Studio711.com – Ben Martens

At seemingly random times from seemingly random companies, we’ll get return labels in the mail. It’s usually in conjunction with someone trying to guilt you in to making a donation. Sometimes the labels are decent and sometimes they’re so bad that you wouldn’t even put them on junk mail.

When we were moving to the new house, I found a box that had some blank return labels just waiting to be printed. It seems pretty complicated to get everything spaced out properly, but it’s actually really easy. I’ll explain how to do this with Office 2010 but this feature has been around as long as I can remember so it should be in your version somewhere.

1. Fire up Microsoft Word
2. Click the Mailings tab in the ribbon
3. Click Labels
4. Click Options
5. Choose your Label Vendor (it’s probably Avery) and then choose the product number

From there you just design one of your labels and Word will automatically create a whole sheet full of them with the proper spacing for the blank labels that you purchased. Run it through your printer and you’re done!

If you’ve gotten snail mail from our house, you’ve seen that our labels have a picture of Oskar on them. Go crazy and do whatever you want. Then you can ignore the little guilt trip that comes with using those freebie labels in the mail.

I was perusing the Windows 8 store the other day and noticed that CascadeSkier is one of the featured applications in the sports section! After spending many months in the top five apps of that section and almost a perfect 5 star rating, it’s nice to get picked as one of the featured apps. I’m not in the top five any more as there are a bunch of team-specific soccer apps taking up those spots, but that’s kind of expected since ski season is winding down anyway. Over 1100 people downloaded the Windows 8 version of the app this winter and about a quarter of them purchased the app. The phone version did quite well too in it’s third season and sold over 500 copies. It’s not going to help me retire any sooner, but it’s still the only hobby I have that creates income!

I have a little custom C# app on my Windows phone that posts photos to Facebook and my blog at the same time. Today it seemingly randomly stopped working. The login code ended in a page that said “SECURITY WARNING: Please treat the URL above as you would your password and do not share it with anyone.” The app stopped there because it couldn’t find an OAuthToken on the response. This was one of the few times that a search failed me so I thought I’d give back and hopefully help someone else stuck in the same spot. Here’s the fix I ended up with:

1. Update to version 6.4.0.0 of the Facebook SDK (released today)
2. Update login code to something like this:

private void LoginToFacebook()
{
    var parameters = new Dictionary<string, object>();
    parameters["client_id"] = _appId;
    parameters["redirect_uri"] = "https://www.facebook.com/connect/login_success.html";
    parameters["response_type"] = "token";
    parameters["display"] = "touch";
    parameters["scope"] = "publish_stream";

    var navigateUrl = _fbClient.GetLoginUrl(parameters);

    FacebookLoginBrowser.Navigate(navigateUrl);
}

private void FacebookLoginBrowser_Navigated(object sender, System.Windows.Navigation.NavigationEventArgs e)
{
    FacebookOAuthResult oauthResult;
    if (!_fbClient.TryParseOAuthCallbackUrl(e.Uri, out oauthResult))
    {
        return;
    }

    if (oauthResult.IsSuccess)
    {
        App.OAuthAccessToken = oauthResult.AccessToken;
        _fbClient = new FacebookClient(oauthResult.AccessToken);
        _loggedIn = true;
        loginSucceeded();
    }
}

The combination of Tyla being pregnant and me being a geek means that when I’m grilling, I like to make sure I’m grilling meat to the appropriate temperatures. It should be safe but not charred beyond belief. There is a book in our kitchen that has a bunch of temperatures for various meats and another book that says how long it generally takes to cook each food. I’ve now combined all that information into an app for Windows Phone called GrillBuddy. It’s not very fancy or complicated, but that’s the beauty of it. Pick your meat, choose the size of the meat and you’re presented with information about safe temperatures, average cook time, and if any rest time is recommended. Bring on the summer grilling weather!

Even though Facebook has a billion users, there are still new people joining and at least one of the people who joined recently is reading this blog post. So I thought it would be good to do a blog post about my thoughts on privacy and Facebook.

