I am, with surprising regularity, faced with the need to access UNC paths from the command line, as that is perhaps pretty much the quickest way to browse to network shares with a different user than the one currently logged in. There’s just one issue: the Windows command line does not support UNC paths from the cd/chdir command. There is, however, a way to work around this issue; by creating a temporary virtual drive.
Category: How To
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Find out what user has a file open
One of the questions that pop up every now and again, yet not often enough for me to consistently remember how to do it, is some variant on “What user is blocking my file access?” A user will typically call in, complaining that they are unable to open/edit/delete a given file on a file share, and ask the support tech they reach to solve the issue.
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Exporting AD group members’ display name
Five years ago, I showed you how to export a list of members of an Active Directory group, using a command line query. One issue I’ve run into using this query, is that I get their user name, not their actual name, which tends to make the resulting list hard to parse. As I had a need to export a relatively large number of group members names as part of a recent ticket, I needed a solution that gave me what I wanted straight out of the box.
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Transferring content between Kindles
I recently picked up a new Kindle, and wanted to ensure that the new device had the same content as the one I replaced. As it turns out, this is rather easily accomplished. Here’s how:
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Unroll a twitter thread
Last week, I showed you how you can quickly and easily create a coherent Twitter thread. Reading Twitter threads can be a bit of a hassle, though, so of course someone made a web app to hep with that. The site is called Thread Reader App. Useful though it is, it could have been a bit more intuitive to use, so here’s how you unroll a thread:
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Creating a coherent Twitter thread
I have recently gotten back into using Twitter, after having left it as little more than a channel through which I promote the posts on this blog for a fairly long time. In the past, when I have had something on my mind taking more than 140 (well, 280 now) characters to say, I’ve simply written a tweet, then replying to it and replying, in turn, to the reply until I’m done.
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Turning on notifications for Facebook posts
I use Facebook for many things. One of those things is to take advantage of the internet hivemind, and get opinions and recommendations for any number of things, from what tech to get, to where to eat. One thing that annoys me a lot, is when someone posts something irrelevant, just so that they can follow the conversation. If memory serves, it used to be that you had to post something – anything – in order to get notifications of what happened in a thread, and it is from this that the practice stems.
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Unmark videos as watched on YouTube
As I’ve made pretty clear, I’m – among many other things – a YouTuber. I have two YouTube channels, and watch a fair amount of content put out by other creators, too. Whenever I come across a video that seems interesting, I add it to my Watch Later queue, so that I can view it at my leisure. From time to time, I use the “Remove Watched” feature, to remove watched videos from my Watch Later queue in bulk, instead of having to remove them manually.
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Batch replace file extension of all files in a folder
From time to time, I need to quickly change the file extension of all files in a folder. While there are tools that can do that for you (one of which I’ve written about previously), if you need to append the same file extension to all files in a folder, using the command line in Windows can be just as quick. Here’s how: (more…)
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Kindle: Reset the furthest page read
I’ve been an ebook user for a very long time now, and bought my first dedicated ebook reader nine years ago. In 2011, it got replaced with an Amazon Kindle, and I’ve been a Kindle user ever since, using both their dedicated devices (including the larger DX size), as well as PC, Mac, and iOS apps.
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Enabling two-factor authentication on WordPress
For the past two years, I’ve been enabling two-factor authentication (2FA) wherever I can, and particularly on services where I want to ensure that my data is as secure as possible. Back in April, I added 2FA to this site. As this was the first time I’d ever set something like this up on a service that I maintain myself, I went to the task with a fair bit of trepidation as I simply had no idea how easy or difficult it would be. As it turns out, it is very easy. Here’s how I did it:
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