Being your own Certificate Authority

Having a box of old RaspberryPi computers kicking around I wanted to make sure they weren’t just languishing around doing nothing. One problem I’ve hit recently is that many devices have self-signed certificates installed, giving certificate errors I have to bypass every time I access them. Why not use an RaspberryPi to be my certificate…


Quasar Harlow

So to help with players travelling to play UK Armageddon, I’ve created this 3D map of the Harlow arena. Please feel free to have a look!


My Addiction

I could have described this as many things, a hobby, a sport, an obsession.  But I think that addiction is far more click-bait like, so far better!  It is of course Laser Tag.  This is a short series of blog posts describing some of my exploits travelling around playing laser tag, and it really has…


Office 365 Multi-Geo – What does it look like?

Microsoft now offer the ability to locate Exchange and SharePoint data in specific geographical locations. There are plenty of details about this, just not a lot about how this looks within the tenant once enabled. Once you’ve requested the licensing from Microsoft they appear is discrete licenses within the available license list. Licences Just assigning…


Switching the on-premises source AD object for an Office 365 Exchange Online mailbox

I recently had an issue where a user had two accounts, each in separate domains.  The problem was that the wrong account was linked to the Exchange Online mailbox, and I needed to move the mailbox to the other account and delete the now defunct un-linked account.  I’m not going to drill in to too…


RFID-RC522 RFID Reader Modules – Why they don’t work and how to fix them

  Recently I purchased a lot of the RFID readers with the name “RFID-RC522” from China.  These were sold as using the MFRC522 chip, but on inspection the chip was blank beyond an orientation marker on them.  Initial experiments showed that these boards could read the MiFare Classic cards reliably, but I couldn’t get them…


Office 365 backdoor message routing

Microsoft would like you to think that Office 365 just works and that online Exchange is just a service you can consume without worry.  However scratch below the surface and you discover their architecture has a few flaws. Office 365 is ever changing – so what I write now will probably be wrong in 3…


OpenHab 2 – Home Automation

Something I’ve wanted to do for ages is setup some home automation. I grabbed myself a nice USB Z-Wave interface and a few devices and had a play with OpenHab2.  At the time of writing OpenHab2 has some great bits and some really clunky bits.  I decided to write this as a bit of a…


Exchange Mailbox Move Diagnostics

Sometimes moving mailboxes fails, and it can be for the strangest reasons. Many reasons are quite easy to identify, but some are a real pain! Here is a quick guide to diagnosing the root cause of the problem, following the process I used to identify and fix some failed migrations. In my instance I had…


Lenovo Laptop – Not charging while booted

A problem that occurred a few years ago return – my laptop a Lenovo T540p would not charge while it was booted.  However shut it down and it charges fine!  This problem had just suddenly appeared and was very obviously not a hardware issue.  I disabled the power services and remove the battery management entry…