658 – Sweary 3-ingredient soup

Posted on November 25, 2022 by ewand

Since many US colleagues are recovering from an eating & drinking stupor having recently given thanks, this week marks a departure from the usual Tip o’ the Week recipe. Instead of tech tidbits or productivity morsels, we’re making a delicious yet fairly healthy staple in only a few minutes, courtesy of sweary Chef Ramsay.

Yes, readers, fresh soup in less than 10 minutes and with only 3 ingredients – broccoli, water and salt.

It’s not uncommon for soup recipes to start with sweating onions or shallots in butter and garlic, adding herbs, chicken stock etc. But not this – it’s vegan and keto-friendly, and is best if you make it right before eating. Adding creamy cheese to the bowl before serving will give it a nice rich finish (though may compromise the vegan-ness).

The key thing about this soup is that the broccoli is cooked in water with the lid on, and the water is saved and used like stock to liquidize it into a smooth and light soup. It’s important to blend it while still steaming hot, and that means it can be served straight from liquidizer to bowls (though it can be re-heated, frozen etc, if necessary).

Start with one or two heads of broccoli, the fresher and darker green the better – about 300g in weight before trimming would make enough for 2 or 3 portions (or 4 if you were doing a light starter).

Hold by the stalk and run a sharp knife around the tips to cut off the florets (you can keep the stalks for vegetable stock, or add to a stir fry etc, but in this case we’re just using the darker florets).

Add water to a decent-sized pan with a close-fitting lid – about 1.5-2x as much water as the weight of the broccoli florets. In this example, we started with 300g, which gave 230g of florets, and added 450ml of water. Or 2/3lb of broccoli, yielding about 1/2lb of florets, cooked in a little under a pint of water, if you prefer those measures.

If you’re in a country which still measures mass by fractions of a hundredweight, you might not realize that a litre of water (=1000ml) at room temperature weighs a kilogram, so 1g = 1ml. It’s often easier to weigh water with digital scales than to try to use a volume measuring jug.

Add a good few scrunches of sea salt to the pan, put the lid on and bring the water to the boil. Once boiling, drop the broccoli in and toss it around in the water. Add a little more salt on top and replace the lid.

Boil for around 4 minutes, to the point where the knife could cut through the broccoli with no resistance (ie if the knife goes easily through a floret to hit the side of the pan, it’s ready).

Spoon the broccoli into a liquidizer jug and pour the remaining water in – experience will tell you how much is needed (the water will be below the level of the florets in the liquidizer). Season with a final scrunch of salt and black pepper.

Pulse the liquidizer a few times, then start slowly and then give it a 30-60secs on full blast, until you can see the soup is smooth and velvety. You can always add a little more hot water gradually during the blend, if you think it’s too thick (at full speed, look in the top of the jug and you should see a swirling vortex – if it’s just blobbing up and down, it’ll be more like puree than soup so add some more – ideally recently-boiled – hot water).

Gordon suggests pairing with some walnut halves and some ash-rolled goats cheese; in this example, it’s Montagnolo Affine, a creamy blue cheese which melts a little into the hot soup and gives it an extra lift.

Serve by pouring on one side of the bowl and let the soup flow around. If you’ve seasoned it lightly but often throughout the cooking process, it won’t need anything else on top, other than some froufrou garnish if you like. Enjoy.

Normal service of talking about Excel pivot tables and other rubbish resumes next week. Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it.

657 – Bye Bye, OneNote (for Win10)

Posted on November 18, 2022 by ewand

When Windows 8 was at the planning stage, a new model was envisaged which could deliver Windows applications consistently through an App Store (rather than needing each app to have its own install/uninstall mechanism). Other benefits would come, too –automatic app scaling of the UI depending on the size and orientation of the screen, improved security and power management… not to mention the same app running on phones, tablets, PCs, Hololens, TVs… such nirvana! And the charms!

Both the the app platform and the Windows Phone had lots of great ideas, but when the Phone went away and the multi-platform app dream then stopped being viable, the ”Modern” app model (which became the Universal Windows Platform, or UWP) was on borrowed time. Perhaps the zenith of UWP app functionality, and still one of its best apps, is/was the OneNote store app, later described as OneNote for Windows 10.

Inevitably, having multiple apps which share the same name yet are fundamentally different can cause confusion. Fortunately, apart from Skype, Teams, Office, Xbox and a few others, Microsoft doesn’t typically have this problem.

Previously, if you’d searched in the Microsoft Store for “OneNote”, you would find the ~~Modern~~ / ~~Metro~~ UWP version, listed as just “OneNote” in the Store even though it called itself OneNote for Windows 10 upon installation, assuming it wasn’t there already by dint of being preinstalled. Capiche?

After deciding to reprieve the traditional Win32 OneNote, having hitherto announced it was to be dropped in favour of the shiny new one, the plan is now to port some of the best features of the UWP app back to the Win32 version and instead consolidate on that. The UWP variant will stop being supported in October 2025, at the same time as Windows 10 reaches end of life.

