you have it, go into the Store app, click on your own avatar to the left of the Search box in the top right, and check under Downloads and updates.

clip_image012There’s a bunch of new functionality similar to Outlook – @mentions support (try it), categories, travel integrations and a lot more – the latest updates are pretty substantial.

Both mail and calendar functionality is getting advanced enough, you might choose to set up Mail and Calendar for your work/Office 365 email account, rather than bothering with installing Outlook on your home PC or companion tablet device.

clip_image014The Focussed Inbox view familiar to Outlook 2016 and clip_image016Office 365 users makes an appearance in Mail (though you do need to turn it on – go into Settings > Reading, and look at the bottom of the settings pane).

Another notable new feature in Calendar is dubbed “Interesting Calendars”, optionally added alongside and sourced from a variety of publishers surfaced via Bing, and tailored for you based on locale.

If you have multiple mail accounts set up, you can choose which one to add your “interesting calendars” to, by checking under the Settings > Calendar section (note – to get to the calendar specific settings, he app needs to be in the calendar view at the time, then invoke settings by clicking on the gear wheel in the icons on the bottom-left).

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If you add a custom calendar to your Office 365 account, the same one will be visible within Outlook too, under the “My Calendars” group.

clip_image020Aside from new features, there are some neat tricks you can use to personalise Mail and Calendar – like choosing the colour scheme and background images to fill the apps when you haven’t got something selected in the preview pane.

clip_image022Or set the “quick actions”, an inherited bit of functionality from the mobile versions of Outlook, where swiping a message left or right can do something to it – delete it, archive it, flag it etc.

Handy if you’re using the Mail app on a touch device (from a cheap 8” Windows tablet to a Surface being used in tablet mode).

For a history of new features in Mail and Calendar, see here (though since that page doesn’t list version numbers and also doesn’t look comprehensively up-to-date, YMMV).

Tip o’ the Week 367 – Shortcut keys and Taskbar

clip_image002Regular readers (and thanks to all of you) will know the predilection in ToWs passim for articles about shortcut keys in Windows. The simple truth being, if you’re able to use a keyboard with both hands and most of your fingers, it’s always going to be quicker than fishing about with a mouse or a pen.

One set of oft-overlooked shortcuts that have been around since Windows 7, deal with switching between applications. Yes, you can use the venerable ALT-TAB method (or even WindowsKey+TAB, if you want to recall the heady Flip 3D days of Vista, or make use of the multiple desktop feature in Windows 10) to flick between open applications, but if you’ve multiple applications running or have pinned apps to the Task Bar then there’s a more direct and arguably simpler way.

The Taskbar goes back to Windows 95 but has grown a lot of functionality over the years clip_image004– as well as customising it, you could try moving it to the vertical plane (maybe better on widescreen monitors as it gives you more real estate when you need it), and more; so much so that it has a whole section of the Settings menu devoted to it – right-click on your Taskbar and click settings to activate.

If your Taskbar is in the traditional horizontal position and if you have nothing running and nothing pinned to it, you’ll see if fill from left to right as you open apps up. If n is a number from 1-9, you can use WindowsKey+n to jump to those apps which are open as if they were numbered from the left. If you are a bit more north-south in your approach and keep your taskbar tucked to the side, then it will go 1-9 from the top.

clip_image005When you pin an app to the Taskbar clip_image007by right-clicking on the icon from its running self on the ‘bar, then it will stay in its current position. After pinning, if you drag it around on the taskbar (to the left or top), then it will remain there in future, even when the app isn’t running.

If you’re disciplined about this, you could have it that your browser of choice is always app #1, Outlook, app #2, etc. This would mean it’s easy to switch between apps, but also to start up apps which are pinned but not running.  In the vertical taskbar example shown on the right, the Amazon Music app and Microsoft Word are not running (no blue line to the left of the icon) but the others are; Edge is pinned, but Outlook & Mail might just be active, but not pinned.

If you use Amazon Music, the Win32 program has such poor support for common conventions of UX (despite being an otherwise decent app, especially if you’re a Prime or Music Unlimited subscriber), little things like pausing music can be a right pain it doesn’t support the Pause key found on many keyboards, and doesn’t offer any system-wide control keys to navigate music… the app needs to be in the foreground for anything to work. A solution to hand can be to pin it to a static position on the list (let’s say #1), then press WindowsKey+1 to jump to it, and SPACE to pause or left & right arrow keys to jump back & forth in the current playlist.

Similarly, if Outlook is in #4 on the Taskbar, then WindowsKey+4 followed by CTRL-SHIFT+I will always take you to Inbox, and CTRL+2 will take you to Calendar. If you want to check what’s going on in your schedule, this quick sequence (WinKey+4, CTRL+2) can be a great time-saver in jumping straight to calendar whatever else you’re doing, followed by CTRL+1 to jump back to the mail folder you might have been in previously.

Tip o’ the Week 366 – Night, Night, screen light

clip_image001As many people use their phones or other digital devices just before going to bed, it’s worth exploring the impact that might have on their sleep. Quite apart from the alertedness you’ll have from having been fussing about with a gadget when you should be settling down to the land of nod, the blue light emitted from the screen (as part of the RGB palette used to make white, for example) may make you less likely to fall asleep and to stay sleeping.

Good advice might be to have no screen-time within 30 mins of going to bed, but good advice tells you to not eat bad food, drink bad drink or inhabit bad habits. And when do we ever follow good advice?

A tactical solution might be to limit the blue light bit of our screen at night-time; it does appear to help, though avoiding electronic over-stimulation immediately before sleep is probably best, as a general rule at least.

Should you need to use a PC, tablet or phone just before bed, there are a variety of tools to help. 4½ years ago, ToW #120 talked about a cool bit of software called f.lux which can tune your PC’s – or other device’s – screen, so that at certain times of the day, it reduces whites to be more pinky, by dialling back the blue light.

clip_image003Well, the same kind of functionality is being built-in to Windows 10 as part of the upcoming Creators Update. Perhaps most effective if used in conjunction with some dark mode tweaks (as in ToW #354), this new “Night Light” feature first clip_image005made it into Insider builds from 15002, initially known as “Blue Light Filter”. To check which build you’re running, press WindowsKey+R and enter winver.

The Night Light options live under the Display settings; off by default, you can turn the feature on then configure it to change the hue of the screen either at a set time, or following the sun.

clip_image006It’s possible to set the colo(u)r (localization, tsk, tsk) temperature and the whites of the screen will fade to a vaguely pink hue, or even blood red if you move the slider all the way to the left. It’s not that easy to capture the effect as a screen shot, since it’s a filter that’s put on the display – if you PrtScn or use the snipping tool, you’ll get a regular white-background window even if your desktop looks like a weather warning.

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Tip o’ the Week 365 – Throttling applications’ network perf

clip_image002If you ever wonder why your home network is apparently bogging down, the blame may not be just down to your broadband provider. As we increasingly use multiple devices on the home network, any one of them may be causing issues for all the others.

If you’re using an ADSL connection, the Asymmetric nature means that preference is given to data download, with only a portion of the available bandwidth allocated to uploads, since most people are browsing, streaming and downloading files more than they are serving data or putting things into the cloud.

One of the downsides to ADSL is that when you do need to upload a lot of data, it has the side effect of hammering the download speeds too. It’s even worse if something you don’t especially care about is killing your download speed through unexpected uploads, or you need to use something that requires decent upload speeds – like a Skype call or an Xbox Live session – and you get poor performance because something else is hogging your bandwidth.

clip_image004OneDrive is a bit of a culprit – in an experiment, the Network Speed Test app was used in normal run of things, and saw ~18Mbps download and .77Mbps upload, which is fairly healthy.

clip_image006Starting a big upload by dropping a video file into the OneDrive folder on the PC, and allowing the sync process to get going (verified by the icon in the system tray changing to show a couple of sync arrows, and the pop up balloon saying what’s happening), and things changed radically; a paltry 600Kbps download and just 150Kbps upload speed. A tell-tale is the network delay – or latency – which rose from <50ms to >700ms, which will make anything that needs real-time communications very difficult.

clip_image008If you think your network performance is terrible, start by looking in Task Manager – CTRL+SHIFT+ESC – and if you think the Send vs Receive stats in the network performance tab is a bit skewed, then click the Resource Monitor link at the bottom of the window… and look at the Send / Receive columns under Network, to see which application is causing the trouble…

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clip_image012Fortunately, the OneDrive app has the option of imposing upload limits; look in the system tray for the OneDrive icon(s), and right-click then choose Settings. Note that you might have separate OneDrive personal and OneDrive business icons; they can be tuned separately.

Under the Network tab, you can put a value in for KB/sec (that’s Kilo-bytes per sec, rather than the Mega-bits or Kilo-bits per second of the bandwidth measurements above – remembering, of course, that 1 Byte = 8 bits, so 1KB = 8Kb), which will throttle the upload speed used by OneDrive sync. Hover over the OneDrive icon to see the

The “Adjust automatically” option sounds hopeful, but still appears to favour upload speed over download requirements, though there may be more long-term monitoring going on. If you’ve identified OneDrive sync as the culprit to your poor performance, you can also pause it for a period of time – handy if you’re on conference calls with Skype and you want to give all of your bandwidth over to that.

