Calumet MF6820 Studio Clamp (Cheap Super Clamp)

I purchased a couple of these a few weeks ago, and just got to checking them out today. They are a cheap version of the Manfrotto 035 Super Clamp. I thought I'd do a quick review / info piece on them as there doesn't seem to be much info out there.

In terms of quality, they are what you'd expect - not as good as the real Manfrotto super clamps. I don't have any cheap Chinese ones to compare, but based on my experience with smaller cheap Chinese clamps, I expect the Calumet ones would be significantly better.

The knobs / handle in particular feel a bit more flimsy / cheap compared to the Manfrotto super clamp. On one of my clamps the rubber at the end of the moving part of the jaw is a bit out of position and raised up (I have tried to push it into place, but with no luck - I think it has been glued like this.

The rubber pad on this grip is raised up at this corner

Now, the main point of this post is to cover the use of the 2 screws that they come with, and the threaded holes in the base of the clamp. As there are no instructions or documentation included with the clamp, and no mention of what these are for on the websites of retailers selling the clamp. The point of these is to allow mounting one clamp at a right-angle, attached to the other clamp. So you could have one clamped to the vertical pole of a stand, then the other holding a pole horizontally like a boom arm. Or use double this setup with two stands and the clamps holding a horizontal pole between them to act like a background stand.

The screws push down in the holes within the V of the jaw. They do need a bit of force to push down - use the hex key also included with the clamp (the screws have hex heads). You'll also need to fully open the clamp to more easily get the hex key above them to push them down and tighten them. These then screw into the two threaded holes at either side on the base of the other clamp. Then you do the same with the other clamp so they are both screwed into each other for maximum stability and strength.

The two holes in the V grip part of the clamp the screws need to be pushed down through

Two clamps, one with the two screws pushed through, ready to screw into the threaded holes in the base of the other clamp.

The two clamps mounted together at right-angles using the screws

This combination gives you the equivalent of the Manfrotto 038 Double Super Clamp. But two of the Calumet MF6820 studio clamps are £28 total, while the Manfrotto 038 Double Super Clamp is £54. So quite a saving with the Calumet clamps. However, do note that getting the screws out again from the Calumet clamp is quite a pain.

While the Calumet clamps aren't as good quality as the Manfrotto ones, there are actually some advantages of the Calumet ones:

• They also have a 1/4" female thread in the centre of the base, so you can screw them straight on top of anything with a 1/4" thread. Or you could screw in something like a 1/4" male to 3/8" male adapter then mount something onto the base of the clamp that way (though I would assume you'd generally be better off using a stud with the thread you want).
• You can pull the clamp handle out and then reposition it without tightening / loosening the clamp at all. Useful for repositioning the handle after tightening it down, or if you have the clamp in a position where you can't fully rotate the handle to tighten / loosen the clamp. I believe Manfrotto now makes a super clamp with a ratcheting handle as well, but my old Super clamp doesn't feature this.
• They come with a flat wedge that fits into the V of the clamp for use when you are clamping two flat surfaces together. This neatly stores under the screw used for tightening the stud / spigot in place. However, it does restrict how much you can tighten down this handle when it is stored there. But it's nice that you get the flat wedge included even if the storage solution for it when not in use isn't perfect.

To sum up, initial impressions are that these do appear to be decent, value for money clamps. I would prefer they had better quality to match the Manfrotto super clamps, if that was possible without pushing the price up more than a couple of quid.

Cleaning / Removing Parcel tape / Packing tape residue from cardboard box

tldr; Use a hairdryer to heat tape to allow you to remove it easily leaving minimal residue. Then rub blu-tack on any residue left to remove it.

It's really annoying when you purchase a collectible off ebay, then the seller just tapes it up and posts it off in it's original box rather than placing it inside a separate shipping box. With collectible stuff the box is an important part of the collectible, so to get it covered in large shipping labels and ugly brown parcel tape is a pain.

This recently happened to me, so I've been looking around for solutions to clean the box up and get it looking decent again. The most common suggestion I found was just about using a hairdryer to heat up the tape to allow you to remove it more easily. This did work, though with the amount of tape my package was covered in, it took a long time to get it all off. You just have to heat a section of the tape for half a minute or so, pull that bit up, heat the next few inches, pull that up, etc. until you've eventually got it all off. I also found it didn't work so well where the tape was going over a paper sticker, it was difficult to pull the tape up without ripping the sticker.

