Nine cheap Android panels were gathering dust on my walls. Then I had a shower thought. Two GitHub Copilot sessions later, I have a fully working smart home panel system with Sonos grouping, media browsing, and more.

Fixing a solenoid fault on my Sage Oracle Touch and the memories it preserves.

Discover how to build a kiosk-based event access management solution in Power Apps with hidden text inputs and external barcode readers for contact-free entry control.

I had a request from a customer who is running a 10-day event where attendees are permitted in certain areas.

TBC

Bridging Windows lock and unlock events to Home Assistant via Task Scheduler, a tiny VBScript wrapper, PowerShell, and the Home Assistant REST API so my desk lights follow my presence.

I normally keep this stuff to myself and don’t share it but I thought I’d break that rule as I work towards a healthier happier mind and lifestyle.

Gist is a big part of my workflow. I've always been on the lookout for a desktop tool. Well, it turns out I was looking in the wrong place.

An autumn walk at Tatton Park where I captured rutting deer with my 500mm lens.

Highlights from a trip across southern Spain - the Alhambra in Granada, a small steak restaurant tucked away on Plaza de San Lazaro, and the Barbary apes of Gibraltar.

I have been working with a large government department where Microsoft Services helped them transform their intranet to SharePoint Online leveraging all the modern capabilities available as well as.

So I'll start by saying how bowled over I am by the engagement I've had after posting a tweet sharing that I had programmatically updated the new footer.

A PnP PowerShell script to switch a modern SharePoint site homepage between variations, preserving the canonical home.aspx page name. Useful for A/B testing audience-specific home pages.

Some five years ago now, I blogged about how to login to multiple Office 365 identities or accounts at the same time using Chrome Profiles.

A spring afternoon at Dunham Massey, a National Trust estate near home and one of my favourite places to wander with a camera.

I'm spending more time with one of my favourite hobbies again - photography. You can browse my published portfolio over at 500px. Be sure to share your feedback.

Welcoming in the New Year with friends in Manchester - a fondue and raclette grill made for an easy, conversation-friendly evening with most of the prep done well ahead.

A weeknight chicken and vegetable egg fried rice - prep 25 min, cook 15 min, ready in 40, inspired by a birthday Chinese meal that hit just the right notes.

After almost two years off the blog, a post about why - migration projects, two house renovations, a move, a break-up, and a daughter who deserves my time. Then back to the SharePoint, M365 and smart-home tinkering I love.

A few hours on the farm during lambing season - new arrivals, watchful ewes, and a generous family who folded us in for a season I'll never forget.

Sometimes a long, frustrating IKEA trip leaves you with the right picture frame and an idea for a Raspberry Pi. Here is how I housed a working Pi inside an IKEA picture frame.

Adding Hue lighting under our kitchen cupboards meant working around the kit's fixed lengths. Rather than buy two full kits, I hacked together my own six-core extension lead.

I finally decided to create my dream home office setup however it wasn't without complications due to a strange limitation with the new Windows 10 display settings.

Update (31/01/15): Session spreadsheet updated and now includes 275 sessions.

A long-overdue confession - I am a sucker for a well-made bag. Tour my collection and what I carry in each, in the spirit of the old Lifehacker 'what's in your bag' series.

3kg of uncrushed Maris Otter, no mill, no time to wait for one in the post - here is what happened when we tried to crush the grain ourselves with a coffee grinder.

I recently responded to a question posted to Twitter using the #SPHelp hashtag. Tim Ferro was trying to understand all the different types of email that SharePoint sends automatically.

I'm sure removing the Recent heading from the Quick Launch in SharePoint 2013 has been talked about a million times over since SharePoint 2013 was launched.

A challenge for most administrators managing more than one or more Azure subscriptions or Office 365 tenants having to continuously log in and out with different credentials to do so.

Update (15th June 2014): We may see a return of the SharePoint ULS Viewer very soon. Jeremy Thake and Office Dev indicated it is coming back to life very soon.

Often a difficult task for some, once up and running with Microsoft Azure, is how to get files in and out of Storage Accounts or Containers. For these particular scenarios there is a really simple tool called Azure Explorer.

I have just discovered that you can give feedback about your experiences using Office 365 directly to Microsoft using their online feedback form (http://msft.it/o365feedback) thanks to a Tweet from Jennifer Mason.

Let me introduce you to the Deployment guide for Microsoft SharePoint 2013. Anyone deploying, installing or configuring SharePoint 2013 absolutely must read this!

This post is part of SP14 Keynote highlights series where I provide some highlights of the next version of SharePoint. These highlights are from the SP24 Conference Keynote that Bill Baer delivered.

This post is part of SP14 Keynote highlights series where I provide some highlights of the next version of SharePoint. These highlights are from the SP24 Conference Keynote that Bill Baer delivered.

This post is part of SP14 Keynote highlights series where I provide some highlights of the next version of SharePoint. These highlights are from the SP24 Conference Keynote that Bill Baer delivered.

This post is the first of my SP14 Keynote highlights series where I provide some highlights of the next version of SharePoint. These highlights are from the SP24 Conference Keynote that Bill Baer delivered.

A simple carrot soup that originates with my Grandad Callaghan. Often a Christmas-dinner starter at home, but quick enough that it has become my go-to for dinner parties served with homemade bread.

In this post, I share information about On-Premises SharePoint, highlights of SharePoint 2016 and see how Outlook attachments (bye-bye) are changing as we know them.

I thought I'd share a PowerShell script that I've created to perform a few tasks against a Site Collection Second Stage Recycle Bin (SSRB) in SharePoint.

I've managed to pickup some reading materials while in America that are going to keep me busy for some weeks.

