Entries from June 11, 2017 - June 17, 2017

Friday
Jun162017

Microsoft’s Surface Dock-Worth the $200 Price Tag?

An article in Windows Central  asked the question whether the Microsoft Surface Dock is worth purchasing at its high price tag. The funny thing is, $200 for a docking station is not really that expensive when you are purchasing one with dual video ports and all of the other accessory ports that you get. See Specs Below: See at Microsoft

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The first benefit is that the connector to the surface is the same magnetic connection that you are used to in the smaller power supply that comes with your Surface product. So with the one connection you are not only powering your device but you are adding all of the ports listed above with losing anything on the Surface at all.

The second thing I like are the dual display ports that allow you to connect two monitors  giving you three active monitors altogether. They are mini display ports so it easy to convert them to whatever you monitors have on them.

Thee are a total of (4) USB 3.0 ports with power to charge your USB devices if you wish to plug them in. There is also a 1 Gigabit Ethernet port and an Audio out port to complete the group of ports being added to your device.

I drove with my family down to South Carolina for a week of sun and fun and for me training and catching up on work as well. I decided to bring my two monitors from my desktop setup with me and my wireless keyboard and mouse. It ended up being a really great setup and I felt I had an even better setup then I had at home with the three monitor display. I also hooked up a 3TB USB drive and a few other items to round up my desktop. It was really nice.

So to answer the question, heck yea! When you look at some of the other similar products on the market they are all priced right around the same amount so I really don’t feel that you would be paying a premium for this product. So if all of this sounds like something that you would want to do with your setup then I would say do it. You will find that it was well worth it.

Friday
Jun162017

Open Live Writer

I had just reloaded Windows 10 with the latest release onto my home and office desktops and wasn’t able to reinstall Windows Live Writer 2012 onto either of those two machines even though I had it running just fine on my Microsoft Surface Book. So after a couple of weeks fighting this I found Open Live Writer.

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Open Live Writer is an open source application that enables you to author, edit and publish blog posts. It is based on a fork of the my beloved Windows Live Writer code. What I like most is that it allows me to easily post to this SquareSpace blog.

It has a ribbon bar that is very similar to Microsoft’s Word Home Ribbon and makes my life very easy creating quick posts like this one. The image alignment tools are great as well and it allows me to paste pictures quickly to the post with no need to upload the image. It handles the image storage to my blog storage area automatically.

If you are interested in this program you can find it here.

Friday
Jun162017

Naked Security Posts

Your daily round-up of some of the other stories in the news!
You can 'force stop' but the ads will just keep popping back up again
Your mouse may be telling us more about you than you realise.
Thursday
Jun152017

June Security patch for Outlook kb3191932 causes error for attachments in emails

Jessy just emailed me that there is an issue in the recent Outlook Security patch causing problems with Outlook attachments. He has mentioned that we need to look at the following kb's  KB3203467, KB3191898, and KB3191932 and remove them. Microsoft is currently investigating. They were just released a couple of days ago.

These are out outlook 2016 group policy settings which should not be blocking any Word or Excel attachments. So why is the patch causing issues for Word and Excel attachments?

 See the Microsoft Tech Article here.

Description of the security update for Outlook 2016: June 13, 2017

Thursday
Jun152017

New Microsoft Pen available to ship on June 15th

Do you have a spare $99's handy? Well that's what this new pen is going to run you. Are you the creative type? Then this pen may well be worth the outlay it will cost you.

This pen responds with 4,096 pressure points to the lightest flick of the point on screen. The lag time is virtually undetectable to help make your drawing experience more lifelike to pen and paper.

Some of the applications that are working with this pen include: OneNote, Microsoft Office, Adobe Suite, Sketchable, Bluebeam Revu, Drawboard, and Staffpad.

Eventually you will have four colors to pick from (Platinum, Black, Burgundy and Cobalt Blue) but only Platinum will be available at first.

Pen Compatibility List:

  • Surface Studio
  • Surface Laptop
  • Surface Book
  • Surface Pro¹
  • Surface Pro 4
  • Surface Pro 3
  • Surface 3

[1] Surface Pen tilt functionality is available now with Surface Pro. Coming to other Surface devices via Windows Update soon. 

 

Wednesday
Jun142017

Naked Security Posts

 
Your daily round-up of some of the other stories in the news!
 
Dust off your company procedures for Patch Tuesday! XP gets a raft of official updates this month to fix publicly-known holes.
 
Malware-laced PowerPoint files are nothing new - but several recent spam campaigns have added a new twist.
Tuesday
Jun132017

Adobe Spark