Configuring a Raspberry Pi as a Dashboard display

raspberry-pi-logoA while ago my TV died. I say it died, my wife called to say it had a funny blank line running through it, and rather than investigate I took it as a signal that the Universe wanted me to buy a new TV, and you can’t argue with the power of the Universe.

As it turns out there was nothing wrong with it, but who wants to keep a seven year old TV when you can upgrade to a 40” Smart TV with Netflix and Wi-Fi built-in?

Anyway, this led to me having a spare TV, and as my wife ‘wanted that thing out of the house’ I was left with no choice but to take it to the office.

Paul, the owner at IT Authority, then wanted to know ‘what that thing’ was doing in his office. Not wanting to reveal my secret plan to install an Xbox into the office, I said I had donated it to put on the wall to display our dashboards.

Honestly looking back I don’t know where that idea came from, but I was stuck with the task of making it work.

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Outlook Office 365 System Folder Names appear with 1

RSS Feeds1After an Office 365 migration I had noticed I had some duplicate folders in my Outlook. The duplicate folder appeared with a 1 next to the folder name, and what’s worse it was on the ‘System Folders’ like Junk Mail or RSS Feeds.

you might be forgiven for thinking, so what? well indeed, but it was annoying the hell out of me and this is my website, so there you go..

I tried numerous times to remove them, or delete them, and replace them with new folders. Of course none of this worked. Read more of this post

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Unable to create a VPN Connection on Windows 10

metroA friend called me up recently to ask for help with a Windows laptop. It had been running Windows 8.1 and auto upgraded to 10. During the upgrade, or, as a consequence of the upgrade it had lost its VPN connection to the main office.

It would not allow a new VPN connection to be setup either, with the wizard instantly failing after you entered the remote IP address, or, accepting the remote IP Address but sitting on the ‘Creating the Connection’ screen indefinitely. Read more of this post

Windows 10 Rollback, Office Key Missing

metroA client emailed this morning to say their PC had automatically upgraded to Windows 10.

They had decided to roll it back because ‘some applications did not work properly’. Which was music to my eyes because I did not want to have to sit through a roll back.

However, when they had gone into Outlook, it was showing as Unlicensed, and prompting them to buy!

I used my favourite Office licensing tool, OSPP.vbs to check the status and found ‘No Product Keys Detected’. Read more of this post

Windows Server Essentials 2016 – Install Stuck at 17% or 39%

2016This week I had a Skype conversation with a fellow MVP and friend from Brazil, Daniel Santos. He reported an issue he was having installing the Essentials 2016 TP4 OS which was stalling at 17% during the Essentials configuration Wizard.

He also reported that the environment had not changed and that previous TPs had installed correctly.

I volunteered to login to his server and check it out.

His Lab was running on a Windows 10 workstation with Hyper-V.

He was also using a Portuguese language edition of the TP but reported the same issue with the English one, I got him to start over with the English one so I could read it!!

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Office 365 ProPlus 2016 CTR Deployment Tool Error 30029-1007

Office 365I had this problem today and i just couldn’t figure it out. Thankfully the issue was i was being an idiot which was my first thought, but you know, its good to confirm these things.

You may be setting up your clients networks to use the CTR Deployment Tool which was recommended to me by Guy Gregory after my last foray into Office 365 deployment.

If you haven’t used it before, then do check it out.

Anyway today i was updating a clients system as they have just given the go ahead to upgrade from 2013 to 2016.

I edited the Configuration.XML file and i was convinced that was right, but immediately  i  would get an error on running setup.exe. Read more of this post