After doing this I was still left with a lot of sticky brown residue in various areas where the tape had been. The worst areas were on a couple of paper stickers where the brown residue had just stuck to the stickers and just the plastic part of the parcel tape had lifted up off them.

Most solutions for cleaning up the actual parcel / packing tape residue were to use something like 'Goo Gone'. I have ordered a bottle of this, but my experience with a similar product is that it is quite oily / greasy. While it may make it possible to clean up the tape residue I would expect it would soak into the cardboard and stickers, just giving me a different problem.

A solution I only saw once was a comment from someone suggesting blu-tack (well, actually they suggested the equivalent product from some other country). So I gave this a go, just rubbing the blu-tack on the tape residue and it worked surprisingly well.

Above is actually after cleaning some of the residue from the box, but you can see there is still some residue left on the box, and the sticker is really bad. You can also see my blob of blu-tack I used for the cleaning.

Above image shows partway through cleaning. You have to rub quite a lot with the blu-tack to get the tape residue off. Possibly if you heated the tape residue again if would come off easier? I found that it was particularly stubborn to remove from the paper sticker.

Above shows after cleaning.

Above you can see that this solution unfortunately doesn't work for all cases. While the blu-tack did remove the brown sticky tape residue, it also removed the ink from the printing on the sticker. So I decided to leave this sticker as it is. Maybe I will try some of the goo gone on it when I get that, unless anyone has any better ideas?

New PC (Case)

The past week I've been working on modding an old PC case to move my old / current PC into. The idea being my new PC can then go into the case of my current PC.

The finished PC, in place and powered on

Inside the PC

The PC consists of the motherboard, CPU, M.2 drive, and RAM from my old PC. The CPU Cooler, PSU, etc. from the old PC are being retained for the (real) new PC, and I bought a new cooler and PSU to be used with the old motherboard in this build.

Mesh front and fans

The case I got for fitting the old PC into is an old Gigabyte GZ-X1 Mid Tower case. Like the vast majority of PC cases it is poorly designed, with little thought given to keeping components cool. However, other than this, the design compares very favourably to most other cases.

It has space for quite a few 3.5″ drives, and four 5.25″ bays. In my case I decided to dispense with the 5.25″ bays (at least from an external perspective) and fill the front with fans. This is important for good airflow over any hard drives in the case.

The first thing in terms of the case mod was to dispose of the worse than useless plastic case front. Next job was cutting away the metal front of the case (normally hidden behind the plastic front).

The top 5.25″ bays have metal covers you can just twist to snap off. The lower half of the case front though is just solid sheet metal, except for some breathing holes near the bottom where a 120mm could be mounted behind. I am a 140mm fan guy (The larger the fan, the more air it can move, so lower RPMs, and thus lower noise) so this was no good for me anyway. I just used a dremel to cut away all this section of the case, keeping the same spacing as the top section of the case.

I also had to cut out a section of the bottom part of the 5.25″ bays cage to enable fitting a 120mm fan in the middle, crossing between the bottom (3.5″ bays) and top (5.25″ bays) halves of the case. The case will only fit two 140mm fans and one 120mm fan, hence my use of a 120mm fan here. It also works much better with the spacing available.

I used some wire mesh ~6mm spacing on the front of the case. This doesn't block any airflow to the fans, while preventing you / kids from accidentally / purposefully putting your fingers or anything else into the fans. I managed to secure this with screws going into holes already drilled / punched into the case - they weren't actually threaded but the screws went in okay with a bit of force to get them to tap.

Front view of the case with the wire mesh, fans, and front I/O

Front I/O

Above the 120mm fan in the middle I was left with a space similar to a 3.5″ bay. I thought that would make a good space for some front I/O. I had a USB 3.0 w/ HD audio front panel I had purchased previously. The board from this almost fit, but not quite. I had to cut / grind out a slot in the bottom of the 5.25″ bays cage that the end of the front panel PCB could slot into. I also had to cut out a small section of edge of the 3.5″ bays column to allow for the HD audio header connector to the front panel PCB.

Rear of the front I/O

I had a USB 2.0 rear slot plate, so I unscrewed the sockets from this, to screw them into the front I/O area on the case instead. I also had a USB-C cable to attach. However, after attaching one of the USB 2.0 sockets and the USB-C socket, I found there wasn't enough space for the second USB 2.0 socket (you get 2 sockets on one header). I tried filing down the plastic around the USB-C and one of the USB 2.0 sockets in order to get them to fit one above the other, but without success.

I decided to just go with the one USB 2.0 socket instead, but once I had started assembling the actual PC in the case I found the cable was too short. The other issue was it meant the front I/O ports were very close together, so you'd have trouble plugging multiple things in at one. So in the end I removed the USB 2.0 socket and put the USB-C socket there instead. Annoyingly, this was after when I'd already cut the mesh for where I had been trying to position the sockets. So the mesh around the I/O area is not quite as neat as it should be.

While the I/O ports are right up against the mesh, this doesn't seem to cause any problems. I can plug USB devices and and audio cables in no problem. When testing the audio I did notice it was a bit buzzy, but with the front I/O board loose (so not touching any metal), and only the HD audio connected (USB headers disconnected) it was still the same. Now I have the PC set up at home I also get slight buzz via my USB audio interface, so my guess is it's down to the cheap PSU (Cylon 700W) I'm using.

Power button

For the power button I had the reset switch (I think from the same case, the power switch from the case I was using with the board for my new PC). Then a plastic power button. The plastic power button is meant to attach into the plastic case front (I don't think it was actually from the Gigabyte case I was using, but another case). Since my modified case doesn't have any way of attaching the button, I had to make something up.

I hot glued the push part of the switch onto the rear of the plastic button, so pushing the plastic button will push the switch. For attaching the switch to the case I bent a rear slot plate / cover, so it would form an S shape (with the top of the S being quite long). I then epoxied the bottom of this onto the top of the reset switch.

The plastic button I was using had some bits that poked out alongside the switch. When I glued the bracket onto the top of the switch I found the glue squeezed out onto this plastic, so I had to insert a piece of paper between the switch and the plastic (only thing thin enough) to prevent them being glued together (which would have meant you couldn't depress the switch). Once the epoxy had dried, I managed to get most of the paper out, but there was some left in the area where the actual glue was. Thankfully, pressing the button depressed the switch and ripped the paper through the middle, so this did work to prevent them being stuck together. It was a bit rough when pressing the button, so I sprayed some WD40 on the glued area and this sorted that out.

For attaching the switch to the case I could now put a screw through a hole in the side of the lowest 5.25″ bay and into a hole in the bracket. I was thinking I would need to drill out a hole in the bracket and use a screw with a nut on the other side, as I couldn't fit a screw into the bracket's existing hole. But Will tried it with a more wood screw type screw, and this went in okay.

The mounting solution for the power button, viewed from below

The button I'm using did have a hole to insert a power LED into (so the button lights up when the PC is on). But I don't like coloured lights near my PC (bad for colour accuracy) and I can tell if it's on by if the fans are spinning or not. So I left this out.

External SATA

Since I am still going to be using this as my current PC until I get the new one up and running, I needed some way of connecting hot-swap HDs. I need one for my 2.5″ SATA SSD that I store my work on, and one for my 3.5″ SATA HDs used for daily backups.

External SATA cables

So for this I just ran a couple of long SATA cables and a power cable with a molex to SATA then SATA to 2x SATA power adapter attached. While not quite as convenient as a trayless backplane, it should still be pretty easy to connect / disconnect the drives as needed. And unlike a backplane, it doesn't matter the physical size of the disk being plugged in.

Cable Management

In terms of cable management, it's not something this case really provides. And using a non-modular PSU like the one I'm using, just worsens the problem. The PCI-e power cables and 2nd SATA / Molex cable that I wasn't using, I just tucked up in the corner of the case. The other cables I tried to neaten up / tie together as best I could.

Top down view

Spare cables pushed into the corner

Front I/O and fan cables (inc. extender cable for the power switch cable)

The fan cables I used a single header to four fans adapter. The Gigabyte fan (which I think comes from this case) has about a 5cm fan cable, and the Noctua fan only has around a 10cm cable. So the use of the adapter cable was more for giving enough extension to allow plugging the fans in rather than the motherboard not having enough fan headers.

