Waaaay back in 2015 I wrote this post that shows you how to get an OEM serial number or service tag from the command-line in most flavors of Windows.
That particular trick is now dead for most Windows 11 users. It relies on WMIC – Windows Management Instrumentation Command-Line – which Microsoft has removed from most versions of Windows 11.
WMIC was a built-in (digitally signed!) tool that IT administrators could use to inventory and configure corporate PCs. It’s been used as a malware pathway for ages, so it’s not surprising to see why Microsoft would remove it. Honestly, it probably shouldn’t have ever been installed on stand-alone PCs and\or only enabled when a PC joins a Windows domain.
In any case,
wmic bios get serialnumber
no longer works. Please try this PowerShell command instead:
Get-CimInstance win32_BIOS
You should see this. I’ve blacked the Service Tag, but you get the gist of it:
Currently there’s a hipster secondhand clothing store called 2nd Street at 1057 Ponce de Leon Ave., in Atlanta, close to Plaza Theatre and across Cleburne Terrace from The Majestic:
click to embiggen
From 1977 to 1993, Atlanta’s regional record chain was Turtle’s Records and Tapes. And the place that is now 2nd Street wasn’t just a Turtle’s, it was the Turtle’s where most indie bands held meet & greets. I met Nitzer Ebb at this store, for example.
I also met Lone Justice’s lead singer Maria McKee at this store, just as she was launching her solo career.
She arrived, perhaps the highest person in metro Atlanta at that moment. I remember looking at her thinking “My God, woman… you have access to weed the likes of which I cannot even imagine.”
So she clumsily (and… highly? is that a word?) said hello to the 40-ish people there. She talked about her debut album for a bit, then answered a few questions. A Turtle’s employee then put a stool out for her and her assistant handed her an acoustic guitar.
She was wearing this HUGE silver ring! It was long – almost as long as the finger it rested on.
Not the actual ring, but similar.
She played a song, then during the next one she started strumming the guitar really hard. The ring flew off her finger and hit a guy in the face, just above his left eye.
It was hilarious to me, because it happened almost exactly like the “if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball!” scene from Dodgeball. I don’t know if the ring was that heavy, or that she was strumming the guitar with that much force, or it if just hit the poor guy’s skull perfectly, because you could hear the ring THUMP against his skull over McKee.
So I started laughing. It was a perfectly scripted unscripted moment. And McKee laughed, too… she laughed her ass off at first, but regained her composure when she saw that the guy was actually bleeding. Not a lot of blood, mind you… but enough for McKee to say “Holy shit! Are you OK, man?”
Someone found the ring and gave it back to McKee, who gave it to her assistant “for safekeeping”. An employee found some paper napkins in a drawer somewhere and gave them to the guy to stop the bleeding.
And I got a silly story I’m still telling 37 years later! It’s terrible, but it really was funny watching that guy react to getting hit with the ring!
On November 10, 1951 Sir Hugh Beaver went hunting. At one point an argument broke out in the hunting party over which bird was “the fastest European game bird”. This was the 1950s, long before the Internet, and Sir Hugh, the managing director of the Guinness beer empire, realized that similar arguments must break out in pubs all the time.
Back at the office, Beaver mentioned the idea of making a “world records book” to his staff. A co-worker named Christopher Chataway recommended his college friends, the twins Norris & Ross McWhirter, who had just started a fact-finding agency in London. And so: Guinness hired them to make a massive fact book.
A couple thousand copies were printed and given away free to pub owners. The idea was the book would sit behind the bar at the pub and decide random arguments. However, many of those publicans soon called the company to ask for a replacement: customers were stealing them in huge numbers. Guinness realized they were on to something, and decided to “take it public”. Thus, the Guinness Book of World Records became a thing.
When I was a kid, it was common for the “Guinness” name on the cover to use the same “stencil font” as the beer:
NOT-SO-FUN FACT: Ross McWhirter was very anti-Irish, belonged to some sketchy right-wing political groups and may have worked with British intelligence in trying to infiltrate the IRA. For this reason, he was assassinated by the Provisional IRA in 1975.
