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Update Redmi Note 9 Pro (joyeuse/miatoll) to MIUI 12.5 (Android 11) preserving your data

TLTR (Too Long To Read) 😉

After reading the title you could ask: "What will I found here? Isn't this suppposed to be the default behavior with MIUI updates?"
Well... sadly, no.

vanBasco website closed, any alternative?

Sadly vanBasco's official website has been closed and is not available anymore.
It was a reference for all of the MIDI enthusiasts like me for more than two decades…

We'll miss its powerful MIDI search engine, giving clean results without the huge pile of garbage returned by other general purpose search engines.

We'll also miss their great vanBasco Karaoke Player, which was (and still is) my preferred lightweight MIDI player on Windows, still working on Windows 11 💪 (it all started on Windows 95).

How to calculate MD5/SHA1/SHA256 checksums of a file without an external tool

Checksum is the easiest way to check if the content of a file is as it was expected to be or was changed/broken after a file transfer or an internet download.

A lot of websites (like CoolSoft) show the expected MD5/SHA1/SHA256 checksums beside each download link, so users can check "download health" after it completes.

Cleanup osTicket tables when a ticket is deleted

osTicket allows administrator to delete a ticket and (supposedly) all of its related entities.

Sadly I've found that ticket deletion is only partially implemented: ticket events (threads) are left untouched and orphaned.
This leads to wrong statistics in dashboard and, worst, lot of garbage left in database.

Additional tables that must be cleaned up are:

Antivirus false positives are a plague for small developers

In the last few weeks some antiviruses detected one of my well-known softwares (VirtualMIDISynth) as malicious.

These detections are false positive because:

  1. I wrote that software and I've built its setup, so I know what I've put inside it
  2. I don't like malware/adware/badware too
  3. I don't like to associate my name to something bad

That said, what other arguments I have to support the statements above, other that my own word? Sadly, almost none!

Proxmox 4.1 kernel panic: downgrade DRBD resources from DRBD 9 to 8.4

I've upgraded my Proxmox environment to the latest 4.1, featuring the brand new (and still in preview state) DRBD 9.

Proxmox documentation is not so clear about it's preview state and, also, users have no choice about the DRBD version to use; Proxmox 4.1 only has DRBD 9, no choice.

My father died last week...

My father died last week at 75, after a hard fought battle with cancer.
He just started his new life as a grandfather, a few years ago.
Last month his disease worsened, and got worse day after day till May 25 when God called him.

He was a great car repairer, but this was only his "official" job.
His brain was always running, he spent his whole life creating a lot of things.
He was my (and a lot of other people's) inspirer, the person to ask for help or ideas.
When I had a problem, he had a fix; when I had a question, he always had the answer.

What happened to MIDI Mapper on Windows 8 (and later)?

The number of help requests I'm getting from Windows 8 users trying to use MIDI programs is growing day by day.
I've done some research and tests on the arguments, but the available documentation is really "poor" (confirming my feeling about Microsoft intention to drop it out).
This is what I've find out.

Let's get back to Windows XP era, where MIDI was "exposed" to the public and it had its own place into "Sound and Multimedia" control panel application.

Opening the Zopo ZP300+ to fix GPS issues

My brand new Zopo ZP300+ smartphone has really low GPS sensitivity. This makes satellites fix a really long task, even helping it with apps like FasterGPS.

Latest ROM (October 2012) improved it a little bit, but the issue seems to be hardware related.

Aardvark Firefox Addin for Firefox 14 (and previous)

As a long time Aardwark user, now that Firefox 14 is out I'm still missing an official version that works with it.

Well, the original Aardvark 3.0 works perfectly in latest Firefox version, but it can't be installed because its manifest (a file inside the addin that says FF which versions that addin is compatible with) reports FF 3.6.* as max version.
Editing this info is not so difficult, but some inexperienced users can't do it.

Pagine