Molex power for the fan splitter cable

USB-C cable and the 3.5″ hard-drive mounted

Drive bays

For adding in 3.5″ hard drives, with the motherboard in the case I found that I couldn't insert the drive into the top slots. To be able to do this I'd need to remove the RAM and the front fan on the CPU cooler. So this case design would not be suitable if you needed to keep the machine on when swapping out a drive (assuming you had to use those drive slots).

As I'm only currently putting a single HD in it, I just put the drive in a lower slot. Even if I did have to use those slots that are blocked by the RAM / cooler fan, it wouldn't be a big problem as the only time I would need to do that would be when installing the drive.

Hotswap bays are best for allowing easy changing of drives, but I'm not really a fan of them for permanently installed drives. This is because they tend to have very poor airflow over the drives, so the drives get very hot and are more likely to die.

Case orientation

I initially placed the motherboard in the case for a quick test, before I had removed the CPU heatsink I intended on keeping for use with the new PC. And I found that actually it did fit and the case lid would close up okay with this larger heatsink (Noctua NH-D15S). So I am now thinking I will do another similar mod on one of these cases for my new PC, rather than using the 5U Server chassis I was using previously / intending on using for the new PC.

The only negative of this is that the case lid / side panel has a raised area above the CPU. I don't know what the reason for this is, but it will prevent stacking one machine on top of another when using them in desktop / rack orientation.

Raised bump on the side panel over the CPU area

The case is around 4U and on my shelf two of these stacked would fit nicely. I think what I would need to end up doing is running the bottom one with the side / top panel removed. I did look to see if there was such a thing as a PCI-e to PCI-e link device for connecting 2 PCs together, as the top PC could also have it's bottom panel removed then a cable used to link the 2 machines together. However, it seems that while such a thing (though not just a simple cable, it would need a logic board) would be possible, it doesn't exist.

The reason I prefer rack mount orientation is because it puts the weight of the heavy CPU cooler pushing down on the CPU (as it should be), rather than trying to bend the motherboard as it would be with the case in tower orientation. Similarly, with a GPU (though I don't have a decent one currently), rack orientation puts the weight of the card pushing down into the slot rather than pulling down on the slot as it would be in a tower case.

For watercooling I can understand a tower case. Similarly, for basic GPUs and stock / cheap CPU coolers, a tower case orientation may well make sense. But for weighty air coolers (both on CPU and GPU), rack / desktop orientation is much more sensible.

For my new PC I'm thinking rather than the wire mesh front I might go for some wood, then drill lots of holes in it for airflow. But we will have to see how that goes.

PS/2 mouse not working via KVM with Windows XP

I've been trying to get a couple of old PCs and servers running recently. I have (or at least plan to have) them connected up to a KVM switch so I don't have to faff around plugging and unplugging the keyboard / video / mouse when I want to switch to a different machine.

But the Pentium 4 era Windows XP machine doesn't seem to accept the PS/2 mouse when it is plugged in via the KVM. Plug the same mouse directly into the PS/2 port on the PC and it is fine, just not via the KVM. I initially thought it was a dodgy cable (I checked plugged one of the servers into the same ports on the KVM, and the mouse worked fine, so I knew it wasn't the KVM). So I purchased another couple of cables, which arrived today - but still the same issue.

I've now found the cause / fix for this, so I thought I'd post it here. In the BIOS Advanced > Peripheral Configuration > Mouse Contoller had to be set to Enabled.

The BIOS on the particular machine gives a helpful description of the meaning of this setting. You can set to Disabled to disable the PS/2 mouse port and free up an interupt input (IRQ). Mine was set to Auto, which is meant to free the interupt input if no mouse is plugged in, but use it for the mouse if one is detected. So it must be that due to the KVM, the mouse prescence wasn't being detected and so the PS/2 mouse port was being disabled. Changing the setting to Enabled (always enable to PS/2 port for mouse) fixed the issue.

RTL9210 NVMe USB3.1 vs SATA SSD

Quite a while back I bought a "USB3.1 Type-C Enclosure" for use with my Corsair Force MP510 512GB NVMe drive. After I purchased it, I found that it was only going at / below USB 3.0 speeds, but with a different NVMe drive installed, it would work at 3.1 speed (or at least above 3.0 speeds). I'd not managed to find any fix for this, so I've just been using it since then at the USB 3.0 speeds.

