Well, it’s been an exciting week. We might not have laser beams but we will get “HoloLens” (though we’re not quite at the “Help me, Obi-Wan…” level of holo-projection). Augmented Reality may be about to get really powerful and mainstream, though one departed great was adding to reality at the height of Reaganomics, almost 30 years ago…

Windows Phone as a name is reportedly going away, to be replaced with just “Windows 10”, but there’s still some innovation to come before the availability of the new phone version, later this year (preview here, maybe?).

The upgrade known as “Windows Phone 8.1 Update” is making its way in the world; some new phones already have it installed, while others are getting it as we speak. Lumia users will see a new package of updates that includes Windows Phone 8.1 Update, known as “Lumia Denim”: see here for an overview or look here for detailed rollout information.

Some highlights

There are a few particularly cool additions; like the ability to group icons on your home screen into folders, where a tap on the group will expand it out into a section with larger tiles so you can start the apps quickly. It’s one extra tap on the home screen but it means you can get quicker access to key apps without needing to scroll around on the usual list of apps.

There’s also a nice feature called Apps Corner, which lets you pick a few (like Maps, or a good Stopwatch) and allow them to be launched by anyone, without needing you to unlock the phone. It’s a bit like Kids Corner but for everyone else, and you do need to specifically activate it (either by navigating through the settings menu to enable it, or pinning a shortcut to the start screen) before handing the phone over.

action center

Everyone who’s on Windows Phone 8.1 will no doubt like the action center, with its quick glance at battery life remaining, the easy jump straight to the phone’s settings or the 4 big tiles that take you to common settings like WiFi and Bluetooth… but did you know you can customise it? Go into settings > notifications + actions and you can replace the 4 default tiles with choices of your own.

Windows Phone 8.1 Update adds the ability to show mobile data on this list – so if you’re travelling and want quick access to be able to switch roaming data on and off, there’s no easier way.

Finally, internet sharing on the Update gets a tweak – you can set your phone as before to be a WiFi hotspot and share out its own data connection to other devices, but you can also now do internet sharing over Bluetooth.

For a full list of what’s new in the update, and for the OS version numbers, see here.

Business cards are still a big part of business culture – even if many of us primarily communicate via email, the ceremony of handing over a little card with your name on it, at the start of a face-to-face meeting, is still quite important. Some countries, such as Japan, have very particular etiquette rules surrounding business cards, so it could take a long time for them to become obsolete.

What better time to institute a resolution to digitise the pile of business cards you may have lying on your desk, than the new year? And to routinely add new business cards to your Outlook contacts folder when you get them, without waiting ages? Well, an update to the amazing Windows Phone app, Office Lens, can help out.

The Lens app (install from here) now has an ability to scan business cards as well as photos, whiteboards & documents. Just tap the option on the top right of the app to choose the mode, then select business card. Now, point the phone at the business card you want to scan in, tap the screen to focus and press the on-screen camera icon or the phone’s camera button, to “scan” the card.

It helps if there’s a contrast between the card and the surface it’s on, so if you have a light desk then try getting a piece of coloured paper, and you don’t necessarily have to angle straight down – try to avoid casting a shadow over the card. The software will try to identify the edges of the card and will scale it as if it was flat, and fills the image.

Once you’ve photographed the card, you can choose if you want to select & use it, delete it and try again, or possibly add another image – so if your card has info on both sides or you want to batch people from the same company up in one go, then you can have multiple images per contact page.

After tapping the save icon, you can choose which section in OneNote you want to save the resulting info – it may be worth setting up a new section in your notebook on OneDrive, just to catch all the contacts while you decide what to do with them. It works best if you have a pile of cards to just scan them all in as one production line, then go through them and edit/tidy up as appropriate.

Each card will produce a single page in OneNote, with the image(s) of the card embedded, and OneNote will try to identify the text off the card and also figure out the key fields (such as name, address, telephone, email etc). The title of each page might not be all that helpful (by default, it’ll be something like “05/01/2015 13:01 Office Lens”) , but it will be possible to search across the whole notebook, so you can find the contact details from each scanned card without necessarily having to do any more. You can always rename the OneNote page later, if you like.

If you want to add the resultant scan to Outlook’s contacts, then each OneNote page that can successfully identify enough key information from the scan will show a “BizCard” attachment, which opens a vCard of the contact information. Simply open, make any final tweaks, hit Save and it’ll be added to your Outlook contacts folder.

Finally, you’ll probably want to delete all the scanned images from your phone – they’ll be cluttering up your SkyDrive/OneDrive Camera Roll folder if you have automatic upload still enabled, so the quickest way would be to use your PC to delete all the card scans from that folder and let it sync back to OneDrive.

Happy New Year! For many of us, time to chuck out trees, and pack away any and all decorations, never to be seen again until December ‘15. Before you recycle the cards you may have received over the holiday season, here’s a quick way of using Outlook to make the job of sending your cards that bit easier.

