Souk's Notes - Unofficial Summaries

2016-04-15 · open the original ↗

• A script can build the Polycom directory from the FreePBX database. Polycom phones read their contact directory from XML files in /tftpboot (with Endpoint Manager defaults): a global 000000000000-directory.xml, the twelve zeros standing for a blank MAC address, or per-phone files named by MAC. The script, saved as /usr/local/sbin/polycom-dir.sh and made executable with chmod +x, is another author's; the host only changed it to suit FreePBX's default blank MySQL password.
• FreePBX's passwordless MySQL root is not the security hole it looks like. The host passes on the FreePBX project's explanation: MySQL is locked down to localhost, so using it as root already requires root access to the server, and someone with that access can do far worse than tamper with MySQL.
• Test-run the script as the asterisk user, and expect a first-run error. He runs runuser -l asterisk -c '/usr/local/sbin/polycom-dir.sh', since that is the user cron will use. The first run reports it cannot remove the directory XML file because none exists yet; the second runs cleanly. He then checks the new file is owned by asterisk and carries the current timestamp.
• Schedule it hourly in /etc/crontab rather than the hourly cron folder. The hourly folder would run it as root, so he adds 0 * * * * asterisk /usr/local/sbin/polycom-dir.sh to /etc/crontab, which regenerates the directory at the top of every hour as extensions are added, removed or changed.
• Phones only pick up an updated directory when they reboot. Watching tail -f /var/log/messages filtered for TFTP, he shows a rebooting phone request its MAC-specific directory file first and then the global one. He tested on a SoundPoint IP 450 and a VVX 410, and expects the same file layout to work on all Polycom phones.

2016-03-08 · open the original ↗

• The video makes no spoken argument; its text is a countdown. The whole transcript of this 110-second clip is "Three, two, one." The cube solve the title names (a LEGO EV3 "MindCuber" robot, about 2 minutes) happens only on screen, so the text gives nothing more to summarize.

2016-02-06 · open the original ↗

• RingCentral's entry plan lacks features most businesses need. The host says the $24.99-per-phone-per-month plan omits inbound caller ID name and multilevel auto attendant ("press 1 for this"), so most customers end up on the $34.99 plan; that is the plan he prices against.
• RingCentral's real monthly bill runs well above its list price. For 10 phones the host reaches about $503 a month: $34.99 × 10, roughly 20% on top for fees and taxes (911 regulatory fees, DID number fees), and about $63 a month to rent nine $5 phones and one receptionist-console phone (rentals run $5 to $20 a month). Customers still configure the system themselves, with RingCentral support available.
• The host's own Crosstalk Cloud PBX bundle costs more upfront, far less monthly. It is $3,120 one-time for the phones plus best-practice configuration done by the host, then about $90 a month with taxes and fees included: $50 for the hosted FreePBX and about $40 for a five-channel SIP trunk plan (five simultaneous calls), his usual plan for 10 phones.
• The host's bundle saves most after the first year. By his figures, five-year savings come to $21,660. First year: $6,036 on RingCentral against about $4,200 for his bundle, a saving of over $1,800. After that his bundle runs just over $1,000 a year against about $6,000. Five-year totals are $30,180 against $8,520, which he likens to legacy Avaya and Cisco PBX pricing.
• The host calls per-phone hosted VoIP pricing "a total racket". This is his opinion, and he is selling the alternative. He says 8x8, Fonality and MegaPath work the same way as RingCentral: they advertise a low per-phone price, then move customers onto higher plans.

2016-01-15 · open the original ↗

• FreePBX voicemail is reached three ways, depending on the phone. A desk or soft phone's messages button (labelled message, voicemail or an envelope) goes straight in; *97 checks the mailbox of the phone you are on, and may skip the password on a desk phone; *98 from any other phone asks for the extension and then the password, each followed by the pound key.
• Playback keys let you scrub, skip and delete mid-message. Once logged in, press 1 to hear new messages; star rewinds and pound fast-forwards 3 seconds per press (three presses moves 9 seconds), 6 skips to the next message, and 7 deletes the current one immediately and moves on.
• Record your name so the dial-by-name directory can find you. The host recommends always doing it: log in, press 0 for advanced options, then 3, speak the name, and press pound to accept it.
• The unavailable and busy greetings cover different missed calls. The unavailable greeting, the main outgoing message, plays when you don't pick up (0 then 1 to record); the busy greeting plays when you are already on a call (0 then 2); end each recording with pound.
• The temporary greeting overrides both standard greetings until erased. It is meant for absences such as vacation: record it with 0, 4, then 1; while it is active the system announces that it overrides the standard greeting, and 0, 4, then 2 erases it so the normal greetings return.

2015-12-24 · open the original ↗

• The T48G is a cost-effective executive phone, preferred over Ubiquiti's UVP. The host found a best online price of about $210, against $300–$400 for some comparable display phones. He prefers it to the Ubiquiti UVP because the UVP has no tactile buttons and, in his view, does not integrate well with FreePBX. He was setting this unit up for a customer, and says it is fancier than he would want himself.
• No power adapter comes in the box, so budget PoE or one. The phone takes 802.3af PoE, so without a PoE switch you need a 48-volt PoE adapter or a separately bought DC adapter, which raises the price. The box holds the phone, handset and cord, an Ethernet cable, the stand and a quick reference guide.
• A 7-inch touchscreen replaces the usual physical line buttons. The display is 800x480 colour, with on-screen soft keys down each side, so the host says buyers who want tactile line keys should look elsewhere. It has dual gigabit ports (network in, PC out), an EXT port for an EXP40 sidecar, and a USB port he understands takes a Bluetooth dongle but has never tried.
• The T48G reboots far slower than other Yealink phones. The host guesses the large display's interface is the cause, and contrasts it with the quick reboot cycle of the Yealink T23G.
• Manual FreePBX registration needs only server address, SIP username and password. Pressing OK on the phone shows its IP; the web GUI's default login is admin/admin, and the line registered without a reboot. Extra line keys, BLF (which also speed-dials), *97 voicemail and park keys go on the DSS Key tab, but the host recommends FreePBX's Endpoint Manager (MAC address plus a T48G template) for anything beyond a few phones.