I've been working lately with my web development site files on my home PC's internal SSD, which isn't great as it means I can't take them to work (or anywhere else) with me. Previously I had been using a Sandisk Extreme USB 3.0 memory stick, but I'd been having quite a few issues with that (it's quite a few years old now), hence why I had moved them to the internal SSD. This weekend I was trying to tidy up my web development files, so I thought I would move them to the MP510 NVMe drive in the USB 3.1 caddy, which I currently just use for various VM VHDs. It wouldn't be as fast as the internal SSD, but at least it would be portable and faster / more reliable than the USB stick.

I thought I would take a look again at seeing if I could fix the issue with the speed, and another problem it has, which is dropping connection when on a USB 3.1 socket. First thing I tried was updating the ASMedia USB drivers for my motherboard to the latest version. Unfortunately that made no difference.

The board for the NVMe to USB caddy uses a Realtek RTL9210 chipset. I managed to find a firmware update to 1.23.15.111620 for the chip. (Finding the firmware update for this and the latest USB drivers for my motherboard was a pain - it seems you have to find them on third party sites and the manufacturers don't release them directly. Yes, motherboard manufacturers do have driver updates on their sites, but these tend to be old ones.) The update went fine, after doing this I ran CrystalDisk Mark on the drive, then unplugged the drive to move it from the USB 3.0 socket it was curently plugged into, to a USB 3.1 socket.

But the disk didn't show up, and when I went into Disk Management it said the disk needed initialising. I tried rebooting, unplugging and re-plugging a few times, tried it in a different PC, but no luck. So I took the drive out of the caddy, in order to try it bare. Unfortunately my PC only has one M.2 slot, and this is used for the boot drive. So I couldn't test it in there.

I looked through all my adapters, hoping for an NVMe riser cable or PCI-e to NVMe riser cable, but the closest I had was a "NFHK N-M201 Ver. 2.0" PCI-e to NVMe M.2 card. I plugged this into a x4 speed slot on the motherboard and thankfully the drive did show up okay.

MP510 NVMe drive via PCI-e to NVMe adapter card

I then tried a PCIe x1 - PCIe x16 riser, with the cable and x16 slot board outside the case (to allow for easy plugging / unplugging of the drive without opening the case up). Then plugged the PCIe to NVMe board into this. This worked, but speeds weren't great.

MP510 NVMe drive via PCI-e 1x to 16x riser and PCI-e to NVMe adapter card

I had issues with my PC refusing to boot, but eventually tracked it down to my use of a USB 2.0 extension cable that only had a single 4 pin USB connected into it, leaving 4 bare pins. As I had been messing about inside my PC I think I must've moved this cable so the pins were touching something metal and shorting out. I couldn't find any electrical tape that wasn't rubbish so I just covered up the bare pins with some selotape to resolve the issue.

Next I tried a simple PCIe x1 - x1 riser. For some reason they had made it with the end of the slot blocked off (so you could only physically fit a x1 card into it). So I had to dremel out the end of it to let the x4 size PCIe to NVMe adapter fit. But this gave the same results as on the x1 - x16 riser.

MP510 NVMe drive via PCI-e 1x to 1x riser and PCI-e to NVMe adapter card

I then tried a Crucial MX500 1TB SATA SSD I'd purchased recently and not used, with a SATA to USB 3.0 adapter. But this just crashed Crystal Disk Mark. So then I tried it connected via SATA, and the speeds were actually better (at least for sequential reads and writes) than the NVMe drive.

MX500 SATA drive via SATA

After that I tried again with the NVME to USB caddy in a USB 3.1 port, and it now worked. But results weren't any better.

MP510 NVMe drive via RTL9210 NVMe to USB in USB 3.1 socket

MP510 NVMe drive via RTL9210 NVMe to USB in USB 3.0 socket

So it looks like my way forward is just using the SATA SSD connected via SATA. I'm not sure why the NVMe drive in the PCI-e adapter is so slow, particularly on the x1 risers. The only thing I can think of is if the N-M201 PCIe to NVMe adapter card was actually PCIe 2.0 speed rather than 3.0 - but I'm not sure how that would be possible when it's nothing more than traces from the PCI-e slot to the M.2 slot and an LED.

