Discover powerful KQL queries to enhance your Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) management. Learn how to track user connections, analyze session times, monitor errors, and gain insights into your AVD environment's performance and security.

Azure Virtual Desktop KQL Queries

This is a quick post collating some of the notes for KQL queries for Azure Virtual Desktop I have in various documents into a single place, just in case they are helpful for anyone and also for my reference, đź‘‹ hello future Russ. Find out all the IP addresses in the last 30 days This query looks at the past 30 days, counting connections by username and client IP address, then sorts these counts in descending order, adds geolocation data for each IP, and finally outputs the client IP, connection count, and location details (country, state, and city) to provide insights into connection patterns and frequencies across different users and locations in the Windows Virtual Desktop environment. ...

July 7, 2024 Â· 7 min Â· Russ McKendrick
Discover how to optimize your Azure DevOps Ansible pipeline with caching techniques. Learn to reduce execution time, improve efficiency, and maintain security checks in your infrastructure as code deployments.

Azure DevOps Ansible Pipeline; Boosting Efficiency with Caching

Back in May 2020 I published what would be one of the more popular posts on this blog Azure DevOps Ansible Pipeline, it covered the Azure DevOps pipeline I had settled upon for running my Ansible playbooks which built and interacted with workloads running in Microsoft Azure. Fast forward four years, I updated the pipeline for Chapter 15 of the second edition of Learn Ansible↗ ; this version of the pipeline, which is covered in detail in the book, can be found in the repo linked below; ...

June 28, 2024 Â· 9 min Â· Russ McKendrick
Day-to-day tools for a macOS user in 2024: Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, Paste, 1Password, and more. Discover essential desktop, terminal, and online services for productivity.

Day to Day Tools, the 2024 edition

It looks like I have written about the tools I use day-to-day since 2017; I wonder how much has changed. 🤔 Info ...

June 16, 2024 Â· 4 min Â· Russ McKendrick
Discover how CrewAI revolutionized my blog's AI-generated music roundups, enhancing content quality and accuracy. Unlock the potential of collaborative AI for your creative projects.

Updating my blog using CrewAI

I have been reading a lot about CrewAI recently and as it was a long weekend I decided to tip my toe in the water and do something with it, but what? About a year ago, while bored, I added a Python script to this blog which used the OpenAI API to write a blog post based on what I had listened to the previous week using data from Last.FM↗ . ...

May 6, 2024 Â· 16 min Â· Russ McKendrick
My new book, the second edition of Learn Ansible is now available for pre-order.

Announcing the second edition of Learn Ansible

Exciting News! I’m thrilled to announce that the 2nd edition of my book, “Learn Ansible: Automate your cloud infrastructure, security configuration, and application deployment using Ansible” is now available for pre-order on Amazon and Packt Publishing’s website! 📣 🎉 📚 Amazon ( 🇺🇸 ) Amazon ( 🇬🇧 ) Packt Publishing ( 🌍 ) Whether you’re a beginner or an intermediate user looking to take your Ansible skills to the next level, this hands-on guide will empower you to automate your infrastructure and application deployments consistently and efficiently. 💻 🚀 ...

April 21, 2024 Â· 2 min Â· Russ McKendrick
A step-by-step guide on installing and running InvokeAI on macOS for local AI image generation using Conda and Python.

Installing and running InvokeAI on macOS

Just a quick post this week, following on from my last post last week about using Conda and also the one from a few weeks about about running LLMs locally using ollama I decided to explore the world of AI image generation on my local macOS machine. To do this I thought I would revisit a tool I dabbled with about a year ago called InvokeAI↗ , the tool is described as follows: ...

April 14, 2024 Â· 7 min Â· Russ McKendrick
Learn how to efficiently manage Python environments on your MacBook Pro using Conda. This comprehensive guide covers installation, creating and activating environments, installing packages, and best practices for streamlining your Python development workflow.

Conda for Python environment management on macOS

As mentioned in a previous post, I recently finished writing the second edition of Learn Ansible. This had me using Python a lot, and my one key takeaway is that managing Python has become a massive chore. Now, with the book complete, I thought I would strip back on my machine, start from scratch - or as close to clean as I could get - and develop a cleaner, more streamlined way of managing Python on my local machine. ...

April 6, 2024 Â· 9 min Â· Russ McKendrick
For the first time in nearly a decade, I updated my dotfiles blog post.

Updating my dotfiles

I decided to spring clean my Dotfiles repo↗ , as it had been a while. Then I noticed that the last time I mentioned them on the blog was nearly ten years ago, so I wanted to give a quick update. The most significant change is that I have moved to using Zsh↗ and Oh My Zsh↗ since Zsh became the default Shell in macOS. Warning ...

April 2, 2024 Â· 3 min Â· Russ McKendrick