iCloud shared streams not shown after upgrade to Photos

The Mac OS X 10.10.3 includes the new iPhoto replacement called Photos. My upgrade experience was not very positive: I could no longer connect to the various albums I shared on iCloud. The albums were still there, they were showing up on other devices, but in Photos they were not visible. The Shared section of Photos showed the message “Connecting to library… Retrieving latest photo sharing activity” but after that, nothing happened.

After trying various things, this is the procedure that fixed it for me:

  • Close Photos
  • Repair disk permissions via Disk Utility
  • Restart
  • Don’t start Photos, but go to System Preferences, iCloud, Photos and disable iCloud Photo Sharing
  • Enable it again
  • Start Photos. After a while, the activity stream will update and the shared photos will start coming in.

 

Function keys on a Microsoft Surface Type Cover

surface_type_coverI knew you have to press the Fn key on the Type Cover of a Surface to get to the function keys on the keyboard. But what I did not know:

  • If you want to “lock” the top row of keys to their corresponding function key: press Fn + Caps Lock. To unlock, press the same keyboard combination again.
  • Pressing Fn + Spacebar corresponds to the Print Screen button on a regular keyboard. Now that is much more convenient than pressing the Home – Volume down on the device…

More info and tips on this link.

Top 100 learning tools for 2014 – my top 10

Jane Hart is gathering votes for the Top 100 learning tools for 2014. Every year, this is a very interesting way of getting to know new learning tools and explore their possibilities.
This is my top 10, in random order:
  • Twitter: the best way to generate your own “information streams” about various subjects.
  • Tweetdeck: invaluable for organizing my twitter stream. I like the fact that it is cross-platform.
  • Microsoft OneNote: the best note-taking application on the Windows platform. Unbeatable in combination with SharePoint and a tablet pc with a digitizer pen. Now finally available for OS X!
  • Instapaper: with the “read later” button in your browser toolbar, you can save interesting articles for later, and read them e.g. in the iPad app.
  • WordPress: excellent blogging platform. Recent releases have been focussing on the usability for the writer, and it is setting the standards for usability. Administration is getting easier with e.g. the auto-update feature.
  • Fever: after the “death” of Google Reader, and the competition between various RSS platforms, I decided to choose a self-hosted solution. Fever is exceptionally easy to install and very stable.
  • ReadKit: excellent RSS reader for Mac, with support for Fever.
  • WebEx: a very reliable, easy to use and complete web conferencing tool.
  • Yammer: the enterprise social network in our company keeps us up to date of what is happening in the various locations and business units.
  • Office 365: the “swiss army knife” of productivity tools: enterprise-grade e-mail and calendar, SharePoint sites for collaborating or storing knowledge, and OneDrive that has 1TB of storage and that is slowly becoming a serious competitor of tools like Google Drive and DropBox.

You can still post your own top 10 and contribute to the list until September 19.