I made a very quick video showing how fast it is to log onto a Windows 10 PC that has a Fingerprint reader.
The laptop in use is a Lenovo ThinkPad P50 which I will be reviewing soon!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGBp54UALk0
I log on all the time now doing this, you can actually put your finger on at startup before seeing the lock screen and it’s even quicker.
Side note – I need something better than the Samsung Galaxy S6 to make these videos on :)
It was time to get my first decent quality Bluetooth speaker. There is such a huge range in quality and price of these, with very little technical information easily available. Do I get a $79 speaker with pretty LCD colors on the front, or pay double for a brand name?
The price range goes from a sub $50AU point, up to several hundred dollars! After asking for advice on Twitter and getting a bunch of different answers, I’d settled on the JBL Flip 3.
This changed when I walked into the store and saw a different JBL on special for $40 more, but $80 off the regular price. More googling and review reading in store locked in my decision to now get the JBL Charge 2 Plus – even though something inside me was slightly concerned about 2 being less than 3.
Luckily, someone had decided to video a comparison of the two units in question:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmSppzPAzuQ
The reviewer chose the JBL Flip 3 due to it’s ‘loop’ cord. Not wanting to attach the speaker to my pants, I went against his recommendation and stuck with the JBL Charge 2.
JBL Charge 2 Plus in box
After getting my new purchase home, it was time to test it out:
JBL Charge 2 Plus not in box
All that was in the box was the speaker, some wrapping, and the charger cable:
Orange you glad there’s a charging cable?
The top of the speaker has the following easy to push buttons – power, bluetooth (for syncing), volume down, volume up, party mode and the call button:
Buttons with battery gauge dots in the middle
I didn’t test the party mode as it was only me, and that didn’t make for a fun party. I believe it lets you have multiple devices connected at once, and whoever plays music can take control from the last person playing music.
On the bottom reverse side, was the Micro USB in, Aux In, and USB Type-A out. You can charge other devices from this, which is handy if you want to leave a cheap tablet connected for a cool jukebox:
Bottom reverse of JBL Charge 2 Plus
Also cool were the side bass speakers, which visibly vibrate in excitement of the music they push out:
One of the side base speakers
The unit itself is quite hefty and solid feeling – putting it inside a pillow case would turn it into a very strong weapon.
Connectivity via Bluetooth was incredibly easy to do – press the Bluetooth button on the speaker, then go to your other device and scan for Bluetooth devices. Selecting ‘JBL Charge 2 Plus’ connected them together without any pins or codes required.
The sound itself that came out of the speaker was unlike cooked pasta – crisp. I was actually impressed with what I heard, exceeding my expectations of what a small speaker could do.
The speaker also functions as a speaker phone, which I also haven’t tested but assume it works. If someone really wants me to, I’ll call them and they can hear if I sound OK, then report back.
Despite not having a comparison for myself, I’d definitely recommend this speaker to someone having a look. How it compares to the JBL Flip 3 I’m not sure, but it does come with a loop.
Today a new version of Azure AD Connect was released – v1.1.105.0 (even though the site says 2/16/2016, but wasn’t there yesterday!)
The download link is here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=47594
If you want a reminder on what Azure AD Connect is, Microsoft have a great article here. It replaced Dirsync and AADSync
It’s worth the upgrade, full release notes are here but the big change in my opinion is:
New preview features:
30 minutes is much nicer to wait for a change (this doesn’t include passwords) than 3 hours.
Note that this used to be controlled from a scheduled task in DirSync and AADSync, but now runs as the Microsoft Azure AD Sync service. If you want to check that your sync has now changed to 30 minutes, run the PowerShell command “Get-ADSyncScheduler” and you should see the values of AllowedSyncCycleInterval and CurrentlyEffectivSyncCycleInterval both as 30 minutes:
If you’ve already got the connector installed, it will just install over the top using your existing settings. It just requires re-entry of your Azure AD credentials for syncing, and took me about two minutes to run.
Success!
