Posts from 2023

Posts from 2023 (52)

• 

  Published on

  2023-12-26 2:09 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azuredevopsyaml

  How to make sure your pipelines run as scheduled in Azure DevOps?

  This article explains in very brief terms - it is Christmas and I'm enjoying my 2-week-long European vacation, after all 😉 - how to make sure your Azure DevOps (YAML) pipelines fire on schedule. Because by default, they won't. And I'll explain to you why that (kind of) makes sense! Problem I've mentioned it before, but my employer is a pretty heavy user of Azure DevOps. You wouldn't believe the amount of plumbing a global SaaS product like Omnia requires - but let me tell you, it's a lot.

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• 

  Published on

  2023-12-19 6:15 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  homeassistanthomeautomationyaml

  How to pick the cheapest hours of electricity using Home Assistant?

  Time to write about Home Assistant for a change! I've been using the home automation platform for a couple of years now and while it's immensely powerful, you also run into all kinds of issues. I could rant in length about one weather station or how difficult it is to get some stuff working on Docker on Windows (and maybe I already have!), but overall it's incredible how many complex things you can do just like that.

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• 

  Published on

  2023-12-12 4:45 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  powershellwinget

  How to fix "The term 'winget' is not recognized as a name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or executable program." in Windows?

  This article explains how I fixed Terminal / PowerShell being unable to locate my winget when I was trying to install something with it. This was quite unexpected as I knew for sure I had installed winget, and I had also used it before successfully. But alas, things break down and need fixing. And here's how to fix this particular issue. Problem Let's take a quick look at the actual problem first.

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• 

  Published on

  2023-12-05 2:58 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azuredevops

  Azure DevOps suddenly not letting you manage Environments ? Sorry, it's for your own security!

  This article explains how to get around new security limitations (did I say "limitations"? I meant "features") in Azure DevOps to make it tolerable to configure your Azure DevOps Deployment Environments. Because the recent changes to Azure DevOps have made it, quite frankly, intolerable. But - let's take a step back before we take the required 15 steps forward (or sidestep the whole issue - now that's what I call a proper shortcut, and I'll share it with you too).

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• 

  Published on

  2023-11-28 6:31 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  windowsupdate

  How to manually install Windows updates?

  This article explains how to install Windows Update whenever your Windows Update service is broken. Which seems to occasionally happen. And while you can run a ton of scripts to fix it (and a lot of guides online just tell you to click "Check for updates" manually, which is kind of funny to me, but ok), the actual thing that worked for me was way simpler. Read on to find out more and possibly laugh at me. Anyway. Background I have a Windows PC that I don't use often.

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• 

  Published on

  2023-11-21 6:00 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  trello

  How to restore an old version of a Trello card?

  This article explains how to easily(?) restore the description (or any other field) of a Trello card. This might come in handy, and the UI for this isn't exactly obvious (read: it's nonexistent). Background If you're like me, you're a heavy (if a bit reluctant) Trello user. Using it all day long, you will before or later run into a situation where you mistakenly (or due to a technical glitch or stupid design) remove the contents of a card and are unable to restore them.

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• 

  Published on

  2023-11-14 8:30 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  powershellwinget

  How to fix winget when it's throwing a "0x8a15000f : Data required by the source is missing"?

  This article offers a couple of different ways to fix the "0x8a15000f" error that winget might throw at you in seemingly random situations. It's a great tool especially for headless scenarios on Windows, but this was an odd one - and required an odd solution. AI-powered summary: Winget Error “0x8a15000f” Solutions Encounter the winget “0x8a15000f” error? This guide offers solutions.

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• 

  Published on

  2023-11-07 9:19 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  hacktoberfest

  Hacktoberfest 2023 - another year, another Hacktoberfest

  This article is a quick one about my annual tradition - participating in Hacktoberfest, the "month-long celebration of open-source projects, their maintainers, and the entire community of contributors.

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• 

  Published on

  2023-10-31 5:44 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azurepowershell

  How to selectively remove items from an Azure blob storage container?

