I suddenly experienced a strange issue today - the row of number keys on my 1stPlayer DK 5.0 Lite mechanical keyboard, i.e. the keys from 2 to 9, would output the wrong number! Specifically, hitting all numeric keys in order would output 1678923450 instead of 1234567890. This happened while gaming and I have no idea what caused it.

Just a bunch of un-related findings that may help when creating Windows and macOS VMs using VirtualBox.

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.

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.

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.

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!

For me, Microsoft PowerShell is hard! I can’t wrap my mind around data pipelines (|). Instead, I keep reverting to if/then, loops and other traditional programming paradigms, similar to what I’d do in UNIX shell!

Starting with Windows 10 May 2019 update, there is a new Windows Sandbox feature, which, despite its name, is based on Windows Containers.

Today I tried to copy files and folders off a USB hard disk (NTFS formatted) on my Windows 7 desktop. I encountered multiple files with permission problems. The manual method to change permissions is very tedious, so I created a script (DOS batch file) to do the same.

Well, it turns out that after creating a PowerShell script to list deleted files (part 1) and another PowerShell script to monitor for deleted, renamed or moved files (part 2), I've decided to revert to a simple, batch file instead because running a batch file is so much easier than PowerShell!

This is part 2, of my attempt to "sync" photos I deleted on my desktop to my SD card (you can read part 1 first). In this post, I try to use PowerShell with .NET framework to (try) monitor for file system changes, and output to a batch file that "replicates" the ren (rename) and del (delete) to files and folders.

I have an unusual workflow when copying photos from my camera's SD card to my Windows desktop. For any photos I my desktop, I want to also delete on the SD card. In this post (part 1 of 2), I describe my PowerShell script to "repeat" what I deleted on the desktop on the SD card. In my next post, part 2, I expand the PowerShell script to (try) monitor for file system changes instead.

It's the last day of 2016... Time for a bit of nostalgia! Over the years, I posted bits and pieces on Blogger, myByways.net (Microsoft), Google Pages and others. For posterity, I've transferred selected information about a HP notebook and desktop I used to have, but I doubt any of this information is relevant any more.

I recently discovered an alternative to remote control my Windows 7/10 desktop PC, instead of using Microsoft Remote Desktop. This method requires a computer with a modern NVIDIA graphics card with GameStream and works with iOS and macOS using a client called Moonlight!

To clean install Windows 10, you need more than the product key from an upgraded instance of Windows 7/8. You'll need a file called tokens.dat created during the upgrade process.