Windows Phone RSS News Reader - Weave

Introduction
One of the advantages of a smartphone is that when you are waiting for the train you can read the latest news  without buying a newspaper! There are of course a lot of ways to read news, there are dedicated apps such as the CNN, Sky News and the excellent Engadget app for all your gadget and techie news. You can also browse to the mobile version of websites and pin them to your Start screen - that works but maybe you want to be a bit frugal with your data network usage? It's not the fastest way to read news either...

RSS (or Atom) news feeds let you download a bit-size portion of news stories. You get to read the first paragraph or so and decide whether you want to read the rest. There are a huge number of different RSS apps for Windows Phone, many are free. I've tied a few and here I'd like to talk about my favourite so far.

Many web sites have the RSS feeds (the orange icon opposite). You just have to copy the RSS URL and paste it into your RSS reader.

Weave News Reader
I've been using Weave for a few weeks on my Nokia Lumia 800 running Windows Phone 7.8. I have a number of feeds including The Verge, BBC News, 43 Rumors and BBC F1.

Many of the Windows Phone RSS news readers are fast and easy to use. I was using RSS Joy and I found it excellent. However, RSS Joy and many others don't have any photos. They link directly to the mobile web page too. I found that Weave was the best because it shows photos and text. When you press the article, it opens in a mobile viewer (not the mobile web page). It makes it fast and easy to navigate. Of course you can also open in the mobile web page if you want. Sharing with Facebook and other social networking is also very easy.

You can pin individual feeds to the Start screen. For example, if you want to have quick access to the BBC F1 news, pin it! It works well but there is something to be said for going into Weave itself and viewing all the feeds. Weave presents them in a very nice way, horizontally scrolling, Windows Phone style :-)

Click here to learn more about Weave:
http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/weave-news-reader/25f7c2fa-ca89-49a7-9937-c7347be73fec


Conclusion
Try Weave, there's a free version so why not? I use it every day. It's easy to use and it is not over complicated. Weave could be better though, when a feed is pinned to the Start screen it would be nice if it were easy to switch to the full app. You have to press the [...] and select it from there - I'd prefer an icon. It's a small point, overall Weave is great!

Recommended: 8/10



PS - If anyone reading this has tried another RSS reader for Windows Phone and prefers it to Weave, please write in the comments!

Word 2010 - Reveal Formatting

Introduction
Sometimes working with a document in Word can be a real pain! Things happen and you just don't understand why. Well of course usually this is because of a style or some other formatting that's crept into your document. The worse situation is when you need to edit a document someone else has created, all manner of odd things can occur.


Solution
Word has a great feature called Reveal Formatting. Here's how to switch it on:

1. Select a word in your document
2. Press Shift-F1

Yes it is that easy!

As you can see in the screen shot opposite, the font and other properties of your text is displayed. This can be invaluable in understanding your document.






Also
Instead of press Shift-F1 you can also open the Reveal Formatting window by clicking the following boxes as shown in this diagram:

It's interesting to open it this way because along the way you can see the other tools available to help you work with styles and formatting. the Style Inspector for example, it's very useful when you want to check styles and what additional formatting has been added.


Show/Hide Formatting Marks 
This is also very important:

Click

In your document you'll see spaces, tabs, paragraph marks, etc. This helps you see double spacing or where tabs are missing and more.

Conclusion
Don't forget Shift-F1!

Crunchbang Linux - change password

To change your password in Crunchbang there are two things you must do:


01 - Change the password
Right click on the desktop
Click Terminal

At the $ prompt type:
sudo passwd <username> [Enter]

You should replace <username> with your Crunchbang username.

Take note that the command "passwd" is not "password" ;-)


02 - Delete the Keyring
You will also need to delete the keyring file otherwise when you restart the computer it will ask "Enter password to unlock your login keyring":

At the $ prompt type:
rm ~/.gnome2/keyrings/login.keyring [Enter]

Close the Terminal window
Right click on the desktop
Click Exit
Click Reboot

When you restart the computer, login as usual.

You may also see the following:

If you see the above enter your WiFi password and click Connect

Your WiFi password will now be saved and the next time you restart your computer you will not need to enter it again.

Source code formatting in Blogger

Problem
I wanted to show some programming source code in my blog. It would be best to display it in a distinctive way so that it is easy to read and easy for someone to select and copy. But how to do this? I could format the text myself but it isn't easy.


