About a month ago, a friend of my tweeted about a guy named @levelsio and his live streaming of himself building a js/php Web App called hoodmaps. I was utterly glued to the videos he made and it inspired me to build something of my own. Then more recently, another friend of mine was discussing how he could have a whole group of users update a Google Spreadsheet without being able to interfere with each others data. Perhaps this was something I could build!?

I resisted for some time. Some Touch Bar reluctance was a big part of that and to be honest, I just wasn’t due for an upgrade. I love new toys as much as the next Geek but the 2013 11” Air was still doing a great job. And then, 2017” MacBook Pro came out. Something about it was a bit irresistable for me. Perhaps behing the 2nd gen of the TouchBar laptops made me positive that the hardware issues would have been ironed out and of course finally Apple have upgraded to the Kaby Lake CPU’s.. and, once I got the idea in my head, well! Oh yeh, and that person on Gumtree never got back to me about the broken 2015 MBP I was keen to buy and bring back to life. So here we are. It’s unboxed and it has not disappointed!!

Lately I’ve found myself playing around with a bunch of iMac’s to fix or upgrade them. The 2011 edition’s particularly seem to be more readily available at reasonable prices now and with an SSD still perform very well. I was particularly interested in the 2011 edition as it comes with dual Thunderbolt/DisplayPort ports and I will really hoping to use this for a 3x 1440p setup at home.

Something I’d been really keen to try for myself for ages was using AWS and S3 to host a static page. I learnt about in the AWS Sys Ops course but like everything else, its quite nice to play with it for yourself in a quasi-production kind of way. This guide by Jennifer Wilson from Northwestern University covers the vast majority of what you need to do and is pretty thorough.

We are currently migrating 12,000 mailboxes into Exchange Online from our Exchange 2007 environment. We have batched up our users based on various criteria and from time to time we have the need to make a migration list from a Distribution Group. Being a little bit too keen to write something myself, I disappeared down the rabbit hole and came up with 90 odd lines to expand a distribution list and its nested distribution lists. It was a daft mistake to doing more research before this because, there is a nice little commandlet that already exists in the ActiveDirectory PowerShell Module: