Tip o’ the Week 447 – October is usually boring

Posted on September 20, 2018 by ewand

October is – in the northern hemisphere at least – a generally pretty unexciting month. The early blaze of autumnal foliage settles into a muted rusty colour before falling away; everyone’s used up their vacation allowance so the roads are clogged with traffic just as the weather starts to worsen and the mornings and evenings get dark. Kids are bored, and folkin’ folkster Roy Harper tells us we do nothing but coagulate.

If you get excited about updates to your computer’s operating system, however, October is going to be a bit more interesting, as the next release of Windows – hitherto known as Redstone 5 – will be with us. Read more from MJF, and see a good summary of what’s coming, here.

There are lots of user interface changes, tweaks and improvements. If you like “dark mode” in apps, it’s getting more pervasive. Windows Weekly talks about the momentum behind Windows 10 if you have a spare hour-and-a-half to listen.

There’s a great new cloud-oriented clipboard experience that can be enabled (it’s off by default, so no need to get spooked), and there will be an improved screen snipping capability – both examples of the kinds of supposedly small improvements which can make a big difference to anyone with more than one PC. And both of these are features that have been proven using “Garage” projects in the past.

The Your Phone app discussed in ToW 442 will be available to all, too. The much-anticipated “Sets” feature isn’t coming this time, though.

So keep ‘em peeled over the next few weeks, for the appearance of the October update. Maybe more news will come at Ignite.

Tip o’ the Week 446 – What’s brown and sticky?

Posted on September 20, 2018 by ewand

Q: What *is* brown and sticky?

A: A stick…

Q: What’s yellow and sticky?
A: One of the most successful product design failures in history.

Yes, the Post-It note (which has gone on to spawn many imitators, sometimes known as just “stickies” or “sticky notes”) was essentially invented by accident almost 50 years ago, by a scientist at 3M who was trying to make a super-strong glue but instead came up with one that didn’t really stick very well but was at least reusable and didn’t leave any residue behind.

Of course, the real story is a lot less simple – the product really took more than a decade to perfect, and convincing people that it was a viable business took several attempts, but eventually it went on to be one of the most-bought office supplies in history.

The digital equivalent has had decades of evolution too, from a simple note app from the company that brought you Tiny Elvis to the Sticky Notes application that shipped with Windows 7, and innumerable similar apps in the various mobile and desktop app stores.

Starting with the Windows Insider “Skip Ahead” community (but soon to roll out wider), the Microsoft Sticky Notes app has been heavily revised, consolidating the multiple windows that would typically be left on your desktop with a single list, and then pop-out notes that feature multiple colours, support for ink, cross-device syncing and more.

Keep an eye out for the Sticky Notes 3.0 arrival on your PC. As MJF says, with the same team now responsible for OneNote, To-Do/Wunderlist, and Sticky Notes, it’ll be interesting to see how deeply integrated they get.

Tip o’ the Week 445 – Finding Modern App names

Posted on August 24, 2018 (Updated November 5, 2021) by ewand

As detailed in ToW #443, there are ways of running Modern Windows apps from a script, command line or maybe just from the WindowsKey+R Run prompt – so you don’t need to use the mouse or your finger to activate them.

If you’re looking for the shortcut name for your favourite app, there’s a somewhat lengthy process to find out what it is, but at least you only need to do it once…

Try the following:

Fire up PowerShell (press Start, type powershell then make sure you don’t go for the ISE unless you want to do some script authoring and debugging. In other words, if you don’t know why you would want to run PowerShell ISE, then just stick with PowerShell…)
From the PowerShell console, run get-appxpackage > $env:userprofile\apps.txt – this will grab the details of every installed modern app in turn, and pipe all of the text to a file
Press WindowsKey+R and run apps.txt to launch the file, and you’ll see an almost impenetrable wall of text (thousands of lines – in Notepad, go to the View menu and enable the Status Bar then press CTRL+END to jump to the very bottom, if you want to see just how many lines…)

