#powershell fun

[bynkii]

A script to dump data out of the macOS logging system: https://github.com/johncwelch/Get-ULSDump It creates a series of .tsv files, one per subsystem. I like TSVs, they're easy to import into Excel, sifting data is a thing Excel is kind of good at. #powershell #powershell-mac #powershell-macOS

[subjectsix]

KIP'S BIG POST OF THINGS TO MAKE THE INTERNET & TECHNOLOGY SUCK A LITTLE LESS

Post last updated November 23, 2024. Will continue to update!

Here are my favorite things to use to navigate technology my own way:

A refurbished iPod loaded with Rockbox OS (Rockbox is free, iPods range in price. I linked the site I got mine from. Note that iPods get finicky about syncing and the kind of cord it has— it may still charge but might not recognize the device to sync. Getting an original Apple cord sometimes helps). Rockbox has ports for other MP3 players as well.

This Windows debloater program (there are viable alternatives out there, this one works for me). It has a powershell script that give you a little UI and buttons to press, which I appreciate, as I'm still a bit shy with tech.

Firefox with the following extensions: - Consent-O-Matic (set your responses to ALL privacy/cookie pop-ups in the extension, and it will answer all pop-ups for you. I can see reasons to not use it, but I appreciate it) - Facebook Container ("contains" Meta on Facebook and Instagram pages to keep it from tracking you or getting third party cookies, since Meta is fairly egregious about it) - Redirect Amp to HTML (AMP is designed for mobile phones, this forces pages to go to their HTML version) - A WebP/AVIF image converter - uBlock Origin and uBlacklist, with the AI blacklist loaded in to kill any generative AI results from appearing in search engines or anywhere.

Handbrake for ripping DVDs— I haven’t used this in awhile as I haven’t been making video edits. I used this back when I had a Mac OS

VLC Media Player (ol’ reliable)

Unsplash & Pexels for free-to-use images

A password manager (these often are paid. I use Dashlane. There are many options, feel free to search around and ask for recs!). There is a lot that goes into cybersecurity— find the option you feel is best for you.

Things I suggest:

Understanding Royalty Free and the Creative Commons licenses

Familiarity with boolean operators for searching

Investing in a backup drive and external drive

A few good USBs, including one that has a backup of your OS on it

Adapter cables

Avoiding Fandom “wikias” (as in the brand “Fandom”) and supporting other, fan-run or supported wikis. Consider contributing if its something you find yourself passionate or joyful about.

Finding Forums for the things you like, or creating your own*

Create an email specifically for ads/shopping— use it to receive all promotional emails to keep your inbox clean. Upkeep it.

Stop putting so much of your personal information online— be willing to separate your personal online identity from your “online identity”. You don’t owe people your name, location, pronouns, diagnoses, or any of that. It’s your choice, but be discerning in what you give and why. I recommend avoiding providing your phone number to sites as much as possible.

Be intentional

Ask questions

Talk to people

Remember that you can lurk all you want

Things that are fun to check out:

BBSes-- here's a portal to access them.

Neocities

*Forums-- find some to join, or maybe host your own? The system I was most familiar with was vbulletin.

MMM.page

Things that have worked well for me but might work for you, YMMV:

Limit your app usage time on your smartphone if you’re prone to going back to them— this is a tangible way to “practice mindfulness”, a term I find frustratingly vague ansjdbdj

Things I’m looking into:

The “Pi Hole”— a raspberry pi set up to block all ads on a specific internet connection

VPNs-- this is one that was recommended to me.

How to use computers (I mean it): Resources on how to understand your machine and what you’re doing, even if your skill and knowledge level is currently 0:

This section I'll come back an add to. I know that messing with computers can be intimidating, especially if you feel out of your depth. HTML and regedits and especially things like dualbooting or linux feel impossible. So I want to put things here that explain exactly how the internet and your computer functions, and how you can learn and work with that. Yippee!

[realwizardshit]

I've just finally seen some Fun Malware. Where it's like weird, obfuscated but not so much that it's total gibberish, but in a way that's pretty blindingly obviously malicious. I don't have the powershell knowledge to decode it myself easily, it'd probably take a week of studying at least to do it by hand, and I don't have a sandbox to run it and look at the logs. Malware analysis is not my thing, it's kind of a fucking nightmare. However. This is Code Analysis, and programming is the interest that started my entire career.

