Snagit’s Video Capture Snag…

Recently, I had to capture screen clips and decided to utilise Techsmith’s Snagit, which worked wonderfully in the past…

However, try as I might, it now hung on my PC whenever I stopped the capture (and it tried to save the clip), showing me a spinner that sat there forever (till its process was killed).

Scrounging around the ‘net provided little clue, but seemed that quite a few people had run up against it also. Then, after weeks of on-and-off searching, I finally ran across this little answer hidden in the corner of the ‘net…

Check the simple fix (if you had not already clicked through the linked solution from above)…

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Zoom 64-bit (x64) Offline Installer…

I absolutely abhor applications that infest your machine in the C:\Users\<blah>\AppData\<blahblah> folder, needlessly littering their “little pebbles of rabbit droppings” all over your hard drive (similar to Mac OS’s ._crap). I have administrator access and don’t want multiple copies of your program, thank you – much less mis-matched, outdated versions.

It’s hard enough to explain software interfaces to my elderly parents without having to also waste time explaining why their applications have different buttons due to different versions due to these “profile-local” installs, or why their C:\ boot drive, running on that small, purposely designated PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, was running out of disk space with multiple copies of the same files

Spotify and Zoom are prime examples, particularly Spotify – at least Zoom provides an offline MSI installer (which then properly installs into C:\Program Files (x86)\)…

But… although there’s a desktop x64/64-bit installer (which infests individual profile’s personal directories), there’s no x64/64-bit version of said MSI installer… But is there?

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su-up!

So, I finally got sick of typing my root user password in my Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), *nix Docker containers and Linux servers…

The answer (for some flavours of *nux): just create an addendum to /etc/sudoers by creating any new file in the /etc/sudoers.d/ directory!

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Breaking My Bluetooth Disconnecting-Reconnecting Cycle…

For some odd reason, some Windows 10 update or software of some sort seems to have suddenly borked my Bluetooth connection/s, whereby any Bluetooth headset and/or speaker would disconnect and reconnect repeatedly from my Bluetooth 5.0 radio (that came with the after-market Intel AX200 Wi-Fi 6/802.11ax NGFF M.2 card I installed on my PC)… I do not have other Bluetooth device types to test, so cannot say if other devices would have also experienced the same connect/disconnect cycle.

Nevertheless, I quickly found a solution: disabling power saving on the “USB hub” devices the “Intel Wireless Bluetooth” device was hanging off… (Assuming you have administrator rights/permissions on Windows…)

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“Over Specifying” an Excel Range Selection…

Whilst attempting to wrestle some data into submission and line ’em up like good little datum on an Excel chart, I ran into an issue attempting to utilise a dynamically defined range of data as the chart’s data source.

I had followed the sages’ advice found over the Internet, first finding out you cannot use an INDIRECT() function directly while specifying chart series source data, then attempting to replicate the advice on using named ranges (as an additional level of indirection).

Unfortunately, try as I might, I still kept getting the dreaded “Excel found  a problem with one or more formula references in this worksheet” error, for which the description and suggestion was to “Check that the cell references, range names, defined names, and links to other workbooks in your formulas are all correct.”, whenever I tried to save or even tab away/take focus away from the data input field:

If you are sharp-eyed and am an Excel expert, laugh at my folly and move on… If you are still clueless on what the cause is, please do continue reading…

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Logitech G933 Microphone Borked by Own Logitech Software…

OK, so I love headsets that have their own microphone toggle switch that is not tied to some software switch requiring a mouse click or even a keyboard shortcut or press. The switch can be a physical in-line flick or push button switch for wired headsets, or, in my current case, a flick up/down microphone on my wireless Logitech G933 headset I purchased quite a while back…

Recently, with the pandemic raging all around and Work-From-Home (WFH) being the norm, a good headset with microphone control was a must.

Unfortunately, for some odd reason, my Logitech G933 headset microphone started to “crap out” – once muted (i.e. flipped up) the microphone would never re-activate, even with repeated power cycling of the headset. Only a reboot would work…

Frustrated, I was finally ready to throw the headset away when I tried it with another laptop… It worked without issues… I suddenly remembered about the Logitech G Hub software that was running (and not running very well at that – it hangs on the loading screen, which I previously tried troubleshooting but never got anywhere).

I killed the G Hub process and suddenly, my headset was working just fine again!

My Background…

Skeletons In My Closet

(or in my case, Diners In The Background, aka the Case of the Faceless Man)…

With the recent global pandemic, working from home means parking myself at my (messy) workbench, work laptop tucked under my triple monitor set-up… that, due to my small apartment, is actually in my dining area (with the dining table at my back). This means I (usually) do not enable my video/webcam feed during virtual meetings/teleconferences, mainly to

  • retain some modicum of privacy for the rest of my household
  • avoid the extremely distracting situation of having people walking past behind me (and given that my webcam is perched on top of my monitor that has been raised to eye height and therefore is pointing downwards, means headless torsos traversing stage left to right or vice versa)
  • avoid having some person/s sitting down at the dining table behind me, eating or whatever

Unfortunately, forced to show my ugly mug via video/webcam feed during work calls, due to guilt for not doing so while everyone else was, or because of conducting customer training, I had to scramble to find a solution to “hide” my background.

You Feel Sense Me?