Now, you might be able to figure out from the Name line in the text, which app the following details pertain to, but it’s not always obvious – take the Mail app, for example … if you have it pinned to the Start menu and then drag/drop it onto your desktop to create a shortcut, you can see the target (which is the same as the PackageFamilyName attribute in the text file) is a bit more opaque…
There are all sorts of ways you could dig around in the file system and/or the registry to find out what the shortcut name is to launch your chosen app, but perhaps the quickest is to copy/paste this text into a PowerShell console and hit enter:

foreach ($p in $(get-appxpackage)) { foreach ($n in (Get-AppxPackageManifest $p).package.applications.application.extensions.extension.protocol.name) { $p.packagefullname + “`t `t `t -=- ” + $n } }
This will display a list of all the packages and the “protocols” that each can support, in other words the direct commands you can run to invoke them (if you run that command and stick a “:” on the end). Some will be pretty useless, but others can be handy – like onenote-cmd: which launches the Modern OneNote without the annoying prompt you get if you just try onenote:
If you want to create a traditional (eg Desktop) shortcut to one of your fave apps, just right-click, New, Shortcut and enter the command, give it a name, and Robert’s your father’s brother.

You could use a variant of this approach to automatically launch Modern apps when Windows itself starts – from WindowsKey+R, enter shell:startup and drop (or create) your shortcut in there.

Tip o’ the Week 444 – Computer! Computer!? Hello Computer?!?

Posted on August 24, 2018 by ewand

Remember the time when talking to a computer seemed like science fiction?

If you’re an Amazon Echo or Sonos One* user, you’ll already be familiar with barking orders at an inanimate object. If you’re tired of shouting ALEXA… ALEXA!!!, then you can even change the “Wake Word” on the Amazon devices – but not yet others – so you can say other things instead. Handy if your daughter or your dog is called Alexa.

In the Alexa app on your phone, go to Settings, look under the list of devices and if you select an Echo device of some sort, then you’ll find a Wake Word option fairly far down the list. This lets you choose something else, though not yet at the level when you could make up your own wake word…

Anyway, who can pass up the opportunity to pretend to be Mr Scott?
(Isn’t it amazing what you could do with one-fingered, random typing on a keyboard in 1986…?)

Anyway, recent announcements saw the preview of Cortana joining hands with Alexa and allowing access both from Windows 10 PCs to (some) Alexa functionality, and US-based Amazon users can access Cortana stuff through Alexa-enabled devices.

On your PC, you may need to check your Cortana settings (just press WindowsKey and start typing Cortana to see the settings) to either enable the Hey Cortana key phrase, or press WindowsKey+C as a shortcut, then speak.

Voice-searching on the PC using Cortana can be a pretty handy thing to do, as there are plenty of phrases that will give you a direct response rather than take you to a website. It’s quicker to press the WindowsKey+C option than to say “Hey Cortana”, and you could ask stuff like M-S-F-T, what’s the time in New York, what’s the news, what’s the weather, convert pound to dollar and so on.

To start using Alexa on your PC, just go to Cortana and say “Open Alexa” – at which point, on the first run, you’ll be prompted to sign in using your Amazon account.

You’ll also need to grant permission to share info between the two services, and now be able to do things like add items to your Amazon shopping list from within the Cortana UI, or in the reverse, query your Office 365 calendar from your Echo smart speaker.

YMMV at the moment, but it’ll surely get more integrated in time. Right now, you can’t stream music through Alexa to the PC (or, it seems, control smart home devices that work through Alexa, though that could be a regional thing for the moment) – and if you’ve a UK-based Amazon account, you can’t add the Cortana Skill to your Alexa account, so there’s no option of querying Cortana from the Echo, yet. US users can, though.

Still, Normal People don’t have electronics listening to everything they say… so what if a few nerds need to put up with some temporary friction from having two competing assistants try to work together? Click-Over-bzzzt.

Tip o’ the Week 443 – Starting modern apps

Posted on August 10, 2018 (Updated November 5, 2021) by ewand

Power Users often like to start applications quickly, without recourse to grubbing around with a mouse or a trackpad. Super Users might even want to write scripts that automate all sorts of things that mere mortals with less time on their hands are happy to do manually. Regardless of your penchant for automation, here are a few short cuts you can take to quickly start apps that you use often.

