Music Free Tech

I’ve been working in IT since the late 1990s and have been a full time systems administrator since 2000. In this blog, you will find a number of things. First, I’ve documented a few things that I’ve learned over the years. Second, this is a place for me to blog about various tech related things.

How to Run Random Videos in MixItUp

Date: 03 December 2021

Mix It Up is a wonderful tool for streamers. It can be used as a basic chat bot but it also gives one a lot of power for throwing stuff up on an overlay. One of it’s weaknesses, however, is that it can’t tell how long a video is which makes it hard to randomly play one video after another. This little hack makes it a little easier. It’s pretty common to want to play a random video.

How to Run Mix It Up Commands from Touch Portal and UP Deck

Date: 15 May 2020

Mix It Up app is a fantastic tool for making streaming easier. It gives you powerful tools for chat, overlays, Twitch Channel Points and more. What it doesn’t have is a remote client that allows one to run commands from a phone or tablet. This is how I was able to combine MIU with Up Deck and Touch Portal to get the best of both worlds.

Use Powershell to Play Random MP3s

Date: 27 November 2019

I’ve been playing with tools to help make my game streams easier. One of the things that I wanted to do was to play random MP3 from a directory. Here’s a little Powershell to get it done.

WSL2 Includes a Full Linux Kernel

Date: 09 May 2019

A couple days ago, Microsoft announced WSL2 which includes some pretty big changes. The biggest change is that it includes a full Linux kernel. WSL emulates Linux system calls but WSL2 includes a kernel which will allow it to run significantly more apps, including Docker.

Working with Advanced Docker Operations

Date: 16 February 2018

We all know, at this point, that Docker is the new hotness. Running individual containers can help with development but doesn’t do much for us when it’s time to deploy the application. There’s where orchestration comes in. Docker Swarm is a great tool to use when you first get started with orchestration. Swarm is built into Docker. There’s no additional software to install. You can learn more about running services in Docker Swarm in my video course “Dive into Orchestration with Docker Swarm”.

Docker - A Better Way to Build Apps

Date: 16 October 2017

In a very short time, Docker has grown from a cool idea to the way cloud services are run. Getting into Docker can be daunting. That’s why I wrote the video training course “Docker - A Better Way to Build Apps” from Packt Publishing. This course provides an introduction to Docker and will teach you all you need to know to get started developing your own applications in Docker. You’ll learn how deploy Docker locally and on GCE, Azure, and Amazon AWS.

System Center Data Protection Manager 2012 R2 Always Crashing

Date: 02 June 2016

DPM is great for backing up Microsoft stuff but I ran into something really, really odd. In short, the msdpm kept crashing. I took a while but I was eventually able to track down which object was causing the crash by trying each failed sync one at a time. (DPM troubleshooting step 1.) For the record, it was the system protection for a Windows Server 2012 R2 server but I’m not convinced that that matters.

SCCM Updates and Powershell

Date: 12 October 2015

Microsoft is doing cool things with Windows Server with what was originally server core and is now the base version of Windows Server. Combined with Powershell remoting and there’s a lot of power from the command line. Unfortunately, is surprisingly difficult to tell if updates are available and to trigger their installation. If you’re not using SCCM, you can run sconfig.exe and select option 6 to manage your updates but packages and applications pushed through SCCM don’t show up there.

Switching to Docker and CoreOS

Date: 10 October 2014

I learned about Docker over the summer at ApacheCon in Denver. While Docker, itself, wasn’t on the program, it came up several times as various people were talking about PaaS systems. Once I started to dig into it, I understood why people were so excited. After playing with it more on my own, I was hooked. I decided that I wanted to move this site to Docker. In this post I’ll tell you a bit about what I did, how I did it and why.

Endnotes with Org-mode

Date: 15 July 2014

I was recently writing an internal peer review for work. Because I’m a happy emacs user, I wrote the peer review in org-mode and exported it to PDF using org-latex-export-to-pdf. The problem was that our interal format requires that I use endnotes and emacs exports my footnotes as, well, footnotes. So, here’s the quick and dirty on how I got the exporter to give me end notes. First of all, you need to tell LaTeX that you want to use endnotes.