November 2012

How Windows 8 change my view on Microsoft

I have always loved the Windows Operating System, but their phones were a joke back it the day, and their in-house hardware was just accessories and a game console. I have come to the conclusion that Windows 8 isn’t designed to just be an Operating System, it is designed to increase the Microsoft Market Share across all of their devices. I used Windows 8 off and on throughout the previews and it was good but nothing super spectacular. However once it was finally released I decided I was making the leap at home.

Telling Friends/Family/Co-workers about Products

In March 2012 I gave a presentation at work about Windows 8 on Desktop and Tablet and I enjoyed it quite a bit, I had many people asking me questions. After all my research was complete I was starting to tell friends to hold off on buying tablets till the end of the year. Once the Surface came out I made sure I had it on day of release, I took it into the office and I was demonstrating it pretty much all day telling people my impressions on the device and how nice the TouchCover was.

Since then I have had my brother question me about it and I believe the Surface might become his only computer in the near future, honestly it would be my only computer if I were not in the IT Field and some of the Software I use requires the x86 chip architecture. It has even got to the point where my mother is telling her friends about the Surface being such a fantastic device.

Increased Xbox 360 Usage

I think the my Xbox 360 usage has really increased the most. I’ve owned it for many years and I am actually more of a PS3 player than I ever was invested in Xbox. In-fact I own www.playstationeuphoria.com and it started with PSN@Home 5-6 years ago and I was the main one blogging. Once I received my Microsoft Surface I decided to finally try out Xbox SmartGlass and it was amazing, I began buying games for the Xbox and seems like I play it every other day at a minimum.

Purchasing Windows Phone 8

After adjusting to Windows 8, after owning a Surface, and admittedly also playing with the Lumia 900 running Windows Phone 7 at TechEd 2012,  I was impressed. I knew that I was interested in switching from my iPhone since I had owned it for 3 years and no matter how many new devices came out the changes were minimal at best. I decided since Microsoft was knocking everything out of the park I would go ahead and purchase the Lumia 920 once it was available, day it came out I went to the AT&T Store and picked up a Red Lumia 920. I’ve had minimal issues with the phone but overall love it.

Conclusion

Overall I have to say not only did Microsoft do fantastic on Windows 8, and the Surface and on Windows Phone 8 but the integration of all the devices, using SkyDrive has been unbelievable. I’ve got my phone syncing my picture to SkyDrive, and I can pull out my Surface to write a blog and use those exact photos with no effort on my part.

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Configure Surface to use MicroSD as Primary Storage

After about a week of excitement and playing around with features, I decided it was time to start optimizing and making this thing run the way I wanted. The first thing I noticed was that I could not use my SD card with my Libraries, so all my apps are going to by default save to the local SSD, which is far from what I want. I knew there had to be a way around this, so I started digging in. I feel I finally have it to the point where others should be doing the same thing, and once done, you can forget about it.

  • Create a VHDX and save it on the SD card
  • Create directories on this VHD for your specific libraries
    • Documents
    • Music
    • Video
    • Pictures
  • Configure the libraries
  • Enable Indexing on the VHDX – This is important because the Photos app doesn’t work right without it.
  • Have a script automatically Attach the VHD on Boot

If you would like to know the exact steps to take, please continue reading.

Creating a VHD

  1. Open Charms Menu (Swipe in from the right side of the screen)
  2. Click Settings
  3. Click Tiles
  4. Change “Show administrative tools” to Yes
  5. Swipe from the bottom of the screen
  6. Click All apps
  7. Under “Administrative Tools” click Computer Management
  8. Click “Disk Management”
  9. Click “Action”
  10. Click “Create VHD”
  11. Browse to the SD Card’s storage and name the VHD whatever you want
  12. Allocate as much of the SD’s storage you want to this VHD,
  13. You can decide between Fixed or Dynamically expanding. I went with Dynamically expanding.
  14. Find the newly created disk in the lower panel, which should be “Disk 2”
  15. Right-click where it says “Disk 2”
  16. Click “Initialize Disk”
  17. Click OK
  18. Right-click “Unallocated”
  19. Click “New Simple Volume…”
  20. Click “Next >”
  21. Click “Next >”
  22. Select the Drive letter you want (can be anything)
  23. Click “Next >”
  24. Name the Volume whatever you want
  25. Click “Next >”
  26. Click “Finish”

