BASIC on BBC iPlayer, Changing DNS Settings via Powershell

This week I have been expanding my knowledge by working my way through the modules on freecodecamp.org; it’s free coding training so what’s not to like?

The awesome news this week is that the BBC has added some of it’s 1980s archive episodes about BASIC to the BBC iPlayer. Concepts from BASIC are still used in coding today and it is fun to see how the teaching/discuss around programming has changed/stayed the same over the last 30 years. To view the episodes visit: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p030632c

Also this week is the beginning of the Astro Pi Challenge! Astro Pi gives young people the opportunity to have their code run on a Raspberry Pi on board the International Space Station! I urge all educators to visit https://astro-pi.org/ and get involved. Looking at Astro Pi has made me want a Sense hat for my Raspberry Pi 3 but that will have to wait until next time I get paid.

I got to use a bit of Powershell this week to script a change to the DNS addresses that a network adaptor uses. Here it is:

Set-DnsClientServerAddress -InterfaceAlias ethernet* -ServerAddresses “1.1.1.1”,”1.1.1.2″

The devices I have used the script with only needed the ethernet interface DNS settings changed (i.e. only the network connection using an ethernet cable, not wireless) so I used ethernet*, however the exact name of the interface can be used instead. To list the interface names use Get-NetAdapter and it will list the various interfaces available. The ServerAddresses are listed in order (primary, secondary) the adapter will try to use them.