I immediately thought of depth-sensing cameras, hopeful that the days of the Xbox Kinect have been left behind in the name of maturity… A full day of researching depth-sensing capable cameras came up with disappointing results, however.

The Intel D435 is the only widely available retail webcam considered “current”, with everything else, like the Intel SR305 and similar third-party Intel SR300-based products (like the Creative BlasterX Senz3D and the Razer Stargazer) currently relegated as “discontinued”/”unsupported” (due to the latest Intel SDK dropping support for SR300) or “limited support” (i.e. using only the normal, 2D RGB sensor, like any other normal HD/FHD webcam)

Countless other pages I forgot to bookmark/note down simply distilled into the single fact that dabbling with depth sensing cameras was a hit-or-miss affair, with actual software support not universal, despite Intel’s SDK having being already been provided… Maybe if someone can write a “tween” application (here or here) that would create a fake green screen that (most) other “normal” software with native support for green screens (like OBS and Zoom) could use, this may be the ideal (compared to what follows below)…

If you have to ask why: some of the solutions proffered still pick up persons moving behind me, and often incorrectly, resulting in some disembodied torso crossing behind me; the use of depth sensing would result in picking up only me, assuming some ability to control/select the distance/depth…

Since I did not want to spend money on something that may work (but most likely not), that brought me back to the “standard” webcam + “human shape/form sensing” and “‘smart‘ background removal”…

I tested several options I could find, namely:

One key point for me, which may not be applicable to you, is that I needed the software to work with BlueJeans, the “video conferencing application of choice” for work.

2021/07/01 Update: With my work moving over from BlueJeans to Zoom (citing the latter is more commonly found everywhere, probably due to their offering of a “free” tier), this is no longer a requirement. Zoom itself had introduced non-green screen background replacement shortly after this article was written also, and to date, it’s outline detection appears to equal or surpass Snap Chat’s.

2020/07/13 Update: BlueJeans surprised me today with an updated version, with a new “background” feature ala Zoom’s virtual background feature (i.e. not requiring chroma-keying/green screen)…

The good: less CPU intensive, less lag than routing through Snap Camera (as expected).

The bad: Shape/person object detection is still wanting, in comparison with Snap Camera (better) or even PerfectCam’s (best) shape detection – persons walking in my background still “appear” in BlueJeans as compared to the other two, despite the rather large distance separation.

Jump past the break to see what I eventually use now…

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Crouching Tiger, Hidden User-SID-in-Registry…

I was poking around my Windows 10 registry and stumbled across an “account unknown” SID – which immediately triggered my “hack alert” (not to mention my OCD)…

I traced this inherited permission up to registry root – which got me really worried

I was about to just “try and clean it up” (e.g. search the entire registry for the same SID and delete it if no such value, i.e. reference, was found), but decided to quickly search the ‘net while waiting for regedit to complete the full tree search when I stumbled upon this.

TLDR: Don’t blindly delete any unknown SIDs…

<RANT> Trust Microsoft to do something stupid like this, all in the name of attempting to “hide” or obfuscate their spying (in the case of this specific SID “S-1-15-3-1024-1065365936-1281604716-3511738428-1654721687-432734479-3232135806-4053264122-3456934681” in question); I mean, why would Edge, one piece of software requiring outbound network connectivity, need to have read permissions of the entire freakin’ registry?!?). This looks like one massive data leak/breach (via an Edge exploit) waiting to happen.</RANT>

Fixing Adobe’s Constipation…

So I ran into an issue where Adobe Acrobat refused to output any prints, citing two errors in succession: “document could not be printed” and “there were no pages selected to print“. A quick Google search found this (extremely old*) Adobe Community post.

Specifically, step #3 fixed it for me (i.e. deleting the entire %LOCALAPPDATA%\Adobe\Acrobat\DC folder). Just remember to quit Acrobat first

*Hey Adobe, it will be great if you can get your shit together and fix issues as old as this.

Clamping Down HARD on DHCPd MACs…

There is an eight year old issue (at the point of writing this) with pfSense DHCPd that somehow did not restrict DHCPd IP “handouts” despite the chosen setting to “Deny unknown clients”… Which, after some digging, turns out more to be of a misunderstanding than what the “common people” would think.

Despite the “Deny unknown clients” setting, certain clients requesting an IP from a pool/interface that does not explicitly list its MAC address will still get an IP address. It turns out that said client is considered “known” if the MAC is listed anywhere else (i.e. in some other MAC address list)…

Anyway, I got fed up with this seemingly insecure behaviour and managed to hack a fix… some 8+ months ago… Just that I never got around to posting the details for people willing to hack their own pfSense fix (unlike my other SSHd configuration fix which was documented in full)…

Well, to cut the long story short, the pull request (merged with another upstream fix) has now been accepted and merged (actual changes)… You will see this fix some-time-soon-now in some upcoming pfSense release… Enjoy!

2021/02/28 Update: A year later and only now is the DHCPd fixes released with a new stable release (2.5.0), instead of the expected 2.4.x! Well, it’s “finally out there”…

2021/06/01 Update: As of time of writing, it appears that 2.5.0 and 2.5.1 are, unfortunately, bugged and I do not recommend upgrading to 2.5.0/2.5.1…

2021/07/07 Update: pfSense 2.5.2 is now released… YMMV…