Update: 1st March 2016
Due to a bug with the time, version 1.1.110.0 has been released. Please use that instead of 1.1.105.0
A new 13.3″ laptop from Lenovo arrived for me, so I thought I’d put it through it’s paces and see how it compared. Don’t confuse this with the Yoga 900S which is due out soon
The laptop arrived in a simple plain white but stylish looking box:
Inside, was a silver Lenovo Yoga 900. It could have been gold, or orange like my older Yoga Pro 2 which I’m a huge fan of, but the silver is still very nice. The Yoga 900 follows on from the Yoga Pro 3, which I reviewed and compared to the Yoga Pro 2. The Yoga 900 is more of a refresh to the Yoga Pro 3, providing an i series Intel CPU rather than the M – (more power!) at the cost of a little more weight and thickness. Regardless of this, it’s still a really thin and light laptop, which I’d prefer to have the extra power of an i5 or i7 CPU in anyway.
It’s still a very slick looking consumer laptop, just like it’s predecessors. This has already ended up being my primary laptop to use at home on the couch!
Lenovo Yoga 900
Let’s have a look at the various hardware aspects:
Keyboard/Trackpad: Nothing much has changed with the keyboard, and that’s a good thing. One of the first settings I change in the BIOS is to toggle the top row of keys to be function keys primarily (F1-F12) as I tend to use these more than the other options such as screen brightness or volume. Personally, this style of keyboard I find very quick to type on – the keys aren’t very clicky, but are spaced out enough and still give enough tactile feedback to make typing smooth and fast for my style. Keyboard is backlit and has the normal high/low/off options.
The trackpad doesn’t have dedicated buttons, but is still nice enough to use. As you can tell from the picture below, my greasy mitts quickly left a mark on the trackpad, but that can be easily wiped off. Looking at someone with a more professional review and getting paid to do it, they had similar marks so I don’t feel as bad :) This is the case for most laptops these days anyway.
Keyboard and Trackpad
Screen: This is a very glossy screen. It was hard to take a picture of it on a good angle due to the reflection, but that was only while taking the photo. It wasn’t actually as bad while using it. The screen resolution is a very high 3200×1800, very clear, crisp and bright. My picture doesn’t really do it justice! Touch screen too, so if you flip the lid into tablet mode, you can easily navigate around or read an ebook.
Yoga 900 Screen
Yes, I do like what I see!
Ports: On the right side, there’s power, the setup/bios button, orientation lock, audio out and a USB 3 port:
Yoga 900 right side ports
On the left side, we have a power cable (same as Yoga 3) which doubles as a USB 2 port, a USB 3 port, a USB Type-C port and a SD Card slot:
Yoga 900 left side ports
It was at this stage I was wondering what happened to video out. This was the first laptop I’d had with the USB Type-C, so my suspicions were that this new port was the answer – and it is. USB Type-C is forming to be the new de facto standard USB port. Apple Macs already have it, Windows Lumia 950/950XL phones do too, along with a bunch of other new devices. It pushes though audio and video as well as data (I know, audio and video ARE a type of data) which means this single port can do a lot. Even better, a cable or device plugged into this port will work either way around, so no longer will you need to hope you’ve got that USB stick the right way around. To top it off, it’s twice as fast as USB 3 at 10Gbps.
Other Hardware: Of course there’s the watch style hinge, which still works as solidly as it did on the Yoga Pro 3, it’s hard not to notice it:
Yoga Pro 900 hinge
There’s also two JBL speakers on the base of the unit which provide some rather decent stereo sound, which end up behind the top of the screen when in tablet mode:
Yoga 900 speaker
As I mentioned before, this is still a very light and thin laptop at 324W x 225H x 14.9D mm – much thinner than the new SurfaceBook Pro as a comparison:
SurfaceBook vs Yoga 900
All the tech specs are available from Lenovo, but the model I have contains:
Quite decent specs! It is only $200AU more for the i7 which you should consider if you need the extra grunt, or want a bit more longevity out of the laptop.
Usage: I set up the laptop with my Microsoft account, and tried a little Hearthstone with both the touchpad and touch. Worked perfectly. Battery life seemed to be really good, as I had been carrying it around in my bag for a week before getting the chance to play, and it was at around half charge – and lasted about 3 hours. Hearthstone pushes the laptop a fair bit, so I wasn’t expecting to get that close to 4.5 hours.
