Monthly Archives: January 2015

Using a Windows 8 upgrade key for a clean install

I recently faced reinstalling a Windows 8 machine, without knowing the key used for deployment on it was an upgrade key. Not wanting to wipe the drive (again), dig up a Windows 7 key, then installing Windows 8 again, I googled and found this advice at Lifehacker, which worked brilliantly: If you do a clean […]

Writing a newline to separate commands in XChat

Just learned something neat: In XChat, if you hold ctrl and shift, and then press “u”, followed by “a”, you get a weird character that signifies a line break. This can be used to put several commands on one line in the configuration, or to type several lines before spamming them all at once into […]

MSSQL Mass Copy

To avoid locking a table for a damn long time, this is how Google told me to do mass copies of data in Microsoft SQL Server: DECLARE @BatchSize INT = 1000 DECLARE @IdMax INT = 25179272 DECLARE @i INT = 0 WHILE @i <= @IdMax BEGIN INSERT INTO [mydata].[dbo].[ProjectEventValues] WITH (TABLOCK) ([projectId] ,[descId] ,[index] ,[controllerId] […]

SMPS Repair

I recently had to repair the Switched Mode Power Supply for my RockWheel (a one-wheeled electric “vehicle”). Looking around for some general guidelines, since I hadn’t touched line voltage in a while, I found this guide over here useful. Archived here for archival purposes…