  In this article, I'll share a simple script for a simple use case: removing blobs from a virtual directory structure in a container in an Azure blob storage account. This should be useful for a case like ours; removing certain directories and subdirectories but not the whole container. But let's not get ahead of ourselves! What was the problem we had?

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• 

  Published on

  2023-10-24 12:29 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azcliazurelog4shellpowershell

  How to update application settings for (all of your) App Services and Azure Functions on Azure using az cli?

  Anyone still remember Log4Shell? The incredibly easy-to-exploit, zero-day vulnerability in Log4j, a popular Java logging framework, that made arbitrary code execution extremely simple and straightforward. The vulnerability had existed unnoticed since 2013 and was simply a side effect of a nifty new feature implemented way back when. But that's enough of that. How serious was it? Well - Apache gave Log4Shell a CVSS severity rating of 10, the highest available score .

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• 

  Published on

  2023-10-17 3:18 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azureblazorswa

  swa emulator throwing "✖ Could not connect to "http://localhost:7071". Is the server up and running?"?

  This article explains how to get around a weird quirk in Azure Static Web Apps local development story. Well - one of the quirks anyway. A real showstopper issue I ran into. One, that isn't even that serious - it's just that the error message doesn't help you at all. But let's take a step back - what was the issue we ran into, again? Problem When you're running your project in Visual Studio Code, it fails to start and you have output somewhat like below in the console:

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• 

  Published on

  2023-10-10 7:42 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azureappservicecertificatecertificatespowershell

  How to export an App Service Certificate from Azure?

  Azure offers this great offering that is in my mind underutilized still - managed certificates that they'll renew for you. While the offering is called Azure App Service Certificates , they are not only limited to being used in App Services. Their biggest strengths lie in their ease of use, automation, and integration with different Azure services. These certs are automatically renewed, eliminating the need for manual certificate management.

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• 

  Published on

  2023-10-03 6:51 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  certificatesopenssl

  How to export a certificate and a private key from a .pfx using OpenSSL?

  Alright, so let's make this a quick one. I've had to google this multiple times, since I have to do this a couple of times per year, which is NOT often enough for me to remember it by heart, or even for my Terminal to remember the commands properly. So, long story short - here's how to export a PEM-formatted .cer -file and your private key (and optionally decrypt it as well!) from a .pfx -file containing both!

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• 

  Published on

  2023-09-26 2:16 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azuredevopsdocker

  How to find out dependency versions in your .csproj files using PowerShell?

  This article explains our solution to a very particular use case. We needed to go through .csproj files, find certain dependencies from them, and then figure out their versions. And all of this needed to happen in an Azure DevOps pipeline. But when would this be helpful? Well, hear me out, because boy do I have a case to describe! Background We wanted to have automatic versioning for our builds in Azure DevOps. We use the standard and boring semver model - i.e. Major.Minor.

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• 

  Published on

  2023-09-19 2:50 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  nodenpmnvm

  node build throwing "error:0308010C:digital envelope routines::unsupported"? Let's fix it!

  This article explains how to fix an annoying error - somewhat along the lines of "error:0308010C:digital envelope routines::unsupported" - you might encounter when running node scripts. This might happen in a pipeline or locally. And guess what: you can probably fix it. Alright. Let's get to it, then!

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• 

  Published on

  2023-09-12 3:39 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  nodenpmvisual-studio

  "This app can't run on your PC" dialog when you're building your app in Visual Studio

  This article explains a fix to an odd issue, where suddenly, mid-build, an error dialog pops up, complaining about your PC being unable to run "this app". The fix is luckily straightforward, even if it's a bit odd. Let me explain - but first, let's define the issue a bit better. What went wrong? Problem So, when running a build that includes some steps executed by node (either defined in your .

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• 

  Published on

  2023-09-05 2:22 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  microsoftoffice

  How to "fix" Word removing tagged users from comments?

  In this particular article, I'll explain how to fix an issue where Microsoft Word (part of what used to be called "Microsoft Office", but that's now called "Microsoft 365") decides to remove your name and everyone you tagged from any comments or conversations you might've had on the article. That's pretty annoying - but let's take a closer look at what was actually happening.