First of all, there are a ton of knobs for controlling your data in Facebook. Allow certain friends to see certain info, keep some things private from everyone, or approve any photo your tagged in. The list goes on and on and the list changes fairly silently in the background. Putting secret stuff on Facebook and trying to control it with their settings is a recipe for disaster. That’s how you get the crazy stories about somebody posting something about their boss and then getting fired because it leaked out.

Here’s an easy way to make sure nothing that you consider private ever leaks out: don’t put anything that you consider private into Facebook.

This starts from the minute you sign up and you are presented with a bunch of data fields. What’s your favorite book? Who are your relatives? What’s your birthday? What’s your hometown? Stop and ask yourself why you’re putting any of this data in there. I fill in some fields like my religious views and some favorite things I enjoy, but in general, if you wouldn’t stand on a stump in a park and yell it out, don’t type it in to those fields.

This guideline should continue to apply every day you’re on Facebook. If you wouldn’t show that picture to your boss, a hacker, or your family, don’t put it on Facebook (or anywhere on the Internet for that matter.)

So what is the bar for things that are ok to make public? That’s one that’s different for everyone. I live a fairly public life. I’ve been blogging daily for over 10 years so the thought of posting some photos on Facebook doesn’t bother me. But there are still things that I won’t put on the Internet like photos or text showing that I’m on vacation and won’t be in my home for x days. However, that’s something that lots of other people do and don’t feel weird about. I also don’t “like” very many things because it’s just more data that can be used to profile me. You need to figure out your own line. The nice thing about Facebook is that you can join, enter very little personal data and then kibitz. Nobody says you have to post anything, but if you’re friends with people, you can still see what they are up to.

It’s a great tool, but it can cause you a lot of trouble if you start relying on anything in the privacy settings to keep certain info from certain people. As soon as you put anything in digital form anywhere on a computer, you are opening yourself up to the potential that the world will know about it.

Somehow I’ve turned into the A/V geek at church. We have a modest setup cobbled together from various donations throughout the years. The problem was that our equipment is up in the balcony so I had to go up there at various points in the service to adjust speaker levels and start/stop the DVD recording. That technically worked fine but was annoying to those who sat around me as I would be coming and going from my seat throughout the service. Here’s the plan that I laid out and recently completed:

1) The first step was to rip out all of the connections and start over. The existing setup was a mishmash of tiny improvements from a half dozen people. Our mixer is a Mackie 1202-VLZ so I dug up the manual and read it cover to cover. The device was capable of a lot more than we were using it for. I rewired everything (removing two unneeded components in the process) and let it sit for a few services to make sure everything was working. That was a huge improvement in itself because now I can sit up there with headphones to individually check any microphone without affecting the output and see the output meter display lights bounce so I know that the proper levels are going to our DVD recorder.

2) The amp we were using was very old and had no remote control. I swapped this out for a newer (but still used) amp that was previously powering the theater room at our house. In addition to having a remote, it also has a display that shows the current volume level. Now I’ve figured out that “42” is the magic number for the volume with an average congregation size.

3) With those pieces in place, I purchased an RF (radio frequency) remote. Normal remotes are IR (infrared) and need to be pointed directly at the receiver. RF radiates in all directions from the remote and even goes through walls. The signals are captured by an RF receiver and translated into IR that the various A/V components can understand. I programmed the remote for five basic functions: volume up, volume down, mute, DVD record, and DVD stop. I can’t adjust individual levels on the various mics, but I can make sure that if there’s a particular noisy child, I can crank up the speakers a little more to compensate. If we’re ever doing a nicer recording like when the choir sings we’ll still need someone up in the balcony to check the levels, but for most services, the remote will work fine.

I tried the whole thing out for the first time last week. Tim kept laughing at me because every time I looked over I had a goofy grin on my face. I couldn’t get over the fact after months of off-and-on work, I was now sitting in a church pew with a remote control! I’ll give this a few weeks to make sure I’m happy with the setup and then I’ll start training the ushers how to do it so I can completely remove myself from the equation.

