IT Ideas

This is a brief demo of the Network File Share for ChromeOS  app. This allows you to easily add Windows/SMB shares to your file manager in ChromeOS. Seems to work quite well. I've managed to access all our network shares and Windows Home Directories with this app.

Some local services that you might run require the use of a SSL certificate in the form of a PFX file - so one with an embedded private key. It took me some time to figure out exactly how to generate these and I've put together a short video which takes you through the steps. If you want to use the resulting PFX file with Spiceworks, see this article  - you will need step 3. This is the approach you need if you are using Ericom Secure Gateway alongside AccessNow or Connect. These are the sort of tools you can use to give ChromeOS users access to Windows apps. Hopefully it will save someone some head scratching! Today it took a few minutes to renew a certificate and get it installed, previously it has taken me hours.....

Did a short demo of the new Q&A feature in Google Slides (and the laser pen!) in the video below. Really very easy to do.

Since ChromeOS v48, some videos when played back from Google Drive fail at certain points in playback. To get it to start again, you have to reload the page and skip past the section causing the issue. This has been flagged with the Chromium developer team and is down for a fix in v51. However, as a temporary workaround, in chrome://flags disable "Hardware-accelerated video decode Mac, Windows, Chrome OS" and restart. The videos will then play fine. This setting has to be changed on a per user basis. Brief video of changing the flag: