Snip, a free screen capture tool

If you occasionally need to take a screenshot (or a screen capture of your screen), recent versions of Windows provide you with the Windows Snipping tool. It works well for simple jobs, but a recent Microsoft Garage project called Snip takes it to the next level.

snip

It offers a number of advantages:

  • it runs in the background and is always available
  • it stores your screenshots in a “library” without having to save manually to a file
  • you can annotate your screenshot with various drawing tools. Especially useful when you are using a tablet
  • you can save your annotations in a video file and add voice-over to it (very handy for describing an issue)

 

Microsoft Surface Pro 3 hangs on black “Surface” boot screen

On several occasions, I had my Surface Pro 3 freeze up on me on the boot screen. When I would turn on the surface, it would get to the black screen with the Surface logo, but it would not get any further. No spinner, no activity, nothing.

The following procedure fixes my issue every time:

  • if the Surface is turned on, turn it off by holding the power button for at least 30 seconds
  • press and hold the volume up button and the power button simultaneously for 15 seconds, then release the buttons
  • screen will flash and the Surface will shut down (sometimes it gets stuck at the bios screen, just exit then)
  • turn the device back on. Things should be ok now.

Check the following link for more troubleshooting tips.

TomTom device reboots continuously after update

If you have a built-in TomTom GPS in your car (Carminat – Renault), you might experience that the device reboots continuously after updating the SD Card with TomTom Home.

The device shows the startup screen, a black-and-white hourglass, and then the startup screen again, it continues endlessly.

Two actions might solve your issue:

  • the support site of TomTom suggest you delete the mapsettings file. That did not solve the issue for me;
  • mounting the SD card on a computer and deleting the loopdir folder in the root of the card solved the issue for me, as suggested here. Personally, deleting that folder did not delete my favorites, the only thing I had to do is set my home location again.

Edit your hosts file quickly

edit hostfileEverybody who has ever migrated to a new hosting provider, purchased a new domain name or made DNS changes has done it: adding lines to your hosts file to “hard code” the ip address of a server host name on the workstation you are working on.

On Windows, this has become a pain since the UAC feature was introduced. In order to modify,  you need elevated permissions, so you need to start your favorite text editor as administrator. On top of that, the file is buried somewhere in the deepest cave of your c-drive (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\).

There must be an easy way to do this. I managed to reduce it to two clicks via a shortcut on my desktop, with the procedure below. Who can do better? One click only?

  1. Right-click your desktop
  2. In the context menu, select New > Shortcut
  3. In Type the location of the item, enter C:\Windows\System32\notepad.exe C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
  4. Click Next
  5. In Type a name for this shortcut, type any name you want (I used Edit hosts file)
  6. Click Finish
  7. Right-click the new icon on your desktop and select Properties
  8. On the Shortcut tab, click the Advanced button
  9. Check Run as administrator and click OK
  10. Click OK

Seems to be a lot of work, but it will save you numerous clicks whenever you need to edit the file again.

Top 100 learning tools for 2015 – my top 10

It is that time of the year again: Jane Hart is gathering votes for the Top 100 learning tools for 2015. This is a very interesting way of getting to know new learning tools and explore their possibilities. Just exploring the top 100 of last year is already a nice learning experience.

This is my top 10, in random order:

  • Twitter: the best way to generate your own “information streams” about various subjects.
  • Tweetdeck: invaluable for organizing my twitter stream. I like the fact that it is cross-platform.
  • Microsoft OneNote: the best note-taking application on the Windows platform. Unbeatable in combination with SharePoint or OneDrive, and a tablet pc with a digitizer pen (like the Surface). It is now fully cross platform with a nice and stable client for OS X!
  • Office Mix: my “new kid on the block” this year. Why would you invest in expensive and complicated authoring tools if you just want to “convert your PowerPoint to e-learning” (even if that is not always a good idea)? Although this is certainly not a full blown, finished product, I think Microsoft deserves to be in the list because they seem to take this very seriously (SCORM export, LTI compatibility…) Certainly a tool to watch closely in the coming year!
  • Instapaper: with the “read later” button in your browser toolbar, you can save interesting articles for later, and read them e.g. in the iPad app.
  • WordPress: excellent blogging platform. Recent releases have been focussing on the usability for the writer, and it is setting the standards for usability. Administration is now a piece of cake, even for non-tech users, with e.g. the auto-update feature.
  • Fever: this “self-hosted Google Reader” is still my main information hub, gathering hundreds of RSS feeds that would otherwise be impossible to follow. Fever is exceptionally easy to install and very stable, and has some nice clients like ReadKit.
  • WebEx: a very reliable, easy to use and complete web conferencing tool. An international company could not do without it.
  • Yammer: the enterprise social network in our company keeps us up to date of what is happening in the various locations and business units.
  • Office 365: the “swiss army knife” of productivity tools: enterprise-grade e-mail and calendar, SharePoint sites for collaborating or storing knowledge, and OneDrive that has 1TB of storage and that is a serious competitor for tools like Google Drive and DropBox.

You can still post your own top 10 and contribute to the list until September 18.