Use PowerShell’s Invoke-WebRequest to report if a website is up or down

If Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) — a protocol used to communicate problems with data transmission — is disabled, PowerShell’s Invoke-WebRequest can be a helpful alternative to use to monitor of a website is up or down. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 …

How to Disable Ads on the Roku Home Screen

If you own a Roku streaming media player or Roku TV and want to disable the advertisements that occupy one-third of the Home screen, you will discover that Roku does not provide you a way to opt out. According to How-To Geek, Roku makes more money from ads than it does selling hardware ($740 million …

Fragment and Social Distance Drives

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Microsoft should have updated its Defragment and Optimize Drives tool to do the inverse by maintaining at least six-bits of separation from neighboring data. It says “You can fragment your drives to help your data maintain a safe social distance (at least a six-bits of separation). Only drives on or connected …

How to use Google Fi data SIM on a Verizon Jetpack MiFi

Google Fi is an MVNO telecommunications service that provides telephone calls, SMS, and mobile broadband using cellular networks operated by Sprint, T-Mobile, and others. Fi has easy-to-understand pricing, can be paused or canceled without penalty, allows up to 9 additional data-only SIM cards to share the same plan, and charges only for the data consumed. …

PowerShell Functions to Get Logged On User and Logoff Logged On User

Two helpful PowerShell functions to help you check who is logged on remotely and to remotely log them off. Remotely Get a Logged On User This Get-LoggedOnUser will use Get-WmiObject to tell you who is logged on to a remote computer. You may use a comma-delimited list of computer names. Function: 1 2 3 4 …