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.