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A blog of software development, .NET and other interesting things
  • Jun 14, 2022

    Podcasts 2022

    Is it really 12 years since I last posted about what’s in my podcast collection? Apparently so!

    My current podcast app of choice on iOS is Pocket Casts. It works well, and it’s pretty cool that it was originally developed here in Adelaide!

    Most of my podcast listening is now done on my morning walk before I start work (now that I work from home). That’s usually up to an hour walking. Previously I used to listen on the bus trip into the city (which was about an hour each way), so now with a bit less time I tend to be more selective about what I listen to for the “second half”.

    I’ve roughly sorted the podcasts by how regularly I listen to episodes. This is mostly how useful or interesting I find the episodes, but may also be because the podcast doesn’t publish episodes that often. Links are to the RSS feeds for each podcast.

    • Daily Audio Bible”. You might say I listen to this religiously! It’s the first thing I put on when heading out for my walk. Episodes take from 20-30 mins, which usually means I have time to listen to something else before I get home.
    • RunAs Radio - Interesting IT topics hosted by Richard Campbell.
    • Windows Weekly - Weekly episodes with Leo, Paul and Mary Jo, that I don’t always get through and sometimes miss altogether, but often interesting.
    • The Unhandled Exception Podcast - A newer addition to my list. Some good shows on .NET. Listening to Dan Clarke’s interviews has inspired a few of our recent speakers for ADNUG (Kendra Havens and Simon Cropp).
    • .NET Rocks! - Carl and Richard. Usually an hour per episode, and if the topic isn’t interesting I’ll give it a miss.
    • no dogma podcast - Bryan Hogan (wonderful accent!) and some great .NET interviews recently.
    • Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman - Scott covers a wide variety of software dev topics.
    • Dr. Karl Podcast - Always interesting science talk-back.
    • Herding Code - Episodes are sporadic, and even less often since the passing of K Scott Allen. But when they do come out they can be good.
    • Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers - a wide variety of software topics.
    • SQL Down Under - Greg Low’s SQL podcast
    • Seeds Uniting Church - Good to catch up on sermons. Used to use this more often when I missed out when I was helping with kids’ church (aka Sunday School).
    • One Dev Minute - Selective listening to topics from Raymond Chen and Larry Osterman (whose blogs I’ve been following for ages). No new episodes since last year though.
    • The Idealcast with Gene Kim by IT Revolution. Some really interesting interviews, hosted by Gene Kim. Some shows are recaps of older conference talks. If you’re interested in DevOps, then can be interesting. Episodes can be quite long. I wish they’d didn’t break them down into shorter episodes.
    • Coding After Work Podcast - Not sure how I got onto this one, not publishing that often now, but a few of the earlier episodes had some interesting guests.
    • Weekly Dev Tips - From Steve Smith (@ardalis), has gone quiet and I think he’s stopped publishing?
    • A special mention should also go to Developer On Fire, which I listened to for the first few hundred episodes a few years back. It burned brightly for a while there. I gather Dave Rael wound it up after episode 452.

    Finally, sometimes after listening to the latest Daily Audio Bible episode, I decide to “unplug” and just take in the sounds around me. It’s ok to not be plugged in all the time!

    2022-06-24 Updated broken links to ‘Seeds Uniting Church’ and ‘One Dev Minute’

  • May 17, 2022

    Migrating away from Google G Suite Legacy free edition (part 3)

    The latest news from overnight - looks like Google has relented slightly with two weeks to go. If your use is personal you can now stay on the no-cost G Suite Legacy!

    See the latest revision of the Upgrade from G Suite legacy free edition help page for details. Specifically:

    If you’re using the G Suite legacy free edition for non-commercial purposes, you can opt out of the transition to Google Workspace by clicking here (requires a super administrator account) or going to the Google Admin console. You can continue using your custom domain with Gmail, retain access to no-cost Google services such as Google Drive and Google Meet, and keep your purchases and data.

    If you don’t take any action, your account will be suspended starting on August 1, 2022. To reactivate your account, you will either need to upgrade to Google Workspace or opt out of the transition for non-commercial use.

    That’s the risk when you force customers to make a choice - they might not choose to stay with you but take the opportunity to reevaluate the market and realise there may be better options out there.

    For me, migration is still an option but at least this removes the urgency.

  • May 15, 2022

    Migrating away from Google G Suite Legacy free edition (part 2)

    Since writing my last post on leaving Google G Suite Legacy, I not only got some good feedback on Twitter, but also came across some more useful resources.

    Just over two weeks left in May and still the waiting list is not available. If one were cynical, you might think Google didn’t want you to leave!

    Resources

    There’s good discussions at:

    Both are great reads - and I feel somewhat affirmed that others have come up with similar solutions. It’s likely someone has already done a similar migration to what you’ve decided to do, so worth reviewing their experiences.

    Cheap or paid

    Simon Waight shared his experience and makes some good points:

    So yes, there’s definitely an element of you get what you pay for. And if you’re not paying for it, then that probably means you’re the product! Weigh up the pros and cons of that.

    Cloudflare Email limitations

    At the time of writing, Cloudflare Email does not support forwarding to multiple email addresses. I have a few Google Workspace ‘Groups’ configured that forward to multiple addresses, that is a problem.

    If you’re in the same boat and plan to go down the email forwarding/routing approach, then there’s probably a couple of solutions:

    1. Choose a different email router service (https://improvmx.com/ was mentioned in the conversation linked to previously)
    2. Forward to one email address and then create a rule for that mailbox that then forwards those emails to the intended recipients.

    Microsoft 365 Family with GoDaddy

    Apparently there are ways to ‘trick’ Microsoft 365 into thinking you’ve switched your domain hosting to GoDaddy without actually doing it, in order to take up the custom email hosting offer. I won’t link to them here but you can find them if you’re really interested. Just be aware that you’re putting yourself in an ‘unsupported’ situation.

    Setting a Reply-To address

    In GMail you can set a different Reply-to address from the one that the email is sent from (eg. the From address can be different to the Reply-To address).

    Outlook.com allows you to set the ‘From’ address when composing an email. If you have aliases set up with your Microsoft account, you can choose one of those as the From address too.

    Ideally, you would want to do some testing to see what the experience of receiving an email from one of these accounts looks like. Does it get flagged as spam? When you reply does it pick up the correct email address to reply to?

    Finally, returning to one of Simons’s points, will it work with SPF, DKIM and DMARC?