Short takes: deleting bit.ly Bitlinks; backing up and restoring Sticky Notes; accessing cmdlets after installing Azure PowerShell

This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Another collection of short notes to add to my digital memory…

Deleting bit.ly links

Every now and again, I spot some spam links in my Twitter feed – usually prefixed [delicious]. That suggests to me that there is an issue in Delicious or in Twitterfeed (the increasingly unreliable service I use to read certain RSS feeds and tweet on my behalf) and, despite password resets (passwords are so insecure) it still happens.

A few days ago I spotted some of these spam links still in my bit.ly links (the link shortener behind my mwil.it links, who also own Twitterfeed) and I wanted to permanently remove them.

Unfortunately, according to the “how do I delete a Bitlink” bit.ly knowledge base article – you can’t.

Where does Windows store Sticky Notes?

Last Friday (the 13th) I wrote about saving my work before my PC was rebuilt

One thing I forgot about was the plethora of Sticky Notes on my desktop so, today, I was searching for advice on where to find them (in my backup) so I could restore.

It turns out that Sticky Notes are stored in user profiles, under %appdata%\Microsoft\Sticky Notes, in a file called StickyNotes.snt. Be aware though, that the folder is not created until the Sticky Notes application has been run at least once. Restoring my old notes was as easy as:

  1. Run the Sticky Notes desktop application in Windows.
  2. Close Sticky Notes.
  3. Overwrite the StickyNotes.snt file with a previous copy.
  4. Re-open Sticky Notes.

Azure PowerShell installation requires a restart (or explicit loading of modules)

This week has involved a fair amount of restoring tools/settings to a rebuilt PC (did I mention that mine died in a heap last Friday? If only the hardware and software were supplied by the same vendor – oh they are!). After installing the Azure PowerShell package from the SCCM Software Center, I found that cmdlets returned errors like:

Get-AzureRmResource : The term ‘Get-AzureRmResource’ is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.

After some RTFMing, I found this:

This can be corrected by restarting the machine or importing the cmdlets from C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\Azure\XXXX\ as following (where XXXX is the version of PowerShell installed[)]: import-module "C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\Azure\XXXX\azure.psd1" import-module "C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\Azure\XXXX\expressroute\expressroute.psd1"

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