Category: Misc

Rationale I have been using an MSI B450 Pro Carbon for the longest time. It came with a very neat audio feature, called Nahimic Sound Sharing. Windows, by default, will only output audio to a single device. If you have two people trying to listen to music with their own headphones, you are out of… Continue reading Replacing Nahimic Sound Sharing with Alternative

WARNING: Currently this is broken, issue reported to Seagate. 1 – Download Seachest Lite from here. 2 – Open Computer Management and delete the existing partition on the drive you want to convert from 512 to 4KN Advanced Format 3 – Open a command prompt with Admin rights, and run the seachest lite with the… Continue reading How to switch your Seagate Exos X16 to 4KN Advanced Format on Windows

Rationale The year is 2022, and if you are serious about storing your data, you likely have an impressive NAS setup with ZFS, ECC Ram, etc. I have gone down the ZFS rabbit hole, but I’m still running a gigabit network, and adding a NAS or server to my setup will require me to upgrade… Continue reading ReFS with Integrity Streams on Windows 11 – Can it be trusted?

In my previous post I discussed performance differences between 512 vs 4096 bytes sector format, and showed that at least as far as testing goes, there does not seem to be any major performance difference. Still, using 4KN formatting for newer devices ensure they are operating in their native space, without any need for conversion… Continue reading How to switch your NVME SSD to 4KN Advanced Format

I have been using 4K native sector size on my Exos disks, and recently came across a way to convert NVME SSDs to run in native 4K sector size as well. If you have a Sabrent drive, there is an easy way to do it within Windows with their SSC Tool. If your drive does… Continue reading 512E vs 4KN NVME Performance

The SDS011 is an air quality sensor that can be used to monitor PM2.5 and PM10 levels. I have used it quite successfully to monitor the forest fires around my home in British Columbia. With the recent news about how harmful PLA particulate emissions from 3D printers can be, I was curious to see if… Continue reading Can the SDS011 monitor 3D printer particulate emissions?

I recently purchased some of these Seagate Enterprise drives, and looks like they shipped with the SN02 Firmware. Upgrading on Windows is quite easy. Just be aware I tested with the drives still clean, while not in RAID. If you were to run this on a live array, I strongly recommend doing one disk at… Continue reading How to Flash the Seagate Exos X16 from the SN02 to SN03 or SN04 Firmware

I never really had a fancy headset, but with a $100 Sony credit about to expire (courtesy of MBNA cancelling their Sony card offering), I decided to take the plunge and buy a Sony Headphone. After getting it charged up, I tried to plug it in on my PC. No sound 🙁 At first, I… Continue reading Front audio connector doesn’t work with my headphone: A potential solution

The issue If you check redflagdeals, there are a lot of Koodo deals from time to time. They also suggest “porting out” the number to Bell with a prepaid SIM. I tried that, but got interrupted in the middle of the process, and when I tried to continue, I got the error: “The number you… Continue reading Porting out to Bell: “The number you requested cannot be transferred to Bell at this time. Please call 1 888 466-2453 for more information”