Tips – Living with technology

I’ve always been happy to give cutting edge apps, operating systems and gadgets a go and when Windows Insider opened up for Windows Phone 10 preview I definitely had to sneak on board and get my trusted Nokia Lumia 930 (a gift from a very dear friend, Jin) upgraded.

To be honest, the experience hasn’t been altogether a happy one. That being said, the actual risk is minimal, but frustrating nevertheless. Especially with apps failing (apps i was using frequently, such as Outlook or my Calendar) in steady streams.

Over the past 5 months I’ve done more than 15 hard resets of my phone – purely because it became too unstable or vital apps (such as the Phone app, durr) became unresponsive. Granted, it’s an easy process to reset, but time consuming.

It came to a head in the past 3 days – 11 hard resets and a couple of updates keeps failing. Especially 10514 and 10536. Kept getting a message “an update was not installed” or somesuch, with the phone then proceeded shortly after with another update download. This went on and on and on, not only making the phone unusable for me but also very hot to touch.

Finally deciding that this was going to stop I figured a downgrade and another upgrade would see the WP10 updates install properly.

So here’s the fix if you’re actually stuck with not being able to upgrade..

Download the Windows Phone Recovery Tool 2.1.2 from here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=525569 onto your PC/Laptop
Install the app and connect your phone to your PC/Laptop
Once connected up, click on the “Install Software” icon (this can take a while so be patient)
Go through the full install and setup your phone again. This will bring it back to WP8.1.
Go to the Store and install the Windows Insider app
Once installed, open the app and sign up for the “Fast” track (only Apple fanbois should go with the slow route)
Once done, restart the phone
Go to Settings -> Phone Update and download the update. Once it’s downloaded it’ll tell you to install and restart. Do so. Voila, I skipped what i believe is the troublesome update 10514 straight to 10536.

(I didn’t have any issues with the phone not being recognised, but have heard some have that issue. Do a Hard Reset if that’s the case first before going through with this process)

This brought me straight to the 10536 update and it’s working a treat again. Apps are stable and I’ve gotten new versions of many of the apps I always used (Outlook, Calendar, Phone, Messaging etc).

There you go, stay happy and keep coding..

One of the neat little tricks, i’ve taken on board more and more of late, is the power of Word and/or Excel personal templates.

It’s always been a frustration for me to dig around on some obscure shared drive, for the latest version of a specific document or spreadsheet template. That’s why I generally use templates for most of the work I do.

Now, one of the problems with this is that I have to "drag" around my template library constantly, so I figured why not just stored them in the Cloud.

SkyDrive to the rescue…

Now, that worked really, really well for documents that i just need to share on the odd occasion – but what if I really wanted to manage and control my templates…could SkyDrive be helpful there in the long run.

no..obviously not. Versioning and such is not available on SkyDrive.

Then i looked a bit further and played around with my Office 365 setup – and now we’re talking familiar territory for me – SharePoint without the hassles of setting up a server, on an internal network that I couldn’t even get to all the time.

What i needed was for my templates to be stored in a controlled environment, available 24/7, for multiple people.

Here’s the scenarios I wanted to deal with:

Controlled access to all templates
Publication of templates when approved
Synchronisation of templates locally

Tools of the trade:

Office 365 Team Site
Basic document library (with versioning turned on)
SkyDrive Pro 2013
Office 2013


First things first – set up a Office 365 Team Site…done
Secondly, create a document library and turn on versioning..done



Then we just need the folder path (full url) to the document library and set up a new folder sync via SkyDrive Pro 2013.






Click on "Show my files" and you’ll see the folder that’s been synchronised to your local folder. Grap that folder path and open up Word -> Options -> Save and enter the path in to the "Default personal templates location".



Click ok – restart Word and voila, you now have a "Personal" tab available on the "New" screen where your templates will be listed. This works just as well for PowerPoint, Excel etc etc.