Category Archives: tools

wake up Windows automatically using a scheduled task

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This seems easy at first, but it turns out to be a lot harder than expected, due to various OS and power settings that get in the way. The idea is simple: you want to have your Windows 10 machine start up at a specific time using a task set in the task scheduler.

When you create a new task in the Task Scheduler, there’s a setting for this, so it looks so easy. It’s on the conditions tab. You activate the option to wake the computer to execute your task, and you’re done. Right? Well, if you’re really lucky that might work straight out of the box.
In case it doesn’t work, here are some things you can fiddle with to try and get it going.

  1. Create a wake-up tasks that doesn’t really do anything. Just run a command like this:
    cmd /c echo %date%
    For a more detailed guide on how to set up a task and the wake timers check this excellent article.
  2. Create a second task that does what you want it to do in a batch script but 10 minutes later than the first. That gives your computer ample time to start up, install any potential updates, or do whatever it sometimes does that takes so damn long.
  3. Deactivate Fast Startup. It messes with your hibernation mode and causes it not to startup again afterwards.
  4. Always hibernate your machine. If you just do a plain shutdown it doesn’t seem to automatically start up again. You can do this with the command below. This is also handy if you want to shut your machine down again, after your task has finished:
    shutdown /h
  5. Enable wake timers in your Power Options advanced settings. See the link below for instructions.
  6. For laptops make sure your Power Options are configured correctly. Mind closing the lid in that case. A closed lid will prevent the laptop from starting up in my case for example. Laptops will also not startup when they are running on the battery by default.
  7. Reboot your machine after fiddling with these settings if it still doesn’t work. This makes sure your settings stick.
  8. If you tried everything and it still doesn’t work, check your BIOS settings and see if there might be a power option in there that might prevent it from starting up automatically.

Give your machine a few minutes if you’re testing this. Yes, it’s annoying to wait, but if you set it too fast, it might not be powered down fast enough to be able to start up again, and miss the timer. That way you won’t be able to tell if it’s actually working.

Hopefully you can now use your desktop or laptop to run some nightly scheduled jobs, without having to have a dedicated always-on machine around. Saves you time and money on power consumption, hardware and maintenance!

automatically delete emails with IMAP Cleanup

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Let’s say you have this IOT device like a motion detection camera. Which sends you emails. Emails you keep in a separate IMAP mailbox. Lots of emails. So you want to delete those emails in some automated fashion, because doing that daily is oh so boring (remember, lots of emails).

Wouldn’t it be great if there was like some handy command line tool that would delete the oldest emails and keep like a 1.000 or 500 of them only? Well yes, that way I could script that annoying job and run it daily.

I didn’t find something that already did this. So I figured I’d be able to whip something up in an hour or so using PowerShell, or maybe a small .NET console application using an existing IMAP library.

Well, 3 different IMAP libraries and about 4 hours later I did have something rudimentary that finally did what it was supposed to do. Delete the oldest email, and leave the most recent 1000 (or whatever number you want) behind. That took longer than expected, so to regain as much time spent on this as possible I threw the ImapCleanup tool on GitHub, including binary downloads. I hope someone else will find this useful as well.

Beware though. This tool deletes emails. Be careful which mailbox you point this at, and make sure you test it in advance on a dummy mailbox. Maybe your email server behaves differently than mine, and important emails get digitally shredded by mistake.

download cover art for all your albums, with powershell

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Image by Juska Wendland, cc-licensed.

Album covers are nice eye candy when you’re using a media player like Foobar2000 which automatically picks up a cover.jpg file in an album folder. The problem is that I have a lot of mp3 albums I ripped from my CD’s from way back and those don’t have any fancy cover art files.

I looked around for some tools that could automagically download covers for my albums but didn’t find anything handy. Since my music is structured in sub-folders like \ I thought this should be easy enough to parse and get pictures for.
If only there was a service that could easily provide those…

I tried the Musicbrainz API’s but that turned out to be hard to use and didn’t give me any covers for some test albums either. Then I thought of Last.fm. They have a lot of cover art, and their URL structure is the same as my folder structure… hmmm.

And here it is, a Powershell script which runs over your folder structure, tries to get the album page from Last.fm and then saves a cover.jpg image from the album page metadata.

A few things to know:

  • Your mp3’s are expected to be in a folder structure like (artist)\(album)\*.mp3
    E.g. The Prodigy\The Fat of the Land
  • If a folder contains any JPG or PNG image, it will be skipped. So that means you can run the script multiple times, and it will only download images once.
  • The “Various artists” folder is skipped by default because it didn’t fit the search pattern. If you store these type of albums in another folder, you might want to update that line with the correct folder name. If it does happen to process that folder in your case because of a different name, nothing will go wrong. It simply won’t find any album matches.

To use it, copy the code below in a file called get-albumart.ps1, or whatever name you fancy. Then run it as follows to get those pretty cover albums:

.\get-albumart.ps1 d:\music

And as always, this script comes as is, without any kind of warranty and you’re free to try it at your own risk. I wrote and used it and it worked great for me. I hope it works for you too. If Last.fm sues you because you’re downloading every image they have on the site because of your huge album collection? You didn’t get this script from me OK. Nope. Not me. ;-)

param ([Parameter(Mandatory=$true)][string]$path)

$progressPreference = 'silentlyContinue'
pushd
cd $path
$artistFolders = ls -directory | where { $_.name -ne "Various artists"}

foreach ($artistFolder in $artistFolders)
{
    $artist = $artistFolder.name
    write-host "::: $artist :::" -foregroundcolor green

    cd -Literalpath $artistFolder
    $releaseFolders = ls -directory
    
    foreach ($releaseFolder in $releaseFolders)
    {
        $release = $releaseFolder.name
        write-host "$release" -foregroundcolor cyan
        cd -literalpath "$releaseFolder"

        if ((test-path *.png) -or (test-path *.jpg))
        {
            write-host "- Images found, skipping."
        }
        else
        {
            $url = "https://www.last.fm/music/$($artist)/$($release)"
            $r = $null

            try 
            {
                $r = invoke-webrequest $url -usebasicparsing
            }
            catch 
            {
                write-host "- Release not found, skipping: $artist - $release" -foregroundcolor red
            }

            if ($r -ne $null)
            {
                $s = $r.content -split "`n" | where { $_ -like "*`"og:image`"*"} 
                $img = ($s -split '"') | where { $_ -like "*https*.jpg*" }

                if ($img -ne $null)
                {
                    write-host "- Downloading image for $artist - $release from $url"
                    invoke-webrequest $img -outfile cover.jpg
                }
                else
                {
                    write-host "- No image for $artist - $release from $url" -foregroundcolor yellow
                }
            }
        }
        cd ..
    }
    cd ..
}

popd
$progressPreference = 'Continue'

cool vim tips and tricks you might not know

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Vim has tons of awesome shortcuts and features you pick up over time. Some of those I don’t use every day so I have to write them down so I can look them back up when I can’t remember exactly how it works. Instead of keeping them locked away in a text file, I’ll throw them online here and spread the Vim love. None of these need any special plugins. They should all work right out of the box with plain old Vim.

If you want to know more about a specific command listed here, use the Vim :help command to find out more. There are usually more options and possibilities for each of these commands and the Vim documentation is excellent.

Here we go!

When you are on the command line using a console application and you want to edit the output in Vim right away, or open that long list of possible command line switches in Vim for reference, this one will come in handy.
I’m using GVim here because since that opens in a separate window from your shell, this is the most useful.

ls *.txt | gvim -
docker -h | gvim -
git --help | gvim -

This one is for opening a ton of files in a single Vim instance from Powershell, in different tabs. This means you are running this from a Powershell console of course.

gvim -p (ls *.ps1)

For more Vim command line options run this in your favorite shell environment:

vim -h
gvim -h

How about opening a remote file, or fetch HTML from a page over HTTP using Vim:

:e https://n3wjack.net/

When you work with log files a lot, being able to delete lines containing or not containing a specific word can be just what you need.
These two commands are perfect to filter out obsolete exceptions and figure out what is causing that nasty production issue:

:g/DeleteAll/d
:v/DeleteAllButThis/d

Did you know that Vim has a spell checker? I didn’t know that at the beginning (try :h spell for more details).
To activate/deactivate:

:set (no)spell

To jump to the next / previous misspelled word:

]s
[s

To get a list of spelling suggestions (or use the mouse in GVim, which is quite practical):

z=

You can add a simple XML-tidy shortcut to your .vimrc file by adding the following command.
What it does is setting the file type to XML, removes spaces between opening & closing brackets, add a return character in-between the opening & closing brackets and finally formats the document so it looks all nice and indented.

nmap <leader>ppx <Esc>:set filetype=xml<CR>:%s/> *</></g<CR>:%s/></>\r</g<CR><ESC>gg=G<Esc>:noh<CR>

You can force syntax highlighting in Vim as follows for e.g. HTML, XML and Markdown.
Of course this works for a ton of other file types as well, as long as you can figure out what the extension/file type key is. But that’s pretty easy in most cases. 

:set syntax=html
:set syntax=xml
:set syntax=md

I add shortcuts for any files I frequently edit by using the leader key and a letter combination that’s easy to remember.
For example this one to edit my custom .vimrc file when I press the leader key followed by “e” and “v” (edit vimrc).

nnoremap <Leader>ev :tabe ~\vimfiles\nj-vimrc.vim<CR>

That’s about it. For more nice Vim tips check out more Vim posts. Another good resource for bite sized Vim tips is the MasteringVim on twitter and it’s newsletter.

make vim awesome with plugins

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Artistic closeup of a .vimrc file

Vim is a great lightweight editor as it is. But after setting it all up on your windows box and tweaking your _vimrc it still might lack that bit of awesome you’re looking for in a modern text editor.

