It's complicated
I had a Beelink SER5 MAX mini PC. I found myself using it for tasks that raised temperatures in its CPU or in the NVMe SSDs that I had installed in it. To prevent throttling (i.e., automatic slowing until it cooled down enough to avoid damage to components), I took the back off and set […]
I wanted a general sense of how air quality looked in the American heartland. There were more sophisticated (and time-consuming) ways to obtain that. But within my time budget and my limited expertise, I was content (for now) to develop a time-lapse video or slideshow based on screenshots from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) […]
I was working in Microsoft Word 2021 on a Windows 11 desktop PC. I wanted to add an image to a document. I wanted to position this image so that it would overlap the text and non-text area (i.e., header, footer, or left or right margin). Word wanted to fight me about this. My mission […]
Nobody likes it when AIs just make stuff up. Nobody likes that in people either. The difference is that people tend to guard how they do it and whom they allow to see it. Bull sessions are a hallowed feature of human interactions. When you feel free to speak your mind, you are apt to […]
The Problem I had an Olympus VN-960PC Digital Voice Recorder (DVR). I was able to upload recordings from that device to my PC using a cable with a USB mini-A type connector. Recordings would be listed in the Olympus Digital Wave Player (DWP) software as they arrived at the computer from the DVR. Unfortunately, the […]
Contents Background General-Purpose Drive Checking Windows System Checking and Repair Add, Tweak, and Remove Programs Shrink or Delete Unnecessary Files Defragmentation and Free Space Consolidation Zeroing Free Space Hole-Punching (i.e., Reclaiming Zeroed Space) . Background Over the years, I had made many backup images of Windows drive C installations. I don’t remember exactly how I […]
I had a Google Pixel 6 Pro smartphone. It had image stabilization and good nighttime video capability. I took it for a run. It produced video of the sidewalk ahead of me, along with some peripheral capture of streetlights, traffic, and buildings. Predictably, the video swung from one side to the other, each time I […]
I converted a recent Gemini chat into this blog post, using roughly the technique described in another post. I saved this post because I wanted to record this form of the debate. In this discussion, Gemini came around to believing that my idea would work. Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Grok did not. Claude pleaded ignorance of […]
It was 2025. I was learning how to use AI. And one of the biggest mistakes I made, in that regard, was to let AIs lead on the question of whether I should stick with Borg or switch to ZPAQ or to its zpaqfranz fork (sometimes referred to here, collectively, as ZPAQ/franz). Now, at this […]
Contents Introduction Using Windows Tools: Preparing a .dd of a Windows Installation Using Windows Tools: Cleaning Up a .dd of a Windows Installation Using Windows Tools: Shrinking and Zeroing Partitions in a .dd of a Windows Installation Using Ubuntu Tools: Cleaning Up a .dd of an Ubuntu Installation Using Ubuntu Tools: Shrinking and Zeroing Partitions […]
Contents Introduction Preliminary Decisions Saving a Running System as VMDK VMDK and VHDX as Temporary Repositories Restoring ADI to VMDK: An Internal Method Restoring ADI to VMDK and/or .dd: An External Method From .dd to VMDK Cleaning Up, Shrinking, Converting, and Zero-Filling the VM . Introduction Within the past few years, I had converted most […]
Another post discusses conversion of various materials to formats that would be highly conducive to ZPAQ deduplication. One part of that project involved conversion of compressed drive images to noncompressed and nonproprietary formats capable of restoring a bootable physical installation. For this purpose, bootable VHDX appeared promising. This post describes my exploration of that format. […]
As described in another post, I was looking for a way to convert my Windows 11 desktop PC system to native-boot VHDX. My unsuccessful first attempt used DISM. This time around, I wanted to try Sysinternals Disk2vhd. This one did not require me to be offline. When I asked several AIs for their suggestions, this was […]
Another post contains the text of a discussion I had with Perplexity. This post summarizes the steps I took to convert that discussion to WordPress. Note that I was using WordPress Classic Editor, not the block editor. Last time I checked, the block editor did not permit some of the steps taken in efforts like […]
As indicated in another post, I was looking for a way to convert my desktop PC’s operational Windows 11 installation to a bootable VHDX. This post presents my chat with Perplexity.ai in which we worked through an approach based on Microsoft’s Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM). DISM was supposed to capture a native-bootable image […]