#56: Hey kids, look who’s back!

Posted on December 6, 2024 (Updated December 5, 2024) by ewand

When does old become retro, and how does fashion decide when something uncool becomes drip? Brand equity rises and falls all the time; some just go out of date and are left behind, while some try to reassert themselves to speed up the cycle – see Jaguar / jaGuar’s recent hoo-hah and “Copy Nothing” brand rehab…

[Richard Ayoade in IT Crowd c 2006, Jaguar deleting ordinary in 2024, Reeves & Mortimer c1993]

(Eddie Izzard has some mildly sweary thoughts about the whole “Looking cool…” cycle).

Retro tech

It’s amusing when old tech becomes cool again – from hipsters rocking LCD digital watches, to GenZers toting feature phones like it was the 1990s. Some brands were never fashionable, like AOL: using an aol.com email address even 20 years ago was a marker of technological unsophistication. Amazingly, you can still sign up for an aol.com address today if you feel like sending email from the past.

Many other products and services were all the rage, then just weren’t – and one good example is Microsoft’s MSN, which now seems to be coming back from life support. Well, certain elements (which are not yet part of the revamp) were very pervasive and cool back in the day … remember MSN Messenger, before Microsoft bungled it into Skype? It was so down with the kids, even a youthful Stormzy was using it (and that’s how he got his name).

The Microsoft Network

MSN first arrived 30 years ago as part of the Windows 95 (“Chicago”) beta program; it was a “walled garden” network service providing proprietary content through a dial up network. Market leaders AOL and CompuServe had similarly restricted services – using them wasn’t really “being on the internet” other than you could browse pages written for those services, use email and later, instant messaging. Win95 initially didn’t even have a TCP/IP stack built-in, so without 3^rd party software, you couldn’t be directly connected to the ’net.

MSN’s late 90s paid-for dial-up service became a regular ISP and there was a Premium subscription available to netizens who wanted additional security and the likes.

From that closed offering, the MSN brand morphed into something applied to lots of Microsoft’s consumer-oriented web experiences – from the Yahoo!-like attempt to establish a homepage, to in 2001 rebranding the first mass free email service which Microsoft acquired 5 years earlier, as MSN Hotmail.

Legacy users of the Win95 MSN service were ported over to Hotmail and given short @msn.com mail accounts. Other users could at one point choose a variety of domain names when signing up for a Live ID / Hotmail account, including @msn.com and @msn.co.uk. These have long since gone away and the only options now are outlook.com and Hotmail.com.

At one point, there were numerous “MSN …” apps for Windows and mobile devices, from MSN Travel to MSN Money. Most of these were subsequently killed off or renamed to something else, like Microsoft News.

Amazingly, you can still buy MSN Premium today – for £7 a month you get, er, lots of stuff that’s available, better and/or for free from other places, including other bits of Microsoft itself.

Today, many of the buttons on the MSN Explorer app either don’t work, or redirect to a page about how Internet Explorer isn’t supported anymore. One of the purported benefits of MSN Premium is that it’s possible to sign up an additional 9 users for an @msn.com email address; given the number of users complaining that it no longer works (and getting radio silence from support), it seems that loophole has now closed.

Microsoft Stop Start

At one point, Microsoft appeared to want “Start” to become the new MSN brand; the homepage for Edge browser (unless you do yourself a favour and set it to something else) was “Start” and the single mobile app which merged MSN News, MSN Money and more was just “Microsoft Start”.

Now the Start apps have been renamed to just “MSN” on mobiles, alongside MSN Weather and MSN Money which avoided the previous cull; PC users don’t have an “MSN” app but might expect to see the same content on Edge homescreen or on the Widgets on their taskbar.

Sadly, renaming the app and service doesn’t appear to have done much for the quality of advertising or the myriad click-bait “news” providers, though it does appear to have gotten less insidious and you can at least hide sources you don’t want to hear from again.

The daily email newsletters are not bad – see https://www.msn.com/en-gb/personalize/newslettersignup to manage your subscriptions. Let’s see if Microsoft starts to re-launch other MSN services in due course…

#19: Where have you been?

Posted on March 22, 2024 (Updated March 21, 2024) by ewand

There are lots of topics that divide people into ‘them’ and ‘us’; politics, religion, fashion, belief in science, PC/Mac, iPhone/Android… just about everything to some extent.

One set of related considerations concern the tendency of Big Tech to track users’ every moves so they can sell advertising and other stuff. Tin-hat wearers will be playing snake on their Nokia 6310 so they don’t have social media companies snooping on them. Ordinary people may passively recognise that using any mobile and a credit card gives away so much about your movements, that they just submit, accept all cookies and don’t really care about trying to be “private”.

