Made by Artisans: Championing South African Craftsmanship on a Global Stage

Founded in 2020, Made by Artisans has emerged as a premier online marketplace dedicated to showcasing the rich creativity and skills of South African artisan producers. Born out of a need to support local talent, the platform bridges the gap between passionate creators and consumers seeking authentic, handmade, and locally produced goods.

Here is a closer look at how Made by Artisans is reshaping the local artisanal landscape.

A Mission Rooted in Local Support

Established during a time of economic uncertainty for many small businesses, Made by Artisans aimed to provide a stable, accessible online platform for artisans to sell their products. The platform serves as a digital community hub, highlighting stories behind the crafts and connecting artisans with customers who value quality over mass production.

By focusing on local South African goods, the company contributes significantly to:

• Job Creation: Supporting creators to maintain or expand their livelihoods.
• Economic Growth: Investing in South Africa's creative economy.
• Sustainability: Promoting ethically sourced and manufactured items.

What You Can Find

Made by Artisans hosts a diverse, growing range of products, catering to various tastes and needs. Their inventory often includes, but is not limited to:

• Handcrafted Leather Goods: Ranging from stylish sandals to durable bags.
• Unique Home Goods: Hand-poured candles, ceramics, and décor.
• Warmth & Comfort: Sheepskin slippers and cozy accessories.
• Specialty Items: Handcrafted items that reflect South African culture.

Convenience and Global Reach

While rooted in South Africa, Made by Artisans has expanded its reach to serve international customers. As of 2026, the company offers international shipping, allowing South Africans abroad and international customers to purchase authentic locally made goods.

Their user-friendly platform ensures that customers can:

• Browse products from multiple local sellers on one site.
• Manage a single checkout process for diverse products.
• Experience secure and reliable delivery.

Supporting the Artisan Community

Made by Artisans operates with a passion for uncovering new locally manufactured products. They regularly invite local artisans to become stockists, broadening their range and offering new entrepreneurs a chance to showcase their work to a wider audience.

With a focus on quality assurance and curated selections, Made by Artisans is more than just a shop; it is a vital supporter of local economic empowerment, ensuring that the unique skills of South African artisans are celebrated and sustained.

You can visit or shop from Made by Artisans here: https://madebyartisans.com

Gmail push notification on iPhone and iPad

Google enabled push notification in Gmail for iPhones and iPads ages ago, but I've noticed not many people know about this and aren't sure how to set it up using the native mail client in iOS (yes, you don't need the Google Mail application)

The process is as follows (screenshots were taken on an iPhone but would be similar for an iPad);

• Add a new mail account but choose 'Microsoft Exchange' (not Gmail)
• Add your details as follows;
• Email: youraddress@gmail.com
• Domain: <leave blank>
• Username: youraddress@gmail.com
• Password: <yourpassword>
• When you click Next, you might receive the following verification notice:

• Click Continue, an additional field will become visible requiring a server name, use: m.google.com and click Done to verify and complete the setup.

And that's it - confirm that Push is enabled for this account in Settings --> Mail, Contacts, Calendars --> Fetch New Data --> Advanced

Two things to note:

• If you get any messages complaining about not being able to verify a certificate, click Accept to continue anyway
• Push mail has more of an impact on battery life, if this is a problem you could always revert back to Fetching without needing to re-setup your mail account.

Gmail formatting in Internet Explorer 9

Experiencing the following Gmail formatting issue in Internet Explorer 9?

The problem is caused by IE9's compatibility mode feature, turning this off resolves the issue. You might not find the IE9 compatibility mode icon in the address bar though for some reason (in my case anyway) - here's a quick fix;

• In IE9, while logged into your Gmail maibox, hit F12
• Choose Browser Mode: IE9 on the bottom toolbar
• Choose Internet Explorer 9

Voila - you should now be seeing your mailbox with the formatting corrected;

Windows app to view iPhone tracking data

There's quite a buzz at the moment following the discovery that up to a years worth of geo-location data is being captured and stored on your iPhone, and the fact that this cannot be disabled without jailbreaking your phone and installing a Cydia app (no, disabling Location Services doesn't help).

If you want to check this data out and don't have a Mac, take a look at the iPhoneTracker for Windows: http://huseyint.com/iPhoneTrackerWin/. This app reads the data from a recent iTunes backup and overlays it on a map for easy viewing.

MMS 2011 Opening Keynote

The opening keynote was pretty cool and as was expected, focused on the cloud. More specifically, it focused on the way Microsoft defines the cloud as a computing model rather than a computing location, the consumerization of IT as a service, and how to empower IT (and consumers) to embrace the cloud model. The cloud is broken up into two parts, the service consumer (the old application owner) and the service provider (the old application administrator) - System Center 2012 will bring the following to the private cloud model;

For the service consumer: System Center code-name 'Concero' which is a service-focused self-service experience which the service consumer (that's a lot of use of the word service) can use to manage their services without needing to know anything about the underlying technology. All they know is, they have a service made up of a bunch of components (applications, databases, etc), and they require resources for it to function. 'Concero' will allow service consumers to request more cloud capacity when required, and understand how services are performing.

