Matt Zaske Online Blog

Configuring/Using AWTRIX 3 on the Ulanzi TC001 Through Home Assistant

• July 14, 2025
• 10 minutes
• automation, home assistant, inspiration, tech

At MMSMOA 2025, in my Home Assistant Happy Hour sessions with Tom Degreef, we used a Ulanzi TC001 pixel clock display to show messages to attendees for a couple demos. It was a neat way to visually display the output we were generating in addition to what could be viewed in the HA interface.

Home Assistant Notifications to Teams with Graph API

• June 30, 2025
• 10 minutes
• automation, home assistant, inspiration, php, tech

I love Home Assistant, and I love APIs/Webhooks/automations, so today we combine the two!

MMSMOA 2025 Recap

• May 26, 2025
• 5 minutes
• inspiration, tech

Another edition of MMS (MOA 2025) is now in the books, and by the time this post publishes it'll have been the better part of a month since it ended! How time flies! It was, as always, an outstanding event bringing the community together for the better part of a week, and I really thank those folks behind the scenes who pull it all together so swimmingly. That is no small feat, but as an attendee and a speaker, I really appreciate these often thankless efforts.

A Basic Graph API Powershell Module

• April 21, 2025
• 7 minutes
• inspiration, powershell, security, tech

During a session planning conversation for MMS Flamingo last fall I had the idea to create a basic Powershell module as an illustration/starting point to using direct HTTP requests with Invoke-RestMethod against Graph API.

Get Started with Graph API for Entra and Intune

• April 07, 2025
• 6 minutes
• inspiration, powershell, security, tech

A few weeks back I presented at BrainStorm K20 Wisconsin Dells where my key session was related to getting started with the Microsoft Graph API. The session went very well, and I have received a significant amount of positive feedback including some "best of the conference" feedback notes.

Building a CM Lab in 2025: Configuring The CM Siteserver

• March 10, 2025
• 9 minutes
• inspiration, powershell, security, tech

In the first post of this short series, I wrote about using the Deployment Research Hydration Kit to build out the basic infrastructure behind a CM lab.

Building a CM Lab in 2025: Using the Hydration Kit

• March 03, 2025
• 9 minutes
• automation, inspiration, mistakes, powershell, security, tech

I've been a proponent of a dev/test CM (or just client device) lab environment for a long time. Though folks in increasing number seem to feel like maintaining a Configuration Manager lab is irrelevant, there are still several benefits to maintaining such a space, especially if you're in the journey to cloud-forward management or need to stay in a CM ecosystem for valid business reasons.

Removing Staples: Moving Away From Let's Encrypt OSCP Stapling

• February 03, 2025
• 5 minutes
• certbot, inspiration, security, tech, website

Last summer, Let's Encrypt announced their intent to end their OCSP service, and this was formalized in December with key dates related to the change. Near the end of January, I also received a direct email from Let's Encrypt detailing certificates of mine that had been configured with the "Must Staple" property.

Basic "Diff" or Delta Identification Between AD Objects Using Powershell

• January 13, 2025
• 5 minutes
• inspiration, powershell, tech

A couple times a year I do some spot checking and a little manual cleanup in AD. This is triggerd by inventory/asset management analysis. I say "spot checking" because by and large the existing business processes and automations take care of the vast majority of changes, but for a couple of reasons there are always a few stragglers.

Exporting Group Policies in Bulk with Powershell

• December 16, 2024
• 3 minutes
• inspiration, powershell, tech

A project cropped up recently that required editing a number of disparate Group Policies in our environment due to a network share path change.

I was originally given a list of GPOs that were (somehow) identified as in scope for change; however, I knew immediately the list was incomplete and omitted some valid matches. So I was left with a choice:

Using Powershell to Send a Teams Notification from a Task Sequence Step

• November 18, 2024
• 8 minutes
• automation, inspiration, powershell, tech

The last two posts were inspired by conversations at MMS Flamingo and focus on using Slack as the communication/receiver for notices relayed from a Task Sequence step and

UPDATE: Direct Slack Notification From a Task Sequence Step

• November 04, 2024
• 4 minutes
• automation, inspiration, powershell, tech

Last week I wrote about a basic process I have in place to fire off a Slack notification when a Task Sequence completes.

