Category: Apps

#75: Mind your P@assw0rds

Posted on by ewand

Designer (28)

Be honest: when you sign up for some website, do you just use the same email address / password? If so, you’re not alone – around three-quarters of people reuse the same passwords, even though most know they really shouldn’t.

A CyberNews study of over 19 billion exposed passwords shows that many are weak and easy to guess, too – the most popular passwords for the last 15 years are, basically, “123456” and “password”. Some of the more high-profile security breaches have come about directly because of weak and compromised credentials.

ToW has talked about passwords a bit in the distant past – #620, #656 in the old days, and most recently, #33 – Securing your Microsoft Account (MSA). If you haven’t done so already, go right now to that last link and set up Multifactor Autthentication (MFA) on your Microsoft Account.

Authenticator being Edged out

Like Google Chrome, Firefox and pretty much every modern browser, Microsoft’s Edge can offer to generate nice complex passwords for you. It also has a password store which can automatically fill your usernames & passwords next time you revisit websites, so you don’t need to remember them or write them down, and synchronise them between different devices logged in with the same ID.

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In shock news bordering on marginal enshittification, Microsoft has decided to remove a useful component of the Authenticator app that it prefers to use for managing 2FA/MFA on its various types of logins.

Thus far, if you have Authenticator set up with your Microsoft Account or an Entra ID, you can sync your passwords from the PC and be able to review them in the app, just as you would by going to Settings / Passwords options in the desktop Edge browser (or entering edge://wallet/passwords into the address bar).

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This means that it can be handy to find a username/password when you’re mobile, in case you need to enter it manually, but also it allows Authenticator to provide an “autofill service” for other apps on your device, not just web pages. When you get unceremoniously signed out of an app just because it’s been automatically updated, the autofill service can recover and re-enter your username and password.

It’s this bit that is being yanked from Authenticator – for reasons unknown, other than “Microsoft is streamlining autofill”. Maybe nobody uses it? Maybe Microsoft would prefer anyone who does use Edge on their PC and who wants to access passwords while mobile, to be compelled to use Edge on their Phone also?

Similarly, Payment info that is synced from browser to Authenticator will be removed in July 2025.

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The workaround (other than moving to a completely different password management system) is indeed to switch autofill provider on your phone to use Edge instead (having first installed it and synced it with your ID, if you haven’t already). In mitigation, the mobile versions of the browser are pretty good, and if you do use Edge on the PC or Mac, it makes sense to sync stuff across to your phone as well.

The password autofill is pretty much indistinguishable when using Edge in place of Authenticator. The UX for password management, however, isn’t so good (go into mobile Edge, Settings, and look for Passwords) but maybe that’s the price of progress?

#74: ZoomIt joins the other ’toys

Posted on by ewand

A large toybox with the Windows logo on the side, half-full of interesting looking toys. One of them

There’s a long history of people building cool add-ons and tools for Windows. From “Tiny Elvis” which amazed Win3.1 users, to a whole suite of tech-nerd extensions called Winternals, offering stuff that could peer under the hood of the then-new Windows NT system. Some were officially produced – the Microsoft Plus! pack for Win95, or numerous Resource Kit tools spring to mind.

Microsoft internal teams released a free set of utilities called PowerToys for Windows 95: some background to the developments came out 20 years ago.

A new PowerToys package appeared more recently for Windows 10 and 11 – it’s a free collection of numerous utilities which extend Windows in some way. Some have featured in previous ToWs – #647 and #15 among them (the former being Old Testament before the Great Reset, the latter being in the new world).

PowerToys is updated regularly on GitHub (see details on https://aka.ms/powertoysresleasenotes) and gets bug fixes for some of the tools, or periodically, whole new additions. After 5 years, it’s still “Preview” and has reached v0.90.1. Perhaps that version number is asymptotic, in that it will never actually be 1.0.

There are currently 25+ tools ranging from occasionally useful things like Find My Mouse to larger, previously separate utilities which might be used every day, like Mouse without Borders.

Look on the system tray for the colourful PowerToys icon and left-click on it to get the Quick access menu (currently non-customizable, which is a bit odd – like, how often do you need to edit your Hosts file? ).

Double-click on the PowerToys system tray icon and you’ll get a more expansive dialog, allowing you to enable or disable individual utilities and get a reminder of what the keystroke is to invoke it.

Don’t fall asleep

One of those occasionally handy tools that, when enabled, has its own system tray icon, is Awake.

It shows up as a coffee cup in the System tray and can be used to over-ride any compulsion your PC has to go to sleep or even blank the screen. Handy if you’re downloading something from a slow network and you need to keep the PC active, or you want to keep the machine available for remote access etc.

Another use case is when using PIP/split-screen modes on large monitors, things can get a bit unpredictable if the primary input disappears through power saving schemes. Setting a longer timeout for the “Keep awake” will mean the screen doesn’t blank so quickly, until you revert to normal and let the machine’s power plan take over.

Zoom Zoom!

A recent addition to PowerToys is ZoomIt (not to be confused with the metadirectory services company which was a forerunner to Microsoft Identity Manager).

If you’ve ever watched Azure CTO and all round technical fellow Mark Russinovich present at a major conference, you’ve almost certainly seen him using ZoomIt. In a nutshell, you can zoom into a static grab of the screen, using the mouse or trackpad to smoothly zoom in and out. It lets you annotate highlights using the mouse – Mark would do this to underline some part of a demo he was giving, showing where something has changed or where a command should be entered.

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As well as zooming on a static view, it can also zoom into a live part of the screen too (which might be handy for doing precision mousing), plus some other neat presenter-friendly tricks like having a full-screen countdown timer.

ZoomIt was originally built by Mark’s company Winternals, which became SysInternals, and was acquired by Microsoft in 2006. The tool is available standalone from PowerToys if you prefer, alongside many other technical utilities.

#73: Seek and ye shall find. Maybe.

Posted on by ewand

A person looking through a magnifying glass AI-generated content may be incorrect.

When storage was less plentiful, computer users paid more attention to the location and size of their files. You’d delete stuff you didn’t need to free up space, and if you only had dozens or maybe a few hundred documents or emails, you’d probably remember how to find them.

Not so now. SSD drives for desktop PCs now cost under £50/Terabyte, or >5p per Gigabyte (compared to 30 years ago, when a 1GB drive could be ~£500, and 58 years ago a 1MB hard disk would have set you back $1M).

A Microsoft 365 Family subscription gives up to 6 people in the environment 1TB each of OneDrive storage as part of the £9/month total. Googlers can get 200GB of Drive space for £2.50 a month, or less than 1p per GB each month.

With storage so capacious and cheap, it’s easy to adopt the “piler” strategy that you don’t need to organise or file things away because you’ll be able to find them later, either through just remembering where you put them or by having some other kind of index or tool.

Time / Money

There used to be a website which posed the question that if Bill Gates (then the richest person in the world) was walking down the street and saw a $$ bill, would it need to be worth for him to stop and pick it up? Let’s ask Copilot to update that for today:

Now, if you estimate your own earnings and divide by 31,536,000, it’s probably going to be worthwhile stopping for a $1 note or £1 coin. But if you think about all the time it might take to manage your emails and old documents, vs just leaving them in place and paying for a bit more storage…

Finding documents on PC

Assuming you have documents and other files on your PC, perhaps synced down from a folder that lives in OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox etc, they should be indexed and easy to find. Maybe you’ve deliberately decided to keep files in a local folder that will be lost if your disk dies. Unless specifically excluded, Windows will index the contents of all your files, and lets you search from the Start menu or from within Windows Explorer.

Press the Windows key or icon to open Start and type in whatever you’re looking for. Helpfully, it offers files/documents or the option of searching the web for the same thing. Unhelpfully, some would opine, the web search uses Edge browser and the Bing search engine regardless of what the default browser/search engine is. This can be worked around but it’s a clumsy way to try to drive people to use Edge and Bing.

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The Windows Search service (and Indexing Service that it replaced) runs in the background and been around in one form or another since Windows 2000. It spots when a file has changed and looks at its properties and contents, so it can be quickly located. Look at the ellipsis “…” on the search results on Start menu for a quick way to tweak the settings.

Some of the clickbaity “Do These 5 Things Right Now To Make Windows Faster!” type articles online would advocate for switching it off altogether, but the gains will be marginal. You’d be better following some of the other nonsense you’d find on the MSN/Bing/Edge homepage.

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Former Windows engineer Dave Plummer shares his thoughts on the efficacy of Windows Search; it’s a relatively hard problem to solve without wasting a lot of resource, even if Macs do a better job (sometimes). If you know the content is on OneDrive / SharePoint / Dropbox etc, it might be quicker just going to the appropriate host and looking for the document there.

If you know the name of the file – or some part thereof – but you can’t recall where it is, then it’s worth looking at freeware, Everything. A super-slimmed down and lightning-fast interface will index filenames across the entire machine; if can also search contents if you like, but since they won’t be indexed first, it’s laboriously slow.

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Hoping to find online

Locating documents online should be easy – for consumer OneDrive, just go to https://onedrive.live.com/ or for corporate files in SharePoint or OneDrive for business, try the new https://m365.cloud.microsoft/ homepage for Office 365 / Microsoft 365 Copilot.

OneDrive offers some useful benefits when managing photos – like the ability to show you pictures taken in a particular place or of specific things, just as Google Photos does. Finding stuff you’re pretty sure is there somewhere might not always work out, though – OneDrive has had a bug for some months which gives rather less than inclusive search results.

Here’s what comes back when the same query is run on the same set of 1,000s of photos stored in both OneDrive and Google… (using the Split view discussed in ToW #51):

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Maybe relying on search to find stuff is a fool’s errand, and the Earth shall belong to the Filers after all.

#72: Sending pages from your pocket

Posted on (Updated by ewand

Browsing on mobile devices is the main way people use the web. As mentioned in ToW #62, the last decade has seen a complete shift from PC & Mac being used for nearly 70% of web traffic to the dominant platforms being Android and iOS.

One nuance the stats don’t take into account, though, is that most of the 30% who’re still on Windows & OS X will also be browsing on whatever phone they have. It’s not uncommon to see people sitting in front of a desktop or laptop, while using their phone for other things – be that reading stuff in a mobile web browser or using a dedicated app.

Sharing is Caring

One feature common to all the main mobile browsers and their desktop equivalents is the ability to send pages (or tabs) from one to the other, assuming you’re signed in on both using the same account. While the meedja appears to work on the assumption that everyone+dog has an iPhone, around 2/3 of mobile browsing is done with Google Chrome and variants, and over 70% of the browsing devices are running Android.

For those reasons, we’re going to use Android and Windows as the use case for this week’s tip, but the same things can also be done on Mac + iOS. Probably.

Mobile apps -> desktop

If you’re sitting on the sofa flicking through stuff, there will be times where it’s easier to look at the content on a bigger screen. Sure, you might be able mirror the device on the big TV, but who ever does that?

Let’s say you’re browsing an eBay listing and want to send it to your laptop so you can see the pictures better. One option is to try using Google’s Quick Share to send something straight from a phone app to the PC, once you’ve set up the software and signed in.  Mac users need to jump through some additional non-official hoops.

Quick Share is the new name for “Nearby Share” –  start by clicking the sharing icon on the top of the eBay app (or from whatever app you’re looking to share something).

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How the app behaves will differ from one to another; in the case of the eBay app, it will offer to send a link to this listing to some other app on the device, including the ability to share it elsewhere.

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The list of apps (and contacts) will vary depending on usage. If you have Microsoft’s Phone Link already set up between your phone and PC, you can just fire it to your PC using the Send to PC command, and it will open a new browser page right away. If using Quick Share, you’ll get a prompt to open it.

Mobile browser -> desktop

Another more general and consistent use case is when you’re on the phone using a web browser rather than an app. Clicking the Share icon in Chrome will let you copy the link to the phone’s clipboard or send it to a variety of other contacts or apps (just as in the previous eBay app example), or “Send to devices”: in this case, any other device where you’re also logged in to Chrome with the same Google ID. You could also screen grab the page or generate a QR code, so if you want to share the link with someone nearby, you can do that more easily than faffing about with Bluetooth.

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After tapping this option and choosing the relevant PC, you’ll see a notification show up in Chrome.

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You’ll also see “Your devices” if you expand Chrome’s History either in the menu or by pressing CTRL+H…

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From Edge to Edge

Some small proportion of Microsoft fans might be running the mobile Edge browser on their Android or even iOS phones. It’s a surprisingly good mobile browsing experience with built-in ad blocker, password saving integration with Microsoft Authenticator and an inevitable smatter of Copilotry.

Edge Mobile was built on the Chromium browser engine and released a year before the main desktop Edge was ported to Chromium too. As a result, many features in Google Chrome are also carried over (since it, unsurprisingly, is also based on Chromium), except that you’d be running Edge on your mobile device and signing into Edge on your PC or Mac using a Microsoft Account.

Similar to how Chrome does it, Edge will also let you send links to your PC or Mac – the quickest way is to go to the “hamburger” 3-line menu in the bottom right, and choose “Send to devices” to get a list of potential target computers. The menu that appears on the mobile browser may be several pages wide; swipe left and right to see the others and press and hold anywhere on the menu to edit it, allowing you to reorder the icons or hide/show them.

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Just as Chrome behaves, having sent the link to one or multiple PCs, a notification will appear in desktop Edge inviting you to open it…

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… and if you have the browser on PC and phone both set up to sync with your Microsoft Account, you’ll also see previous pages browsed on the phone by looking in the History page (CTRL+H) in Edge on the PC, which makes it easy to go back to pages you had previously viewed on the phone without needing to deliberately send them across.

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#71: Trying to search on LinkedIn

Posted on by ewand

a cartoon image of a man sitting in front of a desktop computer screen, showing him trying to search

Since you’re not reading this on LinkedIn, you’re maybe not one of the believers – Stay strong! It’s been nearly 9 years since Microsoft announced its plan to blow $26Bn on acquiring the social network for business users, supposedly in competition with Salesforce, Facebook, Google…

At the time, Forbes commented:

This new deal means Microsoft can embed LinkedIn with Skype, its email system and other enterprise products so that, in the words of one Silicon Valley expert, it will be able ‘to recreate the connective tissue for enterprises.’

It seems the Skype integration never really did pan out. Outlook and LinkedIn never got especially close, and Salesforce’s nightmare of Microsoft poring over all that data and not letting anyone else get access to it never really materialised. Even Microsoft tools don’t really have very good access to the data.

One of us (but not really)

At the time, the LinkedIn acquisition was Microsoft’s largest and seen as quite risky, with the backdrop of a failed $45B bid for Yahoo! and not-exactly-successful integrations of multi-billion buyouts of Nokia and others.

There was some consternation on how LinkedIn could possibly be worth all that money – one of the most popular internal Microsoft Yammer communities has even been reborn in LinkedIn, for current and former ‘softies alike …

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(though Groups in LI seem to be less functional than Facebook Groups, so the place to go is FB’s Microsoft Old-timers, which has about 30x as many members).

In truth, LinkedIn has been very successful – as pointed out by the excellent Jack Rowbotham:

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It’s said there are over 1 billion users. LinkedIn revenue was reported as growing 9% year-on-year in the FY25 Q2 results. Though revenue numbers are combined with other groups, Statista reckons that totals about $16B annual revenue. Not bad.

Maybe what has been LinkedIn’s biggest reason for success in the Microsoft family is that it’s never really been fully assimilated. Sure, management sits at the top table (and co-founder Reid Hoffman is on the board) but LinkedIn has been kept (or kept itself?) at arm’s length; Microsoft friends and partners are not LinkedIn friends and partners. LinkedIn employees have linkedin.com primary email addresses, not microsoft.com ones (even if they may also have a lesser-user microsoft.com address…) There’s a certain defiance of separateness even after almost a decade, a bit like Dynamics used to be or as GitHub also is.

Even the platform it runs on is not quite fully on the bus – after announcing a plan to gradually move to Azure and run on Azure Linux instead of CentOS, that has reportedly been binned in favour of a hybrid model.

Searching for stuff

To paraphrase Yoda: Search not: Find, though that is sometimes easier said than done. Along with holding itself apart organisationally and technically from the rest of Microsoft, LinkedIn has a somewhat stubbornly different look and feel to everything else that comes from Redmond.

Searching on LinkedIn starts with entering whatever you’re looking for in the search bar on the home page.

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There are few operators you can use – AND/OR and putting stuff in quotes can help to guide things, but you will need to use the Posts / Companies etc filters to zone in to the right content, and you can only do that after the first search has been run. Note that AND, OR and NOT must be in capitals and they specifically call out that + / – isn’t supported.

So, if you want to find something – a previous post in a newsletter you’d read, for example – there isn’t an easy way to do it without first searching everything, then telling LinkedIn that you don’t want “people” but something else. Even going to the newsletter home page doesn’t give you the ability to search its contents, which seems like an own goal.

If you’re looking for a Post you may get a button offering “From my network”, and clicking on that will invoke a filter to select your top  connections, people you follow or your own posts.

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But you might not get that option. If you don’t, then you need to select Posts and then use the Date, Content type or, in this example, “From Member” filter. If you’re looking for your own content, you need to type your own name and have it resolve, before clicking on show results.

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More help is available on Search on LinkedIn, and you might notice that some filters stick sometimes (but not always) so if you’ve already set the Posts and From:me filters up, then others searches will keep them until you clear the filters, or they somehow just clear themselves.

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When you do get results, depending on what you search for, you’ll be presented a list of things that look like they match, but there’s no highlighting of the search terms to see where that match is, so you’ll need to open them up individually to see if they match.

For the more adventurous, you could hack the URL to add search terms and set the filters – eg

https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=vermouth%20AND%20recipe&postedBy=%5B%22me%22%5D

There are some special characters in that URL – %20 is space, %22 is “ and %5B and %5D are square brackets, so you could actually enter

https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=vermouth AND recipe&postedBy=[“me”]

… and the browser will sort it out.

Or just search, get a wide range of initial results then use the filters. It’s less “correct” but it’s bound to be quicker.

#65: Enshittifcation 2025 pt 1 – progressing well

Posted on by ewand

A computer on a table AI-generated content may be incorrect.

The “word of the year” for 2023 was “Enshittification” – as defined by author Cory Doctorow:

“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”.

Similar concepts have been written about previously.

An Australian dictionary summarized it nicely in 2024 as “The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”

There are numerous variants of enshittification which we’ve all observed, usually concerned with improving revenue streams for the service provider at the expense of the quality of the service or organizations failing in some way.

· Changing the business model of the service because the original premise isn’t sustainable

· Killing products or removing features which cost too much to provide

· Failure to adapt with technology, stifling innovation, leading to stagnation and irrelevance

· Decline of a service or community due to poor leadership, user behaviour or rise of another

· Trapping customers, making it inordinately difficult to cancel or migrate from the service

Sometimes these moves are long planned – capture the market by operating at a loss then pay back your investors later by reaping the rewards of early market advantage, potentially even turning the screws on your customers (see Amazon, Netflix). Companies might be overaggressive competitors, looking to quash alternatives (Amazon, Microsoft), and it’s just a fact of life that some things don’t work and walking away from them angers or disappoints customers who used them (see Google, Microsoft, many others).

