Exporting the Managed Favorites from Edge

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 0 Comment

It’s time for another short “vibe story”.
Although, “vibe coding” part was not that short… oh, well. 😅

So, there is a feature in Microsoft Edge called Managed Favorites – basically, it’s a policy which adds some predefined (let’s say, work-related) favorites into your Edge browser. Which is pretty cool, if you’re using Microsoft Edge. If not, you would maybe also want to have the same favorites added to your other browser(s). With all other favorites, Export/Import would do the trick. But not with these – if you tried exporting them, you could have seen that they are not getting exported with all other favorites. 🤷‍♂️

What can be done then?

You could go to your admin and nicely ask him to provide you these favorites so that you can create/import them by yourself.

Or, you could go to your registry and read the list (it’s actually JSON… but saved as a single string) from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Edge\ManagedFavorites and create these favorites/bookmarks in your other browser(s):

Or, and this is the option I was vibe coding with my AI companion, you can get the Export-ManagedFavorites.ps1 script and run it to export them (as HTML) for you! 🙂
With managed favorites exported by the script, the toughest part is done, and you can easily import them into your favorite (pun intended) browser(s):

Maybe there are other options (probably there are), but I wanted to have this little PowerShell script for when I need it.

For more info and the script itself, go and check out my GitHub.

Cheers!

P.S. If you think I forgot about the “not that short vibe coding part” – my AI companion didn’t seem to understand my desire to have the final HTML formatted in a certain way… so, it took some time (and a few trips down the rabbit hole) to persuade it have it done the right way. 😅😀

Git vibes?

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 0 Comment

Another day, another project nobody really needs… but here it is! 😁

As I was reorganizing some stuff, mostly on multiple Git repositories (both, internal and GitHub), I noticed that sometimes I forget to save my work. So, to remember (and potentially stop this from happening), came up with a small and simple PowerShell script… helping me to remember. Of course, it was vibe-coded with the ChatGPT’s help.

The idea behind it – I have a local folder with multiple projects/repositories on which I’m working. As I mostly switch from one thing to another (or a computer to computer, or …), I sometimes do something and forget to save it on the remote Git instance. And as things with computers tend to happen… 🙂

Smart people of the Internet say (borrowed from https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/111489234007874526):

So, to potentially stop forgetting (and losing my work), a simple PowerShell script (Check-GitRepos.ps1) goes into the local “projects” folder, gets the latest updates, asks and commits the local changes (if there are some). For now, it doesn’t create additional branches, commits to them, etc. – it may be a feature of the next version.

Current version is just fine for my personal “use case” – smart, simple and quick.

Examples of running it on a local folder:

So, not much else to add – it does what it’s supposed to do. And, as always, it’s available on my GitHub.

Cheers!

P.S. Yeah, I also thought about the question that presents itself – and who will remind me to run the script?! Oh, well… 🤷‍♂️😅

P.P.S. There is also git-fire, which may help with the emergencies.

Organize pictures and videos… the “vibe” way

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 0 Comment

The idea for this one came to mind one summer evening, when I was searching for something on my disks, and realized – it’s a mess.

So, started figuring out this mess by first organizing images and videos backed up from my phone(s) into folders. Phone backups are a nice thing… and usually it’s all in a single folder.

OK, there are options… but it is what it is – now I have a folder called like “Mobile-Backup-XXX”, with all files in it… no subfolders. 🤷‍♂️

Of course, when I opened this folder with thousands of files, and started moving them manually to respective subfolders, it soon became clear that I need help (OK, maybe that was obvious from the start 😁).

A whom do you call for help these days? Ghostbusters? 🤔

Well, no – the answer is always “AI”. More precisely, I called (free) ChatGPT.

Long story short, it helped me to write a nice PowerShell script which will take my folder with thousands of files and slightly organize it by moving those files into (sub)folders named by the date they were taken or created.

After some time, we got the script working, some logging was added, and it was ready for testing – tested it on a few folders, and then realized that sometimes it has issues with reading the “right” metadata, so we reengineered that part.

Some time later, after some other tiny things were polished, script was ready and doing it’s work just as I expected it! Nice!

Now, instead of a folder with thousands of images and videos, I have a folder with hundreds of subfolders… 😅

And if you put stuff into folders, you don’t have to look at it, and it doesn’t bother you anymore, right?! 😁

But OK – it’s a first step in organizing stuff! 😊

Could it be improved?! Of course! But… 🤷‍♂️

The script (Organize-PicsAndVids.ps1) is, as always, available on my GitHub.

Cheers!

P.S. This was also somewhat inspired by an episode from “Scott and Mark Learn To…” series of podcasts by Scott Hanselman and Mark Russinovich – make sure you subscribe and watch them regularly! They rock! 😊