Create/Configure Library Directories on VHD

  1. Click the “Libraries” icon from the “Task Bar”
  2. Single click “Documents”
  3. Click “Manage under “Library Tools” from the ribbon
  4. Click “Manage library”
  5. Click “Add”
  6. Browse to the newly Attached VHD you just created
  7. Click “New Folder”
  8. Name it whatever you want (Eg: Documents)
  9. DO NOT OPEN THE FOLDER, select the folder and click “Include folder”
  10. Remove the Default Personal folder
  11. Click OK
  12. Click “Set save location”
  13. Select the newly created folder
  14. Repeat steps 1-13 for the following
    1. Music
    2. Pictures
    3. Videos

Enable Indexing on VHD – Very Important

  1. Open the “Charms Menu”
  2. Click “Search”
  3. Type “Indexing Options”
  4. Click Settings
  5. Open “Indexing Options”
  6. Click “Modify”
  7. Select the newly Attached VHD
  8. Click OK
  9. Click Close

Create Script to Auto Attach on Startup

  1. Open PowerShell as an Administrator
  2. Type “Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned”
  3. Press Enter
  4. Type “y”
  5. Press Enter
  6. Click Computer from the navigation bar on the left of the Libraries folder
  7. Open the C: Drive
  8. Create a new folder named “PoSH”
  9. Double click the new folder
  10. Right-click in the white area and navigate to “New > Text Document”
  11. Name it Auto-Mount.ps1
  12. Open the new file with Notepad
  13. Paste the below code in, don’t forget to modify the red text to the path you saved the VHDX file at
    1. “Mount-DiskImage D:\YourVHD.vhdx”
  14. Open the “Charms Menu”
  15. Click “Search”
  16. Type “Task Scheduler” and open it
  17. Click “Task Scheduler Library”
  18. Click “Action”
  19. Click “Create Task…”
  20. General Tab
    1. Name: Attach SD VHD
    2. Location: \
    3. Description: This is the Task that automatically attaches the VHD file on the SD card on system boot.
    4. “Click Change User or Group…” type in SYSTEM
    5. Check “Run with highest privileges”
  21. Triggers Tab
    1. Click “New…”
    2. Begin the task: At startup
    3. Click OK
  22. Action Tab
    1. Action: Start a program
    2. Program/script: C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe
    3. Add arguments: C:\PoSH\Auto-Mount.ps1
    4. Click “OK”
  23. Conditions Tab
    1. Under Power uncheck “Start the task only if the computer is on AC power
    2. Click “OK”
  24. Have fun testing. I recommend opening the Camera app and taking some pictures, making sure it index the new ones, try adding music to the folder make sure it shows up in the music app, the same thing for the Video app.

Update 12-30-2012: Thank you, Don, for reminding me you need to set the execution policy on the machine first.

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Backups are Important! Here is How I do it!

As I promised I would blog about the additional backup procedures I planned on putting in place after the outage I had last time. I still have more things I’d like to implement but have not had the time in the evening to do the custom development work.

  1. Cron jobs that backup to the local file system
  2. A WordPress Plugin that backups on a schedule to my Drop Box (WordPress Backup to Dropbox)
  3. A Tumblr! I have setup a Tumblr and found a WordPress Plugin that automatically post everything I write to my Tumblr (Social Networks Auto-Poster)

If you would like to know a bit more detail on my backup stuff please continue reading below. …

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Captain Hindsight! Always have Remote Backups!

On Thursday afternoon I started receiving alerts that both of my personal websites had gone offline, which were on separate VPS Servers through the same provider. I thought this was quite unusual because it isn’t usually simultaneous. Once I got home I looked into it and the servers were completely unreachable, I looked at my providers twitter and they had mentioned an attack on their servers that had been compromised. That is never a good sign!

Over the weekend full details came in that they had been brute forced and the hackers gained access to the physical nodes and basically they nuked the drives. They spent 3 days trying to recover the ~1000 VPS that had been destroyed and had no luck restoring mine, I had looked into it and I had no backups of my blog on my home computer and my other website the most recent backup I had locally was from July of this year. I did follow standard backup procedures and I had a script that made weekly backups… but they were stored on the local server. At this point I knew I had no choice but to start from scratch and mentioned my delima on Twitter.

I was lucky enough that @fast_edo had saw my tweet and mentioned using inurl:mattblogsit.com as a Google Search string, and BOOM! I found a lot of my articles cached. I began doing similar searches on Bing and between the two I was able to find all of my articles – the images in the cache. Now I may not have been intelligent to maintain my articles but I was able to locate all of my graphics and get my blog about 95% restored. I personally decided not to re-post some of the articles but they were things relating to #TheKrewe Shirt Design Contest, and a post that just wasn’t up to par for me.

Over the next couple of days expect to see blog posts relating to setting up backups on your CentOS Servers and WordPress Blogs because I am dedicating myself to that cause to make sure this doesn’t happen again!

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