Tag: en

Blog annual stats (v2021)

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This year has a lot less posts as i have stopped doing M365 news in January. I still post in Technology category occasionally and some new articles get some views, but not that many. Also sometimes i repost in LinkedIn and i get some traffic from there. I have decided to post about interesting M365 news directly on LinkedIn. Got tired of collecting all the news and summarizing them. Again a few posts about board games, books. Will use Matomo for page views stats this year again. Because numbers differ from Google Analytics (Matomo has a bit higher count) and it will be better to compare with numbers from the same system.

  • Posted 26 entries (-50):
    • Technology – 15 (-36), stopped doing M365 news, also decided not to post Firefox release notes, so next year will have even less posts;
    • Reviews – 6 (-12), less books read, less movies or TV series watched;
    • Movies – 3 (-5), only 3 movies watched during Kinopavasaris, no completed TV series to write about, but i have watched lots of old movies, starting with all James Bond films;
    • Books – 2 (-6), bad year for reading, only managed to finish two first books in Dune series;
    • Board Games – 2 (-2), only 1 review in LT for Carcassonne and yearly stats, not playing that much either;
    • General – 2 (-);
    • Artwork – 2 (-);
    • Top 10 – 1 (-);
    • TV series – 0 (-1).
  • No comments this year (-2).

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Yearly Board Games Stats 2021 [EN]

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Usual stats from Board Games Stats app. At some point stopped playing a lot on Yucata. No live plays this year. So numbers dropped considerably again. I have only tried a few new games at the very beginning of 2021, but they didn’t grab me, so not many plays and not enough to review even. Based on number of plays i have cooled down on Oracle of Delphi and Firenze. But they still are my favorite games, just less desire to play anything this year 🙂

General stats:

  • Plays: 46 (-61)
  • Games: 18 (-10)
  • Players: 41 (-59), 99% Yucata, a few games on BGA
  • Locations: 2 (-) (Yucata and Board Game Arena)
  • H-index: 4 (-1) (x games played at least x times)

Most played games:

  • Rajas of the Ganges: 7 (-5)
  • The Oracle of Delphi: 6 (-15)
  • Thunderstone: 5 (-4)
  • Cacao: 4 (-1)
  • Firenze: 3 (-15)
  • Hadara: 3 (new)
  • Zooloretto: The Dice Game: 3 (-1)
  • Las Vegas: 2 (-1)
  • Res Arcana: 2 (new)
  • Santiago de Cuba: 2 (new)

Favorite player count: 2 (no change 🙂 )

Games played live: 0 (-6)

Cloud managed Edge IE Mode site list [EN]

wroot 3 Comments

In my last article regarding IE Mode i have griped that MS allowed to host site list file in the cloud, but there was no option to actually modify and publish it using M365 console. Well, this is now fixed. Microsoft presented a new section in M365 Admin Console called Microsoft Edge site list, which allows to manage multiple site lists, add URLs, save versions and publish them. There is also an option to import xml file with a list. Then you can copy ID of such site list and use it in Intune device profile to push that site list and a setting to use it to selected groups of devices. Alternatively you can use ConfigMgr or regular group policies. Although it is not clear how you can use just ID with group policies. I think it still requires a path to the file. But if you are in Intune camp completely, then this is a nice way to get rid of hosting files manually in Azure and a nice way to have different rings of devices with different sets of sites that has to be opened with IE mode. More information in this article on MS Tech Community.

Fixing Japanese and Chinese IME problem [EN]

wroot 1 Comment

From my understanding the “Japanese IME is not ready yet.” (or Chinese) error started appearing sometime around 1903 was released. There are tons of articles and questions on internet regarding this issue with not many working solutions. Especially for restricted corporate environment. We have started seeing reports about this error while pushing 20H2 version. But it seems such problems were also observed after 1903 update (or maybe even earlier) and some IT staff was “fixing” it by copying IME files from older version into new essentially replacing it. This doesn’t work with latest Windows 10 versions. Not to say this is not a pretty solution anyway. I had to involve Microsoft support recently to tackle this and below are my findings and kind of a solution for this.

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Fixing Windows Defender RCE vulnerability in mpengine.dll [EN]

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In this post I will share my experience with fixing a vulnerability related to built-in Windows/Microsoft Defender antivirus (not to confuse with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint service). This is an integral part of Windows 10 and is still present on the system in some form even when you use a third-party AV solution. In that case it should be dormant and can be used for just a simple scan. But sometimes it can be not the case.

