With the news that WiFi will get a new version next year, and that it will be called WiFi 6, I thought I’d knock up a little guide to the previous versions of WiFi that we’ve had
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Posts By: Jon Scaife
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More WDS errors solved
WDS really is quite an unfriendly system. Clunky, fiddly, and prone ot failure without helpful error information. After updating some of my unattended files I was no longer able to carry out unattended installations, but have eventually solved the series of misleading errors
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Wdsclient — There was a problem initializing wds mode
I’ve had this error several times over the years, and it always seems to be for a different reason. So below I will collate all the possible sources of the problem I have so far encountered, along with solutions
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Adding drivers to windows 10 boot image on WDS on Server 2012 R2
I have enough PCs in the house that I set up a WDS server to make it easier to reinstall windows if any of them go wrong. They have a lot of different hardware and so I needed to add some drivers to the boot image which is from a Windows 10 retail DVD. However, I got an error when trying to add them because the version of DISM used by WDS on server 2012 is older than the version required by Windows 10 images
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Free up disk space on Windows
Most PCs that I encounter have drives that are full. This was the case in the days of HDD, and with modern SSD typically being smaller it is even worse. A full drive will slow your PC down, as well as the annoyance of running out of space at a key moment. Here are a good range of ways of freeing up space
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Constant Kodi Irritations
A few years back I migrated from Windows Media Centre to Kodi (thanks to Microsoft for ending support and development of MC). Kodi is widely used and very versatile, however it has never worked quite flawlessly and I continue to come across a range of annoying issues. Where I have found a solution I will document it below
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Cheap WiFi SmartPlugs with SmartThings
SmartThings compatible smart plugs are annoyingly expensive — typically around £40. This is far too expensive to consider buying many of. There are however WiFi plugs available online for around £10 that don’t officially work with SmartThings. Most of them are based on the ESP8266 chip which can be reflashed with new firmware that will work with SmartThings. Below I document my trials and tribulations with hacking these plugs
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Energenie Mi|Home
I decided to try expanding my smartHome setup with some cheaper smartplugs from Energenie. Below I summarise my findings so far.
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Connect SmartThings to Windows PC’s and Kodi
I have several windows PCs in my house that run Kodi. I wanted to connect them to SmartThings for a range of purposes. There are various things that can be done depending on the functionality you want.
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Set up “home assistant” on a windows PC
As I’ve written about before I have a range of “smart home” devices that I’v ebeen gradually experimenting with. One of the greatest frustrations of linking some of them is that many force you to go via “the cloud” which even with high speed internet can lead to delays of multiple seconds for some tasks (“ok google, mute kodi”) for example. I’ve decided to give the free “home assistant” a try. As usual with anything linux based, getting it up and running just isn’t straight forward. Here’s how…
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