I play a lot of board games with my children (two, aged 10 and 12); they’ve got to the stage now where they beat me as often as I win, which is pretty cool. Here’s a list of the games we’ve played the most; not necessarily our favourites but these are the ones we keep coming back to.
XenoShyft Onslaught Review
I played my first game of XenoShyft Onslaught a few weeks ago. The full release of the game was May 1st but I got a copy a bit early as I backed it on Kickstarter. It’s a co-op, card-building base-defense game; heroic / mercenary corporate troopers hold off waves
of ravening mutated aliens in desperate, heroic battle.
Or they all get mangled, killed and eaten. And not necessarily in that order, either.
If you’ve read a few of the other bits of writing on here, you can guess how my friends and I did….
PowerShell : Finding Duplicate Files, Part 1 : The Basic Script
We have a lot of photos, music and files. Normally we copy the files up to some network storage (so it’s backed up) and later on we come back and name and sort everything. But then, some chaos happens; maybe we get distracted so end up copying the files twice. Or maybe we’ve been away and I’ve backed them up to another device and then copied two sets of files later. Or a set of files were copied to another computer and some of them (but not all) were modified before copying them back.
The upshot is that there’s precious NAS storage being wasted. But how to find where the duplicate files are? Sounds like an excuse reason to put on my scripting hat!
Subsequently to writing this I did some more work on the script. So now there are two more parts; this post covers the basic script while part 2 details putting code in to allow resuming the script after a restart (or crash) and finally part 3 does the same thing but using PowerShell workflows.
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Avengers: Age of Ultron Review
The family and I went to see Avengers: Age of Ultron at the weekend at the London IMAX. Here’s some totally non-objective, fan-boyish thoughts. It’s spoiler-free!
PowerShell : Record Process Time Script (Updated)
I’ve had the script I wrote to keep a record of certain processes run time running for a while (I’m using it to keep a log of the games I play and when). One thing I noticed though is that there are plenty of processes matching the path I’m interested in (anything with “games” in the file path) that I’m not interested in. Launchers, background tasks, updaters or services for example.
What I need to do is set a list of exclusions and then make sure any process that matches the other criteria isn’t listed in the exclusions. The changes are below;
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LAN Yarns : Warcraft 3 Maginot Line
Or; Those Who Don’t Learn From History are Doomed to Repeat It : RTS Edition
A LAN party-staple for a number of years was Warcraft 3 : The Frozen Throne. Apparently, there were some very popular mods for it but as that whole WWW-thing was in its nascency we just stuck with FFA. Out multi-tasking and micro-managing skills were a bit sub-par (read:non-existent) so most games followed a similar pattern. But occasionally, a cunning plan was able to get into the mix.
Journey to the Centre of the Galaxy : Elite Dangerous
Elite:Dangerous is a great game. It’s pretty much “Here’s the entire galaxy. Here’s a spaceship. Off you go!” so you can do whatever you want.
I’d given bounty-hunting, trading and mining a go so I was keen to try exploration. And what better place to go than the super-massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*? Widescreen pics below!
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PowerShell : Getting All File Metadata from a Folder
I noticed my wife going through some photos manually tracking which tags were used to classify different subjects so I wondered if I could write a little PowerShell that could return all the file metadata on a set of files (or the contents of a folder). That would enable me to list out all the tags we’ve used on our photo collection, filter them and generally get an idea about the organisation.
After a quick Google I found a great script here from Microsoft but there were a few additional things I wanted it to do;
- Return the information in a stream of objects so I can use the pipeline.
- Accept input from the pipeline.
- Use either a path to a file or a path to a folder; if the latter is provided recurse through all the sub-directories.
- Get more than 266 file properties. In fact, assume we don’t know how many file properties are going to be listed on the file and get them all.
Updated script and explanation follows! Continue reading “PowerShell : Getting All File Metadata from a Folder”
LAN Party Joy
Last weekend was LAN joy-time; my friends bring our computers to someone’s house, we hook them up to his LAN and then we spend the weekend setting each other on fire.
There’s some food, drink and socialising too but the main thing is the pyromania.
Highlights are below.
Tales from IT : Installing Servers in Style
I’ve been lucky enough to do quite a bit of travelling throughout my working life. Most of the time it wasn’t particularly glamorous (“Be an IT guy! See the inside of server rooms in exotic locations!”) but occasionally I’d get to do something particularly cool.
Like being driven to the centre of New York City in a chauffeur in an enormous stretch limousine.
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Herring's Fishbait 