High CPU usage on Surface Pro3 running Windows 10

System interrupt uses one CPU core

Windows 8.1

I already had this issue running Windows 8.1 and could work around it, simply disabling the realtek high definition audio driver, that seems to be the docking station's audio system.

Windows 10

The problem came back with Windows 10. But this time disabling drivers did not help.

That should be an "idle" system

What brought the fan to a standstill, however was:

Restarting the Surface Pro 3 while in the docking station.

I don't mean powering it down and switch it back on again. That doesn't do any good. It is the restart that does the trick for me.

A very relaxed CPU

This, of course, is only a very temporary solution. So whenever the fan (which rarely ever stops completely) gets on my nerves, I reboot and things are better for the rest of the day.

Docking station drivers?

I suppose that a driver for the docking station's peripherals causes the problems. But disabling any of them did not cure the problem, so I might be wrong. Can anyone shed more light on that issue?

--

Edit 2017-03-08: The current driver package SurfacePro3_Win10_1700802_1.msi did not help either.

More work on the TOP-308 IP Camera

Great news on the TOP-308 IP camera

Root access to the camera

Last year I got this Top-308 IP camera and got a little stuck as I couldn't get full access.
Now user Choziro over on the IPCamTalk-Forum has found a great way to get full root access to the Linux OS of the camera.

This is how it is done:

• Telnet to port 9527 of your camera. (Most likely 192.168.1.10 9527)
• log on as "admin" with an empty password
• type "shell"
• type "telnetd -f"

The session is more or less stuck at that point, but that does not matter.

• Now telnet to your camera (192.168.1.10) at the default telnet port 23
• User name is "root"
• Password is "xmhdipc"
• You now have a nice busybox shell that behaves much better than on port 9527

Rootshell !

No still images from the camera

Nosing around in the file system showed that there was no obvious way to get a single image from the camera. But that is what I need. So I resorted to letting my Raspberry Pi do that job:

This works both with avidemux and ffmpeg:

avconv -i "rtsp://192.168.1.10/user=admin_password=_channel=1_stream=0.sdp" -vframes 1 "image.png"

That will capture a single frame from the camera and write it to a file "image.png".

Putting that into the RasPi's crontab could copy an image to a web site.

How to delete a stuck Thumbs.db file

From time to time Windows users complain that they can't delete folders. The 1st level support people usually think it is some file system permission problem and escalate it to the sysadmin team.

The error message is, that the file is in use. This is almost certainly not the case here.

File in use?

However, it is amazingly easy to fix:
Change the view to "large icons" and back to "details". This apparently rewrites the thumbs.db file.

The thumbs.db file can simply be deleted then.

Trend Micro OfficeScan WebReputation filter gone paranoid

Trend Micro OfficeScan web reputation problems

Safe or sorry

Yesterday users started reporting problems with blocked elements on websites. This also completely blocked sites with Anti-Adblock-features.
Although this banner has now disappeared from TrendMicro's OfficeScan support pages, the problem did not disappear completely.

TrendMicro's info about the problem

Options...

There are two three ways to go:

1. wait it out till TM has fixed it.
   (not an option)
2. add exceptions for blocked servers manually
   (more secure - more work)
3. disable web reputation service
   (less work - less secure)

To add exceptions to the filter, navigate to http://YOURTRENDMICROSERVER.YOURDOMAIN:8080/officescan and go to the Web reputation settings:

Agent settings

Here you can manually add exceptions:

By default, the exception list is not avtive. Do don't forget to enable it.

That should fix it for a limited number of sites. You can get a list of blocked sites from the client's web reputation protocol and copy/paste from there.

The other option is to temporarily disable Web Reputation filtering altogether:

Uncheck the activation box for the web reputation service on to disable it globally.

Microsoft Office Click-to-run component prevents Visio 2016 installation

Click-to-run

On the Surface Pro 3 I use at work, I need Microsoft Visio 2016 for a project documentation. We still use Office 2007 (32 bit), so I also have to run with the 32bit version of Viso. (Not an issue.)
But when trying to install Visio from the CD-Image, the installer complained about an

Office 2016 click-to-run

installation, that prevents Visio from installing.
I followerd quite a few hints about removing that click-to-run component, but couldn't find it on my system as described.

Greek gift

It turned out to be a greek gift from microsoft:
The Surface Pro 3 came with "Office 2016 Home&Student" as "click-to-run" package. In the list of installed programs it was listed as "Office".

MSI-installer

I removed that and Visio 2016 (32bit) installed without a problem. It also did not harm the OneNote App I frequently use with the SurcafePro3.

Test your USB serial converter

Back in the days

when PCs came with serial and parallel ports, techs had sets of plugs to test the serial and parallel interfaces with.

There is also a >>>video<<< on this!

Today

I still use a RS232 adapter on my SurfacePro at work to configure Cisco network components. I had quite a few of these for the last few years with different chip sets.

For my microcontroller hacking joy, I have come to like CP2102 based adapters like this one. The chip is 5V tolerant and puts out 3.3V levels which is good enough for 5V applications, too.

Put it to the test

Sometimes, when stuff doesn't work as expected, I wonder: Does my USB-serial adapter even work? And the test is easy:

Simple loopback

On this adapter, we don't have any additional signal lines that we find on a fully featured adapter, so all we have to do is to connect the TXD pin to the RXD.
Now everything transmitted through the TXD pin is fed back to the receive pin.

If the driver installed ok, you will see a new COM Port. In this case: COM3

For the loopback test, you have to configure that COM-Port into Putty:

Configure Putty

By default, Putty has local echo off. That means that if you press a button on the keyboard, you will see nothing, unless something is sent back by the adapter.

If you see what you type, everything is ok:

No local echo

If you enable local echo (tick "Force on"),

Enable or disable local echo

you will see every keystroke twice:

With local echo

And that also means that your adapter works ok.

Materials used in the video and for the blog entry:

• CP2102 usb serial adapter
• Jumper cables
• 9V rechargeable lithium battery
• Oscilloscope (Kit)
• 9V Clip/Connector
• Putty Terminal Software (free)

Getting started with a Samsung Portable SSD T1 (500GByte)

For my wife's macbook, I was looking for an new external 500GByte USB-SSD drive. She had filled an external 256MByte Transcend SSD with her iPhoto library and now it was time for the next step.

I found a very reasonably priced, now discontinued Samsung Portable SSD T1 (Model MU -- PS500B) at a nearby consumer electronics store. Manufacturing date is 03/2015. Not the latest&greatest, but for 129€, it seemed like a bargain. Worth a try.

From the comments on Amazon, I knew that installation was not painless and many had complaints. So I decided to "unlock" the drive on my Windows 10 PC and re-format it on the MacBook later.

In Windows 10 the drive did not show up with a driver letter, so I couldn't install the software required to unblock the drive. I had expected to see a "tools"-Partition or something like that
The manual was not helpful either.

There is a new drive!

But it looks pretty useless

No tools or utilities partition and no driver CD in the box. Gooooogling helped:

I found the T1 Activation Software here.

I then extracted "SamsungPortableSSD.exe" from the ZIP Archive and ran it.
I choose not to use a password and a few moments later, the drive was accessible:

exFAT... Ugh!

Reformatting to NTFS was quick and painless. The SamsungPortableSSD tool did not seem to leave unwanted stuff on my system.

Re-formatted to NTFS

It is now possible to partition  / format the drive on the MacBook with a HFS file system. No need for stuff that hooks into OSX.

Shows up as expected

Re-formatting to HFS is easy.

Yes, we're sure!

Now that wasn't too hard, although Samsung didn't really make it intuitive. And that might be the reason why I got this drive for cheap.