2025 In

This year is barely 20% over but we’ve already seen numerous changes to popular online services. Netflix is cranking up subscription pricing again (among others); Microsoft has added Copilot features to Personal and Family plans, jacking the cost up significantly to pay for it. Spotify has been teasing a lossless service for years, but might get around to launching it this summer. Hands up who thinks it will be an extra cost over the standard tier?

Even if a service provider puts out notice that they’re going to make some degrading change (or if, as WindowsForum.com does about all the upcoming Microsoft cuts, others collect the news and report it), it can still feel like a shock when you notice it’s not there any more. Microsoft calls it “deprecation”.

As mentioned in ToW #62, there are lots of occasions where a feature changes very much for the worse (from a user’s perspective) but there’s nothing much you can do about it other than seek an alternative.

Search caching

One relatively quiet change that happened in both Google and Bing during 2024 was the removal of cached pages in search results. This was a handy way to find a web page which, for whatever reason, wasn’t online any more … though could be used to find out how a page looked before some recent change. “Link Rot” means that lots of pages link to sites that have disappeared.

Both Google and Bing used to have cached copies of pages that could be viewed by clicking an icon next to the item in search results.

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Google discontinued it without notice in February 2024, so people who noticed would turn to Bing, Yahoo or Baidu as they all still offered the cached feature. The reasons for removal? “It was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.”

Bing followed suit in December, saying, “This week, we’ve removed cache links from Bing search results. As the internet has evolved for better reliability, and many pages aren’t optimized for cache viewing.”

Both reasons smack of “we’re doing this because it makes your life simpler and the feature wasn’t needed any more anyway”, but in reality there will be cost savings and potentially legislative reasons too. Why offer the service if you can’t monetize it? What’s next?

Google has since wired in a link to the Internet Archive – a free, useful resource though sometimes a bit slow and not always complete – if you click the “:” to the side of a search result, then click through to “More about this page ->”.

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Turn to specific addins

One of the use cases for looking at cached results is to see how something was previously described before it was updated; or maybe to see how much something was being advertised for, previously? Have you ever seen a product marked as “SOLD” and wondered what it had priced at before?

It may be worth looking at the various extensions / app stores to see if there’s an enterprise developer who’s built something that might help. One such is the excellent AT Price Tracker, for the UK Autotrader website.

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Who’d want to be trying to sell luxury 3-ton EV-SUVs at the moment?

AT Price Tracker will show a summary of what the same advert has been listed at previously; traders could remove it entirely and re-post to fox the logic of the app, but it’s presumably under the radar enough for most not to even notice it.

Unless Autotrader decides to get some enshittification in and block whatever access the addin has.

#63: Trouble with your network?

Posted on by ewand

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We’ve all been there. Just when you need it to work, your home internet connection goes down or huffs off in go-slow mode. You’ll have seen others who, even 5 years after enforced home working, haven’t quite figured out how to make their networks, er, work. Or the colleague who always appears to be having trouble with their internet, so they can’t switch on the camera…?

What to do if your network appears to be up the swannee?

STEP ONE – THE THREE-FINGERED-SALUTE

If you’re lazy and uninterested in the root cause of a problem, then a quick way to resolution might be the have-you-tried-turning-it-off-and-on-again trick. Most broadband routers have a button to reboot them, or even just pull the power for 10 seconds and then put it back in.

Sometimes, service providers will tell you to reboot your router if you are getting an error – streaming apps on smart TVs appear to be adept at this. Technology gurus will scoff that there’s no way that could be the problem, it must be something with the app provider (until they reboot the router as a last resort, and the app starts working).

The original “Three Fingered Salute” was a moniker applied to CTRL+ALT+DEL, the unmaskable hardware combination on early PCs which forced a reboot. Nowadays, Windows handles it with more grace.

STEP TWO – CAN YOU SEE OUTSIDE?

Once you’ve waited 5 minutes for your broadband router to restart (and assuming that hasn’t fixed the problem), the next thing to check is if your computer can talk to the outside world. If not, that means the problem is somewhere between your keyboard and the internet service provider that the modem connects to. Trying to log a fault with your provider’s support desk will generally mean they’ll make you try unplugging and restarting everything in your house first, so be prepared.

Make sure you’re actually connected to the network and have a valid address; in Windows 11, go to Settings / Network & Internet and look at Properties of whatever the connection is. You should see the local network address of your machine, and the gateway through which everything is sent and received. The format of the numbers might vary but should look something like:

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[If you’re getting a 169.xxx.xxx.xxx address then something is going wrong with your computer and getting an IP address; if it’s in your house, try removing and replacing the network cable, or rebooting the PC and/or router. If it’s in a hotel or public wifi area, give up and set your phone up to do Tethering].

PING!

Now, fire up a command prompt (press WindowsKey+R then enter cmd) and enter ping 192.168.1.1 (or whatever address your default gateway is).

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The ping command literally bounces a short piece of data at the address you’re looking for; if that location is available (and not being blocked by some firewall or other) then it replies, and the fact that you got a response and the speed it took are displayed.

If you’re going to be playing with cables and stuff, you could enter ping -t 192.168.1.1 – the -t flag makes it continue pinging until you close the window or press CTRL+C. If you’re getting a reply at all, and the latency (time<1ms) is stable and low, then your connection to the router is just fine.

Latency is the enemy of a stable and reliable connection – when you see people having problems with Zoom/Teams meetings and their audio or video is garbled and choppy, that’s almost always a latency problem, either within their home network or somewhere further up the chain. Some networks suffer from it inherently – satellite connected, like in-flight WFi, are a good example – and anything that needs a stable, real-time connection (video calls, multiplayer gaming etc) is best avoided.

STEP TWOa – ARE YOU WIRELESS?

If you’re using a wireless network, it’s worth checking that something isn’t getting in the way unexpectedly. IT bods troubleshooting a problematic early business WiFi network found that it kept dropping out randomly, but more often around lunchtime – until they realised their neighbour in the office block had a kitchen on the other side of the wall, with a microwave oven that nuked their WiFi whenever it was used. Some home electronics could do the same, or even things like wood burning stoves.

Maybe your household is near other users who could be getting in the way? Try scaring them for a laugh but it’s also worth making sure your WiFi network isn’t clashing with theirs. It could be worth trying the ping -t trick above and move the machine around the place to see if there are some spots where you’re getting really high latency numbers, or to see if the ping reply doesn’t come back at all.

Try the WiFi Analyzer app from the Windows Store (if you’re on a PC; there are many others for iOS/Android and Mac):

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This app will show you all the neighbouring networks and which channel they’re operating on; if you’re sharing the spectrum with too many others then it might be worth reconfiguring your WiFi network to lock to a different channel; time to RTFM for the router.

An alternative to WiFi Analyzer is the long-established inSSider. The latest version needs you to register for an account, but the old one – which still gives a lot of useful info – is still available, if you’re careful to dodge the many links to other unwanted stuff:

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IT’S NOT ME, IT’S YOU

If the internet connection is still not playing ball, but initial signs are that the local network is OK and you’re fairly confident you don’t have sporadic hardware problems or similar, then it’s pretty likely the fault lies elsewhere. Get ready to face the inertia of service provider helpdesks who will assume that the problem is at your end… to prevail, we must arm ourselves with evidence and above all, keep calm.

To avoid over-doing things, we’ll pick that one up next week.

#62: Will the web become exclusively mobile?

Posted on by ewand

A group of people with chains around their faces AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Looking back over the last 50 years of technology progress, the internet must surely be the most significant change enabler. When the developing ARPANet adopted TCP/IP in January 1983, the ‘net as we know it started to really take shape. TimBL wrote up an idea of how to connect pages of info together, and within a few years the Worldwide Web started on one of Mr Jobs’ NeXT machines.

As the web evolved to become more consumer-centric and people got PCs in their home which could connect, life started to shift online, especially when broadband replaced dial-up in the early 2000s. Laptops and WiFi helped to unshackle people from their desks and enabled working and playing from nearly anywhere. Coffee shop owners of the world rejoiced; up to a point.

But the most significant trend has surely been mobile connectivity – initially providing access to the same stuff just on a smaller screen. Now, we’re beginning to see the web and info on it become desktop-free zones. The decline in relevance of the desktop or laptop computer has been coming a long time, as smartphone usage around the world exploded. In the future, we’ll potentially be forced to use phones where a better user experience could well be delivered on a big screen, as service providers try to reduce costs while trying to provide a secure, easy to use experience.

Desktop falling behind

Even in 2014, Windows accounted for nearly 2/3 of web traffic at the start and a bit more than half by the end of the year. Android was taking an early lead over iOS and the Mac had a steady-ish 5%.

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Data from statcounter.com

Contrast to the end of 2024 and two-thirds of all traffic is from Android and iOS, with Windows & Mac together just over 30%.

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Looking beyond which mobile or desktop OS you use, Chrome is the default browser cross-platform with two-thirds of all traffic, while on the desktop, Microsoft Edge has about 13%. Looking at mobile only, Edge has less half of one percent of usage (beaten slightly by Firefox, and Opera has 4 times the usage) though it’s available for both Android and iOS. You have to wonder when Microsoft will pull the plug, even if the mobile Edge browser is a decent effort (especially so if you use Edge on Windows PC too).

Apps taking over, not always for the better

It’s not just that content is moving to be more mobile-oriented; increasingly, stuff that used to be available on the web can only be done via using an app. To a degree, this could be part of an ongoing enshittification process – a topic we’ll delve into in a future ToW.

As an example, Google has removed the “Timeline” feature from Google Maps online. Discussed briefly in ToW #638, this was a great way of checking where and when you were – handy for doing stuff like mileage claims or remembering how long it’s been since you’ve visited someone.

A screenshot of a phone AI-generated content may be incorrect.