Time to spice things up with plugins!

Vim plugins are written in viml or vimscript, an internal script language in the vim editor, and are plain .vim files containing scripting code which extend vim in all sorts of wonderful ways. There are tons of vim scripts out there so finding the right ones for your needs takes a bit of time. There are however some helpful guides out there and blog posts like this one to help you on your way. I’ll list some of those and links to more plugins at the end.

Installing those scripts and plugins can be tedious though. Download a zip, unpack, copy files, yada-yada-yada. Since we’re into package managers these days we want things to go automatically with a few keystrokes.

Enter Vundle.

You’ve probably guessed by now this is a vim plugin manager (and a plugin by itself). It allows you to install, update and search for available vim scripts among other things. I like this one in particular because it does this all from vim itself with a number of specific commands.
To get started you’ll have to install this one manually though, but it only takes a few command line statements and some .vimrc edits. Once you have this up and running, you’ll be able to install most plugins using it so it’s worth the hassle.

Check out the info on the Vundle github page on how to install and then come back here. ;)

Alright. Now, what plugins should we get?
Well it depends on what you want to do of course, but here are some general purpose ones you might like.

vim-airline

A pretty looking status bar you’ll see in a lot of vim screenshots. It’s tweakable so you choose what kind of info you want it to show.

vim airline status bar plugin

ervandew/supertab

Adds tab completion to vim using the tab-key. That might sound odd but the default use a bunch of control keys so this just comes more “natural”.

The-NERD-tree

This is a directory browsing plugin which is just better than Netrw which comes out of the box. Visually you can fold/unfold folders, search (use any vim command in the window), manipulate files etc. Very handy to keep track of a project when programming or just see what other files are in a folder without having to exit vim.

vim nerdtree plugin

CtrlP

A fuzzy file search plugin. Press Ctrl-P and you’ll get list at the bottom of files in your current directory. Type in some characters of the filename you are looking for and it will filter the files matching those characters. So you don’t need to know the full name, and you can skip parts. Check out this video to get an idea of how it works.

One note on this. If you have a folder with a lot of files in the sub-folder tree (like a C# application with build files in the sub-folder) be sure to exclude any non-relevant types like object & dll files. CtrlP has a maximum file limit and those irrelevant files can stop you from finding those you actually want to see.

In my _vimrc I use this to exclude the .NET build artifacts and some more irrelevant file types:

set wildignore+=*\\obj\\*,*\\bin\\*,*.swp,*.zip,*.exe,*.dll

vim-fontzoom

vim-fontzoom is a simple plugin that allows you to increase or decrease your vim font size using the plus or minus key when you are in command mode. Note that this doesn’t work with the +/- on your numeric pad, just with the regular keys on your keyboard. But you can remap the keys if you want to change this.

chriskempson/base16-vim themes

Not really a functional plugin but hey, you want your editor to look pretty right? I’ve tried a ton of themes already but lately I’m sticking with the chriskempson/base16-vim set. In this package you get a bunch of nicely crafted and balanced color themes which will definitely have something you like. Dark and light themes, monokai, solarized and other classics, it has it all. The last theme plugin you’ll ever need.

Moar!

Depending on your workload there are plenty of more specific plugins out there. Google is your friend, but here’s a few places to get started:

  • The easiest to use and most awesome Vim plugin directory is called VimAwesome. Great to find new plugins, or great to find old ones and how to install them. Each plugin lists how to install it with Vundle or another plugin manager, which is super handy.
  • The 15 best vim plugins according to Steve Francia who made a vim distro called The Ultimate Vim Distribution, so I guess he knows what he’s talking about. :)

indent selected lines with tab in vim

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Artistic closeup of a .vimrc fileOne thing that annoyed me about using Vim was how many keystrokes it took to indent or un-indent a few selected lines of code. My (probably less than ideal) way of doing that was to go into visual mode, select the lines with the movement keys J or K, then use the keys to change the indenting which are < or >.
To indent another level, pressing dot after this would work.

In Visual Studio or a typical Windows text editor I’m used to simply selecting the lines by holding shift & moving the cursor keys up or down, then pressing TAB to indent and shift-TAB to un-indent.

I’m so used to using the cursor keys for text manipulation that it’s hard to unlearn this, so I was looking for key mappings to do the same thing in Vim.
Luckily this turned out to be rather easy. If you add the following to your vimrc file, you can shift-tab away to indent your code:

" TAB-mappings to allow indenting of selected text instead of using < & >
vnoremap <Tab> >
vnoremap <S-Tab> <