In a perfect world I would spend my time between inventing great new devices and systems that inspire and revolutionize things and following up on hobbies like photography and movies. In the imperfect world that we live in I work in IT to pay the mortgage and food bill by creating and maintaining computer systems that make the world of business tick over.
My original training began with computers and physics back in the early 80’s at Canterbury University weaving a career that included pumping gas, frying at McDonald’s, driver education and finally a long spell in IT.
Like most parents of school aged children my life revolves around kids, school, work and kids. Our son is our life right now and we love him dearly but we yearn for our own space and time.
This blog is about things that interest me, things that inspire me and my particular slant on life. Drop by anytime and flick me a comment if you like. I have currently disabled comments on posts because I get no-end of spam but we can still be reach on the contact us page.
Fortunately Open Media Vault, OMV, emails warnings when disks are failing. This is also true for the system disk. I have been getting warnings my old system disk is failing and this is what I did to fix it. First … Continue reading →
Azure pipelines are great, but a frustration is how to persist variables through phases. For two tasks running in the same agent phase you can pass variables a number of ways. If it is a Windows host you can do … Continue reading →
When you try to scan a thick booklet or a book you can often get the above ugly crease around the staples when you try to lay the booklet flat. Less than desirable, the question is how to remove the … Continue reading →
Have you noticed that you can upload a full HD video to YouTube and it’s great quality but when you watch it on YouTube the quality is rubbish. The likely problem is that YouTube is not displaying it in the … Continue reading →
Diwali is such great fun and the Indian community at Spark are so enthusiastic and welcoming. The energy and variety is fantastic, Well done fall of you, I know you put in the long hours practicing the dancing and it … Continue reading →
I have a relatively new install of Windows 10 and it is currently running build 1809 and do you think I can get it to browse to a network share. If I do the standard thing of typing in a … Continue reading →
I had a Windows 10 VM, running inside VMware ESXi 6.0, which I needed to connect to the laptop as shown in the above diagram. In addition I needed both the laptop and VM to be on an isolated LAN … Continue reading →
I use ESXi on a small number of VMs at home and recently moved to some newer hardware. Not really new, they are Lenovo M58 (7479CTO) small form factor. In regards to ESX the biggest factor is the CPU is: … Continue reading →
You will notice as time goes by that the inside of the scanner glass gets dirty. The good news is that for this scanner at least, cleaning the glass is really easy. Firstly remove the scanner lid by unplugging the … Continue reading →
When I was creating a VSTS Git post-commit service hook it became clear fairly quickly that I needed to be able to simulate calls from VSTS using SoapUI. This is what I did. SoapUI: https://www.soapui.org/downloads/soapui.html Python script to capture VSTS … Continue reading →
In a perfect world I would spend my time between inventing great new devices and systems that inspire and revolutionize things and following up on hobbies like photography and movies. In the imperfect world that we live in I work in IT to pay the mortgage and food bill by creating and maintaining computer systems that make the world of business tick over.
