Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Up until this summer, I followed 75-100 websites via RSS on Google Reader. If you don’t know what RSS is, don’t worry about it. The important takeaway is that it basically gave me an inbox style view of all the new posts on each website. It allowed me to make sure that I didn’t miss any post on any of the websites that I follow. Google Reader was killed off this summer so I was left with a change to the system I had been using for many years to get my news.

What I’ve landed on now is dramatically different but I’m enjoying it more. I finally gave up on the inbox-style news gathering and decided that for most blogs, it was ok to not see every post. Instead, I created a river of information from these websites and I would dip my toe in as I had free time and see what was happening. I use Weave News Reader on Windows Phone for that, but there are many apps that will help you read news in this fashion.

For the very few low-traffic websites where I want to make sure I see EVERY post (xkcd, friend’s blogs, etc), I still subscribe via RSS. After trying theoldreader.com for a while, I ended up using feedly.com as my RSS reader. And actually, I don’t use the website very often. On Windows 8 I use the Nextgen Reader app and on the phone I use Phonly to consume RSS from Feedly. They all sync together so no matter what platform I’m on, I can keep up with the trickle of information that I’ve deemed extra-important.

It took a while for my OCD to let go of reading EVERY post on all these sites, but now I’m loving the feeling of freedom knowing that it’s ok to let posts go by on these sites. In reality, I never got to them all anyway and there was always this sense of unfinished business when I’d look at my RSS list. I’m still alerted to important information because it gets repeated often in the stream or I see it in various social media sites. All in all, it seems like a good solution.

I’ve been happily using the Storage Spaces feature of Windows 8 for a while now. It lets me throw in a bunch of drives, tell Windows to treat them all as one big drive, and then tell it to make sure every file is stored on two physical drives. If one drive fails, I can replace it without losing any data.

Up until recently, I had 2 3TB drives and 2 2TB drives. I wanted to replace the 2TB drives with 4TB drives to give me some extra headroom. But how do you remove perfectly healthy drives? One option would be to just pull the plug on one 2TB drive, replace it with a 4TB and let the system repair itself, but emulating a disaster doesn’t seem like a great option.

There’s nothing I could find in the UI that would let me remove one of these drives so I opted for Power Shell instead. Check out the section of this help doc called “How Do I Replace A Physical Drive?” It implies that the UX should have a Remove option but I never saw one. The Power Shell commands worked great though. Repairing the system took hours to finish as it copied lots of data around, but I expected that. It helps to have a spare SATA and power connection to pull this off but you could also do it with a USB enclosure (preferably USB3.)

Now I’m happily running with 14TB of total space. That’s still mirrored so I have 7TB writeable. Oh and by the way, 4TB drives are getting CHEAP. I found these two for $169 each.

My music collection is over 70GB. I’ve spent more time than I care to remember curating it. And now I’m coming to the realization that I should probably delete it. There’s very little point to keeping a local music collection anymore with all the various cloud music services that are available. We subscribe to Xbox Music which means that we get unlimited access to play any of the songs on the service from our phones, computers, or Xbox’s. Why bother monkeying around with local files?

I came to this point quite a while back with movies. When DVDs went out and BluRay came in, I vowed to not end up with shelves full of discs I never used. If I want a movie, I can rent the disc from Netflix or stream it on Netflix or Amazon. That has been a good choice too so I just need to pull the trigger with the music.

The only difference with music is that we’re still holding on to a few music players without internet connections, namely a bunch of Zunes and a cheaper player that I use on my motorcycle. That’s about the only time when we really need to have local files.

Are you still downloading MP3’s or are you just streaming full time from the internet?

I’m not going to debate whether or not it’s good for the NSA to be tapping all of our communications. There are plenty of talking heads screaming at each other already. What I’m here to say is: DUH.

When the news broke about all this wiretapping stuff, I thought, “Don’t we know this already?” I guess not, but it should be assumed. And even if the NSA wasn’t doing it in what they claim is an attempt to protect you, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others are doing it all the time to serve you ads. Forget the NSA, everything you do online is already stored in huge databases whether it’s your ISP, companies following you around the web serving you ads, or the end service that you’re using. Most of your traffic flies around the internet in plain text and is trivial to read/store. It’s not just on the internet either. Stores are tracking you as you walk around based on the signals emanating from your cell phone. And when you’re outside, companies have huge databases full of your location at all times of the day based on which cell phone towers you’re connected to. This isn’t conspiracy theory stuff. It’s very simple technology that’s already widely used.