2015-11-13 · open the original ↗

• The November update is a roll-up, not a new Windows. Hanselman says it would once have been called a service pack or "Windows 10.1", but is now just part of continuous automatic updates; it was rolling out over "the next couple of weeks", and running ver shows build 10586 for the update against 10240 for the release earlier that year. His verdict is that the small changes add up to "a little bit more of a polished experience" and are worth updating for.
• Most changes are small refinements to everyday UI. A "Show more tiles" setting widens Start menu columns from three tiles to four, and the tile resize menu now previews each size; right-click context menus have more consistent spacing and colouring; and two snapped windows now share a splitter bar, so resizing one resizes both.
• Windows can now set your time zone from location. It uses location such as GPS, so a laptop moved between places changes zone by itself; he notes it can be turned off and urges viewers to go through the privacy settings, "just like on an iPhone or an iPad", to see what Windows sends out.
• New Messaging, Skype Video and Phone apps form a "Skype light". He calls their addition "a little bit surprising" and says he is "not quite sure what I think about that yet", adding that they can probably be removed.
• Higher System memory use comes from new memory compression. Task Manager now shows "System and compressed memory": rather than paging rarely used memory out to disk, Windows compresses it in RAM (the "memory manager compression store"), so usage may look higher, and he says not to worry about it.

2015-10-30 · open the original ↗

• The Elite feels premium, and its extra weight reads as quality. Hanselman finds it heavier than the controller bundled with the Xbox One but not tiring to play with, likening the heft to first holding an iPad and to the original Xbox "Duke" controller, though smaller. It ships in a hard-shell zip carrying case he finds useful for taking your own controller to parties, and has textured side grips.
• The physical controls are adjustable and swappable without tools. Both triggers have a short- or long-throw setting, so they fire with less finger travel. The thumbsticks and D-pad attach magnetically (lightly, "just enough to snap in"); the box includes six thumbsticks, among them longer ones he says give more leverage and presumably precision, plus an alternate D-pad.
• Rear paddles and remapping let any button do anything. Four magnetic flippers press green buttons labelled P1–P4, which can be assigned to actions such as jump or strafe, with full remapping and per-game profiles (his examples: Destiny, Halo) switched by a toggle. He notes the paddles help one-handed players reach hard-to-reach buttons, and that since he kept bumping them at first, it matters that they are removable.
• Setup was mostly automatic, but remapping needs a separate app. The controller took a firmware update wirelessly on first sync, without the micro USB cable; he had to download the Xbox Accessories app manually to program buttons, which he calls "not a big deal".
• Probably not worth the price, but he is happy with it. Asked whether it justifies 150 dollars, he says "probably not", yet recommends it to people who play a lot of games; his kids, he says, do not need it.

2015-10-12 · open the original ↗

• A wireless bridge pair replaces cable where trenching or distance rules it out. The Ubiquiti NanoStation M5, top of the NanoStation line, works on 5 GHz with a rated range of 15+ km, point-to-point or point-to-multipoint. The host's examples: a client's two buildings split by a paved alley (about 30 ft, near 100% signal, over 300 Mbps), and a barn a kilometre from the house.
• Configure both units on the same LAN before deploying the remote. Both ship at 192.168.1.20 with login ubnt/ubnt; the host moves the bridge to 192.168.1.10 and the station to 192.168.1.11, sets DNS (4.2.2.2, 8.8.8.8) so the unit can find firmware updates, and changes the admin password. For a window mount, the mount's thumb screw has to be moved to the bottom for clearance.
• Both ends of the bridge must run identical firmware. The host updated each unit from XW 5.5.9 to 5.6.2, and cites a case where a customer's customer updated only one side and the bridge would not connect at all. He recommends running AirView to pick the least-used channel, but skipped it because his area has nearly no 5 GHz traffic.
• The main unit is an access point, the remote a locked station. The main unit runs in access point mode with transparent bridge enabled and WPA2 AES; the remote, in station mode, finds the SSID by site survey and is locked to that access point. The host's link at about 30 ft read −35 dBm, 100% quality and 300 Mbps, and a speed test from the remote side matched his 60 Mbps Charter cable service.
• The remote's secondary port can power a device by PoE pass-through. The secondary port supplies 24 V passive PoE once PoE pass-through is enabled under Advanced. In the host's test, a Ubiquiti AP AC Lite powered up from it, with one PoE adapter indoors powering the whole chain. He has not yet tried repeater mode.

2015-09-29 · open the original ↗

• The host rates the EdgeRouter X a good cheap entry-level router. Ubiquiti lists it at $49 MSRP, but the host could only find it for about $59; it is a small five-port router. He did not test performance against the standard EdgeRouter series, but expects it to be more robust than typical all-in-one SOHO Wi-Fi router/switch units.
• The "WAN + 2 LAN2" wizard gives one WAN and four switched LAN ports. Out of the box the router is at 192.168.1.1 (login ubnt/ubnt), with link lights only on top of the unit. Ticking "only use one LAN" makes eth0 the internet port and eth1–eth4 a single switch0 network on 192.168.1.1; after applying, you must move your PC off eth0.
• Update the firmware first; it shipped one release behind. The unit came on version 1.6.6 while 1.7.0 was current at the time of recording; the firmware downloads as a tar file, is uploaded under System's "upgrade system image", and takes effect after a reboot. The wizards were unchanged on 1.7.0.
• The host replaces Ubiquiti's DHCP and admin defaults. The default DHCP pool runs from .38 to .243 (206 addresses), which he changes to .100–.254, setting DNS to 8.8.8.8; he also changes the ubnt admin password. Port forwards go under Firewall/NAT, with eth0 as WAN and switch0 as the LAN interface.
• PoE pass-through powered an access point even from the bundled adapter. The data sheet says pass-through supports a single airMAX device and needs 24 V passive PoE in or a 12 W adapter not included; the bundled 12 V 0.5 A adapter is 6 W by the host's arithmetic. Yet with pass-through enabled on eth4, it powered a 24 V UniFi UAP, as did 24 V passive PoE into eth0.

2015-07-28 · open the original ↗

• The Windows 10 Start menu and its tiles are fully resizable. Hanselman drags the menu's edge to make it three columns wide or taller and shorter, sets tiles to small, medium or large, pins apps such as Word and Calculator to Start or the taskbar, and drags tiles like Mail out onto the desktop.
• He recommends adding folder shortcuts to the Start menu. Under "choose what folders appear on start" he turns on Documents, Downloads, Network and the personal folder alongside the defaults of File Explorer, Settings and Power, calling it a change he personally likes.
• Accent colour can follow the wallpaper automatically. With "automatically pick an accent color" and "show color on the start menu" switched on, the taskbar and Start menu recolour from each new background, brown for one Bing theme and blue for the next; themes themselves still live in the older Windows 8 control panel.
• Typing what you want is the fastest route to any setting. He reaches the full-screen Start option, accent colour and desktop-icon settings just by typing "start screen", "color" and "desktop icons"; that last one restores This PC and the user's files to the desktop.
• Frequently used settings pages can be pinned to Start. He pins Update and Personalization, and notes the taskbar's search box can be shrunk to an icon to save space, though he prefers the box.

2015-07-22 · open the original ↗

• The Universal Foldable Keyboard is essentially a smaller Surface keyboard. Hanselman finds it about as wide as his iPhone 6 Plus and very thin; it charges over micro USB, has Alt, Windows and a Mac Command key, and has no dedicated function keys, though an FN key appears to give the top row that role.
• It pairs per operating system and switches off when folded. A corner selector covers Windows, Android and iOS; holding the OS button for 3 seconds lit the iPad/iOS indicator and pairing needed only a typed code. Typing and shift-selection worked in email and in Word for iPhone, and closing the keyboard took it from connected to disconnected.

2015-07-21 · open the original ↗

• Xbox One controllers work on Windows 10 with no driver download. On the released build, which he says went to Windows Insiders first, Hanselman plugs the stock controller in over an ordinary micro USB cable and Windows installs it automatically; he adds that it also works with Steam games.
• Game streaming effectively remote-desktops your Xbox to the PC. From the Xbox app he connects to the console on his network and streams Batman; TV and Netflix are refused. He likens the technology to the console's own Twitch broadcasting and reports it working on his desktop, a Surface and Lenovo laptops.
• Bandwidth varies with the scene, and quality is adjustable. The on-screen meter showed about 3–4 Mbps in quiet scenes and 5–6 Mbps on high quality, dropping to 3 Mbps and visibly blurrier on low; he puts lag at about 20 milliseconds and calls it indiscernible.
• A good, ideally wired, home network is the condition. His demo PC was wired to the router with the Xbox on Wireless N; he warns an 11 Mbps network would be saturated, and says Wi-Fi that streams Netflix well should do, with some lag.
• Windows+G opens a game bar that records any screen. The built-in Game Panel in system32 saved a recording of his desktop as an MP4 under Game Clips in the Xbox app, which he says removes the need for tools like Fraps; he calls streaming one of his top two reasons to upgrade.

2015-07-06 · open the original ↗

• Settings are rewritten, but the classic Control Panel remains reachable. Builds 10158, 10159 and 10162 arrived within days of each other ahead of the July 29 release and were mostly bug fixes, Hanselman says. Display settings now show only text size, with resolution moved under advanced, which he reads as a guard against people running the wrong resolution.
• Searching beats digging through the settings menus. Typing a plain-English request such as "desktop icons" into the Cortana box goes straight to the setting, and search covers both new settings and classic ones, shown with different icons.
• One apps page now uninstalls both Store and classic programs. The new add/remove page lists Store apps like Fresh Paint beside classic ones like Paint.NET, sorts by size and filters by drive; he freed a gig and a half in the demo and says he is pretty excited about it.
• New controls target laptops, tablets and metered connections. Battery saver curbs background activity below a chosen charge, with per-app exceptions and a battery-use list where Edge led for him; storage and offline maps can go to an SD card, and driver and map downloads can be held off on metered connections.
• Privacy controls are granular down to individual apps. Location, camera, microphone, contacts and calendar can be denied per app, and Cortana can be told to stop learning about you or hidden entirely. He also set up a PIN and Windows Hello fingerprint sign-in, and says he was told the four-wide Start menu is a bug that will ship three wide.

2015-07-01 · open the original ↗

• The "Get Windows 10" app lets you reserve the upgrade. On up-to-date Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8.1 machines, the GWX tray app, which he confirms is signed by Microsoft and arrived in early May, reserves an upgrade scheduled for July 29; he records on June 30 and shows a reservation can be cancelled.
• Run the app's "check your PC" report before upgrading. It confirms processor and memory are sufficient and flags out-of-date drivers or apps, as it did on one of his other machines; he advises revisiting it a couple of times before July.
• The upgrade is free for a year, not a subscription. Hanselman says waiting past July 29 is fine and Windows 10 does not start costing money afterwards. He offers his own view that Microsoft gives it away because supporting Windows 7 and 8 costs it money.
• Windows 10 blends Windows 7's Start menu with Windows 8's tiles. On build 10159 the resizable menu pairs a familiar left column with live tiles that can be unpinned or frozen, and tablet mode swaps in a start screen, full-screen apps and a back button, which he says non-tablet users need never think about.
• Back up everything before upgrading regardless. He has upgraded seven machines without trouble and finds the newer builds sharper than the rough build 10130, but urges a USB key or cloud storage such as OneDrive or Dropbox first.

