Many of us attend conferences, festivals, marathons and other events. So are others from your city, country or region. Quite often we are traveling in parallel without realizing that other like-minded people are flying alongside us on the same flights.
We’ve created Extendee to fix that. Use Extendee to:
Start the event early. Meet like-minded people and start reaping the benefits on the way to the event.
Save on transportation. Share a taxi on the way from the airport or rent a car together and save.
Maximize ROI. You’ve already invested time and money into going there. Extendee helps you maximize return on that investment.
Check it out at https://extendee.com and, please, help us spread the word by sharing with your friends on social media. Thank you!
There are messages that we send over and over – inform someone that we will be late for a meeting, thank someone else for the information or a lovely evening, greet someone special or the whole world in the morning. You name it.
Additionally, the infamous “app gap” often puts Windows users in a position when certain electronic services aren’t accessible to us just because there’s no app for Windows. But what most of us don’t realize is that quite often these services are provided the “old-school” way as well – via SMS. To give you a personal example, there’s no parking app for Windows (phone) in Vilnius where I live. However, you can park your car the same way by sending an SMS in a predefined format to a special number. Typing or copy-pasting that text every time is very annoying. And that’s what One Tap Messages solves for me:
Now I have presets for all the parking zones in my city and I can park my car right from the start screen with just one tap. I’m pretty sure that’s even faster than from a native app on iOS or Android.
You may have various services accessible this way where you live: from public transportation tickets, to hailing a taxi, to buying stuff from a vending machine.
One Tap Messages is not limited to SMS though. You can add email presets or even “generic” share presets that would activate standard system sharing mechanism to let you share that message to any medium be it social media, messaging apps or anything that accepts text.
As all the other AxGarage apps, One Tap Messages is free on both mobile and desktop with optional in-app purchases to remove the ads and unlock unlimited presets and categories.
A couple of months ago we decided to audit our Azure subscription. We kind of knew that we weren’t extremely disciplined allocating Azure resources while we were in BizSpark, but which of our multiple projects were the least optimal in terms of Azure consumption was a mystery to us.
So, we went looking, and figuring this out turned out to be a bit more challenging than we expected. Especially if you want to look at it from the business (money) perspective.
You can get information by resource types from your invoices. Or you can get a very detailed CSV file but combing through it is not an easy task. So we made an internal tool to be able to slice and group the data from that file as we want to see it.
Now, in the spirit of the AxGarage initiative, we are making this internal tool public.
How to use Usage Analyzer for Azure
Login into your Microsoft Azure account and download monthly usage file (Version 2 – Preview) from the Billing history for your subscription. Upload this file to Usage Analyzer and you’ll get a default parsed view of that file.
You can regroup, filter and sort the resulting data as you see fit for your task at hand. Analyze it directly on the web or you can download a processed file to analyze or visualize it further with a tool of your choice (Excel, etc.)
How much does it cost?
Usage Analyzer for Azure is in beta and is free for now. We will continue providing a free version later on, but some features or usage volumes may be restricted to a paid plan.
Current status and known issues
Sample Azure usage files are not something you can find easily on the internet, so we have only tested the tool with a few provided by our friends. We need your help testing and improving the tool with your actual data. Please try the service and let us know if you encounter any issues or have ideas on how it can be improved. Send us an email at azureusage@axgarage.com.
We know that the tool doesn’t work with usage files from Enterprise Agreement portal. Please let us know if you are an EA Azure customer and would like to use our Usage Analyzer tool.
Get in touch and spread the word!
We have been able to save hundreds of dollar per month by analyzing and optimizing our Azure usage with this tool and we want everyone to be able to reap the benefits of being in the know. Please share information about Usage Analyze for Azure with your friends on social media, blogs, mailing lists, etc. so more people and companies can save money and help us improve the service. Do not hesitate to contact us with your ideas at azureusage@axgarage.com.
Over the years we’ve developed a bunch of bits and pieces of software that we use internally for one thing or the other. We decided to release some of it to the wider audience. All the things we release under this initiative can be found on a special AxGarage site. Much more will be added there as time goes by, but we start with two initial releases in the form of 2 Windows 10 UWP apps: Random Tool and One Tap Reminders.
Random Tool
Random Tool aims to be your Swiss army knife for all things random. We use it to pick winners for contests we run, to spice up a morning standup meeting by randomizing the order of speaking or to just pick random numbers, throw dice, flip coins or make decisions.
Additionally, Random Tool can speak the results aloud making it even more useful in a group setting.
One Tap Reminders
All of us need to be reminded about various things and quite often these reminders are pretty standard for our recurring situations: call someone in 5 minutes, pickup pizza in 20 minutes, switch stove off before something is overcooked, etc. One Tap Reminders lets you create reminder presets, [optionally] pin them to your start screen and activate them with just one tap – faster than you can ask Cortana to do it (even provided she hears you on the first try) and definitely faster than fiddling with reminder settings in an app.
Both apps are universal Windows 10 apps (UWP) and work on both mobile and desktop (should work on HoloLens as well) and available from the Windows Store free of charge (apps are ad supported and include a one-time in-app purchase to remove ads and unlock extra functionality).
AdDuplex blog 