Freebie Friday: Microsoft OneNote

Posted on | by Brian Dunham | Leave a Comment on Freebie Friday: Microsoft OneNote
OneNote

OK, so maybe Microsoft isn’t the first name that comes to mind when discussing free software. The industry juggernaut has been often criticized by Information Technology professionals for its expensive software and licensing costs. But recently Microsoft has begun to soften on that front a bit, with the release of its competitively-priced hosted email and productivity suite, Office 365, which has licensing built right in to the monthly service fee. They’ve also released some really nice free software along the way — and one of my personal favorites is their notation app, OneNote.

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Freebie Friday: VirtualBox

Posted on | by Brian Dunham | 1 Comment on Freebie Friday: VirtualBox
virtualbox

Virtualization is something that those of us in the Information Technology sector have known about and implemented for years now. A typical virtualization implementation in IT would be a bare-metal hypervisor running VMware’s vSphere (formerly ESXi) or Microsoft’s Hyper-V Server. While these are great applications for production environments, virtualization can also be useful for more small-scale applications, for instance: testing out a new Operating System. This is where a desktop (or type-2) hypervisor can come in handy.

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Freebie Friday: VLC Media Player

Posted on | by Brian Dunham | Leave a Comment on Freebie Friday: VLC Media Player
vlc media player

Why use a third-party media player? Well, most people don’t really know what goes on behind the scenes with regards to digital video. There’s encoding, decoding, and transcoding along with a whole host of competing video formats (AVI, MP4, MOV, MKV, etc.) and audio formats (MP3, OGG, FLAC, WAV, etc.) — and that’s only scratching the surface! I won’t bore you with the technical details.

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How to Install .NET Framework 3.5 on Server 2012 R2

Posted on | by Brian Dunham | Leave a Comment on How to Install .NET Framework 3.5 on Server 2012 R2
.NET Framework

I recently ran into an issue with Windows Server 2012 R2 and was able to resolve it despite a good deal of misinformation that I found out on the Internet. It all started when I needed to install a proprietary application on one of my client’s production servers; the application in question required Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5. No biggie, I thought, remembering that this could be enabled as a “feature” through Server Manager. So I loaded it up and attempted installation only to watch it crash and burn (see image below).

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Raspberry Pi Recovery

Posted on | by Brian Dunham | Leave a Comment on Raspberry Pi Recovery

Anyone who knows me knows I’m a Raspberry Pi enthusiast. One of my first Raspberry Pi projects was to see if I could run a web server on a Pi. So, I installed my LAMP stack, installed WordPress, etc. Several days later, I had the very first iteration of this website running on a Raspberry Pi from my home office. Then, one day, I came home to find my website was not responding. No big deal, I thought – I’ll just give my Raspberry Pi the old reboot and everything will be fine. Boy, was I wrong – after unplugging my power chord and plugging it back in, all I received was a solid red power LED and nothing else: no blinking green activity light – nothing.

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