Technology Solutions for Everyday Folks

Tagged with 'inspiration'

Home Assistant Notifications to Teams with Graph API

Screen snip of a teams message/notification from this Home Assistant "bot" stating that there is active load management.

I love Home Assistant, and I love APIs/Webhooks/automations, so today we combine the two!

Some time back I wrote about using a webhook and Powershell to directly post a Teams notification. A few weeks ago, while working on some other Home Assistant business I wondered if it would be possible to do something directly from Home Assistant (HA). I've been using Slack notifications out of HA for years, but there's no officially supported similar Teams mechanism.

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MMSMOA 2025 Recap

Another edition of MMS (MOA 2025) is now in the books, and by the time this post publishes it'll have been the better part of a month since it ended! How time flies! It was, as always, an outstanding event bringing the community together for the better part of a week, and I really thank those folks behind the scenes who pull it all together so swimmingly. That is no small feat, but as an attendee and a speaker, I really appreciate these often thankless efforts.

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A Basic Graph API Powershell Module

During a session planning conversation for MMS Flamingo last fall I had the idea to create a basic Powershell module as an illustration/starting point to using direct HTTP requests with Invoke-RestMethod against Graph API. The concept was simple: here's a couple of lines of code to Do Something in Graph, with direct HTTP requests, and be a launch point for quickly exploring and troubleshooting calls to other Graph endpoints without a lot of overhead or abstraction.

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Get Started with Graph API for Entra and Intune

A few weeks back I presented at BrainStorm K20 Wisconsin Dells where my key session was related to getting started with the Microsoft Graph API. The session went very well, and I have received a significant amount of positive feedback including some "best of the conference" feedback notes. I appreciate those kind words, but at heart it indicates that collectively we need to do more community-based engagement to get folks familiar with Graph API and help demystify the practical bits.

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Building a CM Lab in 2025: Configuring The CM Siteserver

Screen snip of the Sites node of the Configuration Manager Console Administration interface.

In the first post of this short series, I wrote about using the Deployment Research Hydration Kit to build out the basic infrastructure behind a CM lab.

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Building a CM Lab in 2025: Using the Hydration Kit

Screen snip of two available and offline Hyper-V VMs, DC01 and CM01, in Hyper-V Manager.

I've been a proponent of a dev/test CM (or just client device) lab environment for a long time. Though folks in increasing number seem to feel like maintaining a Configuration Manager lab is irrelevant, there are still several benefits to maintaining such a space, especially if you're in the journey to cloud-forward management or need to stay in a CM ecosystem for valid business reasons.

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Removing Staples: Moving Away From Let's Encrypt OSCP Stapling

Screen snip of the summary/output of an SSL Server Test report, indicating a strong "A+" rating for the server/certificate configuration.

Last summer, Let's Encrypt announced their intent to end their OCSP service, and this was formalized in December with key dates related to the change. Near the end of January, I also received a direct email from Let's Encrypt detailing certificates of mine that had been configured with the "Must Staple" property.

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Basic "Diff" or Delta Identification Between AD Objects Using Powershell

A couple times a year I do some spot checking and a little manual cleanup in AD. This is triggerd by inventory/asset management analysis. I say "spot checking" because by and large the existing business processes and automations take care of the vast majority of changes, but for a couple of reasons there are always a few stragglers.

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Exporting Group Policies in Bulk with Powershell

A project cropped up recently that required editing a number of disparate Group Policies in our environment due to a network share path change.

I was originally given a list of GPOs that were (somehow) identified as in scope for change; however, I knew immediately the list was incomplete and omitted some valid matches. So I was left with a choice:

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Using Powershell to Send a Teams Notification from a Task Sequence Step

Screen snip of a completed task sequence Teams notification

The last two posts were inspired by conversations at MMS Flamingo and focus on using Slack as the communication/receiver for notices relayed from a Task Sequence step and

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UPDATE: Direct Slack Notification From a Task Sequence Step

Screen snip of a completed task sequence Slack notification

Last week I wrote about a basic process I have in place to fire off a Slack notification when a Task Sequence completes.

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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).

