It’s that time of the year once again! As everyone winds down the year, it’s a time to reflect, rejoice and prepare for yet another year. It’s been a somewhat turbulent time for me and although there have been struggles, life continues. 2016 brings new challenges with new possibilities, and […]
Yearly Archives: 2015

Microsoft Canberra 09/12/2015 Note: These are unedited shorthand notes taken from a presentation about the new features coming with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 which launched recently (CRM Online) and will launch soon (On Premise). Provided As-is. Presenters: Mike Hopwood, Duncan Haskins – CRM Specialists Personal business assistant – […]
Dynamics CRM 2016 – Notes from Presentation

Introduction As APIs and web services become more and more prevalent, particularly in the Enterprise, there is an increasing need to look at ways to secure the more important interfaces, particularly if they enable access to sensitive data. Recently, I’ve been investigating ways to secure ASP.NET Web APIs using Active […]
Securing a Web API with ADFS 3.0 and JWT tokens

Happy Thanksgiving to folks in the USA. I’ve finally taken the plunge and decided to get stuck into the recently released Release Candidate (RC) of ASP.NET 5. Prior to today, I’d stuck with the RTM version of Visual Studio 2015 which insulated me from some of the changes which are […]
Preparing for ASP.NET vNext and Visual Studio 2015

Welcome, Kodi Introduction Earlier this year I wrote about a little unit which packs a surprising punch. Well, since that time my needs have changed, and I ended up with this unit as surplus to requirements. Never one to let decent hardware sit idle, I moved it into the kitchen […]
Installing a Kodi Media Box

Our phones are fast becoming the centre of our daily lives, whether it be for business or personal use. This being the case, it will come as no surprise that a flat battery – especially with a device without a removal battery – can be devastating under the right circumstances. […]
Review: Official Apple iPhone 6 Super Fast Charger

Introduction In this post, we’ll look at configuring a Windows Failover Cluster and then install an MSMQ role onto the cluster. If you’re looking for how to configure MassTransit 2.x against an existing clustered MSMQ role, you might want to skip ahead to Part 3 (coming soon). Disclaimer: I’ve personally […]
High Availability: MassTransit 2.x with Clustered MSMQ – Part 2

So this article isn’t going to be for everyone, however I suspect it will be somewhat appealing for anyone who is looking at Windows Server 2012 R2’s Failover Clustering capability. Introduction I’m going to write this in a series of posts, as I think there’s also some merit in looking […]
High Availability: MassTransit 2.x with Clustered MSMQ – Part 1
Hi all, Apologies, it’s been a bit of a while since I’ve been in a position to sit down and get some technical writing done. There have been no shortage of challenges on both the technical and consulting front, and the second half of 2015 hasn’t been an idle time. […]
What’s New?

Today we’re entering the world of wearable technology with the Archos VR glasses. This is a new and exciting world, and it begins with your smartphone. The technology is compatible with most modern smartphones, it is simply a matter of locating a compatible media player which is able to play […]
Review: Archos Virtual Reality Glasses

Reliability or luck? That’s a good question to ask. I’ve been buying Dell laptops almost exclusively for over a decade, and this is why. As of September, 2015 I own four working Dell laptops which span over a decade and a half in age, i.e. 1999-2015. Only one has a […]
A history of Dell Laptops

Over the weekend I discovered a power pack which had gone missing to an old Dell Latitude CPt notebook which dates to the pre-Y2K era. Back then, I used to work for an anti-virus start up called vCIS which operated out of the basement of the Software Spectrum building […]
A step back in time, today – Windows 2000

Last week I had a disk corruption which proved to be somewhat catastrophic. My main server had an apparent corruption of the Directory database, and even after I’d run a system restore, still could not bring Active Directory back up. To cut a long story short, my journey would have […]
Introducing a Gigabyte BRIX solution

Introduction This was ideally supposed to be one of the (logically) first entries in a series of articles about the newly minted Microsoft Windows 10. However, owing to some of the more controversial aspects of the default settings in Windows 10, I felt compelled to do a quick write-up on […]
Introduction to Windows 10

Intro Windows 10 was officially released last week. In the wake of the release, concerns have surfaced about privacy and control issues which are enabled by default in all popular versions of the new Windows – including Enterprise edition. We’ll take a look at what reasonable steps you could (or […]