Moving away from Any.do to Microsoft To Do

  • What?
    • This post is only about free versions of Any.do and Microsoft To Do
    • I have been using Any.do for years now and have been compelled to move out. Right choice was Wunderlist – which was bought over by Microsoft – and now shut to allow its Microsoft To Do to take over. I am hoping they are keeping Wunderlist as base and just renaming it to Microsoft To Do.
    • I am very sure Microsoft To-Do has or going to provide good answers to “problems” I see with Any.do
  • Where to where?
  • Challenges with Any.do:
    • Paying for new features:
      • I am pretty convinced with my experience that anything new that would be added will be a “Premium” feature that would want you to pay
    • Lack of good scheduler for recurring tasks:
      • See this is very very important feature for any to-do application. If you can’t schedule it right, the whole idea of reminders fail. And here’s where free version of Any.Do fails.
      • With free version Any.Do allows tasks to be scheduled daily, weekly, monthly or annually. But not on workdays, not on like 2 days of every week (you have to create two tasks and schedule those separately, but then you will be spending time in managing tasks rather than actually doing those)
    • Reminders are annoying:
      • Reminders on mobile are too too annoying. It would even keep hanging, gulping your phone screen when phone is in navigation mode or like chatting; it won’t go until you satisfy it with your response.
      • Reminder pop-up comes with options which can’t be customised.
    • Difficulties in Snoozing a Reminder correctly:
      • Snoozing a reminder needs at least two touches – which is really annoying when you are in middle of something.
      • And even snoozing with two touches would postpone it to next day 10am which might not really something you wanted.
      • If you really want to snooze it to time you like it would mean spending sometime with the app with many touches, not in a flash
    • Need to pay for Integrations:
      • We need integration with Alexa and similar services – but Any.Do wants you to pay for it to do that – buy premium.
      • WhatsApp integration – amazing idea – buy premium
    • Can’t Delete tasks (easily):
      • There’s no way to delete tasks – you are right, that’s strange but it’s true. Rather than giving a button inside take to delete the task, what Any.Do wants is to mark it complete, and hit “clear my completed tasks” from settings.
      • Clear Completed Tasks – this clears all completed tasks and doesn’t let you choose and remove that particular tasks that you wanted to delete
    • Forget about Deleting recurring tasks (easily):
      • In fact, deleting a recurring task is even more annoying. First delete all recurrences, and then mark the tasks as done, and then hit clear completed tasks from Settings. Again, that clears, removes all completed tasks and not the only one you wanted to remove.
  • Does Microsoft To-Do have solutions to these? Yes
    • Most features are for free
    • New features getting added for free versions too
    • Just added “Weekdays” option for scheduling recurring tasks
    • Reminders and Snozzing are in very basic shape right now but looking at how the developers are responding to feature suggestions, pretty sure it’s to turn out good
    • Integrations – frankly, haven’t tried those yet – seems not available natively
    • Oh, sure, there’s delete button for tasks – and for recurring tasks too!
  • Read More:

America Iran Conflicts – Major Timeline

  • Timeline
    • 2020-01-08
      • Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 crashed Wednesday after takeoff from Tehran’s airport. The crash came hours after Iran fired missiles at Iraqi military bases housing US troops in retaliation for a drone strike at Baghdad airport that killed Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani.
    • 2020-01-07
      • Iran claims to have attacked US and coalition force station at bases in Iraq. Trump says “All is Well!”
    • 2020-01-02
      • US military watched the general get on a plane in Beirut, Lebanon, and monitored his flight to Baghdad with drones — including one outfitted with air-to-surface missiles. Once Soleimani landed, the Reaper drone watched him for about 10 minutes before firing its weapons on the two-car convoy leaving Baghdad International Airport. The Quds Force commander, along with the head of Kata’ib Hezbollah, died in the strike.
    • 2019-Dec-27
      • Iranian-backed militia group in Iraq, Kata’ib Hezbollah, attacked a military base north of the Iraqi city of Kirkuk, killing an American contractor and wounding several other US citizens and Iraqis.

Moving away from Feedly to Old Reader

Feedly was natural choice when Google Reader shutdown in July of year 2013.

Feedly topped the list of alternative to Google Reader in almost all tech blogs, e.g. Lifehacker’s one here.

Sadly, feedly (feedly.com) started to pull strings of users. annoying users of little little feature they would add and say, well you gotta get premium to use this.