This particular change has some solid reasoning behind it; rather than The Chocolate Factory storing data about where you’ve been on its servers, they announced that the data would be held securely on the device instead. Is this Google being altruistic and privacy-sensitive, or just trying to avoid being held to account for something down the line? … You decide.

From an end-user perspective, losing access to Timeline in the browser is a bit annoying and too bad if you want to share your history across multiple devices – the data is local to one device only and that’s that. Just in case your phone gets lost, you might want to back it up now…

Un Appy with Online Banking

There are many other examples of websites trying to push you to use their apps (click a link on a mobile browser and it often will try to redirect you), but the biscuit is surely taken by at least one UK credit card provider.

Early digital banking services might have required special hardware or bespoke PC applications, but gradually all went into the browser, with some requiring a hardware token or other device to be used when signing in. Now, it’s very common to need some form of Multi-factor authentication like receiving a one-time SMS message to be able to login; even making a one-off purchase generally requires Strong Customer Authentication.

Users of Virgin Money credit cards have no web-based view of their account, with the options being to use the app or do everything another way. Viewing and download statements can only be done on the phone; the only alternative is to request a paper version be posted.

The in-app help used to advise that if you wanted your statements on a proper computer, then download the PDFs to your phone and email them to yourself. Fortunately, that advice has since been removed…

Happily, if you’re an Android & PC user at least, you could use the Phone Link app to browse the file system on the device when it’s connected. The phone will appear in the left pane on Windows Explorer…

A screenshot of a computer AI-generated content may be incorrect.

… and if you navigate to Phone Name > storage > Download, you’ll be able to view, copy elsewhere on your PC, and even delete the file from the phone storage.

A screenshot of a computer AI-generated content may be incorrect.

If you’re using OneDrive (the consumer version) for your personal files, you might want to enable the Personal Vault and put potentially sensitive stuff in there.

#61: Adios, Office!

Posted on (Updated by ewand

A person eating a dog AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Microsoft is seemingly ditching it’s “Office” brand, which first appeared in 1990 to describe the now-familiar bundling of 3 apps – Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Along with numerous other apps and services being added to the family, for some time the company has been pushing the online version – Office 365 then Microsoft 365 – as the default. Despite this, there is still an on-premises, discrete licensed bundle of the latest apps – Office LTSC 2024 if you really must.

Users of M365 – either personal, family or corporate bundles – can go to office.com and sign in to access all the software, services and data associated with it. This has now been renamed to cloud.microsoft and the accompanying Office / Microsoft 365 app (which is really just a PWA, a web app hosted in what looks like a Windows application) is now Microsoft 365 Copilot, in the headlong rush to call everything Copilot even when it isn’t.

A screenshot of a computer AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Somewhat confusingly, if the “Copilot for Microsoft 365” service isn’t available the following explanation is given on the support page for the app’s transition:

What about regions where Copilot is not available?

For regions without Copilot availability, the Microsoft 365 Copilot app will remove the Copilot tab from the Home screen across web, desktop, and mobile app endpoints. However, the app name and icon will remain the same as Microsoft 365 Copilot for branding consistency.​​​​​​​

… so, it will still be called “Copilot” even if the actual Copilot functionality has been removed.

M365 Personal / Family subscriptions

As well as being corporate fodder, Office Microsoft 365 has had a consumer variant for a decade: Microsoft 365 Personal gets you a single user who can have up to 5 devices where you have the Office apps installed (as well as the use of web versions), 1TB of cloud storage in OneDrive, and you get Outlook.com email without any ads. The Family subscription is around 20% more expensive and gets you the same as Personal, but for up to 6 people.

Former Microsofties can receive M365 Family for free if they’re in the Alumni Association, and with membership being less than half the price for M365 on its own, it’s worth joining if you’re eligible. If you know someone who is a current Microsoft employee or who’s an Alumnus, they might be able to get you a Friends & Family login to the eCompany Store, which lets you buy activation codes for M365 Personal or Family at a significant discount. And here’s a trick: you can stack the codes (ie. buy 3 of them for less than the cost of a regular single year’s subscription, then just apply them all to your account to kick the renewal date forward into the long grass).

Speaking of cost, M365 Personal & Family have risen in price quite a bit recently; partly because they include a load of new AI features and those cloud-based GPUs don’t buy themselves.

Welcome Copilot Users!

At the same time as potentially naming something Copilot that isn’t, Microsoft has rolled out some basic Copilot capabilities for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family users. See here for the details of what’s included and how, though if you’re really not on board with all this AI nonsense, you can opt to stay on “M365 Family Classic”, which is the same as it was before without the Copilot and Microsoft Designer guff.

You’ll be shown lots of Copilot banners if you log in to any Office app with a M365 Personal subscription or the primary user of a Family one (only the owner of the subscription gets the extra sauce, at least for now). There are ways to disable it should you want to, though not everywhere – Outlook.com displays a banner at the top of every email offering to summarize it for you…

Predictably, the User forums are full of “HOW DO I SWITCH THIS OFF” type questions. The short version is you can’t; click the X on the right to dismiss the banner but you need to do that for every. single. email. Or just learn to live with it.