Tyla and I dropped Netflix streaming when they split the subscription from the discs. We’re among the minority that prefers discs though that won’t be the case forever. In the mean time, I’ve been enjoying the selection of streaming videos available for free on Amazon to anyone with a Prime membership. If you’re a Prime member, make sure you check this out! The quality is great, there’s an app on the Xbox360, and the selection is not too shabby. I’ve been using it to watch Top Gear (the UK version) and a couple other TV series.

I’ve kind of expected to pick Netflix back up when our son starts watching some shows, but Amazon is really making a strong push into kid shows too. Engadget ran a story recently about some exclusive children’s programming.

Discs will be around “forever” but it’s not hard to predict that this streaming thing is going to be the way we receive a lot of our content in the future. The big blockbuster shows and movies aren’t there in enough quantity yet to turn the tide, but we’re getting there.

Some of the buzz around Windows 8 is that Microsoft should let people go straight into the desktop mode without first landing on the new Windows 8 start screen. I can understand the desire to never ever change anything (while complaining that they’re not “innovating”), but this one is a bit silly. What’s the first thing you did in Windows 95 through Windows 7 when you started your computer? You either clicked one of your shortcut icons to start an app or you pressed the start button to find an app that way. It’s EXACTLY THE SAME with Windows 8. You can either click one of the shortcut icons (tiles) that are on your start screen, or you can find an app by typing and searching for it. If anything, you now have fewer clicks and you also get the added benefit of seeing a screen full of information that you’ve tailored to your interests.

Now there’s also a complaint that Windows 8 doesn’t have a start button. That one I can sympathize with a little more. It bugged me for about a week and then I forgot about it since I always use the keyboard to press the start button anyway. If you want to use the mouse, you just drag down to the lower left of the screen and click like you did before and it brings up the start menu. And here’s a pro tip for you remote desktop users: Alt-Home presses the start button in a remote desktop window.

So yes, there are some changes. People screamed about Program Manager disappearing in Windows 95 but then they fell in love with the Start button. Now things are moving forward again. Like most other things in life, you should try it with an open mind for a couple weeks before you decide if it’s good or bad.

Aside from a brief online service offered a while back and some betas for previous semi-related projects, most of the work I’ve been doing on the job has been held close to the vest. We’ve been cranking away at a new iteration of our product and it’s now public!

So what is this Microsoft “Data Explorer” Preview for Excel? If you’re a journalist who stumbled on my site and/or you’re looking for the official answer, please visit the Data Explorer blog. But here’s my quick, unofficial summary: it’s targeted at those of you who pull in data from a variety of sources, combine the datasets together, clean it up, reshape it, and push it into Excel. Here’s a quick video that explains a little more:

One key thing that the video doesn’t cover directly is that this can be a great way to work with large data sets. Even if your dataset is millions and millions of rows, we can show you a preview very quickly. That preview gives you enough information to filter it down to just the rows you need, hide some columns that might not be important, and THEN load it into Excel. Depending on how much you’ve filtered out, it could take just a few minutes for your data to show up in Excel.

We heard from lots of customers who have to pull together data from various data sources every single week to generate a report for their teams. With Data Explorer, as you collect all your various data sets and transform them, you’re actually building a little script in the background. Once it’s on the sheet and you click Refresh, we actually go back out to all those data sources and grab the latest data, run it through your script, and present it to you again. So now that lengthy weekly report is just a single click away.

Sometimes finding the data is half the battle. Data Explorer aims to make that easier with the Online Search button. Search for data and drop it right onto your sheet.

Here are some links to get you going:

• Data Explorer blog
• Direct link to Data Explorer download
• Data Explorer online help
• Data Explorer Forum

It’s worth noting that this is a “Preview.” As the test lead for the UX team, I could quickly point to bugs and design issues in our product. We’ve been working hard to improve the quality and stability of Data Explorer, but there’s more work to be done before we officially release it. To make sure we’re focusing our efforts in the right place, we need to hear from you! After you’ve tried the product, head over to the forums and start a conversation or add to an existing one.

This is a very exciting time for our team and we hope this preview sparks ideas about how this can speed up some of the tasks in your life. We haven’t played all of our cards with this preview. There are some very exciting features in the pipeline!