Still, back to the experiment: after setting the limit to 25KBps as above, there’s still plenty of uploading, but not as bad an impact on the downloads…

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Tip o’ the Week 364 – F is for Function

clip_image001PC keyboards have always had Function Keys, just as mainframe terminals did before them – thank IBM for cementing F-keys on the modern keyboard, though. Even Apple Macs had function keys, though the latest fad is to replace them with a Touch Bar – among other things that were replaced.

Some terminal keyboards had up to 24 function keys, with the idea that different application would have various commands assigned to each. The modern multi-tasking, graphically-oriented operating system has largely done away with the clip_image002need for function keys, but certain commands persist and are supported widely – ALT-F4, for example, will pretty much always close a Windows application. CTRL-F4 will mostly close a window or tab.

F1 usually means “help”. F2 tends to rename the thing you’ve selected. F3 normally does a “search”. F5 usually refreshes whatever you’re viewing.  There’s more.

If you’ve a Surface Book, check out Paul Thurrott’s commentary from a while back, and if you’ve any other Surface device you might find the doubling up of function keys and other regular keys causes grief at times, as having the toggled “Fn” key locked on (so as to use the F-key functions) will nullify the other functions printed on the same keys. Losing access to the key that mutes your speaker or presses play/pause might be a minor annoyance, but forfeiting the Home, End and PgUp/PgDn keys can be a right pain if you’re editing text or moving around a spreadsheet. There’s no easy way of avoiding this, other than just being aware of whether you have the Fn key toggled or not.

Somewhat obtusely, Surface Book/Pro fans may not realise that the Fn key doesn’t just toggle on and off, but can be used in conjunction with other keys to provide spot functionality – the most useful being the Fn+Del and Fn+Backspace key combinations, which change the screen brightness up and down. Certainly more regularly useful than the keyboard brightness settings that share the F1 and F2 keys. This nugget was found in the Surface Book user guide, published along with guides for other Surface devices, here.

One of the best hidden function key combos to remember, though, is the F4 key within Office applications – it repeats the last thing you did, from colouring some text to lots of other stuff. If you’re applying formatting, for example, rather than using the Format Painter command in Office apps, you could simply set the format on one paragraph/cell/whatever, then select another one to apply the same formatting just by pressing F4, and you can continue to apply the same settings by selecting some more/pressing F4, etc. Magic.

Tip o’ the Week 363 – Erasing past mistakes

clip_image001[4]Using a Windows PC with Office presents many opportunities to make it easier to do things repeatedly – from shortcut keys which speed up regular tasks, to remembering things you’ve done before or accessed recently, so you can easily repeat them. Sometimes, however, they remember stuff you do mistakenly, and thereafter clutter up the system that’s supposed to simplify the way you work. Now, it’s time to look at ways of erasing those mistakes.

Custom Dictionary

clip_image003[4]Following the ToW #362, a reader asked how to remove misspelled words that are accidentally added to Word’s custom dictionary – if you’d like to edit that, within Word, go to File | Options | clip_image005[4]Proofing, then click on Custom Dictionaries… and then

select the default dictionary and click on Edit Word List…

clip_image007[4]Outlook Auto-complete cache

When you type a name into the To: line of a new Outlook email, the autocomplete cache will offer you a list of previously-used addresses. If you got the original address wrong or someone’s email address has subsequently changed, you may want to remove the suggested name.

In order to do that, when you’re presented with the list of suggestions, either use your mouse to hover over the name you want to ditch, and click the X to the right, or use the up & down arrow keys to move the selection and click the X or press the Del key. You could also clear the whole list, or switch it off entirely – see here for details.

clip_image009[4]Windows Run list

If you’re a habitual user of the Run command in Windows (press the WindowsKey+R) to enter commands, then you may rue mistyping one that sticks around getting in the way, as it is presented to you next time you’re doing something similar. To fix this Most Recently Used (MRU) list, it’s a bit more involved:

  • Start Registry Editor (WindowsKey+R / regedit, natch)
  • Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\RunMRU
  • Find the entry you want to fix from the list of values on the right, and either edit or delete it

clip_image011[4]Explorer recent files

Windows Explorer (WindowsKey+E) shows a list of recent files and folders, which is a handy thing if you want to quickly access things you use regularly, though if you accessed a file in error, you may not want it hanging around in the list. To remove a file from the list, just right-click on it and select to Remove from Quick access.

