QEMU libvirt VM Migration/Backup…

Posted on by dk

Attempting to backup a VM was a mess – the Windows 11 activation was broken upon copying, so I got AI to help me code a migration script…

After a huge amount of my own time (largely because I am a cheap-ass and was attempting to do things locally on a Qwen 3.8 27B on an AMD 395+ Strix Halo w/128gB RAM), a huge amount of repetitions across free Google AI Mode (sucks) and free ChatGPT (good enough), I finally got a working script…

It took about a month, an hour or so on and off whenever I had “spare” time, with some 32 iterations before I had a script that didn’t have script errors and I was sure the logic and technicals were sound (yes, I ran through the code manually). Then another 4 iterations to address run-time issues and figure out what broke Windows 11 activation…

Have fun!

Auto Toggling Touchpad

Posted on by dk

I get irritated whenever my touchpad accidentally triggers when I am typing on the laptop keyboard, shifting focus and ending up typing on some other window or screen. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when the focus shifted from a password entry to a chat window and I ended up sending (part of) my password to someone…

With the help of Google’s AI mode and later ChatGPT (yes, I needed both to get things to finally work), I whipped up a solution based on AutoHotkey.

Total time:

  • design, redesign, code, testing + retesting: ~2 hours
  • Repo ReadMe.md documentation: 0.5 hours

Hopefully this helps someone.

Oppo Find N6

Posted on by dk

It is bad enough that Google tracks all my apps installed, etc. through the Play Store – granted there is some level of (misplaced) trust and the ability to have some central updating platform, but having a useless level of interference (and delay to add) from Oppo through their “HeyTap” crap simply crossed the line.

Refer here to clear the malware, adware and privacy stripping apps.

Forcing the Reddit App Down Your Throat…

Posted on by dk

So, browsing Reddit on your mobile, usually from Google search results, is now an exercise in frustration – Reddit will freeze your screen and force you to jump to their app.

I do not like using the app. If I can use a normal browser to navigate, there is no valid technical reason I must use your app.

So, Fennec browser, complete with uBlock Origin, to the rescue (because Chrome just sucks)!

Add the following to the “My filters”:

! Remove Reddit mobile app wall popup
www.reddit.com##.rpl-bottom-sheet
www.reddit.com##+js(remove-class, rpl-scroll-lock, body, stay)
www.reddit.com##+js(remove-class, scroll-is-blocked, body, stay)
www.reddit.com##+js(prevent-addEventListener, touchmove)

Problem fixed.

I HATE Apple

Posted on by dk

This post was in draft for a looooong time (since June 2024) – mainly procrastination and this starting out more of a “self-help” listing of “required software” turning into a self-indulgent rant… Now finally published because I just had another Mac vs. Windows argument recently…

So, I finally filled in the remaining ~60% of the post originally drafted with headlines only (e.g. “Multiple Monitor Support”, “File System Rabbit Droppings”, “Clamshell Mode”, “Power Management Control”, “Fingerprint Touch Sensor and “PD Power Supplies”) and even added current-day info (with lotsa “saved”/shared Google AI links, ‘coz pages disappear and summaries are better)… Hopefully this helps any users transitioning to Mac, despite some points probably being out of date…

WARNING: In a departure from usual posts having a more professional tone, this post is (unapologetically) laden with expletives, swearing and (apologetically) sexist terms, exposing my absolute anger and frustration on being forced to use, and defend my arguments against, poorly thought out/narrow-minded engineering. If you have sensitive eyes/ears/thinking, please ask Google AI to summarise this post for you instead. 😳  Note that is a “live” link – you will probably get different responses from different browser sessions because, you know, AI.

My experience with Apple has been nothing if short of atrocious, starting with a iPhone 6s forced upon me, so many years back, till 2021 through 2025 where I did not have a choice of Windows or OSX for a work laptop, having a Intel-based MacBook Pro 13 2020 being forced upon me, followed by a MacBook Pro 2022 w/2x USB4/TB3 ports.

I’m going to start with the bad first – draw up a strong, big drink – this is going to be a loooooooong one…

I SWEAR the next time an IT engineer tries to argue Apple’s USABILITY points with me, I’ll drive the bloody MBP through his friggin skull.

Continue reading →

Windows Volume Mount Points, Junctions and Windows 11 Firewall…

Posted on by dk

I was wondering why a simple firewall rule allowing inbound connections to some executable just would not work.

Extensive troubleshooting, excepting disabling the firewall (works), attempting relaxing any other conditions, like removing port restrictions (doesn’t work), source IP/subnet restrictions (doesn’t work), and a whole bunch of other stuff just simply did not work.

Finally frustrated, I just tried removing the targeted/allowed executable – port, source IP/subnet and other bits in place… WORKS.

WTF?

Continue reading →

Email OAuth2 Proxy

Posted on by dk

Microsoft Screws Their Users… Again…

 

Desktop Outlook Banned From Outlook.com and Hotmail.com POP3

Microsoft had stopped allowing users of their premium Outlook desktop product (versus the useless, neutered “Outlook” wannabe bloatware “Outlook for Windows” included force installed in Windows 11) to access their “free” @hotmail.com and @outlook.com emails via POP3 and SMTP (secured or not), forcing everyone to effectively use IMAP mode (links here and here, backup here).

