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My week involved deleting Windows from my personal laptop.

It didnā€™t start out as my plan, but it was the result of my deciding to do a little partition ā€œtidy-up and re-arrangingā€, to give me some more space where I actually needed it and where I could better use it.

An unattended side-effect of this tidy-up was that I made my Windows partition unbootable. As I set about fixing this, I realised there was almost nothing left I actually needed it forā€¦ and if I did then either WINE or a VM would suffice. So I stopped fixing it and and simply blew it away. Last week, was the end of dual-booting for me.

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For the first time in quite a few years, I had a boot problem in Linux. Turned on my laptop and it went to recovery mode.

My heart skipped a beat my mind went straight to the worst – dead drive!

So, I took a breath and went into recovery mode. Ran:

journalctl -xb

Went through the log and saw that it was just an issue with one partition on my second drive. Phew! That’s not so bad. Commented out the mount line in my fstab file and restarted to normal mode.

Once I booted up, I checked the second disk and found it was a corrupt partition table. Installed and ran testdisk, rewrote the partition table on the drive, reboot and missing partition restored. Some days I appreciate Linux and its tools.

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https://boffosocko.com/2021/11/23/55798697/ by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)

Posting to my website with POSSE to Twitter using a fountain pen on paper to photo with OCR to webhook with Micropub. #IndieWeb #Micropub #FTW

I love this idea. I’m just getting back into both blogging and the IndieWeb and this has me wondering about new ways of sharing ideas.

Although, now I want to get a new fountain pen! I forgot how much I used to enjoy writing with one. šŸ˜‰

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I finally placed my first Pine64 order recently and it turned up today.

Three beautiful PineTime Smart Watches…

Our kids have been wanting smart watches and now they are getting open-source ones for Christmas! :man_dancing: :penguin: :christmas_tree:

They look nice and the build quality seems good. Plugged them all in and seamlessly upgraded to the latest 1.7.1 firmware build.

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I went to work on an “un-released” WordPress site of mine the other night and discovered that was displaying a blank page! It was displaying a title and summary of the site courtesy of the “WP Maintenance Mode” plugin. Turns out that this particular plugin has been handed over to a new maintainer and recently updated.

The recent update actually looks very good and the interface is a big improvement on how it used to look, however they removed all the original templates that were the reason I liked the plugin (which, being their project, is their prerogative).

In keeping with the Open Source spirit, I simply forked the code for the plugin and rolled it back to the last point before the templates were deleted. For anyone else that liked the old templates, feel free to grab the old version from GitHub here: Caffeinated-Maintenance-Mode.

 

 

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bigpond_securityIt’s not an anti-virus or security software you hear about much, but if you do come across it you’ll discover it can’t be uninstalled without the original BigPond username and password it was installed under. If you have long since closed that particular account or forgotten the password, here’s how to get around that and remove it anyway:

  • Open regedit (Start menu -> run) or shortcut Windows Key + R
  • type in regedit and click okay
  • Navigate through the registry tree and find the key below:[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREAuthentiumCurtainsv1.5]
    or, alternatively:
    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREWow6432NodeAuthentiumCurtainsv1.5]

remove_bigpond_security

  • Find the values starting with LLC and rename them.
    For example,
    [email protected] change to [email protected]
    LLCID change to disabledLLCID
  • Restart Windows and then try the uninstall again and you won’t be asked for the password.