Hello and welcome, dear visitor! I’m Roland, and you’ve found your way to theblackzone.net, my personal corner of the internet. Feel free to explore, enjoy, and make yourself at home!
Wow, just wow! Another year has flown by, and my website has seen… almost no
activity. An entire year without updates — apart from dusting off and uploading
one of my old music tracks. I don’t think that’s ever happened before, and it’s
definitely making its way onto my New Year’s resolutions list.
Of course, the usual excuse applies: it’s been a busy year (and believe me, it
really has been). Between juggling life, work, and everything in between, I’ll
admit I’ve been a bit too lazy to channel energy into keeping the site fresh.
But here’s the thing: I’m still here, and so is this little corner of the
internet.
As we step into 2025, I want to take a moment to wish each and every one of you
a prosperous, joyful, and healthy new year, no matter where you are. Let’s make
it a year to reconnect, create, and keep things a little less dusty — myself
included.
Here’s to new beginnings, fresh intentions, and perhaps a little more website
activity. Cheers to 2025! 🥂
A happy, healthy and prosperous new year to all of you! I know, I am a little
late to the party, but nevertheless I hope all of you have had a good start
into the new year and are doing well.
Last year felt like it passed quite quickly. I had been constantly busy with
one thing or another and most of my time, especially in the first half of the
year, had been taken by my day job. A company restructuring with many layoffs
and extensive organisational changes gave me a truckload of work.
What followed was an extraordinary warm summer, during which I was mostly
slacking and fooling around with some personal projects.
Starting in late summer, I began a complete overhaul of our company’s IT
documentation, mainly to adjust it to the changes that happend in the first
half of the year. But as it turned out, it also needed a lot of general
updating and in the end it became a project that kept me busy for almost the
rest of the year (rewritten from scratch, the resulting book currently has over
300 pages).
Apart from that, my main interests (and what I have spent most time on) had
been brushing up my knowledge of ARM assembly,
bare metal programming of the Raspberry Pi and
other low-level programming stuff, like operating system design in general.
Now, for 2024 I (maybe just like anybody else) have made myself some
resolutions and set some personal goals. But, as always, let’s wait and see
what becomes of it… 😀
That’s the title of this article on
Computerworld,
giving some interesting insight on Microsoft’s plans to bring desktop computing
to the cloud and strip businesses of the classical PC desktop.
While I wouldn’t go so far to predict an early death of Windows as a desktop
operating system, the article makes clear what we are heading for. At least in
the business world.
In my job as system administrator I can witness first hand how Microsoft is
aggressively moving services to the cloud. They are targeting every aspect of
business computing (because, that’s where the money is) and providing a Windows
desktop as a cloud service is just another piece in their grand picture.
Whether that’s good or bad? You decide for yourself… I could tell some stories.
Funnily, “Desktop as a service”, or DaaS for short, has been around for a very
long time. I remember using Triton Technologies “CoSession” back in the days of
the venerable DOS and Citrix
Metaframe later on in
the good old days of Windows NT.
Yet again it’s Microsoft that tries to sell you old wine in new bottles 😀
One of the most hated “features” that Microsoft has recently forced upon
Outlook M365 users is the new “Apps” sidebar on the left side of Outlook’s main
window.
The much hated Outlook sidebar
This nonsense takes up valuable screen estate on smaller laptop screens and
many users, including myself, prefer the “old” layout where the folder icons
are placed below the list of folder.
Well, luckily, at least for now, there is a way to get the old layout back by
turning the option “Show Apps in Outlook” off.
Open the “File” menu and select “Options”, then goto the “Advanced” section. There
uncheck the option “Show Apps in Outlook” and press “OK”
At the company I work for, we use Microsoft
Teams for video calls,
conferencing and collaborative work. Leaving its doubious technical aspects
aside, the tool mostly works for our colleagues and its usage is pretty
straightforward.
Nevertheless, not all of our employees are tech-savvy and used to this kind of
communication, especially some of the older workers. And so I get frequently
asked for some kind of introductory material which helps them getting started
with Microsoft Teams.
Luckily, Microsoft itself has some helpful resources and training materials for
Microsoft Teams available on their website, which, as it seems, are sometimes
overlooked.
Here’s a list of the most interesting parts for new users (links to German
versions), which I forward to new colleagues and those asking for help:
