HOWTO: Deploy Dynamics NAV Contact Insights Outlook Addin End to End

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This HOWTO explains how to configure a completely fresh environment with Dynamics NAV 2018 and the Contact Insight Dynamics NAV Outlook Addin on-premises while using Azure AD for authentication. The reason this HOWTO was created is a customer wanted to use the Contact Insights NAV plugin for Outlook. It was determined that this plugin does … Read more

2019 Okanagan Half Marathon Route Map

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UPDATE:  Since I made the waypoints anyway, I thought it might be fun to make a video flythrough of the entire 21.1KM of the course.  It’s quick and dirty and more than a little silly but it does serve to demonstrate that this is not going to be easy.  Check out the video here:

 

I’m as surprised as anyone but I have officially registered and paid to run a 21.1km half marathon this October.  Specifically I have entered the 2019 Okanagan Half Marathon which takes place in Kelowna, BC on October 20th.  For those keeping score at home, that’s just 6 months from the time of this writing.

I wanted to know what the route looked like so I could better visualize and mentally prepare during my training.  Unfortunately while the official website (available at https://www.okanaganmarathon.ca/route-maps-p183040) includes a “Route Map” for the “21K”, it actually only includes written directions.  That’s not terribly useful.

So I decided to manually map out all of the waypoints of the course in Google Earth Pro.  I figure I’d post this here in case it’s useful for anyone also participating in the same race or more generally are interested in what 21KM actually looks.

To start us off, here is what the course looks like when taken in as a whole.  The segments highlighted in yellow are those that have to be completed twice (once in either direction).

overviewmap

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Celebrate International Women’s Day with 24 Radio Hours of Music by Women

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I heard tonight that a local radio station will celebrate International Women’s Day by playing songs exclusively by women for 24 straight hours.  This got me thinking — could I fill an entire day’s worth of music sung only by women and do so using only songs that I actually know and like?

I realized I have almost 1,000 songs in my MP3 collection that have been acquired over two decades.  I figure if I have it, it’s a safe bet to say I like the song so I wondered how many hours all those songs would add up to.

First I needed to set a couple of ground rules.  Since the objective is to fill “24 hours” of Radio airplay, I have to take into account commercials and DJ banter.  Some googling suggests that a typical radio station plays 80% music every hour which sounds about right.  That works out to 40 minutes each hour or 16 total hours of music over a 24 hour period.

Finally, to be eligible for this list, the song must be sung exclusively by a woman or women.  Duets or guest spots make the song ineligible.

To figure this out, I needed to scan all of my MP3s and dump the list into Excel along with each song Duration.

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HOWTO: Microsoft Certification Exam Preparation Generator

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If you’ve ever had to write a Microsoft certification exam, you know that the exam syllabus is available from a URL that looks like this:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/exam-##-###.aspx

Where the ##-### is the specific exam you are writing.  You likely also know that  the way Microsoft presents this information is not ideal from a study guide perspective.  It’s broken into categories and from there is just a jumble of words including many, many “filler” words like “plan and configure” or “configure and troubleshoot”.

I am writing a new certification exam and I wanted a simple means to know what specific concepts to study and play with in my lab.  I realized that I should be able to write a PowerShell script that would download the HTML from the URL above, extract the exam syllabus text and then cut out all of the unnecessary words.  This would leave me with a clean “checklist” of keywords I need to Google and understand.

So I wrote that.

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HOWTO: Build a Temperature Alert System using a Raspberry Pi

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I recently had my furnace fail while I was away on business.  Fortunately there were no lasting consequences but it could have been a very bad day.  To try and minimize the risk of such issues in the future, I decided I wanted a temperature monitoring solution that would alert me if the temperature in the house dropped below a pre-defined threshold.  I looked at things like a Nest and the TempStick among others but all of them were hundreds of dollars and or relied on third party cloud services.  Before I invested in something like that, I wanted to see if I could build my own solution for cheaper and that was designed to meet my exact needs.  I recently received a Raspberry Pi from a friend and decided this would be a great use for such a project. 

Specifically I set out to have the following goals:

  • The Raspberry Pi would record the temperature from a dedicated external temperature sensor every 20 minutes and record that value into a SQL database along with the timestamp
  • The Raspberry Pi would host a webserver that would allow me to review the current and historical temperatures from anywhere using my mobile phone
  • The webpage would also include a generated graphical chart showing the historical temperatures so I can review for any odd behavior at a glance
  • The Raspberry PI would automatically email me if the temperature dropped below a defined threshold so I could make phone calls to take immediate action
  • The Raspberry PI would upload a file to my off-site website host during each scanning interval via FTP
  • A cron job would run on my off-site webhost that would look for that file and if that file was not updated for more than one hour would alert me that either a power or Internet failure occurred at my house

I’m happy to report I achieved all of the goals above and figured I’d should share how I did it below.  Keep in mind I am not a software developer and so this solution is the result of grabbing things from the Internet and cobbling them together and tweaking until it does what I want.   With that out of the way, let’s begin with what you need to create something like this for yourself.

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HOWTO: Calculate Elapsed Business Hours Using PowerShell

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Update: 4/11/2022:  An individual by the name of Adam Cook has taken the premise of this script and transformed it into a far more robust PowerShell module and published it on Github.  I wanted to ensure I gave his project all the visibility I could.  The Github page is available here: https://github.com/codaamok/PSBusinessTime Thanks Adam! Have … Read more

HOWTO: Backup and View All Contents of an Android Device

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This HOWTO is written primarily for my own future reference but hopefully it’ll help someone else too.

Let’s say you want to back up the entire contents of your Android device.  How do you do that?

1) Download the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) tool that comes with the Android SDK Platform Tools.  The link of which is available here: https://developer.android.com/studio/releases/platform-tools.html

2) You should end up with the ADB tool in the following location: c:\adb\adb.exe

3) On your mobile phone, go to Options / Developer Options / and enable USB Debugging

4) Connect your phone to your computer via a USB cable

5) Open a command prompt and type c:\adb\adb.exe backup -apk -shared -all -f c:/adb/backup.ab

6) On your phone, you’ll receive a prompt.  Enter your password and choose “Backup my Data”  You will be prompted to enter the decryption password.  Remember this password as you’ll need it to view the contents of the backup

7) Wait for this process to finish.  It will take a while depending on how much data you have on your device

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HOWTO: Generate a Microsoft Exam Checklist

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Are you studying for a Microsoft certification exam?  If so, then you are probably familiar with the “Skills Measured” website that describes what will be covered on your exam.  If not, it looks something like this:

70-347_raw

I’m currently studying for my 70-347 – Enabling Office 365 Services exam.  The skills measured list above is a great starting point to use to determine what to search for and study and experiment with in your lab.  However the layout of the website has never appealed to me.  I would much prefer the text in Excel where I can annotate and color code it.  Unfortunately you can’t just copy and paste the text from the website into Excel as the HTML formatting makes everything a mess.

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Is it just inflation?

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I recently received a reminder to renew my AMA Plus membership.  2018 marks my 10th anniversary of having an AMA membership.  I pay in annual lump sum payments as it’s cheaper than the monthly option.  I was curious how much they’ve charged for the service over the last decade.  Have a look as I think … Read more