mancide's blog

Blog

  • Massive Undertaking

    You know what else is massive? NINJA’S GOT A LOW TAPER FADE….

    Er, um, well.

    Anyway, I’ve been trying to work through how to completely reconfigure the network at work while not crashing everything to the ground. I need to migrate everything off of a 192.168.0.0/16 that someone back before I had this position thought was a super cool, keen idea. I kinda see what they were attempting to do, but it would have been much cleaner to have segregated these segments out to VLANs and not done this massive superscope that they then statically assigned things in groups around the third octet.

    I’m also taking this time to move things off of VLAN1 and segregate some things onto their own VLAN, such as the camera system.

    I’ll keep you all updated on the progress, but so far I think I have a methodical plan to get this taken care of and no one will know anything changed except the people I keep emailing as I’m changing things.

    The next major upgrade will be changing out all this older network equipment.

  • Microsoft 365 Dynamic Mail Groups

    Yesterday was an interesting one for work. Our custom Dynamic Mail groups that had worked for well over a year stopped working, and we had to figure out how to redo them quickly. The best I could figure, Microsoft has made a change in how those custom rules worked, and nothing was being populated for our rule where we were attempting to determine the group membership based on the domain of the Primary SMTP address.

    We ended up pivoting to some of Microsoft’s pre-canned rules determining membership based on the company name field in AD and AzureAD. This was not a huge issue for half of our users as some already had this field populated with correct information. For the rest, I had to whip up a quick script to populate this field based off of their Primary SMPT domain. I’m sharing this Power Shell script below in case anyone comes across this post with a similar issue.

    #Import the AzureAD module

    Import-Module AzureAD

    #Connect to Azure AD

    Connect-AzureAD

    #Define the domain and the new company name

    $domain = “domain.com”
    $newCompanyName = “Company”

    #Get the user accounts with the specified domain

    $users = Get-AzureADUser -All $true | Where-Object { $_.UserPrincipalName -like “*@$domain” }

    #Update the company name for each user

    foreach ($user in $users) {
    Set-AzureADUser -ObjectId $user.ObjectId -CompanyName $newCompanyName
    Write-Output “Updated company name for user: $($user.UserPrincipalName)”
    }

    Write-Output “Company name update completed.”

  • 2025 Burger Week

    The menu for this year’s Burger Week was announced today, and I’m already planning my lunches.

  • WordPress Export File Located

    Wow, I thought a lot of this was lost to the ether of the Internet, but I located a wordpress export file I made before I let the site expire all those years ago. I doubt I’ll go through and fix the broken images of 250+ blog entries, but at least some of the content should be back. I wonder if the wildcard redirect will push things back to the new pages? Who knows, but a little bit of the early Internet blogosphere was restored today. Hooray, I guess.

  • 15 years…

    Hi. I have control of my original domain, mancide.net, for the first time in over 15 years. I made a decision to not renew it around 2009 to save myself a whole $12 or whatever the domain registration fee was. Big mistake. I’m not sure what I will do with this, I’m trying to restore what I have from how the site was in 2009, but restoring the blog may be the biggest challenge. Who knows what will show up here, as the world is wildly different than 15 years ago when this site was something I actively worked on.

  • Night at the Museum

    Night at the Museum is quite possibly the most straight-forward and short game you can play, apart from Avatar, to increase your gamerscore by a quick 1,000 points. The game only has 37 achievements, and most of them are pretty well laid out in-front of you. A few of them require some collectibles, but even those are not easy to miss. A couple of them do require knowing the specifics of the achievement, and which level they will appear in, but then you can simply replay any level that you need to after you finish the game. That task shouldn’t take you more than three hours, and that’s being generous for you to take it easy collecting the items you need.

  • Mini Update

    Mini Ninjas is quite an entertaining game. The graphics are great, and the overall art-style is quite cute and kid-like. The fact that the enemies turn into small woodland creatures after you defeat them adds to the child-like charm. This game is also a very easy 1000/1000 title, taking me only one play-through and a few level replays to mop up the few remaining achievements I didn’t pop during the main story attempt.

  • Big Game Hunting

    As I progress on my quest to complete Cabela’s Big Game Hunter 2008 to full completion, I got past one of the trickier rival hunt achievements last night. The Cougar cannot hit you during the “battle”, and he is quite sneaky sometimes coming out from the bush giving you little time to react to the dodge prompts. After a few restarts I was able to get this to pop, after shooting him more times than I feel that I should have had to shoot a Cougar with a high-powered rifle by the way.

  • Demon on Wheels

    This has to be one of the most frustrating achievements I have attempted. Trials HD ramps up in difficulty very quickly, and the last four tracks induce controller throwing rage, especially after you watch the replays from the top of the leader-boards to witness the ease they dispose of the challenging sections. Inferno II almost defeated me at the very end, I finally finished this challenging map with only 33 seconds left. I do not anticipate going back to attempt a speed run on any of these maps, nor do I foresee myself attempting 200/200 completion on this game because of my hatred for replaying this track ever again.

  • Forza 2

    So I have been playing a lot of Forza 2 lately in an attempt to finish up all of the races, as well collect all of the achievements I had not. Finishing out all of the races was not bad, but now I will be grinding out races to get the 1,000,000 Online Credits achievement, as well as enough credits to purchase the remaining cars I am missing from various regions. I wish back when I had originally played this game I had not purchased cars as I got credits, because I spent more money than I should have buying some cars. I bought a lot of cars before I got the 50% discount on non-race cars which would have went a lot way to helping me avoid the grind I am going to face to finish out these collector achievements. Oh well, this gives me something to work on in between easy Gamefly rentals.