While feed readers who were fans of Google Reader could still keep concentrated on feed reading capabilities ignoring what feedly was talking about all the time; and did not bother to pay for this service.

And, it seems, this annoyed feedly more, so it started cutting down basic feed reading capabilities – like after certain limit, you can not subscribe to a feed for free; and instead, you could subscribe to a topic if you had to.

Now, why in the world someone would subscribe to topics on feedly when there are already tones of webs already in the market (Google News, Google Alerts, Pintrest, Google Newsstand, etc.) doing that and which is not even pure feed reading experience.

Then after looking at tens of alternatives for feedly, I liked The Old Reader (www.theoldreader.com) the most.

It has a very simple website, which is not money hungry as the earlier one.

Old Reader is supported by News+ app on all types of devices – here.

Kudos to The Old Reader! – https://theoldreader.com

IFRS – Intro

  • What is IFRS?
    • International Financial Reporting Standards
    • Goal of IFRS standards have been to become a global framework for how organizations should prepare and disclose their financial statements.
    • There are two prevalent and parallel standards:
      • IFRS 9 – focus on financial instruments
      • IFRS 17 – focus on insurance contracts
    • Note that IFRS 17 is not an upgrade of IFRS 9 – these are two different matters (just like two chapters in one book which aren’t sequel or prequel to each-other)
  • What is IFRS 17?
    • Indicates how insurance contracts and connected events should be accounted
    • In one way it’s a successor of IFRS 4
    • International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) publishes IFRS 17 in May 2017
    • The standard is effective for accounting periods ending after January 1, 2022
  • What is IFRS 9?
    • Indicates how financial instruments should be classified and measured
  • IFRS 17 Impact on Financial Statements:
    • Insurance liability needs to be based on updated assumptions
    • Data is needed with lower granularity and with more history
    • Reporting time lines are shortened
  • References:

Azure VNet – Intro

  • What is Azure VNet?
    • Azure Virtual Network
    • This allows a private network to be created inside Azure.
    • It encapsulates many Azure resources such as Virtual Machines
  • Features
    • VNet is similar to an on-premise network but with capabilities of Azure’s infrastructure which provides scale, availability and isolation
    • Basic entities:
      • Address space
      • Subnets
      • Regions
        • A VNet will be limited to 1 region, however, multiple VNet can be connected using Virtual Network Peering
      • Subscription
    • Security
      • A VNet can be secured using Network Security Groups (NSGs)

IAM – Introduction

  • What is IAM?
    • IAM stands for Identity and Access Management
    • Its a system that stores, secures and manages all identities and defines access privileges.
    • It ensures that the user is granted controlled access to applications or resources
    • It let’s users login from many inbound flows, including:
      • From any location
      • On any network
      • On any devices

AD FS – Intro

  • What is AD FS?
    • It stands for Active Directory Federation Services offered by Microsoft
    • It works on Claim-based Authentication model – meaning, a claim of identity and access privileges made by a trusted party is analysed, verified of the origin and trusted by the receiver to give access to the original requestor.

SAML – An Intro

  • What is SAML?
    • Security Assertion Markup Language
    • It’s an XML variant language used to encode security credentials and sharing those among parties across a network
    • It is an open standard
    • It describes framework that allows one computer to perform below security functions:
      • Authentication: Determining that the users are who they claim to be
      • Authorization: Determining if users have the right to access certain systems of content
  • Versions:
    • Current: SAML 3.0
    • Most Popular: SAML 2.0
    • Previous: SAML 1.1
  • Identity Provider:
    • Performs authentication and authorization
  • References:

RPA – Robotic Process Automation

  • What is RPA?
    • Its a concept called Robotic Process Automation which essentially means automation of processes by giving it to a robot to do
  • How it is different than IA which uses ML and AI?
    • Intelligent Automation (IA) uses Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enable self-automation of processes/tasks which also is aimed to automate further tasks in future using its learning and intelligence abilities
    • However, RPA is seen as an early step to IA meaning RPA is missing self-automation capabilities of IA. With RPA, we can configure tasks to run.
  • Popular Tools:
    • EPAM
    • Automation Anywhere
    • AssistEdge
    • Blue Prism
    • UIpath
    • Pega
    • Contextor
  • Comparison of RPA Tools
    • Check related reference link in “References” section below