2015-06-22 · open the original ↗

• Using Windows by keyboard alone makes you a more effective user. Hanselman argues it keeps your hands and focus in one place, and calls Alt+Tab "probably the number one thing" to learn; he shows the keys on screen with a tool called Carnac.
• Taskbar items can be driven by their position. Win+T puts focus on the taskbar for the arrow keys; Win+1, 2, 3 launch or switch to the item in that slot, Shift+Win+number opens another instance, and Alt+Win+number opens its right-click menu.
• The right-click menu and menu letters are always one key away. Shift+F10 is a right-click, and underlined letters pick the item; in ribbon apps (Explorer, Word, WordPad) a single press of Alt shows the key for every command, so sequences like Alt V R become muscle memory without memorizing them.
• Windows can be snapped, sized and moved without a mouse. Win+Left/Right snaps, Win+Up maximizes and Win+Down restores then minimizes; Alt+Space opens the system menu (X maximize, R restore, S size, M move), which is also how he pastes into the command prompt (Alt+Space, E, P).
• Standard shortcuts and dialog defaults cover most remaining tasks. The bold-outlined button is what Enter presses and Escape cancels; Ctrl+N, O, S, P and W work across most apps, and Win+D (desktop), Win+B (tray), Win+F6 (cycle desktop, taskbar, tray), Win+W (settings search), Win+F (files) and Win+plus/minus (magnifier) handle the rest.

2015-06-20 · open the original ↗

• Windows is not a black box; you can look inside. Hanselman walks through a bug he chased with Phil Haack: GitHub for Windows' "Clone in Desktop" button, an app-specific github-windows:// protocol handler, did nothing when clicked. The registry key under HKCU\Software\Classes pointed at the ClickOnce install in AppData\Local\Apps\2.0, and running that exe directly worked, so the app itself could start.
• Process Monitor needs heavy filtering before it says anything. It logged tens of thousands of events a second, nearly a quarter of a million in a few seconds, so he excluded unrelated processes one by one (or you can exclude all and include one), then captured just the click with Ctrl+E. Highlighting paths containing "github-windows" showed Chrome reading the key and creating the process, and GitHub loading .NET before simply stopping around libgit2sharp, which he says ruled out Chrome and the registry key.
• Process Explorer exposed several hidden GitHub processes. After he killed them, Clone in Desktop worked, though slowly; his hypothesis is that a lost or stuck background instance makes each new launch see it and quit. He also saw two processes start with the -u= URL argument with neither as the other's parent, which he could not explain.
• Process Explorer gives a bug report the evidence a team lacks. It shows each process's command line, path and starter, and run as administrator its loaded .NET assemblies and app domains; it can bring a hidden window to the front, kill a process, and write a full or mini dump, where Task Manager offers only one kind.
• Sysinternals tools can run straight from the web. Typing \\live.sysinternals.com\tools in Run opens a read-only share you can launch them from without a download; he also notes Shift+right-click adds "Copy as path".

2015-06-03 · open the original ↗

• Everything in Azure sits on top of storage. A VM's disks are VHDs in a storage account, so the simplest migration is to build or take a VHD locally (Disk Management can create one), upload it and run it: "literally it's Hyper-V in the cloud". Hanselman serves his Hanselminutes images as public blobs and manages them with CloudBerry Explorer rather than the portal.
• Most people provision far bigger VMs than they need. He runs his Sendy newsletter, sent every month or two, on a shared quarter-core Linux VM using about 200 of 700 MB of memory; he stresses this is his own paid account, since he works on ASP.NET rather than as an evangelist.
• Add data disks to multiply IOPS at almost no cost. His Windows MySQL VM was disk-bound with everything on C:, and the basic tier gives 300 IOPS per disk; adding one 5 GB data disk doubled his IOPS for only storage pennies, and larger tiers allow 4, 8 or 16 disks. The temporary D: drive gives more free IOPS but is not persistent and is shared.
• Portal, command line and Visual Studio all call one backend. The cross-platform Node.js Azure CLI (azure noun verb, --json on any command) creates VMs and sites, and waagent -deprovision plus capture turns a prepped Linux VM into a template for web farms, the same way VM Depot images are copied into your storage.
• Web apps are platform-as-a-service you can still inspect. He creates a site from the CLI, deploys with git push and rolls back between deployments, then shows the in-browser console, running processes and loaded module versions, streaming logs viewable in the CLI, portal and Visual Studio, and a Node.js web job that pulls his blood sugar data.

2015-05-31 · open the original ↗

• The upgrade was quick, but background load stayed heavy. Going from build 10122 to 10130, Hanselman says the machine had not dropped below 30% CPU since he turned it on, with WMI Provider Host and an appx service busy throughout. He guesses, without knowing, that it is log collection in debug builds that Insiders opted into.
• Fit and finish lags: fonts and colours are inconsistent. Context menus on the Start button and taskbar use different font sizes and switch between gray, black and the background's ambient accent colour, and he cannot tell which style is intended. Right-click and the notification centre often fail to respond, and the Start menu's spacing is still off, though "customize list" can now pin folders such as Downloads to it.
• Icons are refreshed but the old ones still show through. Many icons look less "cartoonish and kind of amateurish" than before. Parts of the classic Control Panel and Network and Sharing Center still carry old XP-style icons, tooltips differ from place to place, and he hit a drag-and-drop bug he says he should report.
• Task view now keeps other desktops' windows off the taskbar. Windows open on another virtual desktop no longer appear on the current desktop's taskbar. He calls this "a righteous change" because the old behaviour was confusing.
• Print to PDF is now built in. Any app can print to PDF without installing a third-party tool such as CutePDF. The saved PDF opens in Project Spartan's built-in viewer rather than Microsoft Reader or Adobe Acrobat, though its file icon looks odd to him.