We should make sure all of these companies and organizations are following our current laws, but more importantly we all need to take it upon ourselves to be smart about what we do and how we store our data. If it’s important and it’s not encrypted, then you’re basically screaming it through a megaphone on a busy street corner.

Your data security is your own responsibility. If it’s important, then it’s important enough to encrypt. And if you don’t want to encrypt, don’t send anything over the network that you don’t want the world to read.

I’ve been at Microsoft for over seven years working on various iterations of a common idea. Over the years, our product direction has been tweaked and adjusted quite a few times in big and small ways. I don’t think anybody could have seen this result back then. But that’s part of what makes this milestone so great!

So what did we end up shipping? It’s officially called Microsoft Power Query for Excel and we’re part of the Power BI for Office 365 package. You can find our team blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dataexplorer/. There’s plenty of news coverage too.

This product is an add in for Excel, and in a nutshell we make it super easy to connect to data whether it’s data you already know about or data that you need to search for. You can pull data from SQL, Azure, DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Terradata, Oracle, Sharepoint, Hadoop, Active Directory, websites, Facebook and many more. Don’t know where to find your data? Open up the search pane and find it! Once you’ve identified your data source, you can easily transform it, clean it up, and/or merge it with other data even if the data sources are huge. You’re working with a preview of the data and building up a script in the background as you make changes. Once you’re done, you can hit Refresh and we go back out to each of those sources, run the transformations again, and give you the final result with fresh data!

There’s no rest for our team though. Stay tuned for more exciting things! (Assuming you find data exciting… and who doesn’t?!)

You may have heard about a new currency called Bitcoin. Taken on the surface, it’s just another way to transfer money between individuals except that this one isn’t controlled by any government. It’s as secure as cash (or probably more secure since it can’t be counterfeited) and while it’s not quite as anonymous as cash, it’s much more anonymous than credit cards or checks. Like most other currencies, the value is set by what people think it’s worth. One of the most popular Bitcoin Exchanges is called MtGox and it says that right now one Bitcoin is worth $120 USD. Bitcoins are almost infinitely dividable so you just pay for stuff in portions of a Bitcoin. More and more retailers are starting to accept Bitcoin as a direct payment option or you can just use it as an investment strategy and a way to transmit money between like-minded people. You can never actually hold one in your hand. It’s all handled digitally.

From the geeky math side, it is even more interesting. The project was launched in 2009 by someone who still remains anonymous. Bitcoins are found by solving an unpredictable cryptographic problem and the whole system is configured to only dole out a specific number of Bitcoins every year. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins and they get increasingly hard to find. These “miners” who find Bitcoins are also helping to cryptographically validate every Bitcoin transaction.

I haven’t listened to much of what the general media says about Bitcoin but I’ve heard random snippets trying to link it to terrorism, drugs and clubbing baby seals. That’s nonsense. What really scares people in charge is that no one is in charge of Bitcoin. Governments can’t print more of it or directly affect it’s value. There are many other crypto-currencies out there, but this is by far the most popular one.

It’s a remarkable system and I’ve only begun to scratch the surface with this post. If you’re interested in learning more, check out Leo Laporte’s interview with Gavin Andresen, the chief scientist at Bitcoin.

Hopefully by now you know that a 20 character password made up of just letters is stronger than a 6 character password that is uses symbols and numbers too. Length plays a key role in the strength of a password. Passphrases are a great way to make long passwords that are easy to remember. There’s a good article on the 1Password blog that made the excellent point that though a simple sentence is very long, it might not be as solid as you think. For example, if your pass phrase is “twinkle twinkle little star”, that’s a pretty obvious string of words to put together. The linked post has some good ideas for mixing up your passphrase so that it’s still easy to remember but much harder to guess. If you want to get truly random, they also mention a method of rolling dice to generate completely phrases with completely random words. Mix that in with a few random characters to avoid a straight dictionary attack and you’ve to a pretty solid password!

However you make your password, please make sure that it’s strong, you change it often, and you don’t use the same password on multiple sites. Or if you only want to remember one really good password, check out a tool like LastPass.

PS. If you haven’t read the comic referenced in the image above, here’s a link to the full strip.

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();
    }
}