This is a long overdue (and tedious) write-up of my experience of custom-building a router table.

(Clarification: router as in r-OW-ter table as opposed to r-OO-ter (i.e. the box you get from your ISP for your home Wifi. The pronounciation is annoying, especially for someone who works in computers. Anyway.)

My closer associates know that I am a mostly clueless wannabe woodworker with more tools than knowledge. I have more saws than you could care to name, let alone actually find a constructive use for.

Recently updated to macOS Big Sur. I’m not sure why I do this sort of thing quite so freely… I always naively assume everything will be OK. And so far, Big Sur vs Catalina is just a bit nightmare.

I’m sure there’s a huge amount of “don’t like change” in there but there are many things that are annoying the crap out of me with Big Sur. Calendar notifications for one. Gah.

But anyway, one real issue I have had was with VMware Fusion. I was previously on v11.something and when trying to launch a VM got greeted with “Host OS does not have enough physical memory to launch this VM” which was a complete load of bollocks. After a quick Google, it was evident it was a VMware incompatibility issue - Fusion 11 will not run on Big Sur and you must upgrade to VMWare 12. Yay. $100 later and I have Fusion 12 and… things are still broken. Main issue is that trying to start a VM results in a bunch of error messages… these seem to get resolved by changing the compatibility level of the VM…. but even then, starting the VM ends up in a black screen.

The scenario is: SharePoint… open in Windows Explorer is working great and then mysteriously, BOOM, it no worky no mo.

\\server\DavWWWRoot\etc is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions.

A device attached to the system is not functioning.

Except it does worky on other places, even in the same site. Screams of permissions issues…. but it’s not.

Not much intro needed to this one. Have recently binned our monstrous VMWare ESXi host in favour of a single monstrous Windows Server 2019 and within a matter of nanoseconds of doing a requirement came in that needed a VM building that would allow us to easy test some Java-y / Tomcat-y / MySQL-y stuff and rather than jump the hoops of doing this in Windows, figured an Ubuntu-y type machine would do the job, and rather than faff with VMWare decided to give Hyper-V a bash.

This was today:

Don’t ask me why. Mid-life crisis maybe. I hate running. Did a halfy-halfy last year and thought what the fek.

Finished in a smidge over 5hrs; the first 18 miles or so were fine but -hit-the-wall and the remainder was a misery.

Great to do it, but never again. (Probably.)

The G… is important. Very important, in fact.

Why might you want to do this? Well, the ‘G’ indicates that the saw is compatible with the Bosch FSN guide rail system. G for ‘guide’… maybe.

Let’s back up. Over the last 2-3 years I’ve been steadily replacing my corded power tools with cordless. I have been a longtime Bosch user - Bosch Pro to be precise - for no good reason other than that was where I started, and I’ve never had any problems. I have a Bosch Pro drill that I’ve had for at least 20 years and other than it being the old style battery that now won’t really hold a charge, it’s still going strong. So a few years ago, I stumbled in to the Bosch 18v Lithium system and have been updating ever since.

Quick vid on installing a Westfalia towbar on my 2010 VW T5 Carvelle.

I use a mixture of Mac and Linux for most of my needs. I’ve run Windows virtual machines of same flavour or another but since .NET core 3 landed I’ve barely had to do even fire it up. There’s nowadays very little you can’t do in a non-Windows environment.

That doesn’t really extend (yet?) to remote administration of your Office365 tenant using Powershell.

I’m trying to configure some DNS bits for one of our domains that needs the Exchange Online V2 Powershell module. Come with me as I disappear down a rabbit hole of getting this working.

This is the third edition of this post. It was originally an intro to web scraping with Python (in Python 2) using the Requests library. It was then updated to cover some extra topics and also update for Python 3.

The scenario is to download the back catalogue of the excellent MagPi magazine which is published monthly and the PDF is available for free. More info on the background is in the original post.

However, since the original post a fair bit has changed: the MagPi website was updated so the scraping broke, Python has moved on and I found that despite downloading the issues, having them on a Pi meant I never actually read them because I forgot they were there!

Scenario: you have a Nintex workflow and you want to create an item in a list, where one of its column is a lookup column to another list.

Background: this took *too* long to figure out. I had an initial version of a workflow; it was actually a list workflow, running on an item which already had the lookup value I needed. Using the ‘Create Item’ action to create an item in a different list (which had the same lookup column) was straight-forward; you simply reference the current item in a list lookup