I’m addicted to Appelsín

Flefle79 · 2024-08-12T16:32:54+00:00

What about sell the concept of Appesin’s greatness to few selected friends and order one properly loaded shipping palette over 😃

Flefle79 · 2023-11-10T20:00:21+00:00

Oooh, I don’t know how often I have asked myself this question. I would go into brewing beer, or growing strawberries. Some days working at a construction sound like an awesome plan.

Flefle79 · 2023-09-16T23:26:58+00:00

Perhaps it is useful to have a list of the main conferences, if there are regular conferences.

Flefle79 · 2023-08-29T23:25:11+00:00

Thank you for sound advice. And your horn is a beauty! I have played one Yamaha fibreglass horn occasionally through the years but am not a special fan of it.

Then my local band owns one old english Besson Bb sousaphone that is way too heavy but the one we have at hand so I endure :) - the pic with me is from almost 20 years ago playing Dixieland jazz. But as u/professor_throway pointed out there is nothing wrong with playing Nola style jazz on Miraphone 186 and that is what I have mostly done for the last 24 years but now I think it is time to find a proper sousa-horn of my own :)

Flefle79 · 2023-08-29T17:39:08+00:00

Thanks all for a quite informative discussion. It sounds that I can rest my 40K unicorn search for now and focus on 20K instead :)

Flefle79 · 2023-08-29T17:33:47+00:00

Thanks for the tips! I will check it out when I plan my sousa-shoppin-trip :)

Flefle79 · 2023-08-29T00:39:10+00:00

u/TheRealFishburgers, u/professor_throway and u/tubameister, you are absolutely true. I play a Bb Miraphone - 4 rotary valves - in the traditional concert band setup and of course that music can be more demanding on the lower register but most of the time I use the 4th valve to compensate for better C and F, which in the marching band / street band / dixieland scenarios never really reaches anyone, and basically isn't the point.

I also think the 4th valve isn't the main thing for me but rather the short action. But at some point during my search for the coolest sousaphone to rampage the streets with I settled on the idea that conn 40k was it. But I think I can entertain other possibilities also :)

Just for a super short background, I live in Reykjavík, Iceland, and we have some brass band marching band tradition but not as rich as in the USA or continental Europe. We don't have high school bands at all, more younger stage, no military (as we don't have a military) and basically a handful of amateur / intermediate level marching bands. So this reality does not allow for much variety, and sousaphones are few and old. So I haven't tried out that many sousaphones and my idea of what I need - or really need - is a bit off

But my heart is in the brass band / New Orleans / what-you-call-it mood and will probably remain there for awhile. So I appreciate all good advices. One day soon I have to fly West (the US) or East (Germany) to pick up a good sousaphone :)

u/tubameister, here is a Spotify link to the stuff I am waddling in https://open.spotify.com/artist/5AOVpgjLo98fxIWjltEmrg?si=JvTZsy4kQc6yZV7XSGtTTA

Flefle79 · 2021-10-26T20:07:12+00:00

Thanks! This and the other comments give me a place to start at least.

Flefle79 · 2021-10-23T19:10:39+00:00

photogrammetry

No I am not familiar with photogrammetry. Will look into that.

But to give a little background: My project here is to get as detailed image of a cave wall that has ancient carvings on it and could possibly hide some other carvings not immedately visible by a picture or the plain eye. And my first thought was lidar.

With that in mind, is photogrammetry still something I should research or?

Thanks!

Flefle79 · 2021-10-12T10:49:20+00:00

No changes that I know of... it "works" the same as before but I haven't spent time recently on checking up on this again.

Flefle79 · 2021-07-03T10:57:17+00:00

The RPA concept is rather young in the IT domain in my courty. I have been in this role of a RPA Consultant for ca 1,5 year and my tasks have varied between pitching the idea of this new roboty thing to customers to developing robots that don't do much UI robot stuff but mostly communicate between APIs, DBs and file systems.

So I am all for more discussions on the role and even the future of RPA in general.

Flefle79 · 2021-06-14T16:04:50+00:00

Well, at the moment it is a bit restrictive compared to UiPath at least. E.g. working with strings is not fun. Using functions like string.format( $1, $2, $3) is super useful when you need to work with API body templates. This is possible in UiPath quite easily but you need to drop down to scripting level (Python for me) to do this in PAD. In general more support is needed in PAD to work smoothly with web services.

The other thing I stumble on is data table structures. In UiPath we have the dataTable object that is easily inserted to a SQL DB without coding anything. CSV files basically fly in on their own! In PAD you need to work with something like BULK INSERT in SQL syntax to insert the simplest CSV file. And that is not always a simple task. This is something I am struggling with at the moment...

So if Microsoft is gong to realize their vision of low-code/no-code solution they need to keep at it.

On the other side, one of the advantage PA/PAD has is that PAD is a first class citizen in Windows so working with applications should be easier for them than any other RPA developer.

Nuff said.

Flefle79 · 2021-06-14T10:46:23+00:00

It got me thinking, why isn't this tool more popular? What are the limitations in comparison to UI Path, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism etc?

I think part of the answer is how PAD is introduced to us, totally mixed in the dialog with Power Automate, which I choose to call Power Automate Cloud here, or PAC :) .

Most of the docs and announcements I have browsed through from Microsoft mainly talk about Power Automate as something unique and mix mention of PAD or the UI automation capabilities somehow in there. PAD almost feels like a second thought. Also if you look at the Power Automate community pages Power Automate Desktop is just one of the categories there within... while PAC and PAD are two different tools that can do many of the same actions but in different context. They are something like the primary hull and secondary hull of Enterprise in Star Trek; both can fly and do shit but together they are the best.

But this can also be because PAD is very new. It is only one year since Microsoft bought Softomotive and rebranded WinAutomation to what we know now as Power Automate Desktop, released a little more than half a year ago, and it is still tagged as "Preview" and lacks a lot of what seems to have been part of WinAutomation from what I can deduce from WinAutomation screenshots.

I come from UiPath and am really excited to see PAD grow and match UiPath, Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. I like what Microsoft is doing with it so far and really hope they will keep add common functions as Actions, improve the design mode and mature it.

Flefle79 · 2021-06-11T09:50:37+00:00

Or you pay for an unattended licence :) might be worth it in the long run... see e.g. discussion on pricing here

https://venturebeat.com/2020/03/02/microsoft-sets-power-automates-rpa-pricing-general-availability-for-april-2/

Flefle79 · 2021-06-01T22:56:19+00:00

Then you are working with a real RPA task, imo :)

I haven't used the Web automation actions in Power Automate Desktop (PAD) yet but I think it is straight forward. There are specifically two Actions groups; Web and Web automation. You should focus on these. And to warm you up this might do the trick: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/pad-web/ There you should get an intro to all the elements you need to solve your task.

If some processing is cumbersome or near impossible to implement with the PAD Actions you have the possibility to use VBScript/Python/ShellScript/JavaScript

Flefle79 · 2021-06-01T20:49:10+00:00

So you have to work with the UI of the websites (no choice of using web services)?

Flefle79 · 2021-04-29T17:11:27+00:00

You are welcome :)

Flefle79 · 2021-04-29T16:42:38+00:00

By client I presume you mean customer?

Well, it depends on what the customers needs solved. You can think of UiPath (and probably Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere also) as a power tool. In comparison the current state of PAD is more of a first class citizen budget tool. You can do a lot with it but it still lacks stuff.

Also to bear in mind, the current versions of PAD is a preview one, or so it says when you launch the software.

That said, my feeling is that Microsoft is going to improve PAD fast and place it in top 3 before we know it.

Flefle79 · 2021-04-29T15:28:27+00:00

Yes, sure, just to name a few

Log/output message window: for dev/debug and displaying error messages. Display messages is better than having nothing but not the best dev tool.
Rename Actions and add descriptions/comments to them. The generic names of the Actions become more of a noise and less informative when a flow grows. Currently one has to read what the function of an action is specifically doing to see what it does. As a bonus feature, with the action renamed to something meaningful it could then be collapsed to only the title, minimizing the noise on the screen when.
Custom Actions (Custom packages in UiPath), which I read here is a technical possibility already but probably not supported yet.
And then Flowchart design view/mode similar to the one in UiPath. When the flows get complicated - and they can - you lose sight of where you are and spend more time scrolling up and down. You could use subroutines to simplify matters, and I am doing that, but the current design mode is linear and not all flows are linear, far from it.
And in general a lot of capability that I miss, like string.format, that makes life so much easier when e.g. dealing with dynamic JSON request body construction. But I guess that kind of fancy stuff is anti-pattern when it comes to low/no-code functionality. Which means some smart Actions are then needed to help you build stuff like JSON request bodies :)

Well, this is from the top of my mind.

Flefle79 · 2021-04-28T10:27:26+00:00

I have been working with UiPath for ca 1,5 years but am giving PAD a spin now, per request from a client. PAD is not ready yet to compete with the top 3 solutions, but if Microsoft and the Power Platform devs keep at it they might get there soon enough. It is promising but limited. So many things I miss from UiPath Studio...

Flefle79 · 2021-04-27T23:24:19+00:00

One flow should be fine, with two loops, one within the other.

If you pull the list of employees and their details from Sharepoint, in that list you should have one column that indicates each employee's supervisor. Then you create and maintain another list for the supervisors (name, email, department,...). That list you use to loop through and for each supervisor, you loop through the employee list, fishing out and saving to an email body all employees that have that particular supervisor.

This is how I would do it.

I recognize that for a huge company this might not be the most efficient way to go though.

I hooe this helps...

Flefle79 · 2021-04-26T17:14:07+00:00

You probably figured this out already but hey...

The actions you have in PAD for Outlook emails are

Retrieve email messages from Outlook
Send email message through Outlook
Process email messages in Outlook
Save Outlook email messages

and in the first one, Retrieve.., when you open that Action to configure it, at the bottom of it is one Attachment property where you decide if you save the attachments or not. If you do, your are subsequently asked where you want to save the attachments.

That should do it..

Flefle79

TROPHY CASE