Remote Desktop with Hotmail Account

I have been using a Microsoft Account to log into my personal workstation for the past few years because it makes working with OneDrive fairly seamless. The account I use for logging in has an @hotmail.com address. Because I have been using a Microsoft Surface as my primary machine for the past few years, I have also been taking advantage of the Windows Hello capable camera to log in with my face most of the time. I’m now in the process of migrating from a Surface 7 to a Surface 9.

There are always reasons to go back to the old machine and look at some particular setting or program. A Remote Desktop connection from my new machine to the old one is much easier than getting up and walking across the room to the other machine and allows copy and paste directly between machines. Both machines are running the Professional version of Windows so I can enable remote desktop.

I looked at who had access, it shows that my hotmail.com address already has access, as well as my local network account. When I tried to access it from the new machine, it prompted for my password, but rejected it. I repeated this process several times thinking I must be typing it incorrectly before searching for what might be happening.

I came across a solution which is very simple. I don’t understand what it’s doing, but it works. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/remote-desktop-not-working-with-microsoft-account/71f0c323-688a-4c97-8740-e80eb31ae11d

On the old machine I ran the command runas /u:MicrosoftAccount\MyAccount@hotmail.com winver it prompted me for my password, and then it displayed the standard windows version dialog box. I’m not sure why it worked, but I’m happy that I now can sit at my desk with the large monitor and keyboard and have access to both machines.

runas /u:MicrosoftAccount\MyAccount@hotmail.com winver

Updated: I also came across the same answer using cmd.exe instead of winver.exe as the target of runas, but for some reason it was more difficult for me to understand what was going on. I think it was simply due to the way the email address was obscured in the second one that made it more difficult for me to understand, even though it may have had more screen captures in the demonstration. https://nready.net/remote-desktop-on-windows-11-with-microsoft-account-mfa/

Thanks for the information:

• https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/remote-desktop-not-working-with-microsoft-account/71f0c323-688a-4c97-8740-e80eb31ae11d
• https://cmdrkeene.com/remote-desktop-with-microsoft-account-sign-in/
• https://nready.net/remote-desktop-on-windows-11-with-microsoft-account-mfa/

Windows File Recovery from Microsoft

Last week Microsoft released a new command line tool in the Microsoft Store. It requires running Windows Version 2004.

Last year when I was importing pictures from a camera memory card, the import program crashed. It only managed to import a few of the pictures, but it deleted all of the pictures from the memory card.

Because of my long history understanding how file systems work, I knew that the pictures were likely still on the card, just not in the directory system I couldn’t find a tool at the time to recover the files. I’d put a label on the card and set it aside. As soon as I heard about this program I installed it and tried it out on the memory card.

The funny thing is that it recovered several thousand images, going back several years. I ran it in signature mode, looking for jpeg files. In doing that, It’s just looking at all the data blocks on the drive, looking for jpeg files.

This time I used Adobe Lightroom CC to import the images and group them by the embedded EXIF data. Looking at the details, the photos that got deleted by mistake were likely from 10/28/2018. All of the photos attributed to 06/29/2020 are missing exifdata, and are just recorded as the date they were recovered.

This is a good reminder that you probably don’t want to throw away old digital media, even when you think you’ve gotten rid of all incriminating data.

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Retrieve Wi-Fi Password in Windows 10

Sometimes I go to a place I’ve been before and my computer remembers the WiFi password while my brain does not. The following Windows PowerShell commands will display most of the remembered passwords.

netsh wlan show profiles

netsh wlan show profiles name=’ProfileToDisplay’ key=clear

The first command displays all of the networks your computer has remembered. It can be rather long if you’ve had your computer for several years and done a reasonable amount of traveling and using WiFi in strange locations.

The second command takes the profile name that you retrieved with the first command and displays details of the selected profile. The password is displayed as the Key Content section of the Security settings.

iTunes, Microsoft Store, Microsoft Surface

Last year, Apple finally worked enough with Microsoft to get the iTunes program for windows available in the Microsoft Online Store. I’d always had problems with upgrading iTunes in windows in the past, requiring me to completely uninstall, reboot, and install the new version each time I wanted to upgrade. Often I had to not just uninstall iTunes, but search for other helper programs that Apple might have installed and uninstall them before rebooting.  I did the complete uninstall before I installed the version from the Microsoft store. Since that time, iTunes has almost magically been up to date on my desktop computer. The Microsoft store updates seem to get installed in downtime on my computer and everything just works.

I’m stuck in my ways a bit as far as music goes. I’ve get a large ripped CD collection, that I keep the originals all in a set of binders including the original paper inserts. My iPhone has 256GB of storage, more than half of which is my music.

