Category: Useful

Windows 10 – Search Not Working

Hey everyone,

I’ve just upgraded to windows 10, however the start menu search has been randomly breaking. It just seems to load indefinitely. Thankfully there’s an easy fix:

- Start task manager (ctrl + shift + esc)
- Click more details
- Under the processes heading look for Search (green icon under background processes)
- Click on Search and hit end task

The Search process should now restart and start working. If not you can restart it manually using file > run.

Windows 10 search not working
Windows 10 search not working

wget or curl on Windows

Hey everyone,

Just a quick post on a Window’s equivalent to wget/curl.

To start, you’ll need to open PowerShell (run > powershell.exe). To retrieve the page, you’ll just need to enter the following one liner:

(new-object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile('http://www.whatibroke.com','C:my_output_file.txt')

The page contents will be stored in the output file provided as the second parameter to DownloadFile. To view it, just open the file in a text editor.

If you’d rather something with a GUI, winwget has been recommended on SuperUser.

Australian Tax File Number Generator (TFN)

Updated Tool Available

There’s now an easier to access version of this tool available at the following link: Australian Tax File Number (TFN) Generator

Along with a few other widgets that have been added more recently:

Original Post

Sample Australian Tax File Numbers/Test Australian Tax File Numbers:

865414088 459599230 125486619
656077298 796801997 754601340
243494429 953615761 551953801
946489031 996506823 615315318
412042562 907974668 565051603

I came across an old VB Script used to generate random TFNs for testing. I’ve just done up a quick JavaScript bookmarklet to replace it. Just drag the button on the page below to your bookmarks bar and you’ll be able to generate random TFNs.

Get the generator: TFN Generator

A bookmarklet to generate random TFNs
A bookmarklet to generate random TFNs

For info on how it all works, checkout the Wikipedia page: Australian Tax File Number

UPDATE:
If you’re using IE, right click on the link and press add to favourites. Once you’ve added it, click the link in your favourites sidebar. The generator will appear in the top right hand corner of the page.

Let me know if you have any trouble. If you’d like to a custom or corporate copy please contact me.