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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. The last couple weeks I've been working on demos for my Admin Service and Graph API session in which much conversation (and many demos) will take place working with "read-only" data from both of these services to empower T1 folks.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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)_/¯

I'd automated a whole bunch of other light situations, mostly with some combination of brightness level (obtained from my Tempest weather station) and/or time-based. But all of those solutions were "binary" (on/off). My thought here was to slowly and incrementally bring up the overhead smart lights in my home office space.

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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).

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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. However, this process only upgraded device firmware during a [re]build cycle which works great for our multi-user devices receiving an annual refresh; for high-affinity devices a rebuild happens once every 3-5 years and is usually associated with some form of attrition or replacement.

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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!

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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. To that end, I had to do some manual install/build of the mjpg-streamer, specifically I used this package to get started.

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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."

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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. In that process I noted the longer-term target of moving to 22.04 which brings us to the here and now!

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Mister Thermistor, Fixed With a Silpat

Screenshot of OctoPrint's temperature graph illustrating a consistent hotend and heated bed temperature with only minor +/- 0.5 degree variations over the course of the previous 30 minutes.

I got hooked into 3D printing late last summer. A problem that cropped up after the first couple months of tinkering and relatively error-less printing was an issue with thermal runaway. Something I could correct for short periods of time, but never make totally go away...

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Powershell String Manipulation - A One-Liner

See also: asking a friend for help can save oodles of time and effort.

Around Thanksgiving 2022, an friend of mine asked to talk through a problem he thought might be solvable with Powershell, but he'd been stuck on the design. Naturally, I agreed to help out if/where I could and it provided an opportunity to chat via Zoom which I am not one to turn down.

The Problem

In this case, there's a relatively free-form bunch of text received from a person/process whose behavior is unlikely to change. A couple of things that are consistent in this data:

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Smart Independent Control of a Ceiling Fan & Light with Shelly 1L

Home Assistant dashboard (dark mode) illustration for independent control of office fan and office lights, with office fan in "off" state and office lights in "on" state.

As I've noted before, my 1940's-era house has its own quirks with regard to smart home automation in large part due to 1940's wiring standards.

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Smart Control of a 1940's Three-Way Switch with Shelly 1L

Snip of Home Assistant dashboard card for Stairwell/Stair Lights with status data

Once I settled on jumping into home automation and Home Assistant (HA), the first "practical" thing I wanted to address was the issue of lights being left on at random throughout the house. Some fixtures were greater offenders than others, but with a control mechanism like HA I could actually begin to address what others wouldn't.

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Jumping into Home Assistant: The Installation (and Hiccup) Process

Screenshot of Home Assistant Initialization/Setup Screen at the user account creation step

About a month ago, I took the plunge.

After considering it for a long time and hearing about some cool stuff folks were doing with home automation, I decided it was time to start my own dabbling adventure. A warning to folks: home automation is a little bit like owning horses. There can be a bunch of expense in the process for little obvious reward.

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Adding Push Notifications to the Tempest WeatherBot

Slack Tempest WeatherBot alert notification for a close lightning strike

This is the "final" installment of my summer 2022 blog series about the development of my Slack Tempest WeatherBot.

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Adding External Data to the Tempest WeatherBot

Slack Tempest WeatherBot in-channel alert notification from NWS API data for a Dense Fog Advisory

This is the third in the short series of my journey building the Slack Tempest WeatherBot. In this post I'm walking through the steps to incorporate external data from the National Weather Service (NWS) API for alerts and forecast options.

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Expanding Interactivity with the Tempest WeatherBot

Slack Tempest WeatherBot App Home tab display with current conditions and daily statistics

In the last post I wrote about the basics of building the Slack Tempest WeatherBot and its basic set of command arguments. This post builds on those commands with an overview of expanding the Slack interactivity by adding a bot app home tab.

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Creating a Slack Bot for Tempest Weather Station

Image of Tempest weather station with device features highlighted

In summer 2020, I picked up a WeatherFlow Tempest station...a purchase I'd been considering for the better part of a year. It's an awesome and compact little thing, and on the whole I've been super happy with it. In my location it tends to over-report rainfall as the haptic rain sensor is also sensitive to vibrations on the mounting point (a pole in my yard).

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DMARC: Moving to a Monitor-As-Necessary State

After a year-and-a-half of implementation (mostly monitoring), it is time to switch to a 'steady' or 'monitor-as-necessary state' for all of my things DMARC. I've written about this journey before, with the last major summary in November, 2021.

