I've been daily driving Macs as my portable device for over a decade. Mainly for their build quality and impressive battery life. Apple's release of Apple Silicon (originally with the M1 chip) took things up a notch. Being ARM64 architecture, the chips perform really well while maintaining a good power per watt ratio. Plus macOS is tuned directly for these chips too. I picked up a Mac Mini with an…
Update 2025-05-03: This guide is no longer relevant as of Home Assistant version 2025.1. The new backup experience has significantly improved. See here for more detail: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2025/01/03/3-2-1-backup/ This is my first post after a long hiatus. In the last few years I have been doing a lot with home automation, more specifically building out integrations and automations…
Windows ML (WinML) provides a simple managed API for interfacing with machine learning (ML) models. WinML has the ability to read the model metadata and add helpful wrappers around the inputs. This post will cover how a model needs to be structured for WinML to enable these simple bindings. Input Bindings As mentioned, WinML can read metadata from the model. We are interested in the expected…
Working collaboratively on a set of reports in Power BI can be a complicated exercise. I find most issues occur when people are trying to share the same non-SQL data source. If you're querying a SQL database, sharing the data connection is quite simple. However, what do you do if your data is sitting in a spreadsheet? Loading data from a CSV or spreadsheet is a perfectly valid scenario. There are…
With the release of Microsoft SQL 2016 looming, I've been keeping an eye on the SQL PowerShell cmdlets. In particular, Invoke-Sqlcmd . I was disappointed however, to find the cmdlets are still only included when installed with the SQL Management Objects. It seems that this cmdlet has been designed to fill the gap between batch files + sqlcmd.exe and more modern PowerShell. One of my rules when…
Perhaps the greatest strength of PowerShell is it's foundation on the .NET framework. The .NET framework enables almost unlimited possibilites inside the scripting realm. This blessing can equally be a curse as things can get complicated. Fast. This post will describe three methods for downloading files using PowerShell - weighed up with their pros and cons. Test setup Today's testing is not…
Simply put, the ESP8266 is a $3 wifi enabled micro-controller. Oh, and the firmware has also been released open source! News and code samples have been popping up all over the internet in the last few months. My favourite source of ESP news is hackaday . The ESP-01 is the most common module available and to be honest, it took me hours to get started . There didn't seem to be a definitive guide on…
Find the code for this project at: jourdant/powershell-paperless The New Year period always prompts me to look for improvements I could make in my life. After some searching, I came across this article "Three Steps Toward a Paperless Culture" . A quick glance at my immediate surroundings confirmed that becoming paperless would be a great improvement for my lifestyle. Imagine all those paper…
Internal numbering, or internal extensions are common practice among SIP providers for having multiple DID numbers on a single SIP registration. MyNetFone is a good example. You register to MyNetFone using your assigned internal extension, eg, 0946xxxx. In my case, I have two regional DID numbers assigned to my account. Problem Inbound calls to these regional numbers show the following in the SIP…
This is the final post in a two post series explaining how to utilise Microsoft Azure to serve Microsoft App-V 5.0 content. App-V + Azure [Part 1]: Serving App-V content using Azure Blob Storage App-V + Azure [Part 2]: Scaling App-V content distribution using Azure CDN Design For this scenario, we are building on the design from Part 1 . The changes include adding an Azure CDN in front of the…
This two post series will explain how to utilise various Microsoft Azure services to distribute your Microsoft App-V 5.0 content to a wide audience externally. App-V + Azure [Part 1]: Serving App-V content using Azure Blob Storage App-V + Azure [Part 2]: Scaling App-V content distribution using Azure CDN Design In our topology, we will assume that App-V users are off-premise. The App-V publishing…
I encountered an issue when trying to load balance and publish the App-V 5.0 web services behind an F5 hardware appliance. The design and fix below will also apply to other methods of load balancing and publishing if a wildcard certificate is involved. Design The App-V content is stored on a redundant file share published by an IIS Virtual Directory. Example:…
In my opinion, Azure Mobile Services is not talked about nearly enough. In many of the projects I have worked on, the ability to create a REST API within minutes and consume it within my scripts is incredibly useful. For this post I am going to assume you have a basic knowledge of Azure Mobile Services - enough to create a service, table and define two columns. If you need some help, click here to…
When I'm building an image (especially a hardware independent image), the driver injection tends to be the hardest part - for obscure or old bits of hardware anyway. I had a recent encounter with an old ATI Radeon X300 low profile graphics card. The image was to be built for Windows 8. The last drivers published were for Windows 7 and included in a legacy package from 2010! I count myself lucky…
If you're reading this, my guess is that you're probably building an image. That image is based on Windows 8.x and it's on the cusp of perfection. However, there's one last tweak that has eluded you. Setting the Account Picture for domain users based on their photo in Active Directory. Every couple of months I'd come back to this issue, hoping for a solution. Truth is: it can be done . Caveat:…