Konnichiwa!

This is a weird post: Began writing on 2025-03-07, then kept silent for many months; finally an update on 2025-08-11 (did I forgot anything in the meantime?), and again: nothing for many weeks – and now (end of October) again some updates.

There are reasons for this (mostly the same life circumstances that have haunted me for the past three years), but I won’t go into details here.
Anyways, time to finally sign off this draft and push it out of the door!

And then, for the future, I need to rethink the whole idea behind this kind of posts…

Powershell module saoe

• Initialize-saoeConfigFromJSON: Added this function to combine multiple datasets that are spread over many JSON files in (multiple) global Powershell variables and combined JSON files.
• New-saoeModule and Install-saoeModule: Revised these function. Generates now also a manifest file, pipeline support, splitting the responsibilities, using JSON instead of XML configuration file, better support for internal/private functions, performance improvements, etc.
• Show-saoeDirectoryTree: Added a (more flexible) Powershell version of the classic tree command.
• Join-saoeJSONFile: Added this function as a successor to Initialize-saoeConfigFromJSON.
• Trace-saoeRebootReason: Added this function to filter the ‘System’ event log for (possible/common) reasons of (recent) reboots.
• Show-saoeConsoleColors: Extended this function: It now also displays the 256 color table of the terminal.
• Write-saoeHost: Added it as a custom version of Write-Host, with more font and color styling capabilities (through ANSI escape code sequences).

Project Hotkey

“Hotkey”, one of my projects moved its homebase (= Git remote repository) on 2025-10-25 from Bitbucket.org to GitLab.com.
(Sadly, nothing else changed 😞 , yet 🤨 )

The reason: BitBucket.org recently stopped hosting “random” downloads for projects¹, such as my Zip-File with a pre-built executable in it.

So I was looking for alternative hosts for my Git repository; by chance, I rediscovered that I already had an account on GitLab.com, which lay dormant since its creation on 2019-06-24!

At first glance, it looked like GitLab.com would provide such a hosting/download feature; but now (after setting everything up there) I had to learn that that is only usable if one uses GitLab’s CI/CD pipeline to build a release artifact there (and then write job to package and add it to a “Release”).

Well, maybe in the future. But for the moment, and for this tiny project, I don’t want invest the time in learning the CI/CD pipeline stuff. Also because that may bind me too much to the GitLab infrastructure(?).

As a friendly reminder (to myself):

• Don’t trust Big Tech companies
• There is no free lunch
• Nothing lasts forever

(Sidenote: On the one hand, it’s still fascinating that so much is available for free, at least up to a point; things that cost a lot of money in my youth (or weren’t available): Compilers, IDEs, Operating Systems, remote code hosting, …)

Anyways, luckily, I still have my own download subdomain on this page (which I also totally forgot about), so the ReadMe now points to that URL.
But I will keep this project on GitLab.com, simply to test the water a bit.