I recently bought a new laptop, a Lenovo E14, which I was delighted with, except that periodically the screen would flash severely. The solution was obvious – it was clearly a driver problem, so I installed all the latest drivers – but the problem
Read More
IBM Security Privilege Vault IBM Security Secret Server Thycotic Secret Server
Symbol set problems with Secret Server custom batch file launchers
I have come across an interesting problem when using custom batch file launchers: if any of the command line arguments, such as a password, contains any of these characters: | < > ” & then they don’t get passed into the batch file correctly
Read More
IBM Security Privilege Vault IBM Security Secret Server Thycotic Secret Server
Secret Server – Custom reports (and the annoying ‘SQL that was entered is not valid for reporting’ error)
Secret Server is a brilliant Privileged Access Management (PAM) product. I have being doing some work recently on its custom reports – it’s great that you have the flexibility to create your own custom reports without needing to resort to Professional Services, so I
Read More
Linux Misc Technical Raspberry Pi
Configuring an Infrared Remote Control to Control RuneAudio Archlinux (without needing LIRC)
Introduction
As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog article, I have started using a brilliant Raspberry Pi-based music player called RuneAudio (which uses Music Player Daemon – MPD – at its heart). I have this connected to a home cinema system,
Read More
Linux Misc Technical Raspberry Pi
LIRC configuration file for Sony RM-ADP090 remote control
Recent Linux kernels include support for infrared remote controls and so the requirement for LIRC (Linux Infrared Remote Control) has been diminishing, but nevertheless some systems still use it. I was doing some work with LIRC recently and I couldn’t find a configuration file for
Read More
New version of my Sudoku Solver is now available from App Store…
A while ago I released an updated version of my Sudoku Solver iOS app. As well as solving regular Sudoku puzzles it can Sudoku puzzles ‘with a twist’ (where there is a ‘twist’ of nine shaded squares which must also contain the numbers one to
Read More
Linux Misc Technical Raspberry Pi
ID3 tag incompatibility between iTunes and Linux – and how to fix it
Introduction
I recently set up a Raspberry Pi-based music player based on Rune Audio. At its core it uses Music Player Daemon (MPD) – but I found that MPD wouldn’t read the ID3 tags on a lot of my music tracks. After some investigation I

Raspberry Pi-based music player with Rune Audio
I have recently had some fun setting up a Raspberry Pi-based music player – in fact it took me longer than I was expecting: it took a while to find a music player that I was happy with, and I also found that the tags
Read More
Great read: a fascinating book about the battle for the North Atlantic during the Second World War
I have just finished reading A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Secret Game that Won the War by Simon Parkin. As it says on the dustcover: “1941. The battle of the Atlantic is a disaster. Thousands of supply ships ferrying vital food and fuel
Read More
VMware ‘Failed to connect pipe to virtual machine’ error
I had been running VMware Workstation version 14.1.7 on my Windows 10 laptop quite happily, until after a recent Windows update when I attempted to run a guest virtual machine I got an error ‘VMware Workstation cannot connect to the virtual machine. Make sure you
Read More