New Year-New Focus

Long time no posts. As always I set a goal to write a lot more frequently, but I don’t. Life gets in the way, and blogging isn’t a top priority for me when it doesn’t bring in money to pay the bills.

I turned 60 in 2019, while working two jobs an average of 78 hours a week. So, you can see that I don’t have much time for writing, let alone sleeping or spending time with the children. I’ve made it so that I do get Saturday off from my second job, which allows me to have one day not working for someone else other than myself and my family.

This year my ultimate goal is to be able to only work one job. With that I can start to do other things that I want to do, but can’t.

1. Spend time with my family
2. Do some training for certifications
3. Read
4. Eat right and take physical care of myself
5. Write on this blog
6. Take an actual vacation and not worry about money or how I’m going to pay for it

Wishlist item for the year:

Microsoft please allow Windows Terminal to open multiple tabs of an editor using different accounts. I use ConEmu because I can’t open 2 tabs of PowerShell, one of Office365, Azure, and one for my AD admin account/Exchange hybrid

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.