I’ve been reading about capacitors a lot lately. Not just their high-level circuit behaviours, but also their materials and physical properties. I put together a heap of notes on the topic. Knowing me, these notes will languish in my documents folder and I’ll never look at them again. And that’s ok, because that’s just how… Read More Notes on capacitors, part 1: ceramics & MLCCs
Microsoft added a new field, GuardMemcpyFunctionPointer, to the PE load config structure in Windows 22H2. I couldn’t find any documentation on this at all, either from Microsoft or from reverse engineers, so I thought I’d post my initial findings here. The field is a virtual address (VA) that typically points into the .rdata section. At… Read More What is GuardMemcpyFunctionPointer?
How many processors does Windows 10 support? It’s a simple question, but the correct answer is surprisingly hard to come by. What led me to ask this question was curiosity: I wondered whether it would be possible to run Windows 10 on a Supermicro 7089P-TR4T – a single-node server with eight Intel Xeon Scalable sockets… Read More CPU Socket and Core Count Limits in Windows 10 (And How To Remove Them)
FreeNAS 11.x is no longer receiving package updates due to the major version update to TrueNAS 12.x. A side effect is that the CA certificates database from systems on 11.x is now outdated and contains expired CA certificates. This causes errors such as the following when attempting to create jails or update the OS: On… Read More Fixing HTTPSConnectionPool “certificate verify failed” error in FreeNAS 11.3
Today I found that Calculator.exe could not open. Since it is now a Microsoft Store app, apparently that is a thing that can happen, rather than the executable just being an innate standalone part of the OS. Moronic design decisions aside, finding a fix for this error online is an exercise in futility, because apparently… Read More Fixing Microsoft Store error 0x80073cf9 when trying to install or update a specific app
Intel Cryo Cooling is an active cooling solution that uses a TEC, also known as a Peltier element, to cool the CPU. A TEC can pump heat from one side of it to the other, meaning that one side gets cold while the other gets hot. This is useful for situations where you want to… Read More Tweaking the internals of Intel Cryo Cooling
This blog post started as a ridiculously long comment on a GitHub issue. It’s long enough that it should be a blog post, as someone on Twitter pointed out to me, so now I’m replicating it here with some tweaks to make it read a bit better in continuous prose. A caveat: I very quickly… Read More A primer on Windows PE files and doing API calls without knowledge of memory layout
Memory DIMMs have a small flash memory chip (EEPROM) on them, containing an important descriptor table called the Serial Presence Detect (SPD). This data tells the system the size, speed, timings, operating voltage, manufacturer, part number, overclocking profiles, and all sorts of other information about each DIMM. The SPD chip is accessed using the SMBus… Read More Investigating a failure to read DIMM SPD data on Intel Xeon Scalable platforms
Everyone has something that they are weirdly knowledgeable about. For me, that’s Futurama. It’s one of my favourite shows of all time and I’m only just shy of being that guy who goes to comic conferences to annoy the writers with questions about minor production mistakes. The thing I’m going to talk about in this… Read More How many seasons of Futurama are there?
SwiftOnSecurity asked “What would you change in Windows?”. There are a lot of replies to the thread, and I read them all. I have some of my own thoughts, too, but it was too much for a bunch of Twitter replies, and I think it’s probably useful to collate everything I saw in the thread… Read More What I Would Change In Windows: October 2020 Edition
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