Orico enclosures in a nutshell

 Seems Orico (Leading Technology as stated on the product's box) continues to sell broken products. In this case their 2521U3 2.5" hard drive enclosure when connected to USB3 ports of different machines (two desktops, 4 laptops) cannot be used - nonstop connect/disconnect Windows sound. And the chip used  in the enclosure is ASM22xx. TLDR; 5Gbps not possible with this enclosure when connected to USB3, but perfectly stable at USB2

This enclosure is my 5th from Orico, only two of them work as expected (based on the claims printed on the box)

How to clone OS from non-RAID drive to RAID1 on Asus X370-PRO motherboard

 Let's go straight-forward to the solution:

1. Power off the computer and make your SATA bootable drive to be connected to SATA's second column upper port (from left to right)

2. Install an empty NVMe drive in the M.2 slot on the motherboard

3. Start the PC and clone your bootable SATA non-RAID drive to the NVMe with Macrium Reflect

4. Shutdown the PC and remove the bootable non-RAID SATA drive

5. Connect your two SSDs to first two SATA ports

6. Start the PC and change drive settings in the BIOS to be [SATA mode = RAID] and [NVMe RAID = Enabled], then save and exit

7. Activate RAID configuration utility when prompted for [Ctrl + R] shortcut

8. Make new RAID1 array from both SSD. Save and exit

9. When your Windows boot, clone the NVMe to RAID1 array (your RAID drivers must be installed or you can't see the array) and shutdown the PC

10. Remove the NVMe

11. Start the PC and if everything is ok your Windows will boot normally. Test with CrystalDiskMark the array and check if the Read/Write speeds are around 1100/500 MB/s, something a lot lower should point to problems with the cables/drives or probably OS processes that bottleneck drive I/O 

12. Profit

---

USB3 fanboys: No, it's not wise to try to clone OS from USB3 connected drive because INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE blue screen error can pop-up and burst your holiday bubble

---

This combat mission was created by your friend Asus (written in their manual):

How to check if the HDD or SSD are 4k aligned

Just type in command prompt as administrator:

wmic partition get BlockSize, StartingOffset, Name, Index

The last column in the output is the offset in bytes for where each partition starts, if this value is divisible by 4096 without a reminder then the partition is aligned. For example:

C:\Windows\system32>wmic partition get BlockSize, StartingOffset, Name, Index

BlockSize  Index  Name                   StartingOffset

512        0      Disk #0, Partition #0  1048576

512        1      Disk #0, Partition #1  105906176

512        0      Disk #1, Partition #0  135266304

512        0      Disk #2, Partition #0  1048576

This shows that all partitions are aligned (under NTFS)

Worst game servers in Europe #2: [BlER]Wiese >>> Italy [ONLY] <<< [css] Counter Strike Source

Name: [BlER]Wiese >>> Italy [ONLY] <<< [css] Counter Strike Source

IP address: 94.249.194.112:27015

Reason: Decided to do some casual shooting after years after abandoning the fps genre ... First time joining in that server and instantly detected one wall-hack cheater in it. Got kicked when pointed the obvious

Dyson Sphere Program - optimization training game

Dyson Sphere Program

Warning! Shortest review ahead!


Goal - eat all planet resources and build Dyson spheres

Pros - trains you in optimization techniques. Players doing OCD-layered buildings don't realize the power of spaghetti code

Cons - not fully automated and half of the time in-game camera tries to cut your nerves

Conclusion - The game is not bad, it's a casual production simulator at galactic scale. Give it a try (around 100-120 hours of gameplay to first finished sphere)

Introduction to scoop

Scoop is a tiny command-line installer for Windows, which helps to organize user's apps in more convenient way. All of them are installed by default in home directory or in selected by the use directory, and of course this is not the only feature: - updating all of them with one command - continuously growing database of supported apps - fully portable between Windows version that support at least PowerShell 5 and .NET Framework 4.5 Those features mean the users finally have a tool similar to Linux package managers like dpkg/apt, yum/dnf, portage (btw very powerful), slackpkg, Homebrew for MacOS and Chocolatey/Ninite/OneGet for Windows. It works like this (assuming the user OS meets the requirements):

