DARKCOLD – Justin’s Blog

OneDrive Woes

Today I had a real pickle of a problem to untangle for a teacher. We’re leveraging Microsoft’s cloud as much as we can, which means going all-in with Teams, Office 365 and naturally OneDrive. It wasn’t to be for this teacher however, a kind-hearted co-worker assisted her in setting up OneDrive to always keep her Desktop, Documents and other data always in the cloud during a PD event focused on Teams. This caused nothing but confusion and disarray as it seemed the actual locations were all symbolically linked to the OneDrive folder – she couldn’t find her data and for a while we (the tech I work with) and I couldn’t find them, until I found the recursion. Folders inside folders inside folders. The filename length limit exceeded, things not working as they should.

Nasty stuff, she wanted nothing to do with OneDrive and I couldn’t blame her. She approached me to find out if removing OneDrive would affect her data and to be honest I wasn’t confident with the answers I was finding through searching forums, so I erred on the side of caution. She brought in her 2TB USB hard drive and I tried to backup the data, it wasn’t happening however. I made sure all data was stored locally as well as in the cloud so nothing was missed but Windows wasn’t going to cut it, I needed to be away from the services and things running in the background to get the backup done.

I grabbed my handy Kali Linux USB and attempted to boot into it, secure boot was enabled but a quick change in the UEFI settings disabled it. This computer is an Acer TravelMate 449, which hides the SATA mode from the user for some odd reason. It was set to Optane RST (RAID OFF) so I had to press the super-duper secret key combination CTRL+S on the MAIN tab to put it into AHCI mode so the internal NVMe SSD could be read by my Kali USB (there are no drivers in the kernel for the Intel RAID mode at the time of writing).

I got the data backed up, put the settings back to normal in the UEFI, booted into Windows, killed OneDrive and changed the location of the Desktop, Documents and Pictures folders by going into properties, returning to the default and selecting the option to move the data. It seemed to work as expected but we still have the data on hand in case it doesn’t work out. Hey it doesn’t hurt to have backups!

Pancake

I tried to make a smiley face pancake like in the life hack videos…

Self Hosted to Managed JAMF Pro

If you know me or have read enough of my ramblings you’d know I work in education administrating close to 1,000 iPads. The logical solution for managing this amount of devices is an MDM and the one we leverage is JAMF. I’ve known about the adoption and widespread conversions to cloud since the last JAMF conference I attended, I think the statistic was 70% and when I saw the benefits I was sold; who wouldn’t want to lose the headaches associated with keeping another vital system up and running. Windows updates, Java updates, SQL updates, not to mention the overhead and resources allocated (despite being virtualised it’s still cranking power), maintaining backups, proxies, SSL certificates and more. The only thing holding us back was the cost which thanks to subsidization, this renewal period was brought below on-premises price.

DJMAX RESPECT V – Karma

I’m really rocking this new song they’ve added to DJ MAX – the song, the video, the K-Pop… this is my new favorite.

Happy Australia Day

Someone ripped an Australia flag off my car while I was grocery getting this morning. Disappointing but the sentiment can continue here! 🇦🇺

Top Six Palette Swaps

What’s a palette swap? The simplest explanation is in video games, where one sprite graphic has its colour palette changed and is presented as an entirely new object, character or power-up. As random as the topic is, I thought I’d put together a list of some of my favorites.

6. Shiny Pokemon
You could go your entire life without knowing shiny Pokemon are a thing. They can have higher than average stats and different conditions for determining if you’re going to encounter one throughout the various games. Funnily they’ve existed since generation 1 but there was no way to tell except by examining the Pokemons stats or transferring it to generation 2. One of the most popular is Gyrados who appears in the anime adaption as well as a major story plot point in the second generation games.

Hot Dog Stand

Have I ever posted about the Windows 3.1 theme that was Hot Dog Stand? I have fond memories of playing around with every single pre-installed application and configuring every feature of our family computer back in the day which had Windows 3.1 installed (and yes, I did break this computer on one of my learning adventures when I must have been 7 years old by deleting system files to have more room to install some games from floppies), this theme being one of them. It was bright, it was atrocious, but it was included as a default theme option in every copy of Windows 3.1. Have you ever seen Hot Dog Stand? Here’s a screenshot:

You better believe I was rocking this colour scheme.

Some Good MS-DOS Games (2021)

I love putting lists like this together, knowing my tastes are likely to change over time I’m making this the 2021 edition. Actually it’s pretty funny that I’d make a list of games for an operating system that for most was only used by most to launch Windows 3.1 or 95 long ago. There are so many gems on MS-DOS that it’s hard to distill into just five but I’ll try. Before flaming me for not mentioning your favorite remember it’s subjective! We might not have played the same games. The list is in no particular order, let’s begin.

Australia Doesn’t Exist

I’ll admit I’m guilty of indulging in conspiracy theories from time to time, they’re an interesting distraction with thought experiments ranging from a shadow cabal ruling the world to aliens, an Australian prime minister being abducted by the Soviets to Epstein not killing himself. While I’m sure there’s always some truth among even the most outlandish or absurd theories (off topic but I think my fascination was born watching The X-Files in the early 90s) I feel I can objectively rationalize fact from fiction, and in being part of many sites theorists interact online I’ve seen a certain gullibility from users getting up in arms without attempting to fact check or verify sources. Another contributor I imagine is lack of experience in life. Imagine my delight when I saw this discussion:

2021

Good morning and welcome back to my blog. Another year has passed and now it’s 2021. I’d taken a break to recover from my surgery (nothing major don’t worry) and consume content but it’s time to create again. Truthfully one of the things holding me back was lack of a quiet keyboard – I was using a mechanical from Amazon and while it’s a delight to type on it’s noisey as heck – I can’t disturb everyone at home especially late at night when I suspect I would have the most time to blog. I’d been searching for a quiet keyboard and decided I’d like scissor switch keys like you’d find on a notebook instead of a generic membrane keyboard. I found this Rapoo from Big W for a good price:

It’s a 9300M and there’s definitely a learning curve to it. I find some of the keys I have to press harder (particularly backspace) and I’m making mistakes but will surely get used to it. The old adage you get what you pay for is true, for the RRP I would be disappointed but at $39 it’s acceptable.