2015-05-23 · open the original ↗

• Build 10122 installs could hang, and a driver cleanup fixed it. On the Insider fast ring, he and others on Twitter saw setup hang at 18%. Pressing Shift+F10 and killing setup in Task Manager rolled back without data loss. A command-line cleanup of unused drivers then let the install finish, since the bug apparently hit machines with too many drivers installed.
• He calls this build's Start menu "rough". All apps now sits behind the hamburger menu, which he calls "unacceptably long" to reach. Resizing is turned off when full-screen Start is on, and full-screen Start shows the same tiles with wasted space and no third column. Several Start options are grayed out and searching Settings for "start" did not find them. He stresses that it is a preview and expects fixes.
• Tiles and icons look unfinished. Win32 and Office tiles show blank, live tiles such as Sports and Weather are not updating, and Sublime Text's tile looks like an upscaled small icon although the app ships a 256-pixel one. In his view "the icon style has not yet been decided upon".
• The new Settings app hides common network tasks. He welcomes more of the classic Control Panel moving into it. But setting a metered connection, one click in Windows 8, is now buried under Advanced options, and his home network shows as public with no obvious way to make it private. He doubts a non-technical parent would find either.
• Touch support is improving, but tablet mode is buggy. Tablet mode hides taskbar buttons unless re-enabled, and some apps fail to repaint. The swipe-in panel now carries VPN and brightness controls, which he likens to an iPad. He finds its labels confusing: the Bluetooth-related button does not simply toggle the radio, and Connect, for wireless display and audio, is what found his headphones.

2015-04-23 · open the original ↗

• Mail and Calendar are now separate, touch-friendly "Outlook light" apps. In build 10061 (fast ring), Hanselman shows the new-mail editor resembling the touch-friendly Word app, which he takes as a sign of richer email formatting, plus a calendar with 2-, 3- and 5-day views and animated view changes; he notes the hamburger menus across the apps are inconsistent.
• He has come round to swipe-in Task View. He first thought swiping from the left into Task View, in place of Windows 8's stack of apps, was a step backwards, but finds swipe-and-tap natural because the finger lands mid-screen; Task View now offers unlimited virtual desktops, apps can be dragged between them, and Ctrl+Windows+left/right switches them. He likens it to OS X and hopes for a three- or four-finger swipe gesture, which he had not seen in this build on his ThinkPad X1 Carbon.
• Continuum's tablet mode makes every app full screen. Toggling tablet mode (simulating detaching a keyboard) turns all windowed apps full screen, changes the taskbar and switches to swipe-and-touch; toggling back restores windowed mode.
• The Start menu resizes; accent colour can follow the wallpaper. In this build the Start menu can be pulled out from the side and top, and the new modern-style personalization settings can pick a colour from the background and apply it to the taskbar, tracking changes as Bing wallpapers rotate. He says he is undecided between the Start menu and the Start screen.
• Fast-ring builds are buggy enough that he avoids daily use. During the recording the Start menu hung, which he traces in Task Manager to the Windows Shell Experience Host, and he cites a known bug in this build that prevents launching Win32 apps from the Start menu; this is why he does not use it as his daily driver.

2015-04-01 · open the original ↗

• MyEcho pipes iPhone Siri dictation into any Windows application. Hanselman, who says he made the app with a friend, pairs his iPhone with a Windows app, then dictates with spoken punctuation into Word, Chrome, Outlook or anything else; he says he uses it for long-form writing and that it is under-used.
• It works in any language Siri supports, except emoji. He demonstrates Spanish, French, Japanese and Chinese by switching the iPhone keyboard language, arguing dictation is easier than typing for a language like Japanese. He pitches it at two dollars as cheaper than Dragon NaturallySpeaking — a pitch for his own product.

2015-03-31 · open the original ↗

• Project Spartan is an entirely new browser, not Internet Explorer. Build 10049 (captioned as "1049"), released to Insiders that day, is the first to include it, and it sits alongside IE11 rather than replacing it. Hanselman expects things to change, and notes rendering quirks on his own blog, with the title pushed left and ads appearing off to the right.
• Web notes let you mark up a page and share it. With a finger or pen you can highlight, erase and clip, then the share icon takes a snapshot to email or tweet. He suggests circling a picture or correcting a misspelling instead of just sending a link, likening it to a separate markup app he had used, but built into the browser.
• Reading view is now built into the browser. An icon turns from gray to black when an article is readable and gives a full-screen reading view. He compares it to Read It Later and Instapaper bookmarklets, and notes IE11's Metro full-screen view had something similar.
• Developer tools carry over from IE11 unchanged. F12 opens the familiar IE11 tools, including performance and memory, in a new window, which he assumes means they are written in HTML; he expects web developers to feel at home. In this build SmartScreen is turned off in settings.
• Cortana integration is early and mostly does not work yet. "Hey Cortana" is off by default, and Spartan's "have Cortana assist me" setting is on but grayed out, so what it does is unclear. His voice queries often failed or just opened Spartan; he reads the build as meant to get people, especially web developers, testing Spartan, and relays word that builds will come faster in the coming weeks.

2015-03-13 · open the original ↗

• A Prius starts even when its key fob battery is dead. Hold the fob up against the power button until it lights, press the brake, and push power to start the car. The fob battery is a CR2032, which still needs replacing.

2015-02-23 · open the original ↗

• Excel Online gives you a free spreadsheet in the browser. Hanselman goes to office.com, where Word, Outlook, Excel and OneNote run as JavaScript web apps; he stresses there is nothing to pay for or install to use the "Excel light" he demos.
• Insert Survey turns each question into a spreadsheet column. He builds questions as text, paragraph or date/time responses, marks each required or optional, and shows each one appearing as a column that the answers flow into; he pitches it at students and academic researchers.
• Share the survey link, not the workbook. The ordinary Share button shares the workbook itself; he uses Share Survey, creates a link, shortens it, and tweets it live, and both his own test answer and viewers' answers appear in the sheet almost instantly.
• Downloading a copy breaks the link to live responses. Desktop Excel cannot edit the file while people are filling in the survey, so he saves a copy to open there; that copy stops updating, while the online sheet keeps collecting until the file is deleted.
• He prefers it to dedicated survey services for staying in Office. Comparing it with Survey Monkey, his reasoning is that the results are already where you work, and could be linked into a Word report, for school work for example.

2015-02-11 · open the original ↗

• Underscore-line forms are a mess for whoever fills them in. Using a form his friend Amanda sent him, Hanselman shows the usual result of typed underscores: lines that don't align, confused grammar checking, and respondents left deleting underscores and guessing whether to underline.
• Tab stops can draw the lines, but that is not a form. A right-aligned tab stop (set around 4 on the ruler) with an underline or dot leader, set under Paragraph > Tabs, gives lines that move with the stop; he shows this only to make the point that tab stops have a look.
• A real form needs a .docx and the Developer ribbon. He converts the old .doc out of compatibility mode, enables Developer under File > Options > Customize Ribbon, clears 888 underscores with a wildcard find-and-replace, then adds date pickers, text boxes, checkboxes and dropdowns, setting formats and items through each control's Properties.
• Restrict Editing confines people to the form fields. Limiting editing to "filling in forms", optionally per section and with an optional password, leaves only the fields clickable; Stop Protection lets the author edit again.
• Turn off design mode and paragraph marks to regain control. With both on, especially in table-based templates, the document looks chaotic; he keeps the paragraph-mark toggle on the Quick Access Toolbar and uses Shift+Enter, a line break without paragraph spacing, to lay out fields.

2015-02-07 · open the original ↗

• Touch-first Office apps have arrived in the Windows preview. Word, PowerPoint and Excel previews came in a rollup to Windows 10 Pro technical preview build 9926 and resemble the iPad apps; Hanselman relays, from C++ conference talks, that much of the code is shared C++ across Android, Windows and iOS.
• The universal apps scale from phone-sized to full-screen tablet mode. On his Surface he shrinks Word to something that looks like a phone app, and removing the keyboard or switching to tablet mode makes it go full screen.
• The preview is visibly buggy and incomplete. He hits painting glitches, high/low DPI confusion, a selection menu offering only cut, copy and paste, unintuitive text selection, OneDrive as the only storage (he hopes for Dropbox as on iPad), and a sign-in button that did nothing.
• "Use Office for free" hints at a free basic tier. This is his inference from the first-run prompt: everyone gets the basic apps, as on iPad, with advanced features lighting up under Office 365, which he says he is fine with.
• Touch and desktop versions sit side by side on the same files. He snaps desktop Excel next to the preview: the file format is shared but templates are not, and desktop Excel's optimize-for-touch mode is still cramped; on a small tablet he says he would want the touch version, while full Word stays full Word.

2015-02-05 · open the original ↗

• No summary available: this video has no speech. Its audio track is silent for the full 98 seconds and YouTube has no captions for it, so the transcript is empty; going by the title, it is a time-lapse of a coffee cup being 3D-printed on a Printrbot Simple Metal controlled with OctoPrint.

2015-01-31 · open the original ↗

• A style is a named collection of formats, and most people ignore them. Hanselman likens Word styles to CSS: one name carries font, bold, size, line and paragraph spacing. Styles was the most-requested topic in the series, and he demonstrates on a résumé he found online.
• Fix the style, not the text, and put spacing in it. He right-clicks a style to "update heading one to match the selection", or uses Modify, then Format, then Paragraph to set the spacing after headings (he says 12, then calls it six points). His rule is that typed spaces, tabs and Enters are not how you add vertical or horizontal space. Ctrl+Alt+1 and Ctrl+Alt+2 apply Heading 1 and Heading 2.
• Custom styles let one edit reformat a whole document. He creates a "résumé normal" style and indents every paragraph that uses it by half an inch in one change, and uses "select all" instances to move one style to another, which he calls more convenient than search and replace. To see each line's style, File > Options > Advanced sets a "style area pane width" (he uses 1.5 inches), which shows only in Draft or Outline view. Bullets are under Format > Numbering.
• Heading styles drive the navigation pane. In Print Layout the navigation pane lists every Heading 1 and 2, so sections can be collapsed, jumped to and searched. He pitches this at PhD students and anyone writing more than a page or two. For a sloppy document, Ctrl+A then Ctrl+Space strips all formatting and Ctrl+Shift+N resets everything to Normal.
• A table of contents is a generated field built from headings. He inserts one from the References tab; after renaming headings it does not change until he right-clicks it and chooses Update Field, then the whole table. He promises a later video on captions, APA style and citations.

2015-01-27 · open the original ↗

• Use a page break, not repeated Enters, to start a page. Hanselman shows that pressing Enter repeatedly disturbs bullets and numbering and breaks when font sizes change; Insert > Page Break does the job. Page breaks are visible only with paragraph marks on. Double-clicking the gap between pages hides the white space so the document reads as one continuous page.
• Mixed portrait and landscape pages need section breaks. Changing orientation after a page break turns the whole document landscape. A section break (Next Page), found under Layout > Breaks rather than the Insert menu, lets each section have its own layout. He builds a portrait–landscape–portrait sequence in a 13-page AP art history exam for, say, a large picture or slide.