Solution
As usual a search on the web brought up some interesting results. There are many solutions out there but the simplest and quickest, at least for me, was this page:
http://formatmysourcecode.blogspot.co.uk/
You can use it to generate the HTML code you can use to paste into your Blogger post.


Example
Perhaps you have this source code you want to display on your blog:

<html>

<head>

<title>Hello</title>

</head>

<body>

Hello World

</body>

</html>

Here's what you could do:

Browse to: http://formatmysourcecode.blogspot.co.uk/
Paste your source code into the top box
Click Format Text, the HTML code is generated
Copy the HTML code
Go to Blogger
On your new post click the HTML button
Click where you want the source code and paste at that point

Click the Compose button and there it is!

<html>
    <head>
        <title>Hello</title>
    </head>
    <body>
    Hello World
    </body>
</html>

That's much easier to read and to select/copy.


TIP!
By the way, if the source code box is too wide, click the HTML button, find the code you previously pasted into your blog post. Look for width: 100%; and change it to width: 99%; or less. Look at the Preview to see if that looks better or not. 

AutoIt - The Scripting Language for Windows

Introduction
AutoIt is a free and excellent scripting language. It's almost a full programming language because you can do so much with it. Primarily it was designed for automating installations but it's grown and grown over the years. The best thing about it is that you write the code in a text editor (Notepad or anything you want) then compile it. Once compiled your resulting program is a standalone exe file! Yes, no DLL files to package with it!


Download and Install
http://www.autoitscript.com/

Along with AutoIt itself (it includes the compiler, samples and help files) I highly recommend you download and install the editor for it, SciTE.


SciTE
This code editor makes writing AutoIt scripts a breeze. It colour codes the commands, click a word and press F1 to see help on the command/function. It even has links on the menus so you can easily create form windows and it pastes the automatically generated code into the text editor for you.

The above is SciTE with an AutoIt script in it. You can see the colour coding, for example, the comments are in green, variables are red, etc.


An Example AutoIt Script
Here's an example of what's possible with AutoIt. It's a little script I wrote to convert text from hex to text and back again. It outputs the results to a text file and opens it in Notepad.

; Hex/Text Converter
; By Michael Gerrard
; 01/11/2011
; AutoIt 3

$title  = "Hex/Text Converter"
$input = ""
$output = ""
$outputFile = @ScriptDir & "\HexText-output.txt"

$input = InputBox($title, "Enter a hex or text:")
If @Error = 1 Then Exit

$iCheck = StringInStr($input, ":", 0, 1, 1)
If $iCheck = 3 Then ;if successful it returns 1, a colon was found and therefore it's a hex string
 _CreateText()
Else
 _CreateHex()
EndIf

; Output the result to a file
$file = FileOpen($outputFile, 2)
FileWriteLine($file, $input)
FileWriteLine($file, $output)
FileClose($file)
Run('notepad "' & $outputFile & '"', @ScriptDir)
Exit




; =========
; Functions
; =========

; Create a Hex string from Text
Func _CreateHex()

  $i = StringSplit($input, "")

  ; Make the hex numbers from each character of the text string
 For $n = 1 to $i[0]

   $hex = StringRight(Hex(Asc($i[$n])), 2)

   ; Add each char together with colons
  If $n = $i[0] Then
   $output = $output & $hex
  Else
   $output = $output & $hex & ":"
  EndIf
 Next

EndFunc


; Create a Text string from Hex
Func _CreateText()

  $i = StringSplit($input, ":")

  ; Take the hex numbers and convert them to text
 For $n = 1 to $i[0]

   $iText = Chr(Dec($i[$n]))

   ; Add each char together with colons
  $output = $output & $iText
 Next

EndFunc

What else can you do?
Read and write to the registry, to ini files easily with dedicated commands, control windows, send keystrokes to programs, interact with window controls, run command line DOS programs, pass variables to DOS programs, etc. AutoIt is really for making scripts to automate a process but you can also write GUI (Graphical User Interface) forms and other windows.


Conclusion
I've used AutoIt countless times for many years. It is powerful yet easy to learn. If you want to automate Windows this is one of the best scripting languages out there.

Recommended: 9.9 / 10