Ramblings, ideas, problems, and solutions

Category: How To

  • Calculating percentage change in Excel

    If you do a lot of work in Excel, odds are you’ve needed to calculate a percentage change. Luckily, Excel does this for you quite readily if you simply apply a basic formula of (New Value – Old Value)/Old Value. There is, however, a pitfall that you’ll not get the values you expect if the…

  • Unlock your iPhone while wearing a mask

    Like many people, I have gone from not having any face masks other than PPE for chemical exposure to having a small collection of the things for use when I’m out and about. That’s all well and good, but wearing them means that I have to use my code to unlock my iPhone, which gets…

  • Creating habits to separate work-time from off-time

    Since March of last year I have, for the most part, been working from home. While we were able to work out the kinks in keeping connected to the rest of the team relatively quickly, I’ve found shutting off work-mode to be a bit harder. I find myself wanting to check stuff in the evenings,…

  • Tools for account evaluation on Twitter

    I am a relatively active Twitter user, and enjoy the many discussions I have with people of varied points of view and experiences on the site. One of the things I don’t enjoy, is the inevitable trolls and bots. Luckily, there are a number of tools out there that evaluates an account or tweet. I…

  • DohPro – Renaming GoPro video files quickly

    A few years ago, I wrote about the workflow I have for video editing. One thing I did not touch upon was the fact that a not insignificant amount of my raw footage comes from GoPro cameras. As anyone who has used GoPro cameras will be able to tell you, the file naming convention they…

  • iOS: Using reader mode in Safari

    One of the features in Safari that I use a fair amount is called reader mode. Simply put, it strips an article of extraneous content (such as ads), and allows me to focus on the article itself. Here’s how you use it: In Safari, click the AA icon Select “Show Reader View” It makes a…

  • iPhone: Prioritise download of certain apps

    As anyone who has been using iPhones for a while can tell you, one of the most time consuming parts about getting a new iPhone is downloading all the apps. Some apps are more important than others, and it would be nice if there was a way to tell the iPhone which apps to prioritise.…

  • Finding all groups without a manager in a specific OU in AD

    Last week, I showed you how you can easily find the OU to use when looking for the members of a specific OU. Today, I’d like to show you how I use that information. The background was that we use AD groups to control access to network shares. In order for IT support to know…

  • Finding the full OU path of an AD OU

    Using PowerShell, I was building a script to identify a subset of the groups in a given organizational unit (OU). As you may know, these are built up of subsections with the prefixes CN (common name) and DC (Domain Component). In order to have the script run successfully, you need to specify the OU using…

  • OneNote: Change backup behavior

    Over the past few years, we’ve had sporadic calls from our users who complain that their drives are filling up. One of the reasons for this is that OneNote has filled them with backups of their notebooks. As it turns out, this can readily be set in the OneNote options. Here’s how: Go to File…

  • Microsoft Teams: Dial tone when calling in to meeting

    Since starting to use Microsoft Teams, I’ve been encountering an issue when calling in to meetings; when joining a meeting, I’d get a loud buzzing on top of the meeting audio. Said buzzing was reminiscent of dial tones of yore. Digging into it a bit, I found that the buzzing ceased when I exited Skype…