IT

Adding A Space Into Excel Cells

Posted on April 13, 2016April 19, 2016 by Adam Fowler

This took much more digging than I thought to find the answer so here it is:

Say you have a field in Excel with a value such as “123456”, but want to display it with a space in the middle – “123 456″… how do you add the space?

You can just add it in manually if the cell type allows it, but for a bunch of data, that’s a very time consuming solution.

There’s probably a bunch of ways it can be achieved, but here’s the easy way I eventually found:

if A1 contains “123456” put this into A2:

=TEXT(A1,”### ###”)

B2 will read “123 456”!

If you have a leading zero in your fields, it will drop the zero. For that, you’ll have to do this:

if A1 contains “012345” put this into A2:

=Text(A1,”0## ###”)

Pretty simple, the hash passes on each character from the referring field, and you can modify what happens between each passed character.

If you want to clean it up, then copy your results, and paste special > results. That will drop the code, and just have your newly formatted results.

Skype For Business 2016 Client Deployment Tricks

Posted on April 12, 2016April 12, 2016 by Adam Fowler

I’ve been mucking around with Skype for Business 2016 and wanted to document what I’ve found.

First, there’s two seperate installs. A standalone Skype for Business 2016, and then as part of the Office 2016 suite, it’s one of the components (just like Word or Excel).

This is important, because if you install the standalone version then try to install Office 2016, it won’t like that Skype for Business is installed already, and tell you to uninstall before continuing. I’m not sure what reason you’d install Skype for Business 2016 standalone if you can just install that single component of Office 2016, but it’s a gotcha that might affect someone down the track.

I’ve also seen a few screen nags after deploying the client. There’s the ‘First things first’ screen which you most likely don’t want users to see:

To turn this off, set this key to ‘1’:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\General
REG_DWORD: ShownFirstRunOptin
Value: 00000001

Next is the ‘Welcome – Skype for Business’ screen. Can be annoying, and you can just surpress it from running the first time too, but let people read it on demand instead.

To stop this one showing at first launch, set this key to ‘1’:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Lync
REG_DWORD: IsBasicTutorialSeenByUser
Value: 00000001

The final one I saw was after making calls, asking “How was the call quality?”. Most users won’t want to be hassled by this unless there’s an actual problem, so you may want to disable it.

This setting is actually controlled at the sever end, and has a % chance of showing up after each call. By default, it’s 10%, so I suggest setting it to 0%.

To do so, launch the Skype for Business Server Management Shell and run the commend ‘Get-CSClientPolicy’. This will show you how many policies you have, and you may want to change the value for just some or all, depending which users are against which policy. The field for this setting is called “RateMyCallDisplayPercentage”.

Once you’ve worked out which policy you want to change, run this command: ‘Set-CSClientPolicy -identity “policyname” -RateMyCallDisplayPercentage 0’

If you find any other tricks, feel free to share and I’ll update the post.

Interview with Hacknet Creator Matt Trobbiani

Posted on April 8, 2016September 12, 2021 by Adam Fowler

Hacknet is available on Steam and the Humble Store

In a world where marketing is full of triple A games, with a budget that rivals many blockbuster movies, you may think there is very little room for people to create their own game and make a living off of it.

However, in recent years there has been a resurgence of ‘indie’ games – little to no budget, small teams of people, working together to create something that has their passion and dedication poured into. These games can be big adventures or tiny micro-games, often with the creators making little to to money and just enjoying a fun pastime.

Matt Trobbiani, sole creator and developer of Team Fractal Alligator is one of the less common success stories in the indie gaming world, with a game he released in 2015 called Hacknet. It was also released on Valve’s Steam platform, which helped bring a larger audience to his now highly rated game.

Developed and worked on as a passionate hobby over three years, Matt dedicated himself to creating a hacking simulation game that focuses on realism and immersion, with a story following a deceased, legendary Hacker “Bit”, through the files and programs he left behind. You, as the player, need to work through this puzzle and find out what really happened in this hacker/mystery hybrid.

Hacknet was so successful that Matt was able to leave his day job and become a full time games developer, which is the ultimate dream job of many gaming enthusiasts. How did he manage to reach this goal, and where is he headed next?

Origins

Matt isn’t too sure when it all started, as there was no clear cut time when he decided he was going to make games. Ten or so years ago In high school, he was already making games for fun. This followed him to Univerity where he continued to make games with friends just for fun. It took him a long time to realise that this passion for coding and design could be more than just a hobby, so he joined a club called the “Game Development Club”.

Being a part of a club with like minded individuals made him start thinking about taking on game development seriously, and making something bigger. One of the beliefs that Matt picked up from this process was that although Univeristy was important, he learnt much more by doing his own projects part time. This all helped him skill up, as he kept setting his sights onto bigger games. It was still being driven by his enjoyment of the process, rather than trying to make it big.

Enter Hacknet

A few of Matt’s projects were created during ‘Game Jams’ where developers have 48 hours to create a game from beginning to end, in friendly and fun competitions. It was in one of these Game Jams that Hacknet was born, albeit in a very long way from the final product now available to purchase. Immediate feedback was really positive, which made him consider there was more to this particular idea…

It was this start that lead to the next three years of part time development of Hacknet. It wasn’t even his “dream project” at the time, but the idea of working on Hacknet was calling him. Getting good feedback from conventions and the first public release helped drive him to continue building and refining the experience of playing his creation.

Hacknet had it’s official release last year with huge critical acclaim. The game has now sold over 100,000 copies, a huge achievement for any game, let alone a game created by a single person.

Matt Trobbiani’s home rig

What next?

The release of Hacknet hasn’t stopped Matt’s passion or development work – he’s currently working on translations, multiplayer and modifications for training purposes. He’s even had the US Department of Defense ask for changes to his game, for staff training!

Matt isn’t looking too far beyond Hacknet yet, but he knows he’d like to try something more in the education and training areas after seeing the impact of his game. Currently he’s looking to build specialised education versions for schools and universities, with the idea of introducing students to terminals, computer security and introductory computer science.

He believes that using well designed games have a much stronger ability to teach people of different skill levels, compared to lessons that work at a single pace which won’t suit many people.

Other ideas rattling around in his head include a game that looks at your diet and how you can optimize what you take in, to get the results you want from your body – but that’s just one of many ideas at the moment.

Hacknet is going to still take up a lot of Matt’s time and energy, which he’s more than happy to give – and if you’re in the education sector and interested in talking to Matt about adapting his creation to other possibilities, contact him at [email protected]

Note: If you’re new to Linux and have heard about Bash on Windows, this game is a nice basic introduction to what Bash is (albeit modified for fun!).

Advice

We asked Matt for some advice to pass on to others looking to start or continue their journey into game development, and this is what he had to say.

If someone has a good game idea, where should they start?

“Start smaller than your idea, and build up to it. In lots of things, but especially code, there are certain walls that you’ll hit. Once you hit those points, you’ll need to start again, or do a major reword to design the project in a way that makes it work”

“This happens in a really obvious way as you’re learning to program – you’ll write something that’s 200 lines, but the strategies you used for that make it crazy and unreadable once it’s 1000 lines,

and those strategies don’t work at 10,000 lines, etc etc.”

“If you’ve never made a project as big as what you’re dreaming, you’re going to run into a lot of these barriers, and they’re really hard to break through. The best way past them is with experience – working with people who are really good, working on projects bigger than just yourself, working on other people’s projects, getting an industry job – all of those things help you get the skills you need to make bigger projects work”

“You can get there on your own, but it’ll take a long time, and a lot of projects that might feel like failures – that’s ok, It’s normal to not be able to pull it off first time, no matter how confident you are.”

“If you really have great ideas, and you’re driven to make them a reality – the tools, training and people are out there to make that happen. It’s not always easy, and if you don’t love what you do, it’s going to be hard going, but it’s absolutely possible. Pick a small project – probably a game jam, get a team together, and get to work. You’ll get there.”

What hardware setup would you recommend for game developers?

“Two screens, and a computer fast enough to not hold you back. An important part of game and level design is iteration – trying out lots of variations on an idea, or the same idea with lots of small changes. To do this well, you need to not have to spend a full minute waiting for your code to compile between changes. That sort of delay becomes so frustrating that it inevitably leads to compromises.”

“Having a setup fast enough to let you make changes and see them in action without any real appreciable delay is worth so much – almost all of the effects in Hacknet were tuned over hundreds of compilations that all took seconds at most – i’d never have refined them so much if I was always waiting for things.”

What about your keyboard, is that the most important component for your experience?

“It’s not the most important – having a good machine that doesn’t lag on compile so you can iterate quickly is the most important, but having really nice input and output devices is really nice. If you’re serious about code or game development, you’re going to be spending a *lot* of time at your workstation, so it’s really useful for that to be a really nice environment.”

Hardware

You don’t need fancy hardware to create a hit game. Matt’s home setup is:

Screens: 2 x 1080p Dell Monitors, arm mounted
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970
CPU: Intel Core i5 4460
HDD: 3 x 1TB Western Digital
SSD: 1 x 250GB Samsung
RAM: 8GB DDR3
Keyboard: Topre Realforce 87U with Custom PBT spacebar

Winners of a Hacknet Key:
HackNet Key Giveaway

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen1 Review

Posted on April 7, 2016September 4, 2019 by Adam Fowler

Lenovo has recently released the 2016 lineup of ThinkPad X series laptops. Previously this was only the X1 Carbon, which was a highly regarded laptop. I have a feeling that success has lead to extending the range for 2016 to:

Lenovo X1 Carbon (Gen4)
Lenovo X1 Tablet
Lenovo X260
Lenovo X1 Yoga

A wide variety of laptops to meet different needs. My pick of the crop is the Lenovo X1 Yoga, and here’s why:

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga

Specs
I always like to look at the hardware specs of the device first, so here’s the table of options:

