Friday, November 24, 2017

Amaysim Energy

I thought this might be a good deal until I saw the price fact sheet.

https://www.amaysim.com.au/energy/energy-price-fact-sheets/ausgrid/solar-2/2

My bills would go up around 30% if I took this offer. What a rip off.  TOU Peak, Shoulder, Off Peak, CL1, supply charges are all higher than what Red energy currently offer (best offer so far for me has been Energy Australia)

This is a great example of you don't do the sums you'll be worse off.


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Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Pixel 2 XL - Boot loop issue

My wife's brand new Pixel 2 XL (2 weeks old) decided it would be really fun to get itself stuck in a boot loop. Wife looked down at phone to see it rebooting and thought that was odd. left it alone for an hour while stayed stuck on the 'G' boot screen with a scrolling progress bar.

About an hour later I got to look at it and talk to google support. they just advised to get into the recovery screen and try a 'shutdown'. This didn't fix the issue. Google then offered to replace the device saying there was a hardware issue.

I ended up resolving the issue before having to replace the phone. I had to wipe all the user data and do a factory reset from the recovery bootloader and this allowed the phone to boot correctly.

Total damage:
- Lost some photos and videos from that day
- Had to reload EVERYTHING again.
- Major pain in the ass.
- Confidence has been lost in this google product. Will this issue happen again?

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Thursday, November 02, 2017

SQL Reporting Services (SSRS) prompting for credentials when using a service account

I found what might be a bug in SSRS when using a service account and a custom installation folder. I found that when loading report builder is would prompt for credentials trying to connect to the web service URL. doesn't matter what you put in, it wouldn't let me through.

Looking at the security logs would show that the authentication was successful but then looking at the application logs I could see an issue with  ASP.NET 4.0.30319.0 when trying to read the 'ReportService2010.asmx' file in the SSRS installation folder.

Turns out the service account was missing rights to 'read' files in the SSRS install directory. It couldn't read the folder or the files within the folder. 

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