Precision Computing

If you’ve ever been interested in having all of Wikipedia in a plain-text format, you might have been disappointed to learn that Wikipedia doesn’t actually make this format available.

Edit: If you want to see how deep this rabbit hole goes, check out our Black Hat / DEF CON presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?

In preparation for some upcoming presentations, I wanted to make some images of the current Fortune 500 logos.

I recently had my HP Photosmart Premium stop working.

Edit: If you want to see how deep this rabbit hole goes, check out our Black Hat / DEF CON presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?

We had an interesting discussion at work the other day about how to launch modern Windows applications from the command line.

I got a question today about the handwriting recognition capabilities of my ScanSnap ix500.

We recently had a customer question where they were concerned that some commands might be typed accidentally and end up causing significant disruption.

If you’ve been using PowerShell for long, you are probably familiar with the concept of wildcards.

If you’ve ever wanted to extract tables from a web page in PowerShell, the Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet is exactly what the doctor ordered.

You’ve probably heard of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

tl;dr summary: Create an Outlook rule to “delay outgoing mail by <5> minutes”, “unless body contains: е”, where the character used for the body exclusion comes from typing ALT+1077.

I recently had the misfortune of having my relatively unused NatureBright SunTouch Plus break down: It’s a “Light Therapy” box that is very popular on Amazon, but a recurring problem among the disappointed reviews seems to be that it turns on, but then ju…

If you’re looking for a way to position an object in an exact spot in Autodesk 123D Design, you might have stumbled on forum topics like: The last meaningful response was: It doesn’t appear to have been added yet.

One of the features we’re working on in the latest version of PowerShell is the ability to define custom classes.

In a recent post, I blogged some data based on an uptime monitor I put together when I started having problems with my (then) web hosting platform.

In 2010, I posted about my woes with WebHost4Life (which I’m shocked is still around.)

If you’ve ever tried to pull hard on thin rope (maybe to tighten slack in a line), you’ve probably wrapped the rope around your hand and felt it dig in as it constricted around your fingers.

If you’ve got an interest in languages, writing, and computers – you may have stumbled into the crazy world of Shorthand and stenography.

If you don’t use a Password Manager to store your login information for websites, first go read this: http://www.troyhunt.com/2011/03/only-secure-password-is-one-you-cant.html.

You’ve probably been in the situation of wanting to alert yourself when any update happens to a sports game, UPS package tracking status, or something else.

If you’ve tried to diff files in PowerShell before, you might have seen the Compare-Object cmdlet.

If you’re interested in learning guitar, you might be running into an enormous feeling of dread.

Have you ever wondered who’s in your “Email Social Network”?

In the last post, I talked about how I used PowerShell to “STUN Roll” the open WiFi at DefCon.

Every year, two of the biggest hacking / security conferences take place in Las Vegas: Black Hat, and DefCon.

You might sometimes run into a situation where you’ve got a serialized object stream, and want to redact sensitive information out of that stream.

If you’ve seen the OutputType attribute when writing a cmdlet or advanced function, you might wonder what we use it for.

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’.

We frequently get questions asking if the PowerShell ISE supports a feature that it doesn’t.

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?”

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.

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.

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.

On Friday, Amazon began shipping the PowerShell Cookbook, V3!

<Just putting this on the internet, in case it helps some poor soul.

If you’ve been feeling guilty about not regularly (or ever!)

I got a Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga just under three weeks ago.

I got a Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga this weekend (loving it!)

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

With the draft of the Windows PowerShell Cookbook (3rd edition!)

[Edit 10/2/2015] - PowerShell 5.0 now includes a new and amazing PSReadLine module by default.

The third edition of the PowerShell Cookbook is getting close!

Recently, SMBC Comics made the comment that, “In Britain, they have whilst loops, which do not terminate until the Queen says it’s appropriate.”

Will Steele asked today on Twitter how we did the analysis to come up with this post on the PowerShell blog in 2009.

As a background, I’ve been having a “ghost in the machine” on and off with my motorcycle for a few years.

The biggest scripting event of the year is getting close to wrapping up - Scripting Games 2012!

If you own a Makerbot Replicator, you might have seen some of the amazing colours they offer: http://store.makerbot.com/plastic/1-75mm-filament.html.

Sometimes, you stumble on a blog that is so chock full of information that you revel in its every word.

We were talking about a very cool astrological date on the internal PowerShell mailing list recently.