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Upgrading an Old Application to 21st Century Passwords

I have a confession to make: I've ignored a Really Bad Password Form on an inherited web application for about at least a decade too long.

I'm not proud, but every time I considered changing the password mechanism to something more modern (and more secure), decision paralysis would set in...in great part due to the design challenges I anticipated in quietly upgrading this for users of the app in question.

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An MMS 2022 Recap

Gif of 'secret' high-five handshake between characters Abed and Troy from the series Community

Two weeks out from the last MMSMOA and the technical overload hangover lingers on...but in a Good Way. This post isn't terribly original, but it's my own highlights/recap/pitch of MMS.

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The MMSMOA Retweet Bot in Action

Cartoon robot image of the @mmsmoabot with breastplate advertising MMS and the bot Twitter handle

Hot on the heels of last week's triumphant return of the "MOA" edition of MMS, I'm writing up a post-conference review of my somewhat-accidental creation: the MMSMOA Retweet Bot.

I shared the bot's story with a number of folks during the conference, often while peddling the bot's stickers, but several folks also encouraged me to share the details via blog post as well so here it is!

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In-Place Upgrade of WSL Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04

About two months back (early March to be exact), I had the opportunity to finally deprecate some old versions of applications and packages due to planned retirements and upgrades. Most specifically a full-on move to PHP 7.4 was in sight, though there were other bits. I run and have access to a bunch of different environments so it felt right to get environments back to a standard (or at least closer) base configuration.

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Improving DMARC Compliance: Authenticated SMTP Relay

I've done a lot of server migrations for very unrelated reasons over the last six months or so. Many of these host applications that send emails, and I've implemented the basics to get them sending DMARC-compliant messages. This has generally been limited to DNS SPF records for each host configuration. Generally speaking, having SPF or DKIM compliance is 'enough' to get your messages not flagged as spam, though it can depend on the DMARC policy configuration.

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LAMP to WAMP: Adventures in Server Migration

Server migrations are an inevitable task, but I found myself in a different than normal circumstance recently. A planned server stack retirement, combined with the server "owner's" technical capacity and expertise required a change in platform. Specifically, this shift meant moving from Linux to Windows.

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Certbot on Windows: Automation Is Possible

A recent project gave me an opportunity to try out Certbot on Windows. As I've written about before, I've had an extensive journey with Certbot, at times in fairly 'non-standard' configurations, and Certbot on Windows is no different.

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Revisiting Key Authentication Setups

Nearly 18 months ago I wrote about setting up and using key authentication to connect between hosts. I use it all the time and it's a major timesaver on all sorts of levels.

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Moving an Old Website to Github Pages: Creating a Finished Product

 In the last post I wrote about the process of creating the layout and the challenges through the content conversion and basic layout stages. This post works through some of the fine-tuning and the process of "going live" with the new site and its structure.

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Moving an Old Website to Github Pages: Getting Started

Nearly 25 years ago I spun up a website featuring transcriptions of Monty Python material collected from college students in the 1980s. I don't remember how I came across the archive of these text files, but I still have the originals in part of my personal digital archive. Around the year 2000 I moved the website (and subsequently added more content) into a Wiki system (TWiki, to be exact).

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Drupal Site Improvements and other Housekeeping

On the heels of (and riding the wave following) my recent migration of Drupal to a new server host, I decided it was well past time to finally address some things with my Drupal instance that were been bugging me for a long time. Of course, something like this often spirals into its own set of "other" things to fix for the greater good.

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Moving a Legacy Drupal Stack to a New Server Host

One of my "end of 2021 break" projects was a planned "lift and shift" of my primary Drupal instance to a fresh, sparkly new web host stack. The stack on which it resided was reaching end of life and for a few other reasons it was time to make the change. In preparation, over the last year or so I've been de-coupling and untangling some of the baggage that had accumulated on the old server and its structure over time. Relatively simple things like straightening out, consolidating, or consistently applying vhost configurations.

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Reconciling Disparate Datasets

A few weeks ago I was asked to help update a centralized inventory dataset, which to us is definitely a "tertiary" system. Several hundred device records were associated with our part of the organization, and every time I opened the list I quickly "noped" out of doing anything with it. But the time came when I needed to actually do something with it lest I wind up on someone's naughty list.

