Troy Hunt recently posted a great discussion about the dangers of letting your devices automatically connect to insecure wireless networks – especially if those have a common name like ‘Starbucks’ or ‘Apple Demo’. All devices let you “forget” a network when you are in range, and Windows 7 (and before) even had an interface that let you delete networks when they were out of range. This dialog was removed in Windows 8, although the ‘netsh’ command still lets you accomplish it from the command line.

We frequently get questions asking if the PowerShell ISE supports a feature that it doesn’t. For example, variable watch windows, function browsers, or “find all matches in the current document”. Or as another example, many of you are very familiar with Visual Studio and naturally wish for Visual Studio feature . That is usually different for each person :) The Visual Studio team is many times larger than the PowerShell team, and they’ve had a 15-year head start.

A Facebook friend recently posted a cool picture from the Pi chain that California Institute of Technology created on Pi Day, 2013: After seeing that, you might wonder – “Where in Pi is that?” And, “What number does each colour represent?” PowerShell can help here – its support for regular expressions let you find all kinds of stuff in text. But where do you find the text of Pi? Bing, of course.

Following up on my previous post about the ScanSnap ix500, one thing I couldn’t find when searching for information about it was how well it did scanning information into Excel. So, here’s a quick video that demonstrates it:

If you’ve ever played with the Getting Things Done system, you may have heard David Allen’s excited advice for getting your paperwork organized: a filing system, and automatic labeler. One of the hardest parts of a paperwork filing system is the nomenclature. If you just have files that are labeled “A-Z”, you can never remember – did you put your car insurance information under “C” for Car? “I” for insurance? “G” for Geico?

Updated 7/13/2021 to cover the 4th Edition Over the past 8 years, O’Reilly and I have embarked on an experiment to expand the boundaries of traditional publishing even further – full, online, searchable access to the PowerShell Cookbook. With the release of the 4th edition of the PowerShell Cookbook, I am pleased to announce that we will be continuing with this very exciting approach! There’s been a huge shift in the way that people like to get their content in the past few years.

On Friday, Amazon began shipping the PowerShell Cookbook, V3! You can buy it in both print and digital formats from Amazon, O’Reilly, and any of your other favourite book sellers. If you or your company subscribes to Safari, it’s there too. It’s almost 1100 pages now, despite my continuing efforts to keep it svelte :) Since every edition of the book is about filling “missing pieces” from the last, and we filled tons of “missing pieces” from V2, much of the new content directly replaced recipes that existed in the V3 book.

<Just putting this on the internet, in case it helps some poor soul. There are a lot of forum posts with the issue, none with the solution.> I was recently trying to install Adobe Reader, and had an unfortunate blue screen right near the end. When trying to install again, I got this error: Error 1328. Error applying patch to file C:\Config.Msi\PTxx.tmp. It has probably been updated by other means and can no longer be modified by this patch.

If you’ve been feeling guilty about not regularly (or ever!) backing up your computer, peace of mind is close at hand. The backup industry has been changing recently, making online backups cheaper and easier than ever. If you have moderate backup needs and some technical ability, you can now back up your data for around 25 CENTS per month. If you’ve been investigating backups, you’ve probably seen and considered a handful of options, from easy to complex:

I got a Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga just under three weeks ago. Now that I’ve had some time to put it through its paces, I thought it would make sense to post a quick update on how it’s going. In short: it’s going great, and I would buy it again if it were to disappear today :) Hardware / Guts If you’ve been drooling over the Yoga on the online store, the version you get at Best Buy isn’t any of the three you see on the Lenovo site.