And Microsoft wouldn’t be true to form if branding and packaging was simple… there’s still Copilot Pro, which gives additional capacity or the paid-for Microsoft 365 Copilot addon to business Microsoft 365 subscriptions. And Copilot functionality in Business Applications, Security, GitHub and doubtless many more…

#60: The problem with coupons

Posted on (Updated by ewand

Lots of online shops have promo codes that can be entered as part of the checkout process, to get a discount, free shipping or similar. Sign up to their newsletter and get 5% off your first/next order, they might say. It’s usually a reward for or enticement to repeat custom, or if you believe in more sinister motives, a ploy to get you to hand over your data and expose your very living soul.         

Use one of the many “coupon lookup” sites and you could easily find codes that can save significant amounts of money, especially if you’re buying expensive stuff. To the end user, it looks like free money but there’s a deeper and darker subtext. As we’ll learn, there’s never really such a thing as free money.

Don’t click the bottom one…

Sites like Coupert, Vouchercodes and more sometimes tell you what special offer codes are currently active; be wary of any which offer to “automatically apply all codes” or you’ll end up installing a browser extension, which you almost certainly don’t want to do.

1st party coupons

Microsoft has shoehorned “shopping” into Edge (similar to what Google does with Chrome, though Edge’s is a bit more internationally inclusive and somewhat easier to use), and has a Bing shopping site that’s similar to Google Shopping too.

If the feature is enabled in Edge, you’ll see a little shopping label icon in the address bar when you’re browsing something that the browser might have more insights on, and possibly be able to keep a track on the price too.

Both browser tools are convenient way to find coupons and codes, alongside price comparisons, price history etc, even if you could probably find keener deals and info by looking around yourself.

For vouchers and deals, the browser is basically scraping other sites which purport to offer them, though anyone who has tried such sites previously will probably find out many of the codes don’t work anymore.

Margins to share

Retailers typically have a high markup on stuff they sell, expressed often as a margin – if a clothing outlet sells a shirt for $100 and they are buying it from their supplier at $40, then they have a 60% gross margin. That seems a lot relative to the cost of the actual goods, but then the retailer has to run premises, pay staff, deal with returns and annoying customers – all of which will eat into that margin and give them a much lower %age of profit. So far, so good.

When dealing with online transactions, especially if the delivery cost is charged additionally, the overheads will be a lot lower and therefore the margin could afford to be less – that’s why many online-only retailers can sell the same things at a lower price than you’d find in the shops. But at least in trad. retail, customers might be browsing – they could be wandering through a mall and decide to drop in to a store and end up seeing something they didn’t know they wanted. In online retail, that’s so much less likely, therefore they try to attract buyers in other ways.

Online retailers find it sometimes helps to share the margin they make; hence the deals with cashback sites or credit cards, and by issuing voucher codes to incentivise customers to buy now while the deal is there. They may also have referral codes or links that give a small discount to the end purchaser and a kickback to the referring source as well.

Influencers and other “content creators” can earn money by talking about stuff and linking to places where you can buy it, potentially earning $thousands for driving extra buyers into the waiting arms of the online sellers. Sometimes they’ll have a voucher code that gets money off (and which the retailer can track so they know how much extra business is coming from that source). Sometimes the code is built into links on the blog or website, that when you click through (and subsequently buy), will share some margin back to the referrer.

Honey: The sweetest deal?

Along with the features browsers have built-in, there are loads of addins which can be used to help the shopping experience. Honey was a pioneer, so much so that PayPal shelled out a cool $4B a few year back.

Recent investigations have shown Honey’s business model to be on thin ice, though – ostensibly telling users that they can find the best deals with Honey, while getting retailers to pay them to offer only a limited set of the deals which might otherwise exist… so instead of Honey telling you of a sweet 10% deal you could get, they might be taking 2% off the retailer and showing you a 5% code.

Addins like Honey also sometimes pay to have their offering promoted – including paying money to influencers to have the Honey extension featured. To the chagrin of some – even leading to legal action – it appears that Honey has also been rewriting the referral links from other sites too.

So, Honey pays Spongebob Influencerpants to say nice things about them and feature on his site; all Sponge’s users run off and install Honey and are happy they’re getting something for little effort.

Later, when a user clicks on a link to buy some tat in the description text of Spongy’s latest video, instead of him getting the kickback from the retailer, the Honey addin is intercepting and rewriting the URL and pocketing the referral fee for itself.

Even if you think most influencers are gopping eejits, do check out Marques Brownlee – who is one of the smartest and most balanced of the oeuvre – and see what he says about the “Honey Scam”. Unsurprisingly, he recommends uninstalling the Honey addin with all speed.

Whatever the reality of this situation is, it’s certainly not cricket.