Saturday, December 31, 2022

Dual boot two windows operating systems

I wanted a windows installation where I could write my book and escape from the apps of my everyday windows operating system. You will find plenty of articles about dual boot with Linux, but I couldn't find one on how to dual boot two windows installations. 

In hindsight, after talking to one of my colleagues, there is an easier way to do the same thing using just the windows boot disk and navigating through the UI wizard. This article is still relevant if you want to understand what the wizard does, if you want complete control, or if you want to upgrade the OS in just one of your partitions.

Thursday, December 8, 2022

Convert VHS mpg files to mp4 to import in DaVinci Resolve

I recently got my hands on a bunch of mpg files ripped from VHS cassettes (32 files spanning 157 GB), and I wanted to edit them with DaVinci Resolve. To my surprise, mpg files are not supported, so I had to convert them. I choose to use FFmpeg and convert them into H.264/MPEG-4 AVC compression format with Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) using the following command:

Wednesday, December 1, 2021

Genomics in Azure

Genomics analysis is an interesting field that has high computational and storage requirements. On top of that, there are compliance requirements, especially if the analysis happens on top of patient clinical data. This makes genomic research activities great candidates to run in an compliant elastic cloud, non other than Azure cloud which even has the recent NEN 7510 standard that is a mandatory requirement for all Netherland organizations that process patient health information.

Thursday, September 9, 2021

Network link is disconnected

You get a new device that has a 1Gb ethernet card (mine has the I219-LM) and you start getting random network disconnects. Been there and it is frustrating. There are a couple of reasons why this could happen (faulty drivers, faulty hardware, more than 100m from router) but in my case, it was a faulty cable that was easily identified with a ethernet cable continuity checker.

Thursday, December 24, 2020

Remove unknown locale qaa-Latn from windows

Got a fresh window 10 installation where I configure US keyboard as default and added Greek as well (the language with π and Σ symbols). I noticed that when I was switching languages a 3rd locale (qaa-Latn) appeared in the list which I couldn't remove from the windows list. In my case the keyboard was emitting Greek characters but the windows spelling couldn't recognize the words. In order to remove the extra locale I had to use the following powershell.

Sunday, September 20, 2020

Set proxy for command line in windows

 Ever wanted to force tools like curl and az cli to pass their traffic through a proxy while running them in cmd.exe?

Set the following environment variables and netsh will automatically pick up them and use them for all network connectivity.

Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Download new chromium based edge via powershell

If you ever need to download the stable version of the chromium based Edge via powershell, you can use the following one liner:


# Stable
# Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://c2rsetup.officeapps.live.com/c2r/downloadEdge.aspx?ProductreleaseID=Edge&platform=Default&version=Edge&source=EdgeStablePage&Channel=Stable&language=en" -OutFile "EdgeSetup.exe"
# Dev
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://c2rsetup.officeapps.live.com/c2r/downloadEdge.aspx?ProductreleaseID=Edge&platform=Default&version=Edge&source=EdgeStablePage&Channel=Dev&language=en" -OutFile "EdgeSetup.exe"