2015-01-26 · open the original ↗

• Cortana arrives on the desktop but is still rough. In build 9926 (Technical Preview 2, third week of January, on a Surface Pro 3), Cortana must be switched on in settings. "Hey Cortana" listens on the local machine for the phrase, Hanselman says, not "in a creepy way". It is slow, works only in the US and only in English except for search. He expects it to improve, and is waiting for dictation.
• The Start menu blends Windows 7 and 8 and is rebuilt in XAML. It now has one fixed size (he could resize it in earlier builds), scrolls vertically, and expands to a modified Start screen. Typing searches modern and desktop apps, settings and "my stuff" side by side. Search has a feedback button that attaches a screenshot. Toasts roll up into a unified notification centre, and there are a new Store beta and an Xbox app.
• Windows is getting "a proper windowing manager". Modern apps resize and snap alongside desktop apps with snap assist. A new quarter-snap puts four apps in the corners, though the Store resists small sizes. Win+Tab adds virtual desktops and Ctrl+Win+Left/Right switches them, which he is "pretty excited" about.
• Detaching the keyboard switches into a full-screen tablet mode. On the Surface Pro 3 every app, even Task Manager, goes full screen "iPad style" until the keyboard returns, or the user toggles it from the notification centre. Win+P becomes a general "connect" for screens and audio, including Miracast (he uses an Amazon Fire Stick).
• Join the Insider program if you can spare the machine. He finds the build slow and attributes that to it being a debug build. Settings > Update and recovery offers fast or slow preview builds: fast means new things sooner, slow means fewer setup problems. He runs fast. The new Settings app is still incomplete, and he found its networking section confusing.

2015-01-23 · open the original ↗

• Paragraph marks expose whether a document is properly built. Hanselman turns on show/hide paragraph marks to see every typed Enter, space and tab in example résumés he downloaded (an intern's, one from UC Davis, a .gov federal template). His view, which he expects commenters to dislike, is that spaces used for alignment "advertise I have no idea how to use Word".
• Spaces and stacked tabs break as soon as formatting changes. Text lined up with spaces falls apart once it is bolded or resized. The fix is tab stops set on the ruler (View > Ruler). The selector at the ruler's left cycles through left, center, right and decimal tabs. Double-clicking a stop sets exact positions; he uses a center tab at 3.5 and a right tab at 6.5 inches, then one tab per gap.
• Indent with the ruler's markers, not with tabs. The down-pointing triangle is the first-line indent, the up-pointing one the hanging indent, and the square below moves the left indent. Ruler changes apply only to the selected paragraphs, and a greyed-out marker means the selected lines have different settings.
• A hanging indent plus a tab stop aligns text after a label. For "Note 1:"-style lines with spaces after the colon, he selects them all, sets a hanging indent and a left tab at the same point, then puts one tab after each colon. The result holds when the text is resized. Word's grammar checker objects to a tab after a colon, which he says to ignore.
• Tabs typed inside bullets were meant as indents. In the federal template someone pushed text across with tabs, which looked fine at 12 point and broke at 11 or 14. He deletes the tabs and uses Increase Indent (a quarter inch per click), drags the indent markers, or applies a bullet to join the list.

2014-11-15 · open the original ↗

• System compression keeps Windows 10 viable on small devices. Build 9879's Disk Cleanup, run as administrator, adds an option that compresses Windows binaries and program files; on his machine it estimated about 7 GB freed. Hanselman argues decompression overhead on modern i3, i5 and i7 processors is outweighed by the space regained, which matters most on 64 GB and smaller devices such as his Dell Venue.
• The UI is visibly mid-experiment, mixing desktop and touch styles. Old and new folder icons sit side by side inconsistently ("it's not working for me"), notification options are duplicated between charms and desktop menus, and a second "zPC Settings" appears to be pulling classic Control Panel items such as Windows Defender into full-screen settings. The window "..." button is now a hamburger menu that drops a desktop user into touch-style screens; he expects this to become consistent once "convergence" between keyboard and tablet modes arrives.
• The console gains full-screen Alt+Enter, alongside transparency and word wrap. Copy and paste sit under experimental properties; he shows a full-screen command prompt on one virtual desktop and Visual Studio on another ("it's about time"). He still cannot set per-desktop backgrounds and wants a Mac-style three- or four-finger swipe to switch desktops.
• A hidden registry switch hints at a reimplemented, switchable Start menu. Setting a "use experience" value to 1 under the ImmersiveShell key in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and restarting Explorer produces a half-finished Start menu run by a separate "Windows Shell Experience Host" process with a default Universal-app icon. He labels it his own speculation that this signals convergence of Start menu and Start screen, letting users switch without logging out, and warns viewers not to try it at home.
• The Insider Hub turns preview users into informal testers. Searching "Insider" opens an app listing known problems and build changes, plus "missions" asking users to try specific things and give feedback; he describes it as making Insiders "temporary employees" and encourages signing up on a spare machine.

2014-10-24 · open the original ↗

• New animations are the most visible change from build 9841. Build 9860 arrives through PC settings' preview-builds update check; Hanselman reads Microsoft's "thousands and thousands of improvements" as mostly closed bugs rather than new features, and describes the new open animation as "jelly" and "juicy" while disliking the minimize one.
• Snap assist has become unreliable in this build. Snapping a window to one side no longer reliably offers the other open apps to fill the remaining half, a feature from the first stage presentation; he says signing out and back in restores it and he is not too worried.
• Notifications appear for the first time, still rough. He calls this the first incarnation of notifications in the action center, with odd fonts and spacing, and presumes it will become the home for Skype, calendar, Store and Outlook alerts once polished.
• Virtual desktops gain keyboard shortcuts. Windows+Ctrl+D creates a desktop and Windows+Ctrl+Left/Right switch between them, and closing a desktop collapses its windows onto the remaining one; per-desktop wallpaper is still not possible.
• Data Sense and Battery Saver arrive as frameworks only. Data Sense shows Wi-Fi gigabytes used and resembles the Windows Phone feature, with background-data restrictions greyed out; Battery Saver did nothing in his testing, and he predicts both become first-class features in a future version.

