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. After copy + pasting the first 100,000 digits of Pi from into a text file, you now have some text to work with.

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. The raw unwashed internet is a popular first choice, but usually involves a difficult ordeal of sifting through bad content to find just the right forum response, blog post, or documentation page. Curation. That’s the difficult part.

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.  For more information contact your patch vendor.

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. It’s like the base level one, but upgraded to an Core i5 instead of an i3.

I got a Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga this weekend (loving it!) but noticed an annoying quirk – the different Windows 8 edge swipe actions seemed to require two swipes. A few reviews have run into this as well, such as this one from ZDNet.

Once you got it reacting to your swipes, though, everything was instantaneous. After experimentation, it turns out that not touching the screen for about 4 seconds was enough to put it into this double-swipe mode – which is evidence of some sort of sleep mode.

Or for that matter, “What’s new in PowerShell V3”?

To help those interested in reviewing the juicy new bits of the PowerShell Cookbook, I’ve been able to compile a rough break-down of what’s new, along with the magnitude of the change. Both the V2 and V3 cookbooks were written in the XML-based DocBook format, which has provided mind-blowing power during the editing and creation cycle.

Some notes:

• Some recipes were moved between chapters, and therefore look like a vast deletion from one recipe and a vast addition to another similarly-named recipe in another chapter.
• A few recipes had their titles changed, with a similar effect.
• The “words” column isn’t completely accurate – it’s anything delimited by a space in the cookbook content, including script content in the Solutions, etc.
• The content I used to analyze the “V2” version of the cookbook is the XML before it went through the official copy-editing stage. Once you get to the point where Added and Removed basically balance out, those changes are most likely basic grammar / spelling corrections that were done to the book after it left my hands :)

Without further ado, the full data dump! If you want to see the script that generated this comparison, scroll to the very end!