Trigger Microsoft Fabric Data Pipeline using Power Automate/ Logic App Go read this post first. That's what helped me figure out what to do without too much Googling around! Key things are: The URL to call (via POST) is No need for a body, unless the pipeline needs one. Here's the documentation…

Yammer Admin unable to create new Communities The Engage Administrator role in Viva is known as Yammer Administrator in Entra ID. After assigning that, you will see that the admin is unable to create new communities, for instance. What you have to do to fix this is go to the Admin Portal in Engage…

Zed editor: ERROR [crates/project/src/environment.rs:227] capturing shell environment with “/opt/homebrew/bin/bash” In case this helps anyone else... not saying what follows below is the solution for such errors. Started to use Zed again earlier this week, and one one of my machines it showsa…

Consent between first party application ‘d2ebd3a9-1ada-4480-8b2d-eac162716601’ and first party resource ‘00000003-0000-0000-c000-000000000000’ must be configured Maybe it's always been the case, or maybe it changed some time ago but I never used this connector much and so didn't realize... anyhoo,…

Plus Address emails for Entra ID admin accounts There's plenty of blog posts on this topic, so I won't go into the basic details. We often have admin accounts in Entra ID that must receive emails, but there's no point wasting a license on a mailbox for this. What do we do here? Easy. Use Plus…

Good Fortune (English movie), and others… We happened to watch “Good Fortune” this weekend. It's a blast of a movie! I had so much fun watching it. I didn’t realise it was written and directed by Aziz Ansari (his movie debut). If you like his stuff you’ll definitely enjoy this one! Very satirical…

Untitled Continuing with SuccessFactors on Android, one of the things the app does upon launch is to ask whether you want to use a password or fingerprint. If I select "fingerprint", it says there's no fingerprint to be found. And if I select "password" I can setup a new password and use that each…

SAP SuccessFactors app and Intune We wanted to push the Android and iOS apps of SAP SuccessFactors. iOS is easy. Push the app out to a group. Also push out an app configuration so the app knows what to do when a user clicks on it. Easy peasy. This article has a list of the keys you need to push…

Hammerspoon and macOS shorcuts Sweet, Hammerspoon can run macOS shortcuts! So awesome. 🥳 In a similar vein to my tinkering with Hue lights... I have a BenQ ScreenBar Halo on my monitor which I'd like to turn off when I logoff or my Mac goes to sleep. The latest version of the Halo has some sensors…

Blood in the Machine (Book) "Blood in the Machine" - the book - by Brian Merchant, is crazy! I am only some 100 pages in to it so far, but it is so shocking and eye opening. I never knew this was what the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution was like. I never know this was what the Luddite…

“guestOrExternalUserTypes”: 63 I have an automation that goes through the Graph audit logs API output for any Conditional Access policy changes. I noticed that the output for these had a few entries that looked like "excludeGuestsOrExternalUsers":{"guestOrExternalUserTypes":63, ...} That made no…

Teams Phone and their authentication flows (part 4) Just adding a link to this Microsoft blog post I previously linked to, and especially the video in it. Wanted to capture two screenshots from there. This is how enrollment works for Android phones And this is how it works for Android AOSP This…

Teams Phone and their authentication flows (part 3) Continuing from my previous post (which is a continuation to another post), during my last enrolment the phone OS upgraded from Android to Android AOSP. This was not unexpected because Microsoft is in the process of moving Teams phones from…

Teams Phone and their authentication flows (part 2) Continuing from my previous post, I upgraded the Yealink MP56 phone to the next available firmware. Firmware 122.15.0.107 This firmware is from December 2022. Here is what the admin page shows post-upgrade: Firmware Version: 122.15.0.107 Hardware…

Teams Phone and their authentication flows (part 1) I wanted to document the authentication flow for Teams phones. This is by no means comprehensive, but only what I have been able to gather by looking at a Yealink MP56 phone. The device itself is discontinued, but firmware updates are available…

