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A Years’ PC Gaming : By The Numbers!

A while ago I wrote a script to record the running times of processes on a system (see here).  It was pretty useful for work but I also thought I could use it to answer one of life’s big, unanswered questions;

Just how much PC gaming do I do?  And what games do I play the most?  When?  Can I Top>really justify buying a decent HOTAS just for Elite:Dangerous?

So I ran the script for a year, with it recording all the processes started from my games folder and how long I played them for.  So…

Numbers!  Graphs!  A documented analysis of how to waste time on the PC! Continue reading “A Years’ PC Gaming : By The Numbers!”

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PowerShell: Converting PDF Bank Statements to PDF

I wrote some very quick and dirty code to import American Express PDF statements to CSV here.  I could export the PDF to TXT and then process the text file with PowerShell.I had to revisit it the other day as I had a raft of PDF statements to convert and import into YNAB (and not just from AMEX).

Of course, all the bank and credit card vendors use a standard PDF format for statements so it was easy.

Right?

No, actually pretty much everyone just does their own thing.  And by ‘own thing’ I mean PDFs that are not even consistent within themselves.

So:  the joy of regular expressions. Continue reading “PowerShell: Converting PDF Bank Statements to PDF”

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LAN Yarns : Apologizing for playing my race in Starcraft 2.

I played Starcraft 2 a great deal a few years ago.  After months and months of play I eventually got to Diamond league and promptly hung up Pneumatized Carapace for good.  Occasionally I’ll still watch a game or two but when I was dedicated to it I used to watch loads of them.

While digging through some old posts I made on the forums at the time I found the following about watching a game with my wife.  It’s a “my race is not as cool as the other races” whine but at least it’s by proxy! Continue reading “LAN Yarns : Apologizing for playing my race in Starcraft 2.”

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Tales From IT: Don’t Confuse Relative and Absolute Pathnames!

This incident occurred in the first place I worked and it proved to me just how much damage a little ignorance can do (unfortunately I was the source of the little ignorance in this story).

More specifically, a little ignorance, god-like permissions and a hacked-together backup system built out of scripts. Continue reading “Tales From IT: Don’t Confuse Relative and Absolute Pathnames!”

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PowerShell: Copy Directory Structure and a Random Sample of Files from Each Directory

I got my wife a new digital picture frame as a present.  It looks cool but the attached storage options (USB or card) aren’t big enough to take all our digital photos.

The decision about which pictures to include relies on either organisational skills OR an artistic eye, neither of which I have.

So what about making it strictly random?  Copying the entire directory structure but only a random sample of the files in each folder?

That I CAN do 🙂 Continue reading “PowerShell: Copy Directory Structure and a Random Sample of Files from Each Directory”

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Tales From IT: I Don’t Want To Win If They Don’t Lose

IT projects past a certain size get quite complex.  They have a lot of moving parts and often those parts have to be aligned correctly and at the right time to make everything work.  In turn, that means you need the various people to pull together to make sure the project as a whole delivers.  Sometimes the team doesn’t succeed but normally everyone is pulling in the same direction.  There is no “I” in team!  Etc Etc

There are exceptions.  In one place I worked the IT departments were actively trying to push each other under a bus.  Think ‘Game Of Thrones’ with RAID arrays.

Ethernet 1
Day 1 : How to Make a Garotte out of Ethernet Cable

It made delivering the project…. interesting. Continue reading “Tales From IT: I Don’t Want To Win If They Don’t Lose”