Fixes tagged Automation
11 fixes · back to all fixes
A log write killed the job it was logging, and the exit code still said 0
$ErrorActionPreference = 'Stop' is the setting every PowerShell guide recommends. It also promotes a failed Add-Content into a terminating error, so a file lock on the log file aborts the run from a line that does not matter, in the middle of work that does.
3 min read →
My alert was correct every morning for four weeks, and that is why I stopped reading it
A daily report told me to run three updates. It told me that in fourteen reports across twenty eight days, word for word, and it was accurate every single time. One of the three was genuinely worth doing and I never saw it, because the other two were a permanent false alarm produced by conditions the report had no vocabulary for.
5 min read →
msedge --headless --print-to-pdf exits 0 and writes no file
The command returns immediately, the exit code is 0, there is no error on stdout or stderr, and the PDF does not exist. A browser window was already open, and your invocation handed its arguments to that process and quit.
4 min read →
MCP error -32000: Connection closed means your server crashed before it said hello
The client reports a transport error and nothing else. The server's real traceback went to a stderr nobody is showing you. Pipe a raw initialize handshake into the exact command from your config and the crash prints in your terminal.
5 min read →
schtasks says the task is disabled, Get-ScheduledTask says Ready, seconds apart
AVG Gaming Mode mass-disables every Windows scheduled task and re-enables them minutes later. The trigger is not a game: browsers sit in the Gaming Mode app list, so any headless-browser automation does it to you.
6 min read →
The CLI printed "updated" on all 7 products and 2 of them did not change
A bulk description update reported success on every product. Re-reading the field showed the new text had not persisted on two of them. No error, no retry hint, no pattern. The exit code told me the request was accepted, not that the state changed.
4 min read →
Docker Desktop -Shutdown exits 0, prints "backend already running", and shuts nothing down
The documented quit command returns success, leaves Docker running, and on one invocation spawned an extra 237 MB process. The flag is not parsed by recent builds, so it falls through to the default show-the-dashboard path.
4 min read →
My dashboard said zero for two months, and the number was never wrong
A daily digest reported zero pins published, every day, for sixty one reports in a row. The weekly review escalated it to zero activity, stalled, and that reached my decision log. Pins were publishing the whole time. The counter was reading three spreadsheets that had finished two months earlier, so zero was the only answer it could ever have given.
6 min read →
Scheduled task Last Result 2147020576 on a task that runs perfectly by hand
0x80070420 does not mean the task ran and failed. It means the trigger was missed because the machine was asleep, and Last Result is sticky, so a weekly task reports the same failure every day until its next run.
4 min read →
DETACHED_PROCESS is why your background job pops console windows
A Python git hook flashed a black console window on every commit. The flag meant to hide it was causing it, but not in the way everyone says: DETACHED_PROCESS opens no window itself. It leaves the child with no console, so every console program that child runs gets a fresh visible one.
5 min read →
A faceless YouTube pipeline on a free local stack
Turn a script JSON into a captioned long-form video plus three derivative Shorts with no subscriptions, using edge-tts, headless Edge, and ffmpeg.
3 min read →