Hello, I'm   Jason

There are many package managers for Windows these days. Probably the most popular is Chocolatey. Microsoft has shown examples to get their own stuff installed using Chocolatey in the past. However, there was an interesting package manager that I started using a few months ago called AppGet.

There are several ways you can create an Azure Function. You can use Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, or even the Command Line. For purposes of this article, we’re going to use the command line. We’re also going to use C# for this article, though you can follow essentially the same steps for TypeScript or JavaScript. You can also use Java, PowerShell, or Python for your Azure function. The prerequisites, command-line parameters, and code samples will be different for other languages.

UPDATE: Due to a lightning storm, the launch is delayed until Saturday, May 30th

I’ve been using the free SSL service with Let’s Encrypt for several years now. It’s nice to be able to offer SSL on sites without the cost. We also use Let’s Encrypt to issue SSL certificates for TechBash.com. In late 2018, I blogged about using Azure functions and add a site extension to your account. Then in February of 2019, I blogged about a new Azure DevOps change that caused a failure. Recently, I have been receiving a notice from Let’s Encrypt that my software client was using ACMEv1:

While porting old posts over to Markdown, I came across a post from May 18th, 2008. The post contained a link to a futuristic Microsoft Home detailing some of what we may find in our homes in 2015. The article starts off by mentioning many of Hollywood’s perceived futuristic features:

I’ve been slowly adding small features and tweaks to my site. Eventually I’ll add this as a meta component for the SpaacedOut theme, but for now I’ve added the minutes to read a post to my website and pushed some of the other content (such as tags and the page edit link) to the bottom of the post. I want to get content higher in the fold.

To all the men and women who have served our country through crisis, including assisting during the COVID-19 pandemic, we salute you!

The past few days I’ve had a hardware theme. I’m going to stick with the theme with this latest post. COVID-19 has surely inspired me to clean out my office and straighten things up. I came across so many old DVDs, CDs, and even floppy disks. I’d check each and if the files were worth saving, I’d copy them to my cloud storage, which happens to be OneDrive, and then toss the storage medium. I came across a bunch of 3.5” floppy disks that I wasn’t sure what they contained. Since I was intrigued, I decided to see if I could find a USB floppy disk drive. Sure enough, Amazon had one that was supported on Windows 10:

One of the tasks I had while being in quarantine was to recover my aunt’s hard drive. My old docking station, which was an original USB dock, would not support SATA drives. Rather, it was SCSI only. So, I headed out to Amazon to find something that would satisfy the need. I came across a USB-C and USB 3 Cable Matters SATA docking station for both 2.5 and 3.5 inch drives.

The kids have had to stay home since mid-March due to COVID-19. Each of them had their own machine to do work. The boys were taking turns sharing an old Lenovo Yoga Pro 2 that was 6 years old. As I prepared the laptop for its initial use, I noticed that the battery wasn’t taking a charge. Looking at the Lenovo site, most of the parts could no longer be found. Sure I could get a used battery off of eBay, but I began searching Amazon. I found a compatible L12M4P21 laptop battery on Amazon: