Posts

Did You Know? Automating a Daily Factoid

(NOTE: Posting to Twitter no longer works. Check my YouTube channel for videos on posting to Bluesky and Mastadon) Final post for the year. Returning once more to Power Automate. This time we’re automating the posting of a random factoid from a spreadsheet to social media. This is similar to the other post I made that posts a random blog post from the archives. Creating Our Trigger We’ll start by creating a scheduled flow. How often you post will depend on how many items you have to select from. You want to avoid posting the same thing frequently, at least in my opinion anyway. For this one, I am posting a quick note about the various connectors available in Power Automate. Currently, there are more than 500 connectors available, so I’m going to post every other day. That’s enough content to go out over two years of regular social media posting. Longer, really, since we’re doing a random selection and there’s likely to be repetition along the way.

Wednesday, December 29, 2021 | 5 minutes Read

C# Advent 2021 - Using C# Code in Power Automate

This post is my contribution to the C# Advent 2021. Power Automate has a fantastic feature in preview that lets you add some C# code to your flows. It requires using a custom connector, so it’s limited to those with a license that allows that. There are also a number of other limitations which I’ll get into later. But it’s a start.

Monday, December 13, 2021 | 6 minutes Read

Advent of Code - Day 12

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solutions for Day 12 - Passage Pathing. Problem 1 The Puzzles for Day 12 are a pathing problem. We are finding our way through a cave system. The system has a start point, and end point and a series of caves that are either large caves (represented by capital letters) or small caves (represented by lower case letters). The cave system input is in a the format of:

Sunday, December 12, 2021 | 6 minutes Read

Advent of Code - Day 11

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solutions for Day 11 - Dumbo Octopus. Problem 1 For Puzzles for Day 11, we want to navigate through a cave of octopi by predicting when their bioluminescent energy will flash so we don’t disturb them. The octopi are arranged in a 10x10 grid, with each octopus represented by a power level from 0 to 9.

Saturday, December 11, 2021 | 6 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 10

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solutions for Day 10 - Syntax Scoring. Problem 1 For Puzzles for Day 10, we’re trying to resolve damage to the navigation subsystem of our submarine. Each navigation line contains a series of “chunks”, which are pairs of delimiter characters (), {}, [] and . They may or may not be nested and appear in formats such as:

Friday, December 10, 2021 | 4 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 9

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solutions for Day 9 - Smoke Basin. Problem 1 In the Puzzles for Day 9, we’re evaluating the low points of a 100x100 grid where each point represents a height with a value of 0 (lowest) to 9. The risk level of a point is 1 + it’s height. We need to find the sum of the risk levels of all the lowest points on the grid.

Thursday, December 9, 2021 | 5 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 8

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solutions for Day 8 - Seven Segment Search. Problem 1 In the Puzzles for Day 8, the wires on our 7-segment displays are malfunctioning and we need to figure out what it’s really saying. For part 1, we’ll figure out how many times digits 1, 4, 7 and 8 are appearing in the output. Our displays are represented by:

Wednesday, December 8, 2021 | 6 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 7

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solutions for Day 7 - Whale Attack. Problem 1 In the Puzzles for Day 7, we’re getting attacked by a whale who intends to swallow the submarine. To the rescue come a bunch of crabs in mini-subs. But they’re not in alignment to blast open a rescue tunnel. We have to get them to move into horizontal alignment using the least amount of total fuel possible. They all start in different positions, so the first puzzle focuses on the least amount of fuel required get them into a single horizontal alignment.

Tuesday, December 7, 2021 | 3 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 6

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solutions for Day 6 - Lantern Fish. Problem 1 Puzzles for Day 6 focuses on fish population growth. In this case, fish are on a 7 day cycle. After that cycle, a fish produces a new fish and restarts its own cycle. The new fish has two additional days for its first cycle. So, given this, each fish is represented by a counter: 6 or 8 counting down to 0 each day. After 0, existing fish create a new fish (starting at 8), and reset their own counter to 6. Also, the fish start with a certain number of fish at various points in their own cycles as dictated by the input file.

Monday, December 6, 2021 | 3 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 5

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solutions for Day 5 - Hydrothermal Vents. Going forward I’m combining the posts into a single post per day. Problem 1 Puzzles for Day 5 is about finding the intersections of lines plotted on a grid. In this case, we have a set of lines defined by the endpoints across a 1000 x 1000 grid. For puzzle 1, we will only look at horizontal and vertical lines and count the points where at least two lines intersect.

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Sunday, December 5, 2021 | 3 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 3

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solution for Day 3, Puzzle 1 - Binary Diagnostic Problem Puzzle 1 for Day 3 involves analyzing some binary numbers that are output and using the frequency that a particular bit is 1 vs 0. For each bit position, we get the frequency across all the input data, then use that total to build two final binary numbers.

Saturday, December 4, 2021 | 8 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 4

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solution for Day 4, Puzzle 1 - Giant Squid Bingo Problem Puzzle 1 for Day 4 is all about bingo. A giant squid has attached to the sub… for a game of bingo. In this case, we’ll process a set of 100 bingo cards and then “call” numbers one at a time until we get a bingo on one of the cards.

Saturday, December 4, 2021 | 6 minutes Read