If providers give you – the user – enough functionality in exchange for knowing all about you, most people will happily subsume to their free services. If you’re a smartphone user who takes lots of photos and they’re uploaded to the cloud, there’s every likelihood you’ll also be adding GPS coordinates for where the picture was taken, as well as date/time and all the other usual EXIF stuff about the picture, the model of phone and more.

Upload those pics to Google Photos (or Apple Photos if you’re an iPhone user) and you can look at all the images you’ve ever taken in a given place, helping you realise both when you visited that place in the past but also giving the easy ability to compare photos over time.

Look at Google Photos in a regular web browser (having signed in with a Google Account) and by clicking Explore, you’ll see your photos grouped by the place they were taken. If you upload photos from a phone or camera which doesn’t have GPS tagging on the pics, you can add location manually.

The experience is considerably better using Google apps on a phone, though. Go to the Google Photos app and you’ll see various groupings of photos based on time or on what the has been identified as a “trip to…”, where you’ve clearly taken a cluster of photos in a specific place.

Select the Search option on the lower right, however, and as well as seeing similar place groupings to what you’d get on a PC browser, you can also look at your photos arranged on a map, under the “Your map” heading.

Initially, you’ll see a map broadly centred on your current location with splodges of colour which indicate where you’ve taken photos. If you zoom in, you’ll see more specific blobs and a gallery showing only those pictures which feature those particular locations on the map; it’s an incredibly powerful way to look back over the years at how favourite views, landmarks, people or pets might have changed.

There’s no immediate equivalent of the “Your map” functionality when viewing Photos or Maps in a full-size browser – there is a Timeline view in Maps which shows you places you’ve been (regardless of whether you took photos or not), and there is a “My Maps” feature where you can create your own map view and import all kinds of info, such as a list of location coordinates to make a custom route.

Bing Maps, despite spending years trying to be as good as Google, removed the ability to import and export GPS trails unless you’re a developer embedding a map in your site. Boo.

Anyway, back to Google and My Maps (not Your map, they’re mine):

Custom maps – and the photos associated – can be shared with others too, so if building a route map for guidance, photos of key landmarks can be easily inserted to let people know they’re going in the right direction.

673 – Where is my mouse?

Posted on March 17, 2023 (Updated March 17, 2023) by ewand

The “mouse” was invented 60 years ago, as a means of moving a cursor around on-screen. Through many generations of hardware, it evolved from using wheels to rubbery balls, before eventually going sensor-based and even losing the tail that may have helped coin its original name

Since many people now use laptops with touchpads, they won’t even use an external meecely peripheral but the term “mouse” is still often used to refer to the pointer that it controls. Finding that pointer on your desktop can sometimes be a challenge, especially if you have multiple screens on your computer, and particularly if at least one of them is a snazzy ultrawide job.

The free PowerToys addons to Windows 11 includes a section of Mouse utilities; install the full PowerToys suite and you can usually enable each feature individually, and set what mechanism you’d use to invoke it. Perhaps the most useful is the “Find my Mouse” keyboard shortcut – just press the CTRL key twice in quick succession, and the screen dims with a spotlight on where your pointer currently is. Press CTRL once again to remove it and go back to normal.

There are loads of settings to tweak how some of the utilities work – Find my Mouse could be enabled by shaking your mouse if you’d prefer. There’s also a highlighter feature that indicates if you’re pressing a left or right mouse button, or a crosshair view which, when turned on, sets a permanent crosshair display (again, configurable in numerous ways) that remains in place until you repeat the key combo to switch it off.

Mice can jump high – who knew?

A new mousey feature in the latest release of PowerToys is called Mouse Jump – erstwhile known as FancyMouse – and lets you teleport your mouse pointer from one side of a potentially massive desktop to another.

This is particularly handy if you have multiple screens set at different heights, and in order to traverse from one side of the desktop to the other would take you multiple swipes of a physical mouse or strokes of a touchpad.

Press the activation key and you’ll see a shrunken version of the desktop in a small window; click where you want the pointer to vamoose to on that depiction of the display and it will teleport to the other side of the desktop.

0x29A – It’s only a number

Posted on January 27, 2023 by ewand

Last week’s ToW was the six-hundred, three-score and fifth, and while this week’s is one more, it’s probably best if it’s not mentioned. As well as being called out in a certain old book, said number also features greatly in legend, light musical entertainment and popular fiction.

