My latest project: Vanchor (Virtual Anchor)

Vanchor is an Open Source trolling motor for smaller boats. It’s created with a goal to be cheap and easily modifiable to fit your needs. The total cost of the project including a cheap trolling motor is around $300.

• Project page
• Github

Features

Hold Position

Locks the boat in position by using GPS. It can be configured to an radius that fits the acuraccy of your GPS receiver.

Hold Heading

Locks the travel towards the current magnetic heading. It has 2 different modes:

• GPS Mode - Travels in a straight line from current destination to a waypoint 1000km away with the help of the AutoPilot. This counters side-drift that might occur.
• If GPS is not available, it will use the eCompass to try to hold heading. This does not counteract sidedrift in the same way as GPS Mode.

AutoPilot

AutoPilot reacts to NMEA APB sentences and steers the boat accordingly. The APB sentences can be generated in 2 ways:

1. From a plotter, like a Garmin, Humminbird or OpenCPL
2. From a GPX file with waypoints

NMEA server

Can send and receive NMEA to apps like Navionics, iNavX or SignalK

Web interface

Vanchor is controlled through a web interface with bootstrap and JS.

It’s been a while since my last post on this blog, but this is a quick one that might make your scripts run a bit faster if you want to fetch the UserAccountControl flags for multiple users (especially if you have thousands of users in AD).

You know when you read documentation about a task or problem you need to solve and you think ‘Thats easy!’. But you find yourself scratching yourself in the head 6 hours later… Sounds like the average IT-task right?

I wanted to write a new guide to show you the thought process that I have when I’m exploring .net classes in Powershell. And something that most of you use is Exchange so I wrote a few lines on how to explore and use the EWS API.

I got a task to come up with a method to import resource calendars in public folders to resource resource mailboxes instead. A lot of the methods I found online involved a lot of manual hand cranking, and that’t not viable for 100s of calendars.

Happened to go down the rabbit hole and found out that you can search the data stored by Windows Search in powershell.

A while back I decided to create a powershell module for todoist.

A while back we had a couple of session with microsoft, one of those focused on DR of Active Directory and another one was on AD health. Here are some of my notes and things learned. Some of them are obvious but might need a reminder and other ones might not be well known:

I wanted something that would run powershell scripts as a service easily and I never was a fan of running it with taskscheduler. This windows service reads the path of the script and it’s arguments from the app.conf file so you can run any powershell script that you want (i think). It also redirects output and errors to eventlog and terminates itself if the script would stop running. I have tested it on Windows Server 2012 and Windows 10.