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DMARC: Time to Evaluate Reports

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about my first foray into implementing DMARC controls. Specific to domains through which email was not intended to be sent, it was the beginning of my DMARC adventure and expansion into some 35-ish domains.

This became its own series of posts with time:

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Implementing Certificate Authority Authorization

During the foray into fixing up the Let's Encrypt root certificate expiration bits for my affected bot host, while using the helpful SSL Server Test tool, I discovered the "new" (not really new) Certificate Authority Authorization (CAA) DNS record.

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Keeping the Wireless On - Script the Reconnect

Electric arc between two plasma globes

In our classroom fleet, almost all devices are wireless-only for their network access. This as a design is great for mobility and flexibility and the user experience but presents its own set of very unique challenges on the technical side. At various times and for a wide range of reasons, we encounter the situation where devices "lose" their wireless/Wi-Fi connection. Resolution usually involves dispatching a tech to the space or walking a user through, under most circumstances, simply "reconnecting" to the proper SSID.

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Breaking the Chain: An Edge Case of Let's Encrypt Root Certificate Expiration

It's been written about and announced for some time—the forthcoming expiration of the DST Root CA X3 certificate. The good news for most folks is that it's not a big deal. And that, I thought, also included me. For the most part, this has panned out to be true.

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A DMARC Follow-Up: Nine Months In

It's been a full nine months since I first wrote about implementing DMARC controls, and over six months since I last wrote about fiddling with DMARC settings, so it's time to provide another quick update.

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Whoops! Cleaning up Mistakes via API

Gif with "I've made a huge mistake" as caption.

Posting again after kind of a lengthy break. It's summertime, and for lots of disparate reasons I've queued up topics but haven't had the ambition or taken the time to write them all out. So today we get a tale of automation mistakes and the subsequent cleanup.

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Cleaning Up Old Mistakes Part Deux: Leveraging Includes

This post is the second of a two-part miniseries identifying and correcting old mistakes. Part one discusses cleaning up Git repos based on permissions faux pas.

Today's atonement for old mistakes: Using centralized/standard "includes" for path variables and eliminating passwords from committed code.

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Cleaning Up Old Mistakes: Git Repos With Nested Accounts

This post is the first of a two-part miniseries identifying and correcting old mistakes. Part Deux is also available.

Today's atonement for old mistakes: Git repos used in production in which nested/disparate accounts run code.

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A Twitter Bot for Dad Jokes

About a month ago, I discovered this gem of a tweet:

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My Personal Git Cheat Sheet

I've used a number of various Git cheatsheets over the years, usually duing a moment of "how do I do __ again?" and sometimes during a moment of panic like "Shit! Undo that commit!"

Recently, I (finally) "removed my training wheels" and uninstalled the UI client I had for Git, for two reasons:

  1. I was not actually using its features anymore*; and
  2. It was constantly getting in the way of Git updates.

* Save for the occasional git clone action

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Git-ting the hang of Hooks

Several months ago I made the decision to finally use Git to manage a more complex "legacy" web application project that I inherited over a decade ago and continue to maintain. Years ago when migrating the web application to a new hosting stack, I ported the development/test and production sites into their own Git repositories. Thanks to the magic of GitHub, it made the actual migration to a new host pretty simple in that the migration itself (save for the database bits) was more or less a simple git clone action.

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Signing Git Commits: Chasing the "Verified" Stamp

I've been working on projects lately that actually involve writing more code than I have in a while...and so I'm using Git/GitHub with greater frequency than I have in some time.

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Implementing DMARC: Adjusting SPF Records

It's been a couple of months since I last wrote about implementing DMARC and what comes next (review and adjustment). So I figured this would be a good time to document a few changes I've made based on the reporting data received so far.

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2020: An Energy Year in Review

Now that I've had a chance to really look at the data from our 2020 electric use, in a modified format from what I've written about before, I thought I'd wrap up with an overview of our overall electric use during a most unusual year.

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My First Twitter Bot: A Journey into Twitter's API

Dancing Robot

Sometime around Thanksgiving/November 2020, I formalized the idea that I would actually build a Twitter bot for the sake of novelty and as an experiment/learning exercise. One night at suppertime, we discussed what might be cool as a bot and those ideas are still on the list as possibilities for the future. Ultimately, I settled on a bot idea that built on some things I've used in the past (Google API) so I wouldn't have to learn All The Things in addition to building a bot and figuring out the Twitter API.

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Exporting Legacy/Archival Emails with Google Apps

At work, we've had a number of folks retire over the last 18 months, and a number of those folks are holders of some significant institutional knowledge and memories. Recently I had the opportunity to work with one of these individuals as they prepared to both hand off information to others, which led me to recall several conversations I've had with my Libraries/archives friends about preserving the "right" subsets of digital messages such as email.

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My Incremental Certbot Panacea

I've written about Certbot more than any other topic in the last 24 months or so, in part because it's been an interesting adventure for me both in helping to demystify SSL certificates, but also because it's been an evolving and incremental process to Make It Better. The first post I'd written in February of 2019 talked about using a web service to generate a Let's Encrypt certificate...good for 90 days...for free.

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Interruptions and Intentionality

Snip of cartoon saying 'Hey, so I just sent you an email about that thing.'

Interruptions: they're everywhere.

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Implementing DMARC for Active Domains: Policy & Review

This is the second post in a two-part series to implement DMARC controls for actively-used domains, where this post focuses on creating and reviewing/adjusting your DMARC policy and controls. Part one reviewed proper DMARC prerequisites and contains information you will need to have in place before creating your DMARC policy.

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Implementing DMARC for Active Domains: Configuring Prerequisites

As a follow-up from my previous post about implementing DMARC controls for unused/alias domains (those not used for actively sending messages), I wanted to write a bit about how to implement basic DMARC controls for those domains actively used to send emails.

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Armchair Pair Programming

This past Friday, somewhat out of the blue, I was pinged by a friend about helping him work through implementing what I'd done to date with Certbot...with the additional twist of his own unique configuration challenges.

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Implementing DMARC on Alias Domains

A few weeks ago I crossed a tweet with some simple instructions for securing your "unused" email domains, specifically the few bits required to implement DMARC controls to prevent Bad Folks from using your domains to send spam emails. The short thread led to an awesome reference by the UK Government on the same process.

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Automating Certbot: A Recap of My Journey

Long winding road

Over the last two months, I've shared what amounts to a four-part "series" of posts walking through my journey of using Certbot for SSL certificate management, with the primary challenge being not having the traditional root-level access on the web server. Those posts are, in order:

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Certbot in Manual Mode with Script Hooks

If you've been following along in the mini series, I've gone over the details of using Certbot in manual mode, then bolting some simple scripts together to improve the process of generating and managing certs, all done with a bit of magic thanks to our old friend key authenti

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Improving Manual Certbot Domain Validation

In my second post about using Certbot in manual mode, I address some of the 'pain points' from the first post: namely the process of scripting together some of the bits to create/renew a certificate and otherwise requiring fewer individual commands be entered (or remembered).

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Moving to Certbot with Let's Encrypt

This is the first post in a short series of posts about automating what one can in an environment that might not support full-automation with Certbot and Let's Encrypt. Technically it's the second post as the first was geared toward setting up key authentication between systems, something that's leveraged significantly in this series.

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Quick Tests of WQL Queries

Recently I was working on a clean-up/improvement project in the MEMCM (SCCM) console which required some WQL query work and updates. In particular, I was fiddling with some collection queries to segment some areas for a process improvement project coming up. That's intentionally vague, because the 'why' in this case doesn't really matter. What does matter is that I needed WQL to give me proper results.

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Quickly Extracting Icons with Powershell

One of the things I both love and loathe is adding the little icon to an advertised deployment in the Software Center console of SCCM/MEMCM. As many have said it in the past, "Pretty Counts" and I wholeheartedly agree.

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Auto-Power On Dell Workstation

Cartoon characters join together with "Let's Power Up!" as a caption.

As we begin another academic year, this time in a pandemic, we're providing more virtual/remote desktop access to computer lab and public-access workstations for those in need. We're starting by using the machines taken out of general service due to physical distancing requirements. These workstations are still powered on, but we've removed their keyboards, mice, and fiddled with their monitor configurations (along with basic signage) indicating they are not in service (at the console/in person).

