Software History

Have you ever found yourself in a pinch where there’s a QR code on a web page or stored on your computer and you don’t have your phone with you (or more often than not your smart phone’s battery has died on you {again})?  Well Zxing to the rescue.

About a week ago the BBC ran an article about standardisation of mobile phone chargers.  Not particularly interesting at first thought, but the article was quite enlightening.

Well it’s been a little while since I posted my comparison of Microsoft Tag and QR Codes.  In this post I noted that there was a strange 90° anti-clockwise when using the Microsoft Tag reader on my Samsung Omnia i900. Well I stumbled across the reason today whilst testing some Microsoft Tag print outs I had produced for an event.

Today the Academy York office hosted an event for the Academy’s technical community.  Staff with ICT interests from York were joined by a range of like minded colleagues from the Academy Subject Centres and some guest speakers from outside of the community - around thirty in total.

One thing I came across after managing to find five minutes to read through some news feed recommendations a few weeks ago is something which could be the ultimate ICT support tool.

At Thursday’s technical community event I had a little experiment involving QR Codes and Microsoft Tags.  We have information up in our office meeting rooms about how visitors may access our wireless network.  We have an alphanumeric access key and I used this as the basis for my little experiment.

Microsoft Office Labs have launched an exciting new addition to One Note - Canvas for One Note.  This is the same idea as pptPlex for PowerPoint and instead off slides it amalgamates One Note notebook pages into a single canvas.  You can then zoom in and out and edit pages on a desktop like layout.

A little while ago I spent some time outside of work struggling with a particular application on my Samsung Omnia i900 mobile phone.  It seemed like it just didn’t work properly and I almost reported it to the developers as a bug.  Just before I did I came across another piece of mobile software and noted a very similar problem and this time something clicked and I realised what the issue really was.

I’ve just been installing some new software onto my Windows Mobile phone, but I kept getting an error message saying that it had been unsuccessful … nothing as to why of course.

I’ve been trying a number of applications recently on my Windows mobile device (Samsung Omnia) and it started grumbling again that I’m low on main storage memory.  I’ve made it much happier now so I thought I’d share some of my tips with you on how to keep your storage memory free.  Some of the tips may only be applicable if you have certain items of software installed.

I was recently asked to look at a problem a colleague was having with an Excel spreadsheet where they wanted to use a drop down list in the cells of one column and then a drop down list in the next column that was dependent upon the selection in the previous column. This is something I’d come across before and a little browsing of the help file refreshed my memory and I gave them a solution based upon data validation and the use of the INDIRECT function.

I posted earlier about a better way for producing dynamic lists in Excel.  One of the “tricks” I used to simplify things was using the text values of the items in a primary list to identify a secondary list to use.

It seems that drop down lists are the in thing at work right about now.  One of my colleagues dropped by with a query about creating drop down lists in Word 2007.  So this is how to go about doing it…

After spending a bit of time looking at service desk records today I had the opportunity to look at a particular request where a SharePoint user wanted to include links to files on other web sites in a document library without uploading the file onto the SharePoint site.  This is actually a really nice idea as then if the other site is updated (assuming the URL remains the same), the latest version is always accessible via the SharePoint site.

Microsoft Exchange is a fairly ubiquitous system for handling e-mails and I made a surprising discovery today whilst amending a user’s mailbox storage limits … they don’t get updated straight away.

Have you ever wanted to use the browse for a folder dialog box from your VBScript?  Well maybe you can make use of this function?  It’s an amalgamation of various other scripts tailored to my own needs so hopefully it’ll suit your purposes too, but if not just tweak it until it does.

Armed with my folder browser script I finally finished rounding out my script to clone / duplicate a folder structure.

A few days ago I was speaking to one of my users about creating some PDF files from Microsoft Word and securing them so that they can’t be copied or printed.  Rather than using expensive software from Adobe or a generic creator like CutePDF I recommended using the add-in for Word 2007 that Microsoft provide as it provides some useful accessibility options (thanks to JISC TechDis for highlighting that one to me).

A little while ago I posted about some ways to reclaim memory on a Windows Mobile device.  The reason for this was that the main memory on my Samsung Omnia was almost at zero and it had been a fairly common occurrence.  I’ve spent a little while recently trying to get a Skype client working on it and installing it to anywhere but the main memory seemed cause a few issues.  Today however I’ve had a good day working on the phone and I’ve managed to not only get the latest version of the Skype client running from storage rather than main memory but also found a few additional ways of getting some more control over the main memory.

Having spent a good part of the last couple of days doing some housekeeping and updating on my Samsung Omnia I had a bit of an issue late last night.  The Omnia is aimed at doing everything (hence the name), but last night I owned an Oblivia.  I’m not sure quite what happened but I think a disagreement between Windows Vista and my Omnia may have been to blame.

A few weeks ago I gave a presentation I’d been trying to put together for the best part of six months and this evening I’ve sent it on to the users who attended and who were unable to attend but showed an interest.  I realised at this point I hadn’t actually blogged about it so I thought I might put together a little post about it.

I came across a bizarre issue today in Microsoft Word. A user had a document containing a set of information laid out in a tabular format where the text in each cell was being condensed and overlaid so that the text was all being placed one character on top of another

I deal with a fair few academics and if there’s one thing they love about the Internet and the World Wide Web it’s YouTube and the vast resources it offers.  Giving multimedia presentations is obviously a great way of getting people engaged, but an issue is that when visiting an institution you can’t always guarantee that you will have access to the Internet so being able to download a video from YouTube is a huge benefit.

Since I had my Omina problems the other week (it’s about to go in for repair as there are still some strange hardware issues) I lost lots of basic information on the phone.  One of the things I lost was the ring tone.  I can’t remember what I had before, but I like to have something simple and professional that won’t cost me and won’t embarrass me in the office.  I don’t want the latest polyphonic chart hit blaring from my pocket as I sit at my desk.

I recently came across a site called TED. It’s a web site for the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design conference.  The web site itself has a showcase of videos clips from conference speakers and is worth a look.  The thing I want to quickly post about however is something I think is quite innovative … an interface I’ve not seen anywhere else (yet).

A little while ago I received a request for the installation of Spotify on a work computer. I’d not heard of it at this point so I did some research and discovered that it was a piece of software that linked you to a massive library of music on the Internet. After a bit of discussion in trying to ascertain what the business case was for installing this to a work computer it faded away.

Unfortunately due to illness it’s taken me a couple of extra days to put this together, but at the weekend I attended The Gadget Show Live (GSL) at the NEC, Birmingham.  The Gadget Show is a UK television programme shown on Channel 5.  Each series has a weekly show and it showcases new technologies and compares leading products against one another.  it’s usually a good watch and the journalistic comparison is presented at a layman level and at the same time tends to offer some insightful points on practicalities of individual items.

Today has been a very busy day!  An early start saw me pulling together a variety of thoughts and pieces of information in preparation for the Higher Education Academy’s ICT team away day.  This was the first away day the team had ever had and there was certainly some apprehension as to how the day would pan out.