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SMTP Server As a Relay to Exchange Online [EN]

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With Microsoft hammering down on Basic Auth support in Exchange Online many systems admins are wondering what to do about email function in multi function printers and scanners and other internal systems that have to send emails (SharePoint and similar). Although it seems that SMTP Auth might stay available a bit longer even after the final date in October of 2022. Still, there could be better options to avoid problems when Basic Auth is gone and MFPs cannot send emails directly to Exchange Online using just email and password. I am not 100% sure below provided setup will work all the time, but it was recommended by our MS partners and listed on Microsoft support page. Read More

6 years

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The blog is 6 years old today. A short overview of changes (full summary as usual on January 1st). This year i have stopped doing Microsoft 365 news posts. Same as with board games news it became too tedious to keep up with the avalanche of news and to do short summaries of all of them in Lithuanian. So, after doing this for 2 years i’ve decided to stop. Now i only occasionally post something on LinkedIn with a link to a news article and my short summary or opinion. This feels more comfortable. I try to pick only something that stands out or is interesting to me or readers. As i don’t post it here, i get less traffic to my blog. But i am still getting enough views of old articles (some are still puzzling). Also stopped doing Firefox release posts as i got disappointed with Firefox in general and stopped posting in a local community that i used to post about Firefox news. Have only done 9 technology articles, 2 books, 3 movies and 1 board game review so far. I might finish one more book before the end of this year or do another review of an old board game in collaboration with D6.lt. But this year will be scarce on content. And i kind of start to feel an urge to start doing some series again 🙂

Mozilla Firefox 89.0 – Proton Redesign [EN]

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This will be my last post about new Firefox versions and this time in English. I started posting release notes in Lithuanian here a few years ago as i was posting them in a local forum, so i figured i will post this in my blog and then copy to that forum. Which is nearly dead now. As well as my interest in posting such things 🙂

It feels like only yesterday i was writing about my concerns about Quantum update (with its Photon UI). It killed a lot of things i liked about Firefox (customization and ability to extend various features). I have adjusted to that and to the loss of many extensions, although i still miss some of them and more robust tabs handling (multi rows, tabs opening position, etc.). I didn’t like the UI changes as well, but it was easier to get used to.

Seems that redesigns and UI changes happen more often in Firefox now. Maybe this is an attempt to stay relevant (even bad press is still press). Some will hear negative comments and will be curious to try to see is it really that bad. But i believe that influx of new users is not as high as exodus of long time users.

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Blog annual stats (v2020)

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Last year i have mentioned that i have started using Matomo. But it was in the middle of 2019, so i couldn’t use it for annual stats. Now that i have used Matomo for a complete year and also given the fact that i’ve screwed up in February by uninstalling old Google Analytics add-in in WordPress without realizing it is actually connecting my page to GA (i have lost 20 days of stats because of it), i decided to use Matomo numbers instead of GA for page views this time. I have compared them and they of course are very similar. Matomo numbers are a bit higher. Not sure if it counts differently or because of that 20 days gap in GA. But i like higher numbers better 😀 Will see, maybe next year i will go back to GA numbers or maybe i will get rid of Google Analytics completely. Although it is nice to have two options, if one suddenly stops working. The 2020 stats:

  • Posted 76 entries (-36):
    • Technology – 51 (-37), there were no Insider build posts at all this year, now i am only posting about final releases of next Windows 10 versions; about the same amount of Microsoft 365 news and a few other articles here and there (Android, Spark);
    • Reviews – 18 (new), this is a new category which combines my reviews for books, movies, TV series, so the number is high;
    • Books – 8 (+1), just finished last book a day ago to make this number higher 😀 ;
    • Board Games – 4 (-3);
    • Movies – 8 (+5), last year i have explored the option of watching Kinopavasaris movies digitally at home, so i have watched more movies this way and i kind of liked it;
    • General – 2 (-1);
    • Artwork – 2 (+1);
    • Top 10 – 1 (-);
    • TV series – 1 (+1).
  • Removed Next Game category (it is now Board Games and Reviews combined) and a few other old categories that didn’t have any posts for years.
  • Have received even two comments this year (+2) and actually replied to one of them. And also received an email regarding one of the articles. Btw, started using Antispam Bee because older plugin became a bloated money grab. This one is very good dealing with spam comments and is free.

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