Treg's blog

July 27th, 2023

Automate MSFT Teams Presence and Status Messages

Posted by Treg in Howto's

Recently, the organization I work for moved from Slack to Teams as their primary communication platform. Ever since, I try to adapt my working style, but some (mainly chat) features are lacking. 😬

One of the key features I use, are custom status messages. This to keep my colleagues informed about my availability.

Setting a custom presence, a custom location and custom status message a few times a day is very cumbersome and time consuming. That’s where I started researching possibilities.

Very quickly, I found a few forum and blog posts around setting up Microsoft Power Automate flows to achieve these goals. A big ‘PRO’ is that you can run these flows directly as your Office 365 user since you are already authenticated towards the O365 ecosystem.
Additionally, with the ‘Power Automate’ application on you phone, you can run such flows as ‘Instant Flows’, which make this very convenient.

Pre-requirement: being enrolled in Office 365 with the ability to use Power Automate.

To start, open Power Automate and add a new flow by clicking on the “New Flow” button and selecting the “Instant cloud flow” option.

Change Status / Presence

Add a new step to a Power Automate flow.
Choose “Send an HTTP request to SharePoint”.

Configure the HTTP request as follows:

  • Site Address: https://presence.teams.microsoft.com
  • Method: PUT
  • Uri: /v1/me/forceavailability
  • Headers: 'content-type' → 'application/json'
  • Body:
    {
    "availability": "Away"
    }

The availability can be set to one of the following statusses:

  • Available
  • Busy
  • DoNotDisturb
  • BeRightBack
  • Away
  • Offline

Change Status Message

Add a new step to a Power Automate flow.
Choose “Send an HTTP request to SharePoint”.

Configure the HTTP request as follows:

  • Site Address: https://presence.teams.microsoft.com
  • Method: PUT
  • Uri: /v1/me/publishnote
  • Headers: 'content-type' → 'application/json'
  • Body:
    {
    "message": "I am working from home."
    }
  • Body with expiration timing for the status message:
    {
    "message": "I am working from home."

    "expiration": "2023-08-01T00:00:00.000Z"
    }

Attention, the expiration date is in ISO8601 format.

Change Location

Add a new step to a Power Automate flow.
Choose “Send an HTTP request to SharePoint”.

Configure the HTTP request as follows:

  • Site Address: https://presence.teams.microsoft.com
  • Method: PUT
  • Uri: /v1/me/workLocation
  • Headers: 'content-type' → 'application/json'
  • Body:
    {
    "location": "1"
    }

A location can contain the following configuration:

  • “0”: Not set
  • “1”: Office
  • “2”: Remote
August 12th, 2015

How to get rid of orphaned Windows Installer files

Posted by Treg in Howto's

Note to self and the interwebs: found a great tool today to free some diskspace in the C:\Windows\Installer folder. It’s called “PatchCleaner”, well well. It saved me more than 13 Gigs… 🙂

You can find the PatchCleaner software here: http://www.homedev.com.au/Free/PatchCleaner

Be advised, this tool does “non recommended” stuff. Move orphaned files with the tool to another harddrive for safetey reasons. (don’t delete them)

April 27th, 2011

Shutter, linux snipping tool

Posted by Treg in HOWTO Ubuntu, Linux

Finally I took the time to find a descent snipping tool for linux… and I found Shutter. A very nice, quick and clean tool to take screenshots and parts of screenshots. The program offers some extra features, yours to find out.

Off course, this is open source software which on integrates nicely in the Gnome notification area. The software is available in the Ubuntu repositories. 🙂

October 20th, 2010

Tweetdeck on Linux, security problem (+fix)

Posted by Treg in HOWTO Ubuntu, Linux, Tech

While testing KDE4.5, it seemed I couldn’t use Tweetdeck anymore. The problem has something to do with storing passwords securely. Since Adobe AIR is a 32-bit application, it needs the 32-bit version of the KDE wallet client libraries in order to get the AIR ELS working properly. (Similarly on GNOME, the 32bit libraries for GNOME keyring are used.)

You can check if 32bit kdewallet client libraries are installed by testing the dynamic link dependencies of e.g. Adobe AIR’s libaddkey.so:

Code:
ldd "/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/Resources/libaddkey.so" | grep kwallet

If you get something like “libkwalletclient.so.1 => not found” you will need to install the 32bit library. In Ubuntu 9.10 this library is in the kdelibs4c2a package, but this can be detected automatically by the getlibs package (see http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=474790):

Code:
wget http://frozenfox.freehostia.com/cappy/getlibs-all.deb
sudo dpkg -i getlibs-all.deb
sudo getlibs libkwalletclient.so.1
sudo ldconfig

Re-run the ldd command above to check that the client library can now be resolved.

