Tip o’ the Week 394 – Change your lock screen

Posted on September 12, 2017 by ewand

As any fule kno, good corporate types should lock their PC every time they walk away from the machine. The Dynamic Lock function in Windows might help, and further tips were covered back in ToW #372. The simplest way to lock your machine when you get up and go to walk away, is to hit WindowsKey+L.

When you return to the computer, assuming you’re not showing a screen saver or the screen hasn’t gone completely blank due to power settings switching it off, you’ll likely have some kind of lock screen be shown – customisable under Settings -> Personalisation -> Lock Screen (or just press Start and type lock to jump straight into the lock screen settings).

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.

Click or tap on Edit, and select the Crop and rotate option. You can then quickly adjust the aspect ratio of your photo, and if the source image is portrait format (whereas your screen will almost certainly be 16:9 widescreen landscape), you could first set the image to be Widescreen then tweak “Make landscape”.

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 the layout, hit Done. After you’ve played around with other filters or enhancements, just save the picture, and you’ll be dropped back into the main Photo app to view your results.

If you’re just doing one picture, click or tap Set as >, and you can quickly make the pic your lock screen or background.

Tip o’ the Week 390 – Paint it black

Posted on July 28, 2017 by ewand

“SHOCK, HORROR!”, the internet & news media said, “Microsoft is killing Paint!”. Cue the opportunity to make Clippy comparisons, and reflect on a bit of software that appeared in its first version in Windows 1.0, bring out the odd eccentric who manages to produce quite amazing art using Paint (like Pat Hines, who’s tried other paint software but “never managed to ‘connect’ with it”, or Jim’ll Paint It, who paints odd scenes on request, and whose fondness for MSPaint means he prefers the WinXP version).

Most of us probably don’t use MSPaint for much these days; maybe the odd bit of clumsy touching-up of images, or using it to snip bits out of screen grabs for documentation purposes.

Here’s one use case, if you’re in the UK and want to print out a map for a walk you’re going to do – fire up MSPAINT, set the canvas dimensions to something huge like 4096×4096 (in File / Properties), then go to Bing Maps and screen grab (WindowsKey+S, or use the Snipping Tool) the relevant sections of your planned walking route, looking at the Ordnance Survey view in the top right, and zooming in so you see the footpath details.

For longish walks, you’ll struggle to fit the whole route on one screen at the max detail level, so you’ll need to grab a bit, paste it onto the Paint canvas, move the map view, grab the next section, then using Paint, assemble the bits together like overlaying jigsaw pieces by moving your newest-pasted chunk around so it fits the rest. Copy the whole finished lot into a Word doc, and print.

Anyway, Paint is most definitely not dead – it’s just going to be an app that’s packaged and maybe delivered via the Windows Store, just like lots of other apps that are traditionally part of Windows and may or may not be installed by default (like Calc, Mail, Groove etc). There’s always Paint3D, too (ToW 358).

If you do need to do some more intensive image manipulation, especially of photos, there are many free options, from Adobe’s PhotoShop Express or the built-in Microsoft Photos app, which lets you carry out simple tweaks to photos you’ve acquired. For more creating and pixel-by-pixel tweaking of images, though, you’d be hard pressed to find a better value yet powerful tool than Paint.NET. It looks a bit 1990s in some respects, but it’s a simple and effective image editing tool, that has been likened to the bits of Photoshop that people like, simplified and delivered for free.

Find out more about Paint.NET here – download directly from here, and keep an eye out for a packaged version of Paint.NET hitting the Windows Store at some point, too. Who knows – maybe it will be there before MSPaint is loaded on the cart and taken away?

Tip o’ the Week 389 – Jump to Windows Settings

Posted on July 28, 2017 by ewand

There are many ways of jumping straight into bits of Windows that would otherwise take a load of clicking around the place. ToW #312 covered some of them – especially on how to go directly to special folders like your pictures or downloads, but there are many other ways of jumping right into important bits of Windows under the hood.

WindowsKey+R / ncpa.cpl is one of the longest-serving and most useful, going back to Windows for Workgroups; it proceeds directly to the guts of the old-style networking control panel that can still be used to manage and connect to remote networks or configure advanced properties of the PC’s network stack.

Pressing WindowsKey+X shows a shortcut menu that gives you quick access to lots of different but handy bits of Windows options and settings – eg. the System page, which gives you easy way to find your machine’s name, what version of Windows you’re using, what spec hardware you have etc. Not stuff you’ll find you need every day, but when you do, this is the easiest way of getting to that page.

Maybe the easiest, but not the most direct – many of the settings pages can also be got at by running ms-settings:name, eg ms-settings:about, which will do the same – either by entering that from the Run command (WindowsKey+R) or by creating a shortcut on the desktop (right-click on the desktop, choose New -> Shortcut) and then enter the appropriate command. Try some other ms-settings: commands – appsfeatures, display. Chere here or here for some more ideas.