Apps pinned to taskbar

The taskbar in Windows obviously shows you what’s currently running, but can also be used to pin frequently accessed apps or – by default at least – those that Windows thinks should be frequent (Edge, Store, etc – right-click on them to unpin if you disagree). You’ll see a highlight line under the apps that are running, so those without the line are simply pinned there.

If you start typing the name of a favourite app at the Start menu, then right-click on it in the list, you can choose to pin it. So far, so good.

If you drag the pinned apps around, they’ll stay in that position relative to each other, and new apps will always start to the right (or underneath, if you use a vertical taskbar, as you really should). Now, if you press WindowsKey+number, you’ll jump to the app that is n along the line, and if that app isn’t running, then Windows will start it. So in the picture above, pressing WindowsKey+2 would start Edge, or WindowsKey+3 would bring Outlook to the fore.

Shortcut to desktop

You could try an old-skool method, by creating a desktop shortcut to apps that are already on your Start menu – press WindowsKey+D to show the bare desktop itself, then press Start to show the actual Start menu.

Assuming your Start menu isn’t full screen then you’ll be able to drag icons or tiles from the menu to the Desktop, and if you right-click the shortcut and look at Properties, you’ll see a Shortcut key: option… just press some key sequence that makes sense to you and press OK to save.

This method differs from the taskbar one above, because each press of the shortcut you set might start a new instance of the app (if it supports that) – which may or may not be desirable. If you end up with several windows of OneNote, for example, you could cycle through them by repeatedly pressing the appropriate WindowsKey+n as above.

Keep on Running

There’s no better mark of being a real PC deity than by launching your apps through running the executable name… you know the drill? WindowsKey+R to get the Run dialog (it’s so much faster than pressing Start), then enter the app’s real name and you’re off to the races. winword, excel, calc, notepad… they’re for novices. The genuine hardcases might even dive into the (old fashioned, obvs) Control Panel applets like ncpa.cpl rather than navigating umpteen clicks.

Looking at the shortcut to OneNote’s modern app above, though, it’s clear there isn’t a simple executable to run – onenote will launch the on-life-support OneNote 2016 version.

Many modern apps do, however, let you launch them from the Run dialog by entering a name with “:” at the end…

Examples include:

onenote:	Modern OneNote (annoyingly, you may get prompted to open in OneNote 2016 – just hit cancel and it goes away)
ms-settings:	The new-fangled control panel. You can tag on other commands like ms-settings:display or ms-settings:windowsupdate but you might be quicker clicking the icon than typing all of that.
bingmaps:	A good bit quicker than launching the browser and navigating to the maps URL, even if you do press ALT-D to set focus to the address bar, and type bingmaps <CTRL-ENTER> to auto-fill the www. and the .com
outlookmail:	Even though it’s not real Outlook, this launches the Mail part of the Mail & Calendar store app. outlookcal: does the other bit.
ms-windows-store:	For when you can’t wait to check out all the great new apps in the Microsoft Store.
fb:	If you feel the need to do a personality test or look at other people’s holiday photos.

Tip o’ the Week 442 – Whose phone? Your phone…

Posted on August 10, 2018 by ewand

Back at the May 2018 Build conference, an app for Windows was previewed, which would allow you to manage content from your phone, on your PC – “Your Phone”.

If you’re an Android user, and a Windows Insider, then you can get a preview version of the Your Phone app for the PC; after starting the app on the PC, it will ask for your mobile number and text you a link to download an updated version of the Microsoft Apps app (ya falla?). Download the update, sign in as appropriate, and suddenly your photos on the phone will start appearing in near real-time on your PC.

The Your Phone app actually uses a Wi-Fi connection on the phone to sync content with the PC – they don’t need to be on the same network but they do need to be able to talk to the back end service that coordinates things. For now, it just does photos (and only on Android), but in time, more services will be added. See more details here. And here.

The photo sharing capability is pretty cool – if you ever find yourself taking a photo on your phone and then immediately wanting to use it on your PC, then your alternatives are either to wait for OneDrive to sync your new pic from phone to cloud (and then back down to your PC)… or plug the phone in on a USB cable and root about in its file system to find the photo. Or the worst, but probably most used: you email the photo from your phone, to yourself…

Some features of Your Phone will be tied to particular preview versions of Windows 10 – such as the recent latest build, 17228.

