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The Collapse of Freedom of Speech in Real-Time

Josh Hendricks — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Collapse of Freedom of Speech in Real-Time

Say what you will about Charlie Kirk (at your own risk), but prior to his heinous murder the manenjoyed his 1st amendment rights to freedom of speech and believed in the free exchange of ideas.He encouraged and promoted public debates with prominent voices on the left. Now, the politicalright are callously using his gruesome assassination to silence MAGA critics.

Got the time?

Josh Hendricks — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Got the time?

Every few years I end up having to mess with the time. Not like, the linear flow or the speed at which we perceiveit. As cool as that would be, I'm usually just messing with mundane Windows time settings. When you're working withphysical security systems, maintaining accurate time across all servers and devices is kind of important. And it'scommon for surveillance and access control networks to be isolated from the Internet, so not only do you need a timesource, but you need to distribute the time. Fortunately, Windows has a built-in time server - you just have to knowhow to turn it on!

Restreaming RTSP with FFmpeg and MediaMTX

Josh Hendricks — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Restreaming RTSP with FFmpeg and MediaMTX

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If you've ever messed with IP cameras and RTSP video feeds, you might have run into a situation where VLC can accessthe stream without a problem, but the system meant to record that stream can't seem to do it. There's nothing morepermanent than a temporary fix, so in this post I'll show you (and my future self) how to work around the issue.

Why I never learned Bash

Josh Hendricks — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Why I never learned Bash

I’ve been using a computer since ~1996 (age 12/13). I’ve built many PCs, and installed various Windows and Linux operating systems many hundreds of times over the past 28 years. I played L.O.R.D. on my dads BBS, played DOS games like Wolfenstein 3D, Descent, and Duke Nukem. So far in my IT career I’ve worked as a system administrator, software vendor support, and as software developer. It may surprise you to hear then that I learned my first shell language just 5 years ago, in 2019.

Nerdbank.GitVersioning and the Revision number

Josh Hendricks — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Nerdbank.GitVersioning and the Revision number

I love using the NerdBank.GitVersioning CLI tool nbgv. It completely removes the need to think about an aspect of aproject that doesn't add any value to your customers. But today I realized I understood the first three parts of theversion produced by nbgv, but the fourth "revision" component was not obvious. Turns out it is a uint16 value of thefirst two bytes of the commit id!

Serving a web api with Pode

Josh Hendricks — Sun, 12 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Serving a web api with Pode

I added a subtle "Now playing" text to the footer of this site which represents the first result in the response fromthe user.getRecentTracks method on the Last.FM API. The data isupdated every few seconds with a little bit of JavaScript by polling a small Pode web service running in my home lab.

But I AM the administrator

Josh Hendricks — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

But I AM the administrator

A while back I was helping a co-worker with a project where the customer neededto automate a lot of minor Windows configuration steps on some Windows IoTserver appliances. One of the tasks was to make it possible to disable WindowsFirewall, because even an administrator was greeted with the message "For yoursecurity, some settings are managed by your system administrator" and the optionto change firewall settings was disabled.

Image Comparison

Josh Hendricks — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Image Comparison

I recently came across a couple of blog posts on image comparisonalgorithms shared by Dr. Neal Krawetz. One of them, titled "Kind Of Like That",describes the "dHash" algorithm which generates a perceptual hash based ongradients in the image. With more than 200k family photos to wrangle, I wrote upa PowerShell implementation to find similar images and it works surprisingly well!

New PSPushover PowerShell Module

Josh Hendricks — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

New PSPushover PowerShell Module

Back in 2021 I wrote a module called Poshoverfor sending push notifications with Pushover.net. Thisweek I decided to use that module as a reference during my PowerShell + DevOps Summitworkshop in a few weeks. I never liked the name, so I renamed it to PSPushoverand set it up in a new repository.

Parse Code from Markdown Files

Josh Hendricks — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Parse Code from Markdown Files

Introduction

Are you testing your documentation? If you write PowerShell scripts or modules, you are hopefully using Pester totest your code. And if you use PlatyPS to generate markdown documentation like I do, then you have a bunch of examplePowerShell code sitting in .md files. But what happens if you rename a command, a parameter, or make a breaking change?

Generate markdown tables from PowerShell

Josh Hendricks — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Generate markdown tables from PowerShell

I had a need to generate a markdown table dynamically from PowerShell, so I wrote a flexible function which uses theproperties on the incoming objects to define the column names, supports the definition of maximum column widths, andoutputs either pretty-printed markdown with padded values and aligned columns, or "compressed" markdown without theunnecessary padding included.

Debugging ConvertTo-Json

Josh Hendricks — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Debugging ConvertTo-Json

My co-worker, Jared, who regularly uses MilestonePSTools and builds tools with it brought me an interesting problem yesterday - an apparent compatibility issue between our SDK and the #!powershell ConvertTo-Json cmdlet from the built-in Microsoft.PowerShell.Utility module. If you've ever struggled with the error "ConvertTo-Json : An item with the same key has already been added.", follow along as I share our debugging process until we finally discovered the root cause. While the details in this post involve the Milestone SDK and the MilestonePSTools module, the root cause and the process of finding it is relevant to anyone using .NET assemblies or 3rd party modules with PowerShell.

Argument Transformation Attributes

Josh Hendricks — Wed, 21 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Argument Transformation Attributes

Introduction

Argument transformation attributes make it possible to offer your userssome flexibility in how they supply values for parameters. I've started to usethese in the MilestonePSTools module tomake it possible to provide a name instead of a strongly typed object like a#!powershell [RecordingServer] or a #!powershell [Role], while still making it clear in the#!powershell Get-Help documentation what the expected object type is, and withoutpolluting functions with object transformation code.

Your users deserve argument completers

Josh Hendricks — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Your users deserve argument completers

Introduction

One of the things I love about PowerShell is the focus on usability anddiscoverability. The PowerShell team, and the community, have invested so muchinto reducing friction and accelerating your workflow. Argument completers areone of the tools available to you, and you should consider adding them to yourprojects if you aren't doing so already.

Securely Reading Passwords from the Console

Josh Hendricks — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Securely Reading Passwords from the Console

If you've ever written a console application which requires the user to enter sensitive information like a password or a token, you might have wrestled with concerns of exposing the password in plain text within the console window.