October 9, 2018—KB4464330 (OS Build 17763.55) Windows 10 failed to install on HP Elite 8100 - Blue Iris running as a service

This issue has been bugging me for other a month now, I figured it was related to the Windows 10 update that was deleting peoples files etc whilst it did what it did... turns out it wasn't. I had a similar issue with another HP in my house which turned out to be an old USB stick that interfered with the update..

So with that in mind I set about pretty much pulling apart my HP 8100 Elite.. still didn't work.. then I remembered that a Compaq I have didn't like a Windows 10 update a while ago and that turned out to be the fault of an out of date RAID driver (!?!) that Windows 10 hadn't updated.. so then went about installing all manner of old crappy drivers that I probably didn't need..

Then I sat down and thought.. humm.. it always got to 95% before crapping out and saying it couldn't finish the job (which was after the reboot). Then I remembered.. I had a copy of BlueIris running as a service at boot-up, which was handled by Task Scheduler.. I disabled that and hey presto the update worked.

It didn't occur to me that it would be an issue as its gone through several updates whilst BlueIris has been in place without issue so whatever is in this release is precious enough to take issue with either this program, or anything running as a service (that you've forced in there).

I thought I'd stick this on the interweb in case anyone else is being annoyed by this problem.

Oh and straight after fixing this issue, I got this!

Bosch MUM46A1GB Food Mixer

Okay so, I go on a lot about computery stuff.. but I'm also getting into cookery. As part of my interest, I invested in one of these bad boys. Having never owned a food mixer/processor thing.. I went for a Bosch, after all, it is German. I have to say, its pretty amazing! The juicer function is pretty great, I've been getting tons of juice of of oranges compared to the little dribbles of juice you'd get by doing it by hand. I've made some smoothie drinks and today.. a pretty awesome Scotch Egg Pie.

I followed the recipe apart from.. I added a little extra water when mixing the pastry. I used the tool on the left initially to turn the mix into bread crumbs, using the amount suggested and then switched to the tool on the right to turn the bread crumb mixture into dough. I added the same amount of water again at this stage.

I also used the tool on the right to mix the sausage meat, parsley, salt and pepper together.

It turned out really well, however the recipe says to use "good quality sausage meat" none of the packaging ever says "this stuff is crap" so I went with the only one available in Sainsburys. There was a fair bit of fat in this and that fat effected the pie's base - made it quite wet and had a hit of not quite fully cooked about it. I'm thinking that maybe next time, I'd cook the sausage meat up first, drain off the fat and then stick in the mixer to loosen up before adding to the pie base. I'm fairly sure this method wouldn't kill me. I cooked mine for a full hour in a gas oven but found the pastry around the edge didn't look entirely cooked but the topping was looking particularly brown, so decided to drop the oven down to Gas Mark 4 and place some foil over the top. This helped the edge and protected the top but couldn't totally fix the bases problem (which I'm hoping my pre cooking of the meat idea will solve). Oh and I used a table spoon dipped in water to make the little trench thing they mention for sitting the eggs in - the sausage meat is pretty sticky.

Pretty awesome pastry if I do say so myself..

...eggs going in.. (my Mrs boiled them - I can't boil eggs..)

Egg and meat mountain complete!

Then sprinkled on the breadcrumb mix...

Then after an hour without foil and then approx 20 with foil sat over the top at a lower gas mark, out she comes!

Eggs coming back out again. It was damn good, even if the pastry was a bit moist at the bottom.

Dell Latitude E6410 - Random uninstalled hardware with Windows 10

The Dell Latitude E6410 is my new toy, although I'm actually typing this on my old G6.. I upgraded the RAM to its fullest (8Gb) and installed a circa 240Gb SSD - these things are amazing. If you haven't installed one yet, you must. The difference it makes to your system is amazing. If you're going to upgrade anything, it must be this, especially on a laptop. I did the upgrade from Windows 7 to 10 and then created a recovery drive and did a fresh Windows 10 install (pretty sure I've covered how to do that in here somewhere).

One thing I have noticed.. is a little piece of hardware sitting in the Device Manager showing as not installed.. everything is working fine. Its not falling over or hitting critical errors.. so what is this unimportant thing..

Right clicking on the item, selecting properties (like you used to in Windows XP.. and probably 2000 come to think of it), gives you some extra info.. the details tab gives you some details you can search on. This actually relates a system whereby an inbuilt accelerometer would tell the HDD to stop spinning in order to protect itself during impact.

