Open a browser and paste:
ms-windows-store://pdp/?ProductId=9n4wgh0z6vhq
Open a cmd window and paste:
start ms-windows-store://pdp/?ProductId=9n4wgh0z6vhq
Then click install.
]]>Go to Power Bi and choose to update app, then go to the the permissions tab and you can see that the list just shows names, and you cannot export.
Open Chrome F12 dev tools, and inspect a users name and you can see that there is a title attribute that contains the User Principal Name which we are interested in.
In the console at the bottom, paste this command to return a semi-colon delimited list of UPNs:
$$("span[class=displayName]").forEach(user => { console.log(user.title + ";") })
I’ve been responsible for compiling a few together so thought I would finally document my steps. It might not be optimal but it’s what has worked for me.
You’ll likely be getting videos from all over the place in different formats. I received the majority through Messenger (.mp4), so for consistency, if a video was sent to me another way I would just send it to myself on Messenger to get an mp4 and deal with the slight compression. On your computer, go to messenger.com in a browser, click the video, then click download in the top right.
Will update this post later with more specifics on how to use each app
]]>What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself
— Senaca quoting Hecato
Written in August 2020 during Melbourne’s Lockdown 2.0 and only published in 2021 during Lockdown 3.0 :man_facepalming: whoops - will require a re-write / update / 2021 edition
You can jump straight to the changes if you want.
I haven’t figured out if I will share this yet. Or how. Or if it’s even interesting. But I think I probably will because there is a chance that something in the below will help someone.
As you may know, I quit my job in October 2019 as I was burnt out after ~17 years (through acquisition) of being with the same company and industry - advertising, media and creative agencies. The final year of my constantly changing role was particularly challenging as the company went through multiple restructures, redundancies and budget cuts. When I resigned I had about 9 months of unused annual and long-service leave that was paid out, so the aim was to take 4-12 months off, recharge, spend more time with friends and family, climbing, hiking, camping, then once I felt ready, look for some more meaningful work (what does meaningful mean? yeah, more on that later)
We demand to be taken seriously
The first few months of not working were glorious. Within 2 weeks of my last day of work I finally sat my drivers license exam and got my manual license at the ripe old age of 36.
Thank you Jess for being an excellent and patient teacher
I learnt to trad climb at Dyurrite/Mt Arapiles with Jon, another excellent and patient teacher. I started doing more sport and trad climbing with Phil, Gerardo and Sean, completing my first few multipitches. My outdoor bouldering grade improved, completing a bunch of v4 climbs on days spent at Mt Alex, Benloch and Camels Hump with Phil, Tee or Bo. I booked to do the Kokoda trail in May with my little brother Lachie, and hiked whenever I could in preparation - Feathertop with snow a highlight.
Jon at Dyurrite/Arapiles on my first visit
I did 10 sessions with a psychologist while I had free access through works EAP (Employee Assistance Program). I had wrapped up a lot of my identity in my work, and with not working for the first time ever in my adult life I had quite a bit to do to figure out who I am, what I value, and what is my purpose - or at least I thought this was what I needed to figure out. I’d graduated school at 17, went straight to uni, then started my career at the end of my 2nd year of uni, going back to uni part time a year later to finish the course while still working.
People would ask me how I was going, and if I was thinking about looking for work soon. Around February/March I started to feel like I was ready to look for a couple of days of work a week.
Then covid hit.
Firstly, some caveats. I know I’m lucky in that I don’t have dependents (a cat doesn’t count). I know people will scoff at my get up time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Surviving was enough for the first lockdown.
If you pretend lockdown life is forever, ‘what does thriving look like?’— errr, me
Back in March, Jess and I talked about writing down some predictions for ourselves for 3 months time (maybe with the view to it being post-covid? I don’t remember). I’d forgotten I’d written them down in OneNote and not shared them with anybody until now. I’ll come back to how accurate they were.
In chatting with Jon at the start of April he had also asked me something similar. In some ways, everything I’ve written down here is answering him.
I found this video about Spaceship You helpful, particularly the bit about the core generator being your health made up of two halves (physical and mental) and if the core is low, it’s easier to start with the physical half.
Without work to provide a defacto structure, I recognised that if I didn’t invent my own I would slip into old habits of going to bed late, which means I would get up late, I’d then eat lunch quite late, leading to eating dinner late, going to bed late, and so the cycle would repeat.
