Tag: Microsoft

Check for Updates on Your Unbranded Nokia Lumia

It looks like updates are now going out for Nokia Lumia smartphones running Windows Phone 8 particularly if you have an unbranded model so it pays to manually check for an update if you’re keen to try it out. Of course, your phone will automatically poll around once a week for updates but it never …

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Surface RT Firmware Update – Improved Device Waking

One minor gripe that I have had with the Surface RT is that it doesn’t always wake up reliably when you push the power button or Window button. This tends to happen most when the device has been left alone for longer periods of time allowing the device to go into a deeper sleep state …

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Sharing Wi-Fi Via Your Microsoft Surface

One of the biggest gripes that people may have is the lack of 3G/4G/LTE connectivity on both versions of the Microsoft Surface. Of course, on Surface Pro you can plug in a dongle and add such connectivity but it can become cumbersome to have a USB device protruding from the tablet or a dongle hanging off …

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Enjoying Your Own Media in Hotel Residence

Here’s another quick tip for those who might travel a bit. In the lead up to my business trip to Singapore I had fallen behind on my video podcasts and figured I would catch up on them when I was back at the hotel. I planned for this by packing an HDMI cable in my …

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Why Debugging is Greyed Out for SSIS Packages

Here is a quick tip for those using SSIS packages with Microsoft SQL Server. If you use the data import wizard in SQL Server and save a copy of the SSIS package used to import data you might want to reuse that package to load more data in the same format. However, once you’ve loaded …

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RSS Feeds Arrive in Bing News

This may have slipped under the radar for some but I reckon this is a fantastic update that will have me using Bing News far more often on my Microsoft Surface. It could also be a handy alternative for those facing the prospect of being orphaned by the shutdown of Google Reader. In the most …

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Microsoft Surface – Type Cover or Bust

The title really says it all but I thought I would share my experience with the Touch Cover and Type Cover for Microsoft Surface. To put it plainly, they are chalk and cheese. You can type far more easily and efficiently with the Type Cover compared to the Touch Cover with a minor increase in …

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Importing Data From Oracle to MS SQL Server Databases Via SSIS

If you’ve been following the blog then you might remember that I have had a couple of failed attempts (first article and second article) at getting connectivity going between an Oracle database as a source and a Microsoft SQL Server database as a destination. Not to be dissuaded from finding a solution I have found something that I have …

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Enabling Flight Mode in Windows RT

Here’s another quick tip for Microsoft Surface or Windows RT tablet owners out there. When you hop on a plane for travel you’ll need to turn off all of the various wireless interfaces (i.e. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and cellular if you’re lucky to have that built in). Fortunately. there is a one stop shop to turn …

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Using Telnet to Delete Mass Amounts of E-mail

For whatever reason, you may end up with a huge amount of e-mail stuck on a mail server and it all just needs to go. Maybe you’ve been lax in clearing e-mail, your e-mail application isn’t managing your mailbox properly or perhaps you’ve just been spammed into oblivion. However, if you’ve got hundreds or even …

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