Speed up your Nexus 7! My Nexus 7 was running very slowly on Android 5.1.1 Lollipop. I’ve tried to hard reset the tablet several times, but after a couple of weeks it became very slow again with even 2 apps installed. I followed the 2 steps from the following video of “Abs Recon -Solutions”. The Dynamic Gesturing option wasn’t available on my tablet, but disabling Gesture Typing worked perfectly fine! ...
I’m so happy to tell you that I’m one of the 5 people from Avanade Netherlands that will attend Microsoft Ignite in Atlanta this year! We are all really excited as this is the first time that we attend a big conference like Ignite. Last year I followed a lot of online presentations from home, and the high quality of the presentations makes this the best Microsoft event of the world. ...
My notebook connects to a Docking Station with access to my receiver with speakerset, 2 screens, power and a KVM switch for my mouse and keyboard. When I lock my laptop, the sounds switches from the receiver to my internal speakers. When I unlock my laptop, the sound switches back but the Spotify application doesn’t play any sound. Closing the application doesn’t solve this problem, because the application will crash and I have to use the Task Manager to force the application to close. I made a PowerShell function that I’ve added to my PowerShell profile. https://gist.github.com/jvravensberg/302a3de8dbc92b54812afc408f5c43ec The Restart-Spotify function looks for any process that ends with “spotify” and stops the process. ...
First of all, I absolutely love Let’s Encrypt. It’s a very easy way to protect a website. All WordPress.com websites are protected with an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt as well. I received an e-mail this morning from Let’s Encrypt about their new Subscriber Agreement. Above the message, there is a big list with 3.125 e-mail addresses including my own e-mail address. Looks like they forgot to put those email addresses in the BCC of the email. ...
My current work phone is a Lumia 925. Because it’s 2 years old, I can choose a new phone. This is a very hard choice, because I like the design of the iPhone, but I prefer Android above iOS. It would be an easy pick if I could choose the Nexus 6P, but the iPhone SE and the Nexus 5X are some really good competitors. I’ll use this blog post to help with my decision. Maybe it will help you as well. ...
In this step-by-step, I’ll show you how to configure PfSense with an Azure Site-to-Site VPN by using a Dynamic Routing Gateway/Route-based Gateway. This even works with a VPN behind a NAT setup. I was looking for a stable solution that could handle the new Route-based (IKE v2) Gateways. This tutorial is based on the new Azure Portal. Prerequisites A Hyper-V Host (Windows 10 is fine as well) 2 Hyper-V Virtual Networks. One called “External Virtual Network” and one called “Internal Virtual Network”. A Hyper-V VM with PfSense installed with NAT configured between the internal and external virtual network. Just download the ISO from the PfSense website and create a Generation 1 VM with it. Give it 512 or 1024 MB RAM and 1 vCPU and follow online installation instructions. Configuration of your Azure Virtual Network & Gateway Go to Portal.Azure.com and sign in to your Azure environment. Create a Virtual Network and use the default settings. Make sure that the address space is not the same as your internal network. Create a Subnet by opening the virtual network you just created and then click on the Subnets button under “General”. Create a Gateway Subnet by clicking on the “+ Gatway Subnet” button. In this tutorial, I use: 10.0.0.0/19 address space VM subnet of 10.0.0.0/20 (10.0.0.0 - 10.0.15.255) Gateway subnet of 10.0.16.0/29 (10.0.16.0 - 10.0.16.7). Create a Virtual Network gateway. Give it a name, select your Virtual Network and create a new Public IP address. Select VPN as gateway type and use the Route-based VPN type. Azure will start the deployment of your gateway now. This could take up to an hour, so take a short break. :) After the deployment has been completed, open the Virtual Network Gateway you just created. Click on Settings and Connections. Click on Add to create a connection. Give it a name, choose Site-to-site (IPsec) as the connection type, create a new local network with the Public IP address of the PfSense instance and use a strong ‘password’ as PSK. The Public IP adress could be an IPv4 Address of a router, which is the gateway of the PfSense VPN VM. Open the PfSense Web Portal. Go to the VPN button in the top menu and open IPsec. Click on “Add P1”. Use the settings from the Phase 1 table below. Leave other settings as default. You’ll see a new entry in the IPsec Tunnels overview. Click on the Show Phase 2 Entries button and add a new P2 entry by clicking on the Add P2 button. Use the settings from the Phase 2 table below. Go to Status, IPsec from the top menu. There you will see the new VPN connection. Click on Connect VPN. Click on F5. You’ll see that the status is jumping between ESTABLISHED and CONNECTING or ESTABLISHED X seconds and ESTABLISHED 0 seconds. Give it some time here. It can take a couple of minutes to get this working. Check the logging under Status, System Logs and IPsec. Check if the status of the Connection in Azure is set to “Connected” as well. (Optional) Don’t forget to give your IPsec VM a static MAC Address and IP Address from your router of within the Web Interface. (Optional) Give your PfSense VM a reboot to check if the VPN works after a reboot. Try to RDP to an Azure VM from your Internal Hyper-V network or do a trace from your command line to a VM: tracert 10.0.0.5. ...
WARNING: Removing Windows 10 Apps can make your system unstable. I had issues with my NUC after removing some default applications. Don’t do this in your master Enterprise image! Block apps with AppLocker instead. Use the following PowerShell command to check which Windows 10 Apps are installed: Get-AppxPackage | Select Name Make sure that you get all the packages that you want to delete in one view. For example: Get-AppxPackage | Where {$_.Name -ilike "Microsoft.ZuneVideo" -or $_.Name -ilike "Microsoft.WindowsCamera"} To remove those packages, pipe it to Remove-AppxPackage. ...
Recently I passed the 70-533 Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions exam. I was thinking about stopping with the Azure exams but I couldn’t resist it to pass this exam as well. Today I passed the 70-534 - Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions exam with 857 points. I think that the 70-534 exam is a lot easier than the 70-533 exam. Most of the questions where questions where you had to select the Azure features that you could use in a specific situation. ...
Problem: Multicast during an SCCM 2012 R2 SP1 (1511 release) Task Sequence fails with error “Failed to get MCS key (Code 0x80004005)”. This error is found in the smsts.log log file on the (Windows 10 Enterprise x64 1511) client machine. SMSTS.log file contents CLibSMSMessageWinHttpTransport::Send: URL: SCCM01.CORP.DOMAIN.COM:443 CCM_POST /SMS_MCS_AltAuth/.sms_mcs?op=keyinfo ApplyOperatingSystem 15-4-2016 9:02:57 656 (0x0290) In SSL, but with no client cert ApplyOperatingSystem 15-4-2016 9:02:57 656 (0x0290) `Request was successful. ApplyOperatingSystem 15-4-2016 9:02:57 656 (0x0290)pNext != NULL, HRESULT=80004005 (e:\nts_sccm_release\sms\framework\osdmessaging\libsmsmessaging.cpp,2054) ApplyOperatingSystem 15-4-2016 9:02:57 656 (0x0290)reply has no message header marker ApplyOperatingSystem 15-4-2016 9:02:57 656 (0x0290)DoRequest (sReply, true), HRESULT=80004005 (e:\nts_sccm_release\sms\framework\osdmessaging\libsmsmessaging.cpp,10358) ApplyOperatingSystem 15-4-2016 9:02:57 656 (0x0290)oMcsRequest.GetMCSKey(mcsKeyInfoResponse), HRESULT=80004005 (e:\nts_sccm_release\sms\server\mcs\consumer\mcsisapiclient.cpp,429) ApplyOperatingSystem 15-4-2016 9:02:57 656 (0x0290)Failed to get MCS key (Code 0x80004005) ApplyOperatingSystem 15-4-2016 9:02:57 656 (0x0290)ClientRequestToMCS::DoRequest failed. error = (0x80004005). ...
A couple of months ago I decided to migrate my blog from a self-hosted WordPress.org blog to WordPress.com. In this blog post, I’ll tell you why I did that. No maintenance required A self-hosted WordPress.org installation needs maintenance. Plugins as well as the WordPress installation needs to be updated multiple times per month. I know there is an automatic update mechanism for WordPress which works fine for a basic installation of WordPress, but there is a chance that the upgrade will break your plugins and you have to restore a back-up to temporarily fix your website. ...