The New Chromium Edge Address Bar Search

I’m trying out the new Microsoft Edge Chromium Beta right now. I like what I’ve seen so far in it’s speed of browsing and that it will allow you to add Chrome extensions and themes with some extra setting changes. You can check out the helpful blog posts at MSPoweruser.com

As for changing the default search in the address bar from Bing to Google or anything else it is completely different from the way you are used to adding search engines to IE. To do it with this Chromium beta version of Edge here is what you need to do.

1. Click the 3 orbs in the top right of Edge and Go to Settings
2. In Settings click “Privacy and Services”
3. At the bottom you will see ” Address Bar” – Click it to open
4. Click “Manage Search Engines”
5. In the new window click “Add”
6. In the three box type as follows
   1. Descriptive Name (Google)
   2. The URL without the https (google.com)
   3. Then this more cryptic line which fills the query: {google:baseURL}search?q=%s
7. Click Add
8. Click the blue colored Address Bar words on the page to go back to the main Address Bar settings page

From there you can choose your default search from the drop down choices on the “Search engine used in the address bar” line. You have now added a search engine and set it as the default.

Happy browsing!

PowerShell Transcripts

Do you test cmdlets in a PowerShell window? Do you just do something that you know should work and it doesn’t? Have you ever thrown the kitchen sink at a problem and all of a sudden your script is working? I bet you just closed the PowerShell window you were working in and lost all that work, because I’ve done it before.

Well, once bitten, twice isn’t gonna happen. Why? Because I’ve added the Start-Transcript cmdlet to my profile. It’s that simple, no muss, no fuss. There are a lot of different parameters that you can set with Start-Transcript such as:

• [-OutputDirectory <String>]
• [-Append]
• [-Force]
• [-NoClobber]
• [-IncludeInvocationHeader]
• [-WhatIf]
• [-Confirm]
• [[-LiteralPath] <String>]
• [[-Path] <String>]

I dislike the naming convention that is default with PowerShell so I have added the Start-Transcript with the following bit of code

$a = (Get-Date).ToString(‘Mdy’)

Start-Transcript -Path C:\PowerShell\Transcript\$a”_transcript.txt” -append

What I’m doing is storing the current date in a variable as a string of just the month, day, and year which when you run $a will look something like “4619“, which is April 6th 2019. I then start the transcript with the -path parameter to my powershell\transcript folder with the name 4619_transcript.txt. I also use the -append  parameter in case I quit my powershell session during that day. Using append will just continue with the same transcript and avoid an overwrite of the file or an error.

Overall this is for me is easier to understand and find. I hope this helps you and gives you some idea’s for improvements to what I’ve shown you. Let me know in the comments if you have any enhancements.

What Version am I Using?

The other day I was doing a quick one-liner on a bunch of DMZ servers when a few of them failed. At that point I wondered if I had updated the older servers powershell version. So, I threw another quick one-liner at them to get the powershell version. No fancy stuff, but I always get asked by colleagues “how do you know what version of powershell you are running?” So, I tell them an easy way to remember $PSVersionTable, which is “You are trying to find the PS Version in Table form stored in a variable,” which adds up to $PSVersionTable.

You can see above that when I output this as a variable it is in table format. Also, if you look at my menubar, I actually have the psversion written to it. That is done in my profile along with some color changes and starting a transcript of the session. Easy, one-liners always makes my day.