Month: February 2025

Amazon Alexa devices cannot be pinged, here is an alternative

February 22, 2025

I want my Home Automation to check if my Amazon Alexa devices are present on the network or not. However, Amazon Alexa devices cannot be pinged.

NMAP comes to your help (If you do not have NMAP installed, apt install nmap should solve the issue).

The following code will give you a 1, if an Amazon Alexa device is present at the given IP address. It gives you a 0 if not. 

nmap -T4 -F 192.168.178.120 | grep "host up)" | wc -l

How to Disable Caps Lock in Windows 11

February 21, 2025

Press Windows + R, type regedit in the run box that opens, and press enter.
If you get the following box,…

… press YES.

Go to the key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout

Right-click on the available space, click New and then select Binary Value.

Name it “Scancode Map” and enter the following binary value in the value data:

00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
02 00 00 00 00 00 3A 00
00 00 00 00

Recheck that it looks like the followig screen shot:

Restart the computer to disable the Capslock key.


Visual Sudio Code, the YAML extension and Home Assistant’s “!secret” option

February 19, 2025

I use Visual Studio Code to edit the YAML files of my Home Assistant installation. Works great. However, there is one annoying thing: The YAML extension treats the “!secret” option of Home Assistant as “Syntax error” and underlines it in red.

To solve this problem, open your settings.json at 

C:\Users\<yourusername>\AppData\Roaming\Code\User\settings.json

On my installation it looks like this:

After I added the code… 

,
    "yaml.customTags": [
        "!secret scalar"
     ]

… it looked like this…

… and the problem is gone:

Right-click Context menu in Windows 11

February 9, 2025 · 1 Comment

The behaviour of the Context menu on Windows 11 has changed compared to Windows 10.

This is how it used to be on Windows 10 (in this example, after a Right click on the recycle bin):

And this is how it looks now:

Especially the Show more options in the last line is annoying.

Thankfully one can revert to the old behaviour of Windows 10. All you have to do is to add a key to the registry.

To do so, Right click on the four blue tiles and select Terminal (Admin):

Then, run the command

reg.exe add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" /f /ve

After rebooting the Computer or restarting Explorer via Task Manager, you will have the “old” behaviour back.

That’s lovely. However, you sometimes have junk in the right-click context menu that is unwanted.

For example, I use the Image Viewer “IrfanView” but I do not like the fact that it added an entry to the context menu:

Here is how to edit/remove unwanted items from the context menu:

Right click on the four blue tiles and select Terminal (Admin), then type regedit and press <Enter>:

Select “Edit/Find” and look for “IrfanView”:

Now keep pressing <F3> until this…

and this…

… showed up. I deleted them both and the annoying entries were gone (after a Restart of Explorer).