670 – Clipboard history

Posted on February 24, 2023 (Updated February 24, 2023) by ewand

Some tips deserve multiple bites^*especially when the recipe changes between software versions. This one harks back to ToWs #457 and #482, yet it’s still seemingly little known. If you ever have to watch someone share their desktop on Teams and fuss about when copying and pasting stuff, this could be a useful tip to share with them.

*ToW readers will probably know there are 8 bits in a byte; did you know that half a byte is called a nibble?
There is no accepted name for 2-bits, though Bing AI suggested it might be a “crumb”.

The metaphor of cutting and pasting has been around since the early days of interactive computing, taking inspiration from the way that printed publications would be edited together by physically cutting parts of one page and gluing/pasting them onto another. They might have been kept on a physical clipboard between the snip and the stick.

The Windows clipboard is common across all applications, and has an opt-in feature to keep a history so you can go back to something you copied previously; turn on the history or interact with your previous clips by pressing WindowsKey+V. See more on using Clipboard history. You can also sync the clipboard across multiple devices too.

The same UI for clipboard history can also be used to insert special characters, emoticons and the like, into any application – in fact, pressing WindowsKey+. (that’s a full stop or period) brings up the smiley-picker, which is just another one of the tabs on the same dialogue as clipboard.

You can pin clipped items if you like, and pressing the ellipsis … gives the option of removing an item, or pasting it as text – handy if you’d like to paste a URL rather than a smart link that results in the title of a web page with hyperlink behind it.

669 – Hazelnut in every bite

Posted on February 17, 2023 by ewand

What has a hazlenut in every bite? That’s right, a Topic from the British sweetie shop of yesteryear, and nothing at all to do with what’s near Tufty’s nest. Sadly discontinued last year, due to falling demand, there’s no accounting for taste.

Topics are still available today to users of Microsoft 365, as a way of curating certain scraps of knowledge that they can share with other users within the same organization. The very first version of Microsoft SharePoint (codenamed “Tahoe”) had a capability that aimed to do much the same thing – “Best Bets” were a way for an administrator to guide the search experience so that if someone ran a query for a term, rather than returning hundreds of old PowerPoint files that contain that word, it would take the searcher to a more official site.

Viva Topics – because everything is getting Vivafied just as in the days of Tahoe, every other product had Live and/or .NET in its name – is part of a growing family of “employee experience” offerings; it’s an addon to even the top flight ~~Office~~ Microsoft 365 subscription, but adds AI-powered discovery as well as the means to manually curate things.

After deploying Topics and assigning licenses to the appropriate users, topic pages can be automatically created based on the documents that exist already – the Search and underlying Graph services can identify subjects that look like are active, with people contributing to them through documents, conversations and so on. Codenames or location names, for example, could be quickly identified and suggested.

A Knowledge Manager could also be assigned to create or approve new pages; individual users could be empowered to do it themselves, though that might end up in something of a mess. Best practice would be to have some kind of form or email-based request, where a user would ask for a topic page to be created and they would then own the content within.

Discovery is pretty easy – depending on how it’s set up, if the title of a topic is mentioned on a SharePoint site, it can be automatically highlighted on a pop-up card with which will give a summary of the topic, and a link to more the main page which contains furtherinformation.

Topic pages themselves can be full of useful info; a search for documents or other pages that the SharePoint environment behind the scenes considers to be related, as well as specifically curated sources of information, contact cards for the people who are managing the project or involved with the customer, links to docs or other websites etc.

Within Office apps like Word or Outlook, if the user highlights a word or phrase and chooses to Search for it, a sidebar in Office will run a search online and across internal sites for that word – this is avialable to everyone, with or without Topics deployed.

If Topics has been configured and the searched for term is a topic (or is one of the topic’s synonyms, or is otherwise related), then the user will see it fairly prominently in the search results.

Now who’s for some chocolatey nuts?

668 – Ay Eye Ay Eye, Oh

Posted on February 10, 2023 by ewand

Not Aye-Aye, Ally-Ally, nor Why-Eye, but Ay-Eye, as in A.I. And not the cheesy Spielberg flick. The tech news has been all about artificial intelligence recently, whether it’s ChatGPT writing essays or giving witty responses, to Microsoft committing another chunk of change to its developer, OpenAI.

Original backers of OpenAI include Tony Stark (who has since resigned from the board in order to discombobulate the world in other ways) and AWS, though Amazon has warned employees not to accidentally leak company secrets to ChatGPT and its CTO has been less than enthused.

ChatGPT is just one application – a conversational chatbot – using the underlying language technology that is GPT-3, developed by the OpenAI organization and first released over 2 years ago. It parses language and using previously analyzed data sets, gives plausible-sounding responses.

Further evolutions could be tuned for particular tasks, like generating code – as already available in PowerApps (using GPT-3 to help build formulae) or GitHub CodePilot (which uses other OpenAI technology that extends GPT-3). Maybe other variants could be used for interviews or auto-generating clickbait news articles and blog posts.

Another use for GPT-n has been unveiled in the New Bing – an old dog has maybe learned some new tricks?

You’ll need to join the waitlist initially but this could ultimately be a transformational search technology. Google responded quickly by announcing Bard, though Googling “Google Bard” will tell you how one simple mistake hit the share price. No technology leader lasts forever, unless things coalesce to there being only one.

Other AI models are available, such as OpenAI alternative, Cohere, and there are plenty of sites out there touting AI based services (even if they’re repainting an existing thing to have .ai at the end of it). For some mind-blowing inspiration including AI-generated, royalty-free music or stock photos, see this list.

667 – Good Game, Good Game

Posted on February 3, 2023 by ewand

Gaming is big business. There’s a story that gaming is bigger than Hollywood, though that depends what you include and what you don’t. Like TV and cinema, the gaming industry has faced transformational changes to its traditional model. The days of buying a game in a store, taking it home and playing it for days or months, before it gathers dust on a shelf or is passed to a new owner, are largely over. Mobile gaming, digital delivery, pay-for addons and subscription services are the new world.

Games consoles are typically subsidized by their maker, using the razor blade economics model of selling the device at a loss but making that back by charging a little extra on every game. Add to that the move to online services as a way of making money to help keep the cost of the hardware low.

Sometimes that hardware cost can bite – like the feared Red Ring of Death which affected the Xbox 360 console about 15 years ago; the action to extend warranties on Xbox consoles and to swiftly replace failed ones cost Microsoft over $1B (nearly a quarter of which was FedEx charges for the free shipping to and fro) but probably saved the Xbox brand from irreparable damage, thanks in part to swift decision making by SteveB.

Other costly mis-steps are all over the gaming industry – like a film studio releasing a bad movie, sometimes successful tech companies back track from their entertainment plans, like Google shuttering its cloud-streaming Stadia service or Atari literally burying unsold stock. There was even a documentary about that one.

But let’s not get down on history and failure; the future’s bright! Maybe virtual reality will be the next big thing, just as 3D Television was for home entertainment.

The Xbox 360 went on to be a successful platform, and many of its games are still played today, as the weird hardware of the 360 can be emulated on the more powerful Xbox One and its successor Xbox Series S and Series X. Some of the old games can even be upgraded by the new consoles, running in 4K and with a higher frame rate than the originals.

Back in the present, the Xbox Game Pass subscription service (sometimes referred to as like Netflix for video games) continues to evolve and grow; new titles released include the Nintendo 64 classic given a 4K reboot, Goldeneye 007, and Age of Empires II has made the surprisingly successful leap from PC to console too.

Game Pass is available for Xbox consoles, for PC games, or in the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate combo which includes both PC and console games.

Check out TechRadar for some tips on finding special deals.