Matt Zaske Online Blog

Quickly Extracting Icons with Powershell

• September 08, 2020
• 2 minutes
• inspiration, powershell, tech

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.

Auto-Power On Dell Workstation

• August 24, 2020
• 3 minutes
• automation, inspiration, powershell, tech

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.

Formulas in CSV Files

• August 10, 2020
• 4 minutes
• automation, inspiration, tech

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.

All Sealed Up!

• August 03, 2020
• 5 minutes
• lifestyle, personal

It's been a wild couple of weeks since I last posted anything here. I'd exhausted most of pre-written content and with a bunch of these improvement and scope creep projects on the horizon it was not feasible to get more material churned out in the short term, so a break it was!

Improvement Project Scope Creep

• July 13, 2020
• 5 minutes
• lifestyle, personal

As I've written about before, there have been plenty of random projects to work on during the pandemic and additional time spent around home. Due to a pretty significant hailstorm last summer, we're going to be replacing every roof on the property and also re-siding the house.

That's not where the scope creep comes into play.

Setting Up Key Authentication

• July 06, 2020
• 4 minutes
• automation, inspiration, security, tech

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.

Pollinators on the Prairie

• June 29, 2020
• 3 minutes
• lifestyle, personal, weather

One of the things I've always enjoyed about our little home on the prairie is the fact we've always a selection of various critters or insects beneficial to the larger environment. Part of this is bolstered by the fact we live across the road from several hundred acres of waterfowl production area owned and managed by the US Fish and Wildlife service.

Pushing Data Into Google Sheets Sheets (Yes, Multiples)

• June 22, 2020
• 4 minutes
• automation, inspiration, php, tech

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.

Interesting Pandemic Electric Usage Pattern

• June 15, 2020
• 3 minutes
• finance, inspiration, lifestyle, personal

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).

Programmatically Push Data to Google Sheets

• June 08, 2020
• 3 minutes
• automation, inspiration, php, tech

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.

Pandemic Projects Aplenty

• June 01, 2020
• 3 minutes
• lifestyle, personal

It is no surprise to me that retail outlets catering to home improvement projects have been doing well during the pandemic and various iterations of stay-at-home orders. The sudden 'found' time of folks who might normally spend time on other endeavors is suddenly focused into projects around the house. To some degree this is the same here...

Character-Perfect Fixed Width Import Files

• May 25, 2020
• 4 minutes
• automation, php, tech

One of my springtime projects at work was to button up a recently-refreshed process to transmit some billing data between systems. By 'recently-refreshed,' I mean 'finally made a process whereby a human doesn't have to manually generate a file which had been the de-facto process for the better part of twelve years. Due to the cascading effects of some staff turnover in the unit in question, IT was brought into the loop to help find a better way to work this process.

Shaking The GnuCash Account Tree

• May 18, 2020
• 5 minutes
• finance, inspiration, personal

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.

Simple, Yet Powerful Excel/Sheets Functions

• May 11, 2020
• 3 minutes
• inspiration, tech

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:

GnuCash For The Win

• May 04, 2020
• 6 minutes
• finance, inspiration, personal

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.

Count of AD Groups Ranked by Members

• April 27, 2020
• 3 minutes
• inspiration, powershell, tech

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.

Energy Use Analysis

• April 20, 2020
• 7 minutes
• finance, personal

A little over a decade ago we had a ground-source heat pump installed for our home heating and cooling. Commonly called a 'geothermal' system, the basic function is that it uses the earth's relative/stable temperature (well below the frost line) to act as a heatsink for air conditioning and heating.

Powershell Exports AD Computers to CSV

• April 13, 2020
• 2 minutes
• powershell, tech

A couple months ago I wrote about using Powershell to find and export AD records for the purposes of our Windows 7 End-of-Life project. This post is effectively a second in a series of 'exporting computer records from AD with Powershell' if you will.

Well, It's Been A Ride These Last Weeks

• April 06, 2020
• 3 minutes
• personal

So I wound up putting a bit of a pause on posting this last month or so. Certainly not for a lack of things to say...but certainly for lack of time to nuance them. I've had to schedule and reschedule the various posts I had in progress (but not fully finished) a couple of times now. Hopefully I can get to the point of starting to regularly crank out new stuff on the normal schedule.

But first, this bit of a reset.

TRIM-ming up for Summer

• March 09, 2020
• 3 minutes
• automation, inspiration, php, tech

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.

The Financial Automation Account

• March 02, 2020
• 6 minutes
• finance, inspiration, personal

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.

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

• February 24, 2020
• 3 minutes
• tech, website, drupal, inspiration

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.

Financial Literacy Matters

• February 17, 2020
• 9 minutes
• personal, finance

As we enter the thick of tax season (I just filed ours this past week), I thought I'd write a short bit about my own take on financial literacy. This idea was originally sparked when I read an article last year about Why Financial Literacy Matters from a more education-based perspective. I suggest giving it a quick read.

Private Content in Drupal

• February 10, 2020
• 3 minutes
• drupal, website, tech

When I started going down the Drupal road a year ago, with minor delay after delay after delay, one of the many 'dorky' things I wanted to do was port my old "Start Page" to a real platform.

Quality Educational Theatre

• February 03, 2020
• 3 minutes
• personal, theatre

This past Saturday ended a most marvelous run of the One-Act Play production in which my 7th grader was cast. I'm deliberately not going into any details regarding the production, because it doesn't matter what production was in scope, but how the production went.

It. Was. Fantastic.