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I recently followed a discussion on booting from a Time Machine volume. One participant was 100% sure that when the Time Machine volume did not contain a separate, bootable partition, booting from the volume was not possible. This is wrong. Misunderstanding this might have big consequences, after all we are talking about backups here. The OSX bootloader supports booting from files, when the file is stored in a known filesystem, i.e. the bootloader must understand the filesystem.  This file is then handled as a partition containing a filesystem. Time Machine stores OSX’s hidden recovery partition as a file on the Time Machine volume. When running Time Machine for the first time, aRead More →

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The Apogee MiniDAC is a wonderful converter. But how does it work? Well, first of all, you can’t download the schematics from the net. So how it exactly works I don’t know. But looking at the components inside reveals at least some info. Therefor my guess is as follows: 1. Two times CS8416 input digital receiver/PLL chip. Looking at the number of inputs and print layout, I guess the two units are needed because of the number of inputs to be switched. 2. Wavefront AL1402, that’s an ADAT receiver chip which decodes the 8 channel (optical) ADAT stream into 4 stereo pairs. 3. Xilink Spartan XC2S50Read More →

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I hate registry changes in general but this one I like. It shows the various tasks and services that are run during startup and shutdown in the same way as when Windows installs updates. Open the following node in the registry using your favorite registry editor: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System and add the following entry of type dword32 with value “1”. “VerboseStatus”=dword:00000001 It’s that simple and it makes your PC look a lot more intelligent.  Read More →

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Playing around with Hyper-V is fun. It’s one of the core components of Microsoft Azure. This Cloud computing thing is (of course) nothing magical. Microsoft has described their cloud in technical detail in one of their free ebooks. The main components are Win Server 2012 R2, System Center, Hyper-V and RDP. Microsofts power lies in the scalability (virtual server, virtual network) and management (System Center 2012). Microsoft provides full featured time limited evaluation versions of Win 8.1 Enterprise and Win Server 2012 R2 for free on their Software Evaluation site. Win 8.1 Enterprise can be used for 90 days and Win Server 2012 R2 forRead More →