Trying to get some WiFi data out of WMI using Powershell. I can only get so far, then it stops working. I can get the MSNDis_80211_BSSIList object, but when I get the embedded Ndis80211BSSIList property and try to look at it Powershell reports a format error, "Not found ". This is frustrating.

Had similar issues using Outlook automation from JScript. Some COM objects you can work with, get a list of attributes and off you go. Others are unprintable. You can tell that you have one in a variable, but you can't print it, it will throw an exception.

In Windows PowerShell In Action by Bruce Payette you find a cool script on page 315 (Listing 10.1): Get-HexDump. I wonder why he used PadLeft to make the hex numbers two characters wide, when the string format 0:x2 would do the same thing. Let's call it the pressures of the deadline.

I refactored the script, taking the guts out of the inner block. That winds up like this:

$hex = $record | hexbytes
$char = $record | readable
"$hex $char"

filter readable {
  if ([char]::IsLetterOrDigit($_)) 
  {[char] $_ } 
  else {"."}
}
filter hexbytes {" {0:x2}" -f $_}

Took awhile to figure the whole script out. The key was realizing that -encoding byte changes Get-Content from reading lines to reading bytes (-ReadCount bytes at a time). This is a good script to study when you are learning PowerShell.

#Get Talking...
$tts = New-Object -comObject "SAPI.SpVoice"
function speak($s) {$tts.speak($s)}
speak "Hello, I am Power Shell"
$tts.rate=5
speak "Too much Coffee"
$tts.rate=-5
speak "time to sleep"

$tts.rate=0 while ($true) { if (([datetime]::now).minute -eq 0) { speak "ding dong"; sleep 60} }