The SharePoint Conference has sadly finished and our holiday has started. We are currently staying in a lodge on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon for a few days...slightly different from the Venetian where we've spent the last week.

This evening I have had the great pleasure of meeting Bill Baer and his wife.

So I have an early draft of my expo hall treasure map mapped out! Do you have yours?

Update: 23/02/2014 I've updated the #SPC14 sessions spreadsheet one last time to include some missed sessions and a request to have sortable start and end dates.

A customer recently reported that they were not able to create any new Site Collections within any Web Application in their SharePoint 2013 UAT environment.

Something I have found frustrating with the SharePoint Conference 2014 website over the holidays is that you have to browse through the sessions as search results pages.

It is a very special day for me today - ClearPeople has just approved my trip to attend the SharePoint Conference 2014 (#SPC14). Thank you thank you thank you!

It's official you can now customise the Office 365 login page with your own branding \- ok not quite yet but Microsoft has just released a preview feature that will soon allow us to.

Retiring my well-travelled Canon IXUS 220 HS and treating myself to a Canon PowerShot SX280 HS for my birthday - first impressions and what tipped me to upgrade.

A customer asked me if I could help troubleshoot their SharePoint environment - they had extended a web application and configured it to use Forms Based Authentication (FBA) with SSL however they.

If you're working with Windows Azure and want to use PowerShell to perform management tasks you will first need to install and configure Windows Azure PowerShell as per this article "How to install and configure Windows Azure PowerShell".

This post describes how I configured one of my Windows Azure hosted Virtual Machines with my domain name registrars DNS - this meant that I could make SharePoint 2013 available using my domain name.

A quick walkthrough of using SharePoint's Reusable Content feature plus a touch of jQuery to give content authors easy, code-free tabs on their pages.

I can see again...I love my new glasses!

The default interval for Windows Azure Active Directory Sync (DirSync) synchronisations is 3 hours. If for instance, your Active Directory has lots of changes you probably want to consider shortening the sync interval.

When configuring Windows Azure Active Directory Sync (or DirSync as it was previously known) it's useful to be able to run various synchronisation tests.

The first batch of our sloe gin has been prepared and laid down until at least Christmas or should that be for as long as I can keep my hands off it!!!

If you're visiting Cromer anytime soon then you must try and have a meal in The Red Lion on the seafront. It was very reasonable for two of us to have two courses there - both of which were very delicious and adequately filling.

I've configured Forms Based Authentication (FBA) in SharePoint on several occasions - from 2007 right through to 2013, but until now I have never discovered a life-saving tool that Steve Peschka has.

A really good lunch at the Crab & Winkle in Whitstable - friendly staff, fish that hit the spot, and easy with a small one in tow.

A short note on reading The Wolf of Wall Street after seeing the trailer - I picked up a copy from my partner's shelf and could not put it down.

This is going to be a real quick post but I wanted to introduce you to my baby daughter Florence who was born just a few days ago. Mum and baby are doing well and keeping daddy plenty busy.

Since our Office 365 tenant was upgraded we've been experiencing difficulties with our users signing into Lync 2013.

Ok, so this has bothered me for some time - until now, there has been standalone OneDrive for Business SkyDrive Pro client. Users have had to install Office 2013 to experience the new way of synchronising files with SharePoint.

On holiday in Majorca, I was lucky enough to be invited out for a ride by the chairman - a fit, focused cyclist who was a long way ahead of me. Here is how I got on.

If you need to check what version of SharePoint server your Office 365 tenant is running especially during the Office 365 and SharePoint Online service upgrade (aside from checking through the Admin.

At the time of writing this post, I was working for a "Microsoft Cloud Accelerate" partner.

A quick post here to share a new feature in SharePoint 2013 that enables you to easily embed code such as javascript and CSS into the content area of a web part page for example.

I've been exploring SharePoint 2013 in recent days and noticed that the 'Sign in as Different User' option or action from the welcome control (user menu) seems to have been removed or forgotten from the user interface in this build.

This one's quick. There are a couple of ways to find out your SQL server version. Firstly the version is listed within the Object Explorer in the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio.

I was asked to review a client environment yesterday to find out why the links in their top navigation bar were displaying for users that did not have permission to the particular sites.

My mum's chocolate brownie recipe - the one I bake for friends, colleagues and customers, and which long ago became known as the SharePoint Brownies.

On many occasion, I have been to conferences and on training where the presenter has done a demonstration and used a screen magnifying utility to enlarge part of the display.

This morning I was trying to create a new style in the itemstyle.xsl stylesheet to use within the content query web part (CQWP).

Quite a common requirement for implementations of SharePoint that I am involved in is to create new managed paths for a given web application.

When I write PowerShell scripts, I often want to step through sections. This allows me to decided whether to proceed with parts of my script or not. I achieve this by using the ChoiceDescription class as demonstrated below.

Today I had a requirement to remove all the headings and links from the quick launch navigation of hundreds of SharePoint sites.

The need to backup or download SharePoint solutions or WSPs from SharePoint come's up from time to time.

It goes without saying...but whenever you download and use any code or script from this site, or any site for that matter, you should review and understand what the code or script is doing before you attempt to use it.

When I started my new job a few weeks ago I decided I was going to introduce some new tools and utilities to help myself and my colleagues be more productive.

Sixteen molten-centred chocolate muffins, eaten warm so the middle stays gooey - perfect on their own or with vanilla ice cream and a Chantilly cream.

Many people have said to me "your using WordPress for your blog but you're a SharePoint Consultant" and my response is typical "but why must use SharePoint - I guess you also have a problem with me using a Mac?".

This green pea chowder recipe is one of my favourites. It’s so simple with a delicious result under 20 minutes. It has a beautiful colour with a nourishingly filling flavour.