I also have accepted that I’m a night owl, and therefore more likely to be productive later in the day, so I don’t try and force myself to work first thing in the morning. A few years ago I saw Dan Pink’s opening keynote at Telstra Vantage talking about knowing your chronotype
My basic structure looks like this - I’ve listed the night time first, because without nailing the night, I won’t nail the morning
I think I might add in a wind down activity like doing a jigsaw at some point.
Every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become
— James Clear - Atomic Habits
Here a few more little excerpts from the book Atomic Habits. I actually listened to the audiobook while running/walking/riding and then purchased the paperback. It had always been on my list of books to read, but thanks Karloskar for inspiring me to actually do it.
I had actually started trying to read more this year already with the rough goal of reading 12 books (1 a month), but the reading of Atomic Habits helped me frame why and how. I also realised that reading non-fiction before bed wasn’t the best way to form a reading habit, so I’ve switched to reading some fantasy genre trash as John calls it
What I’ve read so far this year:
Metro Melbourne in stage 4 lockdown meant we can/could only leave our houses once a day to exercise for 1 hour.
To maximise this exercise time outside I decided to add learning yoga using Down Dog
Each day I would either:
My daily activities have now evolved into doing a collection of the below:
I’m using a habit tracking app on my phone that sends me a notification at 11pm each night to check-in about my day. There are plenty out there, and I just stuck with the first free one I tried, Daylio
Some highlights:
I’m making a lot more of an effort to actively seek out human contact through phone and video calls - normally I’d get this interaction in person.
Giving plasma every 2-4 weeks.
I had a few online sessions with a different psych for free as part of another work EAP. The psych got me to do something I’d wanted to do for ages but never got around to which was to actually define my values. They are still a work in progress but for now they are:
You may have noticed the reading on philosophy. I’d asked John if he had a recommendation on a basic grounding in a bunch of different philosophies and he recommended Alain de Botton’s book which covers:
I found Epicurus, Seneca and Montaigne the most interesting, and from there I’ve then started reading more about Stoicism in particular which has helped me a lot during these last few months.
I have generally healthier consumption, and am looking forward to getting my cholesterol re-checked once lockdown eases:
Back to those 3 month predictions where I was fairly prescient
It’s hard.
I started this post with a quote that I’m also going to end with
What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself
— Senaca quoting Hecato
I am a work in progress, and that is a good thing
]]>To obtain optimal light blockage from my apartments poorly designed micro venetian blinds, I have flipped the blinds around so the tilt rod and raise/lower strings are now on the window side and hard to use.
This results in the bedroom blinds being left closed most of the time, and as my kitchen gets sunlight through the bedroom door, it leads to a dreary disposition.
This sounded like a perfect opportunity to improve my working from home experience through the use of technology by adding a button driven mechanical process to open and close my blinds, and I’d get to play with Arduino and do some more programming.
Code
Wiring diagram
Finished product
Parts required
Decisions I had to make
Features
Todo
Code is on github here
Breadboard with open and close buttons attached to the wall. Lego tower behind the blinds, with the stepper motor stuck to the top. Shaft coupler connecting to the tilt rot.
Random angry birds lego tower I had in the cupboard that was basically the correct height. One day I may replace it
If you don’t have any equipment yet, a $40 kit at jaycar containing an UNO Arduino-Compatible board, breadboard, usb cable, jumper wires etc might be a good start and may be cheaper than buying some of the parts individually
Turning the tilt mechanism using either a servo or a stepper motor seemed like the best approach as then I wouldn’t have to figure out how to interface with the raise and lower string which is the kind you have to pull on an angle.
I took down the blinds and experimented with housing a motor in the top rail connected to the horizontal metal rod that is responsible for the tilt, but there’s not much room up there (at either end), and I decided that a modification that could be removed easily to return the blinds to manual control was preferred. This meant that I was going to have to attach a motor to the tilt rod that a human normally turns.
A stepper motor allowed me to program in a set number of rotations between open and closed.
Keep it simple to start with, and use buttons to open and close on-demand instead of trying to get fancy with automatic function based on time of day, light levels, or voice control
I’ve been wondering what the quality of my sleep is like, and how much sharing a bed with a cat (or my partner) affects it, so I borrowed an IP camera with infrared from a friend.
This camera is old and so can’t do motion detection or write footage to a remote location (only SD card).
Below is the process by which I am recording the footage via an RTSP stream, analysing it for motion, then speeding it up so that I can watch a 2 minute summary.
Some of my notes after a few nights:
dvr-scan -roi to specify region of interest to just detect motion of just me (head or feet), or catdvr-scanExample output (roughly cropped to just my cat, you don’t need to watch me sleep ya weirdo):
You will need a copy of ffmpeg and dvr-scan (which you’ll also need Python for). I’m running this on Windows and have my utils in my %path%
Start capturing RTSP stream into 5 minute long video files split using clocktime (so 1:00-1:05 etc). Each file is labeled capture-xxxxx.mp4 where xxxxx is an incrementing 5 digit number.
ffmpeg -i rtsp://user:pass@ip:port/11 -c:v copy -c:a mp2 -ar 44100 -aq 0 -ac 2 -map 0 -f segment -segment_atclocktime 1 -segment_time 300 -segment_format mp4 "capture-%05d.mp4"
Generate a file called scan.txt that contains the command for the next step that includes all remaining videos as parameters
powershell "'dvr-scan', (((Get-ChildItem capture*.mp4).name) -join ' -i ') -join ' -i ' | Set-Content scan.txt"
Example scan.txt content:
dvr-scan -i capture-00009.mp4 -i capture-00010.mp4 -i capture-00011.mp4
scan.txt and copy the contents into your clipboarddvr-scan command using the contents of your clipboard.DSME_xxxx appended on the end eg. capture-00009.DSME_0000.avi, capture-00009.DSME_0001.avi etc.Output the filenames of videos of motion in the format that ffmpeg wants into a file called files.txt
powershell "(Get-ChildItem *DSME* | ForEach-Object { 'file ''{0}''' -f $_.name }) | Set-Content files.txt"
Example files.txt content:
file 'capture-00009.DSME_0000.avi'
file 'capture-00009.DSME_0001.avi'
file 'capture-00009.DSME_0002.avi'
Run ffmpeg to stitch the videos together at 20x speed (for 10x change 0.05 to 0.1)
ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i files.txt -filter:v "setpts=0.05*PTS" output.avi
output.avi to see how badly you sleepYou can troubleshoot this kind of behaviour using the Xbox Accessories application on either Windows 10 or the Xbox One itself.
You can see in the bottom right of the screenshot below that the thumbstick is not centered at rest:
The elite controller retails for AU$200 and was out of warranty so fixing it myself seemed like a worthwhile project. I did a bunch of research, and while most fixes suggested that you would need to replace the whole analog joystick housing which would involve soldering, I figured out that there were 2 small sensors, each responsible for the x and y axis, that could be replaced instead and may fix my issue.
I ordered replacement parts from AliExpress (but didn’t wait for them to arrive). The whole housing looks like this:
The sensor inside which is the bit we want can actually be found in 360/PS3 controllers too and looks like this (left one is the damaged sensor from the Xbox One Elite Controller and the right one was taken out of an old Xbox 360 controller):
You’ll need T6 and T8 security torx screwdrivers to pull apart the controller. Note the security torx variant of the screwdriver has a hole in the middle due to the screws having a post in the center of the head. (You can also snap off this post with a small flathead screwdriver to enable a normal torx to fit, and I also discovered if you have the correct width flathead screwdriver you can then also turn the screw using this)
I used this video for help with dissassembling and reassembling the elite controller:
I used this video (starting at 4:32) for the sensor replacement:
Xbox 360 controller:
Xbox One controller:
Now my Elite controller is working perfectly again, at least for now!
Note: Upon reassembly, the elite controller has a ribbon cable that controls the paddles on the back. If you re-connect this upside down the paddles will still work but the top left will now be the bottom right and so on.
]]>PowerShell code is on github here: https://github.com/stugr/public-misc/blob/master/OutlookBirthdayCalendar.ps1
Outlook.com has an automatic birthday calendar and I have found the creation of entries to be incredibly unreliable, particularly when changing birthdays on a contact in iOS (mail account is added to iOS to allow contact syncing in both directions, and Save Contacts is turned off in the Outlook iOS app)
Read about the birthday calendar: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/add-a-birthday-calendar-in-outlook-com-b8e636da-fda8-413f-940e-68396efa49a6
Script requires Outlook to be installed and the account you want to use to be setup. Untested with multiple accounts.
After running in default whatIf mode to ensure it’s operating against the correct account and you’re comfortable with what it will do, toggle $whatIf = $true to run it for real
1/01/4501 12:00:00 AM$subject's Birthday)Step 5 can be toggled off by setting $deleteRecurringCalendarEntry = $false
systeminfo | find "Install Date" you’ll find that it will only return the date of the last Windows 10 build that has been installed, instead of the original install date.