[hoenniswheretheheartis]

Windows 11 is A Time.

To backup without one drive, the official advice is to "copy and paste manually" but all buttered up so it sounds official.

The lock screen on boot never remembers what I set it to.

Steam opens a powershell window because it can I guess?

The spacing between app icons in the taskbar is too thin

But worst

File Explorer no longer opens to the current directory any more, even though I've that option checked.

It's a great OS if you're using a mobile device or if you're a solid believe in mobile-first development. Or if you're into onedrive or cloud storage in general.

But if you're not in that camp? Tough cookies; have fun when security updates for Windows 10 stop later this year.

[eightglass]

OMG the stupidest thing just fucking happened last night.

So we built a computer for our engineering club, and installed windows 10, cause I know a place to buy a win10 product key for like $9. As part of the setup, it asked if we wanted windows 11 like 8 or 9 times, with multiple popups, and those fucking full screen ads. Here’s the best part. We get it all setup, get the drivers installed, activate with the product key, and then we had to upgrade to windows 11, cause it’s for the entire club, and software compatibility, etc.

THERE WAS NO FUCKING UPGRADE BUTTON

After shoving windows 11 down the face of every user for the past however many years, the one singular time someone actually wanted to upgrade from 10 to 11 the button literally was gone. All that was there was the “go here for instructions” in the updates page in settings, which after 2 clicks took you right back to where it started, with no changes.

We literally had to go download the installation media online.

Microsoft is fucking hilarious in its incompetencey

Anyways just thought you’d like this fun story 👍

Ughhhhhhhh Microsoft..........

back in 2020 i made the bad decision to join the windows insider program or whatever, i got windows 11 early..

i have grown since then 🙏🙏

(also you don't even need to buy windows? just run the powershell script from massgrave)

[slytherverse]

*sitting criss cross applesauce with one keyboard balanced on each leg, barely conscious* science is fun we like science science is fun . next person who shits on my workflow bc they hate windows powershell will be jettisoned

[phoebastria-albatrus]

also messing around in powershell and regedit is so fun. kinda yuriful

[lepartiprisdeschoses]

I managed to archive the past few years of my blog with TumblThree, but that only gives you a folder of all your files and you need to use an additional script for a proper index to make it feasible to actually browse posts (it's supposed to look like this, and I assume that's entirely offline and will still be functional when this site is eventually gone?).

So I spent over an hour going back and forth between Python and Powershell. It was fun doing some light programming at first, but after getting nowhere I'm just exhausted and regret not playing TF2 or reading before winding down for the night.

[caluski]

few weeks back i finally installed zotify which is the best fucking option out there. no torrenting, no soulseek (couldnt figure it out for the life of me - i really am getting old), no youtube -> mp3 converter. you can literally download not only single songs, but the entire albums AND playlists (and apparently also podcasts, but im not into that) so you can imagine my joy when i found out i could just download my entire love and food playlist at once. its great. AND what i care about a lot - all the data/information is already downloaded alongside the song, including even album cover. i cannot possibly complain!!!

anyway, as i was installing it, it reminded me just how fucking satisfying using commands is. i wanna download more fun python scripts. i wanna discover more stuff that i can manually write into powershell. i need to browse fucking github so bad

[bynkii]

Fun with variable scopes in PowerShell

So variable scopes. This can be fun, or really, quite maddening. My latest project is bridging PowerShell to AppleScript’s Choose File. Most of it has been easy, but the hard part has been the “of type” parameter, because it’s big. Like my current list uses around 1300 file extensions and file types to generate a list of Type Identifiers that can be use with “of type” because Type Identifiers are…

[vidadelafuerza]

JavaScript Node.js PowerShell JSON Repeat

Lately, I've taken a lot of time to reacquaint myself with JavaScript usage in Node.js. Specifically, I'm learning all the basic things I enjoy doing in PowerShell: File manipulation (list, read, write) and data manipulation (parse, extract, interpret, summarize).

Specifically, my favorite thing is to see something of interest on a website and/or analyze a website's requests in the Network tab of DevTools (CTRL+SHIFT+I). It has to be something useful. Such things can be scraped for data I might want. The way I do that is in the Network tab of DevTools (Chrome, MS Edge). Looking at a request, I can right click and get the PowerShell (or other code) that would give me that exact same information in Windows Terminal. Then, I typically do an ad-hoc script to get what I want.