Other numbers attract a certain amount of superstition – some tall buildings don’t have a thirteenth floor, for example, and even big companies like Microsoft have been known to dodge bad luck by not shipping a v13 of a product (like Office – look at the File | Account | About dialog in any Office app, and you’ll see the version number – Office 2007 was v12 and Office 2010 was v14). Some cultures don’t much like the number 4 or 14 either.

One numerically interesting but easily overlooked app in Windows 11 is the venerable Calculator. Start it by pressing the Windows key and entering calc, or if you’re truly blessed, you might even have a physical button on your keyboard. The app starts in whichever mode it was last run – by default, a simple calculator with the same kinds of functions that were common on the popular pocket calculators of the 1980s.

But look at the hamburger menu on the top left and you’ll see so much more – from Programmer functions to convert numbers from one base to another (so you can decode hex error messages or “funny” binary t-shirts*), to a whole array of converter functions which let you quickly change currency (at the current rate) or transform from one measurement standard to another.

There’s a neat date calculator too, so you don’t need to resort to using an Excel formula to count how many days there are between two dates.

Back in Standard mode, you’ll see the history of your calculations on the right side, and you can use the Memory functions to store multiple numbers for future use; much better than the old one-and-done M- M+ and MR buttons on a pocket calc. There’s also a mode which keeps the calculator window on top of others, even if it isn’t the active window at the time.

If you have a full-sized keyboard, you’ll also probably have a NumLock key – that turns the numerical keypad on the right side on and off. In the early days of the PC, smaller keyboards didn’t have separate cursor keys, so these were sited on the keypad. In order to use these cursor functions – and the others, often doubled-up PgUp / PgDn etc – you’d switch NumLock off. And then swear when you went to use the numerical pad to quickly enter a number into some DOS application, only to find you’ve moved the blinking cursor around instead.

*convert each of the 8-bit binary numbers in the t-shirt to decimal; assuming the decimal number is the ASCII code corresponding to a letter, open a new blank doc in Word, and holding down the ALT key, enter the decimal number on your numeric keypad. Oh, if you’ve only got a laptop with no separate Numlock/keypad, bad luck.

664 – Android apps on Windows

Posted on January 13, 2023 by ewand

Microsoft has a somewhat complicated history with ”mobile apps”. The Windows Phone platform promised much, and though many of the ideas were good, ultimately it went away. The Universal Windows Platform app model was a sound idea in some respects, but when the ‘Phone disappeared, its raison d’être ceased to be.

At one point, there were calls that Windows Phone should be able to run Android apps in emulation, or that Microsoft should embrace Android in other ways. Recent years have seen Microsoft publish a profusion of Android apps, including the excellent Launcher, which takes some of the ideas honed in the Windows Phone UI and makes them available to just about any Android phone.

When the dual-screen Surface Duo phone appeared, it was the first time Microsoft had shipped a device running Android as the base operating system. Recent speculation on the future of the Surface Duo 3 might point to a different form factor, but it’s still very likely going to be running the Android OS.

On the desktop, Windows 11 has been offering Android apps to many users for a little while. Similar in some ways to Windows Subsystem for Linux, which basically lets you run a fully-fledged Linux machine inside your Windows PC, the Windows Subsystem for Android means running Android in a virtual machine and allowing apps to appear in a window alongside native Windows apps.

To run Android apps on the WSA on Windows 11, you first need to install the Amazon Appstore. There are many apps in this store, but since it originally started as a walled garden for Amazon’s own Fire tablets, there are gaps. You won’t find many banking apps, for example, and aside from the thousands of garish games, many of the available apps could just be run in a browser on your PC instead.

Install the Amazon Appstore app from the app for the Microsoft Store (still with us?), and it adds the bones of the Subsystem for Android too.

The Amazon Appstore app itself is a bit crude – it doesn’t offer much opportunity to filter and sort the apps it presents, so it’s not easy to wade through the many stupid games to find real apps you might want to use. It’s maybe better to peruse what’s available through a browser, and then search specifically within the Appstore app for the app you want to add.

After you’ve installed your Android apps, you will see them show up individually in Windows’ list of programs, with nothing obvious to differentiate from native apps.

Clicking the … menu next to an installed Android app then choosing Modify presents a familiar-looking UI (if you have an Android phone) for managing the permissions or the running state of the app.

If you wanted to use Android apps that are not published through the curated Amazon store, you’d need to have access to the Google Play store, and that’s not officially an option with the Windows Subsystem for Android.

There are numerous hacks online to enable Google Play Services (and thus the Googley Store) but getting it installed and running is convoluted, and at least one script has already been subverted with malware, so might be a risky endeavour too. You might want to try running BlueStacks or another Android emulator, to get access to the Google Play store.