The MP510 drive attached to a PCIe - NVMe adapter, inserted into a PCIe 1x - 1x riser, the empty PCIe 1x - 16x riser, and MX500 connected via SATA.

Alesis Melody / Harmony 32 keyboard is the same model

I've been looking at getting a (music) keyboard for my niece's 6 year old birthday. Ideally I was looking for one that doesn't require external power and has built-in speakers (i.e. doesn't require external speakers). Just to make it easy for her to use without having to plug various things in each time she wants to use it. I imagine she will mainly use it plugged into the mains power, but having the option of using it on batteries as well is nice.

Unfortunately finding a 'good' keyboard at a reasonable price that is not merely a midi controller wasn't that easy. Most midi controller keyboards are pretty decent, but not suitable as she doesn't always have access to a computer / tablet to plug it into. It would also complicate the process in that she wouldn't be able to just turn the keyboard on and play.

I started looking at the Korg Volca FM. This offers a large range of adjustments to the sounds you can make, plus a nice range of built-in sounds. The keyboard is only very small, but I would think it would be fine for a 6 year old. It also includes an arp and looper. Polyphony is limited to 3 notes, but for the price (~£100) that's not bad. The main issue with this is that adjusting the sounds seemed quite complicated with quite a bit of menu diving.

I then looked at the Yamaha Reface DX and CS keyboards. The CS keyboard has a good range of sliders that she could have fun playing around with to adjust the sound. But it doesn't have any built-in sounds. The Reface DX has a good range of built-in sounds (presets), and allows adjusting the sounds, but this requires menu diving. Both have speakers and can use battery power. Used they can be had for around £250. Reviews on both models seemed very positive.

I then found the Novation Mininova. This combines the best of both the reface DX and CS - loads of preset sounds plus lots of knobs, buttons and sliders to immediately adjust the sound with no menu diving needed. Plus a vocoder that I'm sure my niece would love. The problem was that it requires mains power and separate speakers. Plus the cost, like the Reface models, is around £250 used.

I also thought if I got her such a good keyboard she wouldn't have as much fun when visiting me and playing on my keyboards. I may get a Mininova myself though as they do look fun to use.

Finally, I found the Alesis Melody 32 keyboard. This is much more of a 'toy' keyboard, but for a 6 year old I think many of these 'toy' features will be appreciated. It has loads of voices, rhythms and some drum buttons (something missing on the synths), demo patterns, performance recorder, and MIDI. Plus the price was good - only £40.

Unfortunately I couldn't really find many reviews of this keyboard. It's further complicated by the fact that it seems to be marketed (and labeled) as both the Melody 32 and the Harmony 32. They both have pages on Alesis' website, and you can see they have the same content apart from the name change: https://www.alesis.com/products/view2/melody-32 and https://www.alesis.com/products/view2/harmony-32. They even went as far as changing the name on the product shots - and did a good job, I can't tell which ones are the originals.

It's missing a lot of features the more expensive keyboards and synths have, e.g. no pitch bend, no velocity sensitivity, and not even octave up / down buttons. The buttons also apparently don't send MIDI, only the keys. But for the price, and for a 6 year old, it seems like a good deal to me. It won't be a keyboard she can grow with as much, but it also won't be a case of spending lots of money for features she may never use. I just have to hope it works okay and doesn't break easily.

Annoying

This morning I found my VM I use for my web development work wouldn't boot. When I viewed it in Virtualbox it would get as far as EXT4-fs error loading journal then stop. Unlike my previous issues I've had, it wasn't even getting as far as being able to mount the filesystem read-only.

I first ran a Windows chkdsk on the physical disk the VM HD was stored on, which said it fixed some issues. I then rebooted the PC, but still had the same issue on starting the VM.

With no way to get to a console with the VM in its current state, I had to wait for ages while I downloaded an Ubuntu ISO, as I didn't have a linux ISO handy to boot the VM from. After eventually getting that downloaded, I booted from that and ran an fsck, which fixed various issues. I also ran e2fsck -C0 -p -f -v /dev/sda1 as per Fix EXT4-fs error loading journal - I'm not sure if this step was necessary, but I thought it wouldn't hurt to run it since the error I was getting was related to this.

With this done I managed to boot the VM okay.