DESCRIPTION	THINKPAD X1 YOGA CONVERTIBLE ULTRABOOK
Processor	Intel® Core™ i5-6200U Processor (3M Cache, 2.3GHz), Turbo Boost 2.0 (2.8GHz) Intel Core i5-6300U Processor (3M Cache, 2.4GHz), Turbo Boost 2.0 (3.0GHz) Intel Core i7-6500U Processor (4M Cache, 2.5GHz), Turbo Boost 2.0 (3.1GHz) Intel Core i7-6600U Processor (4M Cache, 2.6GHz), Turbo Boost 2.0 (3.4GHz)
Operating system	Windows 10 Home 64-bit Windows 10 Pro 64-bit Windows 7 Professional 64-bit preinstalled through downgrade rights in Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
Display	14″ FHD (1920×1080), 300 nits, 16:9 aspect ratio, IPS, 10-point Multi-Touch 14” WQHD (2560×1440), 300 nits, 16:9 aspect ratio, IPS, 10-point Multi-Touch
Hinge / mode	Yoga hinge, 360 degree / Laptop, tent, stand and tablet
Stylus Pen	ThinkPad Pen Pro, active pen for multi-touch display, docks inside laptop and auto recharges.
Graphics	Intel HD Graphics 520 in processor only, supports external digital monitor via HDMI, Mini DisplayPort; supports dual independent display Max resolution: 3840×2160 (Mini DisplayPort)@60Hz 4096×2160 (HDMI)@24Hz
Onelink+ Adaptor (optional)	HDMI to VGA Adaptor Mini DisplayPort to VGA Adaptor
Memory	Up to 8GB / up to 16GB for i7-6600U model, LPDDR3 1866MHz, non-parity, 1 x 204-pin SO-DIMM socket, max 16GB
Webcam	HD720p resolution, fixed focus
Storage¹	128GB / 192GB / 512GB SSD, SATA3 256GB SSD, SATA3 Opal 2.0 Capable 512GB SSD PCIe NVMe
Optical drive	None
Dimensions (W x D x H)	333 x 229 x 16.8 mm
Weight	Starting at 1.36 kg
Case material	Display cover: Carbon-Fibre Reinforced Plastic + Glass-Fibre Reinforced Plastic; Bottom: Magnesium/Aluminum
Case colour	Midnight Black
Battery	4-cell Li-Polymer battery (52Wh)
Battery life²	Up to 11 hours³
AC adaptor	65W AC adapter
Keyboard	6-row, LED backlit, spill-resistant, multimedia Fn keys
UltraNav™	TrackPoint® pointing device and multi-touch with 3+2 buttons click pad
ThinkLight ™	None
Fingerprint reader	Integrated touch style fingerprint reader
Audio support	HD Audio, Realtek® ALC3232 codec / stereo speakers, 1 watt x 2 / dual array microphone, combo audio/microphone jack
Security chip	Trusted Platform Module (Software TPM & Hardware dTPM enabled)
Manageability	Intel vPro technology
Ethernet	None
Wireless LAN	Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8260, 2×2, Wi-Fi + Bluetooth® 4.1, no vPro
Wireless WAN (optional)	Huawei ME906S (4G LTE/WCDMA/HSPA/GSM/GPRS/EDGE/GNSS), M.2 Card
SIM card	None
NFC	None
Ports	3 x USB 3.0 (1 x Always On) Mini DisplayPort™ HDMI Onelink+ connector MicroSD, supports UHS-I SD card Combo audio/microphone jack Security keyhole Optional Card Reader

This is all pretty standard with good options these days, nothing underpowered or missing in my opinion. Here’s some interesting points:

Stylus Pen

This is a very nice to have, a discreet stylus hidden in the chassis of the Yoga X1. It’s a bit larger than the one I found in the Yoga 260, but still much smaller than a Surface Pro 4 pen. It also charges while docked, and won’t go flat in a year like the Surface Pen :) For more details on the pen, check out this YouTube review

X1 Yoga Pen

Battery
We’re really getting into good devices with a working day’s battery life. This device was left on a desk for two weeks with frequent but short usage, but always in at least standby mode and still had half it’s battery left. Nothing unique to this particular laptop, but it’s a compelling consideration to upgrade if you’ve got something that hasn’t got an Intel 6th Gen CPU in it.

Storage
We’re now seeing more devices having hte PCIe NVMe SSD option – a lot faster than SATA3. For an idea on the difference, read this review. For most people you won’t ‘need’ a faster SSD, but if you’re doing work with lots of local IO, it’s going to be a worthwhile upgrade.

Weight
1.36kg – that’s 0.05kg heavier than the X1 Carbon Gen3, but 0.18kg heavier than the 1.18 kg X1 Carbon Gen4. Keep in mind, the X1 Carbon Gen4 doesn’t have touchscreen, and as a comparison the Apple MacBook Air 2015 13″ weighs 1.35 kg, so these are all really light laptops. Lenovo have managed to design enough toughness into the hinges for the full flipped Yoga experience, which previously was really clunky.