After this, erase Adobe AIR ELS and enter your account data anew:

Code:
rm -rf ~/.appdata/Adobe/AIR/ELS
TweetDeck

After this, AdobeAIR shows up in KDE wallet manager with an ELSKey stored password.

I found this solution on the Ubuntuforum.org. (provided by mkalen in this topic)

June 30th, 2009

Qtek/HTC en Proximus GPRS/MMS

Posted by Treg in Howto's

Deze post is deels een herinnering voor mezelf en deels voor de mensen die hun Qtek/HTC PDA of smartphone niet (deftig) ingesteld krijgen op het Proximus netwerk. Met onderstaande instellingen is het mogelijk om de MMS en GPRS functionaliteiten te gebruiken van het netwerk.

Natuurlijk moet uw abonnement deze functionaliteiten ondersteunen. Op Mijn Proximus kan je indien gewenst deze zaken controleren of aanpassen. De helpdesk is bereikbaar via +32 (0)475 15 12 12.

Wanneer je enkel Internet connectiviteit wenst, dien je enkel stap 1 te volgen. Alle andere instellingen zijn nodig om MMS-en te kunnen ontvangen en versturen. (more…)

September 3rd, 2007

DD progress

Posted by Treg in Howto's, Linux

Sometimes, copying big files/volumes with DD takes much time. With this simple script, you ‘ll see the progress of the copying process (in MB). (source)

dd if=/boot.img.gz of=/dev/sda -pg bs=1M 2>&1 | perl -e 'print $i++." MBn" while(read(STDIN,$c,3));'
August 15th, 2007

Move a Debian Etch (vmware) virtual machine

Posted by Treg in Howto's

Today, I had to move a Linux Debian Etch virtual machine to another vmware host. No problem, this is a rather simple operation. BUT my eth0 interface just disappeared when I powered the virtual machine on the other host.

I managed to solve this problem by following these rules:

  1. Edit the file /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules and delete all the occurrences of the lines like the one given: SUBSYSTEM==”net”, DRIVERS==”?*”, ATTRS{address}==”00:16:3e:aa:f9:f8″, NAME=”eth0
  2. Save the file and quit the editor.
  3. Reboot the virtual machine
May 11th, 2007

Linux kernel SATA bug solved.

Posted by Treg in HOWTO Ubuntu, Linux, Tech

Finally there’s a bugfix for the Linux kernel SATA bug I mentioned in this post. This is how I fixed it on my Ubuntu 7.04 machine:

– Make a file called stopsata in the folder /etc/init.d
The file should contain the following two rules:
#!/bin/sh
echo 1 > /sys/class/scsi_disk/0\:0\:0\:0/stop_on_shutdown

– Make a file called S89stopsata in the folder /etc/rc0.d
The file is a symlink to the previously made script. You can link it with:
ln -s /etc/init.d/stopsata S89stopsata

Attention, Ubuntu 7.04 is using kernel 2.6.20.x. This fix is already included in the kernel but not standard activated yet.

Info/patch about the bug on kernel.org: http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7838
Info about the bug on Ubuntu’s launchpad: Bug #63937

April 20th, 2007

OpenVPN pkcs12 key conversion

Posted by Treg in HOWTO Ubuntu, Howto's, Linux, Tech

Since the latest network-manager-openvpn doens’t support pkcs12 certs, I needed to convert the pkcs12 key into other keys. This is how I managed to do it.

Extract CA cert, client cert and private key to a single PEM file
> openssl pkcs12 -in client.p12 -out client.pem

Extract client cert to client.cer (no private key or CA cert)
> openssl pkcs12 -in client.p12 -out client.crt -clcerts -nokeys

Extract client private key to client.key (no certs)
> openssl pkcs12 -in client.p12 -out client.key -nocerts

April 5th, 2007

3ware/AMCC 8006-2 and Ubuntu Dapper Drake LTS 6.06

Posted by Treg in HOWTO Ubuntu, Linux, Tech

Lately I installed an Ubuntu Dapper LTS 6.06 server with a 3ware 8006-2 sata raid controller. I wanted to use the CLI and the 3DMD raidcontroller software. So I downloaded the software on the website, installed it, but it just refused to work, complaining about wrong drivers. I suppose the drivers into kernel 2.6.15.x are good enough, in fact they are _to_ good/new. So I started to find a solution. I found one by downloading the newest CLI version 9.4.1.

The 3DMD tool wouldn’t work either, so I tried to install the 3DM2 tool. It failed because the installer didn’t generate a .pem file. So I searched some repositories with 3DM2 binaries and found a debian based package.

wget http://ftp.debian-unofficial.org/debian/pool/restricted/3/3ware-3dm2-binary-i386/3ware-3dm2-binary_9.3.0.4-1duo1_i386.deb

I just had do install it with dpkg and it works perfectly now.

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