Sway

Another spinoff of installing Windows 10 on VirtualBox was the discovery of Microsoft's Sway, described by Wikipedia as follows:

Office Sway is a presentation program and is part of the Microsoft Office family of products. Generally released by Microsoft in August 2015, Sway allows users who have a Microsoft account to combine text and media to create a presentable website. Users can pull content locally from the device in use, or from internet sources such as Bing, Facebook, OneDrive, and YouTube. Sways are stored on Microsoft's servers and are tied to the user's Microsoft account. They can be viewed and edited from any web browser with a web app available in Office Online. They can also be accessed using apps for Windows 10 and iOS. Additional apps are currently in development for Android and Windows Phone.

Sway is only available within Windows or iOS, so I have installed it on my iPad after discovering it on my Windows 10 installation and wondering what it was all about. Here is my first effort at creating a Sway presentation:

From Evernote to OneNote

With Evernote's decision to limit free accounts to access from only two devices, I decided it was time to abandon a platform that I'd been using almost from its inception. I'm sure I'll have lots of company. There's something very annoying about crippling a service that was formerly provided for free and increasing the price of the paid service options. 

I opted for OneNote over Google Keep (although I plan to test out the latter in the near future) and then investigated whether it was possible to migrate notes from Evernote to the OneNote. It turns out that is possible but the tool provided by Microsoft only works with Windows. I discovered that it was possible to run Windows 10 with no product key under VirtualBox, so I downloaded and installed it. 

I then downloaded Evernote for Windows, synched all my notes, downloaded the migration tool and moved all my notebooks, notes and tags across to OneNote. It turns out that I had 2001 notes. The migration is proceeding as I write and the whole process has proved relatively painless, with the major difficulty proving to be the download of the 4Gb ISO file. The downloaded failed two times but succeeded on the third attempt.

So as well as successively moving all my Evernote notes to OneNote, I now have an installation of Windows 10 on VirtualBox as well as the latest version of Ubuntu.

Virtual Computers

I've decided to reformat the hard drive on my Toshiba laptop after 2.5 years of use. Initially I used Microsoft's Virtual PC software to install a virtual Ubuntu machine that turned out to have some virtual hardware issues. Later, I used VMWare's software to create another, rather more successful, virtual Ubuntu machine. Finally, I installed a dual boot system so that I could boot to either Ubuntu or Windows Vista. All of these installations consumed hard disk space, of which there was still plenty, but things were obviously messy and so this is an attempt to tidy things up. I intend to run Portable Unbuntu for Windows (link) which allows you to use Ubuntu from within Windows.

POSTSCRIPT: a day later I'm still trying to download the 439 MB file. Every attempt yesterday failed because the download just hung or because it was impossibly slow. The download today seems to be going better predicting 3 to 4 hours rather than 3 to 4 days! Fingers crossed.