Setting the scene on a Hue light via API Continuing my trilogy (here and here) of Hue API posts... in my previous post I detailed how I set the lights to turn or or off when I login to my Mac. Slight issue with that. When I used to do this via the Hue sensor, it would set the correct scene coz the…

Turning off and on Hue lights when I unlock/ lock or sleep/ wake my Mac Barely a few days since my previous post on having fun with the Hue API, and the sensor stopped responding to my API calls. There's no error or anything, the sensor just doesn't get enabled! I run the command as before:…

Power Apps – The user has not been assigned any License and is disabled. Encountered a red-herring of an error today. A colleague shared a Power App with another colleague and got the following: The user in question was indeed enabled and licensed. Also, interestingly, the user Id in the error…

Intune – App Protection policies and custom apps Every so often I get a request from one of our IT folks asking if I can add such and such app to our App Protection policies. Thing is, most of the time the app in question isn't one that's supported by Microsoft/ Intune. (See this article for a…

KQL – Outputting the input of a function Playing with Functions in KQL today. One of the things I wanted to do was troubleshoot the input I am passing to a Function. Couldn't figure out a obvious way to do this, so here's what I did. My objective here is simply to see if I am even passing inputs…

Fun and games with the Hue API I have a Hue sensor on my desk that turns on and off the lights on the desk when I am at it. Since my desk is in our bedroom, and I don't want the sensor to be active during weekends, I wanted an easy way to disable it on weekends and enable it after weekends (or…

Adding a bunch of IPs to an Azure NSG So... there was an Azure outage today. Related to Azure Front Door. That was my evening gone! As the resident PowerShell person on the incident call, as part of implementing some workarounds I had to add a bunch of IP addresses to a Network Security Group. I…

A House of Dynamite (English movie) I enjoyed "A House of Dynamite" which was released this week on Netflix. Not many people seem to like it though! Yes, the ending was abrupt, but I loved it. To me that made sense, and it was the only possible ending one could have for a movie like this. The…

Firefox multi-account containers and Entra ID SSO I use Firefox. And I use the multi-account containers extension heavily in that. Very useful at work too when I have multiple test account and want to sign in with these, as I can open these up in separate tabs as opposed to separate windows as one…

KQL – Get a list of users removed from an Entra ID group I wanted to get a list of users recently removed from an Entra ID group. I can see the removals in the audit logs, but there's easy way to add a column showing removals. Enter KQL. We are sending all audit logs to a Log Analytics workspace,…

Updating AllowToAddGuests A colleague reached out regarding an issue. He had created a Team and applied a sensitivity label to it. Unfortunately, this sensitivity label disabled external sharing. He then went ahead and remvoed the label, but he still couldn't add external users (even after waiting…

Managing O365 add-ins with the Application Admin role O365 add-ins, also known as M365 Apps or Integrated Apps, are what you can deploy to Outlook etc. via this section of the M365 admin center. As per the docs, you need to be a Global Admin or an Exchange Admin (possibly with Application Admin,…

Azure Front Door, Azure Functions, Fragments, Managed Identity, Azure Tables, etc. At work I spent some time yesterday working on a side project to setup forwarding from one set of URLs to another. We are migrating a service from our on-prem world to the cloud, and there are tons of URLs pointing…

Code Dependent (Book) Quick shoutout to "Code Dependent" by Madhumita Murgia. I stumbled upon it at Waterstones the other day and purchased it on a whim. So glad I did as it was a very enjoyable read. I was half expecting (and not looking forward to) it being a book that bashes AI (or goes the…

I killed an AI idea today Little things in life... but I killed an AI idea today at work, and I am pleased about that. 😀 A colleague reached out with a requirement he got from someone else. They wanted to create an AI agent that will scrape the Internet for certain types of news and put it into a…

Sahasam and Vyasanasametham Bandhumithradhikal (Malayalam movies) "Sahasam" is a fun movie! I stumbled upon it in Amazon Prime, and was familiar with it coz of its amazing songs. Here's three of them: A variety of numbers, as you can see. One is a remix of an older song, another is an Onam number,…

Well-oiled machine. Only the best people. etc. etc. Super great business environment.

Happy September 21st to those that celebrate!!! 😃 💃🏾🕺🏾

it’s important to do things for your teenage self every so often, as a way of staying on speaking terms with the person you used to be

Flights have been delayed and cancelled at airports including Heathrow after an alleged cyber attack targeted a service provider for check-in and boarding systems.

Yes, Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension was government censorship

Resident Alien (TV show) Just wanted to give a shout out to one the best shows to come out in recent years - “Resident Alien”. It ended last month after four amazing seasons and I just caught the last episode yesterday. “Resident Alien” is one of those rare shows that keeps the momentum going each…

Azure Runtime Environment – Installing a specific version of a module I have an Azure Automation Account Runtime Environment with a few Graph module installed. As you can see th existing ones are on version 2.25.0. I want to add the 'Microsoft.Graph.Applications' module. You'd think if I tried to…

Energy Secretary Chris Wright: "I'm working every day on using AI to figure out how to cure cancer or launch fusion energy or understand dark matter. Our Defense Department is trying to figure out how to keep America safe. God bless the First Lady. She of course is wiser than all of us."

Offshore wind is the most important ocean based climate solution, not marine carbon dioxide removal. I’m so angry.

This is such an insane statistic that it's hard to understand. 40% of what is shipped is fossil fuels -- not 40% of things are shipped *by* fossil fuels. 40% of *what is being carried* is the fossil fuels themselves.

Teams AOSP Phone; Conditional Access Blocks vs Grant Had an interesting issue at work that we resolved today. It's probably not relevant to most folks, but I enjoyed getting to the bottom of it with a colleague (who came up with the eventual fix) and wanted to make a note of it. We have…

Once again: LLMs are word-association algorithms. They are incapable of grokking that the words they parse correspond to actual objects & phenomena outside of their own algorithms. To an LLM, its statements depend not on facts but on how often words occur together in the material the're trained on.

Rosencrantz: Do you think death could possibly be a boat? Guildenstern: No, no,no (…) Death is the ultimate negative. Not - being. You can’t not - be on a boat. R.: I’ve frequently not been on boats. 🎭 T. Stoppard, Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead 🖼️ A. Böcklin, Isle of the Dead #BookWormSat

“- I ought to say, explained Pooh, (…) that it isn’t just an ordinary boat. Sometimes it’s a Boat, and sometimes it’s more of an Accident. It all depends. - Depends on what? - On whether I’m on the top of it or underneath it.” 📚 A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh #BookWormSat #ShipsandBoats

Export Azure AD Connect (Entra Connect) OUs to a CSV file Had to whip this up for a colleague. Turns out I was already doing this in one of my runbooks but had forgotten. Now that I rediscovered it, time to put it here for future reference. This PowerShell code will go through all your connectors…

PSPrivateMetadata is System.Collections.Hashtabl A follow-up to a previous post... I don't know if what I what I say below is accurate, take it with a pinch of salt. As mentioned in that post I have a function that checks if a runbook is already running, and if so waits or quits. One of the things…

Dia Browser Debuts with Contextual AI Chat, But Arc Users Feel Left Behind

Seichō Matsumoto’s “Inspector Imanishi Investigates” My second Seichō Matsumoto book. The first was "Tokyo Express" which was a shorter and more murder mystery than "Inspector Imanishi Investigates", and I enjoyed a lot. The solution to the mystery was very neat too. "Inspector Imanishi…

Ponman (Malayalam movie) Wasn't aware of the movie "Ponman" but stumbled upon it in Hotstar today and saw it. A must-watch thriller starring Basil Joseph, in a very different role, I loved it! Basil's been experimenting a lot nowadays, including Maranamass which I recently watched, and…