Kevin Costain
Whether for business or pleasure, you won’t find it hard to get travel tips from others. But, often the really important “in-transit” knowledge is skipped because we’re resigned to it being painful. I’ve probably travelled more than a million miles to some amazing places in all kinds of vehicles, and no matter how or where I go, I’ve learned there are always some basic things that would improve a trip. I want to share these 7 tips with you. These are distilled from a wealth of mistakes and a desire to learn and be better.
Airlines Are About to Make Flying Even More Painful
The long waits. The difficult and intrusive security. The cramped feeling on flights. The nickle-and-diming checked bags and food items. Over-priced everything at airports. Now, this insanity is going to ratchet up to a new class of ticket below economy named “basic economy“. This new class of ticket appears to be finding widespread adoption among airlines, with United Airlines setting incredible new lows. If your last class ticket is with United expect no chance at seat selection, no access to the overhead bin, and be forced to board the plane last (and look like a cheapskate).
We’re Doing it Wrong: Creating an Active Directory Domain
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
It can be hard to admit that.We’re naming the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of an Active Directory domain either a valid name, or using .local TLD and these are both incorrect. Recently, when I was again tasked to build a small (200-ish user) Active Directory domain from scratch, I was again confronted about how wrong those of us in this industry have been. What’s even worse is that Microsoft has been recommending the “Right” way for 14 years!
Let’s Encrypt Just Did A Reddit AMA
If you’re following trends on the Internet, you’ll know that Google (and others) are really pushing web encryption. To this end, Let’s Encrypt has really aided in getting sites easier, and quicker encryption. On November 10, the crew were nice enough to do a Reddit AMA, and here are some things I gleaned from that.
Apple’s September 7, 2016 iPhone 7 Event
I’m a big Apple product user. Currently, I regularly use a Macbook Pro for administration duties, a Magic Mouse v2, an Apple Wireless Keyboard, Apple Watch 1, and an iPhone 6s Plus. For the most part, I think these products are rock-solid and reliable (for what I do). Given this, every Apple announcement is generally met with great interest for me, mainly because I’ll probably be in there at 3am Eastern Time buying the next iPhone on Friday like many of you.
Exchange 2016 and Reducing Disk Usage on the Server’s Boot Drive
Every new version of Exchange Server seems to need more space on a server’s boot drive. Given that, you may be faced with building an Exchange Server and wish you had made the boot partition larger. Once it’s done, though, you can’t always take it back and reconfigure everything. Here, I have some strategies for redirecting drive use from an Exchange Server installed on C: to another, larger data drive.
Note: This article is focused on Exchange Server 2016 on-premise. Newer and older versions of Exchange may act differently.
Highlighting the Good: Teksavvy
One familiar refrain amongst all Canadian Internet users when talking about service levels is “There’s nothing we can do”. We’re resigned to bad connections, routing devices that appear untested, over-priced services, and systems that are truly hellish. Big companies operate as if they were monopolies. In fact, you don’t have to go far to find horror stories. If you even look at the history of my blog, you’ll see that I write much more about negative topics than positive. The challenge, I find, is surfacing the good stories, so they can also compete for attention just as much. This is a story about Teksavvy.
Administrative Rights and Viruses
This is strange and confounding, but seemingly something that clearly makes sense when put up to basic scrutiny. The pitch, as Karl Palachuk puts it, is that Windows users who are not locally administrative users cannot be infected with viruses. This is an absurd and wrong line of thinking from someone who professes to have been in the IT industry for more than 25 years. But, we can all be wrong, so I say own it Karl. I’m a little surprised no one has actually discussed this much up until now.
CWL’s What to Read – A Different, Yet Simple Mailing List
Blogs, sites, social networks, and news sites are all vying or your time. With all that noise, it can be difficult to ingest the most compelling and useful information out there. In the past, I’ve resisted the idea of being part of that noise because I didn’t want to contribute to it. Over time, I realized that a great portion of my time is spent weeding through the noise. I do it so you don’t have to.
How To Spot a Fake or Scam Website
Often I hear this: “How am I supposed to know when I see a fake? They’re all so perfect!”. This familiar refrain is often followed by the person explaining how “computer illiterate” they are or some other version of that idea. The truth is, if you know what to look for, you can often tell that you’ve landed on a fake page. It’s important to learn that you have to suspect everything you see in a browser.