It involves creating a new view and a couple of custom fields within the Contacts function in Outlook – as has been mentioned before on ToW, when Outlook views any item (an appointment, a contact, a task etc), all it’s doing is using a particular form to display a bunch of fields. It’s possible to easily extend those items with your own fields and there are form editing capabilities too, but we’re not going to use them today. This tip might look a bit daunting but it’s really quite simple, and it’s something you’ll only have to do once – it persists in your Contacts folder so is available on all PCs.

If you have multiple monitors, then it might help to put this email on the 2^nd monitor as you may not be able to easily switch to read the instructions whilst you’re setting things up. Or maybe just print it out.

Create a new view

Firstly, go into the Contacts folder then select the Views tab, and select Change View, then Manage Views to see a list of views that apply to your Contacts folders. Click the New… on the top right.

Select Table as the type of view and give it a name like Christmas Cards, then click on OK to create and start editing the new view.

Click the Columns button and remove everything from the “Show these columns” list on the right hand side, except for Full Name.

Now, it’s time to create a couple of new columns which will be visible in the view and can be used to track interesting bits of info – like whether you sent a card to this contact, and if you got one in return. Click on the New Column button and for the name enter Got Card, then choose Type Yes/No and leave Format as Icon. Press OK to create, and repeat the process for the Sent Card field.

Now, select other relevant fields from the chooser on the left – try selecting All Contact fields from the “select available columns…” drop-down box, then pick some of the more esoteric contact fields that already exist – Spouse/Partner and Children fields will let you remember who to make the cards out to, and Home Address and Notes are pretty self-explanatory.

Once you’ve created the view, resize the columns as appropriate (elongating address, for example). Now, you’re probably looking at a contacts list that’s got 1,000 entries of people you principally do business with, and a handful of friends you might send cards to. The next trick is to filter out people you want to be in the list.

The nice thing about using the Table type view is that you can edit in-line, ie. you don’t need to open up the contacts forms to change the details. Since you’ve just created the Got… and Sent… fields, none of your existing contacts will have a value for any of these fields.

If you click on the Got or Sent fields, you’ll set it to be either yes or no. Try locating a few of your friends in the list and tick these fields, maybe fill in Spouse and Children while you’re at it (and now’s a good time to do that, as you’ll probably have all their names on the cards you received).

OK, now we have a quorum of contacts tagged with Got & Sent attributes, go into View Settings and click the Filter button, then switch to the Advanced pane. From the Field drop-down box, choose User-defined fields in folder and add Got Card.

Change the condition to exists and press Add to List.

Repeat the same process with the Sent Card field, then press OK. Finally, before saving the view, you might want to change the Sort order to Full Name.

Now if you press OK to save the view, you should see your contacts list filtered to show you only the entries that you have tagged as having some value for both Got Card and Sent Card.

If you want to continue adding contacts to the list, simply open your existing contact (maybe from the main Outlook contacts view), then click on All Fields, and select the fields from the user-defined fields in folder – you can then set Yes or No for each of the custom fields, and that contact will now show up in your Christmas Cards view.

If you want to ditch someone from the list, open their contact, look under All Fields, select from user-defined fields in this item (not user-defined fields in this folder!), select the field and Delete it.

So what’s the point of all this faffing about? Well, in 11 months’ time when you come to do your next round of cards, just select the view in Outlook and if you select File / Print and select Table Style, you’ll get a nice sheet or two of all the details and addresses you’ll need to write all your cards.

As buzzwords go, 2014 has been a big year for the “Internet of Things”, or IoT. A term coined 15 years ago by a specialist in RFID, it was later refined in a paper as referring to a world where machines can share information (perhaps about themselves) with each other, to better manage the environment we live in. Let’s hope the sharing and acting doesn’t become too autonomous. Who knows where that would all lead?

The IoT industry (such as it is) comprises largely of companies making gadgets (sensors, controllers, chips that could be embedded into other devices etc), companies selling means of connectivity (like 3G or short-range wireless) and companies selling software solutions to either manage the whole shebang or to do something with the inevitable mass of data that results from it.

Analysts breathlessly predict gargantuan volumes of data (Zettabytes, man!), billions of things, worth trillions of dollars. And everyone’s trying to be seen to be taking part, and to brand the whole area with their take on it (Cisco keeps gamely plugging away, talking up “IoE” or Internet of Everything, Microsoft came out with the Internet of Your Things, though that term may have been put to bed…). There was even a recent event called the Internet of Good Things. Nothing to do with FYC.

Make it real, take it home

While we wait for IoT to realign the stars (or did you see the ISS on Christmas Eve?- #ItsSantasSleigh), we could start with a bit of home automation that is arguably bleeding into IoT, and it’s not ridiculously expensive. Here’s just one example of a fairly simple system, though no doubt readers will email in with recommendations of their fave gadgets. The reason for choosing the kit that follows was largely that this stuff has a reputation for being either expensive or unreliable, or both, and these choices are relatively cheap and cheerful. And won’t be a cause for an argument over Christmas if and when they stop working…

First, you need a box

In order to do anything truly IoT-like, you’re going to need a box (a hub, if you will) that will talk to your things and then corral their data onto the internet. Your average smart sensor isn’t going to have the compute power or connectivity to talk TCP/IP to an internet endpoint, and if it does, that’s why it’ll be 3 times the price of every other one: just look at Belkin’s WeMo. No, what you need is something like Swedish company Telldus’ “TellStick Net”: £70 from your favourite Danish IKEA-like electrical store. Oh, sadly, it appears Tellstick isn’t officially available in the US. Too bad. Maybe it’s karma for all the apps and deals that are US-only…

The Tellstick Net talks to devices which use the ISM band at 433Mhz to communicate with each other; it’s a relatively short-range but low-power radio, and it’s pretty cheap. You may have devices which use this band already (wireless doorbells and the like) though you might not be able to automate much of what they do.

It’s cold outside

One useful thing you could do with your new box, is rig the house and garden up with temperature and humidity sensors – indoors is probably OK, but if you have a garage or a loft, you might want to know that it’s not getting too cold or too damp. And it’s very handy to know exactly how cold it is outdoors, too. A multitude of different sensors are available that talk to the Tellstick box, such as this one (£10).

As a programming task (after you’ve done your Hour of Code, of course), you could rig up some software to keep a log of temperature in your area over time, and maybe cross reference it with a feed of weather forecasts. Here’s a starter for ten. Or just set up tellmon.net to do the logging for you.

Remote Power

Do you have any devices where the power socket is out of reach? Like Christmas Tree lights (plug behind the tree?), or exterior lights that run from the garage? Well here’s a simple solution that can also be controlled by the Tellstick – you can switch them on and off discretely, see the current status and even schedule them to come on and off at set times.

As with temperature sensors, there are loads of power switches which are compatible – like these (£15), which even come with a button-operated remote so you can switch them on and off without resorting to using a computing device.

The principal means of setting up Telldus Live (the cloud service which underpins the Tellstick Net device) is through your browser (try it out with username demo@telldus.com and demodemo as password), or you can use their free app for Android or iOS devices.

There is a 3^rd party app called SmartHome for Windows Phone and Windows 8, which is nicer and more featured, but does require you shelling out a quid.

The observant will spot that the Fence sensor >> reckons it’s 71 degC outside… clearly a faulty device…

Other systems are available

Of course, there are hundreds of other means to doing home automation – there are proprietary, generally reliable (but expensive) things like Crestron or Control4, that could generally mean retrofitting a good bit of kit to your house, but may also do audio and video distribution, lighting control etc.

There are systems to do lights, like Philips’ Hue (great if you want to spend £50 on a light bulb), heating controllers like the Googly NEST or BG’s Hive, to other more entry-level systems like LightwaveRF, which is more expensive than the simple 433Mhz varieties, though offers more capability and is more attainable if you want to get into things gradually, when compared to the more professional type installations.

With Telldus Live, you could have the base system, 5 temperature sensors and 6 power devices all up and running for £150. Not cheap, but in the world of gadgets, that’s not too shabby.

Exactly 5 years after publishing the very first instalment (though it was internal only for a year before I started posting the tips on this blog), Tip o’ the Week goes Old Skool: #256, or 2⁸, the number of combinations possible from a single byte. If you want to join the retro-fun, Sir Clive is backing a new crowd-funded Speccy games console. Sinclair was a hero of the 1980s’ UK 8-bit computer market, before having to sell out to the-then un-betitled upstart Alan Sugar.

Time moves on. The oft-mocked and much-maligned Clippy died, aged 10. Not enough people wanted to write letters any more, it seems.

Other things change, too – the very idea of Clip Art within Office apps, for one. Word 6 from the early 1990s had a handful of clip art images, but later versions of Office had full libraries of pictures and vector-image clip art. But Clip Art is going the way of the dodo…

Microsoft announced recently that the Clip Art collection was being closed down, to be replaced by Bing Image searches.

To insert Bing images into Word docs or Outlook emails, just go to the Insert tab and look under Online Pictures.

The Bing Image Search option shows pictures which are available for free use, licensed through an arrangement called  Creative Commons – so you should be able to use them without charge, though do bear in mind that the license to re-use may have specific conditions – select the desired image  and click on the link for more details.

So, let’s raise our hats to Clip Art – even if it’s sometimes pretty naff, with images that are out of date and a bit cheesy.

If you don’t like the Bing Image options, you can always select Pictures from your own PC, or add your own collections to the “Online Pictures” list  – from online accounts such as OneDrive, Flickr or Facebook.