army of two: the devil’s cartel (xbox360)

i received this game some time ago for free from games with gold but never played it. not too long ago i wanted to load up a co-op game and the “army of two” name seemed to obviously indicate it was co-op. i didn’t have high hopes for this game as it looked pretty generic.

i finished the game yesterday and the story is cliche, lame, predictable, etc. reminds me of a michael bay movie. the highlight of the game to me was the gameplay it’s actually pretty well done in my opinion. all of the weapons i tried out were fun to use and being able to acquire new weapon loadouts helped keep the game from getting stale. the game overall is too long at 49ish missions. i was especially getting bored during the missions where you trudge through catacombs and cemeteries (it seemed to never end). the game does pick up again during the end sequence though. the game switches it up on some missions with driving a truck, firing from a truck, or firing from a helicopter, which adds some variety.

i didn’t realize that i had been playing the game on easy mode all along as opposed to medium/normal. some of the last few missions were pretty difficult even on easy which makes me think that the games harder modes may be impossible. for instance, after beating the game i’m replaying it on hard mode and i’m on mission 10 or so and the enemies do a lot more damage and they blind fire often. their blind fire is also impossibly accurate all the time too. about half way through the game (on any mode) the enemies are helmeted and armored and take several (or lots) shots to kill.

i don’t really care if the story sucked in this game because i never played it for its story. i think it does a pretty good job of what it goes out to accomplish. i’m not familiar with the other titles in the army of two series, but i’m interested in checking them out if they’re more of the same. to me, devil’s cartel was easy to get to get into, had fun gameplay, and was just pure dumb entertainment.

Posted in: Games by resinblade Comments Off on army of two: the devil’s cartel (xbox360)

vcsa 6.0: error while extracting local SSO users

after successfully adding an AD domain as an identity source in vcenter i was unable to expand a listing of domain users and groups from within the vcenter SSO settings. this also failed when i tried to set up vcenter permissions for domain users.  i kept receiving this message: “error while extracting local sso users”.

i eventually found out this problem is caused by domain controllers missing reverse lookup DNS records. once i added the missing records in DNS this problem was resolved.

source:
https://communities.vmware.com/thread/506270?start=0&tstart=0

Posted in: IT by resinblade Comments Off on vcsa 6.0: error while extracting local SSO users

vdp 6.1

in previous VDP versions it was possible to do direct upgrades to the latest version. unfortunately, there is no direct upgrade path from 6.x to 6.1.x. a new 6.1 appliance must be deployed and the old VDP appliance’s settings and data can be migrated to it.
source: https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2127665

if you try to simply mount a 6.1.x upgrade iso to an older appliance it won’t be recognized as an update package. also a side note regarding vdp upgrade packages…it takes a few minutes for the package to appear after an iso is attached to the VM. i have seldom seen the package appear immediately after mount.

Posted in: IT by resinblade Comments Off on vdp 6.1

south park: stick of truth (xbox360)

i just got this game and played it all the way through within 2 days. that’s fairly abnormal behavior for me because i usually play games in spurts and i have been known to let a few weeks or months go by between game playing sessions. i really enjoyed this game and this is one of those occasions where my personal opinion matches those of the game reviewing press. i finished the game and all side quests within about 16 hours. and i’d say that i definitely was not speed running through the game. i took a lot of time looking for hidden items, side quests, and misc. events. i also ended up with 115 facebook friends and 76/103 of the equipment items (i wasn’t really trying for either of these). on the other hand, i was definitely trying to find all the chinpokomon and was successful in doing so.

i hope this game wins awards for how it pulled off the visuals and virtually seamless gameplay. the entire game feels and looks like an interactive south park episode. i’ve played a lot of games over the years and i can’t say that i’ve played anything quite like it. for the sake of clarification, i’m not saying it plays like an interactive movie (i.e. dragon’s lair), i am specifically talking about the look and feel only. you’re definitely in control of the gameplay except for the occasional cutscene/scripted event.

the visuals catch your attention first and then the game’s story maintains your attention. the story is laden with quality south park humor. i really think that if you didn’t know anything about the show you could still enjoy this game…depending on whether or not you dislike crude adult humor and/or are easily offended. the game almost seems to make it a point to cover several potentially offensive topics.

info:
blocking is mandatory! high armor
junk items are just there to be sold (i ended up with $300 even after the hasslehoff surgery)

helpers:
stan
kyle
cartman (good group damage, but dies often)
butters (fairly weak, but professor chaos ability is awesome)
jimmy (didn’t find him that useful)

good things:
innovation in rpg. per battle focus, battle avoidance
transit system
creativity and diversity of the levels
insane attention to detail and character cameos (even the facebook updates are funny)
difficulty is good (normal)

things that i didn’t like or felt could be tweaked…
i could see that some people would be upset by the overall shortness of the game. i take somewhat of a middle ground stance on this. the main quests and side quests can be completed within 15 hours. i spent 43 hours playing mass effect 1, but the main quests could have been completed in 20 hours. the additional 23 hours of side quests and what not in ME1 were for the most part filler. so i think having 15 hours of solid fun to play gameplay is an admirable feat. not once did i feel that any particular quest was a tedious chore. i have felt otherwise playing several other games. i would always prefer to have quality over quantity. however, i did purchase the stick of truth for $30 and i while i feel that price is fair for what i got out of the game, i may have not felt the same if i had purchased the game for $40+. if i had paid more for the game i could see myself desiring that it be a couple of hours longer. considering the various difficulties in the development process though i’m very happy with the final product.

max levels (15)
hand holding/nagging
battle controls/tutorial precision controls
equipment strapons/patches