The Frequent Folders and Quick Access views in Explorer are essentially the same thing, so if you see a folder there you’d rather not have, just right click it and choose Remove from Quick Access or Unpin from Quick Access.

Tip o’ the Week 362 – Working with symbol characters

clip_image001One of the coolest things about the PC as it developed from the earliest days, was the ability to represent “foreign” symbols through expanding beyond the 7-bit ASCII character set, meaning it’s feasible to use all sorts of exotic symbols, accents, icons and the like (without resorting to art).

As well as “Dingbats” fonts (like Zapf or Wingdings), there is a plethora of symbols available within regular fonts too, and there are a variety of techniques to access them…

Symbols in Outlook / Word

There’s a Symbol menu in both Outlook and in Word, that lets you access some relatively commonly used symbols, or go to another dialog to pick from a more extensive range, and from special clip_image003characters too.

Word & Outlook do a pretty good job of anticipating some through AutoCorrect rules – like the En Dash that is used when you type a straight hyphen but with spaces around it – but there may be cases where you want to force it rather than relying on AutoCorrect.

You’ll find special accents embedded within each font, so if you want to spell someone’s name correctly, you may need to delve within. On an English keyboard, you can make an acute version of the relevant letters by pressing ALT-GR – so instead of e you can quickly write é, but if you want to do something else, you’ll have to try harder.

clip_image005If you go into the More Symbols option above, you can pick one of your fancy accents from the many presented, and just press Insert to stick it into the cursor at the current location, and in the current font/size. If you’re not using Word / Outlook, you could always run the old Windows app, Charmap, which will let you copy the right character to the clipboard.

Another less-well known technique is to use Alt-x in Office, in combination with the Character code (as shown within the symbol dialog, as 00E2 in the case of â). Type the code of the character you’re looking for and immediately press Alt-x to convert that code into the character you need. In case you find it hard to remember the handy 4-digit hex code, if you put the cursor immediately after any special character and press Alt-x to replace it with the Character code (and press it again to restore the character). Or, if you can remember that instead, try the Shortcut key shown at the bottom of the dialog above…

clip_image006AutoCorrect

Of course, if you regularly want to correct Jurgen to Jürgen/ J00FCrgen, or Cecile to Cécile / C00E9cile, then without butchering their name every time, you could add your friends’ names to your AutoCorrect rules. In Word, either click the AutoCorrect button in the Symbol dialog, or else go into the menu at File | Options | Proofing | AutoCorrect Options, and you can add the automatic corrections you’d like to apply.

The same AutoCorrect options for Word will also apply to Outlook, but if you want to set them there, go into File | Options | Mail | Spelling and Autocorrect | AutoCorrect Options (avoiding the branding inconsistency) and do the same.

Tip o’ the Week 361 – Music streaming choices

clip_image001Happy New Year! Fingers crossed, 2017 will be slightly less momentous than 2016, whether your measure of panic is political upheaval or celebrities ceasing to be. Some people even think 2016 was a real horror movie.

News just in, though, is that 2016 saw a resurgence in sales of vinyl LPs; in the UK, over 3.2m LPs were sold, up 53% from the previous year and the highest for 25 years.

Why? A few major releases from the likes of Bowie & Prince, but even new music is being released on vinyl at a rate unheard of a few years back. Amazingly, a high proportion of the LPs sold never get played – they’re objects to collect and to admire, while listening to the music in digital format. Maybe even bought by people who don’t own a record player.

Still, the burgeoning trade in big plastic discs is only 5% of the market and makes up the 41% of overall sales attributed to physical media including CDs. It seems streaming is the way most people consume music now, and the eventual outright demise of the digital download is being predicted in its favour.

But which of the many paid-for streaming services to use?

Groove

clip_image003Well, Microsoft fanpeeps will turn to Groove for the Music Pass offering, which is slick, cross-platform and reasonably priced, has great integration with OneDrive for roaming your own media around, hugely improved Xbox and Windows apps, integrates well with Sonos (if that’s important to you) etc. But still, it gets little attention from the media, it seems.

  • Fastcompany’s analysis of how streaming is changing, ignores it outright
  • Most of the comparison lists of which is the best streaming don’t even mention Groove, or list it as one of a few other options or at best an also-ran – eg. here, here, here.
  • Although the catalogue is more or less the same as the others, there are gaps in functionality – like the Family Plan idea, where you could have multiple users all tapping into a family subscription. Calls have been made (MSPowerUser here, Paul Thurrott here) to hurry up and offer such a thing. Time will tell.