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Formulas in CSV Files

Bad Magic Trick with a ladle for cooking

A while back I received a call for assistance in helping to streamline an inherited process. In this particular case, an individual had created a complex (but necessary) process to essentially transform and move data between disparate systems. The employee(s) responsible for creating this process had since left, but the process remained and needed to be manually done often enough that it was painful enough for the person now responsible for the process to ask for assistance.

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Setting Up Key Authentication

Hands playing with a set of keys on a ring.

While I was preparing to write an upcoming post about moving directly to certbot from SSLForFree now that they've merged with ZeroSSL, I realized that I'd not actually ever written a post about one of the components I use all the time, including for my new certbot process: public key authentication.

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Pushing Data Into Google Sheets Sheets (Yes, Multiples)

Screenshot of basic sheet including multiple tabs/sheets (Excel)

If you recall from the last tech post about pushing data directly into Google Sheets, I promised a follow-up regarding the process of adding multiple sheets worth of data to a given parent sheet.

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Interesting Pandemic Electric Usage Pattern

Stock bar graph with trend arrow ending downward

This is a relatively short post, but as I entered our May electric usage into my tracking spreadsheet (see the Energy Use Analysis post from a while back), I noticed something peculiar about this last few months since the pandemic really hit (and we started staying at home all the time).

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Programmatically Push Data to Google Sheets

Screenshot of a very basic CSV file of gibberish test data

I've written in the past about the ability to ship files to Google Drive via its REST API and PHP, which is a super-cool process in and of itself. In the last few months, I've been moving more and more of our internal data shipping processes to Google Shared Drives for ease of end user access. As folks started working remotely, moving data to Google has solved several support burdens regarding access and such.

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Shaking The GnuCash Account Tree

Man shaking tree of money

Over the years I've developed a habit where a short part (~30 minutes on average) of most weekends are dedicated to entering the week's receipts, reconciling (or balancing) accounts, updating investment fund values, and so forth. Once familiar with GnuCash, this process is pretty straightforward and easy to do. Then, roughly quarterly, I go through and double-check any accounts that have fallen behind this cycle for various reasons (sometimes an account wasn't used during that time, other times I just forgot to reconcile it, and so forth).

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Simple, Yet Powerful Excel/Sheets Functions

Cartoon about functional programming

As a reflection exercise for a project I wrapped up a bit ago, combined as an exercise to make Future Me's life a Better Place, I pulled together a simple Google Sheets workbook to make a quick 'calculator' and balancing mechanism to help keep track of a couple datasets. And in so doing, I again befriended a couple of super simple, and super powerful functions:

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GnuCash For The Win

Parks and Rec "They call me the Swiss Army accountant" gif

As I wrote about a couple months back, GnuCash is my accounting software of choice since ~2010. I wasn't exactly "sold" on it from the start, but it was a free and open-source solution that seemed robust enough to handle pretty much anything I could throw at it, from managing business finances and whatnot to a whole mess of personal accounts. Did I mention: free and open-source?

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Count of AD Groups Ranked by Members

A cartoon/drawn group of random people

A week ago, someone on one of our more generalized Slack channels asked if anyone knew how to make AD Users and Computers (ADUC) filter mechanism rank output based on a group membership count. Now, I don't necessarily understand (or honestly, care) about the particular use case, but I knew the answer was going to be 'no, that can't be done by way of the GUI.' Which was the first part of my answer.

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TRIM-ming up for Summer

Trimming a hedge with lawnmower attached to tractor loader

Not really TRIM-ming for summer, but taking the opportunity to briefly write about Rule #1 when dealing with unknown (or incoming) data.

Sanitize. Thy. Inputs.

Without going into great detail (as it doesn't matter at the end of the day), last week I encountered a vendor that apparently doesn't know how to do this very well. Or at all. What ultimately transpired is the complete failure of a reasonably-routine change process to capture a critical failure in production.

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The Financial Automation Account

Mechanical slide coin sorting machine

A couple weeks ago, I made brief mention of my financial automation account and how I've come to consider it my "free money" account. I wanted to dig into that topic just a bit more, since it's become a key component of my own regular financial well-being.

Why an Automation Account?

Simple: it's thoughtless, once set up.

