Andy's Techie Blog

My first Vista tip!

I’m loving the sidebar at the moment. I changed the options so that it is always on top and dropped a couple of useful things on there.

Clock, it’s a bit more visible than the clock in the system tray.

Remote Desktop Connection Gadget - allows me to quickly Remote Desktop into any of the servers i’m looking after

Slideshow – I use this to cycle pictures of my daughter

So i dropped the slideshow gadget onto the sidebar. Created a search to only find pictures that are tagged with my daughers name and i tried to point the gadget at the search…no not happening.

I was a little bit annoyed that i couldn’t do this. It meant i’d have to create a seperate folder and it starts to do away with the whole “tagging” feature (which i really love btw!)

Anyway a bit of digging this morning comes up with the following from the sidebar team blog

1)      Create an actual folder

2)      Perform a search of pictures

3)      Save search to created folder

4)      Point the Slideshow gadget at the created folder

5)      Make sure “Include subfolders”  is checked

Lo and behold it works!

Our action pack arrived last week so i spent yesterday upgrading my PC to Vista and installing Office 2007

The installation went (generally) well. I opted for a clean install so i’m still in the process of tweaking everything to my liking

So far i’m pretty impressed. Even though i ran the beta for a while it’s nice to keep finding out things!

Also performance seems ok. The machine i ran the beta on had twice as much RAM as my main PC but this is still pretty responsive.

I’m also very impressed with Office 2007 so far. I’m spending lots of time in Outlook so getting used to that and spent lasts night poking through OneNote. I’ve heard lots of good things about OneNote but i never really “got it” before. However i’m going to try and make it part of my working day so we’ll see how that goes.

When i was doing my backups before the upgrade i forgot to export my RSS feeds. I do have a copy of an old OPML file somewhere but i’m going to use it as an exercise for trimming the dead wood. Currently i only have four feeds

Coding Horror, SBSDiva, Vladville, UK SMB Girl

Certainly makes a difference from what i had before. I’ll add others in as i come across them

I’ll post more thoughts and tips as i find them!

I haven’t commented anything about the CES as everything has generally been said elsewhere

However i stumbled across a video on Techeblog

It’s basically an LCD screen that shows a different image depending on the angle your viewing from

One of the applications mentioned in the video is that you could have one screen in a car but each passenger sees a different video.

However, i’m excited about this for a different reason.

CINEMA

My other half is profoundly deaf which means that if we want to go and see a film we need a subtitled showing. I dont know how this works over in the states but over here it’s a complete nightmare. Many cinemas are reluctant to show subtitled films (for various reasons i wont go into here as it’s a real bug bear with me and it would make this an even longer post!) and they are never advertised very well so going to see the latest blockbuster becomes a military operation.

I do use the excellent Your Local Cinema site to find out which cinemas are actually screening. It’s rarely our local cinema and we drive on average 25 miles just to see a film. (which is crazy when our local cinema is less than five miles away). We have to plan in advance (usually weeks) so none of this “shall we catch a movie tonight”. This generally means we only visit the cinema three or four times a year and generally have to wait for them on video.

Sorry..started to get into my rant there <blush>

The point i’m making is if we could have a cinema screen with this technology we could have regular screenings where you only see the subtitles if your sitting in certain parts of the cinema. It would mean ANY screening could have subtitles instead of the random few we get now.

Fingers crossed eh?!

After writing up my last post i noticed a pop-up preview type effect whenever i hovered over one of the links in the post

Turns out i’m one of the lucky beta testers for the SNAP plugin (details here!)

The page you a linking to appears as a little thumbnail you can click.

Looks quite cool at the moment..not sure if it will get annoying though so will save my feedback till i’ve been using it for a few days!

Steve Clayton mentions his favourite IE shortcut where you can add “www” and “.com” onto the end of a word

 e.g hotmail ctrl + enter becomes www.hotmail.com

This is a shortcut i also use lots during the day and is such a time saver

Just added onto this you can specify your own shortcut.

When i press ctrl+shift+ enter i get “www” and “.co.uk” added on

To change the suffix goto

TOOLS, INTERNET OPTIONS, LANGUAGES

At the bottom of the dialog you can specify your suffix here

BINGO!

For more information about IE shortcuts you can go to the IE Quick Reference page where there are lots of useful keyboard shortcuts

You can even download the page as a pdf to print out!

Turns out i’m not the only one going to the Nottingham event!

Going through my feeds at least two other people whose blogs i read are going

Eileen Brown will be delivering “A look at Exchange Server 2007 featuring manageability, scalability, consolidation of servers and end user capabilities including voice integration, unified messaging and digital rights management”

Vijay Singh Riyait (who uses the same wordpress theme as me :-p) will be going to both the events

I’m looking forward to it as i haven’t been to one of these events in some time

Well not my town but pretty close!

The Microsoft technical roadshow is running February to March in various locations across the country. They are showing off Vista, Office and Exchange and also running developer sessions on whats new with the products.

I’m all booked up for the Nottingham event on 20th Februrary

Check it out here

I posted a while back on how useful scripting is so i thought i’d share a useful resource i found yesterday

“Hey Scripting Guy” is a very useful (and entertaining) column on the Microsoft Script Centre. What makes this particular column great (in my opinion) is that a question for a specific problem is answered in great depth with lots of examples and pointers for any “gotcha’s” that might trip you up

So anyway enough brown-nosing, i found out yesterday that you can download their archive as a complied html help document (here)

Articles are grouped into categories with the added bonus of being able to search for exactly what you need.

Go get it!

Interesting post over on The Furrygoat Experience (by Steve Makofsky) talking about his opinion on the apparent death of client side apps.

I’ve seen a couple of posts on various sites over the last twelve months or so on how they think all applications will eventually become web based. This may (or may not) be true but i dont think it’ll happen anytime soon.

As Steve mentions certain applications just work better on the client side. His example of photo editing is a good one and video editing, 3d rendering, audio editing / conversion are just some examples i can think of off the top of my head.

Web applications will become more powerful as the Web continues to mature and bandwith increases but i believe rich client side applications are here for a long time

When i was reading Susannes post entitled “What is the backward P at the end of my sentence” i initially thought

“I already know how to toggle paragraph marks”

What i didn’t realise is that they have a specific name :-  a Pilcro

Just a useless bit of trivia i’m pleased to learn as i’ll annoy everyone with it for the next six months!