Tip o’ the Week 388 – Crossing Time Zones

Posted on July 28, 2017 by ewand

Another dip into the annals of ToW, dusted down and spruced up – this topic was first covered in #301, though the topic of time zones has also featured in #280, #244, #120, #26…

When moving between countries, one of the tricks the traveller needs to decide is how to handle the switch of time zone. Do you set your watch to the destination time as soon as you board the plane, or only when the pilot announces, in his or her ever-so distincive pilot tone, what the local time is on arrival?

Also, do you wait for your phone to pick up the destination time zone automatically, or do you set it manually? If you have a Fitbit or other wearable, do you want it to pick up the time from your phone or do you force it on departure? Decisions, decisions…

Frequent travellers tend to have pearls of wisdom on how to deal with jet lag – like get your mind in the destination time zone and keep it there (ie. If you’re out having dinner after arrival, do not keep saying that it’s really 4am; it’s 8pm now and you can’t go to bed for at least another two hours), or get the sun – or even a bright light – on the back of your knees. All we can cover is how to handle the crossing of time zones using your PC…

Outlook – whenever an appointment is created, its date and time are recorded as an offset from UTC, and the time zone it’s due to take place in is also noted. If you’re creating meetings or appointments which are in a different time zone, like travel times, then it may be worth telling Outlook by clicking the Time Zone icon in the ribbon, and then selecting the appropriate TZ – especially useful if you’re moving between time zones during the appointment itself, and don’t want to run the risk of horological befuddlement.

If you’re booking a load of appointments in another time zone – eg. you’re working in another country for a few days and creating appointments with people in that locale – then it’s even worth switching the TZ of your PC whilst you do the diary-work, to save a lot of clicking around in setting the appropriate time zone specific to each meeting.

The best way to do this would be to show your second time zone in the Outlook calendar – in the main Outlook window, go to File | Options | Calendar and select the second one to show; when you’re ready to switch between your local TZ and the remote one, just click the Swap Time Zones button to switch the PC (and Outlook) between the different zones.

Windows 10 – In the Settings | Date & time menu, there’s an option to tweak how Windows deals with time and time zones – some of which might be applied by policy and therefore greyed out for you. Like other phone OSes, Windows 10 – even on proper computers – has the option of setting time zone automatically.

If you’re going to use the time zone swapping in Outlook as per above, then it’s worth disabling the automatic mode as Windows can get itself properly confused; the default time zone will change, and Outlook will end up showing the same time zone for both primary and secondary.

Using the old fashioned Windows control panel time settings applet, you can choose to show a second time zone in the clock on the system tray – in the Date & time settings, look to the right and you’ll see Add clocks for different time zones.

There’s a nice Alarms & Clock app in Windows 10, that shows a map of the world with your choice of locations, and the moving daylight line so you can see what’s happening around the globe. A good alternative to that exec boardroom display nonsense, that you might expect to see gracing the wall of your average corporate hot shot.

Tip o’ the Week 384 – Insiders Update 16215

Posted on June 30, 2017 by ewand

The Windows Insider program has over 10m participants, and after the release of the Creators Update, the heat is being turned up again as the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update starts testing.

If you’re an Insider on the Fast Ring, you can get hold of the newly-released build 16215, which contains a load of new functionality – for some more detail of what to expect, read here or see this.

There are myriad UI changes, many of them quite subtle, and Edge browser gets some interesting new features (and some returning ones) – more details here. Full release notes for the build are here.

Gotchas

As ever, there are a few known issues documented in the release notes. In this build, If you have multiple displays at different scale resolutions, Edge may habitually load pages at the wrong scale – so everything is either really really tiny
or absolutely massive.

To workaround this, just flick to another tab and back again – and save constantly zooming in and out.

Another issue to be aware of is that after installation of 16215, you may find that Outlook won’t connect to your mailbox any more – and any attempts to create a new profile will fail.

Repairing / reinstalling Office won’t help either. Instead of going through the aggro, try a quick fix in disabling HTTP/2 on the machine:

Open Registry Editor (WindowsKey+R regedit)
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\WinHttp
Add a new DWORD value, called EnableDefaultHttp2 – default value will be 0x00000000 – that’s fine.
Now repeat by adding the same value, at: HKLM\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\WinHttp
Reboot. Bob’s your uncle. Enjoy.

Tip o’ the Week 382 – F…F…Feeds in Edge

Posted on June 30, 2017 by ewand

If you use the Edge browser in Windows 10 as your default (presumably by ignoring prompts on any Google property, to install and default to Chrome) then you may be familiar with the default tab behaviour, which helpfully shows you most-visited sites and also displays some “news” content below.

