David Thacker Blog

So this is just a quick personal post - about the product NerdVision. So in May 2020, I shifted my focus from the general focus of Intergral onto the product NerdVision ; while I have had input from the inception of NerdVision, it hadn’t been my sole focus.  Since May the Team has done a fantastic job, we have brought out support for several new technologies, and we have experimented with different approaches to things; some have been a great success and some a little more complicated. These last 3 months have, in many ways, been made more difficult by COVID-19. But in other ways, it has made things easier, especially from a meeting perspective.  So what is some of the progress has the team made so far?  Launched the new website and a new UI with support for lite and dark themes https://www.nerd.vision/ Support for Dynamic logging https://www.nerd.vision/post/change-log-messages-without-restart Support For Adobe ColdFusion https://www.nerd.vision/post/nerd-vision-now-supp...

Over a period of time you will collect many passwords and accounts inside google chrome if you use chrome to manage your passwords. At some point you may wish to remove all these passwords or atleast clean up a large number of them. Dealing with them inside chrome or passwords.google.com can be a longwinded pain if you want to 50+ passwords. It may not be obvious but you can bulk manage passwords in chrome /google quickly and easily at-least you can at the time of writing using chrome 78. Right so before we get started we should make sure that we will be able to re-import the passwords back into chrome once we are done. 1) go to chrome://flags and search for ‘import’ and then make ‘Password import ‘ set to enabled. ) 2) You will now get a prompt to relaunch google chrome, relaunch 3) Now make your way back to chrome://settings/passwords and you will now see the option to import where export once was. If you want to check import works first, do this now. Bulk Managing passwords into Chr...

So this week we have been celebrating just a bit, we just released a brand new service called nerd.vision its a developer tool that allows the developer to debug their environment whether that is production or local. No matter what your skill it gives you ‘nerd vision’ get it, yeah cool right ?! nerd.vision is a freemium tool and in its initial release all features are free we are super pumped to get it out to the developer communities - to kick things off we are supporting python and java, with node, php and many other languages coming soon.  Want a feature that you do not see submit it here: https://www.nerd.vision/product/roadmap and get your friends to vote for it. Anyway, as the title suggests this is about doing things right, so in the past with past products we have continued to use ‘older’ style products which are enterprise grade mainly due to what was available at the time and a lack of need for change in the underlying systems.   Digital River for Ecommerce SalesFo...

So we love the Google Hangouts Meet hardware, so much so we equipped all our meeting spaces with them with a mixture of the Logitech PTZ and Huddly camera setups paired to the Asus Chromebox 3 and Mimo Vue touch screen display, Meet speaker etc. During a recent update the Mimo Vue touch screen display, stopped responding to touch input. We tried everything, powering down the devices pressing reset etc etc. The google diagnostic tool from the admin panel reported everything as all OK too. In the end what we did to fix it was hold the reset button on the back of the Mimo view display down for 30 - 60 seconds and the device started working again. (Will add a photo soon). I am surprised this worked as I would of expected the full powering down and unplugging of devices should of achieved a similar result but obviously something more is happening when the reset button is held.

So you want to embrace a digital transformation and stop running your file server, mail server etc internally. Running all these systems internally has a cost on the workforce, as these systems age and grow they demand more attention. For us the GDPR caused us to look into all of our systems, understand where and what every bit of data we had and how we should deal with it. It caused us to ask the questions of do we still want to maintain these systems and be responsible for these systems security. Initially we looked into systems like, BOX, Dropbox, Amazon work mail etc.The problem with these systems they are disjointed, and the cost quickly adds up.   Then we looked into Gsuite, Office 360 and Zoho Office. Zoho office was the first one out it didn't seem a great set up for a business our size. Next was Office 360 it was a possibility  but as the Dev team use Linux it probably would not be the best fit. There was nothing wrong and for the windows users of the business it would...

When setting up a computer, especially a Family computer - you may want to block application installs if non admin or similar.  Now looking online this is possible if the application is installed via the windows installer -(  gpedit.msc) see link to use: http://www.thewindowsclub.com/how-to-prevent-users-from-installing-programs-in-windows-7 But for applications like Chrome & Mozilla Firefox and many others they do not need access to the windows installer to be installed. But what you can now do in the latest version of Windows 10 is to set up an admin account and enable 'Allow Apps from the Windows Store Only' See this guide on how to enable it : https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-to-permit-block-on-apps-installing-if-theyre-not-from-microsoft-store/ Now when you log into the user account they can only install apps from the windows store. So we are almost there. Finally what we need todo is block the windows store : https://docs.microsoft.co...

