Technology Musings

 I've been doing some evaluation this week on a Facebook Portal unit - and especially using it with Zoom. These days, lots of us are spending lots of time on Zoom calls for social and other purposes, but my own use-case was to see how easy it would be to use with Zoom for an 89-year old friend, who has never used a tablet or anything similar. I have to say - I'm really impressed with it. You can catch some details in my YouTube video: About Portal Facebook have a number of different-sized Portal units - you can see the different types here . You can use them to make and receive calls on Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. I tried the 10"Portal unit and subsequently bought my own Portal Mini 8" unit. Getting Started The unit is very attractively boxed. Physical setup is just a matter of plugging in the (proprietary) power cable at the back, using a giant plug which also acts as the stand. There is also a USB-C socket hidden away at the back, next to the woofer. I didn...

Whilst lurking in a Macrumors forum the other day, I came across a mention of something I'd just never heard of before - and it's really easy to setup. If you have more than one Mac on your network, you can setup content caching, so that updates and iCloud downloads from Apple on one machine are cached for others on the network to use. Setting it up is just a few clicks, really simple. Go into System Preferences, select Sharing, then click on Content Sharing and tick the box. And - unless you run anything more complex than a single subnet on your network - that's it. Apple do recommend that you reboot any clients so they can take advantage of the cache. Full details are in this Apple support document , which also has links to other documents on more advanced settings (and how to set it up if you have a much larger network, for example). Does it work? I enabled my main Mac (a 2018 13-inch MacBook Pro - which is normally has a wired Ethernet connection, which is what Apple r...

  Came across an annoying issue with Poly CCX Teams phones this week, so worth documenting here briefly to save others the same pain. In short: The phones log into Office 365 and MUST have the time accurate to within 5 minutes, otherwise they will not log on. Indeed, if they drift, they will stop working. Out of the box, they will try and get time over NTP from time.windows.com, and fall back to north-america.pool.ntp.org. If you do not have port 123 open to the Internet from the network where the phones will sit, then you can get them to look at an on-prem NTP server, but there is a major gotcha.  You can configure DHCP scope option 42 to point at your on-prem NTP server (usually, in a Windows environment, a local domain controller) however that's not enough - you also need to tell the phone NOT to override this setting: because out of the box, it does . So to get a phone working in such an environment, you may need to follow these steps (assuming you do have Scope Option 42 ...

Microsoft Teams is a great solution for chats, calls, and meetings - but it's not so great for larger meetings. For that, there's Microsoft Teams live events, which is the next evolution of Skype Meeting Broadcast. Why is Live Events better for larger meetings? Well, Teams is fundamentally a collaboration tool, and Teams meetings are many-to-many meetings. Whilst Teams has a maximum of 250 attendees, such a large Teams meeting would be pretty hard to manage, to say the least. Live Events is designed to work for one-to-many meetings (up to 10,000 attendees), and is much better suited to that type of event: all attendees are muted for example, and just the presenter's video is shown. There are also audience feedback mechanisms much more suited to large-scale events. As this is a <cough> live area of interest right now, here's a quick run-down which might be useful if you're looking at trying it out. Understanding Event Types Although this doesn't ...

For many years when I worked as an IT Manager in 'corporate IT', Macs were a big No No for me. "It's not our standard!" we would say. "We can't manage them!" we would assert. But a few years ago, when I needed to buy a new computer for myself, I went out and bought a Mac. I guess from a professional point of view, I felt I really should find out what they're like. And from a personal point of view, I use an iPad and an iPhone, and I knew that the Mac would integrate well into the ecosystem. I thought I'd find it hard getting used to the Mac - but d'you know what? I didn't. Sure, some of the keyboard shortcuts took me a while to find or get used to (but to be fair, most PC laptop keyboards have things like their cursor keys and other special keys in non-standard locations). But by-and-large, things Just Worked. On a couple of occasions - like when my work laptop died suddenly with no warning, and it wasn't until the follo...