645 – mobile ad blocking

Posted on August 26, 2022 by ewand

The internet just wouldn’t work without the magic that is the Domain Name System, or DNS. If you are not a networking guru, this service is effectively the index of internet hosts (not just websites but also anything else that offers a service on the net), and is used to find the actual address that your computer will connect to, using a name as the reference.

If you put www.bbc.co.uk into your browser, that means you want to connect to a machine called www which belongs to the domain bbc.co.uk, and a beautiful yet simply elaborate system is used to figure out how to find that domain, get the address(es) of the actual host, and provide the info back to your device so you can connect to it and request information.

Being the one service to bind it all also means DNS is often the thing that brings everything to a halt, eg. if your home router can’t connect to your ISP’s DNS server, then you’re basically unable to communicate with the rest of the world as you’d be unable to find anything (unless you hard-code your machine to use a different DNS, like CloudFlare’s 1.1.1.1 or Google’s 8.8.8.8).

Futzing about with DNS can sometimes bring benefits, though. One such is that for the many webpages which contain embedded adverts or clickbait links, if your browser is unable to connect to the source of the advert, then it might just not show the content at all. On desktop computers, you could use ad blocker browser extensions of all kinds, but on mobile devices your choices are a bit more limited.

If you rely on mobile apps like Google News or Microsoft Start, which show content within the app and have no ability to install 3^rd party browser extensions, you may have to take more action to block out all the insidious and stupid adverts.

A true geek’s solution at home could be to set up a Pi-hole; a DNS server (traditionally targeted to run on a Raspberry Pi microcomputer, hence the name) which will filter out the garbage by deliberately blocking the URL-to-address resolution of thousands of known advertisers or clickbait providers. Great when you’re on the home network, but what about if on the move and connected to another network?

One possible solution here is to use a provider like NextDNS, which has been described as effectively running a Pi-hole in the cloud for you to use.

Free for up to 300,000 name resolutions (which sounds like a lot, but in reality, isn’t), it’s a snap to try out and if you sign up, you’ll be given simple instructions on how to plug it into your phone, tablet, desktop or even home router, so as to extend protection to every device connecting through that network.

DNS queries would be routed to the NextDNS service and if the requested host is from one of a plethora of blocked sites – not just ads, but known trackers, phishing links etc too – then it will simply return a dud response as if the site doesn’t exist.

Your app or browser will either show you an empty box, maybe an inline error frame, or it may silently move on and display nothing at all. Just one small victory!

Using a service like this – others are available – can be switched on or off quickly (in Android, it takes the form of a single switch to configure a Private DNS with a URL unique to your account), and works regardless of whether you’re on Wi-Fi or mobile connectivity.

626 – Android Link

Posted on April 15, 2022 by ewand

Leaving aside dewy-eyed recollections of Windows Phone, Android and iOS mirror Windows and MacOS in many ways – the latter being more closed and single-supplier while the former is relatively open and available from a large number of providers. Android has a far larger market share than iOS, even if the cognoscenti seem to flock to the Apple device.

Microsoft has made great strides in the Satya Nadella era to embrace other ecosystems, from releasing Office apps for iOS to wide support of Android to emulate some of the best bits of Windows Phone.

One way of making your Android device more integrated to your Windows PC has just been refreshed and renamed – Phone Link.

Previously known as Your Phone, this app lets you access a variety of features of your phone from your PC; from reading and sending SMS messages and working with photos easily, to making and taking calls using your PC as a headset to the phone.

The UI has been updated to follow Windows 11 design, the app is easy to set up and activate – head to aka.ms/phonelink.

There are some things you can’t easily do with Phone Link, though – while it will mirror notifications you receive on the phone, it doesn’t necessarily allow you to interact with the app that generated them (eg a notification from Twitter won’t let you open the Twitter app to view the full thing). It does allow you to clear notifications though, so if you’re the type with loads of unacknowledged notification badges on your phone, this could be a good way to get rid of them.

While on the topic of mirroring, it is also possible to use WhatsApp on your PC – so you can type messages and paste photos etc into WhatsApp messages, without dealing with the vagaries of autocorrect on the phone.

592 – Take Note

Posted on August 11, 2021 (Updated August 11, 2021) by ewand

The simple text editor Notepad has been around since the dawn of Windows – it’s one of the few apps that was in the box with Windows 1.0 and is still there 36 years later, in Windows 10 and 11. Many people will encounter Notepad because they open a txt or log file, but some still fire up Notepad to quickly scratch something down, like a number being read out to you over the phone, when they say “do you have a pen and paper handy?”. Normally, It should take you under to two seconds to get Notepad running from anywhere – Press WindowsKey+R notepad ENTER.

Another handy use of Notepad is to quickly strip text of formatting; you might find that copying and pasting text from multiple documents often drags unwanted font choice, size, colours etc. In many apps you have the option of pasting something as Text Only, but if not, then putting the decorated text into Notepad first, then selecting and copying it again from there will mean it pastes quickly and cleanly into the destination document. Sometimes, it’s actually quicker to use Notepad as a middleman too (especially if you favour the CTRL-C / CTRL-V method of clipboard interaction).

Some people – for whatever self-flagellatory reasons – actually use Notepad for taking notes during meetings or calls, and then maybe format their raw text into something more structured afterwards. ZDNet’s Microsoft commentator Mary Jo Foley is devout Notepad user. The fact that it’s simple and quick appeals to many, it seems.

Notepad was turned into a Store app in mid 2019 and has gained a few tweaks to functionality, though nothing that normal people might notice. It’s getting a new icon in Windows 11, and who knows what other advanced functionality might follow.

Despite its relative simplicity, there are some obscure features – like the ability to add content to the header and/or footer of a page that’s being printed, even if there’s nowhere to save that setting (since a TXT file is just that, until you start getting into the intricacies of different text file formats and what that might mean to applications which may consume the text file you’re editing).

Following last week’s F4 tip for Office apps like Excel, ToW reader Flaviu Comanescu-Balla goes one better in highlighting that pressing F5 in Notepad will insert the current date and time, so if you are keeping phone notes or something, you can quickly annotate them.

In fact, Flaviu also spotted an even more obscure feature, where if you put .LOG as the first line in a Text file saved from Notepad, every time you open that file, the current date and time is appended at the end, so you can jot something down, save it again and keep a log of activities.

524 – I read the news today, oh boy

Posted on April 17, 2020 by ewand

With most of the world in lock-down and everyone staying at home, it’s easy to be fixated with the news, even though there’s really only one topic.

You could look at Microsoft News – a recently-updated app and website that serves up a mixture of curated news from 3^rd party sources that you can define, along with annoying click-bait adverts for sometimes dubious products that you are seemingly unable to block or hide.

The same guff pollutes the otherwise excellent new-tab experience in the new Edge browser, assuming you aren’t seeing the Office 365 tab.

There’s an FAQ that explains the rationale behind the advertising, though if you have time on your hands, you could always make your feelings known through the Feedback Hub app (here’s how), add your voice to the reviews tab on the Store, or join up to the Microsoft Old Timers group on Facebook and gripe about it while sharing photos of old t-shirts and stuff.

In the “good old days” theme, a new beta “News bar” app has been released, offering to display the same curated and presumably ad-filthy content on a sidebar reminiscent of a Vista gadget, or a ticker running along the top of the task bar like a 1990s website. Though it may be geo-locked so you can only get it in certain countries for now, read more on the News bar app here.

Whilst cooped up inside, spending your life on conference calls or Teams meetings, spare a thought for those who are new to the whole experience, and shed a tear for the technology they’re using. They could be Skyping.

518 – The App(s) of Office

Posted on March 20, 2020 (Updated March 20, 2020) by ewand

Once upon a time, there were Microsoft Office mobile apps, for Windows.

Ever since the demise of Windows Mobile and the collateral damage caused to Microsoft’s previous Universal Windows Platform apps strategy by not having a universal platform any more, their future has been in some doubt. In fact, since late 2018, it was reported that the Office “Mobile” apps for Windows were being de-prioritized in favour of the desktop variants (with the exception of OneNote), and separate mobile apps for the surviving mobile platforms.

If you search the Microsoft Store app on PC, you won’t find any trace of the Office mobile apps for Windows PCs any more but if you want to see what the future looked like from a point 5+ years in the past, you can still access the direct links get the UWP apps for Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

In these enlightened days, Microsoft builds quite a lot of apps for iOS and Android, more especially the latter since it has a larger number of users (and seems to be growing its share in key markets) as well as being more open when it comes to the both the end-user and developer experience (though Apple may be changing its tack a little).

Recently, the Office team has shipped a whole new, unified Office app for Android and for iOS – more details in the team’s blog, here.

The app brings together Word, Excel and PowerPoint, but also adds a bunch of other related things – like Sticky Notes, and some related and useful technology like the ability to manage PDF files, extract text from an image and more.

Back in Oct 19, MJF wrote about this strategy and more recently has suggested more features are on their way.