Robbie

HOWTO: Automate One-A-Day Photography

May 10, 2026December 28, 2017 by Robbie

This will be a somewhat unusual HOWTO compared to those typically on this site. In an effort to lose weight, I decided I wanted to take a photo of myself, once per day so I could track and further motivate the progress of regular exercise. I then wanted to overlay the date each photo was taken as well as my weight on that day. Finally, I wanted animate these daily photos into a GIF and upload it to my website so I can remind myself anywhere of my objective of losing weight. The trick is I wanted to automate this entire process. This meant I needed to find a solution for the following:

Remotely control my camera to be able to take a picture and download it from an automated script
Be able to programmatically crop the image from the camera to remove everything except the white background and myself
Have a mechanism to be able to overlay text onto an existing image so I can add the current date any my weight data
Obtain my latest weight from my Garmin Index scale via Garmin Connect and append it to the image
Combine all of the previous images into an animated gif so I can watch my progress
Automatically upload the animated gif to my website so I can view it anywhere

To complete this project, I decided to try and leverage my Canon S100 which I purchased as Canon’s top-end prosumer camera in 2012. As I researched my options however, I discovered that Canon disabled any kind of remote control capabilities for this camera. Fortunately I discovered that some very smart people created an alternative firmware for many popular Canon cameras including mine. This firmware is called the CHDK or “Canon Hackers Developer Kit”. This provides all sorts of additional features that are otherwise only available in Canon’s DSLR professional series cameras. The one that I’m most interested in however is that the firmware provided the option to remote control my Canon S100.

Bank of Canada Interest Rate Changes Review

May 10, 2026July 16, 2017 by Robbie

For those of you that live in Canada, you are no doubt aware that the Bank of Canada recently increased their policy rate from 0.5% to 0.75%. I heard of a lot of media reporting that said this is the first change in 7 years. I further read that we could expect further increases in the near future. Since this policy rate directly impacts the rates that regular consumers get on any new loans and impacts even existing with variable rates, it seemed important to understand how this rate has fluctuated over the years.

To that end I did some research and found that on the official Bank of Canada website, you can download a CSV containing a list of every single day for the last 10 years and what the interest rate was on each of those days. That is available here:

http://www.bankofcanada.ca/rates/interest-rates/canadian-interest-rates/

I wanted to know what the shortest number of days has been between interest rate changes. Given the large scale impacts of changes to this rate in the country I assumed it would be something that was done exceptionally cautiously and once changed, a long waiting period would take place to review the impact. According to my research though this assumption doesn’t appear to hold true over the last decade.

First though, a comment on the news reports that this is the “first change in 7 years”. That claim turns out to be patently false. The recent change represents the first increase in 7 years. Over that time frame however we’ve seen 2 decreases to the rate. Below are my findings:

HOWTO: PowerShell Function Return Quirk

May 10, 2026July 9, 2017 by Robbie

Have you ever been using PowerShell, created a function that called another function and then tried to return data from the parent function only to discover that the returned data included more ‘stuff’ than you intended? This quick blog post demonstrates why that is and presents one workaround to prevent it in the future.

Clear-Host

Function Show-OutputMessage
{
    # Note that the only thing this function does is write to the pipeline.  It does NOT return any data.
    Write-output "An important message"
}

Function Run-Function
{
    # Inside a function, we call a sub function that inside that calls write-output. 
    Show-OutputMessage

    # Let's assume this parent function performs some kind of operation that returns a status code.  So the only thing we want to return is the status, ie:
    return "OK"
}

$Status = Run-Function
if($Status -ne "OK") { write-host "It's broken" -ForegroundColor Red } else { write-host "It's working” -ForegroundColor Green }

Clear-Host

Function Show-OutputMessage

{

# Note that the only thing this function does is write to the pipeline. It does NOT return any data.

Write-output "An important message"

}

Function Run-Function

{

# Inside a function, we call a sub function that inside that calls write-output.

Show-OutputMessage

# Let's assume this parent function performs some kind of operation that returns a status code. So the only thing we want to return is the status, ie:

return "OK"

}

$Status = Run-Function

if($Status -ne "OK") { write-host "It's broken" -ForegroundColor Red } else { write-host "It's working” -ForegroundColor Green }

HOWTO: Use Autohotkey to Toggle Windows Based on Window ID

May 10, 2026April 1, 2017 by Robbie

Autohotkey is an invaluable tool for automating tasks we perform hundreds of times per day without even thinking of it. The tasks many only take a few seconds each, but added up over the course of a year or more, it really adds up! One such common task involves switching between applications in Windows. Sure, you can click the application you want on the task bar or use Alt-Tab. But what happens when you have a ton of programs and tabs open?

You have to hunt.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just press a keyboard shortcut to launch/resume any application? This is where Autohotkey excels. You can configure it for example to toggle between applications based on their window title. But what if you can’t use the window title? This post shows you how to toggle between an application where the title constantly changes and you otherwise have nothing consistent about the application with which to configure Autohotkey to use.

HOWTO: Run Process Monitor on a Remote Machine from the Command Line

May 10, 2026February 15, 2017 by Robbie

I have a treat for you today. I have finally solved something that has been a pain in my side for years now. Have you ever been in the following situation?