Amazon Music Unlimited

clip_image004Recently launched, but will tap into the huge subscriber base already addicted to free next day deliveries and some fat old men on Prime (as it can be had for a discount if you’re a Prime user already), and no doubt enjoy stickiness through the ease of integration with must-have techno-toy, the Amazon Echo (there’s even a £3.99/mo subscription that works with just one Echo device).

If you’ve an Echo or Echo Dot device, ask Alexa if she’ll open the pod bay doors. And many other stupid things.

There’s an app for some mobile platforms (not Windows Phone, obvs) and a fairly decent Windows desktop app, too. Integration with Echo/Alexa is great, and there’s a promise of being able to use your Echo to control playback of Sonos devices, later in the year. This opens the somewhat tantalising prospect for existing Sonos users, of having a relatively cheap Echo Dot providing basic Alexa type services while controlling the music on the better-sounding Sonos.

The Amazon Music desktop app plays back local music and stuff that’s streamed, even offering the ability to upload your own tracks to the cloud service so you can consume them when mobile, though you need to pay extra if it’s more than 250 tracks.

Spotify

clip_image006King of the hill as far as streaming goes, Spotify offers a free ad-supported but otherwise limited service. It says that 40m of its 100m users pay for Premium, which offers a richer feature set – it also supports Amazon Echo and Sonos playback (which is generally more pleasant than using Sonos’ awful desktop controller app).

There’s little more to say about Spotify other than it’s the service synonymous for most people with the act of streaming music, just like YouTube is for video or Skype is for video chat (unless you’re an Apple user, of course)…

One potentially infuriating thing about Spotify, though, is that its desktop app won’t play back local files encoded in anything other than mp3 / mp4 / m4p – so if you have a huge library of existing media all neatly encoded and tagged in FLAC, then too bad.

See comparison with the Amazon Music, here…

All the others

Meh. Some people like them, there are plenty of up & coming streaming services that think this is the year they’ll break through, but Tidal, Deezer, iHeartRadio, Pandora; whatever. YouTube is still the most popular music streaming service, for copyright-dodging tightwads who don’t want to pay for content and are stuck in 2002.

Switchingclip_image007

One of the hardest things to do is to switch from one service to the other – what if you want to try out the new service but don’t want to rebuild all the playlists you may have made already? Try Soundiiz, a free web-based playlist sync & export tool, which supports a lot of the popular services including Spotify and Groove, but unfortunately not Amazon, Google or Apple’s offerings. Still worth a look, though it’s been in beta for a long time…

Tip o’ the Week 360 – Seasonal online goodies

clip_image001If you’re still planning on completing your holiday gift-buying towards the end of the shopping period, you may want to turn your attention to some online offers that will go down well with some – if not all – members of your extended family.

EMEA-based ‘softies can get an online equivalent of the North American retail Microsoft Store “Doorbusters” and the now-finished online “12 days of deals”, through their online employee store. The shelves are looking pretty empty, if truth be told, but you might still snag a 12- or 24-month Xbox Live Gold subscription for a bargain; you just get emailed the code, and it can be added to either a new (free) Xbox Live account to upgrade to Gold, or can be used to extend an existing one.

If you’re not an Xbox Live subscriber already, you could get the first month for only £1, and then apply the above code later should you wish. The public-facing “Countdown” promotion (running as of 22nd December all the way through to the other side of the festivities) has a load of other offers available, especially if you’re also an Xbox Live Gold member. Remind yourself how rubbish 1970s arcade games were for only £3, for example.

clip_image002Various other goodies are available from the online Microsoft Store website, and the other Microsoft Store – the one with apps, games and entertainment – has a roster of daily deals and other discounts worth checking. Christmas isn’t Christmas until you’ve seen Hans Gruber fall off a skyscraper (act quickly – deal running out).

There’s a Countdown sale on digital content, too, for when you realise the Christmas telly schedules are full of stuff you don’t want to watch, and your Sky Q box is up the swannee and taking an hour to reboot.

clip_image003Sadly, there are no Groove Music Pass deals to be had this year, unless you’ve never used A Zune, Xbox or Groove Music Pass previously. You can try it for free (for a month), and you’ll be sent a promo code to grab another 3 months free – so well worth a go, especially since the Groove apps for PC and Xbox One have been updated with support for Music videos, and the iOS and Android mobile apps have been given a refresh to keep pace with the UWP versions too.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, see you all in January!