random PC tips

Here's an account of changing the motherboard and processor to your PC while keeping your Windows 10 installation intact. My old mobo finally died on me, and I had to get a replacement. The processor I had on it was a second-gen Intel Core i7. I opted for an AM4 motherboard with a AMD Ryzen 5 series processor. While waiting for the parts to arrive, I wondered if I needed to install Windows 10 again from scratch.  Turns out, I didn't.  As my hard drives were fine, I just installed the new parts, put my old hard drives in, and turned the machine on. Windows started to a blue screen, with repair options available. "It seems you are having trouble starting Windows" or something like that. I thought I would need to remove the old Intel processor driver, and do stuff like that, until it works. So I went and booted it to safe mode ( here's a guide on how to do that ). And voila, I got to login to my PC just like it was before.  So I started thinking, if the safe mode wor...

Yle Areena is a really great free streaming site run by the Finnish goverment funded media house Yleisradio . It has a Netflix-like browser interface. I am using a Home Theater PC (HTPC) called Vero 4K to watch content. It is running the OSMC Linux distro with Kodi as the interface. However, this guide should work on anything running OSMC, for example a Raspberry Pi . Lately, Yle changed their API, making the yle-areena Kodi plugin obsolete. After that I have been using yle-dl by Antti Ajanki to download and watch movies. It's a bit of a hassle to use. Compared to just using the Areena plugin, you have to first download the content on the command line and then find it on Kodi and play it. But it works well enough. Keep in mind, this is all legal according to Finnish law. Yle Areena is a legal streaming site and you can make recordings for your own use. So, here's how to get yle-dl running on OSMC.  Connect to the OSMC device with an SSH terminal program like PuTTY . Updat...

I'm a big fan of Yle Areena , Kodi (formerly XBMC) and the OSMC operating system . I have been enjoying the Yle Areena plugin for Kodi , but recently Yle made some changes to their API service, making the Yle Areena plugin unusable and obsolete . Currently, there are no working plugins for Yle Areena that I know of. As a workaround, I have been using the command-line tool yle-dl to download the movies and episodes to .mkv files, and then playing them with Kodi. A tip for using yle-dl: For some reason, yle-dl tries to create impossible file names by default. So my recommendation is to always specify an output file name when you download something, or the script will probably fail with an error. Use a command such as: yle-dl https://areena.yle.fi/1-123456 -o filename.mkv After a while, the file will start downloading. Be patient, there is often little feedback at first, and it might look like it hanged, but it has always worked in the end. Then you should make the file available to...

Finally. No more ringing in my ears! I had a really bad case of coil whine with my computer. In the end I fixed it just by tweaking the BIOS! The coil whine was at it's worst when the PC was idling or under a light load.  Coil whine is a high-pitched sound that is produced by coils resonating at a high frequency. It is really hard to sense where exactly it's coming from. This is because humans cannot sense direction for high-pitched sounds. At first I thought it was my graphics adapter. So I bought a new used one. But the ringing was still there after the upgrade. Next up, I suspected my PSU was the culprit. So I changed the power supply to a newer 80 Plus Platinum model. I hate changing the PSU. And it didn't help. So it looked like my motherboard was the cause. It's an older ASUS motherboard, P8H67-V.  After googling around a bit, I found people talking about ASUS motherboards and coil whine when power-saving features are on in the BIOS . The so-called "C-state...

  There are some instructions all around the internet on how to play Starbound co-op multiplayer with your friends, but most of them are needlessly convoluted. Many of them ask you to run a Starbound server. But you don't actually need to run anything else than the game itself. This guide applies to two people, but others can join as well. The players should all be connected to the same home network via wifi or an ethernet cable. I got my version of Starbound from the gog.com store. But this guide should work with all versions of the game on Windows 10. Find the local IP address of the player who hosts the game Let's say the 1st player is the one who is hosting the game. They need to check their local IPv4 IP address. That is where the game is running.  You can find out your local IP by pressing the windows key, typing "cmd" in the search, and then by typing "ipconfig". From there, find you IPv4 address. The printout will look something like this: Wireless ...

  At the moment, you can get Ken Follett's The Pillars Of The Earth (and two other games - Deponia: The Complete Journey and The First Tree) for free on epicgames.com. I highly recommend doing as I did and getting them with a couple of clicks! But when launching the game, I was greeted with an error. There seems to be some bug with the Epic games version. I think the problem is caused by the space in my Epic games username. The error message reads: Init failed, could not load game. There is no game file or the game file is corrupted. For more info view messages.log. When clicking OK, the messages.log file opens, with text like this: 19:04:09.352:m_gamePath: C:\Games\PillarsoftheEarth\NAME" 19:04:09.352:Loading game from file 'NAME"' failed! 19:04:09.352:Init failed, could not load game The message would look like that if your username is "USER NAME". But don't worry. You can still launch the game. Go to the folder where the game is installed (in my c...

I needed to input audio to a browser on Windows 10. We were developing a HTML5 app and wanted to use audio to control it. Specifically, we wanted to route the audio we were listening to (from Spotify) to the browser (Firefox) for use as an input. On Linux, it's much easier to route the audio you're hearing to whatever program. But on Windows 10, this is not always possible without some effort. Some programs on Windows 10 allow you to choose the audio output as an input. An example of this is the Audacity sound editor / recorder. But browsers typically only allow you to choose the microphone as an audio input. Step 1: Routing audio output as an input to a program For this purpose, I found a piece of software called VB-CABLE . I didn't need ASIO in this case, as I was just playing music from Spotify. For ASIO output you should try the HiFi-Cable software instead. ASIO is necessary for those who want to route sound from a professional audio DAW software such as Ableton Live, ...