If you read my post on asking tiny questions, you're already familiar with how structured output turns LLMs into pretty reliable data processors. We saw how requesting boolean responses or specific JSON formats made local LLMs actually useful for automation tasks. In this article, we're taking that same structured …

This is the first installment in a series of posts that show actually useful use-cases for AI in automation. Most of the content will revolve around "structured output," which is basically JSON-formatted AI output. You'll learn more about structured output in-depth later on, but in this post, I wanted to give …

I've been super busy with a couple projects (including dbatools 2.0, which will be GA soon) and hadn't kept up with much, but I got a notification on my phone for an article on infoworld.com that talked about a new GitHub Copilot feature in VS code called Copilot chat. While reading the article, I got the feeling that …

When I first joined Mastodon, I was excited to learn that fedifinder and debirdify can help find my Twitter friends on Mastodon. Both are web-based tools that search your follows and/or followers on Twitter for possible Mastodon accounts, then export the results to a CSV file. First thing I'd recommend doing? Find your …

After moving from Twitter to Mastodon, I wrote a blog post about how aliases can help us keep a consistent social media presence even if we change servers. This means that even though dbatools is currently using the fosstodon.org server as [email protected], I'll be linking [email protected] on all of our …

One of my GitHub Actions, mssqlsuite makes it ultra easy to install SQL Server on Linux, Windows and macOS runners. When working on the macOS portion, I was surprised that docker was not built-in. Turns out, GitHub had to remove docker from the macOS images because of licensing issues. Workarounds One of the most …

Code signing your scripts, modules and applications can help increase enterprise adoption, as large organizations often prohibit running unsigned tools on Windows. Signed code allows machines to verify that what they're running hasn't been altered or compromised by a third party, which ultimately increases their …

If you're curious about the $Env:PSModulePath for GitHub Runners, here's what I came up with after running this workflow. Knowing the $Env:PSModulePath of each runner can be useful for making specific types of GitHub Actions. I used it within my own GitHub Action, psmodulecache which makes caching PowerShell modules …

Edit: Nevermind! Just follow Kendra Little's blog post if you're looking to move from WordPress to another platform. Doing it the way this tutorial suggests makes it impossibly hard to add new posts. After getting hacked one too many times, I've decided to move all of my blogs and URL-shortening sites from a Virtual …

Recently, I moved many of my blogs/shortlink domains to GitHub Pages. With that, the security of my sites increased dramatically, but I lost some functionality including search and 301 (Moved Permanently) Redirects using .htaccess, which I use extensively for shortlinks. Because GitHub Pages don't support .htaccess or …