Skattered Thoughts – Episode 3

Random Search History

My search phrases over the past week are like an exercise in how to confuse psychoanalysts:

• Japanese toilets
• Chysanthemums
• What happened to Bryan Ferry?
• 14 inch band saws
• Outdoor solar lighting
• 250 technical searches from Azure, m365, to PowerShell, REST, Terraform and Kusto
• Ikea store hours
• Dog harnesses for a 100lbs dog
• Definition of egalitarian
• Definition of tantamount
• who is Ron DeSanitize guy?
• ViveTool no longer enables explorer tabs windows 11
• What happened to Fabio?
• Estimate shingle roofing materials for barn roof
• why does my OnePlus 9 Pro suck so bad?

Is Apple a Slowly-Crashing Airplane?

After watching a few product reviews and the Apple March Event review by Marques Brownlee (highly recommended, even if you don’t use Apple products), I had some discussions with my son, who is a big Apple fan. Not so much because of the name itself, but because he works in the music production world, and that’s heavily tied to Apple products.

During that discussion, a vision popped into my head that seems like a very good metaphor/analogy for how Apple seems to be performing over the past few years: In war movies, especially those from WWII era, there were often air battle scenes where one pilot would be talking with another pilot on their team, and suddenly the other pilot wouldn’t respond. Then pilot one would look over and see pilot two’s plane slowly veering off towards the ground/ocean, obviously due to the pilot (two) being no longer living. That’s what Apple seems like to me.

It’s mostly incremental changes now. Not even incremental innovation. The innovation once famous from Apple, as a whole, seems to be gone. I wonder if that’s really true, and if so, is it really tied to Jobs being gone, or is there a bigger issue? But regardless, to me at least, Apple seems to be a pilotless plane, slowly heading for an eventual bad ending. I don’t even use Apple products, but to me that would be a very bad thing. Their innovation is what pushed the entire industry, in fact, multiple industries, to push harder than they ever would have otherwise. Desktops, laptops, tablets, TV interfaces, and of course: phones.

Cool Stuff and Events

• MMS MOA 2022 is coming like a freight train! May 2 to 5 at Mall of America. Get your tickets now!
  • I’m doing a session on ConfigMgr health check automation using Azure Automation and 2 sessions where I’m co-presenting. If you’re coming to MMS MOA tap me on the shoulder and say hello!
• Chapter 9 of “Practical Automation with PowerShell” by Matthew Dowst, is out now!

Query Azure Automation Hybrid Worker Status

If you have more than a few hybrid workers, and want a quick view in Log Analytics of how they’re doing, here’s a Kusto query that might help. Special thanks to MVP Cameron Fuller (@cfuller) for showing me how to use summarize. For me, this comes in handy with a particular tenant that seems to have issues where one of their hybrid workers doesn’t report in because their IT folks like to shut down VM’s without asking who uses them (thinking about cost savings only).

Heartbeat 
| summarize arg_max(TimeGenerated, *) by Computer
| extend Elapsed = now() - TimeGenerated
| extend hours   = datetime_diff('hour', now(), TimeGenerated)
| extend seconds = datetime_diff('second', now(), TimeGenerated)
| extend minutes = datetime_diff('minute', now(), TimeGenerated)
| project Computer, TimeGenerated, Elapsed, hours, minutes, seconds
| order by Computer

Example output…

Time for a Date?

I was exploring some Date/Time calculations with PowerShell for a recent case I was working on. Just sharing a few snippets in case they’re helpful to anyone else. That’s not a typo below, “.value__” has 2 underscores at the end.

$StartOfWeek = (Get-Date).AddDays(-(Get-Date).DayOfWeek.value__)
$NextFriday = (Get-Date).Date.AddDays(5-(Get-Date).DayOfWeek.value__)
$DaysToXmas = (New-TimeSpan -Start (Get-Date) -End "12/25/$((Get-Date).Year)").Days
$DaysToIRS = (New-TimeSpan -Start (Get-Date) -End "4/15/$((Get-Date).Year)").Days

# Compare current time between two timezones using GridView selections

[array]$zones = Get-TimeZone -ListAvailable | Select Id,DisplayName | Out-GridView -Title "Select 2 Time Zones" -OutputMode Multiple
if ($zones.Count -eq 2) {
  $tz1 = Get-TimeZone -Id $zones[0].Id
  $tz2 = Get-TimeZone -Id $zones[1].Id

  $offset1 = $tz1.BaseUtcOffset
  $offset2 = $tz2.BaseUtcOffset

  $utc = [datetime]::UtcNow
  $time1 = (Get-Date $utc).AddHours($offset1.Hours)
  $time2 = (Get-Date $utc).AddHours($offset2.Hours)

  Write-Output "$(($zones[0].DisplayName).PadRight(42,'.')) $time1"
  Write-Output "$(($zones[1].DisplayName).PadRight(42,'.')) $time2"
} else {
  Write-Warning "you need to select 2 time zones"
}

Now I’ve got to get back to exam study. Until next time! (pardon the pun)