Update 2021-02-16 Theme changed to add site search. New theme is also more configurable, which I’m happy about. :) Will continue to tweak the site and layout of certain pages that have got garbled in the migration. Update 2021-02-14 Links to old popular articles now have aliases so old links will work. Still working on site-wide search, I may just change the Hugo theme. I’m currently moving the site from WordPress to Hugo with comments provided by Disqus.

Microsoft is finally retired the old TechNet Gallery - one of the websites where I’ve made my utilities available in the past. So, this is just a heads up that if you get my scripts from there, they will no longer be available in the near future. They will still be available on the Microsoft PowerShell Gallery and on my own GitHub. I’ve been expecting this as over the past few years some functionality of the site has been broken for months on end.

Hi all, In these interesting times I thought I’d create a round-up of some tips and recommendations for those of you who are looking to improve your technology - whatever your situation. It’s a grab bag of various items I’ve been collecting for a while but I hope some of these suggestions are useful to you. I usually write posts geared towards IT professionals but this post is aimed at people from all walks of life working from home with little IT assistance.

Hi all, You might have noticed some changes in the last few months to the site and the content - specifically that some posts go up with passwords on them initially and I want to explain why this is. I’ve decided to start a Patreon and also accept donations from anyone who is willing to “toss a coin to your Tech-Witcher”. One of the rewards to anyone who becomes a patron (at any level) is early access to articles on the site and videos on my new tech focussed YouTube channel.

Microsoft have been developing an all new version of their web browser Edge and will release it in early 2020. If you are familiar with the existing Edge browser, it’s the same in name only - the new Microsoft Edge is vastly improved in many ways. The new Edge is now based on Chromium, the same project that Google’s Chrome browser is based on. So, this new version of Edge will share all the compatibility that Chromium based browsers have.

Disclaimer: This isn’t my personal experience with Stadia as I’ve haven’t tried it myself, either during it’s beta phase or in its current state. xCloud and Stadia comparisons: xCloud currently only streams to phones and tablets running Android and is in a preview phase. Stadia has had a preview phase, which was available as an invite-only beta, using Google Chrome and playing Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and is now a released product and service.

Recently I’ve been doing some research into quantum computing; I wanted to understand its current state in 2019 along with where it could be headed in the next few decades. Let me preface this by saying that I’m not a physicist, although I do have a basic understand of quantum mechanics. I would like to take the opportunity here to thank some friends who’ve advised me during the writing of this article.

I’m a big Weird Al fan, and going through some of his work I came across ‘It’s All About The Pentiums’. If you’re not aware Weird Al Yankovic is a musician and comedian. He writes parodies of popular songs and has been for the last few decades. I thought I could update this track in particular to 2019’s technology without changing the song completely. Just for fun, also I had a lot of coffee this morning.

As you may be able to tell I’ve updated the site design and structure to assist in finding the most relevant information. I’ve also recently updated all my PowerShell utilities to support custom subject lines in the email output, along with a few other improvements and fixes. The best place to get my most up to date utilities and see other scripts I’m working on is on my GitHub. I still update the scripts on TechNet and PowerShell Gallery, but GitHub is where I focus my work.

Recently I’ve had time to catch up and reflect on a few games that all touch on aspects of mental illness. I tend not to write personal blog posts, but I want to share some of my thoughts on these games as they made me think about interactive storytelling and mental illness, at a time where I’m currently reflecting on a lot on my own life. Although I’m not going out of my way to spoil the plots of these games, I’m going to assume that by reading this post you have either played them or don’t care about spoilers.

I’ve been doing a reasonably large scale Windows 10 deployment recently and I thought I’d feedback on performance of my MDT setup, whilst also taking into account the specification and topology of the network. Below is a screenshot of the times of some successfully completed deployments for reference. As you can see, they’re in the vicinity of around 1hr 30m. Let’s delve into the specs of everything. Windows Server 2016 Standard w/ Desktop Experience 4x vCPU 8GB RAM Dynamically expanding VHDX for C:\ Windows Dynamically expanding VHDX for E:\ Deploymentshare 1x vNIC using the Virtual Host network adaptor The config of the VM is really nothing special, and I could have done some extra work to optimise the configuration.