Category: General

So, you’ve got an event coming up and there are people who need to be able to participate remotely. People in the room need to be able to hear the people on Zoom (or Teams, or whatever), and the people who are remote need to be able to hear what’s going on in the room. If you’ve got a small enough event and room, no problem, just grab a bluetooth conference speaker/mic and you’re good to go. But what if it’s a bigger room? Let’s say you’ve got an auditorium with a lectern and an audience that needs to be able to ask questions of the presenter.

Here are some notes.

Continue reading “Hybrid Event Guide”

We need to migrate a whole bunch of email accounts from Google Workspace to Office 365, and we’re not the administrators for either of the tenants so we don’t have access to any of the tools which make that relatively simple. The administrators have expressed no interest in making those tools available to us as a paid service, either, so we’re pretty much on our own. Here’s my plan (currently still undergoing some revision as the folder mapping isn’t working quite the way I expected):

Continue reading “Imapsync, OAuth2, Google, Office365”

For the two other people in the world who might run into this problem:

I’m trying to install NextCloud on a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 system, and I want to use the user_saml app and Shibboleth for user authentication. This means I need to use php7.1, first off, because 7.2 doesn’t have mcrypt support and user_saml requires it. I’d also like not to have to build everything from source. The problem I’ve run into is that php7.1-curl depends on libcurl4 and libapache2-mod-shib2 depends (through libxmltooling) on libcurl3, and you can only have one of those installed at a time.

I have found a workaround, and I’m documenting it here mainly so I don’t forget how it works, not because I expect anyone else will find it useful or interesting.
Continue reading “Libcurl3, Libcurl4, Shibboleth, php-curl, & Ubuntu 18.04”

We’ve been using Ticketure for the last year to sell tickets to special events. As far as I know, they’ve been great. But I did hear yesterday that we’d received some calls from people confused about whether an event this weekend was sold out. It sounds like there’s some confusion over the legend for their calendar date picker:

Some people see that “Fully booked” and read it not as a key to the calendar below, but as an indication that the event is fully booked. I’m not sure what they think “Venue closed” and “Tickets not yet available” mean in that context, but that’s not relevant to the immediate problem, which is that I’d like to just remove the key entirely. I’d also like to remove the date picker for April (and, unseen to the right, May) because this event only runs on March 3rd and 4th; there’s no reason to have any other months available for selection. Continue reading “Styling Ticketure date picker elements”

One increasingly common task here involves transferring email between two accounts, either to create an archive from a departing employee or to migrate an employee’s email between services. There are three possible mail back ends at the UW: Deskmail (in-house IMAP), Microsoft (Office 365), and Google (G Suite). We might be called on to migrate mail between accounts on any combination of those.

One way to do this would be to set up both accounts in a desktop email client such as Thunderbird or Outlook and drag and drop between the two. For small amounts of mail, this works fine. But once you’ve got mailboxes where folder organization matters, or if you’re going from Google (which has labels, not folders) to anything else, you’re going to want something more robust.
Continue reading “Archiving / Transferring Email with imapsync”

Inspired by the University of Alberta Museums Blog, this will be a blog for talking about and documenting projects the Burke IT department (all two of us) works on for the Burke Museum which could be useful for other similar institutions. The Burke is in the middle of construction of a new building, and will be moving in the next few years. At least one of the projects here will be related to that: an initiative to provide barcoding and asset tracking support to the collections managers who would like to take this opportunity to barcode their collections.

I also built an inexpensive Raspberry Pi-based firewall for PCI compliance in the gift shop recently. I couldn’t find a good set of instructions which had all the steps I needed, so I’ll be writing that up as well. There may be some inexpensive digital signage projects in the future, and who knows what else.

Possibly we’ll also use this to talk about some things that didn’t work, or don’t work how we’d like them to. Sometimes the most valuable page I find is the one which tells me the thing I was about to try will never work.

In any case, that’s what this is about. If you’re reading, welcome.