random PC tips

How to make your linux drive image smaller with zerofree and virtualbox-manage First you need to write zeroes on top of old unallocated data (the files you have deleted) on the virtual drive. This is done with zerofree. zerofree will only overwrite unallocated data so the Virtualbox drive image file will not get any bigger than it already is. Then we use vboxmanage to compact the virtual disk image. Note that this will not work if you are using an encrypted hard disk. This is because the zeroes written by zerofree will be encrypted. In that case, the virtual disk image will grow to it's full size. 1. Install zerofree First, install zerofree on your virtual machine: sudo apt install zerofree 2. Log in to recovery mode Log in to your machine in recovery mode. At startup, press shift to see GRUB menu. Select Advanced options and recovery mode for the newest kernel. Then select Root from the menu. Press enter when it asks you to "Press enter for maintenance". 3. Remount the d...

 I had some problems logging into my brand new Xubuntu 24.04 LTS install running on Virtualbox. On the first login, I was booted back to the login screen. Opening some apps would also throw me out of the GUI session to the login screen. Eventually, I got into a loop where I get continually thrown into a login screen. This bug is mentioned on the Xubuntu homepage as a known issue: Xorg crashes and the user is logged out after logging in or switching users on some virtual machines  Seems that this bug also affects Ubuntu 24.04 . To get a terminal from the login screen, I pressed Ctrl-Alt-F1 and logged in. To get back to the GUI login, you can press Ctrl-Alt-F7. To fix the problem, I had to remove libva-wayland2: sudo apt remove libva-wayland2  After this, login is possible again in GUI mode (Ctrl-Alt-F7). However, this also uninstalled some apps I wanted. Looks like I have to skip Xubuntu 24.04 or Ubuntu 24.04 for now until this is fixed.

I was trying Fortnite on a laptop but got the following error: The installed version of the Intel graphics driver has known issues. Please install the latest driver version. Would you like to visit the following URL to download the driver? https://downloadcenter.intel.com/product/80939/Graphics Intel(R) UHD Graphics Installed: 30.0.101.1122 Minimum required: 30.0.101.1404 First, I tried to update the driver through Device Manager with Windows Update. To try this, right-click your graphics adapter in Device Manager and select Update. But there was no newer update available. I then tried to update my drivers with the software Intel Support Assistant. But after updating the drivers, I still got the error message! Then I checked my laptop model and googled what graphics adapter it has. I went through that original link again, selected the graphics card type by hand and downloaded the newest driver, and now finally the error message is gone. So there you have i...

Many people seem to have a problem on their PC where a process called CxUiUSvc is eating all the RAM memory. This is caused by a faulty audio driver that seems to be totally useless. The problem seems to appear on HP and Lenovo laptops among others. A driver update might help you, but that is unlikely, since Conexant has stopped operations and will no longer provide updates. The fix to the problem is to stop the CxUiUSvc service and disable it in Windows Services. Stopping the service has seemingly no effect your audio will continue working normally.  Some sites and people recommend setting the service to start manually. This however is reported to cause the service to start again automatically after a few days. Setting the service to disabled should stop it from starting again by itself. Here is a good tutorial on how to disable services. Use the instructions in the tutorial to change the startup type of the CxUiUSvc service to disabled. Some sources: HP forums discussing this iss...

Glances screenshot from the Glances documentation I wanted to have an easy way to monitor how my server is doing. Glances is a software that gives you a good overview of your system. So I decided to install it. I have a headless Ubuntu Linux server machine for random programming and hobby projects. It runs a web server and a couple of other services. With "headless" I mean the server doesn't have a monitor or a desktop environment. I also have Home Assistant installed on a Raspberry Pi 4. I wanted to bring the monitoring data there for easy review. Glances allows one to do that. It provides a web interface for directly checking the status of the machine and an API for Home Assistant to gather status data. Glances installation the Ubuntu way is problematic I first tried to install Glances using the built-in package manager apt. This proved to be a bad idea for two reasons. First off, the Glances version that you will get with apt is outdated. Especially if you have an olde...

Finding stuff on the Android ScummVM app is not the most intuitive process, but it pays out! Finding the game folder on Android ScummVM is not very straightforward, so I decided to write this quick guide. I already wrote a guide on how to install and play Curse of Monkey Island on Android , but didn't elaborate on how to find the game folder on the app. Firstly, ScummVM is an awesome open-source collection of game engines capable of running many old point & click classics . In addition to the first three Monkey Island games, you can play Blade Runner, Broken Sword, Day of the Tentacle, Elvira, Full Throttle, Gabriel Knight, Grim Fandango, Indiana Jones, King's Quest, Kyrandia, Lands of Lore, Leisure Suit Larry, Longest Journey, Loom, Myst, Police Quest, Quest for Glory, Sam & Max, Simon the Sorcerer, Space Quest, The Dig, Ultima, Waxworks... the list goes on and on! So, you have transferred the game folder of your game on your phone using USB file transfer or by copyin...

