With all of the Windows 11 shenanigans of late, I’ve found myself needing to perform bitlocker recovery more often than I would like.
For those of you needing to take something from your clipboard and have it typed out instead of pasted–like for a recovery key into a Windows VM–here is an Automator script which will save you some time. I found this in a GitHub Gist1 so here it is for postarity:
[Read More]I own a couple of the CloudFree Smart Bulbs1 that I use with HomeAssistant and the awesome Adaptive Lighting2 custom component. This trifecta makes it so the lights in my home automatically adjust to emulate the sun throughout the day. If you have HomeAssistant and haven’t set this up yet, stop reading this and go set it up!
My only complaint about these lights is that the warmest they say they go is 2000k, which is not quite warm enough for my tastes. Luckily, since these bulbs come running Tasmota, there is a workaround we can put into place ourselves! Since the bulb has RGB LEDs in it, we can tell the bulb to fall back to the red LEDs when the bulb is set to its warmest levels.
[Read More]Because I have a complete and utter disregard for my own free time, I’ve found myself moving Windows partitions around several times in the past month. There are two really fun things about this:
my windows pc won't boot please fix are either out of date or trying to sell you shareware
Luckily, EFI systems are pretty straight forward in how you get from power button to OS. Basically, when you start your PC it will look for an EFI partition containing boot files. The EFI partition is typically a standard fat32 partition with a special boot flag on it. The boot files can get a little complex, but they’re basically pointers to the actual OS to boot. Knowing this (or if you’re skimming the article because you hate reading), here are the prerequisites:These instructions only apply to GPT disks and a UEFI system. If you do this while running MBR/BIOS… I have no idea what will happen. We’re going to be messing with disks here, so be careful and don’t blame me if something gets messed up.
[Read More]For my work, I’ve recently switch to using a Dell Latitude 5530 laptop with an Intel 12th gen processor. All-in-all it is a great machine and I’ve been enjoying using it. Along with the switch to this hardware came a switch to using Windows full-time from my macOS/Linux background. Windows has come a long way, and I have actually been enjoying using it! However, I recently caved and installed Linux on the machine in a second drive so I could continue making things hard on myself living in both worlds.
I’ve recently switched back to KDE after an extended stint on GNOME. I love the polish and workflow of GNOME, but the Plasma desktop is so packed with power-user features that it can be hard to stay away for long.
Of course, what I mean by power-user features is their excellent emoji support. Just like on macOS, Plasma has a button combo, super+., which will bring up a searchable emoji picker. Added in 2019, One quick keystroke and you’re greeted with this:
A recent episode of Linux Unplugged was talking about using certificates for SSH auth, and got me thinking about enhancing my usage of SSH. I stumbled upon this page with some good recommendations from the infosec folks at Mozilla:
I’ve recently been deploying a new enterprise setup for my company. Part of this process involves configuring device registration with an Azure Hybrid Active Directory. We also decided to use Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) with Multi Factor Authentication (MFA).
While setting up one of the machines I ran into the above screen while trying to setup Windows Hello for Business, AKA a pin for the user I was logging in as. The proves to be a problem as most businesses will restrict what resources you’re allowed to access when a pin isn’t configured.
[Read More]When diving into high-performance virtualization, memory is often an area of focus. In this article, I will attempt to explain simply why memory is a concern, and the various ways that are available to you to fix it. This way, you may pick which solution fits your needs.
Memory management is a key responsibility of your operating system (OS). Your OS takes the memory in your system and divides it up into pages. As programs request memory, your OS assigns pages to said programs.
[Read More]When browsing through other peoples’ setups, you’ll find a huge range of flags people set. Here’s a list of what I find important, along with what they do. The table on contents will be organized by levels to represent where each config option should go. Note that there are many more flags to explore, should you be so inclined1.
Specifying huge pages
Over the past few months I’ve gotten into experimenting with PCI Passthrough using Linux virtualization. The basic premise is that, instead of dual-booting Linux with Windows for gaming, we can run Windows in a VM and passthrough necessary hardware (storage, graphics card) to achieve near-native performance.
I’ve learned a lot from this experimentation. There are lots of helpful people in this community, but there are also a lot of differing configurations and no one place to look all of the various settings up. With this in mind, I aim to pool all of the information I’ve learned, to help people with their virtualization journeys.
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