If you search the Microsoft Store for “OneNote” now, you’ll get an app with the same name and basically the same icon as the old UWP app, but this one is an updated packaging up of the desktop/Win32 app. The description even points out that some of the pictured features are planned for the future vs available now.

Both versions of Windows OneNote have been able to coexist for years – WindowsKey+R onenote <ENTER> will fire up the desktop application whereas Win+R onenote-cmd: <ENTER> starts the UWP version. Both could even open the same Notebooks so apart from user preference, it didn’t really matter which one was used. The UWP app had a similar look and feel to the web and mobile apps, though they have diverged somewhat in recent months.

One benefit of keeping both is that it’s a great way of having all your work notes in one and all your home stuff in the other, so when you search for something, it won’t cross over and give you meeting notes when you’re looking for shopping lists.

If you want to more easily distinguish between the versions, you could change the icon of the full-fat version, and potentially pin them both to Taskbar or Start menu.

If you don’t have “OneNote for Windows 10” installed on your Windows PC, you can still get it if you know the secret – well, it’s not much of a secret, you just need to know the direct link to the Store that lets you find it. Shhhh.

656 – Sign-in around the world

Posted on November 11, 2022 by ewand

Childhood games sometimes revolved around the goodies and the baddies. Early Western movies often had the convention of good guys wearing white hats and villans wearing black; if nothing else, it helped the viewer distinguish who was who in a fast-moving fight scene when the film is shot in monochrome.

White hat and Black hat are also terms given to computer hackers, the black hats being figuratively worn by criminals trying to break in to systems for nefarious gain, whereas the white hat hackers do it so they can report vulnerabilities and make things more secure. As ever with computing, there are also many shades of grey.

In your own technology environment, you probably never see the bad actors until you are dealing with the aftermath of a security breach. Check that your common usernames and passwords are not being circulated around, by using the Password Monitor in Edge and look for known leaks at Have I Been Pwned.

If you use a Microsoft Account (also known as MSA, commonly identified with domains like outlook.com, hotmail.com, live.com etc), then it’s a good idea to make sure it has a complex password and most importantly that muti-factor authentication is enabled. See best practices for managing your MSA.

If you’d like to scare yourself, take a look at the activity history for your MSA – here – and you’ll probably see lots of attempts to sign in from places you’ve never been to, if it was even possible to have visited them in the timeframe of the activities.

Hopefully all the unrecognized tries to sign in have been denied… maybe it’s a good time to log in to any old Hotmail.com etc accounts you may still have, just to make sure they are secured appropriately?

It used to be considered a good idea to change passwords regularly, but in recent years that has been discouraged. It would be safer to have a long, complex password which is unique for each website or account you use, probably hooked up with a password manager and authenticator app. You could even remove the password altogether and use only multi-factor authentication.

MFA – or 2FA – isn’t perfect, though. El Reg reports on a very real threat to enterprise security, described as “MFA Fatigue” – when an administrator of a system who normally has to use MFA to access it, is bombarded by authentication prompts at times they don’t expect.

Human nature might assume the system is playing up, and eventually hit “Approve” on the MFA screen, to stop the annoyance.

Microsoft’s security prouct group has some advice on how to protect users from MFA Fatigue Attacks and has released a bunch of updates to the Microsoft Authenticator app and the back-end services to hopefully make it less of a threat.

The primary problem with all IT security though, ultimately sits between the keyboard and the chair.

655 – Like my email

Posted on November 4, 2022 (Updated November 4, 2022) by ewand

Every time you buy anything, stay anywhere or eat something, you’re peppered with requests to review and recommend whatever it was. If review / like fatigue has not yet set in, there’s now the ability to signal a reaction with emails in Outlook and M365.

The likey-likey feature is only present for emails in your own organization – ie. you can’t like that email that informs you’ve won the state lottery, or that your Apple ID has been compromised (though it is reported that sometimes the reactions do work across tenants). You can, however, send an appropriate emote to any email that originated from someone in your organization (even if there are other externals on it).

In desktop Outlook, look for the smiley icon in the response area at the top right of a message in the preview pane or when you open it outright; Outlook Web App has a similar UI which might contain other extensions’ icons next to the smiley too.

There isn’t a could have been a meeting or a please take me off this email button, but whenever you click on the like, love, laugh etc icon, the reaction is visible to the originator of the mail. (Happy Silver Anniversary, btw, Bedlam DL3 – hope you get on the EBC wall)

To see what people have to say of the guff you send, look at the Notifications icon in the top right of Outlook / OWA, and as well as any mentions you may have from people who can’t type your name without putting an @ in front of it, you’ll see a summary of who has reacted to each message, and how.

Alternatively, look in your Sent Items and if you select a message you can see what reactions it has had; there isn’t an easy way to show reactions in the table view so you could see which messages are the most popular without having to preview or open them up. It probably can be done – though likely a palaver for limited utility.

Here’s a challenge – if you’re a ‘Softie and you got this in email, react to the message and see if we can break the internet.
Thank you for all that you do!