I’ve kept my iPhone synchronized with my desktop computer because of the storage requirements of all of the music in the past, but at times have wished I was synchronizing with my Microsoft Surface Pro 4 tablet that I travel with, and use just as much as my desktop. My Surface has 256GB of storage in the internal SSD, and I’ve been using a 256GB micro sd card in the accessible storage slot for the past couple of years. That’s good for movies while traveling, but I didn’t want to allocate over half the space to iTunes.

The falling price of flash cards recently convinced me to buy a new 512GB flash card to leave in the Surface. I was able to get all of my music transferred over to the SD card and iTunes installed from the Microsoft Store with very little impact on the internal storage on my Surface. I followed the Apple support ducument and had a few issues because my library had never been consolidated from my early MP3 ripping days.

I’ve been running my Surface SSD with between 50 and 70GB free, which from what I’ve read about SSD usage is good for both lifespan and performance. The iTunes directory on my micro SD card consists of 24,169 files and 137,859,861,360 bytes according to a simple dir /s command.

All was looking good until I got around to connecting my iPhone to the new machine and telling it to backup on the new machine. The backup completed correctly, but I then found out that it had used up all the free space on my internal SSD and I was now down to less than 3GB free space.

A quick search on the web led me to this page explaining how to relocate the backups to an external drive in windows. That seemed good, until I realized that the directory described does not exist on my machine. One more change that seems to have happened to iTunes locations in the Microsoft Store move. A search on my machine led me to find the MobileSync directory in my user profile directory. I used robocopy to move the backup directory to an appropriate directory on my flash card, which took a while because it consisted of 58,623 files and 77,743,703,474 bytes. I then created a directory junction from the SSD location to the flash location.

robocopy /COPYALL /E /MOVE C:\Users\Wim\Apple\MobileSync\Backup D:\Wim\Apple\MobileSync\Backup
mklink /J C:\Users\Wim\Apple\MobileSync\Backup D:\Wim\Apple\MobileSync\Backup

After all that had completed I started iTunes and connected my phone, initiating another backup. Everything now appears to be working properly, with iTunes storing both it’s library and device backups on my secondary storage device.

The only drawback I’ve currently run into is that I use Windows Server Essentials 2016 as a home server and it’s device backup feature to backup my machine for emergency file recovery. The microsd card is recognized as removable media, and the backup software doesn’t easily let me include it in the regular backup strategy.

Odd Wildcard Matching in Windows 10

I recently ran into an odd behavior of more files matching a pattern than I expected. I’d used exiftool to modify the dates on files my GoPro produced. It creates backup files of the original images when it modifies the tags. Here’s the command I ran.

exiftool.exe -r "-AllDates+=4:7:6 17:40:00" -ext jpg f:\GoPro\20170807

Now I had about 4000 files with the .JPG extension and another 4000 files with a .JPG_original extension.

I ran my program that parses the directory structure and turns all those images into a time lapse movie, and it seemed to be including both the file extensions, making a very disjointed movie.

I loaded my source code in the debugger and it seemed to be doing a findfirst / findnext specifically looking for .JPG files, and not some other extension, but it was definitely retrieving files both with .JPG and .JPG_original extensions.

I then ran a couple of commands at the windows command prompt and was surprised to find the same results there.

dir F:\GoPro\20170807\372GOPRO\G*.JPG /p
dir F:\GoPro\20170807\372GOPRO\G???????.JPG /p

Each command returned both the JPG and JPG_original files.

dir F:\GoPro\20170807\372GOPRO\G*.JPG_original /p

returned just the JPG_original files.

dir F:\GoPro\20170807\372GOPRO\G??????.JPG /p

had one less question mark and correctly returned no files.

This is all unexpected behavior, though I’m glad to see that it was consistent with the operating system and not something specific to the C runtime. I’d love an explanation of what’s going on.

Tiananmen Square 25th Anniversary and Right To Be Forgotten

I find it extremely interesting on this the 25th anniversary of the suppression of Tianamen Square Protests that Europeans are trying to implement the Right to be forgotten.

25 years ago I had just started working at Microsoft and was using the internet to communicate inexpensively with friends still attending university. I had a screen on my desk that could run 640×480 resolution. I remember seeing the image of a solitary man stopping a line of tanks displayed on screens around the office. I was graduating college, the cold war was ending, and students were demonstrating for democracy in China. What could be better.

This morning on the radio I was hearing about how most of the young in China didn’t know the recent history of demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, and thinking of the irony that Europe is trying to make the right to be forgotten law enforceable. If the knowledge of what the Nazis did had been forgotten by 1970, where would Europe be now?