Leaving discussions over any reasons (e.g. financial greed trying to force clueless desktop Outlook + “free” MS email-using people to pay for more storage) and the sheer stupidity of forcing this down full-fat, existing Outlook customers’ collective throats (against, say, everyone else like those using Thunderbird or other third-party email clients) aside, I had simply left this aside, relying on my trusty K-9 Mail on Android to access any emails on these “throw-away” accounts…

Unfortunately, there were a few emails (mainly shopping-related receipts) that I wanted to keep – so once again, I had to roll-up my sleeves and fix shit Microsoft breaks get things working…

Google search basically found me Email OAUTH2 Proxy nearly immediately… Attempts at simply using the Docker image did not go so smoothly, so I ended up using pipx and did a “bare metal” install..

Continue reading →

Customising CyberChef…

Posted on by dk

So, in the need to run some Base64 encoding + decoding using local HTML files and modern browser-based JS, I came across CyberChef…

Asking Google’s “AI Mode” (even the “Pro” version) to provide instructions to strip the files down to the basic (e.g. no bloat from Tesseract OCR files or other operations/modules not needed excepting “To Base64” and “From Base64” operations) was an exercise in frustration… With “instructions” from deleting .mjs operation files from source tree, to editing the src/core/config/scripts/generateConfig.mjs (in truth, only one or the other was required – along with some other steps), to attempting hard-code edits on webpack.config.js.

None of that worked correctly – No HTML was produced at the end due to some compilation error.

Fortunately, it pointed me in the right direction, and I finally managed to “shrink” my build for easy transfer, down from the hefty 70+MB .zip file…

Continue reading →

Nested Partitions grub-update Mess…

Posted on by dk

Having imaged an old MBR-based partitioned disk to a VHD and back to bare metal on a now UEFI, GPT-based NVME SSD, update-grup was complaining every time:

# update-grub
Sourcing file `/etc/default/grub'
Generating grub configuration file ...
grub-probe: warning: Discarding improperly nested partition (hostdisk//dev/nvme0n1,gpt2,msdos1).
grub-probe: warning: Discarding improperly nested partition (hostdisk//dev/nvme0n1,gpt2,msdos2).
grub-probe: warning: Discarding improperly nested partition (hostdisk//dev/nvme0n1,gpt2,msdos3).
grub-probe: warning: Discarding improperly nested partition (hostdisk//dev/nvme0n1,gpt2,msdos4).

<above 4 lines repeats 11 times>

/usr/sbin/grub-probe: warning: Discarding improperly nested partition (hostdisk//dev/nvme0n1,gpt2,msdos1).
/usr/sbin/grub-probe: warning: Discarding improperly nested partition (hostdisk//dev/nvme0n1,gpt2,msdos2).
/usr/sbin/grub-probe: warning: Discarding improperly nested partition (hostdisk//dev/nvme0n1,gpt2,msdos3).
/usr/sbin/grub-probe: warning: Discarding improperly nested partition (hostdisk//dev/nvme0n1,gpt2,msdos4).

<above 4 lines repeats 29 times>

Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-6.17.0-22-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-6.17.0-22-generic
/usr/sbin/grub-probe: warning: Discarding improperly nested partition (hostdisk//dev/nvme0n1,gpt2,msdos1).
/usr/sbin/grub-probe: warning: Discarding improperly nested partition (hostdisk//dev/nvme0n1,gpt2,msdos2).
/usr/sbin/grub-probe: warning: Discarding improperly nested partition (hostdisk//dev/nvme0n1,gpt2,msdos3).
/usr/sbin/grub-probe: warning: Discarding improperly nested partition (hostdisk//dev/nvme0n1,gpt2,msdos4).

<above 4 lines repeats 23 times>

And so on… and so forth…

The great, wise ChatGPT was convinced that this was the work of the devil and that the “Microsoft Reserved Partition” partition was without a “soul” (file system) and would need to be “cast out” (excluded) by grub-prober… And then went on to instruct me to “add the file system UUID” to my /etc/default/grub via the GRUB_OS_PROBER_SKIP_LIST="<UUID>@/dev/nvme0n1p2" line… Never mind it just told me there is no file system for the MSR partition (and therefore no file system UUID)…

Continue reading →

Rebuilding Ubuntu LTS on WSL2 and Interfering Docker Integrations

Posted on by dk

In an attempt to get some AMD iGPU accelerated apps to run via Ubuntu LTS on WSL2, I had to rebuild my Ubuntu LTS “VM” under WSL2.

  • I had to first remove the existing Ubuntu LTS (named “UbuntuLTS”): wsl --unregister UbuntuLTS

WARNING: Although multiple sources state that the source .vhdx file does not get deleted, it actually does get deleted for me! 🙄

  • I re-downloaded the .wsl file directly from Ubuntu, then installed the VM manually:

wsl --install --from-file "ubuntu-24.04.4-wsl-amd64.wsl" --name UbuntuLTS --location "D:\WSL\UbuntuLTS" --no-launch

Note that if you have Docker already installed, the default “distro” WSL2 may have been set to Docker’s docker-desktop:

  • set the correct default: wsl --set-default UbuntuLTS
  • run wsl.exe and it will launch into the newly created distribution, set a new (default) user and password… and ignore the stupid <3>WSL (299 - Relay) ERROR: operator():579: getpwuid(1000) failed error 🙄
    • NOTE: the error will “go away” after a wsl --shutdown and restart…


  • turn on the integration in Docker again…  and watch errors pop up…
    An error occurred while running the command. DockerDesktop/Wsl/ExecError: c:\windows\system32\wsl.exe -d -e sh -c cat - > ~/.docker/config.json: exit status 1 (stderr: , wslErrorCode: DockerDesktop/Wsl/ExecError)

Continue reading →