Posted in: Games by resinblade Comments Off on south park: stick of truth (xbox360)

outlook: remove unwanted mailbox

i’ve been trying to figure out this one off and on for a while now. at one point i was testing some calendaring items by giving myself full access to another mailbox. since i had full access, the mailbox automatically showed up as another account in outlook. which was fine, but after removing my access to the mailbox the entry in outlook remained. i reverified that i no longer had full access or any other delegate permissions. i tried recreating my OST and mail profile. the fact that the entry would show up on multiple devices made me realize it wasn’t a local issue. i verified that under my account settings i had no other mailboxes specified. so after all that and no luck i gave up and decided it was time to google.

i wasn’t that confident that i was going be able to find out anything online since this seemed like something that would be difficult to search for. fortunately, i was wrong and found an article that explained the situation perfectly.

to remove the unwanted entry from outlook, you must go the the user account of the mailbox you once had access to and use attribute editor to edit the MsExchDelegatesListLink attribute. then remove the entry or entries for the accounts that should not be there.

also for future reference it looks like you can prevent mailbox automapping by using the Add-MailboxPermission cmdlet -AutoMapping $False.

source:
http://www.slipstick.com/exchange/removing-managed-mailboxes-from-an-outlook-profile/

Posted in: IT by resinblade Comments Off on outlook: remove unwanted mailbox

office365: unified groups

unified groups are apparently some kind of strange abomination that’s like 3/4 exchange online and 1/4 sharepoint online. in other words, this group doesn’t seem to exclusively exist in either application. the concept is cool but the there’s a huge downside (at least to me) is that by default users can create these groups and name them whatever they want all day long. even worse, they can purposely or inadvertently make the group public as opposed to private. the contents are then available to everyone in the tenant.

the management in the current admin GUI for these groups is very minimal. there are far more options available in powershell:
https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Use-PowerShell-to-manage-Office-365-Groups-aeb669aa-1770-4537-9de2-a82ac11b0540
https://technet.microsoft.com/library/mt238274(v=exchg.160).aspx
https://technet.microsoft.com/library/mt238273(v=exchg.160).aspx

i’ve found use in the following:
Get-UnifiedGroup
Get-UnifiedGroup | Export-CSV c:\users\user\desktop\o365.csv
Set-UnifiedGroup -identity name@mytenant.onmicrosoft.com -HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled $true

Posted in: IT by resinblade Comments Off on office365: unified groups

azure ad sync follow-up

i updated aadsync recently because i learned the newest version includes an auto-update feature. the process to upgrade is pretty self explanatory the only thing of note i can mention is that the installer probably ran somewhere between 20-30 minutes which i thought was strange at the time.

after the upgrade completed i learned that there had been quite a few changes with aadsync starting with version 1.1.105.0. the old way of manually syncing is no longer possible. now manual syncs and setting changes must be done through powershell. to force a manual sync run: start-adsyncsynccycle -policytype delta

another change is that aadsync no longer uses the windows task scheduler for scheduling syncs. in fact, the upgrade removed the task scheduler job as part of the install process. to check the new scheduler settings run get-adsyncscheduler and to change the settings use set-adsyncscheduler with parameters. i ended up changing NextSyncCyclePolicyType to Delta and SyncCycleEnabled to True. from my understanding of the documentation there is no way to set up syncs for less than 30 minute intervals (at least with this version).

sources:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/active-directory-aadconnectsync-feature-scheduler/
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/active-directory-aadconnect-version-history/

the auto-update feature is discussed further here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/active-directory-aadconnect-upgrade-previous-version/
to me, it still seems pretty new, so i don’t think i’ll be enabling in this release…maybe later down the road.

Posted in: IT by resinblade Comments Off on azure ad sync follow-up

ramune japanese soda

i’ve known about ramune for probably 10 years or so and have always wanted to try some. i think i was always fascinated by the marble drop mechanism which i imagine most people are. anyways, i finally got the chance to try some.

the original flavor tastes kind of like the classic american “bubble gum” flavor but perhaps a bit subtler. the bottle is about half the contents of an american soda can and has about half the sugar as well. so therefore if ramune had a 12 oz can version it would have about the same sugar contents as american sodas. the carbonation seemed much lighter than what i am used to. i’m not sure if that’s intentional or just because the bottles were shipped and lost some carbonation in the process.

for the melon flavor i was expecting watermelon but its not like that at all. it’s going for a honeydew type of flavor. at first i thought the flavor was strange but it quickly grew on me. pretty good stuff…i can’t really place the flavor exactly i know i’ve had some type of candy, mouthwash, or medicine that tasted similarly?

pineapple tasted too medicinal for me and has been my least favorite. strawberry tasted like most strawberry bubblegums and was decent. grape tasted like every run-of-the-mill grape soda (which is not a bad thing).

Posted in: Food by resinblade Comments Off on ramune japanese soda

microsoft 70-411 notes

WDS can be operated from the commandline with “wdsutil”. at least in 2012 there are no WDS powershell cmdlets.

two required wim files:
boot.wim – winpe
install.wim – OS

instructions for adding a boot wim to WDS:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/11643.how-to-add-a-boot-image-to-wds-server.aspx

WSUS
force a client to check in with the WSUS server: wuauclt /reportnow /detectnow

Posted in: IT by resinblade Comments Off on microsoft 70-411 notes

windows 2012: viewing open files/sessions

i recall the process of viewing which users had what files open on a file server being straight forward in 2008. in 2012 it’s not so much.

to bring up a Shared Folders mmc in 2012 run fsmgmt.msc

source:
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/3cfqfj/how_do_i_view_open_sessionsshared_files_on_server/

Posted in: IT by resinblade Comments Off on windows 2012: viewing open files/sessions