On my new Windows 10 desktop I wanted an on-screen display (OSD) of system performance overlay while gaming - similar those benchmarking videos one finds on YouTube. While I don’t overclock my CPU or GPU, I still do want to know the utilization and temperatures, as these give me a hint as to whether the system is thermal throttled or bottlenecked.

I found that Oracle VM VirtualBox 6.1 was running very slowly on my brand new Windows 10 PC.

Initially I thought it was to do with VirtualBox, e.g. insufficient cores or memory, the display controller (VBoxSVGA), insufficient video memory, etc. And then I thought it might be an AMD thing, so had a look at BIOS, e.g. nested AMD-V, etc.

We will remember 2020 for all the wrong reasons, but on a lighter note, 2020 has been quite the year… for silicon!

• The incredible performance of Apple’s M1 and A14 (@ 5m).
• AMD crushing Intel with its Ryzen 5000 series CPUs (@ 7nm).
• The neck-and-neck race between the AMD Radeon (@ 7nm) and Nvidia RTX.
• The launch of next-gen consoles from Microsoft and Sony.

I just got myself a new desktop PC! I am not much of a Windows user, but am looking forward to Cyberpunk 2077! I have never built a PC before, so I did the research and learnt a lot. Here is what I bought and why.

Here is a quick iOS Shortcut to join Cisco WebEx personal rooms by email name. In my organization, once logged in to Cisco WebEx, we can join a colleague’s personal meeting room just by his or her email name. Here is a shortcut to either:

• Launch WebEx for the contact from the Contacts App share sheet,
• Or just run the shortcut to select email to launch WebEx.

I use macOS spaces (virtual desktops) to arrange the various apps I frequently use. I have one space setup with two Firefox windows, in fullscreen Split View mode. But by default, Firefox windows are not really “full screen” for me, in that the tabs, toolbar and bookmarks bar will still be displayed. Here is my workaround to force the browser to full screen.

I’m always eager to learn about the open source tools or frameworks developers use. I found this list a good “read” :P

The Apache and PHP bundled with macOS Catalina 10.15 does not include the PHP ZIP extension. Grav (specifically, the Problems Plugin) detects this issue, and Grav will not run! Here is a workaround.

Here is how to create a Docker container on macOS to “compile” Sass stylesheets to CSS. In my case, I wanted to (re)compile my Bulma-based theme with the latest version 0.9.0 with my variable overrides.

I recently installed Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) (dated 23 April 2020), with the intention of creating a VM using VirtualBox 6.0.22 (released 15 May 2020). I had issues with VirtualBox guest additions, and this is how I solved it.

Wondering how to download a video from YouTube, with audio and subtitles intact? Here are a couple of methods I’m documenting in case I ever need to use them.

On my MacBook Pro with retina display, when I take a screenshot, the image is saved with a DPI of 144. But, using ImageOptim to compress the image with Strip JPEG/PNG Metadata enabled will remove (or reset) the DPI setting to 72 DPI - resulting in a double sized image when displayed in Preview and Quick Look. Here is how I correct this.

From macOS Catalina 10.5 onwards, zsh is the default shell, instead of bash. I have a lot to learn about this shell, and so far, this is how I configured zsh... There is an overload of snippets on-line, but I’ve not seen a post doing what I do, so hopefully this helps someone!

Grrr, to no one’s surprise, my MacBook Pro with butterfly keyboard is experiencing keyboard issues. In my case, a keypress on “j” is often triggered twice, resulting in “jj”. And with the lockdowns, I don’t want to risk a repair! So, here is a quick workaround using Karabiner-Elements v12.9.0.

Recently I’ve been building a few web sites without JavaScript where possible, relying instead on modern browser support for CSS.

Here are some things I’ve figured out, including toggling the NavBar burger dropdown, smooth scrolling, showing and hiding modal dialogs with transitions!

I recently needed to setup a Kubernetes cluster without an external DNS and without Internet access. In the old days, static IPs could be mapped to FQDNs by creating entries in the hosts file, but that won’t work with Kubernetes. With Internet access, the typical solution would be to use a wildcard DNS like xip.io or nip.io. Instead, the workaround is by hardcoding the mapping in the CoreDNS configuration.

While testing out Grav, it’s quite easy to setup a local instance on a macOS computer, since macOS already comes with a suitable web server (Apache 2.4.x and PHP 7.x). I never realized I didn’t actually describe how I set it up, but just wanted to point out one important change.

Ah, just as I post my method of creating a shortcut with an icon of my choice on the iPhone home screen - which I demonstrated with Firefox - along comes a browser that allows a choice of icons out-of-the-box!

Here’s how I “changed” an app’s home screen icon on iPhone. I’m so OCD that I want my home screen dock icons (the tray at the bottom) to be all of the same colour! Actually, changing an icon is not possible, but creating a new shortcut with an icon of my choice is!

I just spent hours trying to figure out and fix a Windows 10 machine that was taking 100% disk, 100% RAM and about 50% CPU with absolutely nothing running. Of course, I initially blamed the user... then, a misbehaving (hidden, background) app... then, malware / virus... the, a runaway Windows Defender... then, a hard disk / hardware failure... but ultimately discovering the culprit is - drum roll - Microsoft Windows itself! As usual!