0windows 8 logoMore WDS errors solved

Published by & filed under Windows.

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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0windows 8 logoAdding drivers to windows 10 boot image on WDS on Server 2012 R2

Published by & filed under Windows.

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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0Storage SpacesFree up disk space on Windows

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

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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0Constant Kodi Irritations

Published by & filed under Kodi. Last updated .

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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2Cheap WiFi SmartPlugs with SmartThings

Published by & filed under SmartHome & IoT. Last updated .

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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0Set up “home assistant” on a windows PC

Published by & filed under SmartHome & IoT.

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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