It’s a lot less chunky too than older X1 Carbons, here’s a comparison with the X1 Carbon Gen1 where there’s quite a bit of height difference (the Carbon is designed to appear thinner, but is perfectly flat on the table):

Left to right: X1 Yoga, X1 Carbon Gen1

Ports
On the left side, we have power, OneLink+ dock connection (which will only take a OneLink+ dock connector, not the older OneLink), Mini DisplayPort and USB 3.0:

X1 Yoga Left Side

Right side has stylus pen, power, volume up/down, 3.5mm audio jack, 2x USB 3.0 and full size HDMI:

X1 Yoga Right Side

The back has the fan out slot, and a panel that hides a MicroSD and SIM card slot:

X1 Yoga Back

Keyboard
It’s very similar to the X1 Carbon keyboards in layout and feel, but also the keys will retract when folded into Yoga mode to protect them against wear. You can see the little rubber mounts pop out in the top corners too, which will touch the table when this is face down:

Keyboard in Yoga Mode

Laptop Mode

Hardware aside, why do I think this is the best in the X series now? This is around my personal tastes, but everyone has their own requirements. Here’s the standout reasons for me:

X1 Yoga vs X1 Carbon 4th Gen – Carbon is lighter and thinner, but doesn’t fully flip around. There’s also no touchscreen option anymore!

X1 Yoga vs X1 Tablet – Tablet has some awesome additions like a projector, but personally I don’t like the more flimsy style of keyboard (similar to Surface 4, but a bit better). Tablet mode is cool, but the X1 Yoga flipping around is light and thin enough already without taking away the proper laptop experience. Just wish I could have a projector in it! On top of that, the tablet is using the m7 series of Intel CPU which isn’t going to be as powerful as the i series.

X1 Yoga vs X260 – Has 25 hours battery life!! But, Smaller 12.5″ again with no touchscreen, or ability to Yoga. Weighs the same despite this. It is hard to get past the 25 hour battery life, but only needed if you’re not near a power point for a very long time.

The X1 Yoga will also soon have an OLED option for the screen – that should be a big jump in screen quality. As I haven’t seen this yet I’ll refrain from making further statements around it, but expect to be impressed.

For a high end laptop, the X1 Yoga is an all rounder that I’d strongly recommend anyone to consider. It’s definitely one of the best all rounder business grade machine available.

If you have any questions or comments please post below!

If you want some more information and visuals, MobileTechReview have a video on the Yoga too:

Lenovo Yoga Home 500

Posted on April 1, 2016September 12, 2021 by Adam Fowler

Lenovo has been on fire with their Yoga range in the last few months for home and business laptops (with my top picks being the Yoga 900 and the Thinkpad Yoga X1). Yoga being ‘on fire’ That makes me think of this:

Not to digress any further, the latest product I’ve been sent in the Yoga range (Thanks Lenovo!), is the Yoga Home 500.

When I first heard about it, all I knew was that it was an all-in-one PC. That didn’t sound too exciting – A screen and desktop box in a single unit, a form factor that had been around for many years, but I’d never actually had one to check out. What arrived was much more than what my expectations were.

Firstly yes, the Yoga Home 500 is an all-in-one PC. But it’s also a tablet. And a gaming box. And a family device hub for photos and videos.

I’ll start with the PC side of things. We have a 21.5″ screen, with a computer build into the chassis. Here’s the specs, I’ve underlined the ones I have in this model which seem to be the best possible :)

Lenovo Yoga Home 500Tech Specs

DESCRIPTION	LENOVO™ YOGA™ HOME 500
Processor	5^th Generation Intel^® Core™ i5-5200U Processor 5^th Generation Intel^® Core™ i3-5010U Processor 5^th Generation Intel^® Core™ i3-5005U Processor Intel^® Pentium^® Dual-Core Processor
Operating System	Windows 10 Home
Graphics	Intel^® Broadwell Integrated Graphics Up to NVIDIA^® GeForce^® 920A Discrete Graphics 1 GB DDR3-VRAM (gDDR3)
Memory	Up to 8 GB (4 GB / 8 GB) DDR3 – 1600 MHz
Webcam	1080p with Dual-array Microphone 1080p Light Sensor
Storage	Up to 500 GB / 1 TB HDD Up to 500 GB / 1 TB SSHD
Audio	Integrated 2 x 2.8 W Speakers
Battery	Up to 3 Hours with 4-cell 48 WHr Battery
Display	21.5″ FHD, 10-point Multitouch, LED Panel
Dimensions (W x D x H)	(mm) : 526.4 x 39.5 x 318.6 (inches) : 20.72″ x 1.55″ x 12.54″
Weight	Starting at 10.1 lbs (4.6 kg)
WLAN	WiFi 802.11 a/c or b/g/n, Bluetooth^® 4.0, Near Field Communication (NFC)
Ports	3 x USB 3.0 1 x Headphone / Microphone 1 x Power DC-in 1 x HDMI-in 6-in-1 Multi Card Reader