This “My feed” section can be a neat way to get news items of interest without having to do anything but fire up a new browser tab when you were planning to do something else anyway. Maybe distracting, though, unless you’re careful, and as well as the news, there’s plenty of click-bait garbage in there that can do just that. Who couldn’t resist naming these forgotten 1990s movies, or those car badges you don’t see any more? Or wonder what it was that happened next that shocked everyone?

There isn’t a lot of fine-tuning that can be achieved with My feed, however; a fact that’s driving people nuts on feedback forums and on the sometimes preposterously-named “Answers” forum (“please clear your browser cache, reboot, stand on one leg and rub the top of your head – that should fix it”).

Some of the feedback, though, and particularly the responses to it on the Insiders-only Feedback Hub, can be quite amusing….

The main degree of customisation you can do is to tweak the settings for what you prefer – click on the gear icon in the top right (above the Top Sites section), and choose whether you want to switch off the feed and just show Top sites or nothing. Some lanugages (not US English, oddly) allow you to choose what your favourite topics are, though deselecting some (and making the surrounding border disappear from the topic) doesn’t actually remove it from your feed – it just makes it a little less prevalent, and not quite immediately.

If you have US English set as your language, you will get a list of topics across the top of the feed to filter its contents, but in every other language it seems to be pre-sorted.

The gripes being exposed online about the feed tend to be around the nature of the news itself or in the tone and volume of the adverts (like, in the UK, do I really want Microsoft to push dodgy-sounding $30 TV antennae?).

The most annoying ads appear to be served up by Taboola and there doesn’t appear to be a way of blocking them – unless you know differently; then please write up what you did and share the info with me, whereupon kudos will be bestowed in great quantity – so if you don’t want to put up with intrustive click-bait, then your only current option is to basically switch off the feed and go somewhere else for your news (research shows many are using social media as their preferred way of hearing news, though the tide may be turning).

Maybe use a proper news web aggregator site, e.g. Bing news or this little-used one, both of which would let you filter and customise your news sources, or rely on a news app to provide you with even more control or detail (such as MSN News or Feedlab if you’re after getting your news up the RSS).

The challenge with any news feed is filtering out the fake news. Still, there’s still the odd bit of truth out there.

Tip o’ the Week 380 – Hey Cortana, take flight!

Posted on May 30, 2017 by ewand

With the news that Cortana is coming to a consumer audio device near you, it’s worth revisiting a few things that Cortana on your desktop can do for you. If you have a Windows 10 PC with a microphone, then you may be able to enable “Hey Cortana”, which lets you talk to your machine and ask it stuff. See what’s new with the Blue One in the Creators Update.

You can leave yourself voice notes and Cortana will stick them in the Quick Notes section of OneNote – using the Modern App version of OneNote, look under Settings -> Options -> choose a notebook for Quick Notes to set the default location.

Even if you don’t talk to your PC, pressing WindowsKey+Q will launch Cortana, as a quick way of searching for apps or documents on your machine, or answers on the web – just type in your query, then filter by the icons on top of the window as appropriate.

Cortana can do a lot more than just be a shim for Bing search; she can offer immediate advice, like what the time is in a different location, what’s the weather for tomorrow, and more. Type a flight number to see its current status, a stock symbol for a quote or a couple of currency symbols for an immediate exchange rate estimate.

While many of these commands work when you type them (eg type, time new york, as on the left), some will only work when spoken and some will give a better UI and/or more detail when voiced rather than typed (such as the “Hey Cortana, what’s the time in New York” query on the right)…

Of course, there are plenty of stupid things you can ask Cortana – open the pod bay doors, sing me a song, knock knock, who let the dogs out, etc etc. Just like Alexa or Siri, there are many built-in Easter Eggs.

You can sometimes string some interesting productivity commands together, too – some could be useful in context, like reminding you to buy milk next time you’re in a supermarket (whereupon your phone will trigger a reminder when it knows you’ve just walked into a supermarket, based on GPS) or next time you talk to a particular contact, to remind you to ask them something (where it will pop up when you next speak to them, exchange emails etc).

You can issue some pretty complex instructions to add reminders – eg. “Hey Cortana, add Pink Floyd exhibition Their Mortal Remains at the V&A to my calendar for tomorrow at 3:45” … and Cortana can put it on your calendar, or just maintain a list of reminders in her own Notebook.

(NB: screen shot to the right was not faked up, although it did take more than one attempt …)

Cortana’s getting skills, too, from Graph to bots to Rome.

Tip o’ the Week 378 – Sharing, caring

Posted on May 24, 2017 by ewand

One of the Charms in Windows 8 promised to make it easy to share content between applications – rather than copying & pasting, maybe it would be better to allow the source application to provide some extra context to the destination app. When it works well, app-app sharing is really useful, but it maybe didn’t take off quite as much as expected.

