Skattered Thoughts – Episode 4

5 Questions about: MMS MOA 2022

(1) “My employer won’t pay for me to attend. What should I do?”

Quit! You don’t need that stinking employer anyway. Your future is worth more than they’re willing to invest. Find someone willing to invest in you, or do a bikini carwash.

(2) “I don’t like imaging computers. Why should I go?”

Silly nerd. There’s more to nerd life, and MMS, than imaging machines. Scripting. Automation. Cloud stuff. More Automation. Security stuff. Scripting Stuff. Stuff stuff. Even beer stuff. It’s all here! You’ll see people demonstrating some of the craziest nerd stuff ever. And some sessions on imaging too.

(3) “Where is Mall of America?”

It’s Mall that’s in America. More specifically, in the Minnesota area.”

(4) “Will any cool people be there?”

All the cool people will be there. I’m not sure how I get accepted, but my grandkids think I’m cool, so I’ll go with that. Check out the list of the coolest presenters here!

(5) “What am I waiting for?!”

Yeah. What are you waiting for?! Register here!

Nerd Stuff

Microsoft made some significant announcements this week regarding MEM (mostly around Intune).

• The new Remote Help feature is GA and cost is around $3.50 per user per month. Word has it that every user has to be licensed in order to use the service (not just administrators or help desk staff). Some are upset at the price, while others say it’s cheaper than the TeamViewer option.
• I’m gonna party like it’s….

Buried deep inside the Windows 11 registry, you can still find nuggets of past treasure, buried like a dog hides a bone. Keys for “Skype”, “Netscape”, “Wordpad”, and “SkyDrive”, as well as “SoftGrid” and one of my personal favorite keys: HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Wow64\x86. Because WOW6432Node wasn’t good enough.

PowerShell Tune-Ups

Do you get frustrated with frequent errors/warnings when you run scripts? Quite often it’s from really simple things that can be addressed with very little change. Let’s take a look at a few examples.

Remove-AppxPackage -Package "fubar"

You can replace this with Remove-Item, Stop-Service, and so on. Basically, issuing a command to do something to a target that may not exist (or can’t be accessed). You’ll know because it throw more red on the screen than the last Rambo movie (towards the end when they invade his quiet, relaxing farm, and he goes on a butchering spree). Anyhow, a slightly cleaner approach would be to leverage the pipeline AND the ErrorAction parameter.

Get-AppxPackage -Package "fubar" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Remove-AppxPackage

Now, this will make sure you can get the target item (i.e. AppxPackage named “fubar”), and only if it finds it, will it send it to Remove-AppxPackage to try to delete it. You may still get an error when trying to delete it (permissions, resource contention, etc.), so you could still wrap this in a try/catch block to handle that.

However…

This is all predicated on you not caring if the package/thing doesn’t exist. If you want to know that doesn’t exist (or is not accessible) that’s a different thing. There are quite a few ways to address this scenario, but one of the simplest is combining If/Else with ErrorAction.

if ($pkg = Get-AppxPackage -Package "fubar" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) {
  $pkg | Remove-AppxPackage
} else {
  Write-Output "Who names a package 'fubar' anyway?!"
}

Adding another teaspoon of code to address the possibility that the Remove-AppxPackage statement explodes for some reason…

if ($pkg = Get-AppxPackage -Package "fubar" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) {
  try {
    $pkg | Remove-AppxPackage -ErrorAction Stop
    Write-Output "phew! It actually worked!"
  }
  catch {
    Write-Output "Boom! $($_.Exception.Message -join ';')"
  }
} else {
  Write-Output "Who names a package 'fubar' anyway?!"
}

As I mentioned already, there are other ways to do something like this. Play around with it and see what you like best.

YouTube Surfing

Some recent (or recently discovered by me) clips and sessions worthy of watching:

Kim Oppalfens – Windows Defender Application Guard – on WPNinjas

Nico Kanakos – Setting Local Time Zone using PowerShell – RTPSUG / Mike’s son (so unfair, 11 yrs old, I feel even older now)

Microsoft Teams – Meeting Tips

If you’re still getting used to Microsoft Teams and conference calling, and maybe looking for some tips for making your conference calls more productive, fear not.

• Remember to mute and unmute yourself every 2-3 minutes
• When you want to stop sharing your screen, make sure to click the “leave” button instead
• People love the echo effect. It reminds them of stadium movies like Rudy and The Replacements
• Stop and ask “can you guys hear me?” every 30 seconds
• Wait at least 3 minutes after sharing your screen before asking if anyone can see what you want them to see.
• Ask half of the attendees to join using the web app, instead of the desktop app
• Switch between tenants as often as possible. It’s like moving working loose a rusted bolt
• When you dial in, give your name as “wanted fugitive“
• At a random time during a conference call, unmute while yelling at your dog/spouse/kids/neighbor/dishwasher/TV/ or call out to Alexa, Google or Siri, then go back on mute
• Point your camera at your mid-section.
• Sit uncomfortably close to the camera.
• When someone is sharing an emotional story, come off of mute while laughing hysterically, then go back on mute

More YouTube Surfing

I go in and out of channel surfing, but these are some of the ones I visit most often. My tastes are weird, like me, but don’t be hatin’. If you like any of them, great. If you don’t, that’s great too.

• The Daily Doug (music)
• Rick Beato (music)
• John Savill (tech)
• Marques Brownlee (tech)
• Aba & Preach (social)
• MEM Tips & Tricks (tech)
• Lex Fridman (science)
• Michael Reeves (humor)

Sade Day, not a Sad Day

One of the clients I did some work for had this thing they did on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, I forget which, where they expected everyone to pronounce every word with an interim “A” as “ar” and a trailing “A” like, well, “aye”, the same way Sade pronounces her name (spoiler, it’s “shar-day”).

So “I made some coffee” turned into “I mar-day some coffee” (they actually said “I mar-day sar-may car-fay“), and so on. It was a lot of fun. Staff meetings were actually kind of fun. Let me know how this works in your staff meetings?

Twilight Zone

Speaking of consulting gigs… Back in 2015, I was working with a client in the food processing industry. Obviously I can’t say their name or provide too many specifics, but they worked with pork and name began with an “S”. Their naming convention for tech stuff (networks, routers, DNS zones, machines, service accounts, blah blah blah) was “SF”+whatever. Pretty boring, yes.

A month later, I was sent to a different (US) state to work with yet another food processing client, who does chicken. Well, they don’t really “do” chicken, because that would be weird. Or maybe not, since I’m old and can’t keep up with social trends. But this client worked with processing of chicken products, and their name also began with an “S”, and their naming convention was also “SF”+whatever, and almost exactly parallel in so many respects, that I thought maybe someone was playing a joke on me.

For example, their IT department office layout was identical. Same Steelcase model cubes, and desks, arranged very similar. The only difference was the shape of the buildings and parking lots. As I said, I really thought I was being pranked. But I wasn’t. These just happened to be similar, and happened to be lined up in my work queue. If you eat anything with chicken or pork, you’re probably enjoying one of their products. In fact, I learned how many things come from those two animals that are vital to other industries which I never expected. Medical supplies, cosmetics, fabrics and textiles, and so on. And now you know.

Questions? Comments? Abusive hateful thoughts? Kind and loving thoughts? Leave a comment below.

I hope you have an awesome weekend! Remember, making someone else smile, makes you smile too.