While I was waiting for the Ubuntu ISO to download I decided to take a look at an HP Pavilion 360 laptop that I'd reinstalled Windows on but was missing some drivers. From looking up the vendor and device IDs for the missing drivers I knew these were the Intel Bluetooth and Trusted Execution Engine drivers. The drivers on HP's website (both Win 10 and Win 8) didn't work, neither did any Intel drivers I could find.

Both HP and Intel's software that is meant to automatically find and install updated drivers for your system didn't find the correct drivers either. (Actually the HP software was one of the first things I installed on it when first setting it up after reinstalling Win 10, and it only found 1 driver I think out of the many that were needed).

The drivers listed on HP's website for the laptop seem pretty bad - the card reader drivers didn't work and I ended up having to find some from a Lenovo website to install.

So today I figured I'd put back in the original drive (I replaced the original SSHD with an SSD to try and speed the laptop up as it is extremely slow, though it didn't actually help much). Then in device manager view the driver files for the bluetooth and TXE devices, find them, and copy them. Then put the SSD back in, and install the copied drivers.

But after getting the laptop unscrewed and apart, and removing the SSD, I realised that this was a pretty stupid way of doing it. Why not just boot off the SSD, have the original disk on a USB to SATA dongle, then tell Windows to look for the drivers on the original disk. So I tried that but the original disk kept losing connection.

So I ended up having to plug the original disk via SATA to USB into my PC, copying the system32 (and I also copied the system and SysWOW64 dirs in case) onto a USB stick, then putting that USB stick into the laptop so it could grab the drivers from there. Thankfully though, this did work and I now have all the drivers on the laptop.

Before finishing with it, I ran hwinfo on it to see if the CPU temps were getting really high, but they weren't. Around 40-50 when idle, or 50-60 when watching a YouTube video. So I still don't know why it's so slow.

I did manage to get some work done in the afternoon. Then in the evening I had an annoying issue where I couldn't get one of my local dev sites I was trying to work on to load. So I spent ages trying to fix that, in the end it turned out that some of the .htaccess rules had been removed, messing things up. This was with a WordPress site, I presume either WordPress or a plugin had updated the file and removed some of the rules needed for the site to be accessible. This must've happened at least a day ago as my backup from yesterday was the same, I had to grab the .htaccess file from the live site to get my local site up and running again.

So I didn't get much work done today, but it wasn't a total disaster / waste of time.

Sappy 2021

Unfortunately it seems the eM Client software I set up with all my email accounts about a month or two ago was only a trial. And so I am now without easy access to my emails. I looked again to see if there are any suitable mail clients, but the only one I can find is Evolution, which doesn't work on Windows. And since I haven't got my new Ryzen 5900X processor I ordered in early Nov when it came out yet, I can't build my new PC with a linux OS I could use Evolution on.

So today I've been working with my main personal and work accounts (1 each) open in Outlook online. When I went on 'open an additional mailbox' on my work account, it comes up with a "Open another mailbox" prompt. If you click in the text input, it then pops a box with a list of "Suggested contacts", all of whom are people I communicate with over email, and none of which are additional mailboxes I have access to.

So evidently MS thinks you'd like to try and open one of your contact's mailboxes rather than one of your own. I'm sure many people would find viewing their contacts' mailboxes quite interesting, but I would guess that MS doesn't actually allow that. I think the reason for showing your suggested contacts as to which mailbox you'd like to open is more just a case of Microsoft logic.

In the evening I made some whole grapefruit muffins, and after trying one I realised why I couldn't find any whole grapefruit muffin recipes - they are quite bitter (particularly in aftertaste). So I made some cream cheese icing to go with them that helps subdue the bitterness a bit.

I also spent ages on Ali Express putting together a shopping basket of parts to hopefully make something like a DIY Roland Handsonic. The end cost was nearly $100 though, it's amazing how quickly the cost adds up for a few cheap parts. It seems Ali Express have also started adding an extra 20% on top of the order at checkout, presumably because the UK is no longer in the EU. Though I don't really know why that would make any difference.

I didn't need to purchase any of the parts now - they're not on some special super deal or anything. But with the length of time things take to get here from China, I thought I might as well get it all ordered, then in a couple of months, if I do have any time, I can look at the project instead of having to wait then for parts to arrive or having to pay much higher prices from UK sellers.