Microsoft Support & Discussions

Managing app permissions isn’t a sexy task (if such things exist) but it’s a task we sometimes have to do – and for Flatpak app there’s no better tool than Flatseal. Today a new version of Flatseal was released. Flatseal 2.1.0 offers “refined visuals, improved performance, support for a new permission, quality of life additions, and fixes”, according to developer Martín Abente Lahaye. And since he works on the app, he knows what he’s talking about. Unlike me. I only just installed the update. Since this is not an app I use on the regular some nuance in the latest uplift might be lost on me. But visually I can say: it looks banging thanks to libadwaita 1.4 a…

Struggle staying on task when with multiple app windows open and in view? I came across a GNOME extension today that could help you keep focus on the app you’re working in – even when a smorgasbord of other apps are open, visible, and demanding attention from behind it! All it does is dim background windows. That’s it. Unfocused windows dim, focused window bright When enabled, the window in ‘focus’ (technical focus; the window you’re able to interact with using your keyboard or mouse without needing to click on it again) sits in full brightness – thus obvious and drawing in your attention. Every other visible window sits in the dark. When you switch…

Ticketbooth is a neat Linux app with one purpose: to help you keep track of the Movies and TV shows you want to watch. The few streaming services I use offer a “watchlist” feature. This lets me ‘bookmark’ content I come across for later viewing. That sort of helps, but most recommendations I encounter are in blog post or via social media, and the suggestions not always available to stream. Which Ticketbooth quite literally just the ticket for me! Ticketbooth lets you track your TV series and movies Using it is easy: click the “+” icon to access a search dialog, punch in a TV show or movie title, select a match from the results returned to add it to your lis…

A new version of the Tuba Mastodon app for Linux is rolling out on Flathub. Tuba 0.5 features an array of UI changes, many the result of the new widgets and adaptive capabilities provided by libadwaita 1.4. Naturally this includes the ‘full-height’ sidebar and split-toolbars “made famous” in GNOME 45: Tuba 0.5.0’s new look thanks to libadwaita 1.4 The new widgets affect the navigation of the app somewhat. The top toolbar is gone (in wide mode) so Tuba’s sidebar is home to “Home”, “Notifications”, and “Conversations” filters, along with a labelled “Search” entry. “Preferences”, “Keyboard shortcuts” and “About” move from the sidebar to the sidebar hamburger me…

A new version of Polari, a terrific looking IRC client for Linux desktops, is out. Much of the improvement comes by way of the latest libadwaita, with Polari v45 adding support for (among other features) those natty new full-height sidebars featured heavily in GNOME 45 core apps. Confession time: I don’t use IRC often – but I know many folks, especially developers and those active in Linux communities, do. IRC remains a delightfully deft communication protocol because it’s (largely) text-based and community-based. No GIFs, no memes, no reactions, no trends. In an age of social media immediacy IRC feels refreshingly slow, where conversations play out over hours or…

Purism has announced its first foray into tablet computing with the Librem 11 tablet. The 11-inch slate uses the company’s secure, privacy-focused PureBoot technology as standard, and ships with the their Debian-based PureOS by default. The Purism Librem 11 specs also look decent enough, offering a balance of performance and power efficiency (important in portable devices): 11.5-inch AMOLED (2560×1600 @ 60Hz) Intel N5100 CPU (Quad-Core @ 1.1GHz) Intel UHD Graphics 8 GB LPDDR4 (soldered) 1TB NVMe storage Ports wise there’s everything you’d expect, including a pair of USB 3.1 Type-C inputs (with power delivery, and support for charging), plus a standard …

KDE Plasma 6.0 will be released in February 2024. KDE developer Nate Graham revealed the release date in a blog post giving a top-level overview of Plasma 6 development to date, writing: Graham says he feels ‘confident that the release will be in excellent shape by then’, and adds that another 5 months of development will offer ‘enough of a runway for a solid final release’. Exciting stuff. Development on KDE Plasma 6 kicked off (heh) earlier this year. The desktop side is now built using Qt 6 technologies. This unlock support for new features, capabilities (including enhancements to ‘convergence’ implementations), and further future-proofing. Earlier …

The latest point release of Thunderbird 115 – aka the new version you’ve no-doubt heard people raving about — features a flurry of fixes. For one, Thunderbird 115.2 makes the size, unread, and total columns right-aligned by default which, to my eyes, gives the client a more balanced presentation — but I appreciate that could just be me! Sticking with visual improvements for a comment, Thunderbird’s message compose window was not correctly applying theme colors to menus in the last version – so that’s also been addressed by this update. Thunderbird 115.2 with newly right-aligned size and unread columns Creating tags from unified toolbar sometimes failed, and …

Speech Note is an offline, AI-powered app able to transcribe your speech into text in a variety of different languages. A reader got in touch to point me towards the app — thanks, David! — and given that it sounds pretty cool I figured I’d give it a spotlight on the site. Speech Note use OpenAI’s Whisper and a stack of other open-source libraries, voice engines, and other doohickeys to perform its transliterative magic. It supports Speech to Text (i.e you speak, it types), Text to Speech (i.e. you type, it speaks), and machine translation to translate text/speech from one language to another. Speech Note (image: Flathub) “Text and voice processing take pl…

The latest nightly builds of the Nautilus file manager sport a split header-bar look. And if all goes to plan, Nautilus’ new two-panel look will roll out to all when GNOME 45 is released in September. The new design extends Nautilus’ sidebar to the full height of the window, gains the title “Places”, and becomes the new home for the file manager’s hamburger menu: Nautilus in GNOME 45 Beta 1 (Back) and Beta 2 (Front) The sidebar also becomes the new home for the widget relaying active file transfer and extraction progress: Transfer progress widget gets a new home The new design isn’t here to look pretty (though that it does) but to take advantage of t…

When I watch videos on KDE Plasma I do so using Haruna, a Qt-based media app with a pleasant UI and a potent feature set. Haruna 0.12.0 is the latest version of the app (at the time I write this, at least) and it adds a flurry of new features – a few I personally appreciate. For instance, it’s now possible to enable preview thumbnails when skimming over the progress bar (as in hovering, not needing to scrub). This makes it much easier to find a specific part of a video you want to jump to/revisit/rewatch: Enable timeline previews in Settings > General There’s also a new setting to only allow a single instance of Haruna to run. This option is off by defaul…

Today, I worked on a service request where the DNS was providing an incorrect IP address randomly. In this article, I would like to share a PowerShell script that checks the DNS resolution every 5 seconds to help identify the issue. This script resolves a DNS name using two methods (Resolve-DnsName and nslookup), logs the details, and saves the results in a CSV file for further analysis. This approach helps in identifying the DNS server responses and understanding the resolution process over time. [HEADING=3] [/HEADING] Resolve-DnsName - A PowerShell cmdlet that provides detailed information about DNS queries. nslookup - A command-line utility that queries DN…

We are excited to share that we are releasing video page templates in SharePoint Pages and News. With this feature, we're enabling authors to create video centric page content. These templates are available in both SharePoint and Stream, making it easy to showcase video with a customized and branded pages experience from either application. [HEADING=2]Creating a video page from Stream Web App[/HEADING] This feature enables the creation of Pages and News outside of the SharePoint platform. Navigate to a video on the Stream Web App. Under the share dropdown, you will see a new entry point: Create video news post. Tip: This entry point is only available …

We are delighted to share that Marthe Moengen, a Data Platform MVP from Norway, has been recognized as one of the Top 50 Women in Tech awardees in Norway. She is a community leader who helps data platform communities around the world, and as a woman community leader, she assists other women in developing their skills. To celebrate her remarkable achievement, this blog post will feature her community activities, career history, and women empowerment story. ---------- Community activities and how to help community members “Being a part of the data community is so inspiring, and I'm always striving to inspire others as well. I love delving into top…

Imagine you’re a program evaluator or a qualitative researcher tasked with analyzing hundreds of interview transcripts. Each transcript is filled with valuable information, but the sheer volume and time-consuming nature of the task can be overwhelming. You find yourself buried in a sea of words, desperately seeking a way to extract meaningful insights efficiently. This blog is meant to walk you into a solution by using Azure's AI Language Service. [HEADING=1]Introduction [/HEADING] In the realm of program evaluations and qualitative research, interview transcripts hold the key to understanding participants’ perspectives and experiences. However, manually sift…

Introduction Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transformed the digital landscape through "intent-based outcome specification," a paradigm where users describe desired outcomes via detailed prompts instead of traditional commands. This course - targeting a non-developer audience - delved into the foundational principles of Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on their core mechanisms and capabilities. Students learned and practiced effective prompting techniques, essential for navigating this powerful yet complex method. The course included the analysis and discussion of recent research on prompt engineering, keeping students abreast of th…

Dev Tunnels is a tunneling service that can boost your productivity when testing and debugging web apps, webhooks, APIs, and more. You can also simply use Dev Tunnels to seamlessly share your work with colleagues, demo at conferences, or cross-device app testing. Whether you use Dev Tunnels through Visual Studio, VS Code, or the devtunnel CLI, it takes mere seconds to get started. We’ve heard from organizations that IT Administrators want to control certain aspects of Dev Tunnels to achieve consistency or compliance across their organization. In response to this feedback, we’re thrilled to announce that Dev Tunnels now supports this level of control with Group Poli…

Hi everyone! Brandon Wilson here once again with this month’s “Check This Out!” (CTO!) guide. These posts are only intended to be your guide, to lead you to some content of interest, and are just a way we are trying to help our readers a bit more, whether that is learning, troubleshooting, or just finding new content sources! We will give you a bit of a taste of the blog content itself, provide you a way to get to the source content directly, and help to introduce you to some other blogs you may not be aware of that you might find helpful. From all of us on the Core Infrastructure and Security Tech Community blog team, thanks for your continued reading and support! …

We are excited to announce the new Microsoft Defender Bounty Program with awards of up to $20,000 USD. The Microsoft Defender brand encompasses a variety of products and services designed to enhance the security of the Microsoft customer experience. The Microsoft Defender Bounty Program invites researchers across the globe to identify vulnerabilities in Defender products and services and share them with our team. Continue reading...

Congratulations to all the researchers recognized in this quarter’s Microsoft Researcher Recognition Program leaderboard! Thank you to everyone for your hard work and continued partnership to secure customers. The top three researchers of the 2024 Q1 Security Researcher Leaderboard are Yuki Chen, VictorV, and Nitesh Surana! Check out the full list of researchers recognized this quarter here. Continue reading...

At the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), our mission is to protect our customers, communities, and Microsoft from current and emerging threats to security and privacy. One way we achieve this is by determining the root cause of security vulnerabilities in Microsoft products and services. We use this information to identify vulnerability trends and provide this data to our Product Engineering teams to enable them to systematically understand and eradicate security risks. Continue reading...

Meet Derrick, a Senior Program Manager on the Operational Threat Intelligence team at Microsoft. Derrick’s role involves understanding and roadmapping the complete set of tools that Threat Intel analysts use to collect, analyze, process, and disseminate threat intelligence across Microsoft. Derrick’s love of learning and his natural curiosity led him to a career in technology and ultimately, to his current role at Microsoft. Continue reading...