Tip o’ the Week 440 – Break out the whiteboard

Posted on July 23, 2018 by ewand

Teachers of any tenure will probably have used a blackboard, with the dusty chalk and the other paraphernalia that goes with it, and be thankful that whiteboards came along to make things easier. Many companies will have whiteboards in meeting rooms too, and most will have the good sense to never allow permanent marker pens within 100 yards of the whiteboard, and to throw away whiteboard markers when they stop working well, rather than put them back and pick up another one…

As we move to a more digital future, the days of the whiteboard – like the flipchart before it – are giving way to electronic smart boards, first seen as a projector/camera arrangement over a relatively normal whiteboard, but now more integrated with screens and multi-touch sensors in front. Much like the Microsoft Surface Hub, in fact.

The Surface Hub 2 will be with us in 2019, and looks like a great step forward while mimicking some of the flipchart form factors of old. Just make sure no clown goes near it with a flipchart pen…

Before the gorgeous-looking SH2 appears, there is some news for 1:few collaborators who like to use a smart board, especially if they’re not in the same room – the general availability of the Microsoft Whiteboard store app.

Get it here. Oh, and Teams has a free version too, now… Go forth and collaborate!

Tip o’ the Week 439 – Go! Go! Go!

Posted on July 23, 2018 by ewand

The legendary Merry Talker made a big thing about his “Go” (quite apart from his Colemanballs). Public Service Broadcasting celebrated the iconic Gene Kranz (nearly 49 years ago) calling round all the flight controllers to get them to agree whether the Eagle should “Stay” or “Go”. And, of course, there’s an ancient board game.

But if you haven’t been hiding under a rock for a few weeks, you may have seen news about the Microsoft Surface Go being announced.

Is it an “iPad Killer”? No. The tablet market is pretty saturated, and even if potential buyers of one device flock to the Go, it’s not likely to be kryptonite to the other. It’s probably more likely that the Go exists to appeal to potentially erstwhile Chromebook buyers, in sectors like education, or as companion device to existing Windows fans in the same way that some people use a tablet as a PC alternative when they travel.

Given its performance, the Surface Go is likely to be a useful 2^nd machine for many PC users, rather than an alternative primary device – though some early reviews seem to make it sound pretty good. MJF reckons many variants (LTE, 8GB RAM/256GB SSD) will be forthcoming, so maybe the mix will change in time.

So, Brits: like pretty much every “low-cost” device, the entry level £379 machine – now available for pre-order – isn’t the full story. It’s fairly low-spec and doesn’t come with a keyboard or stylus/pen, so ordering the one most people would want will be nearer double the headline price…

Oh well, start saving up now – or wait until late August and decide (after playing with it in the flesh – in store, maybe?) if it’s the right thing for you.

Tip o’ the Week 433 – You can have the power

Posted on June 2, 2018 by ewand

With modern hardware and Windows 10, there is a great deal of flexibility in the way power (in the sense of AC/DC as opposed to Power Users) is managed.

As PC systems evolved over time, and Windows got reliable to the extent that you don’t need to reboot every day or even every week (Windows 7, realistically), the needs of power management also changed as the shift from mains-powered desktop to Lithium-Ion battery laptops gathered pace.

Sleep states defined what goes on under the covers in as a PC goes into a different power mode – whether that’s automatic (because of timing, or because the battery level gets to a particular point) or if the user chooses to sleep/hibernate, hits the power button, closes the laptop lid etc.

Most PCs could go into a low-power (S3) standby state, where the CPU was shut down but the contents of memory were preserved (still consuming power, but a lot less of it), so the machine can be woken up quickly and carry on as before. After some period in standby or at a point where the battery was about to run out, the PC might even wake up and dump the memory contents to a file on disk, then shut down completely (called hibernating), meaning a subsequent wake-up would take a few seconds longer as it would need to resume from hibernate, since the contents of that huge memory file will be read back in before continuing.

Windows 8 introduced the idea of “Connected Standby”, meaning that even when a machine was in a low-power state – to all intents, asleep, but with the CPU still able to run in a restricted manner – the system can maintain a wireless connection that means apps could remain up to date. This was a feature that only applied to modern/Store apps, allowing for synchronising contents in the background while the PC was asleep, so that when it wakes up, the app data and live tiles on the Start screen would be up to date.

