Thursday, September 26, 2013

Woo.. Raspberry Pi

I placed my order for a Raspberry Pi last night. Now to think of  a cool project to use it on (I'm thinking controlling underbench lighting)

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Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Powershell: Ping List of Computers and Export the results to CSV

This script will ping a list of computers and then output the results into CSV.

Get-Content c:\test\computers.txt | ForEach-Object
    {
        if(Test-Connection -ComputerName $_ -Quiet -Count 1) {
            New-Object -TypeName PSCustomObject -Property @{
                ComputerName = $_
                'Ping Status' = 'Ok'
                }
    }
    else
    {
        New-Object -TypeName PSCustomObject -Property @{
            ComputerName = $_
            'Ping Status' = 'Failed'
        }  
    }
} | Export-Csv -Path c:\test\PingStatus.csv -NoTypeInformation

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Onenote code formatting

ATTN: Microsoft Office Team. Please put code highlighting into the next version of Onenote.. it's pretty much the only thing stopping me from using Onenote as dedicated code snippet database.

I see that a 3rd Party tool is available for this but it should be availble inside the product
http://www.onenotegem.com/2/post/2013/01/onenote-insert-highlight-syntax-source-code.html

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Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Monday, September 23, 2013

Citrix Forums : Receiver 4 USB Power Issues ...

Just keep an eye for this issue.. if you install v14.0.0.91 of Citrix Receiver on XP you may find that the electrical current rating for your USB ports dropping from 500ma to 100ma. This is not enough current to run anything beyond a USB keyboard.

There is an updated version of the c:\windows\system32\drivers\ctxusbm.sys floating around that fixes the issue on XP devices. Contact your citrix support to obtain the updated file. We replaced the file and rebooted the issue is fixed on XP devices.

Citrix Forums : Receiver 4 USB Power Issues ...:

'via Blog this'

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Thursday, September 19, 2013

Powershell: Restart service on a list of computers

#Gets a list of machines and then restarts the specified service on each computer.
#Get list of computers
$Computers = Get-Content C:\myscript\serverlist2.txt
#what service
$service = "spooler"
#Function to create object
function OutData($computer,$service,$Object) {
 $out = New-Object psobject
 $out | add-member -type noteproperty -name Computer $computer
 $out | add-member -type noteproperty -name Service $service
 $out | add-member -type noteproperty -name Result $Object
 $out
}
#create empty variable
$result = @()
#main
foreach ($computer in $computers)
    {
    if (Test-Connection -ComputerName $computer -Quiet -count 1)
        {
        $Object = "Restarted $($service) service"
        Restart-Service -InputObject $(Get-Service -Computer $computer -Name $service)
        $result += Outdata $computer $service $object
        }
        else
        {
        $object = "$($computer) not online"
        $result += Outdata $computer $service $object
        }
    }
#export the results
$result | Export-Csv C:\myscript\RestartServiceResults.csv -NoTypeInformation
$Result


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Tuesday, September 10, 2013

My Plasma Ball sets of my smoke alarm

I turned on my plasma ball that my dad gave me years ago,, then the smoke alarm went bezerk. I wonder what is happening to cause this.

I suspect the high frequency and high voltage of the plasma ball may be knocking the protons that the smoke alarm uses sense if there is smoke in the room or not off course (normally smoke particles would do this).

Powershell Export-CSV as FileName with Date

Exporting data from powershell in to CSV format is easy. We can use the 'export-csv' cmdlet. However I got stuck trying to append the date to the filename of the CSV.

The tricky bit that I got stuck on was when i tried Get-date I tried like this thinking it would work.
$users | Export-Csv c:\temp\LNCUS-$(Get-Date -format dd-MM-yyyy) .csv -NoTypeInformation  
This failed with the following error


The error happens because the output from Get-Date is not in a string format. To fix this we just need to convert the date format to string by doing the following
$users | Export-Csv c:\temp\LNCUS-$((Get-Date).ToString('MM-dd-yyyy')).csv -NoTypeInformation

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Tuesday, September 03, 2013

How to restart the task sequence wizard in WINPE without having to reboot

If you make a mistake and cancel out the task sequence wizard in WinPE you can restart it without rebooting. Keep in mind this won't work everytime as it depends on where you failed your task sequence

TsBootShell.exe

To find it you might need to goto to the root of your WinPE drive and type

DIR TsBootShell.exe /s

It will normally be found in

X:\sms\bin\i386

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