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I'm a big fan of Homebrew, the package manager for MacOS. There's only one problem -- I need to keep one cask (AKA a GUI application) at a specified version because I haven't paid for the latest version.

I am in the middle of a SQL data conversion project. Amazingly, our *new* SQL Server database requires dates to be stored in Unix format, which is a bigint field with the number of milliseconds since 01/01/1970. Amazing, I tell you.

Here are some queries that I have found useful in this project. I have updated this article to include an alternative that does not involve functions.

You may know the convenient feature in Windows 7 to snap windows to the right and left: drag a window all the way to one side of your screen and it will snap to the side of your screen, taking up exactly one half of it. The keyboard shortcut Win+Left (right) arrow does this as well. But how do you snap windows to the top and bottom of your screen? It's easy!

If you are running a Drupal site with Network Solutions hosting, please accept my condolences. And the lack of shell access? The pain of your loss is almost unbearable.

However, thanks to jomariworks on the Network Solutions forums, at least you can enable Clean URLs!

I had some FLAC audio files on my computer that I wanted to convert to a lossy format (AAC, in my case). iTunes won't play FLAC, and VLC wasn't helping me. I ended up calling FFmpeg in a PowerShell script to quickly convert all of the files.

$target = 'J:\FLAC'
$target = $target + "\*.flac"
$files = Get-ChildItem $target

foreach ($file in $files) {
    .\ffmpeg.exe -i $file -acodec libvo_aacenc -b:a 256k -ar 44100 -threads 4 -n $($file.BaseName + ".m4a")
}

Let's say you need to add a new user to all the Active Directory groups of an existing user. It would be painstaking and error-prone to compare group memberships in the AD Users & Computers snap-in. But don't despair: There is an easier way!

First, install the free ActiveRoles Management Shell module for PowerShell from Quest if you don't already have it. Trust me, you'll wonder how you managed Active Directory without it!

Second, run a command like this in PowerShell:

Here's a quick way to remove blank lines from a file using PowerShell. This will also remove lines that only have spaces.

(gc file.txt) | ? {$_.trim() -ne "" } | set-content file.txt

Let's say you want to use PowerShell's Get-WmiObject commandlet to retrieve a list of files older than a certain amount of time. Here's one way to do it.

If you're wondering "Should I turn off the Windows Firewall service to disable the Windows Firewall?" The answer is NO!

If you send a lot of emails to distribution lists that you also belong to, it can be annoying and unproductive to move those same emails from your inbox. However, with the Rules feature in Outlook, it is easy to have your computer do this for you.

Here's how: