Directory Opus is a file manager – remember those? I haven’t thought about them for years. DOpus (as it’s known for short) has a long history starting on the Commodore Amiga where in later versions it was available as a Workbench (the Amiga’s operating system) replacement. I only used Directory Opus version 4 on the Amiga, but it was a great file manager and was a great tool to have back then.

At the time of writing Windows Admin Center has been around for almost 18 months, in those 18 months it’s come a long way and is still being actively developed and updated. It’s a simple install, can be installed on either Windows 10 or Server 2016/2019, doesn’t require an internet connection or Azure, and will work with your existing on-prem servers. It’s also free. Windows Admin Center (WAC) is a much needed tool for modernising the management of servers in the Microsoft ecosystem.

Update 02/10/2017 The Groove Music service is being discontinued, here’s the blog post from Microsoft covering the details. A small home project I’ve been working on recently is trying to consolidate all my personal music files along with deciding on a streaming service. Up until now I’ve only had my music files on my main PC and used Spotify along with a monthly subscription for tracks not in my personal library, but I really wanted one place to host my personal collection and also have access to a streaming catalogue.

A feature that I’m very happy to see coming in the Creators Update for Windows 10 is Night light. It’s not exactly a headline feature, but I’m happy to see it and wanted to draw attention to it. What Night light does is change the colour temperature of the display as the sun sets, reducing the blue light and enabling your eyes to relax as you work into the night which, I personally do a lot.

Recently I’ve been looking at my home NAS/media server setup and been wanting to update it. Up until now, I’ve either watched movie and TV show DVD rips locally on my PC or on my Xbox 360/One through the media apps, served via DNLA from my old QNAP NAS. At some point the experience became very slow and clunky, either due to my NAS' DNLA server not being very good or the Xbox One media player app not being very good.