“Jump Lists” are the list of documents that appear when you right-click a taskbar icon in Windows 1x. They’re a handy tool, but as far as I know, Microsoft still doesn’t provide a way to delete only the jump list of a specific app.
Consider: you’re hosting a Zoom call and will share your desktop with attendees. You will need to open Microsoft Word as part of your presentation, but you don’t want anyone seeing your Jump List history with “Offer Letter from [Other Company]” or “Updated Resume”, etc.
So how do you delete just Word’s jump list? Easy!
Close the app you want to delete the jump list of, then go to:
Make sure the Explorer window is sorting the long, gibberish-looking files by “Date Modified”, and in descending order (most recent at the top):
Now right-click the taskbar icon and pin (or unpin) any document from the jump list. Refresh the Explorer window to verify that the first file is the most recent. If it is, delete it… because that’s the jump list for the most recently edited icon, which you just edited. Repeat for any other apps you want to clear!
This is Bob Montag. He played for the Atlanta Crackers, a minor league baseball team, in the 1950s. He was a below-average outfielder, but was known for hitting very long home runs. In fact, he once hit a home run that traveled 520 miles!
Sort of.
Montag hit a home run during a game in 1954. The ball traveled some 450 feet, easily clearing the right-field stands. It landed in the coal car of a train that just happened to be passing Ponce De Leon Park. You can even see the train tracks in this aerial photo:
Ponce de Leon Avenue is just visible on the left. Across Ponce from the park was Sears’ gigantic building, which became City Hall East for a time before being sold off to become the current Ponce City Market.
When the conductor found the ball in amongst the coal he was mightily confused… until he realized the ball must be part of Montag’s “huge home run” the radio announcers were talking about. The train arrived in Nashville, swapped cargo & passengers, then returned to Atlanta.
The conductor stopped by the park and told the story to Montag, who autographed the ball for him. And thus, the legend of the “home run Bob Montag hit that traveled 520 miles” was born.
This is the Hertella Auto Kaffeemachine, a third-party option for German Volkswagens in the 50s or 60s, and the only known coffee maker for a passenger car:
It has some clever tricks: the mug is held in place via magnet, and the entire unit is held in place by a simple bracket, to make washing it easy. But it lacks a power switch, so you have to plug (and unplug) it manually. And it appears that it would have made terrible coffee, since it basically brews the coffee just like tea.
If I mention “Henry VIII”, you’d likely think of a fat guy eating a turkey leg. But that’s likely inaccurate.
Turkeys are indigenous to North America. After several arguments over whether turkeys made it to England during Henry’s lifetime, Tudor historians now generally agree that they probably did arrive late in Henry’s reign. So he possibly ate turkey, but there’s NOTHING in the historical record that says he did or didn’t, nor if he liked it.
Many people swear they’ve seen a portrait of Henry holding a turkey leg… but if so, that would be news to Tudor scholars. They’re most likely thinking of Hans Holbein’s portraits (and later variations thereof) in which he’s holding gloves, not a turkey leg:
OK, but where do we get the idea of Henry the Glutton? Likely from the 1933 film The Private Life of Henry VIII:
It’s a film where Charles Laughton portrayed Henry as almost comically over-the-top in every way. Loud? Fat? Womanizer? Gluttonous? Laughton turned all those traits up to 11 in the film. Famously, there’s a scene where he tears into a roasted chicken and casually tosses the bones over his shoulder as he eats. THAT’S likely where the trope come from!
By Queen Victoria’s reign, London was running out of space to bury its dead, especially since engineers were digging up so much of the city to bury water & sewer lines… and some were even talking about burying entire trains! WHAT A WORLD!
A group of investors bought a huge plot of land in Brookwood, Surrey, 23 miles outside the city, and started the London Necropolis Company. That land became the world’s largest cemetery at that time. But they needed a way to move bodies and mourners to the cemetery… so they also built the London Necropolis Railway.
In typical British fashion, it was class-based. Third-class burials saw mourners jammed into basic railcars, and their loved one tossed into a pauper’s grave. First-class burials involved fancy railcars and mausoleums. As you might guess, second-class was middle class, with nice (but not lavish) railcars and the typical service and headstone folks have today.
The London Necropolis Company was in business from 1854 until 1941, when the railway was destroyed by German air raids. The company wasn’t as popular as investors had hoped: only 200,000 burials had taken place in the 87 years it was open, far short of the 50,000/year its owners had aimed for.
FUN FACT: there are many golf courses in Surrey, and the fare to Surrey on the Necropolis Railway was far cheaper than a regular train. So golfers would often wear black and crash a funeral party, just to save a few shillings getting to the club!
So, I have the world’s worst power company. And surprise, surprise my power went off today.
Because of this, I have a UPS backup for my PC and primary monitor. The secondary monitor isn’t on the backup, so when the power went off, that monitor turned off immediately. I normally do a daily walk, so I decided I’d go do that while the power was out. With the primary monitor off, the UPS can power my micro PC for almost 4 hours, so I hoped when I got back in an hour the power would be back on and I could just turn on the secondary monitor and go.
The power was indeed back! But now I had a problem: Windows had somehow swapped my monitors, because when I clicked “Identify” the correct numbers showed up on each screen… but they were backwards on the actual monitor settings applet. No matter what I did – restarting, removing and adding the secondary monitor back via Device Manager, I just couldn’t figure out how to get the monitors to identify correctly.
I dug and dug through search engines trying to find my specific problem. It was not fun. In the end though, I found a fix and it’s pretty easy:
1) Unplug the secondary monitor from your PC and close any Settings windows.
3) Plug the secondary monitor back in, and open Display Settings. The displays should now be identified correctly.
I don’t often go in to a lot of details in my “Geek Tips” because I’m assuming you are a Windows “Power User”. If you don’t know what a “registry key” is, you should ask your personal PC guru before messing with ANY of this stuff!
Wow! Check it out! After I published last year’s roundup in February, I swore I’d get this year’s list done ON TIME! And hey, it appears I have done so!
Part of me wonders why I still bother doing these. I used to get a few comments on the site and a few Facebook likes when I posted these things… but now I get very, very little feedback on it.
Since my heart attack, I’ve had to do a daily walk, and I often take that chance to ponder things. And I guess no one really cares about the musical choices of a random, almost 55 year-old dude on the Internet. Let’s be honest: I know I wouldn’t care about the top albums of some random 53 year-old dude from, say, Roanoke, Virginia… so why should anyone else?
But there’s more: I seem to have cornered the market on my specific music style. I sometimes joke that “I like all kinds of music: Norwegian girls with synthesizers, Danish girls with synthesizers, French girls with synthesizers, Greek girls with synthesizers, Swedish girls with synthesizers… even German girls with synthesizers!” But holy crap is that SO TRUE for me this year. There’s not a lot of variety here. But it is what it is. The records below are my Top 10 Albums of 2025, from the extremely narrow spectrum of music I love. Please sit back and enjoy!
As always, the list comes from my Last.fm stats generally, although I often tinker with the specific order of the albums. After that are the honorable mentions, followed by the “Band of the Year”, “Song of the Year”, “Live Song of the Year” and the raw data from Last.fm.
My Top Albums of 2025
10) Wet Leg – moisturizer– I wish I could find the analogy I want for this album. Because it’s a really solid album. As a collection of music, it’s undeniably better than Wet Leg’s eponymous debut LP. But there’s just something… missing here. In a sense, Wet Leg was kind of like Duran Duran’s Rio album. Here in the US, Duran Durans’ self-titled debut was overlooked by almost everyone. It would later be reissued with an updated cover and “Is There Something I Should Know?” on it. So for many in the US, Rio was the first Duran Duran LP. It was so perfectly of its moment – so new and singular and noteworthy – that it dwarfs other Duran Duran albums, even ones that are arguably “better” than Rio. Wet Leg was a like a bolt of lightning across the pop music firmament – an “OMG what IS THIS?” moment – that any follow-up LP just can’t match. “Catch These Fists” was a MONSTER hit, but quickly grew old… to me, anyway. As the ladies themselves may agree: the second hit is never as good as the first.
