Archive for Uncategorized

How to rate limit YouTube uploads on Windows 10 / Chrome / Firefox for free.

OK so there are instructions online about how to rate limit Chrome and Firefox from the developer console, but none of them seem to actually work for YouTube uploads. (Or I was doing it wrong which is also quite possible.)

The only working solution I found was a program called TMeter Free, using the documentation at https://www.howtogeek.com/347711/how-to-limit-any-applications-bandwidth-on-windows/

I’m happily uploading to YouTube at 2/3rds the max my ADSL can handle – ADSL becomes very slow on downloads if the upload is maxed out.

Tmeter is free from http://www.tmeter.ru/en/ – up to four processes only.

HP x360 440 G1 won’t turn on – possible fix.

Had one of these come in today – customer had two, and both died in short order. Thought it might be a faulty docking station.

Symptom: Charge light works, but no power light or power switch function. Holding power button for >15 seconds causes the caps lock light to come on for a second or so.

Solution: Seemed to be to disassemble, remove the main battery and the CMOS battery. Power up the machine and get past the bios battery failure message, and hopefully back to normal. Possibly you’ll find yourself in the middle of Windows update – possible cause of suspicion??

Good luck!

How to turn on a Samsung A20, A30, A50, A70 with broken Power Button, Maybe.

If you have got your phone wet and can no longer turn it on using the power button, but it shows as charging when you connect it to a charger; you might be able to ‘wake it up’ by doing the following.

1 – Hold down Volume Up and Volume Down

2 – Plug in the charger.

With a bit of luck, you’ll see a warning about loading a custom OS.

Press the Volume Down option to ‘restart phone’

You should now have a phone that’s started up.

If your touch screen is also dead, you can probably attach a standard USB Mouse (might require a USB to USB-C adapter) and operate the phone as needed to get your stuff off it.

You might be able to make use of this phone as a video surveillance camera, etc.

How to make ZaraRadio 1.6 work with Satellite input on modern hardware.

The free version of Zara Radio uses a technique to enable satellite playback by unmuting a “playback” input in Windows 98 / early XP’s audio mixer. This feature doesn’t exist in computers made since about 2005.

ZaraRadio does support ‘scripts’ within the playlist file.

You can take advantage of this by using the free app SoundVolumeView to save two profiles – one with a line in set with “Listen To This Device” enabled for the Line In input, and another with it disabled. (File –> Save Sound Profile (Selected Devices))

You can then create a batch file with the relevant commands
– for example, satellite_off.bat would contain:
C:\Users\Public\Documents\SoundVolumeView.exe /LoadProfile satellite_off.spr

You can then open a Zara Radio Playlist in Notepad and add the relevant lines to the end of it. For example,

-1 C:\Users\Public\Documents\satellite_Off.bat
-1 .stop

How to Outside Broadcast for free.

I’ve typed up this document on how you can do an Outside Broadcast for free using free software.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-HvRYwUTadnc3NAOmNiCHtEfmSs3Hets/view?usp=sharing

How to export data from NITEA without merged cells.

I’ve not had much to do with NITEA, but was asked to extract some data from it for use in a different system. This proved to be a bit challenging at first because NITEA exports very nice looking reports to Excel, but with lots of merged cells in positions that can change for no obvious reason. (Seems to be a way to maintain column width rather than setting an explicit column width.)

After much head scratching, I found a way to import this data. My trick is to save the NITEA export as a CSV file from Excel, then using another spreadsheet select the Data –> From Text option to import said CSV file. The trick is to tick the ‘treat consecutive delimiters as one” option.

This isn’t perfect as it will mean empty cells are ignored, which will affect alignment of data if there are empty values for some records. Depending on the layout of your exports this may or many not be an issue. A workaround is to highlight the cells in the original NITEA report and use a find and replace to replace the empty cells with a character. A bit laborious but could be automated. (Doing the entire worksheet will likely generate some heat!)

Of course, a real programmer will likely be able to do something clever like create an array in a programming language or some such. I’m not a full time programmer, so I just use the tools I know to get the job done if I can.

There’s more fun to be had if you’re trying to get multiple tables into one recordset. This might at least give you a start 🙂

How to replace Laser Assembly in Numark MP-103

Hopefully the above steps help you out 🙂 Here’s the PDF version….

Bushnell Neo Golf Rangefinder broken after April 2019 (Can’t find GPS)

I have a customer with two of these, and they’ve both stopped working. I suspect they’re affected by the GPS Week 10 bit rollover issue.

I’ve emailed Bushnell but not expecting to get a reply given these are over ten years old I think.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/8/18255847/gps-week-rollover-issue-2019-garmin-tomtom-devices-affected

Windows 10 VirtualBox virtual machine spinning dots MacOS host Fusion Drive

Ok so this isn’t definite, but I have a suspicion that in the above configuraton, the presence of a Mac Fusion Drive on the host causes a long (two minutes of spinning dots) delay when starting a Windows 10 guest. This suspicion is based on the same VM opening much faster on a similar mac with a standard drive.

I don’t have a solution; this is just an observation.

Don’t buy the Nokia 6 (TA-1003) if you want dual SIM support.

This handset appears to have a bug where it randomly changes the default SMS SIM. There are no apps to monitor this, and no solutions available.