# blog.jourdant.me > Jourdan Templeton's blog: practical notes on Azure, DevOps, PowerShell, home automation, IoT and data. Written by Jourdan Templeton, Customer Advisory Director at HSO ANZ. Content is licensed CC-BY-SA-4.0 unless stated otherwise. Every post is available as clean Markdown by appending `.md` to its URL. All posts in a single file: https://blog.jourdant.me/llms-full.txt ## Posts - [Quickstart: Running Azure DevOps v5 Build Agents on macOS and Apple Silicon](https://blog.jourdant.me/post/quickstart-running-azure-devops-v5-build-agents-on-macos-and-apple-silicon.md): DevOps, published 10 Nov 2026. The v5 agent moves to .NET 10 and drops macOS Ventura, so here’s my updated one-script install for Apple Silicon Macs. - [Quickstart: Running Azure DevOps Build Agents on macOS and Apple Silicon](https://blog.jourdant.me/post/quickstart-running-azure-devops-build-agents-on-macos-and-apple-silicon.md): DevOps, published 3 May 2025. How I run Azure DevOps build agents natively on an Apple Silicon Mac Mini, with one script to download, configure and install the agent as a service. - [Seamless Home Assistant Backups with Azure Blob Storage](https://blog.jourdant.me/post/seamless-home-assistant-backups-with-azure-blob-storage.md): Home Automation, published 31 Oct 2024. How I sent Home Assistant backups off-site to an Azure Files share over SMB, before the 2025.1 release made it unnecessary. - [Preparing Vision Models for Windows ML](https://blog.jourdant.me/post/preparing-vision-models-for-windows-ml.md): Data Science, published 15 Jun 2018. How to shape a vision model’s input tensor so Windows ML can bind images to it automatically. - [Loading data from files in SharePoint](https://blog.jourdant.me/post/loading-data-from-files-in-sharepoint.md): Power BI, published 7 Apr 2017. How to load a CSV from a SharePoint document library into Power BI so the whole team works from the same data source. - [Simple SQL in PowerShell](https://blog.jourdant.me/post/simple-sql-in-powershell.md): PowerShell, published 24 Apr 2016. A small Invoke-SqlCommand function that runs SQL queries from PowerShell using only the .NET framework, with no SQL tools to install. - [3 ways to download files with PowerShell](https://blog.jourdant.me/post/3-ways-to-download-files-with-powershell.md): PowerShell, published 3 Apr 2015. I time Invoke-WebRequest, System.Net.WebClient and Start-BitsTransfer for downloading files in PowerShell, and explain when to use each. - [Introduction to ESP8266 and NodeMcu](https://blog.jourdant.me/post/introduction-to-esp8266-and-nodemcu.md): IoT, published 18 Jan 2015. Getting started with the $3 ESP8266 wifi chip, including the power and flashing tips that took me hours to work out. - [Going paperless with Tesseract OCR](https://blog.jourdant.me/post/powershell-and-tesseract-going-paperless-with-ocr.md): PowerShell, published 4 Jan 2015. Using Tesseract OCR from PowerShell to read text from scanned documents, my first step towards sorting a mountain of paperwork automatically. - [Re-writing MyNetFone destination SIP headers](https://blog.jourdant.me/post/freeswitch-rewriting-mynetfone-sip-headers-to-show-correct-destination.md): FreeSWITCH, published 11 Dec 2014. How to pull the dialled number out of MyNetFone’s Diversion header in FreeSWITCH so those calls follow the same dialplan rules as my other providers. - [Part 2 – Scaling App-V content distribution using Azure CDN](https://blog.jourdant.me/post/scaling-app-v-content-distribution-using-azure-cdn.md): App-V, published 26 Nov 2014. Putting Azure CDN in front of Blob Storage so App-V clients around the world stream packages from the closest location. - [Part 1 – Serving App-V content using Azure Blob Storage](https://blog.jourdant.me/post/serving-app-v-content-using-azure-blob-storage.md): App-V, published 17 Nov 2014. How to host App-V 5.0 packages in Azure Blob Storage and stream them to users outside the office over HTTP. - [Publishing App-V 5.0 content with a wildcard SSL certificate](https://blog.jourdant.me/post/app-v-publishing-app-v-5-content-with-a-wildcard-ssl-certificate.md): App-V, published 13 Nov 2014. Why the App-V 5.0 Management Console fails behind a load balancer with a wildcard certificate, and the one-line hosts file fix. - [Getting scripty with Azure Mobile Services](https://blog.jourdant.me/post/azure-getting-scripty-with-azure-mobile-services.md): Azure, published 2 Aug 2014. How to send data from Bash, PowerShell, Python and VBScript to an Azure Mobile Services REST API in a few lines each. - [Installing drivers from untrusted publishers](https://blog.jourdant.me/post/ps-installing-drivers-from-untrusted-publishers.md): PowerShell, published 6 Jul 2014. How to install drivers silently during imaging by importing the publisher’s certificate into the Trusted Publishers store first. - [Setting the Windows 8 Account Picture from AD](https://blog.jourdant.me/post/ps-setting-windows-8-account-picture-from-ad.md): PowerShell, published 13 Jun 2014. A PowerShell script that sets each domain user’s Windows 8 account picture from their photo in Active Directory. ## Optional - [RSS feed (full content)](https://blog.jourdant.me/rss/feed.xml) - [Posts metadata as JSON](https://blog.jourdant.me/api/posts.json) - [Author](https://blog.jourdant.me/api/authors.json)