Finding MTU on Mac Right so you have just moved house and your internet falls off when you connect to your works VPN - likelihood is your MTU is set too high for your ISP. Searching for this on the net there is a ton of misinformation. So usually the mac has a maximum MTU of 1500 for some ISP’S this limit needs to be set much lower. So first lets take a look at what your macs MTU currently is. ToDo this: 1.Open ‘Terminal’ 2.Type: " networksetup -getMTU en0" This will return you with what your MTU is currently set at. For Macs this is usually 1500. Now you need to test what is the maximum MTU you can use on your connection 3. In terminal enter: "ping -D -s 1500 www.google.com" ,  You will probably get the message ‘ping: sendto: Message too long' Procedure to find optimal MTU: If your MTU is currently set too low, for example 576, the following procedure will not be able to detect whether you have discovered the "Optimal MTU size"...

If your HTML and CSS skills are lacking or are not as good as they should be then you should consider an HTML editor ( https://html-cleaner.com/ ) that will allow you to copy and paste plain text, edit it and then copy out the marked up HTML. Now I will only use this method if I need to quickly change or update a basic HTLM template usually you can edit the template in a WYSIWYG editor inside MailChimp or similar but if you need to create a basic HTML for your email something like :  https://html-cleaner.com/ is not a bad choice for quickly getting the text out. If Mandrill the service we used included a editor inside Mandrill and not in another service (MailChimp) then this would be perfect.   If you would like to get in touch or have any questions then  please do not hesitate to get in contact.

2 Weeks in with the Macbook Pro So after 2 weeks of using the MacBook Pro,  I have not needed to go back to Windows the only thing I needed was to install Excel as Numbers was not feature rich enough. Using the MacBook Pro is a joy and the hardware is fantastic. I dont really have anything to complain about. If you try to use it like a Windows PC you will not enjoy it but if you accept the workflow of the Mac and adapt to its way you will be happy. The same apply's to Mac users going to Windows. The workflow is much more focused per screen than compared to what windows users expect and may find the focus limiting/ frustrating coming from Windows. Spark Mail - is amazing and has allowed me to deal with email much more effectively instead of hating dealing with outlook everyday. I would say that Spark Mail - is worth getting the mac for  that alone. Sofar I really love the Mac but I still have a place in my life for a Windows Machine too - just make sense that it is fairly recent has...

Beginning  as a startup we required a low-cost phone solution as we grew we opened more offices we needed additional local numbers for the offices we were opening. The solution  we needed would be a VOIP one, Skype had facilitated our growth with little investment. We had used Skype on daily basis for the last 8 years, it enabled our business to have lines so that we were able to operate collocated offices in Germany, France, UK and also America. Skype was by no means perfect but for us it worked up until the day that Skype decided to kill off personalised voicemail… We never received any prior notification that our voicemail would be deactivated. Our first realization was when our phone started to ring out, no stand in voice mail just the phone ringing out. We needed a quick solution that would allow us to recover have voicemail and integrate into FrontApp any other feature at this moment was just nice to have. The options we reviewed were TalkDesk, AirCall.io & JustCall   Tal...

As described in a previous post the team were struggling with managing a shared IMAP Inbox. Emails were going missing or getting incorrectly marked up as Junk. We needed a solution we chose FrontApp. Getting to know FrontApp Automatic Rules Easy to apply inbox rules to carry out specific actions depending on the type of email. We have over 62 rules in place that manage a wide variety of scenarios from. These can be triggered on the body of an message, subject, from address and many more. Further that this you can use a combination of all of them to achieve the correct workflow rules. There are over 30 conditions that you can filter from, 17 Actions that can take place such as automatically pushing a leas to Salesforce or any other CRM you may have. If you want to read more about these rules it would be best to read FrontApps Documentation for it. Not just for Email FrontApp is not just for processing and dealing with emails it can deal with messages from pretty much any channel you can...

In 2014 my team had a issue we were using a standard shared IMAP inbox. Using thunderbird to connect and tags to distribute the work to the team members. This was fine when we had a single sales person working on the inbox and email volume was low. But business was picking up and so was the volume of emails coming in. We were managing but every so often an email would go astray. This was either due to human error or an over zealous junk email filter. We needed a better solution. The standard communication method in the business world is email. Instant chat tools like Slack, Hipchat and Google Hangouts. These tools do bridge the gap between communities and teams for much more rapid communication. Internally we use Hipchat and its good. There are some issues due to the rate that chats progress. Team members can miss out on vial info. Especially notifications and tags are not correctly setup. Most communication platforms are closed. Requiring an invitation or a corporate email to access t...