OK, this is pretty far removed from the norm of an IT blog, but it is the weekend so I feel it's allowed. The topic has some technical (practical) aspects, and is something I've been talking with a few people about lately.

I've seen various techniques on how to cook steak properly, but I came across one individual's website (which, frustratingly, I can no longer find) a few years ago, which summarised everything beatifully and set me trying out a few different ways from the norm. In a nutshell: cook the steak from room temperature, oil the meat and not the pan, use a pan as hot as you can, and let the steak rest for at least as long as you cooked it.

It's all about heat

I used to work in a professional kitchen. Well, I was a waiter in a nice restaurant, which meant I spent a bit of time in a pro kitchen (generally on the "other" side of the hot plate). Professional chefs seemingly have a duty to verbally abuse their waiting staff, which mine did with gusto if not applomb.

Several years later, I was being shown round a call centre (as The Client), when I recognised one of the chefs who'd been giving me verbal, was now trying to sell software over the phone. Presumably, the world of cooking hadn't worked out for him quite as he'd hoped.

Anyway, one thing I learned about cooking steak back then was, it's all about heat. Now the trick to cooking a good fillet steak (and that's pronounced fill-it, not fill-eh, unless you currently live in France), is to try to get close to restaurant kitchen heat levels in a domestic kitchen. It can make for a lot of smoke, but it's very effective. Here's the deal...

• Take your fillet steak out of the fridge at least 20 minutes before you want to cook it, to allow it to get to room temperature. Taking a cold steak and throwing straight onto hot metal won't do anything for the tenderness of the end result.
   
• Pat the steak with kitchen roll to remove any excess moisture (if the meat is wet, when you put it on the heat, that water will vapourise and only form a barrier between the steak and the heat source).
   
• Once patted dry, rub a little sunflower or vegetable oil into the steak, with your fingers (don't use olive oil - it burns at too low a temperature), and leave to sit for a few minutes. Season with salt & pepper if you like.
   
• Put a small, dry, frying pan on maximum heat on the biggest ring/burner on your hob. Leave it there for a least a couple of minutes. In the meantime, go and open some windows. Things are likely to get smokey. I've heard of some people leaving the pan on heat for as much as 10 minutes, but you might struggle to see the cooker by the time you're ready to put the fillet on.
   
• When the pan is as hot as you can suffer, gently place the steak onto the surface. After 30 seconds or so, move it so it doesn't stick and burn. Now it's a straight function of how hot your pan is, how big the steak is, and how you like it cooked, which will determine how long to leave it there. I tend to find 2-3 minutes each side will give a nice medium-rare on a decent sized fillet on a pan that's been on heat for a few minutes.

There's a trick to being able to tell when the steak is properly cooked, and it involves prodding your own hand. Pressing on the surface with your finger, you'll feel the flesh give way a little, and it should be about the same firmness as if you press with the finger on the fleshy part of your hand when pinching thumb and fingers together. It's easier to show than describe:

So if you touch thumb and index finger, the firmness of your hand will be about the same as a rare steak, while thumb and little finger will be more like well done. Experience and practice will help you out here, and don't be scared of cutting the steak to check it's cooked as you'd like - better a well-cooked dish with a cut in the middle, than an undercooked but nicely presented one.

I can't really understand wanting to cook a lovely fillet of beef to "well done". You might as well save a bit of cash and buy a cheaper cut. In fact, according to Anthony Bourdain (and I've heard this of other chefs too), the skankier bits of beef get set aside for serving to restaurant customers who like their meat good 'n burnt - with a label on the meat saying "SFWD", or "Save For Well Done".

Finally, take the steak off the heat and put on a warmed plate and just let it rest for 10 minutes or so, before serving. You might want to deglaze the pan with a little red wine and maybe a knob of butter, to make a nice sauce. Mmmmmmmmm.

Organising our home lives is increasingly done digitally, from keeping in touch with friends and making arrangements over social networking, to just the basics of communicating intra-family – how many readers have multiple laptops or <cough> “tablet type devices” (soon to be Surfaces for Microsofties at least, thanks Steve!) at home? Have you ever IM’ed your significant other even if you’re both in the house at the same time?

Well, as an adjunct to the merry-go-round of keeping your home life under control, Tim Hall suggested this week’s tip, and although it concerns something that’s actually been possible in Outlook for several versions, it’s a hugely useful feature which is perhaps easily forgotten.

We’re all used to having other people in the company being able to see our calendar, so they don’t make arrangements with or for us that conflict with other appointments. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to share the calendar with your nearest and dearest?

Well, you can. Go into Calendar in Outlook, and in Outlook 2013 (other versions are available, though the UI may vary), look at the Ribbon on the Share part of the main Home tab. You’ll see the ability to Publish Online – with a few clicks, you can have Outlook push some or all details of your calendar to an external service on Office.com (after prompting you to login with your Office.com/Hotmail account ID), and which can in turn be consumed by invited Outlook.com/Hotmail etc users if they too are running Outlook. You choose who to invite, and they get emailed a link to add your calendar straight into their Outlook client. Simple as that.

