In This Article TLDR Macs are a pleasant place to spend 40+ hours in your work week, and totally workable for those with Microsoft-centric jobs. Let me give you a jump start on how to make it work. The Background I'm weird. This is a known fact that I've embraced. My family has two minivans... Continue Reading →
Automate Failover of SQL Server Always On Availability Groups with PowerShell
The Problem One of the initiatives I've been working toward with my team this year is automating as much of our SQL Server patching as possible. Over time our environment has become increasingly complex, and while Microsoft provides some rich GUI utilities for managing Always On Availability Groups, it becomes difficult to use them efficiently... Continue Reading →
Set Database Target Recovery Time with PowerShell
Background My colleague and I were recently looking for ways to improve our production Availabiity Group nodes. These are beefy machines with a large amount of memory, and things like buffer cache scans can be lengthy. In his research, my teammate came across discussions on best practices for the Target Recovery Time setting of databases.... Continue Reading →
Introducing “Tiny Tech”
I'm so happy to share with you a little project that I've been working on! Growing up, I always had a love for computers and an insatiable desire to learn about them, but there weren't many resources available. It's my passion that children everywhere can learn about computers in a fun and free way. To... Continue Reading →
Using PowerShell to Disable or Enable a List of Active Directory Users
I was doing some volunteer work recently when it came to my attention that there was a large number of enabled users in their Active Directory environment. This number was far greater than the amount of active employees. In order to address this, we took a simple approach: Export a list of enabled users. Have... Continue Reading →
Using Azure Icons in Keynote
Keynote is a fantastic tool for putting together slick presentations easily. Unfortunately, if you're making those slides about Azure then you can hit a bit of a snag. Microsoft distributes their icons as SVG files, which are not supported by Keynote. Fear not! We'll have you equipped with PNG's and off to express your artistic... Continue Reading →
Striving for Privacy: Swimming Upstream
Introduction The struggle is real my friends. Everyone seems to want online privacy, or at least be concerned about it. There are a number of sophisticated and easy-to-use tools to help people achieve more of it. Yet it still seems almost impossible to attain any decent level of privacy. Why is that? It's a question... Continue Reading →
Coming Home to HomeKit
The Background From the outset, Apple's HomeKit intrigued me. Over the years we have gradually become great fans of the Apple ecosystem, always appreciating the level of quality and smoothness that they bring to their products. Also, I was just very excited about the smart home trend in general and the possibilities that it brought.... Continue Reading →
My Work From Home Tips
We live in an interesting time where businesses have suddenly been forced into a remote work model in order to stay profitable during the COVID-19 crisis. Because of this, many people have now been thrown into a work from home situation (whether it's something they wanted or not). I've worked from home on and off... Continue Reading →
My Journey to Better Privacy (Part 6: Conclusions)
Introduction Over the last few months I have been on a journey to better privacy. During that time I've gone over search, browsers, social networks/messaging, digital assistants, and email. This is not an exhaustive list of all the areas where online privacy is concerned, but it's the primary ones that had not yet been addressed... Continue Reading →