Practical notes from technology, home infrastructure, software, data and occasional experiments.
This archive preserves technical and personal material from the site. For writing on SaaS security, customer trust, resilience, governance and leadership, visit Insights.
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Excel Dashboard Building – Tricks
Having spent enough of my career building Dashboards for Security Programs in various tooling, Excel continues to be the most common. However as a cell-based platform it is far from ideal when dealing with objects in general. I have however discovered the following tricks. Select Objects Sometimes you want to just select all graphs, text…
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My Home Weather Station Build
Note: This project is currently on hold. I’m restoring these notes from an older site draft and may come back to complete the build later. I wanted to design and build my own weather station using a microcontroller. Requirements Hardware Item Details MCU Arduino MKR WiFi 1010 Environmental Sensors MKR ENV Shield Battery LiPo 3.7V…
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Obsidian Filter Empty Tasks
If you use Templates in Obsidian and like to create an empty task item for quick typing, you will often find empty tasks showing up in your task lists. The first trick is to exclude your Templates folder from Tasks. You can do this in the Tasks block as below. Replace Templates with wherever you…
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IIS + PHP Minor Version Upgrade W/O Web Platform Installer
I spent far too long trying to work this out. On Windows Server with IIS, most people would recommend using the Web Platform Installer (WebPI). The problem is that only certain specific versions are available. If, for example, you want to upgrade from PHP 7.4.13 to 7.4.27, WebPI cannot do it. You have to handle…
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Reverse Engineering Hozelock Cloud Controller
I recently bought the Hozelock Cloud Controller to automate watering in my garden. While trying to integrate it with OpenHAB, I discovered a number of useful and slightly concerning things about the REST API used by the service. This post reflects what I found in 2019, so it should be read as a snapshot of…
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IIS 7 Start / Stop / Restart
If you need to start, stop, or restart IIS from the command line, the quickest option is to use iisreset. Commands Start IIS: Stop IIS: Restart IIS: Note iisreset restarts the entire IIS service, so use it with care on shared or production servers. If you only need to restart a specific site or application…
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SCP a Directory in OSX
When copying a directory with scp on macOS, the placement of the trailing slash matters. If you want to copy the folder source and keep the folder itself in the destination path, use: That will copy the source directory into /path/for/dest/. For example, if you run: the result on the remote host will be:
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Rules to follow while naming a SQL Server Instance
When naming a SQL Server instance, it is worth keeping a few practical rules in mind. General rules Good practice In addition to the technical limits, a sensible naming convention will save confusion later. A good instance name should: For example, you might choose names based on: Examples Reasonable examples might include: Poor examples might…
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SQL Server Version Numbers
SQL Server version numbers typically look something like 13.0.5026.0. The list below reflects the major version numbering as it stood at the time of writing and is intended as a quick reference rather than a complete current release matrix. Determine SQL Server version To determine the version of SQL Server, you can use any of…