Technology Solutions for Everyday Folks

Matt Zaske Online Blog

Triggering a Slack Notification on Completion of a Task Sequence

Screen snip (sanitized) of a completed task sequence Slack notification

A number of years ago I started having my primary OSD Task Sequences "check in" as one of their last steps. Specifically check in with key information so I can follow up as necessary ("trust but verify") with downstream actions to ensure our asset management systems are properly updated.

I chose a Slack webhook to accomplish this as I could set up a quiet channel for notifications and queue them for later review (once a day or a few times per week).

Read More

Creating a Generic OAuth Token Request to Microsoft Graph API

After spending much of the month of August on a European vacation, I'm back and preparing for my sessions at MMS Flamingo Edition coming up in October.

Read More

Exporting Full MySQL Database Tables on Ubuntu

...or, How I Suffered Through an 'If it Can Go Wrong, it Will Go Wrong' Scenario for a One-Off Export of Database Tables

This is one of those posts I'm writing up because in the moment I was so incredibly frustrated about how unnecessarily complex this action was, and I still have the various browser tabs that ultimately provided me the necessary bits open. I write this mostly for Future Me should I need to do something like this again.

Read More

Basic Dialog to Manually Name OSD Task Sequence Device

Many years ago I wrote about the way I automatically generate the OSDComputerName value for most devices in my fleet. Much of that process remains as it did back then, but I've never written about how I handle the one-offs (such as my testing VMs or other nonstandard hardware).

Read More

Manually Pointing Windows Activation At Alternate KMS Host

Screen snip of a successful Windows 11 Enterprise KMS Activation

If you work with a lot of disparate dev and test devices across different domains, tenants, etc., you might run into the sort of Windows activation issue I encounter. In particular, when I'm doing dev/test work using physical hardware in my lab space (for things like OSD or OSDCloud), these machines wind up managed by my dev/test tenants/environments, and thus not pointing at our production KMS server for Windows activation.

Read More

Setting Up SSH Key Authentication: 2024 Edition

A recent project I worked on required setting up more SSH key authentication, and seeing as how I'd not written about it for two years since the last iteration, it seems fitting to do another quick primer on setting that up for SSH...the 2024 edition.

Read More

Getting Started with WSL - A Quick Installation Guide

Snip of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS in the Microsoft Store.
  • April 29, 2024
  • 4 minutes
  • tech

I've been using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) almost as long as it's been generally available, and I use it for all sorts of things.

Read More

Automatically Process and Send Google Form Responses on Submission

Screen snip of a dynamically generated PDF from Google Form submission

I haven't written anything up about Google stuff in a while, and since this topic came up a few times in as many weeks (including from conversations at BrainStorm K20) I figured it's time to share the solution I've used several times.

Read More

Creating a Differential Sensor In Home Assistant

Home Assistant Gauge Card indicating a temperature differential

If you've fiddled enough in Home Assistant over time, you might have encountered the situation in which it is useful to trigger off of, or simply display, a calculated value. There are a few different ways this can be accomplished but this post focuses on creating a specific sensor to do both: be used as a trigger value for automation, and also displayed neatly in a dashboard.

Read More

Belated Farewell to the Twitter/X API

"dead Twitter" bird icon: an upside down Twitter bird with an X where the eye would be.
  • February 12, 2024
  • 2 minutes
  • bots, tech

This isn't much of a "real" post, and admittedly I needed a filler for this week, but it's been on my list to write about here for a while: Last summer I shut down my three Twitter bots when the Twitter API moved to a ridiculous new access rate structure.

Read More

Export CM Collection Member Details to CSV

A script snippet I use all the time (and which gets a lot of search traffic) is something I wrote in 2020 about exporting AD computers to CSV with Powershell.

Read More

Lighting the Dark Days of Winter with Home Assistant

Screen snip of two settings in Home Assistant for Light state and a script trigger

This fall, right after the time change, I found myself often working intensely enough to suddenly notice "it was dark outside" in the late afternoon. Good for productivity, I suppose; not so much otherwise? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Read More

Reflections on Advent of Code 2023

Screen snip of a portion of the AoC "map" for 2023

I finally gave Advent of Code a shot for 2023! In years past I'd think about/stumble across/remember it a week or two in and automatically 'nope' out of starting. This year, in large part due to the WinAdmins Discord, I was both reminded of it in advance and also had a small community of other folks taking part (and a private leaderboard to watch).