As both hardware and software platforms have improved, the connected standby idea morphed into Windows 10’s “modern standby”. ToW 335 talked about managing battery states in Windows 10, and briefly discussed using a powerful tool to tweak the way your PC handles standby states.

Powercfg is a command line tool, run from an elevated command prompt (ie one with admin privileges – press WindowsKey+R, type cmd, then crucially, press CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER to ensure the command line is entered with the right level of privilege). If you don’t see “Administrator” in the title bar of your resulting command windows, you ain’t an admin, buster.

To check and see what power modes your PC can handle, try running powercfg /a; a more traditional, ACPI desktop will probably support S3 and Hibernate modes, but a modern laptop will likely be able to operate in Standby (S0 low power idle) – that’s “modern standby”.

You can get some detailed reporting on how your PC is behaving, by using powercfg with one of the following command line arguments: /energy, /batteryreport, /sleepstudy, /srumutil, /systemsleepdiagnostics or /systempowerreport.

SKYPE FOR SIGN OUT, OUTLOOK FOR DISCONNECT

Now, one side-effect of this S0 low power mode is that Windows 10 PCs will likely enter that mode shortly after the screen is locked (via timeout or by WindowsKey+L). Non-modern apps (ie Win32/x64 apps like Outlook, Skype for Business etc) won’t know how to deal with this effectively disconnected state, and will drop their connection.

This means that when you unlock a plugged-in laptop after being away for a while, you’ll see that Skype for Business is signed out, and Outlook might tell you it’s lost the connection to the server (and then immediately re-connects). If you find this annoying and would rather lengthen the time that elapses when your machine is plugged in, before it goes to connected standby mode, then powercfg to the rescue!

From an elevated command prompt, run:

Powercfg /setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_video videoconlock 3600
Powercfg /setactive scheme_current

Using the flag /setdcvalueindex instead will tweak the behaviour when on battery only. The value in the first command is the number of seconds before the screen will timeout when locked, so substitute 3600 seconds (ie 60 minutes) for a value of your choice. For further details of what Powercfg can do, see here.

Tip o’ the Week 431 – Hiding your name

Posted on May 18, 2018 by ewand

If you use your laptop on a train or in other public spaces, there’s always the concern that someone might be looking over your shoulder and reading what’s on your screen. With the GDPR bogeyman about to be unleashed, there’s never been more concern and focus on not leaking information.

You could invest in a screen filter to stop snooping, but a simple step to make you immediately more comfortable, is to not show your own name – have you ever felt self-conscious that random people in the wild can see your name, and maybe even recognise you?

Paranoid Microsoftie Andrew Brook-Holmes went digging to see how to stop this behaviour, and thus inspired this tip.

To switch off the display of your name on the login or lock screen, first go into the Local policy of your machine – the quickest way is to press WindowsKey+R then enter gpedit.msc, then expand out the local policy to Security Options as shown on the right.

In the right-hand pane, you’ll see a long list of policy items, many of which won’t be configured but could conceivably be; there are options to hide or show elements on the login screen, but in this case we’re going to try not showing the last named user at all.

Double-clock on the Interactive logon: Don’t display last signed-in, and you’ll have a simple Enable/Disable choice – in this case, we want to use a double negative – enable the fact that we’re not displaying. If you’d like a more detailed explanation of what it does, there’s another tab on the dialog showing exactly that.

Now if you lock your screen (WindowsKey+L), you’ll see that it’s already in effect. It might be annoying depending on how you’ve got the machine set up, as you’ll probably need to enter your username as well as PIN/password etc every time.

If you use Windows Hello to sign in with your face, then you won’t need to do anything except present your boat race to the camera. If you decide you’d rather go back to normal for easier sign-in, just reverse the process you’ve done above.

If you can’t find Local Computer Policy (as home edition doesn’t have that capability, for example), you may need to use the Registry instead…

Press WindowsKey+R – enter regedit – navigate to…

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

…and set the value of dontdisplaylastusername to 1. Log out to apply the change.