If you use Nextcloud with Thunderbird, you might have noticed that Thunderbird version 102 is currently incompatible with the add-ons Provider for CalDAV & CardDAV and TbSync . But if you are only syncing your Nextcloud calendars with Thunderbird, you are in luck: you no longer need these two add-ons and can just remove them. Thunderbird now directly supports CalDAV calendars. Your calendars should work like usual. As I only synchronize the calendars I am unsure about contact list (CardDAV) synchronization. For that you might need to wait for add-on updates. At the time of writing, the official Nextcloud manual wasn't updated to reflect this change, and still listed the two add-ons as required .

There are some great adventure games on Android already. I can warmly recommend Thimbleweed Park or The Silent Age for example. But what if you wanted to play an old classic that cannot be found on Google Play? ScummVM is an app that can emulate these games, if you have the data files. And Curse of Monkey Island is one of these classics. Installation Purchase Curse of Monkey Island from gog.com or Steam (costs about 5€) Download and install it with the GOG Galaxy launcher ... Or Steam Locate the Curse of Monkey Island install directory on your PC Copy the directory to your Android phone, either with a USB cable or on the SD card with an adapter Install the ScummVM app on your phone Start ScummVM and press "Add game" Find the game folder on your phone, select it and click OK.  If you have trouble finding the folder, I made a separate guide for that. Now you can start enjoying Curse of Monkey Island! These instructions should also work on an iPhone. Controls The game is or...

  Here's some seeds I've found for Spelunky 2, and a couple others that I found from Steam. The problem when finding seeds online is that some of them have changed and are no longer working. At the moment these work, and they should continue to do so for a while. If you don't know how to enable seeds in Spelunky 2, you should continue playing! You will get there eventually. Seeds I've found so far: ABADABAD : 1-2 jetpack & telepack, 1-1 is nice & easy CACAFEED : 1-2 quite easy kapala, super fast 1-1 ABBACACA : 1-2 mystery box + altar, altar needs bomb, also power pack in shop CACCAB00 : 1-2 mystery box + altar 715517EE : 1-3 easy(?) kapala A15ADADA : 1-3 shop has 3x bomb box And here's a couple working seeds I found from Steam discussions. 222d7b75 (Tall Jade Vortex): Jetpack, mattock, and bomb box in 1-2 shop, perfect for practicing no-teleporter speedruns. There are even more bombs and paste on 1-3, if you can manage to steal them from the shop. ABCDEF00 (...

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, ...

Recently I had to export some image for CMYK printing. The print house was requesting a certain FOGRA color profile. I don't have any Adobe licenses and am doing all the image work on GIMP, so I had to do a bit of research. Googling around, I found two options to export images. A plugin called "Separate" and another plugin called Cyan . It looked like Separate is not maintained anymore , so Cyan was my choice. Here's how to do it: Download Cyan, Run Cyan once and select some profiles as "default" profiles. I'm a bit unsure why you need to do this, but this is how it works for some reason. Restart GIMP and you should see the Cyan drop down in the file menu. From there, you can select to export any file you've opened with GIMP. Close Cyan and browse to this location with Windows File Explorer: C:\Users\<YOUR USERNAME>\.config\Cyan\icc Copy any .icc color profile files you want to use to that folder. Now you can select those new profiles the next...

 I recently came across a great piece of open source software: Bloatbox . It allows you to remove unwanted bloatware that came with the Windows 10 installation. For some weird reason these cannot be uninstalled through the windows apps catalog. But now there is a cure for that. Download bloatbox from it's github page and run the .exe file. Then select the apps you want to remove and click Uninstall.   Here are some recommendations to remove: Microsoft.BingWeather Microsoft.GetHelp Microsoft.GetStarted Microsoft.MicrosoftSolitaireCollection Microsoft.People Microsoft.YourPhone

Suddenly, I started getting this error on a Lenovo ThinkPad, with Windows 10 64-bit: PowerMgr.exe 0x0000007E The specified module could not be found. Open Device Manager by pressing Windows button and typing "device manager" and hitting enter. Locate System Devices, and Lenovo Power Manager from there. Right-click and Select Uninstall Device. Select to Delete device driver and click OK. Then click on Action, Scan for hardware changes. The Lenovo Power Manager device will reappear. Reboot your PC. The problem should be fixed now!

I have a problem with Windows Update. An update fails every time, causing the computer to be locked out of new updates.  The problem is with update KB4565351. I'm using 64-bit Windows 10 version 1909, running on a ThinkPad X201 laptop. The update fails with error code 0x800706be. First try: Running Troubleshooter for Windows Update First I tried the troubleshooter for Windows Update. Like I expected, it did not find any problems. Oh, well. Second try: Resetting Windows update Next up, I tried this solution to reset Windows update: https://appuals.com/fix-windows-10-update-error-0x800706be/ It did not help. I still got the same error.  I also found another, slightly different solution for resetting the Windows Update. Third try: downloading the update manually from Microsoft Update Catalog Then, I tried downloading the KB4565351 manually from the Microsoft Update Catalog. I got the version for x64 Windows 10 1909. After downloading, I ran the package by double clicking on it. ...