2014-10-15 · open the original ↗

• The hybrid Start menu mostly won her over. Hanselman's wife, a Windows 8 laptop user who came from Windows 7 at work, found pinning and resizing with little help and called the full-screen Windows 8 start screen "weird"; later, asked directly, she said that as a creature of habit she would probably prefer the bigger screen, which he shows can be switched back on.
• Windowed modern apps fix Windows 8's hidden controls. Hanselman's case is that full-screen apps leave non-technical users asking where minimize and close are; she had not known Windows 8.1 hides those buttons at the top edge, and called learning that the best thing he showed her, though it is not new in Windows 10.
• Only the snap helper is new, not snapping itself. She had been halving her screen by eye and did not know side-by-side snapping has existed since Windows 7; the Windows 10 addition is the prompt offering another open window for the other half.
• Virtual desktops and Explorer's Home drew a lukewarm response. Hanselman pitched virtual desktops as like an extra monitor for separating email, research and browsing, and she was unsure of the value; Home's most-recently-used folders and files she judged worth it only if they save her usual four- or five-click hunt.
• Her takeaway was that Windows 8 does more than she knew. She concluded that Windows 10's changes are subtleties for power users she would barely notice, and that what surprised her were existing Windows 7 and 8 features such as snapping and hidden minimize buttons.

2014-10-02 · open the original ↗

• The Start menu combines Windows 7's menu with Windows 8's tiles. Hanselman tested on his personal laptop because Windows 8 was criticised as tablet-oriented; the menu is resizable, tiles can be enlarged until it becomes a start screen, the full start screen can be restored via taskbar properties, and he sees the mix as sensible for enterprises.
• Modern apps now run as ordinary desktop windows. Xbox Music opens windowed and can be resized and minimized, and a "..." title-bar button carries full screen, share, search, settings and app commands formerly in the charms bar; Continuum, shown on stage to go full screen when keyboard and mouse are detached, is not in this build.
• Virtual desktops and a snap helper speed window management. Task view adds desktops that each keep their own apps, though he has not found per-desktop wallpaper; after snapping one window, Windows offers a choice of what to snap beside it, and window chrome gets a visual refresh with a glow.
• The command prompt is overhauled into a modern console. Experimental properties add transparency, resizing with word wrap, Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V and Alt column selection, which he reads as Microsoft actively working on the console.
• Search moves to the taskbar and Explorer gains Home. The taskbar search button covers the web and local files, with talk that Cortana may live there; Explorer's Home shows favorites, frequent folders and recent files, which he would rather replace with This PC but thinks could help non-technical relatives.

2014-09-10 · open the original ↗

• A Windows VM comes from the portal's quick create. On a free trial, Hanselman names the VM, picks Windows Server 2012 R2, a medium size, credentials and the West US region; he says it provisioned in about 5 minutes (fast-forwarded on screen) while the portal stayed usable for other tasks. He also points to a larger gallery of images, some (such as Visual Studio) exclusive to MSDN subscribers.
• Access is over Remote Desktop from a downloaded RDP file. "Connect" on the VM's dashboard downloads the file, and in the logged-in server Task Manager shows two processors and 3.5 GB of RAM, which he says is what he asked for.
• Shutting the VM down stops the billing. He shuts it down from the portal and says that once it is down he is no longer billed. The video is Microsoft's own product walkthrough, recorded in 2014 under the "Windows Azure" and "Microsoft Azure" names.

2014-09-10 · open the original ↗

• An Express site goes from local to GitHub in minutes. Hanselman runs the Express generator to make a Node site, turns it into a repository in GitHub for Windows with a Node .gitignore, and publishes the initial commit to GitHub.
• Azure websites can deploy straight from source control. In the portal's custom create (West US, free trial) he picks "publish from source control", where the options shown include a local Git repository, Visual Studio Online, Dropbox and CodePlex; choosing GitHub authorizes Azure and lists his repositories, and he deploys the master branch.
• Every push redeploys the site through a webhook. He says a GitHub webhook tells Azure to deploy whenever new code is checked in, and the portal keeps a deployment history with detailed logs of the files deployed; the site then serves at an azurewebsites.net address. This is Microsoft's own 2014 product walkthrough.

2014-09-10 · open the original ↗

• Linux VMs use the same quick create as Windows. On his free trial Hanselman creates an Ubuntu Server VM with two cores and a password, under the default username "azureuser", in West US, alongside a stopped Windows VM.
• SSH is mapped by default and gives full control. The VM's endpoints show private port 22 exposed publicly as port 22; he connects with an SSH client from a command prompt to the VM's cloudapp.net address, where top shows 3.5 GB of RAM, and installs and runs htop to show he has full control. This is Microsoft's own 2014 product walkthrough.

2014-09-10 · open the original ↗

• Visual Studio creates and publishes the Azure site itself. Hanselman makes a new ASP.NET MVC web application with "host in the cloud" ticked, signs in to Azure and sets the region (West US, no database) without opening the portal; Visual Studio creates the website, and publish, with settings pre-filled, puts it live. The portal dashboard then shows the app's CPU time, data in and out and requests. This is Microsoft's own 2014 product walkthrough.

2014-09-10 · open the original ↗

• The one-month trial will not charge the card by default. Hanselman signs up with a Microsoft account and a credit card, which he says is not billed unless spending limits are removed; when the credit runs out, sites shut down unless the user chooses to be billed. His new account shows a $200 credit with 30 days to use it, and a status box changes colour to warn before credits run out.
• MSDN subscribers should activate their separate Azure benefit. He says it comes at no charge with up to $150 in Azure credits a month ("$1,800 plus a year"), use of MSDN software in the cloud, and a 33% discount on virtual machines. These are Microsoft's 2014 offer terms as he presents them.