As I have an SSD, I don't need this as there are no spinning parts to protect. That was as far as my quest took me as I didn't need to fix it. If you're sat there with a conventional HDD.. rather than spend time trying to fix it.. get an SSD, I promise you won't regret it! I know its money but it's money well invested.

New Home Server Ideas..

I'm looking to upgrade my home server at the moment. I've come into a little bit of cash I wasn't expecting so I'm looking to do useful things with it, rather than wonder where it all went in a few months time. One of the things I'm really looking into is upgrading the place I dump all my stuff.

I'm currently running a little HP DX2300. I have 2 x 2TB HDD pooled in a ZFS that Rsync's all my vital stuff to a 2TB UFS. I'd looked into RAID etc etc but figured in my old fashioned way that a back up is a back up is a back up. If its not a proper back up.. its not a proper back up. The last time I upgraded my storage I simply ran Rsync to my backup disk and then Rsync'd back again to my new ZFS pool. I'm quite happy with how that works as it sits pretty comfortably with my level of knowledge surrounding redundancy etc. This article here explains my thinking pretty well. Some of the comments relate to others doing the same thing.

I'm using Nas4Free and I like it, mainly because it isn't resource hungry, it works on pretty much any old computer, which is a big thing to me, I hate binning old tech and it frustrates me when people go on about how wonderful Linux is for re-provisioning old IT.. when it doesn't! I have an old T41, Linux won't even install on it (I know you can force the kernel blah but why?), whereas Windows 7 will. So who is the champion of the working man there eh!

My reasoning for upgrading is.. as the article outlines, when you want to expand your ZFS, you have to pretty much destroy it and start again. So, if I'm going to go through the faff of that (it is worth it in fairness, it has worked really well), I might as well upgrade the whole system. Keep the one I've got for testing or give it to my parents and play around with some proper remote administration (they live in Portugal).

The Hardware: I've read a bit about people turning old servers in to Gaming PC's. I'm not a gamer but I know these machines (for the proper fanatics anyway) are pretty meaty bits of kit.. I also know that for business and the hardcore home users, servers are even better. I'm neither, I just like to dick around and get things to work for me. So.. what about turning a Gaming PC into a server.. surely that would be a server good enough for me. The theory is good, they're setup for power (power enough to run a load of disks and a decent processor), they're designed for upgrades etc, they have multiple bay spaces, they have a ton of cooling gear installed.. why not?

I've found this in PC World of all places (sometimes they're pricing isn't actually that bad..), I've also found these babies, you can get them for a little bit less elsewhere but for a couple of quid, I'm not sure I can be arsed with the hassle. So that would be.. 2 x 4TB backing up to.. I always preferred the idea of the backup being 1 disk.. as then you're reducing your risk of failure in the backup.. 2 backing up to 1 rather than 2 backing up to 2. Which means.. if I want to back up everything (which I haven't before) I would need something like this.

A pretty meaty bit of kit. So.. the PC itself would be £349..99, the 2 WD Red 4TB HDD's £139.99 x2 = £279.98 and the 8TB backup £178.90, which according to my maths works out at about £1 million.

So, the hardware is one consideration, the other is the OS. I like Nas4Free because its served we well so far. Its not the most user friendly setup, you need a little bit of knowledge or at least the patience to sit and read or watch a few YouTube how to's. This guy helped me setup mine. It did feel a little bit like.. to get it to work, open it right up. Which although true 90% of the time (I still get random permission errors) it does feel a little weird knowing that anyone with access to my network can see my unmentionables.

I've looked at FreeNas - is or isn't a distant relative of Nas4Free, I've lost track of the argument.. but only briefly through my PC, it wouldn't run on my server (not powerful enough) so I couldn't get a good feel for it. I managed to get Amahi to run on, very easy to setup however, its definitely got the whiff of a business model about it.. they want to do a lot of the stuff for you.. for a fee. Its very user friendly but if you want to work things out for yourself and be your own king of the home network/server.. this probably won't be for you.. The one I am definitely interested in trying out however is OpenMediaVault. This looks really smart. Obviously, one I start messing around I will post any findings I make (unless its a complete disaster and then I won't want to talk about it).

That said.. since my Asus router.. a lot of the work I wanted my server to do before has been taken over by it. Am I just fiddling for fiddling's sake.. probably.

AMD Quick Stream Error

Hey, well my little (maybe not little) HP Pavillion G Series laptop (mentioned in a couple of posts years ago) is still going strong. She's have a couple of updates since then, has all the RAM she can handle and an SSD shoved inside to make it the best it can be.. even sporting Windows 10. I did get a Dell Latitude E6410 for my birthday from my Mrs, I missed the trackpoint from my Thinkpad T41/61. The Dell is great, built like a tank and quite dinky really.