1. Open a PowerShell command prompt 

2. Write "scoop search nameofyourapp"

3. If it's found in the buckets (collections of apps in scoop) write "scoop install name-of-your-app"

4. After successful app installation (scoop warns if there are problems during installation procedure and suggests what to do to fix them) the user must open "Start Menu -> All Programs -> Scoop Apps" and click on the corresponding shortcut to start the freshly installed application

There are also limitations: - number of bucketed apps is still less than those in Chocolatey - sometimes changes in app version or small code errors in app manifests block the user from successfully installing or updating desired apps. Usually an update to scoop fixes that because the whole development is on GitHub where every scoop user can report the problems

GDPR compliance in a nutshell

Recently MongoDB added field encryption in version 4.2. This means if there's a request to delete all user data (stated in GDPR) administrator can delete the encryption key(s) which is used for access to the personal data. So no key - no data ... right ... but the data is still there and probably ready to be brute-force decrypted. Nice try, MongoDB

A simple check for power outages

Sometimes users leave their computers on for longer intervals than usual only to see later that they have stopped or worse - dead because there were power surges. Reasons for that - one of them is the power outage. Many haven't a good protection like UPS or backup power sources and it's good to know exactly when this happened. Relatively it helps to estimate when to shutdown the hardware preventing it from losing data or become broken. One simple way is to check when this occured with the following PowerShell command (assuming the user is using Windows Vista and above):

Get-EventLog -LogName System -EntryType Error | Where-Object {$_.EventID -eq 6008} | Select -Property Message | ForEach-Object { if ($_.Message -match "([0-9]{1,2}:.*[0-9]{4})") { Write-Output "System shutdown at $($Matches[1])"}}

This parses whole Event Log on the machine with level Error in System Log where the event ID is unexpected system shutdown (eventID 6008) and outputs the results using regexp for extracting the date and time:

System shutdown at 2:05:00 PM on ‎3/‎1/‎2019
System shutdown at 1:32:30 PM on ‎2/‎27/‎2019
System shutdown at 9:28:38 AM on ‎1/‎25/‎2019
System shutdown at 2:45:59 PM on ‎1/‎21/‎2019
System shutdown at 4:15:13 PM on ‎1/‎10/‎2019
System shutdown at 9:57:27 AM on ‎1/‎10/‎2019
System shutdown at 3:16:15 PM on ‎12/‎27/‎2018
System shutdown at 6:33:47 PM on ‎12/‎23/‎2018
System shutdown at 6:29:35 PM on ‎12/‎23/‎2018
System shutdown at 6:26:43 PM on ‎12/‎23/‎2018
System shutdown at 5:53:58 PM on ‎12/‎23/‎2018
System shutdown at 5:34:58 PM on ‎12/‎23/‎2018
System shutdown at 10:40:03 AM on ‎12/‎23/‎2018
System shutdown at 10:19:27 AM on ‎11/‎24/‎2018
System shutdown at 3:47:47 PM on ‎11/‎17/‎2018
System shutdown at 3:07:32 PM on ‎10/‎14/‎2018

How to fix '32bit only' guest OS issue in VirtualBox

Recently installed on one of my test machines latest version (5.2.20) of VirtualBox and found that it's not possible to install and run properly a 64bit guest OS, the only option was 32bit. The culprit was 'Hyper-V' enabled feature on Windows 8.1 x64 while Intel's VT-x was enabled in BIOS (AMD-v for AMD cpus). So, to remove this '32bit only' restriction, go to 'Control Panel > Programs and Features > Turn Windows Features on or off' and uncheck the box in front of 'Hyper-V', click OK and restart the machine. Problem solved

Recently started to play Eve Online and already regret for that

Just a couple of random links:
The Real Reasons Player Population Is Declining
Eve Online Steam Charts
Bots Are Threatening Eve Online's Economy And Players Are Fed Up

Add to the equation too much clutter in the interface and that most of "successful" players are in fact already in large in-game groups where they multi-account and stay only for selling in-game currency ISK/PLEX/goods for real money gave me a big smile on my face :) This game called "Space simulator" is dead. DEAD.