9)Â Nation of Language – Dance Called Memory – And this album seems to have the same problem. Nation of Language’s last album, 2023’s Strange Disciple, wasn’t their first, but my goodness what an amazing LP it is! Much like Wet Leg’s new LP, this one is (arguably) the better album. The band has always been a mixture of OMD, New Order and Tears for Fears, and they’ve refined that model even more here. Much out it is flat-out beautiful: the opening track “Can’t Face Another One” reminds me SO MUCH of something you’d hear on one of my all-time favorites, OMD’s Dazzle Ships! And there’s the raw emotion Ian Devaney is known for, but I’m not sure if we’ve ever heard him bare his soul at a depth like this before. Only problem is, this album just doesn’t stick with me the way Disciple does, and “Inept Apollo” is the only thing resembling a single on the LP:
8)Â Mogli – Paradox – Selima Taibi is a German singer, songwriter and filmmaker who makes music under the name Mogli. She’s pretty. And that’s about all I objectively know of her. She makes (wait for it!) a dreamy, gauzy pop that’s just soooo nice to listen to. I came across the title track in a random Spotify playlist (like you do) and fell in love. Beautiful. Haunting. Downright sparse at times. Sounds like something an exclusive European luxury brand like Longchamp would use in a commercial? That’s ticking all my boxes. And you know what? The rest of the album is pretty good, too! I mean, not everything is a platinum single here, but “Cupped and Open” and “Swim” are solid. Very much worth a listen!
7) Magic Wands – Cascades – Man, these guys… they have all the thumping drums and cold bass of Pornography-era Cure, with a touch of Cabaret Voltaire’s Red Mecca thrown in for spice. It’s really great when it works, and I was amazed at how often I threw this on when walking or working. Only thing is, as dreamy as most of the tracks from this album are, there’s a lot of “samey” here, even for me. This is one of those records where you get to track 6 (of 10) and say something like, “weeeeeelll let’s see what else Spotify has for us!” That doesn’t mean the first 6 tracks aren’t good. These guys are fun, and if you squint your eyes hard enough, it almost REALLY IS like 1982 all over again!
5) Maria Somerville – Luster – Ireland’s Somerville paints a picture like few others can. Her music seems to float in a dreamland… so light and airy and fragile. She’s drawn comparisons to late-era Cocteau Twins, but to me Somerville (and this album specifically) seem to inhabit a sphere more like Julee Cruise. It’s just so haunting! This album (her second) is all thriller, no filler. Every song on the album is amazing, blurring its way to next amazing song to the next. She seems to perfectly fit the dreampop niche of being singular and obscure and hard to fathom at time, yet in the end is still more relatable than fringier “art pop” like Julianna Barwick and Julia Holter.
4) Saint Etienne – International – After 35 years, Saint Etienne are finally calling it a career… or have at least announced that this album, their 13th studio LP, will be their last. It leaves me with mixed emotions. A big part of the reason I stick to newer music is that music requires fresh blood. So you could say it their time to go. Still, they’ve been a part of my world since 1998, and it’ll be hard to say goodbye. But thankfully, this last LP is good. Alas, it’s not quite what I’d hoped. It’s a collection of good songs – some of them really, really good – but nothing more. Saint Etienne’s catalog seems filled with albums of purpose. They invoke a place, like Home Counties or Tales from the Turnpike House – or a time and place, like I’ve Been Trying to Tell You and The Night. Or perhaps they’re about influences, like Words and Music by Saint Etienne or Tiger Bay. The songs here, while again quite good, still somehow seem random, as if Bob and Pete put out a call for “songs to end a career on”. I like it, but I think I’ll miss Saint Etienne more.