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Interesting Log Entries (or, Why To Patch Thy Systems)

Random text scrolling from within a terminal window

So far in 2020, I've been keeping a closer eye on the logs of this Drupal site. Back in the day, I used to pore over logs in a sort of 'bender' fashion, presumably as I was bored or something similar. Rarely was something particularly interesting, but it was a good way to figure out and correct some random things. Still is...but it's 2020 and nobody manually looks at logs anymore.

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Visual Customizations for Windows 10 in OSD

Windows logo

As we work through the tail-end of our Windows 7 fleet (January 14, 2020 is coming if you haven't heard...), I've found myself rolling a different type of hammer process for the last of the "upgrades." This past week as I was tweaking what amounts to an in-place update (by way of wipe and load) for Windows 7 to Windows 10, I was reminded of how Past Me was indeed awesome (and inspired) since this simple script with all the various background and image sizes still works in Windows 10 19XX deployments.

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Dynamically Created Anchor HREFs

Multiple Arows Crossing Paths

Back in the day, namely before Javascript and jQuery were really a thing, the idea of dynamically creating an anchor's HREF attribute required some serious magic and behind-the-scenes wizardry. Or something like Flash. Those were not the days...

A Bit of Background

Several years ago, during a client's web app rebuild/refresh, I decided to clean up some of the gnarly baggage behind their reporting mechanism.

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Batch Ship Data to Google Team Drive

Moving Data

A few weeks ago, I wrote a brief bit about capturing webcam images. This post expands on the initial process: specifically, what to do with the images once procured.

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Capturing Your Internet-Connected Webcam Images

Puppet bird with binoculars

Over the years, we've had a few public Internet-connected cameras pointing at various places around campus. We've used them for publicity and other purposes since the mid-1990's, and starting in around 2010 would sometimes be called upon to create a sort of time-lapse video of activity from one of said cameras.

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Windows Scheduled Tasks with Powershell

Mechanical Mathematical Calculator

As I struggled to find looked for inspiration for this week's post, I wound up looking within...oddly enough as I was reconfiguring my email out of office response (the below is what I had for my time at MMS):

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MMS: Drinking From the Fire Hose

Drinking from the fire hose

I spent last week at MMSMOA, a conference I cannot recommend enough for anyone working in the Microsoft/Windows/Systems Management space. The main event, held at the Radisson Blu Mall of America, is a solid four-and-a-half days of deep technical material, networking, sharing, and more!

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What's In Your Lunch Bag?

Winnie the Pooh prepares to eat

Many of those I work and associate closely with know that I'm pretty often a routine machine. I'll be writing more about the various things I've turned into simple routines, automatic processes, and so forth.

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Performance Can Matter

Performance Measure

I've had this written down as a topic suggestion for some time, and to balance/counter my post a couple weeks ago regarding performance, there's absolutely another side to that coin.

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Does the Performance Matter?

Does it matter?

Back around 2015 or so, I wrote a simple Powershell script which basically re-populates Active Directory (AD) group membership based on data procured from our central systems. Two primary AD groups in particular are synchronized to our print management system, PaperCut, which pre-provisions accounts and access so folks handling monetary transactions don't have to create accounts, etc.

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It's Presentation Season!

Wizardry

As I mentioned a month ago, I've taken the opportunity to commit to more speaking/presentation engagements than ever before, in an attempt to better inspire folks and do more technical evangelism. It just happens to be that I have three things lined up in as many months!

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Speaker @ MMS

I am speaking at MMS Music City Edition, October 12-15, 2025!

MMS Music City Logo

Past Speaking Engagements

I was a speaker at MMSMOA, May 4-8, 2025!

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I was a speaker at BrainStorm K20 Wisconsin Dells, March 9-11, 2025!

Logo for BrainStorm EdTech Conference

I was a speaker at MMS Flamingo Edition, October 20-23, 2024!

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I was a speaker at TCSMUG OSD Day, July 31, 2024!

Twin Cities Systems Management User Group (TCSMUG) Logo

I was a speaker at NWSCUG, July 19, 2024!

Northwest System Center User Group (NWSCUG) Logo

I was a speaker at MMSMOA, May 5-9, 2024!

MMS Logo

I was a speaker at BrainStorm K20 Wisconsin Dells, March 10-12, 2024!

Logo for BrainStorm EdTech Conference

I was a speaker at MMS Miami Beach, October 29-November 1, 2023

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