As of September the 20th, my site is hosted on Microsoft Azure, more specifically an Azure Storage account, using the Static Website feature! By making my site have a static front-end, the need to run it on script-enabled web-servers is gone and it can run on pretty much any host you can think of. Also by removing access to the dynamic scripts (WordPress back-end), the site’s attack surface decreased to 1/10 on an imaginary scale.

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On a warm summer day I noticed my central heating was on, which was odd to me. After looking at some of the heating elements, it turns out a thermostatic valve was broken. Now would a good as time as ever to make the heating smart, but how? With help of the cloud?  New dimension Enthusiastically I looked at all the products I could use to refit my heating system into a per-room cloud controlled system.

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Last weekend I decided I needed to improve my Powershell scripting skills for a technical training I’m attending this week and started working on a script that could download, install and configure several applications unattended on demand. More on that script in a later blog post, for now I will focus on a specific feature I needed to script in order to make it all work. One of the applications was still using a .

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The following post describes my personal setup in my home network to conserve power and how you can possibly do the same in your own home or small business setup. By implementing advanced standby / hibernation setups, you can have significant savings on power bills and reduce your carbon footprint. I will show how you can use power saving techniques without it becoming impractical. I should warn you this post can get quite technical in the end and may not work in your setup (totally depends on your network router).

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What can we expect to see of Windows 7 at the upcoming Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (or PDC) next week? I take a sneak peak at some of the features or improvements leaked, discussed or presented the last couple of weeks. This list isn’t accurate as Microsoft has deliberately been quiet about Windows 7 and its main features. Expect to hear about most of the following article next week when Windows 7 is officially uncovered to developers, IT pros, the press and the rest of the public at Microsoft PDC 2008!

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