Tales From the Northwoods

I have decided to name my personal blogs “Tales from the Northwoods” as they could embody personal stories and experiences, or tales I find worth it to share from my neck of the woods.

This past week has been alot for me. To keep it breif here are a few things I have started on or accomplished this week.

• Fought with Windows on creating kiosks for retail stores
• Started house hunting
• Walked and played on the ice of the frozen Lake Superior
• Made no-bake cookies, and home made pizzas
• Shoveled out my mailbox

Family

We ended up getting some snow on Friday, and I ended up playing out side and shoveling with my kid. I am running out places to put the snow. You can see just how much I have around my mailbox at the picture linked aboved.

We spent Sunday evening making cookies using this recipe, and even made homemade pizzas. My wife made the dough from scratch as well. We did this after spending some time playing on the ice due to Lake Superior being frozen. If you have a chance to do this I highly recommend doing so as Lake Superior is such a strong and beautiful lake.

All in all we had a fun family filled weekend.

ABL

One thing I want to make sure I am always doing is learning. Weather it be learning a whole new skill or something small I want to Always Be Learning or as I call it ABL.

This week I have learned a bit about Windows Kiosks and Active Directory. I am working on setting up some kiosk so guest can have a way to order via a kiosk tablet. The kicker here is that we want to reuse some Windows POS tablets to be used for a guest facing kiosk. That means it has to be able to only work on 1 website and 1 website only.

The first thing I tried was using Edge Kiosk Mode , and then using GPOs to secure it. We got really close except for 2 things. I kept getting an errory about 85% of the time and that was after following this guide , and I learned that Windows doesn’t use the same shell when this mode is enabled. The issue that happens is that the on screen keyboard is forced to be the full keyboard, and I really need one with number to be a default for 1 page on the website.

I went on the learn how to use a logon script to kill Explorer.exe which allows me to start a program on the computer of my choosing. Chosing a browser with the correct hints / tags allowed me to pull of a kiosk. I really wish I would have done this to begin with.