There are a few other options which could prove more useful if not quite so straightforward to set up. What if your other half isn’t using Outlook? How about being able to sync a copy of their calendar onto your Windows Phone…? We’ll look into these in a future Tip o’ the Week, but if you’re keen to press on, you could look into a free third party addin that replicates content between two calendars, meaning you could keep a copy of your work Calendar in a household Outlook.com account, and sync that to the Windows Phones of everyone in the house…

[This is a re-heat and update of an older blog post on You Had me at EHLO!]

Search Folders in Outlook 2003 and 2007 can be a useful tool to manage large volumes of mail in your mailbox; one tip is to create a folder for "all mail since this morning" or similar; I also have a search folder for "all unread blog posts" which means I get a single filtered view, grouped by folder and sorted by date. Here are a couple of examples...

• Firstly, create a Search Folder by right-clicking in Outlook on the ‘Search Folders’ root folder, and choosing New Search Folder … then navigate to the bottom of the list and create a Custom Search Folder.
• Click the ‘Choose’ button to start the creation process and give the folder a name (hit the Criteria button on the following dialog once you’ve decided on a name).
• Navigate to the Advanced tab, and using the Field button, choose Frequently Used Fields -> Received and change the condition to ‘on or after’ and the value to ‘8am yesterday’. Hit the ‘Add to list’ button.
• Next, choose ‘In Folder’ from the ‘All Mail Fields’ heading within the Field drop down, set the condition to ‘doesn’t contain’ and then follow with a list of words which you want to exclude from the results.
• Finally, select 'Message Class' from 'All Mail Fields' if you want to restrict the type of content you're going to include - I don't want RSS feeds to be part of the search result, so have set the condition to "doesn't contain=rss" since the Outlook 2007 RSS form is of message class IPM.Post.RSS.

The second condition here sets the list of folders we want to exclude… I use ‘DL: Sent Junk Draft Deleted’, which means any item in Sent Items, Drafts, Deleted Items or Junk Items will automatically be excluded, but so will any folders which contain the letters ‘DL:’ in their name. This way, I filter social mail and less important Distribution Lists into folders which all start DL: <name> and the other DL items which are more important still show up in the Search Folder.

The last stage is to add the Search Folder to the Favorites Folders collection, and set the default view of the Search Folder to show Arrange by Folder… then it’s really easy to quickly collapse & expand the groupings to show and hide specific folders from the results. Now, all I need to do is get round to reading and responding to all that email :) The sad thing is, that as of writing (around 5pm), the filtered mail from yesterday morning is showing 202 items, 172 of which are unread :(

More info on search folders is on Office Online – some here, and here.

//Ewan

If you’re a recently lucky Windows Phone 8 recipient, you’ll no doubt have followed all of the instructions in how to set up your new phone, so you’ll already know that you can go to My Phone and reinstall all the apps you’d downloaded onto your previous WP7 device (note that the previously recommended Reinstaller app no longer works, due to changes in the Marketplace/Store architecture).

The Windowsphone.com What’s New page gives a quick summary of what the main differences are between WP7 and WP8 (from a user’s point of view, at least – there are many other differences under the covers, since WP7.x was based on Windows CE whereas WP8 now runs on a Windows 8 based kernel).

Here are a few other tips that might be of interest…

Identify your phone

When everyone around you has a Black Lumia 920 too†, you might find it helpful to quickly identify which is yours, so you don’t mix up your phone with others’. One quick way of doing so is to customise the lock screen – easy enough to do, but if you’re going to the bother then why not put your own contact details on it so if your phone gets lost, it might be returned?
There’s a simple app called Metro Lockscreen Creator (a trial version does everything you need, since you’ll probably only ever run it once) – it just creates a simple block picture with a photo you select, and some text (your name, perhaps, or phone number).

Run the app, create the lockscreen and then point your phone at the picture it generates…
† other phones are available. Like blue HTC 8Xs, for example.

Bonk to send

The Register enjoys discussing “Pay-by-Bonk” (fnarr, fnarr) etc, meaning using new Near-Field Communication technology (which is now part of WP8) to allow actions like paying for goods or transferring data in some way.  One obvious way of using this is to send photos to another WP8 user – try tapping on the “…” icon at the bottom of a photo you’re viewing, choose share… and then Tap+Send. You then tap/press your phone against another WP8 device, and the receiving device will prompt the user if they’d like to accept the incoming pic. The phones will use Bluetooth to transfer the content, so you will need to keep them relatively close until both sides confirm the transfer has taken place.

If you can find another WP8 user who’s willing to let you try, give it a go – it can be quite hard to get started, but once you’ve done it a couple of times, you’ll be well enough versed in the technique to make it a smooth and pain-free experience in future. Chortle, Chortle.

PhotoBeamer

Whilst on the topic of pics, those of you with a Nokia handset (including Windows Phone 7.5 users with an older Lumia) can try out their PhotoBeamer app. Install from the Store (or click the previous link and follow the tag on that page), and use the app to navigate to photos you’d like to share with others. Meanwhile, on any computer with an internet connection, browse to www.photobeamer.com and point your phone at the QR Code on the screen. Immediately, you’ll send the photo you’re looking at to the PC screen, and you can use the phone to swipe back and forth around an album too. Genius.

Ringtones

Setting your own distinctive ringtone on WP7.x was always something of a faff, in fact it was the subject of ToW #93. Nowadays, it’s a good bit simpler though for best effect, you’d still be wise to edit the track you want to use, since the hook of the song you like (that you’d want to use as your tone) is probably not right at the start of the song.

To create a ringtone, just drop your choonz into the \Ringtones folder on the phone (by plugging it into your PC, running the Windows Phone app on your PC to manage it properly). No need to worry about tagging with a genre or anything.

One of the biggest cultural impacts of using Instant Messaging and UC technology in a business context is the way that people tend to check the status of someone before contacting them. It’s a relatively rare occurrence to get an internal phone call out of the blue if both parties are online: usually, it would be set up with a quick chat on IM first – then the calling party knows that the call they make isn’t going to drop to voice mail.

To quote UC aficionado Tony Cocks, “it’s all about presents”. 
Or presence, and the value that it gives to anyone trying to contact you.

If you’re set to Do Not Disturb (DND), for example, we probably all know that means trying to send an IM won’t work. Trying to call via Lync or on the internal phone number won’t get through either – setting yourself to DND sends all calls straight to voice mail (or straight to oblivion, for many people). I heard a story the other day about someone who got an unannounced incoming cellular call – the caller saying, “yeah, I saw you were on Do Not Disturb so thought I’d call your mobile…”  Like, duuuuh…

Did you know you can allow people you trust to interrupt you when you’re on DND..? Right-click on their name in Lync, choose “Change Privacy Relationship” (right at the bottom of the menu). Set them to be part of your Workgroup, and when you set yourself to DND, they’ll see you instead as being on Urgent Interruptions Only. And they can IM you.

Anyway, we can infer a lot from someone’s automatic status – if they’re Busy, then chances are their Outlook calendar has been blocked out or they may have manually set the status to show they’re busy. That doesn’t mean they’re uncontactable – only that if they don’t respond, then you shouldn’t be surprised. If they’re In a Meeting, it means not only is the Outlook calendar blocked out, but it’s being blocked by a meeting with more than one attendee. Maybe that means you could still IM the person, but they probably wouldn’t be able to take a call. If they’re on In a Call or In a Conference Call, then they’ll definitely not be able to take a call as they’re on one already…

If they’re Away (like Richard, here), then they’ve probably either wandered off from their PC or else they’ve locked the computer (WindowsKey + L), and you may get some extra context about how long they’ve been away for. If only a few minutes, they could be sitting at their desk talking with someone (or reading a paper etc), and sending an IM might get an immediate response … but if it’s been 30 minutes, they probably are genuinely not there and you’d better look elsewhere, or send an email.

Add further context

As you can see from Richard’s status above, he’s also got a line below his name that says where he is – TVP. Actually, this is just set by the free-text note field at the top of the Lync main window (which asks “What’s happening today?” if you haven’t set anything else). It’s a handy way of giving a little more context if you want people to know, or just provide a pithy one-liner akin to a Facebook status.

If you want to be a little more specific you can also provide a number of custom presence states, so rather than just being Busy you could be Busy writing reports, or instead of being Available you could be Working from home. See TechNet or previous missives on this blog.

For place specific info, you could try setting up custom locations – in short, when your PC appears on a particular network, you can give it a name and then whenever you use the PC at that location, it will show up in your own Lync client right under your name and your status. Different locations needs to be named separately (eg Home, CP, Edinburgh, TVP).

It’s not all that obvious to everyone else, however – to see someone else’s custom location, right click on their name and View Contact Card (or just click on their name and press ALT-ENTER). If they’ve set a location up, you’ll see it – otherwise they’re either not in a place they’ve named, or you’ll just see their time zone. If you want to make it plain to everyone else where you are, then you may want to stick to custom status and/or using the Lync “What’s happening today?” text status field.

You can see set the Lync status on the above screenshot is Off work – that tells the world that even though I’m online via Lync, I’m not online to do work… and if someone was to click on my details, they could see a whole load of information about whether I’m likely to respond to their IM. If you’ve set your status to Off work and someone IMs you about work, then it’s perfectly acceptable to just ignore the message (press Esc to get rid of the popped-up window in one fell swoop). Well, depends who it is…