Software

GitHub is a great place to find some good resources and solutions. Whenever I need it personally or professionally, if the solution is really useful, I make sure to add a star to it.

I review my stars from time to time, and it wasn’t any different on the 31st of December 2024.

By the end of 2024, I had accumulated the following, which are really worth looking at.

The list is curated, and I pick the ones that are worth knowing for the following year, 2025.

While I’m cautious about purchasing expensive licenses, for some businesses, the cheapest option, Business Basic for £4.90 per user per month, is more than enough!

Every now and then, I discover new “hidden” features that I can use with just a basic license, and this time was no different.

Setting up computers in businesses, I always default to Google Search. Frankly, Bing just hasn’t kept pace, despite the recent AI hype. For most users, Google’s familiarity boosts productivity, which is key in any business environment.

What I hate is that Microsoft, with every other Microsoft Edge update, forces Bing back as the default search engine.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve told my friends and their friends not to send pictures over WhatsApp. If you must do it, please at least change this one thing first to make everyone’s life easier.

Recently, at work, we have faced an issue where we want to resurrect one of the old Excel files and we found out that, when a file on its own can be opened without any problem, some options, like Workbook Structure or individual Sheets been protected with a password.

The problem was that the person, who initially create the file, was no longer with the company and nobody knew what password was used. As we were able to open the file on its own, as it wasn’t protected, knowing about how XLSX (also XLSM) files are constructed, I decided to use the brute method to remove restrictions.

Here’s how it goes…

Privacy is the key and it’s not only in our private life but also in business. If you using Gmail (Google Workplace) for your business, something called read receipt is an odd thing.

Many businesses however are using solutions from Microsoft called Microsoft 365 Business (in various plans).

Microsoft, in their subscription service, provides a lot of useful functionalities, but there are some functions, that are heading back to times when Microsoft Outlook started gaining popularity (Microsoft Office 97).

Through these functionalities there was one, requesting a receipt sent back to the sender when the recipient read an email.

Do you watch YouTube a lot? Are you addicted to it, or just need it for your work?

Do the ads cause you a headache?

There is nothing better than suddenly showing an Ad in the middle of streaming from YouTube to a bigger audience (possibly on a bigger screen and using bigger, much louder audio equipment). This may ruin a lot and put distraction in time when you need people to concentrate on presented material (either video or just audio).

This may annoy you and others to the extent that you will think to pay this £11.99 per month for YouTube Premium only to get rid of this annoyance.

But what if I will tell you there is a better (and cheaper) way?

Sooner rather than later the time has come when another person asks me what to do when they are running out of space on Google Photos and therefore on Gmail.

There are a couple of things that I cannot imagine doing when surfing around the internet. One is RSS/Atom to stay on top of new things on websites that I am watching (I wrote about it in a post: Why RSS still matters in 2021?). The other important thing is a virtual place where I can save a website to come back to it or to read it later.

When I started working for my employer, they were using an on-site server and file storage with overnight backups to external drives. Everything was limited by the broadband (internet connection) speed, which in England is quite crazy — business parks rarely have access to inexpensive fibre connections, whereas at home you can get cheap Full Fibre. When things changed (or rather, the company needed to invest in change), we moved everything into the cloud.

We chose Microsoft 365 as our provider.

Once the migration was completed and people had got used to accessing their files in the new way (which hadn’t changed much thanks to the integration of the OneDrive app with Windows, apart from the use of file links), I needed to find a method to back up all files in case of an emergency (or the accidental removal of important files by an employee).

Although Microsoft provides an option to restore files for a short period (typically 30 days), sometimes that may be too short — by the time you notice files are missing, it could be too late. It’s better to have a backup (even an old version of the file) than to have no copy at all.

Without going into costly online backup solutions, or even investing in Microsoft 365 Backup (with its pay-as-you-go billing model), I decided to build an inexpensive and relatively cheap long-term backup system — and I did.

I like SAP Crystal Reports. Why? Because it helps gather the information needed and present them as I would like to, with just basic crystal reports design knowledge.