Triggering a Slack Notification on Completion of a Task Sequence

• October 28, 2024
• 8 minutes
• automation, inspiration, php, powershell, tech

A number of years ago I started having my primary OSD Task Sequences "check in" as one of their last steps. Specifically check in with key information so I can follow up as necessary ("trust but verify") with downstream actions to ensure our asset management systems are properly updated.

I chose a Slack webhook to accomplish this as I could set up a quiet channel for notifications and queue them for later review (once a day or a few times per week).

Creating a Generic OAuth Token Request to Microsoft Graph API

• September 16, 2024
• 4 minutes
• automation, inspiration, tech

After spending much of the month of August on a European vacation, I'm back and preparing for my sessions at MMS Flamingo Edition coming up in October.

Exporting Full MySQL Database Tables on Ubuntu

• August 19, 2024
• 5 minutes
• inspiration, mistakes, security, tech

...or, How I Suffered Through an 'If it Can Go Wrong, it Will Go Wrong' Scenario for a One-Off Export of Database Tables

This is one of those posts I'm writing up because in the moment I was so incredibly frustrated about how unnecessarily complex this action was, and I still have the various browser tabs that ultimately provided me the necessary bits open. I write this mostly for Future Me should I need to do something like this again.

Basic Dialog to Manually Name OSD Task Sequence Device

• July 29, 2024
• 3 minutes
• inspiration, tech

Many years ago I wrote about the way I automatically generate the OSDComputerName value for most devices in my fleet. Much of that process remains as it did back then, but I've never written about how I handle the one-offs (such as my testing VMs or other nonstandard hardware).

Manually Pointing Windows Activation At Alternate KMS Host

• July 08, 2024
• 4 minutes
• mistakes, tech

If you work with a lot of disparate dev and test devices across different domains, tenants, etc., you might run into the sort of Windows activation issue I encounter. In particular, when I'm doing dev/test work using physical hardware in my lab space (for things like OSD or OSDCloud), these machines wind up managed by my dev/test tenants/environments, and thus not pointing at our production KMS server for Windows activation.

Setting Up SSH Key Authentication: 2024 Edition

• June 10, 2024
• 3 minutes
• automation, inspiration, security, tech

A recent project I worked on required setting up more SSH key authentication, and seeing as how I'd not written about it for two years since the last iteration, it seems fitting to do another quick primer on setting that up for SSH...the 2024 edition.

Getting Started with WSL - A Quick Installation Guide

• April 29, 2024
• 4 minutes
• tech

I've been using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) almost as long as it's been generally available, and I use it for all sorts of things.

Automatically Process and Send Google Form Responses on Submission

• April 08, 2024
• 8 minutes
• automation, inspiration, tech

I haven't written anything up about Google stuff in a while, and since this topic came up a few times in as many weeks (including from conversations at BrainStorm K20) I figured it's time to share the solution I've used several times.

Creating a Differential Sensor In Home Assistant

• March 25, 2024
• 3 minutes
• automation, home assistant, tech

If you've fiddled enough in Home Assistant over time, you might have encountered the situation in which it is useful to trigger off of, or simply display, a calculated value. There are a few different ways this can be accomplished but this post focuses on creating a specific sensor to do both: be used as a trigger value for automation, and also displayed neatly in a dashboard.

Belated Farewell to the Twitter/X API

• February 12, 2024
• 2 minutes
• bots, tech

This isn't much of a "real" post, and admittedly I needed a filler for this week, but it's been on my list to write about here for a while: Last summer I shut down my three Twitter bots when the Twitter API moved to a ridiculous new access rate structure.

Export CM Collection Member Details to CSV

• January 29, 2024
• 3 minutes
• powershell, tech

A script snippet I use all the time (and which gets a lot of search traffic) is something I wrote in 2020 about exporting AD computers to CSV with Powershell.

Lighting the Dark Days of Winter with Home Assistant

• January 15, 2024
• 7 minutes
• automation, home assistant, inspiration, tech

This fall, right after the time change, I found myself often working intensely enough to suddenly notice "it was dark outside" in the late afternoon. Good for productivity, I suppose; not so much otherwise? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Reflections on Advent of Code 2023

• January 01, 2024
• 7 minutes
• inspiration, php, tech

I finally gave Advent of Code a shot for 2023! In years past I'd think about/stumble across/remember it a week or two in and automatically 'nope' out of starting. This year, in large part due to the WinAdmins Discord, I was both reminded of it in advance and also had a small community of other folks taking part (and a private leaderboard to watch).