Original Install Date: 30/10/2019, 2:45:19 AM
Instead, you’ll need to hit up the registry.
Using powershell you are able to get the date for each upgrade build along with the very first install date.
Expanded longhand:
# get old versions
(Get-ChildItem -Path HKLM:\System\Setup\Source* | ForEach-Object {Get-ItemProperty -Path Registry::$_}) +
# append current version
(Get-ItemProperty 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion') |
# select the fields we care about
Select-Object ProductName, ReleaseId, CurrentBuild,
# make date readable and convert from UTC
@{n='InstallDate'; e={([DateTime]'1/1/1970').AddSeconds($_.InstallDate).ToLocalTime()}} |
# sort
Sort-Object 'InstallDate'
Collapsed shorthand:
(gci HKLM:\System\Setup\Source* | % {gp -Path Registry::$_}) + (gp 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion') | select ProductName, ReleaseId, CurrentBuild, @{n='InstallDate'; e={([DateTime]'1/1/1970').AddSeconds($_.InstallDate).ToLocalTime()}} | sort 'InstallDate'
Example output from an old computer that’s been upgraded all the way since Windows 8.1:
ProductName ReleaseId CurrentBuild InstallDate
----------- --------- ------------ -----------
Windows 8.1 Pro 9600 16/09/2013 9:49:28 PM
Windows 10 Pro 10240 1/08/2015 12:19:42 AM
Windows 10 Pro 1511 10586 13/01/2016 3:47:41 AM
Windows 10 Pro 1607 14393 9/10/2016 5:53:53 AM
Windows 10 Pro 1703 15063 26/04/2017 10:50:15 PM
Windows 10 Pro 1709 16299 10/03/2018 1:32:55 PM
Windows 10 Pro 1803 17134 17/05/2018 3:45:10 AM
Windows 10 Pro 1903 18362 30/10/2019 3:45:19 AM
NB. You may notice an hour discrepancy between the systeminfo and powershell outputs for the last install, likely due to daylight savings and how epoch time is stored by Windows and subsequently converted to current timezone. I’ve not needed this information to be absolutely precise so haven’t installed a fresh computer to see which one is the correct value.
]]>I’ve found the easiest and quickest way to determine where the account lockout occurred is to query the PDC Emulator with Powershell. You may require a domain admin to do this.
# Get PDC Emulator from the domain
$pdcEmulator = (Get-ADDomainController -Filter * | ? {$_.OperationMasterRoles -contains "PDCEmulator"}).hostname
# Run command against PDC Emulator
$lockouts = Invoke-Command -Credential (Get-Credential "DOMAIN\AdminAccount") -ComputerName $pdcEmulator -ScriptBlock
{
# Filter on event id 4740 for the past 24 hours
Get-WinEvent -FilterHashtable @{logname='security'; id=4740; StartTime=(Get-Date).AddHours(-24)} | select timecreated, @{N='who';E={$_.properties[0].value }}, @{N='where';E={$_.properties[1].value }}
}
# Search results for the user
$lockouts | ? {$_.who -eq "User.Locking" } | select timecreated, who, where | ft -auto
TimeCreated who where ----------- --- ----- 5/07/2016 1:34:12 PM User.Locking computerName 5/07/2016 12:34:12 PM User.Locking computerName 5/07/2016 10:46:47 AM User.Locking UAGserver 5/07/2016 10:01:56 AM User.Locking CASserver
Depending on your environment, if you are seeing lockouts occurring on a workstation, it will generally be typing a password wrong or saved credentials somewhere. If you are seeing them at a UAG or CAS server, investigate their activesync devices.
Get-ActiveSyncDevice -mailbox 'User.Locking' | ft guid, friendlyname, devicetype, whencreated -AutoSize
Guid FriendlyName DeviceType WhenCreated ---- ------------ ---------- ----------- 28236d04-478a-433a-9af6 Outlook for iOS and Android Outlook 15/06/2016 12:24:14 PM 4abe3b7c-cba3-45db-ade2 computerName WindowsMail 2/12/2015 4:19:10 PM
If you need to remove these ActiveSync devices:
$devices = Get-ActiveSyncDevice -mailbox 'User.Locking'
$devices | % { Remove-ActiveSyncDevice -Identity $_.identity }
If you get an error like An unexpected error has occurred and a Watson dump is being generated: Object reference not set to an instance then set this before running remove:
Set-ADServerSettings -ViewEntireForest $true]]>