The working from home thread: tips and advice

Thanks for that. I also wonder what they are like for actually partitioning what you’re doing on the screen.

I do a fair bit on excel so the width appeals to a certain extent, but more important is having two separate bits of work kept apart to reference, and somewhere to dump stuff not in immediate use etc. Dual seems a bit easier for that, I would assume

It's easy enough to snap windows to either side of the screen of an ultrawide so it's like using two monitors.

Much more flexible in that it can be used as one big monitor or three windows across the monitor or whatever though.

I switched from 3 27inch to one 49incb ultra wide. I use a programme to snap things, so that works well.

Teams sucks as you can only share the whole screen or 1 program, zoom is fine as you can draw a box and share whatever is inside that.

There are workarounds on the teams issue, but I’m hoping they steal the zoom approach.

There are workarounds on the teams issue, but I’m hoping they steal the zoom approach.

It’s Microsoft. They will.

Well either that or buy Zoom snd somehow destroy it...

What have Microsoft bought and destroyed?

Excel for example seems to be going strong. Hotmail was alive last time I looked. I suppose Skype as a verb is dropping out of use.

The Nokia thing wasn't great but that was already failing.

github?

Skype has gone from great to shit. Teams chat is such a poor ripoff of slack it’s embarrassing.

MS is good at a few things, but they’re not on the ball when it comes to new trends.

They’ll never buy zoom as it’ll never be for sale. Why would China sell a well working surveillance tool?

There was some chat that they (superwide monitors) have a bit of an issue when it comes to sharing screen on team's or zoom just as an fyi

Similar with a standard 4K monitor. Most people I share screens with are on a laptop so my 4K monitor content on their shitty little 1920x1080 is unreadable. If I share my whole screen I have to faff around to make everything 3x the size so they can at least try to read it, or mess up everything by temporarily changing the scaling options.

The workaround (which works for superwide monitors too) is to use Picture-In-Picture or P-By-P and pretend you have a second monitor that's only 1920x1080 and share that.

I do exactly this for my Webex calls. Also nice that I can have stuff on the rest of my monitor that I'm not sharing (although I minimise the non-work stuff just in case) which I can drag on/off the extra PiP screen as necessary. And I don't have to resize anything or faff with scaling options.

Of course, you need a second output from the computer/laptop, a spare input on the monitor, and for the monitor to have PiP/PbP functionality (which most modern monitors will have). Also having it in a non-fiddly setup is important (it's just a couple of button presses on my monitor's remote) having to do it via a on screen menu would probably be a ball ache.

If you're working from a laptop then the obvious workaround is to just open your laptop when you want to share a screen and share that.

Although personally I very rarely share a screen as I like to fully control what I'm sharing.

Surely ms buying Skype was more about the tech than the product? I could have sworn I saw something called Skype appear on my pc the other day when I was doing something on teams

Teams stole a lot of the functionality from skype for business.

Yes, I haven't found a neat PiP approach for my samsung screen, I have to fiddle round in the on screen menus which as you say is a real pain.

Think so. Guess it formed the basis for Teams?

I'm on a desktop. I have considered just getting a smaller (say 24inch) screen and putting it in portrait mode for screen sharing, my biggest issue is that is then off to one side, so when I am on camera, there is a question of where I put it, would spend the whole call craning my neck to look at the second monitor...

one year now working from home, short spell in the office last summer.. dilemma around those who want to be back in town and those very comfortable stay put aka living at work..
i've missed out on annual 5000 miles of bike commuting ffs.. and ive turned into a lard arse!!

#rantover

What have Microsoft bought and destroyed?

Lync

[Edit]

Huh - so Lync was MS all along. Well I never.

I quite liked it, pre-Skype days.

Ha, good point. My last bike commute home was 13th March 2020. But then I've only missed out on 500km 1000km of bike commuting and 500km of run commuting in that year.

^^ Nokia Mobile tho. Now all but gone.

I can get to a web interface for teams by going to devspaces.skype.com

No commuting has meant my best year for running (more energy for it) but it's effort to get back to where I was with cycling. Silly commuter racing is life

Got an MX Keys keyboard a few weeks ago too (upgraded from the K380 that I'd picked up at the start of lockdown) - it's really nice isn't it?

Now trying to work out if I can really justify swapping out my perfectly adequate MX Anywhere 2 mouse to a newer one purely so they can use the same USB-C charger...

This is pretty much why I'm getting the Master 3...

Crossposting here too;

I had some Jabra 65Ts for work calls that were great. Until they stopped properly charging in the case. I bought the below as a replacement as they were an extra fiver off. Sound quality for me was not as good, but the magnetic snap back into the charging case and the wireless charging of the case itself has been great. However, I think they may be causing some slight delay on my voice on work calls, as I'm now seemingly talking over or being interrupted by the customers I speak to.

https://smile.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0­8HVQKLM3/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_­s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I don't think it's a problem with my laptop (had no such issue with the Jabra's), and both these and the Jabra's are BT5.0

Could it be something else or just cheap shit earbuds?

.