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Amazing infrared thermometer for £8
I bought an infrared thermometer to diagnose my central heating system but for £8 it is great for anyone who is interested in physics. It measures the infrared that that is emitted from a surface to get the temperature. Different surfaces emit different amounts of infrared. To promote getting an accurate reading I stuck a…
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Windows 10 Creators Update: How to turn off focused inbox
If there is one thing that is guaranteed to make me fume with anger it is vendors mucking about with my email. I think that ordinary home users should use Office 365 and Microsoft email services. Outlook.com offers you a free mail account with an *@outlook.com address. You can also use it with other addresses…
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Using Excel 2016 to unpivot data
Normal people, by which I mean those who don’t process data all day will often create data that is present in a crosstab table. This is a poor structure for storing and processing information. We say that its “denormalised” because the three different columns “Europe”, “USA”, “Asia” contain information of the same type – “budget…
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Create the Union of two tables in Excel revisited
In 2013 I published a technique to create the union of two tables in Excel. This post is still very popular and so I am revisiting this topic. Excel 2016 (and possibly Excel 2013 but I have not tested) has this capability built-in and the new method should always be preferred to the one that…
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Understanding Formidable Forms and WordPress
I have been using Formidable Forms with WordPress on and off for about 3 years. I have a conventional SQL and web programming background and I have found understanding the Formidable framework difficult. Today I had the insight that Formidable “views” are really just HTML fragments that contain data fetched by a simple SQL statement working…
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How should a user manage their passwords?
I was recently asked how a user should manage their passwords. This is a tricky topic and I have avoided biting the bullet until now but here goes, Considerations It is very important that user do not lose access to important passwords by forgetting them or losing access. Users are often the weakest link in…
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New year – annual backups
If, dear reader, you have been following my advice on backups then you will, be using OneDrive to sync your Documents to the cloud. This gives you a real-time copy of everything in case you use your laptop and the ability to access documents from many devices. be using File History with a big NAS…
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How to manage work
This article was written in response to a question from a 3rd year Computer Science student and it uses terms familiar to that domain. However the principles it puts forward are generally applicable and should be useful to any reader. What is “work”? “Work” is a verb, it doing something to create a Deliverable and it…
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“The Checklist Manifesto” is a game-changing book
What is it about? The author’s key message is that the volume and complexity of knowledge today has exceeded any single individual’s ability to manage it consistently without error despite material advances in technology, boatloads of more training and super-specialization of functions and responsibilities. Yet, despite demonstrating that checklists produce results, there is resistance…
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Please vote for Outlook 2016 to work properly
In my last posts (1,2) I described how Outlook 2016 does not work properly with connected accounts (additional email addresses). Please vote to fix this bug here. https://outlook.uservoice.com/forums/322590-outlook-2016-for-windows/suggestions/13457142-option-to-make-microsoft-outlook-2016-work-with-ou
Dr James Bayley
Creating successful projects
Dr James Bayley 