Read More

OctoPrint Webhook for Filament Change Notifications

I've been using OctoPrint to handle nearly all of my 3D printing operations since I moved to it a little over a year ago. It's an absolutely wonderful platform and I can't recommend it enough.

Read More

Hotend Thermistor With A Silpat, Revisited

I decided to post a quick follow-up to the original fix I'd implemented about ten months ago.

The $1M question was...

Read More

Back to a Regular Schedule?

Gif of a "retro" television powering up to a white screen/noise.

Man, it's embarrassing to see that I haven't published anything really technical (beyond my MMS Miami Beach recap) since the end of July...and before that anything on a regular schedule since April! Despite my best intentions, some aspects of life got complicated.

Read More

MMS Miami Beach Recap

Rudy (at left) and Matt take a quick picture from the speakers' angle of the "Big Room" at MMS Miami Beach as we begin our 8 a.m. session.

I had the great honor and pleasure of being a speaker at MMS Miami Beach Edition at the end of October. It was the first speaking event I've had since 2019, largely due to the pandemic, and the experience was marvelous! The entire team behind MMS is outstanding, and their attention to detail really makes a difference in the experience both for attendees and speakers.

The Overall Experience

The speaker attire this edition was pretty rad: lots of flamingo gear!

Read More

Enabling Pi-hole DNS Across Multiple VLANs

Screenshot of the "Top Clients" dashboard box of the Pi-hole admin interface, showing six clients with their local dns addresses and activity.

I recently (and finally) upgraded my home network to a UniFi system after years of consideration and an incorrect assumption it would cost a small fortune to enact. My existing "core" router was reaching the end of its normal life, though, and I wanted a real mesh network with better outdoor coverage instead of using the range extender during the "not winter" months and connecting to a different SSID.

Read More

Turn off the fan already! Tales of an automation modification

Snip of details when creating a Home Assistant helper entity for a timer object.

It's been a couple months since my last post, and while I had some things in the queue I have lacked time to finish them out due to MMS in early May, being involved in a community theatre production that just wrapped up a couple weeks ago, and for random reasons building a chicken coop of all things. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Here's to a return of more regular posts, assuming I have adequate time to write and revise them!

Read More

Addressing Firmware Updates for Dell Latitude 54X0 in a Task Sequence

Screenshot of a child task sequence for updating firmware in Full OS mode, with a Run PowerShell Script step highlighted with package and script information.

For about two years we fought with getting firmware (BIOS) updates to install on our Dell Latitude 54X0 models during their build/rebuild using a MEMCM task sequence. No matter what random trick I tried or thing I read, I just couldn't get the update executable to successfully apply the update in our primary build/refresh task sequence. Our techs (self included) would have to apply the update manually after devices were [re]built.

Read More

Semi-Automatically Offering Dell BIOS/Firmware Updates

Photo of Dell firmware update in progress instructing a user not to power down the system and showing a progress bar with basic status information.

Several years ago I implemented a mechanism in our primary [re]build [Configuration Manager/MEMCM/SCCM] task sequence to address upgrades of our fleet's firmware (BIOS). On the whole, the process has worked very well and definitely helped keep things updated.

Read More

Creating a Reference Sensor Template in Home Assistant

Snip of a Home Assistant Dashboard item identifying two sensor states: one for bathroom humidity at a level of 44.6% and another for bathroom humidity target at level 49.0%.

It's been a while since I wrote about any Home Assistant stuff so I figured this was as a good time to write about something I'm super happy with: custom/reference sensor templates!

Read More

Going Dual Camera with OctoPrint

Almost as soon as I started using OctoPrint, I also set up an old webcam to let me remotely "see" things since I keep the printer in the basement. That whole process was an adventure, because I don't use a Raspberry Pi for OctoPrint like most folks; I have an old Intel NUC (also used as a local dev server) running Ubuntu on which I installed OctoPrint.

Read More

Creating a Practical and Automatic Server and Data Backup Solution

If you had disk/storage failure (on any of your important devices/things/places), would you be "up the creek?"

For many folks, the answer to that question is "absolutely."

Read More

Upgrading All The Things to Ubuntu 22.04

One of my "winter break" projects this year was to get all of my disparate Ubuntu server instances upgraded and into parity. Last year I wrote about my adventure moving WSL Ubuntu from 18.04 to 20.04, which happened before 22.04 was officially released.

Read More