You are reviewing log files and discover that a remote computer (perhaps a virtual machine running on shared storage) is running wild and hammering on the disk. You need to figure out what exactly what processes and files are causing that disk IO. However perhaps that computer is always in use and you simply can’t log in locally to launch resource monitor or process monitor. You need ultimately to run Process Monitor remotely. Unfortunately you google this and discover that it’s not possible due to the amount of data that process monitor generates and can’t pass it all over the wire. So what do you do?

I found myself in this exact situation yet again today and finally decided to sit down and solve it once and for all. My googling revealed a suggestion in some forum to use psexec to run procmon.exe on the remote machine and then copy over the PML file to your machine for analysis. I’m afraid I couldn’t find that blog post so I can’t give credit to the original author of the idea. But there is a world of difference between an idea and a practical implementation and that’s what I have to share with you today.

Below is a PowerShell script that includes a function called Get-ProcMonData. It accepts just two parameters, a -ComputerName for the name of the remote computer you wish to connect to and -Duration for how long procmon will run for on the remote system. Note that the script is hardcoded to limit you to a maximum of 100 seconds as I discovered the hard way that Procmon generates an enormous amount of data and you can easily fill the remote drive if you’re not careful.

HOWTO: Add Computer to Group without Restart

May 10, 2026February 2, 2017 by Robbie

Credit where credit is due, this is taken directory from the blog below and is documented here only so I can easily find it again in the future. Source: https://deployhappiness.com/quick-tip-add-computer-to-group-gpupdate-without-restart Let’s say you add a computer to a group but you want that computer to gain that membership but can’t restart the system. What do … Read more

HOWTO: Restore Active Directory to a different server

May 10, 2026January 14, 2017 by Robbie

This HOWTO is a proof of concept to demonstrate a way to take an Active Directory environment on one server and restore it to a different server on an entirely different network. The scenario in this example is we have a domain controller which has a number of other third party applications installed and we wish to migrate just the AD portion to a new dedicated Active Directory server in a separate environment. Once completed, the old server will be permanently powered off.

We will have two systems, one called PRODDC1. This is our production system hosting Active Directory and all of our other applications. The second system is called initially NEWDC1. This is a fresh copy of Windows 2012 R2 with no configuration of any kind, not even a hostname or IP assigned. Crucially, these two systems are on isolated networks and cannot see each other.

On PRODDC1

From Server Manager, installed the Windows Server Backup Feature
Once installed, run Windows Server Backup and from the left menu choose Backup Once
Choose Custom and select only System State

HOWTO: Get Webroot Endpoints using Unity REST API and PowerShell

May 10, 2026November 18, 2016 by Robbie

Webroot has recently released a new REST API that allows us as administrators to pull detailed endpoint data programmatically. What this effectively means is that all of the information that is presented to us in the Webroot Global Site Manager can now be extracted directly and integrated into other processes. I very much wanted a script that would be able be able to run on a scheduled task and compare all the systems in Active Directory with those registered in Webroot and then report on those AD systems that either do not have Webroot installed or haven’t checked in for more than a week.

It took some reading and trial and error but I managed to create a PowerShell script that can connect to Webroot and pull all of the details for every endpoint for a given keycode into an object which you can then do whatever you want with. I figured I’d save you the frustration of figuring out how to make this. Of course this code is presented as is. It’s working for me but your mileage may vary.

Here’s how it works:

HOWTO: Check CPU Usage of VMs with VMware Workstation

May 10, 2026October 30, 2016 by Robbie

Do you use VMware Workstation on Windows? Do you run more than a handful of VMs? Have you ever had your host CPU pinned by one of the instances of vmware-vmx.exe but the only way you could figure out which VM was the issue was by logging into each one and checking CPU usage there? I found myself in this situation and figured there had to be a better way. I realized that each VM runs as its own separate vmware-vmx.exe process. I further figured out that the .VMX file that includes the name of the running VM is part of the command line arguments used to call it. Putting this information together, I wrote a simple PowerShell script that is intended to be run on the Windows Host that will show all running VMs and their current CPU usage. Note that the totals are for each VM, not of the host. This is why multiple VMs can show 100% usage.

HOWTO: Write Vietnamese on a computer

May 10, 2026October 25, 2016 by Robbie

I have previously discussed how to use a Windows based computer to write in Japanese and Chinese. The time has come to tackle the next of the Asian languages, Vietnamese. As before, the same disclaimer applies. The information below is what I was able to figure out based on information primary from Google and Wikipedia. Some or perhaps even much of it may be incomplete but it does appear to at least be logically consistent. At first I thought typing in Vietnamese would be considerably easier since the language at first blush appeared to use the Roman alphabet, just as English does. Therefore, I expected it to be as simple as “Select the Vietnamese keyboard and start typing”. As I started researching however, I found this was not the case at all.

There are a couple of important things to be aware of when trying to write Vietnamese on an English keyboard. Let’s assume you’ve used the “Language” Control panel applet and added the “Vietnamese” language already. Once installed, you press the “Preview” button to see what the keyboard looks like this:

The first thing that will probably jump out at you is that all of the numeric digits on the keyboard have been replaced with special characters along with the open and closed square brackets, dash and equals keys. Why is that? To understand this, we’ll have to look at how the Vietnamese alphabet is constructed.