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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Geekery

  • Your Bitness Is Insufficient

    I spent part of the workday making a script to perform two tasks on all machines at a particular client site:

    1. Remove a specific named user from the local “Administrators” group on a PC.
    2. Remove that user from the PC entirely.

    Since I’ve been moving toward using PowerShell rather than various (potentially abandonware) utilities for handling command-line scripted jobs, I looked into if there were simple commands to perform those two tasks. Good news! Remove-LocalGroupMember and Remove-LocalUser exist!

    The bad news? Microsoft’s documentation for both of those “cmdlets” stresses the fact that if you are on a 64-bit version of Windows and you try to use them in a 32-bit console, those cmdlets aren’t available at all.

    Guess whose RMM system hasn’t yet gotten around to making 64-bit agent software? Surprise, that’d be ConnectWise’s “Automate” product. What does this mean? It means that the Automate agent’s “commands” are sent to a 32-bit console. Exactly what I don’t want.

    Not to worry, however: With some testing I found that I can invoke PowerShell 7 (which lives separately from the “native” installed PowerShell) via the remote agent and those cmdlets are available! A heck of a workaround, but I’ll take what I can get. On the downside, the client for whom I needed this script didn’t yet have PowerShell 7 installed, not on any of their machines. This led to some time spent figuring out a fix for the PS7 installers not downloading reliably from our S3-compatible bucket. (Oh hey, Github links direct to the PS7 MSIs, thanks for existing.)

    So… with PS7 deployed to the client’s machines (after I updated some automation to make sure all clients’ machines will get the PS7 product and/or update) I successfully ran my new script to eradicate the unwanted user account. A day well spent.

  • I just wanna rock thru paradise

    (Look, the last songs I listened to before starting this post were all by Midnight Oil and I couldn’t resist mangling the first line of “Pictures” for no good reason whatsoever. Deal with it.)

    If you’ve known me for a decent number of years, you know I can’t resist making a “living room multimedia” setup. The most recent rig is an Intel NUC that I planned to run Kodi on, since it does a decent enough job at reading ratings & other tags from my music library files. Unfortunately, what it doesn’t do is offer much in the way of remote controls anymore. The product’s always been more focused on watching videos than listening to music anyway, so I suppose it was inevitable that I’d eventually tire of its shenanigans.

    So today I tried switching to Mopidy. Basically, it’s a service-level process which provides access to your music library and will play whatever you select through the local machine’s audio hardware. Perfect!

    Only. Well. Not actually perfect.

    For starters, Mopidy and Pulseaudio had to be made to talk to one another. (I goofed the first time I tried to follow the instructions to make this work, because of course I did.) And I needed a front-end. (I’ve gone through several, none of them particularly great.) And then I ran into the biggest, most annoying problem: Mopidy and its available front-ends don’t care about tags (other than artist, title, album, and maybe artwork).

    I need the ratings, and I also need the Mood tag. Oh, and I want to be able to make smart playlists. That, at least, Kodi could do!

    I’m afraid I’m going back to the drawing board. Again.

  • Workflow Wut

    We had a weird problem with one ticket that wouldn’t stay closed.

    Yes, this is about the ticketing system workflow shenanigans I wrote about a couple of times earlier this month. Yes, there were more shenanigans.

    (more…)

  • Eh? Aye.

    We live in the future, and it’s both awesome and horrifying.

    Collectively, many of us have spent the last few decades adding data to the Internet. Words, pictures, sounds, and so forth. And now, people with lots of money to buy lots of computer equipment are going to use what we’ve made to make themselves an even bigger pile of money.

    (more…)

  • Satisfactory – New Clear Power Plan

    In the co-op Satisfactory game with the kids (look, I get to call them “kids” even though they’ve been full adults for over a decade now, it’s my parental privilege) we’ve finally reached the point where we need to consider actually doing the thing we only really joked about early on: Tackling nuclear power.

    (more…)

  • Satisfactory – In And Around The Lake

    “… mountains come out of the sky and they stand there!”

    Yes, ha ha, the song “Roundabout” by Yes (ha ha) earworms me every time I think about building roundabouts in Satisfactory. Maybe you, dear reader, are young enough not to have this problem. I envy you your youth and your lack of Jon Anderson’s voice in your head.

    Anyway.

    (more…)

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