The Sharing icon from Windows 8.x and early Windows 10 versions was the 3-blobs-in-a-circle which does looks a lot like the Ubuntu logo for some, and doesn’t necessarily convey the meaning of sharing to others. One of the tweaks in the Creators Update was not only a newly-designed icon, but a new Sharing UI that aims to simplify the process further.

If you are using a suitable Windows app (like Edge or Photos, for example), which touts the new sharing icon (the one with the arrow leaping out of the box), then when you choose the Share action, a UI will show up that lists all the apps that could be the target for Sharing, and a link to the Store to find more.

Click or tap on the destination app, and depending on what that app can do and what data the source is providing, you may see more content than simply sharing the URL or copying the file.

Sharing a page from Edge to OneNote, for example, will put a thumbnail image if available, a description of the page, and will let you add your own verbatim notes before saving the content as a new page in your notebook.

There are a few Clipboard apps which can be handy for sharing content so you can paste it into an old fashioned app that doesn’t support the Share method. Some “traditional” Windows apps – like the venerable Windows Explorer – are Share enabled, even though their icon may still be using the old design for now (and some Store apps have the same design lag – the Store App itself being one of them…)

Tip o’ the Week 377 – Windows 10 Films & TV

Posted on May 22, 2017 by ewand

In a culturally-sensitive and relatively unusual sort of localis(z)ation, Windows 10 has an app called Films & TV. Or Movies & TV, depending on where you are in the world. Whichever, it’s the de facto video player in Windows 10, unless you start by installing your own.

The naming may only be skin deep but in Blighty, still, Kermode & Esler host the Film Review and dear old Barry Norman (and why not?) fronted the Film… franchise for 27 years, keeping sign-writers and logo creators busy as the program name changed annually.

The Films & TV app got a nice refresh to coincide with the Creators Update, recently – so if you haven’t played around with it much, then it’s maybe worth another look.

Films & TV can show off your local video files, or let you explore stuff to rent or buy as well as access previously bought video content. In an ideal world, it would be nice to allow apps to be able to retrieve content from any source, similar to how devices like Sonos can support multiple music sources (Spotify, Groove, Amazon etc). Sadly, for now at least, you can only see content that you bought through the Films & TV (previously Xbox Video) store.

Still, there are some cool touches to the app UI – like the ability to play back video on a Miracast-enabled device, so you can source the file from your laptop yet watch it back on your monster telly.

Assuming Miracast works, that is. Russian Roulette would give you better odds than with some supposedly Miracast supporting gear, but let’s move on…

The new “Explore” section in F&TV lets you see film trailers and recommended movies & TV series, as well as some highlighted 360° videos from sources like GoPro. Check out the Indy cars driving across the Golden Gate Bridge – Monaco it ain’t but it’s still quite impressive.

You can set the playback to a mini player mode which lets you carry on watching something more interesting than whatever you’re supposed to be doing, as the mini player stays on top of other windows.

When playing back ordinary video, you could choose to play it back as 360° video instead – a relatively freaky experience that’s presumably included because you might happen upon 360° video encoded as regular MP4 or whatever, and want to experience that as intended.

Still. ~~Movies~~ Films & TV is a nice, simple video player which is Tip o’ the Week 377 – Windows 10 Films & TVworthy of consideration, even if you do end up installing VLC.

Tip o’ the Week 375 – Edge improvements in CU

Posted on April 22, 2017 by ewand

Now that the Windows 10 Creators Update is generally available, it’s worth looking at some specific new features that may delight users who are upgrading. The Edge browser has been given a bit of an overhaul, so that’s a good place to start.

Battery improvements – as mentioned in ToW 335, Edge browser has been deliberately tuned to work better on battery-powered laptops or tablets, compared to other browsers. Well, following the Creators Update, a further test was run to stream videos until the identical laptops drained all their battery – with Edge outperforming Firefox & Chrome handsomely. YMMV but it’s worth looking at browsing with Edge if you want to get the best out of the time on your laptop.

Extension support – there are more and more extensions coming out for Edge, featuring translation, password management, tracking & ad blocking and more. See them here.

Tab handling has had some further tweaks, from the ability to set tabs aside for later (and be able to bring them back individually, or all at once), to the enhanced view showing tab previews. Did you know, also, that if you click on a tab and drag it off the window your browser is in, it’ll create a new window with just that tab in it? Handy if you want to have the equivalent of a “boss view” with all your social guff in one window, and all your boring work stuff in another.

Security – there’s some underlying improvement to the way that Edge protects the user from nastiness (well, some of the nastiness) on the internet – see more about it, here.

There’s a summary of changes in Edge within Creators Update here. And there are more tips, here.