Solution

Almost two years ago I pre-ordered some bitcoin mining hardware from Butterfly Labs, what a waste. After countless delays, more than a year late, they finally shipped the hardware, and given the low probability of ever recovering the money through mining, I immediately sold the hardware on eBay, for a little profit. In the meantime USB stick miners became available, outperforming GPU mining, and easy to set up and run. I’ve had a couple of ASICMiner Block Erupter’s running under my desk for some time, in the early days I saw some fractions of coins coming in, but in recent months they are so under-powered against the current hash-rates that they do little more than blink lights. ...

I finally figured out why I kept on getting VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE BSOD’s when installing Windows 8 on my SuperMicro workstations. It turns out that the problem goes away when I use a PCIe slot associated with CPU #1, instead of a slot associated with CPU #2. Some history on my adventures with Windows 8 and SuperMicro SuperWorkstations: I got ACPI_BIOS_ERROR BSOD’s while installing Windows 8, SuperMicro provided a Beta BIOS that resolved the problem. The Windows 8 install hangs if installing to an SSD drive on an LSI 2308 SAS controller, that issue is still unresolved, but can be worked around by connecting the SSD to the Intel SATA controller. I got VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE BSOD’s while installing Windows 8 with an NVidia Quadro 5000 graphics card, same with an ATI FirePro V7900 or an NVidia GeForce GTX 680 or an ATI HD 7970. And this post is about resolving that problem. ...

Part of the research I did before migrating from Blogger to WordPress.com, was to make sure that current Blogger permalinks would resolve correctly once the old posts were imported into WordPress.com. At the time all seemed fine, but soon after migrating, I received alerts from Google Webmaster Tools that there is an increase in site errors, specifically 404 errors. Some background: Permalinks are the URL’s that point directly to specific posts on the blog. These URL’s are known by search engines, are shared on forums, and are basically the static address of posts. Blogger and WordPress.com use different styles of permalinks. WordPress.com allows some customization of permalinks, but unlike WordPress.org, there is no support for custom plugins to handle rewrites for permalinks, 302’s or 404’s. ...

In a previous post I reported that my SuperMicro SuperWorkstation 7047A-T failed to install Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012 due to an ACPI_BIOS_ERROR. I contacted SuperMicro support, and I was informed that new BIOS releases are on their way that will support Windows 8 and Server 2012. This morning I received an email from SuperMicro, with a new Beta BIOS for the X9DAi motherboard used in the 7047A-T. The new BIOS allowed me to install Windows 8 and Server 2012. ...

In my last post I described how to prevent Windows from automatically restarting when encountering a BSOD during the OS install process. This allowed me to see the ACPI_BIOS_ERROR fault code while installing Windows 8 on my new SuperMicro workstation. The new Windows 8 BSOD page looks friendly, but no longer displays any error parameters other than the main fault code. In order to get additional details of the crash, I had to hook up a kernel debugger to the machine. Windows 8 adds USB3 and TCPIP kernel debug support, and I will describe how I used the TCPIP network option to capture details of the crash. ...

I’ve been using CrashPlan as an online backup solution for quite some time, and it works really well. I like the fact that I can subscribe to the consumer plan, with almost 3.5TB of data backed up, and that the backup client installs on a server OS. Many of the other “unlimited” backup providers I tested have restrictions in place that make such a setup impossible. CrashPlan sends email notifications about backup status, and I noticed that something was wrong with the backup: ...

I got so frustrated with the NCP VPN client software, specifically a recent update, that I decided to let my frustration out by writing about it. For a long time I used the, IT approved, Cisco VPN client to access our corporate network. And as the OS technology moved along, so did my systems, meaning Vista, Windows 7, and 64-bit. While, for the most part, our IT approved systems remained to be only 32-bit XP. Cisco, for some reason, maybe they are representative of IT organizations as a whole, was late to support Vista, was late to support Windows 7, and for the longest time never supported x64. ...

In my last post I discussed the calibration of my DELL 2408WFP monitors. After calibration, and changing the monitor settings, the monitors looked pretty good, but I later found that the monitor colors looked all weird again. It turns out that the monitors reverted to their default settings, invalidating the calibration. It seems to me that as soon as my PC goes to sleep, or the monitors go into power saving mode, or power off, that on turning back on they revert to default settings. ...

While shopping on Amazon I noticed that they were offering the Pilot of the Showtime series Nurse Jackie in HD for free, so I decided to give it a try. The install (version 2.0.1.95) went smoothly, and the 1.3GB download also completed pretty quickly, and I watched the show. Ok, now I wanted to stop the Unbox player service from running and terminate the tray icon application, I have no need to have it running all the time. ...

I bought my first SLR camera, a Canon EOS 20D, and my first wide angle lens, a Canon EF-S 10-22, several years ago. Amongst the many articles and reviews I read, online and in magazines, I came across a product called DxO Optics Pro, a product that would supposedly correct, amongst other things, lens distortion. This seemed like the perfect tool to help me with my wide angle pictures that looked very “fishy eyed”. And since DxO, then version 4, was receiving good reviews, I decided to trial the product. In those days the DxO licensing model was to pay per camera body and per lens module, not a cheap investment, but I really liked the results and so I purchased the product. ...