Surface Tweaks

[surfacetweaks]

Fn Key Shortcuts

On the Type Cover, Fn+Capslock toggles the mode of the F1-F12 keys, so e.g., instead of Home, the F9 key can operate as a normal F9 key and vice-versa.

Also, Fn + Del raises screen brightness. Fn + Backspace lowers screen brightness.

Fn + Up works like Page Up. Fn + Down works like Page Down. Fn + Left is like Home. Fn + Down is like End.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/36tqu6/hidden_keyboard_shortcut_tip_you_can_change_the/

[surfacetweaks]

Unfortunately the WinTab drivers which enable older software have a disadvantage in software capable of supporting the default drivers. I tested here in Mischief and get similar results in OneNote.

On the left are the default drivers... note the little dots I can make at the bottom of the box. On the right are the WinTab drivers... note the weird straight parts at the beginnings of brush strokes and the lack of most dots (I tried to make many little dots like on the left side but most of them registered as "taps" or "clicks" or something and didn't come through as marks).

Also, handwriting was different. On the left it felt more natural and on the right my letters felt sort of stunted while writing, like the beginnings of pen marks were ignored. I notice this in OneNote too. This is similar to what I experienced in FireAlpaca in "tablet coordinate" mode. Switching to "mouse coordinate" there helped some, but there's clearly a problem and these other programs don't have a similar option.

So while I was excited about the WinTab drivers at first, I'm going to revert to the default drivers for most things and only switch to WinTab if necessary in the future. I'm just going to avoid FireAlpaca and perhaps use Mischief or something else instead (other software has better touch support anyway!).

[surfacetweaks]

Pen Top Button Remap

Ideas and files from:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/2j04x1/how_to_change_the_exe_that_loads_with_the_surface/

At the link you can find the Windows Registry key that controls what runs when you press the Surface Pro 3's pen top button. There is also a handy application the author there created to change the registry key in a more user-friendly way than going into reedit.

[surfacetweaks]

Battery Report and SleepStudy Report

On the Surface subreddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/Surface) I found people mention the "Battery Report" and "SleepStudy Report" pieces of the Windows command line tool "powercfg". Here are a couple of small batch (.bat) files you can make to run the reports and open the result in your web browser, then delete the report file when done to keep things tidy. These reports can help you monitor your computer's battery usage and sleep activity. Battery Report does not need admin privileges so that script is very simple, but the SleepStudy one does, so there is extra code to create the UAC window for admin privileges. (UAC code found here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1894967/how-to-request-administrator-access-inside-a-batch-file originally https://sites.google.com/site/eneerge/scripts/batchgotadmin)

Run Battery Report.bat

cd %HOMEPATH% powercfg /BATTERYREPORT battery-report.html del battery-report.html

Run SleepStudy Report.bat

@echo off :: BatchGotAdmin :------------------------------------- REM --> Check for permissions >nul 2>&1 "%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\cacls.exe" "%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\config\system" REM --> If error flag set, we do not have admin. if '%errorlevel%' NEQ '0' ( echo Requesting administrative privileges... goto UACPrompt ) else ( goto gotAdmin ) :UACPrompt echo Set UAC = CreateObject^("Shell.Application"^) > "%temp%\getadmin.vbs" set params = %*:"="" echo UAC.ShellExecute "cmd.exe", "/c %~s0 %params%", "", "runas", 1 >> "%temp%\getadmin.vbs" "%temp%\getadmin.vbs" del "%temp%\getadmin.vbs" exit /B :gotAdmin pushd "%CD%" CD /D "%~dp0" :-------------------------------------- cd %HOMEPATH% powercfg sleepstudy sleepstudy-report.html del sleepstudy-report.html

[surfacetweaks]

WinTab drivers for the Surface Pro 3

The first thing I knew I needed for the Surface Pro 3 is the N-TRIG WinTab drivers. This lets me use the stylus (with pressure sensitivity) in older/smaller drawing/art software like Photoshop CS3 and FireAlpaca.

N-TRIG has the drivers available here: http://www.n-trig.com/wintab-2/ http://www.n-trig.com/downloads-drivers/

This let me use pressure sensitivity in FireAlpaca. However, I noticed that my old Wacom Intros 3 was snappier in FireAlpaca. With the SP3's stylus, the first centimeter or so of lines was always missing. Changing FireAlpaca's environment setting "Brush Coordinate" from "Use Tablet Coordinate (recommended)" to "Use Mouse Coordinate" fixed this issue!

[surfacetweaks]

About a week ago I got a Microsoft Surface Pro 3. I will record here information about some of the changes/tweaks/improvements I have made for it to be a grad student and artist's primary mobile computer!