From what I’d want from a regular use laptop (that’s not a gaming laptop, or crazy high specc’d with the matching size and weight), the Yoga 900 ticks all the boxes – but just make sure you invest in something like a USB Type-C to HDMI type connector if you need to do video out, so you can plug into everything else you have.
Should You Buy It? On this one, I’m going to say most likely “yes”. I’d suggest this over the Yoga Pro 3 due to the newer and better CPU. It’s at quite a reasonable price considering the US$ for Australians at $2199, and in the US it’s currently $1099. The screen doesn’t detatch, but to me this is unnecessary if you can fold it over into tablet mode and still have a powerful, light and thin device to use compared to the SurfaceBook. The upcoming Yoga 900S is going to be less powerful with the Core M cpu, so I’d only pick that if you had very basic requirements and really wanted a ridiculously thin laptop. Also Intel’s 7th gen CPU isn’t due until late 2016, and even then it’ll take a while to turn up in different devices – so you’re future proofed for a while.
Got any questions or comments? Ask and I’ll do my best to answer!
Running a Wake On LAN can be tricky if you’ve got lots of subnets to worry about. A magic packet will only work in the local subnet unless you happen to have complete access to your entire network and make some router changes.
There’s also ‘Wake Up Proxy‘ which was added to Configuration Manager that can potentially work too as it’s peer to peer and clients try to wake each other up, but won’t work in a lot of scenarios such as 802.1X.
In light of these, I wrote a script that was a mashed up version of a few things I could find and accomplish the task of sending WOL packets to each subnet I cared about.
What this script does:
This is valuable to me for software installs that require no user logged onto a computer. It will leave all computers at the login screen, ready for software installs.
This only works in a single subnet though, so the next trick is to set this up on a server in each subnet as a scheduled task. Each server is configured to check the SCCM collection of computers that exist in that subnet. Then, a master task is created that calls the task on each of the other servers:
This master task triggers all the WOL scripts, on a schedule or on demand as you wish. You need to use an account that has access on all servers required of course to be able to remotely trigger the scheduled tasks.
I’ll also note that Adam Bertram wrote a different WOL script that will find each subnet and use any PC it can find to send WOL commands to other computers which is worth checking out. It doesn’t incorporate the forced reboot, but should be modifiable to achieve that result.
The script uses the free wol.exe program from Gammadnye and is expecting to run from C:\Scripts\ but you can change that to whatever you like without breaking anything.
Download the script here (rename to .ps1)
Start-Transcript -path C:\Scripts\Log\wolreboot.txt
$SiteCode = ‘SCCM Site Code goes here’
$CollectionName = ‘Target collection name goes here’
#Retrieve SCCM collection by name
$Collection = GWMI -ComputerName $siteServer -NameSpace “ROOT\SMS\site_$SiteCode” -Class SMS_Collection | where {$_.Name -eq “$CollectionName”}
#Retrieve members of collection
$SMSMembers = GWMI -ComputerName $SiteServer -Namespace “ROOT\SMS\site_$SiteCode” -Query “SELECT * FROM SMS_FullCollectionMembership WHERE CollectionID=’$($Collection.CollectionID)’ order by name” | select NameForEach ($SMSMember in $SMSMembers){
If (test-connection $SMSMember.Name -Count 1 -quiet)
{
write-host $SMSMember.Name “Online”
$name = $smsmember.name
Start-Process Shutdown “-r -t 300 -m \\$name -c `”Initiating scheduled maintenance reboot. You have 5mins to save your before your PC will reboot`”” -NoNewWindow -Wait
}
Else
{
$a = (GWMI -ComputerName $siteServer -Class SMS_R_SYSTEM -Namespace root\sms\site_$SiteCode | where {$_.Name -eq $SMSMember.Name}).MACAddresses
$a = $a -replace ‘:’,”
foreach ($mac in $a){
C:\Scripts\\wol.exe $mac
write-host $SMSMember.name “WOL packet sent” $mac
write-host `r`n}
}
}
Stop-TranscriptExit
Update 9th August 2016
A few changes to the script – it’ll now log via transcript, but more importantly will support SCCM client objects with multiple MAC addresses, and broadcast each found MAC address.