Some notes on the specs and hardware – There are two RAM slots, but with 8GB it was a single stick, meaning this can easily be upgraded to 16GB, assuming the RAM isn’t soldered in – I can’t find any videos or photos of the insides of this, and there’s no screws to be seen so most likely comes apart like an Apple iMac using a plunger.

The hard drive appears to be a hybrid with 8GB SSD cache, and close to 1TB for the rest. This gives a bit of a better performance than your standard platter HDD, but not as good as an SSD. I found it fairly snappy overall despite this.

The screen seems of high quality, touch response was great. The dedicated NVIDIA Geforce 920A graphics card is a nice touch too, especially for being able to at least game with lower settings.

Yoga Home 500 Front

So yes, it seems to function quite fine as an all-in-one PC, and does everything you’d expect from a Windows 10 box. On the right hand side of the chassis is the power and volume up/down buttons:

Right Hand Side

… and on the left hand side is a Multi-Card Reader, Audio 3.5mm Jack, Three USB 3.0 ports, a HDMI in (so you can just use this as a monitor) and power in, using the standard rectangle plug that most (but not all) Lenovo products have these days:

Left Hand Side

As you can see from those photos, there’s a cool kickstand that holds the monitor up. This is fully adjustable (as in, you can set it to any position in it’s range, rather than just having a few locked options) and goes all the way down to tablet mode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTR28suT5FY&feature=youtu.be

Tablet mode – this is where things start to get interesting. It’s a giant tablet, that has a 3 hour battery. Lenovo provides software called Aura along with a bunch of apps and games, and an app store for free. From what I can tell, the idea of this is to have a device in the middle of the table that a family or group of friends can sit around and have fun with. 4 player touch games, along with using the paddles and joysticks that come free with the Yoga Home 500, or going through photos and videos is where this device shows it’s strengths. I can see this being really useful for coming back from a holiday and showing photos off, flicking through and telling a story about what happened.

I thought I’d do a quick video on this, where it shows objects in Aura can be flicked across the screen, and orientated whichever way you like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcfvST4jPRg&feature=youtu.be

The games that come with this are actually quite decent, rather than being crappy low end games. Here you can see an asteroid type game that can take up to 4 players, using touch, joysticks or even bring your own controllers:

The app store seems to have a variety of different games, and yes there’s Air Hockey!

Other items that come with the Yoga Home 500 are a keyboard and mouse (both paired already to the device, no little bluetooth dongle required):

Stylish mouse with touch sensitive scrollwheel

Thin keyboard

There’s also the paddles and joysticks for playing games:

Joystick has plunger, paddles have 4 touchpads

And of course, because you’ll be putting your grubby mitts all over this thing, there’s a screen cleaner:

Official Lenovo Screen Cleaner

All together this is a pretty cool piece of kit. The 3 hours battery life means you can take this wherever you like in the house and play on it, but you’ve also got a giant screen and a lot of power under the hood for a particularly large portable device.

The Lenovo Yoga Home 500 is an all-rounder device, but does all those things quite well, rather than falling into the trap of doing all things averagely. It’s easy to use, has a multitude of use cases and due to it’s small footprint, it isn’t hard to find it a home somewhere around the house.

Any comments or questions about this, please respond below!

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