For the service provider: System Center VMM 2012 which will allow a cloud fabric to be assembled regardless of the underlying infrastructure (VMware, XenServer or Hyper-V). This is a key point, the focus is moving past virtualizing the datacenter; it's no longer about the virtual machine, and no longer does the virtualization technology have to be a factor, the point is there are resources available and they can be added to a single cloud fabric for consumption. On the cloud fabric, any number of private clouds can be built, each containing services made up components such as applications, databases, etc. 

To give you an idea, the following scenario was demonstrated during the keynote:

• the service consumer notices performance for a specific cloud service is no longer acceptable, and requests more cloud capacity through 'Concero'.
• the service provider does not have any capacity on the current fabric and needs to provision additional resources. He procures additional hardware resources and connects it to the network.
• the service provider (using VMM 2012), remotely provisions the new hardware resources (by remotely interfacing with IPMI, SMASH, or DCMI which is supported by HP iLO) with the standardized Server OS image and adds the new capacity to the current fabric.
• the service consumer assigns the additional capacity to the cloud service.

This is a great scenario, and is looking pretty slick due to the way Microsoft is tightly integrating the System Center products to make this easy, and possible. Nice one MS.

Some other product announcements were made;

• Opalis will be renamed System Center Orchestrator 2012 (I always felt Opalis was out of place, so finally a proper place in the System Center suite of products)
• Virtual Machine Manager 2012 went Beta today
• System Center Advisor announced (previously code-name 'Atlanta') and will be part of System Center 2012 - this will allow a top-down view to services, focused on recommended configuration based on insight contributed by Microsoft. 90000 Microsoft employees will provide input to this 'advice' which will allow the tool to make recommendations to configuration. An example was given, showing how a hotfix would be relevant (recommended) for a SQL server which is part of a service known to have issues with a SQL server without that hotfix. This product will be available to all existing software assurance customers.

Three key takeaways from the keynote (click to enlarge):

Microsoft Management Summit 2011 - Las Vegas, Nevada

I was fortunate enough to get a seat at Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas this year, it's my first time so I'm planning on using this opportunity to attend some in depth technical sessions, and meet some of the industry experts so I can put faces to the names. There are a lot of breakout sessions and hands-on labs to choose from, most focused on management technologies/solutions (as the event name suggests) from Microsoft and a range of partners - there's also quite a focus on cloud computing this year.



I arrived late on Saturday night (LV time), and was quite tired after my trip via Amsterdam. I almost missed my connecting flight from Minneapolis to Las Vegas as clearing customs took a while and overbooking is a huge problem in the US - I was lucky and got one of the last seats on the flight. The weather wasn't great yesterday, mostly overcast, windy and lots of rain during the night. It suited me fine though as I spent the day trying to adjust to the change in time from SA, at 1pm (bedtime back home) I got really tired all of a sudden...I think they call it 'jetlag'?... :P 

Arrived in Amsterdam on KLM

 

Left Amsterdam on Delta

 

Monday morning and the weather is looking much better - I say 'looking'...as it's 8'C outside.

Registration opened for MMS attendees at 7:30am, and things looked pretty well organized. The queue at the registration counter was manageable and it took less than a minute to register. The first breakout sessions for the day only start at 1:30pm, so I have some time to kill...



LinkedIn Social Connector for Outlook 2010 x64

I've been wanting to use the LinkedIn Social Connector for Outlook 2010 for quite a while now, but a x64 version was never available. Googling has never returned much around the x64 version either, just some speculation and complaints about it taking so long to release.

Until I stumbled upon this: https://download.linkedin.com/desktop/osc/en/latest/bin/LinkedInOutlookConnector_x64.exe

Happy times.

List of Standalone Installers

I'm annoyed by software installers which need to constantly download additional content from the internet in order to complete an installation. Besides taking forever to install, it requires you to be connected to the internet and doesn't make efficient use of internet bandwidth if you need to install on more than a few machines.

The following is a list of the most common standalone installers I could find, any other suggestions would be great;

• Skype
• Windows Live Essentials
• Adobe Reader X (10.0)
• Google Earth
• Google Chrome
• Java Runtime Environment (x86) and (x64)
• Internet Explorer 9 RC (x86) and (x64)

Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate (RC) Standalone Installer

The release candidate of Internet Explorer 9 was made available for download on 10 Feb, the final version is expected in April.

Here are the direct download links for the standalone (offline) installer (saves you having to re-download 30MB for each machine you want to upgrade):

• x86:  http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/F/4/5F49F6DB-5538-48CE-9E13-38621B5176D4/NeutralMSU/x86fre/IE9-win7.msu
• x64: http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/F/4/5F49F6DB-5538-48CE-9E13-38621B5176D4/NeutralMSU/amd64fre/IE9-win7.msu

Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 is RTM

SP1 is RTM and will be available for download as follows;

• TechNet/MSDN/VL subscribers - Feb 16, 2011
• General availability (Download Center/Windows Update) - Feb 22, 2011

It would appear that an uninstall of SP1 Beta or RC is still required before installing RTM - there have been reports of users who are not able to remove SP1 RC due to the uninstall files being placed in a Temp folder during installation, any disk cleanup tasks post installation which might have removed these files will prevent uninstallation. I guess the only safe options would be System Restore back to a pre-RC restore point, or a complete rebuild. Hopefully you didn't deploy the RC to any production servers, the RC will expire on Nov 30, 2011.