One line (or very brief) helpers

[robintech]

Preview version of Exchange online message trace can do instant results for small blocks up to 90 days now, saves waiting hours or sometimes days for a trace report to finish.

 

Extended Query Range: You can now query up to 90 days of historical data for near real-time queries. However, please note that you can only query 10 days’ worth of data at a time. 

 

[6Foot2]

[ChromeOS] Chrome extension Privacy Badger broke Google Translate – confirmed by disabling all extensions and re-enabling them one by one, and requesting translation between each reactivation.

[mavhc]

Remove those annoying MS Office lock files that start tilde dollar:

get-childItem -Recurse -force -file | Where-Object {$_.Name -like '~$*' } | Remove-Item -force

[Koldov]

These are temp Office files that appear when a file is opened?

 

I'm guessing they get left if a document isn't saved properly, or the teacher just closes the laptop and goes home with the file still open.

 

I have an old .bat file for this (F:\ is our file server's shared drive)...

 

REM Show Temp Office Files

dir /ah /s F:\~*.*

REM Delete Temp Office Files

del /ah /s F:\~*.*

 

I cleared them over the summer, so since September, currently I have:

 

Total Files Listed:
             337 File(s)        211,501 bytes

 

I normally do them every holiday as I was never really sure what would happen if I deleted them whilst someone was actively working on the file or still had it open though...

 

 

 

Edited September 30, 2025 by Koldov

[mavhc]

Convert public key output from ssh-keygen on windows to cisco format, split by space, take the middle word, split into 80 char lines:

 

((Get-Content $file) -split " ")[1] -split "(?<=\G.{80})" | Set-Content "cisco.txt"

 

[jthompson]

Software release notification system: https://newreleases.io/

Create a list of GitHub repos to watch and get notified of any new releases for them. Free to use. Includes options to post notifications to Teams and offers webhooks and an API.
Yes, you could do similar just with a GitHub account or some custom code to query the GitHub API, but this presents things nicely.

 

[jthompson]

Further to this, here are some repos (GitHub) for some of the software that lots of use will be deploying in schools.

• audacity/audacity
• dotnet/runtime
• FFmpeg/FFmpeg
• HandBrake/HandBrake
• ip7z/7zip
• microsoft/PowerToys
• musescore/MuseScore
• notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus
• videolan/vlc

[jthompson]

Turn any Bluesky profile into an RSS feed. Just append /rss to a profile URL.

 

E.g. https://bsky.app/profile/edugeek.net/rss

 

I have seen it mentioned that this can be done for hashtags URLs as well, but it's not working for me.

 

 

[pete]

Disable the airplane mode hardware button on a HP laptop via Powershell.

 

get-pnpdevice -Friendlyname "HID-compliant wireless radio controls" | disable-pnpdevice -Confirm:$false

 

(you still need to disable startup of the radio management service if it's a laptop issued to kids, this is for staff who keep catching F11 when going for "-")

[6Foot2]

ITVX: Clear the cache: On the Home screen press the following on the TV remote: 0 0 0 0 7 7 7. Close the app and power off the TV/Freely Puck/Other and router at the mains for 10 seconds.

 

*Found today because the screen when using ITVX was turning black after about 10 seconds (but sound was still running)