Anyways, I came back to my HP and found this really annoying error at start up. Admittedly.. I don't start up anywhere near as often as I used to. I've found that Windows 10's energy saving settings make actually turning off the computer a bit of a waste of time.. I digress.. this is still annoying. I left it a little while, figuring it'd get sorting in the next Windows update.. it didn't.

The fix was surprisingly simple. I can't take all the credit I'm afraid... AlanVi posted the fix on this Microsoft forum. Basically.. follow this link, download and install AMD Quick Stream.. and the problem goes away. You would think companies like AMD and Microsoft would let each other know stuff like this might happen to each others gear..

On a more personal note.. I started up Chrome on this old pup and found the Amazon page for my new laptop.. I didn't even try to hide the impending affair from my G6.

How to setup a VPN into your home network!

And a proper VPN too, a VPN that lets you view all your shared content in a way that makes it look like you're actually at home!

I have an Asus RT-AC68U which I bought to replace the waste of time efforts being churned out by the Virgin Media "Super" Hub.. Seriously, what is the point of superfast fibre optic up to my house.. and then giving me a crappy router?

Anyway's the internet actually works in my house now which is nice. The router is fast and easy to setup and has many little extra's (probably standard on most routers these days in fairness). One of the options is VPN! Exciting stuff. VPN's are great for securing your connection to the internet, especially if you're using public WIFI but I wanted a VPN to be really useful and connect me to my home network.

So, login to your router

This is what I'm greeted with, don't worry about the white boxes, that's where I've removed data relating to me. As you can see, on the left had side is a tab referring to VPN.

Then select OpenVPN - this is a free program that you'll use with your laptop/phone etc to connect to your VPN. Then, switch on the VPN server and then select Advance Settings.

Here you can see extra options. The important one is the Interface Type, TUN means that the VPN will just route your internet traffic over your home connection. TAP is the interface that will allow you to connect to your home network as if you're at home! 

Go back to General settings and create your user accounts. 

As you can see above, the Asus gives you links to the OpenVPN website and provides instructions on how to setup your Client (laptop/phone) using the key that you can export (see button below VPN Details).

I've used it from work on my laptop and it works brilliantly. The only glitch I've noticed is that mapped network drives don't tend to work so you end up going to your shared drives via the Network link in File Explorer. A minor issue in something that is otherwise really handy!

Oh and Android's version of OpenVPN doesn't like the TAP interface yet. So, if you set it to TAP you can use your home VPN on your laptop etc but not your Android. Changing the interface to TUN will allow you to connect your Android however then you'd lose access to all your shared drives when away from home.

Getting Cortana to speak proper English like wot I do..

I've been playing around with Windows 10 for a few months now and despite people moaning about it (like people always do with any new release), I actually quite like it. There's no revolution in any of its lay out, its pretty much Windows 7 with a few shiny bits added.

One of the main additions to Windows 10 was Cortana. The ability to speak to your computer and get it to do stuff without you touching it. I've never really been into voice recognition software but since playing around with it on my Android whilst driving.. I've actually found it remarkably handy. I didn't expect it to work.. but it did.

Anyhoo, lets try it on Windows 10.. As far as I could tell it was all set up as UK English.. but apparently not! Cortana thought we were in America, and speaking American English. Good grief. Should be easy to change (after all this is Windows 10..). No. What a lot of faff for something that's main purpose is to make interacting with technology easier and more intuitive..

So first off, click on the Windows icon and go to Settings

Then select Time and Language etc

Then Additional date time and regional settings

Then click Region and then Administrative

Then click Copy Settings

What! Look! America! How did that get in there! Pesky imperialists.. 

Click the bottom two radio buttons asking if you'd like to copy your language to the Welcome Screen etc and then click OK

Phew, everything's back to Blighty!

Now go back to settings, easiest way might be to go back via the Windows button and head back to Time and Language etc and click on Region and Language

Click on Options

and click on Download under speech

Once the download has finished, click on Settings

These should all be set to UK, if they're not, select UK from the drop down lists and then click Apply settings to the Welcome Screen etc

Now, head back to Settings, Time and Language and then Speech and select English UK from the drop down.

For some reason with me, this option didn't appear straight away. I clicked around back and forth a couple of times and then it appeared as an option. Ideally, I guess a reboot would have prompted the appearance.

Its a lot of clicking around back and forth but it's the way its done! I've used it a couple of times and it is remarkably clever.