How to remove the recommendation section from the Windows 11 start menu appears to be an incredibly common question asked by people using Windows 11 for the first time (or even people who have been using Windows 11 for a few years and dislike the current state of the start menu). Microsoft seem to really want people to see their recommendations… however all is not lost, their is a registry tweak which can disable the recommended section of the Windows 11 start menu. At the time of writing this works on the latest Windows 11 24H2, all you need to do is create a few registry keys. To do that the most simple way is to copy the text below in to Notepad: Then save the file to somewhere such as your desktop as startmenufix.reg Then simply double click on startmenufix.reg to add the above keys to your registry: After doing so log off, log back on and the recommended section of the Windows 11 start menu will be gone! Now why can’t this just be a simple toggle in the settings app? You can also deploy this registry tweak via group policy, so anyone who logs on to a…
The CWWK Q670 is certainly an interesting motherboard, especially if your goal is to build a low powered home NAS with up to 8x SATA hard drives. In summery I can get my CWWK Q670 NAS build to idle at 18w, that is with 4x hard drives spun down and various Docker containers running an NVMe drive. That is with some tweaking however, so do read on if you are interested in why I chose the CWWK Q670, the hardware I used and the tweaks I did to get down to 18w at idle running UnRaid. Firstly why the CWWK Q670? The CWWK Q670 supports 8x SATA hard drives natively via the Alder Lake-S PCH SATA Controller on the Intel 600 Series Chipset. In short this is ideal as this SATA controller supports ASPM, meaning we should be able to significantly reduce power usage when our NAS is idle and the hard drives are spun down. In addition we also do not need to use a PCI-E SATA controller to use all 8x drive bays, which would increase power consumption. Other cheaper Intel 11th or 12th Gen “NAS Motherboards” from Topton, BKHD and CWWK seem to use the JMB585 SATA…
The user boxes on Konica Minolta Bizhub Printers are handy to quickly print additional copies of common office documents, however what happens when the printer has been in service for over a decade and time comes to replace it? you’ll probably find no one has any idea where the (essential) data on the printer originated from. So the question than becomes if its possible to get a digital copy of the user box data off the printer, so it can be stored on the new printer. Although its not immediately obvious this is indeed possible using the Web UI of the printer. The printers Web UI does offer the option to download a PDF, however on our Bizhub C220 this process was very slow as it had to be done for every document in the user boxes individually if you didn’t want them to all be combined in to one huge PDF. Thankfully their is another way, although not perfect it does allow you to export the user boxes in batched of 10, all to individual PDF’s named exactly as their were on the printer. Below I have detailed how I managed to do this for over 100 documents relatively…
Currently they are some great low powered “NAS” motherboards from Chinese manufactures such as BKHD, CWWK and Topton which feature very low power 11th Gen Intel processors, such as the Celeron N5105 or Pentium N6005. While these processors will never win any awards for raw processing power, they are very power efficient and support Intel Quick Sync. Quick Sync allows for video to be hardware transcoded on these low powered processors, with next to no load on the CPU and very little power usage. This is perfect for a NAS / low powered home server you might also wish to run Plex on, Plex can make use of Intel Quick sync to hardware transcode media to a different format the device streaming the media can play, with very little power and cpu load. The only problem is hardware transcoding does not seem to work by default on Unraid with 11th Gen Intel Processors. The fix however is quite simple, like anything, once you know how… I spent a lot of time trying to figure out this issue, this is how I managed to fix Plex hardware transcoding on Unraid with my 11th Gen intel NAS build. First log on to…
Upgrading to pfSense 23.05.1-RELEASE on our Netgate SG-4860 caused the device to encounter an interrupt loop, leading to higher than usual CPU usage. This is actually mentioned in the release notes for pfSense 23.01: Devices based on “ADI” or “RCC” hardware, such as the 4860, 8860, and potentially other similar models, may have issues with the ichsmb0 and/or ehci0 devices encountering an interrupt loop, leading to higher than usual CPU usage (NG 8916). Despite that I never actually had any issues with pfSense 23.01, however upgrading to 23.05.1 caused this issue. Everything otherwise worked fine, so this was on my to look in to list due to having other projects ongoing. Anyway about two weeks later it would appear /var/log/system.log is now 17gb and our SG-4860 has run out of storage, meaning no configuration settings can be saved. I also could not access the console over a serial connection as I was simply spammed with “ichsmb0: interrupt loop, status=0x60” and unable to type anything, so not an ideal situation to be in. However the web-ui still functioned so I could access Diagnostics > Command Prompt du -Pshx /* allowed me to figure out something in /var was using all the…