What I read in 2026 Okay, let's go again. Here's what I read in 2026 - and hopefully I'll actually manage to write up some short-form reviews for these as I go. [Placement for book images] * Killing Pretty, Richard Kadrey * The Kill Society, Richard Kadrey * Hollywood Dead, Richard Kadrey
What I read in 2025 I saw someone talking about what they'd read so far in 2025, and though I've re-read a lot of my comfort series this year (as I seem to keep doing) it was interesting to revisit what I had read through. A few trends, series, or
Safely Testing Functions from Scripts I recently saw a post by Jakub Jares on testing self-contained scripts with Pester [http://jakubjares.com/2019/06/09/2019-07-testing-whole-scripts/]. He suggests, essentially, hijacking the call to any functions, dot-sourcing the script, and then removing the hijack (an alias, in this case). We
Getting Started with Badgy So, I bought a Badgy [https://github.com/sqfmi/badgy]! It seemed like something interesting and fun, vaguely related to my previous projects converting old Kindle screens into low-power ToDo lists, and I'd have something amusing to take to at least one convention and geek out about.
Powershell Lazy Random Password Generation in PowerShell So, good passwords are pretty fashionable these days - with an eye towards the ever-relevant XKCD. [https://xkcd.com/936/] Sometimes you just want a short method to generate a random string, with some control over which characters are used. Here's a method I use when I need
Sunday Ride with EP I had a lovely ride with my friend Elaine today, though we got a bit lost. Seems like Strava crashed at some point, as Elaine tracked us as having gone 45 miles, not ~42.
Powershell Bottles of Beer function Write-BottlesOfBeer { param( [int]$bottles = 99 ) $b='bottles of beer' $w='on the wall' $n='no more' $bottles..1 | %{ "$_ $b $w, $_ $b.`r".Replace('bottles',"bottle$(if($_ -gt 1){'s'})") "Take one down and
Amazon Echo - CuSteam Skill After a few days tussling with the out of date walkthroughs Amazon provide for developing Alexa Skills, I was happy to get this working: ...now I've just got to get something useful to other people working.
Export-HashTable After seeing this amazing thread [https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerShell/comments/52xv55/what_were_you_surprised_that_powershell_could_do/] , I had a quick think about the problem mentioned here [https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerShell/comments/52xv55/what_were_you_surprised_that_powershell_could_do/d7ookpe] . > I
Vulfpeck Live! Holy heck, these guys are simply amazing. Here's their bandcamp [https://vulfpeck.bandcamp.com/]. Their albums are great, but their live performances are just... something else. I saw them live on Saturday 17th, at the Brooklyn Bowl at the Millenium Dome (O2 something?), and it was absolutely wonderful.
SysInternals Updater I was just running a delightful batch script written by Jason Faulkner [http://www.howtogeek.com/50356/batch-script-to-auto-update-sysinternals-tools/] to update my SysInternals tools directory. It was taking forever! At least 2 seconds per tool (regardless of state), and a huge chunk of time to
Google Chrome allows Tab-by-Tab muting Was just going to re-enable NPAPI plugins in Chrome, and I found this: Now that's cool! Slightly weirdly, I love exploring the about:flags page in Chrome (Canary, or otherwise) and finding things in various stages of development - and I always loved the functionality that allowed you
Powershell Active Directory - Storing Bitlocker Recovery Info A recent quick project was to enable storage of Bitlocker recovery data within Active Directory, instead of our moderately secure encrypted drive of text-files. This is actually a really easy process (assuming you only have Windows 7 / 2008R2 and up on the domain), only needing to make a few
Sunday Bike-Ride (08/06/14) Nice ride! Managed to miss my Dad at Gransden, Orwell, and Barrington, but otherwise lovely. Also to note: The Royal Oak in Barrington stops serving drinks at 15:00. What the what!?
Streaming - Payday 2 Watch live video from Jinoxide on TwitchTV [http://www.twitch.tv/jinoxide] I've been playing plenty of Payday 2 with the Playstuff [http://www.playstuff.net] gang recently - it's in vogue, after some great updates, publicity and trailers. Anyway, I thought I'd stream some
Watch_Dogs - _Role Model I've quite enjoying Watch_Dogs, playing it a little every few nights - it's not the new best thing since sliced bread, but it's quite interesting. I'm slightly disappointed by a lot of things in it - punishing damage in gunfights mixed with little
DJ Konsky - Hottest Hits of 2013 DJ Konsky's Hottest Hits Of 2013 Mashup [http://vimeo.com/80533660] from Brett W. [http://vimeo.com/user23057946] on Vimeo [https://vimeo.com]. Quite good fun. Some recent controversy about some-guy-I-can't-remember trying to pass the video off as his own.
Sunday Bike-Ride (18/05/14) Thanks to Fergus for putting up with me - turns out, I'm awful at hills. I had a lot of fun, though, and was convinced of the necessity of cycling gear. I was going to get one of the r/Cycling [http://cycling.reddit.com] jerseys, but shipping is
Weight, what? Weight = Some To this end, do I really need a wi-fi enabled weighing scale? This simple-looking device will apparently do interesting things like "recognise me", and "weigh me", and "wirelessly upload my current weight and fat/body ratio to the vast pool of
Powershell PoSH Fun I was browsing r/Powershell [http://powershell.reddit.com] (as you do), and noticed a chap complaining about the test at the end of a course, where he was asked to > Create a directory named "newdir" in every empty directory whose name is longer than 8 characters
Soundcloud Mashups, mixes, and more - Soundcloud hosts a bizarre amount of great music, and pops up in a lot of the places I go searching for streamable tracks at odd times. My account on Soundcloud is Jinoxide [https://soundcloud.com/jinoxide], and I occassionally reshare or like stuff - here's
music What So Not - Touched Part something of a couple of posts designed to test out these themes that I'm trialling. Here's a quite nice piece of chilled-out ambient music. It's quite nice and relaxing - I found it under a bookmark I made a month or so ago,
