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…

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a blog post, two and a half years it appears (or 938 days if we’re been exact!)

My last blog post was back in 2018 on EU Domains To Be Revoked From UK Citizens, Faith In .EU Domains Lost, this was rather concerning as I had no real desire to move away from my .eu domain name, it was short and summed up where in the world I was blogging from.

Needless to say this is one of the reasons that put me off blogging, what was the point if one day I’d loose that domain and not even be able to redirect any traffic to a newer domain? In addition I had various online accounts associated with this domain, so knowing I could loose the rights to it due to a political event, such as the UK leaving the EU was very concerning.

Exchange access to your Outlook.com or Hotmail.com inbox is now possible if you apply to join the new Outlook.com preview program. As mentioned above joining the Outlook.com preview program gets your email account converted in to an Exchange Inbox, meaning you can fully take advantage of Microsoft Outlook on the desktop. Changes you make to your inbox, calendar and contacts will sync in real time just like your Exchange inbox you might have at School or Work, as will the mail rules you create and so on. If you happen to be using Mac OS you can finally use your Outlook.com or Hotmail.com email account in the OSX Mail app or even Outlook for OSX without having to resort to using IMAP, meaning everything will sync and not just your email. If you have always wished your Outlook.com / Hotmail.com was a Microsoft exchange inbox then follow this link Outlook.com Preview Program Request Signup and get yourself on the list today. If you want to learn more about the new Outlook.com powered by Office 365 have a read of the New ways to get more done in Outlook.com blog by the Office 365 time.