When I read books, or websites, and find worthy facts, I aim to try and keep them. If I read a book, my bookmark is often a few pieces of paper stapled together with info and page numbers from the book. Well, I’m scrapping that technique, which went hand-in-hand with folding down page corners. I’m also ditching the small pieces of paper that litter my desk with random bits of information: “PowerShell objects come from classes,” and “LastLogonDate is the converted version of LastLogonTimeStamp.” Now, it’s all slated to go in a single file called InfoLines.txt in Dropbox, here: C:\Users\tommymaynard\Dropbox\PowerShell\Profile.

If you’re wondering why I use a Dropbox folder it’s because I want this file and its worthy facts to be available regardless of whether I’m on my work, or home computer. You can read more in a post I wrote that uses Dropbox to sync my profile script between work and home, here: http://tommymaynard.com/sync-profile-script-from-work-to-home-2017. It may help make what I’m doing here make more sense.

For now, because I just started this today, I only have a few lines of worthy information. Here’s the contents of my InfoLines.txt file so far. If you can’t tell, I’m finishing up Amazon Web Services in Action. I only have 70 more pages to go!

The auto-scaling group is responsible for connecting a newly launched EC2 instance with the load balancer (ELB). (AWS in Action, p.315)
DevOps is an approach driven by software development to bring development and operations closer together. (AWS in Action, p.93)
Auto-scaling is a part of the EC2 service and helps you to ensure that a specified number of virtual servers are running. (AWS in Action, p.294)

Each time I open the ConsoleHost, the ISE, or Visual Studio Code, I want a random line from the file to be shared with me. The below code will return a single, random line with asterisks both above and below it. This is in order to help separate it from the (totally unnecessary, unwelcome, and shouldn’t even be there) message that tells me how long my “personal and system profiles” took to load, and my prompt. They need to put that message in a variable and not on my screen without permission. Don’t tell us what you think we need to know, guys.

'**************'
Get-Content -Path "$env:USERPROFILE\Dropbox\PowerShell\Profile\InfoLines.txt" | Get-Random
'**************'

That’s it. Now, whenever I open one of these PowerShell hosts, I’ll get a quick reminder about something I found important, and want to keep fresh in my mind.

Update: I decided I wanted the asterisks above and below my technical fact to go from one end of the PowerShell host to other. Here’s how I did that.

'*' * ($Host.UI.RawUI.BufferSize.Width - 1)
Get-Content -Path "$env:USERPROFILE\Dropbox\PowerShell\Profile\InfoLines.txt" | Get-Random
'*' * ($Host.UI.RawUI.BufferSize.Width - 1)