Current Web Scrape++ Project

The project that has my interest at the moment is one where I'm taking all the text of a copyrighted version of the Bible, then using DOM queries and JavaScript to get just the verse numbers and verse text per chapter from the HTML. It sounds as complicated as it is, but it's the kind of thing I do for fun.

Node.js comes into play when I want to loop through all the HTML I've pulled and sanitized. The sanitization wasn't easy. I kept only the HTML with actual Bible text - which reduced the HTML payload to less than 2% its original size. That part was in PowerShell and Visual Studio Code. But I digress.

Using the Console of DevTools, I already have the JavaScript I'll need to pull what I want from the HTML file data into an array of "verse" objects, which I can then easily translate to JSON and write out.

Next, my goal is to take the data, store it as JSON files, and then manipulate it with PowerShell. For instance, I wonder what it looks like if I replace the word "Lord" with "Earl" or "Duke". As silly as that sounds, that's the entire modus operandi for my project, which has been maybe as much as 6 to 8 hours. The rest probably won't take that long, but each step has to be pursued with the smallest steps I can think to make. (There's no use looping 1189 chapters / files of HTML text to get erroneous stuff, so I go small and then large.)

[pillmillipedes]

fun fact: the reason these cursed shortcuts exist is because some of microsoft's keyboards have a dedicated "Office" key which for compatibility reasons maps to Ctrl-Win-Alt-Shift.

I don't remember if they work for non-365 versions of the apps, but if they do, some of them could be actually be kinda useful: X for Excel, W for Word, P for Powerpoint, etc.

And since this seems to have become a "people knowing shortcuts other people don't know about" post, here's some actually useful ones (some are common knowledge, some are not -you'd be surprised):

Win+V: show clipboard history

Win+D: show/hide desktop

Win+E: open file explorer (when in powershell: "ii ." also works)

Win+Shift+S: take a cropped screenshot (I prefer the snip & sketch tool because it lets you draw, but this is also pretty good)

Win+PrintScreen: save a screenshot to the Screenshots folder

Win+Period: open emoji panel

F2: rename selected item (works in many apps)

there's also a microsoft PowerToys app you can install that adds shortcuts for OCR, a color picker, etc.

Also I remember messing with school computers by rotating the screen sideways/upside down with a shortcut, but it might've been removed in modern versions.

cats know keyboard shortcuts even microsoft doesnt know about

[navybluetriangles]

1, 5, 6, 7, 17, 22, 28 :D

1 - What do you really need right now?

Hmm. I really need someone to tell me what to do. I probably wouldn't enjoy the answer, and I hate people telling me what to do 😆 but it's probably what I need.

5 - Something that makes you ridiculously happy?

Lots of things make me happy, but ridiculously happy? Spending good times with my friends who really feel like they respect and enjoy my company, seeing small garden birds, and messages from people I have saved. Sometimes I look at those and get so happy I scrunch up into a ball. Eee!

6 - What are you craving?

For once, not food! I really want a full, long massage, where I don't have to think about anything.

7 - Song stuck in your head?

Jealous Love by The Faim, it's soooo good. Pretty much any song from that album is stuck in my head recently. 😆😁

17 - Space, enchanted forest, magical kingdom, or underwater city?

Ohhhhh, this would be difficult. Underwater city would stress me out a little, I think I'd be stressed about drowning or feeling trapped. Honestly, all of these sound really cool.

Hmm, enchanted forest would be cool too, but also scaryyyyy. What if I ate a weird berry or offended a talking deer or something?!

So, space or magical kingdom. On one hand, magic would be real and awesome and you'd have a whole kingdom to explore! You could explore culture, and foods, and meet people, and see magic, and explore old buildings. But, space? All of space. You could discover so many truths about the universe, maybe discover alien life, see beautiful other worlds. There would be literally no limit to where you could go. I would have no idea which to choose.

22 - Strangest thing that has happened to you this week?

Uhm, I know it's silly, but I ran a script I'd made in Powershell, and it actually worked. 😅 It was only something really small and silly, but usually they NEVER work. So that was surprising....... strange.

28 - What about life makes you smile?

Ohhh what a good question. I really enjoy when you see people interacting in small ways. People going about their business, trying their best to be kind to others and to themselves. I like it when you see someone lend a stranger their Clubcard to get a discount, or people making cups of tea in their cars in lay-bys, or any small things that aren't just about survival. There's a road sign that points out the highest point of the M6 when you're driving on it. It always makes me smile. Its entire purpose is to let you know a cool fact, and I love that! Life is so hard and horrible sometimes, so I really love when I see people doing things just to be kind, or have fun, or just to have a tiny moment of enjoyment.

[amalgamgooze]

making a text-based adventure game is hard

I've realized that maybe the RPG that I was working on was a little ambitious for what resources I had.

For such limited time (and patience), I've realized that maybe I'll need to postpone any work on a game of such caliber for a bit...

Fortunately, I've found myself enjoying a new genre of games as of late--visual novels and other narrative-heavy games.

"Oh god," you yelp. "My *absolutely-favoritest* blogger has fallen to the clutches of lust!"

Not to worry, my friends. I'm not playing *that* type of visual novel.

I'm talking about Disco Elysium and Kyle is Famous and Night in the Woods.

And I'm also really digging the aesthetic of the Windows PowerShell window I have to use to install Python packages.

"I've got big things planned for this game,"

the foolish never-would-be game dev announced.

"This game will change the industry--it'll change the way the common man sees video games,"

the developer self-awarely pretentiously claimed. They might be a little crazy, but they still knew that changes as big as those wouldn't happen as a result of their little game.

But then I come back down to reality.

Changes as big as those don't *have* to happen as a result of my game.

In fact, I could make this game just for myself.

Nobody else would ever have to play it.

...

But then I'd miss out on all the fun of sharing my works with the world.

I'd miss out on the "what were you thinking here" shared laughs moments,

I'd miss out on the "only someone on drugs would write something like this" compliments,

I'd miss out on all of it.

...

And also making a game of this sort of nature kind of implies I'll be able to get my mom to play *a* video game.

...

Did you know that making a text-based visual novel adventure game is somewhat difficult?

Even if you know how to do classes and object-oriented programming and such?

I've spent a good part of today literally just drawing diagrams of how inheritance of locations is going to work in this game.

Dude. You have to start down at the *text* level and work your way up.

It's... interesting, to say the least.

And I'm sure my methods aren't exactly the best. Yet.

I'm fully prepared to have to scrap it all in favor of a more efficient, cleaner organization method.

...

Prepare for total .JSONification. All things must be JSON.

Everything you love. Everything you hold dear.

I.

Will.

Make.

It.

JSON.

...

Anyway, yeah. I'm going to probably be spending 10 hours a day on average coding for the rest of my life, with my jobs and my hobbies and my projects and my everything.

Fuck, I've accidentally made an interesting image filter for my internship while trying to detect edges using a custom-made gradient algorithm.

That means only one thing--I have the capability to program my own shit for Aseprite and Krita.

...

And it'll all make my art so much easier.

...

And what about music?

What if I make an algorithm that helps me continue the song when I'm stuck and don't know what to add next?

Based on what I've learned in Music Theory?

...

It's daunting that the possibilities are now endless, I suppose.

But at the core of it all?

Where everything began?

...

It was some radical dream in which I so vehemently desired to make a game.

To get my story out there in turn-based RPG form.

A dream that formed well over 7 years now.

And will continue to grow and form.

...

Some radical dream that persuaded this what-would-otherwise-be-just-another-sterile-passionless-STEM-major into taking weird classes like Art and Music Theory and Modern Drama in an immensely passionate pursuit of realizing their insane dream.

You know.

Instead of just focusing on what's important.

...

I could probably be saving *more* lives with more dedication to, oh, I don't know--cancer research? Biotech?

...anything productive?

But instead here I sit, wasting my potential by making stupid games.

...

I don't think my games are *stupid*, per se.

However, when you compare the societal impact of a video game to something like cancer research, well...

I'm just ashamed!

My priorities aren't in the right places, it seems--!

...

But don't try to console me.

I've already convinced myself that even though games might not better society in the same way medical research does, and even though I'm a terrible person for wanting to waste my potential, it's still what I want to do.

Hah.

And so they look in the mirror, at peace with the fact they're a terrible person in the eyes of some.

But in the eyes of others, and even sometimes the same people, they're triumphant.

They're doing shit they physically should not be able to.

They continue to defy expectations.

The logic of the world has gone to shit, and the reflection in the mirror somehow proves this point.

I should not exist in the capacity that I do.

And...

...

I believe I've made my argument that a narrative-based game from me would be, at the very least, interesting.

...

And I totally didn't just have an unprofessional breakdown-rant in typed format.

...

def generateNewBreakdown(self, _subject:str=None) -> str:

...

On an unrelated note, I'm really starting to become attracted to the way Python code looks.

It's not a sexual attraction to the way the code looks.

Yet.

[nitallica]

So I have news

The new laptop finally came in. I went with another Alienware (an M18 this time) because at the time I was still employed at SVP and we had a nice big discount with Dell, putting it far below the ASUS ROG I had been eyeing. Basically the same specs, and to be fair, until my last lappy ate itself, both brands had proven rock solid. Dell's tech support proved slightly better than ASUS in my own personal experience. And considering that machine was well over 7 years old, I'd say that it held up really well! So now I'm still moving data over. I had online backups through Carbonite which kept most things that I'd forgotten. Sadly, I lost my OneNote notebook. The online copy was over a year out of date. Apparently it had stopped backing up, and I could not find any local copies. If I could've gone back, I would have manually exported a backup copy somewhere. Oh well, you live and you learn. Sucks because that's where I stored all of my custom Powershell scripts I'd written over the years. Bleh! Almost all of my software licenses were backed up via email or my external backup drive. Unfortunately about 25% of my Plex library is on that drive too since I'd store my manual DVD and BluRay rips there. I've now got the drive mounted on my Shield again, so those are populating back into Plex now. I lost the rips I had done of my iTunes library, so I'll have to do those over. No biggie, just gonna take time. I wish to God someone had a place where I could buy movies and TV shows with no DRM. I mean, it's easy enough to buy on DVD or BluRay and rip it myself, but the out of print stuff is harder and harder to find. :( Like, I'd love to have all of Murder She Wrote. Let me pay to download full copies to own myself and put on my Plex so I can watch offline. That's one of my few comfort shows. Netflix, Hulu, Peacock Premium, hell even just basic cable, it's all too expensive now. Let me pay for and own what I want. /le sigh At least DRM-free music is easy to find and usually pretty reasonably priced, so no worries there. :) Also: I accepted a job offer this past Friday with DataPerk. It'll be a pay and benefits cut, but the job sounds fun. The guys I met seemed nice enough. I'm not looking forward to having to go through all the medical authorizations for all of my treatments and medications again (considering we JUST did that when SVP changed providers). And DP's benefits do not cover my therapy so I'll be back to paying that out of pocket, which is going to hurt for a while. Better than going without though. Been there, did that, not gonna be that stupid again. I honestly don't have updates on much else. I know I need to get away first chance I get. Unwind, let off some steam. The last year has mostly not been good for me outside of the few trips I took. This year I need to take better care of myself, drawing firmer boundaries where needed (family included). So we'll see ... source: https://www.nickifaulk.com/2024/01/28/so-i-have-news/

[mirqmarq428]

You into programming? Any languages of choice? Any projects you are willing to talk about?

Yes, i program for fun and efficiency. im addicted to Emacs, so elisp is sort of my default language at the moment. I keep trying to get into Common Lisp, and if i got a chance to sit down with StumpWM again that would be great.

I'm also quite fond of PowerShell. Imo it's about as close to lisp as you can get with sh-like syntax, and on windows it's completely overpowered (iv written briefly about this a while back, search my #powershell tag).

Projects? I tend to get just far enough in on something to use it okay for myself, then it never get polished. For example i made an Emacs plugin to change and view GNOME settings, but you have to touch the files first or it won't do anything - and i use it like twice a year so the pressure to fix that "bug" is essentially zero. Same sort of thing with the hyprland-esque wallpaper generator - i got a third of the way thru porting it to Windows/Mac and just kinda haven't picked it up since. Also with that one i had the brilliant idea of writing the git branch and remote names in kanji, so there might be even weirder bugs outside of UTF-8 Linux. Lol