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• 

  Published on

  2023-08-29 2:10 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  dockerdsmhomeassistantsynology

  How to install Home Assistant on Synology NAS (DSM 7.2)?

  This article explains how to install Home Assistant on your Synology NAS device using Container Manager and Web Station. This probably applies to DSM 7.2+ on any somewhat modern Synology DiskStation device. A lot of the steps also apply if you're setting up ANY containers to run on your NAS, to be fair. But let's not get ahead of ourselves!

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• 

  Published on

  2023-08-22 1:42 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  modernsharepointpnppowershellsharepoint-online

  How to configure a custom 404 page for a SharePoint site?

  This article explains how to use some archaic PowerShell magic to configure a custom 404 page for your Modern SharePoint Online Communication site. If you've been working with SharePoint for a while, this property might be already familiar to you. A lot of settings for each site collection are stored in the root site's property bag, and that's where you'll find the key “vti_filenotfoundpage” which should have the value "/sites/ContosoPublishing/Pages/PageNotFoundError.aspx”. Classic.

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• 

  Published on

  2023-08-15 4:12 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azuredevopsdocker

  Azure DevOps pipelines suddenly failing with "##[error]#0 building with default instance using docker driver"

  Another (possibly?) timely and weird one here! This article explains how to work around Azure DevOps suddenly stopping to play nice with Docker and the rest of our tooling and causing all builds to fail with oddly non-descript error messages. Annoying to deal with but not the end of the world as we'll see! Background Another odd one for the books! No idea what caused it, but suddenly our pipelines started looking like this, with no clear reason (I mean, we break builds all the time...

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• 

  Published on

  2023-08-08 8:02 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  windows

  How to fix Windows not recognizing your mouse clicks?

  Since I ran into this annoying little issue again, I thought it might be a good time to document it for the next person who needs to google it on their phone, after frantically clicking every single button they have on their mouse, only to realize their computer really doesn't care about any of that. None of the clicks do anything. I've only ever run into this on Windows 10, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happens on other versions as well.

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• 

  Published on

  2023-08-01 10:43 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  outlookwindowswindowssearch

  Outlook Search broken due to Windows Search acting up? Here's 3 ways to fix it!

  Well, this was kind of a dumb one. Search in Outlook suddenly stopped working completely. And I don't mean the normal "Outlook Search can't find anything" -kind of issues, I mean it literally found zero results with any search terms. Well, everything is buggy and nothing works. Not that unusual by itself, but something that should be fixed. This article explains how to fix it. Well, even a couple of different ways to fix it!

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• 

  Published on

  2023-07-25 3:08 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  blazorvisual-studiowebassembly

  "Failed to launch debug server process due to: TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined...." when trying to debug Blazor WebAssembly

  This article explains how to fix an annoying issue when trying to debug a Blazor WASM (WebAssembly) project. In my case, I had a Blazor WASM SWA (Static Web App), that built just fine and ran well in Azure, but refused to be debugged. What an annoying little problem. I mean - it's not a problem until you have a problem to investigate. But when you can't investigate a problem, then you do have a problem. So let's take a closer look. At the problem, that is.

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• 

  Published on

  2023-07-18 6:03 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  gittypescript

  How to clean up redundant .js, .jsx and .d.ts files from your repository?

  Even if you have a 100% TypeScript project, it'll still end up with a lot of .js (JavaScript) or .jsx (JavaScript with React extension) files. Unless you properly ignore them, they'll end up cluttering your Visual Studio solution, and even git. As these are, in that case, generated files and essentially build artifacts, you will most likely not want to commit them to your code repository. They'll get recreated during the build anyway and are more likely to cause confusion than to do any good.

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• 

  Published on

  2023-07-11 3:22 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  windows

  How to fix jarringly jagged text in Windows?

  This article explains one simple fix to all your text appearing wonky, with jagged and somehow oddly fuzzy edges in Windows. The guide is written for Windows 10 (because that's the only modern OS that natively supports taskbar being docked on the side of the screen), but it probably applies for Windows 11 as well. Background As we all know, it's not your computer.

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