Laptop keyboard replacement is fairly straight forward and simple, though some of them require a bit of patience or skill. There are, however, two types of keyboard replacement I did really tedious.

Macbook Pro Retina 13"

The original keyboard is mounted with rivets and when you pull the problem keyboard off, you virtually have to snap and break th rivets. After that, there are 54 tiny screws waiting for you, but luckily you can at least buy the tiny screws somewhere.

Whether you don't want to keep your home lab computers on 24/7 for security reason or just want to be environmentally friendly and save energy, you want to be able to switch on/wake up your computer on demand.

The popular way to achieve this is utilise WoL - Wake On Lan, an old technology back in 1997. Basically you can turn on your computer from anywhere. It involves configure your Router, set up a DDNS and turn on WoL BIOS features. We won't discuss details here today, rather, we target the computers that do not support WoL in their BIOS.

Patient: Toshiba Satellite A300D PSAH8A-01J00H, Vista 2GB RAM 320GB HDD BIOS 1.8

This model can only be found on Toshiba Europe website and was sold in Australia. No BIOS/drivers update found from Toshiba. No A series from Satellite family and there is a A series in Satellite Pro family but no A300D product.

1. Windows Store Apps troubleshooter

Click Start > Settings > Update & security > Troubleshoot
Scroll down to the bottom
Click Windows Store Apps
Click Run the troubleshooter

Try to runing troubleshooter a couple of times

2. Reset Windows Store
Press Windows key + R
Type: wsreset.exe
Hit Enter
Try to reset a couuple of times again

3.  Reset Software Distribution folder

WARNING - Shadowsocks is not an alternative to VPN, it will not protect your privacy.

There are so many reasons that people need Shadowsocks some times and this guide is just an easy following instructions.

1. Server setup

We've been recommending people using Thunderbird for years. Thunderbird is just as good as paid email programs if it's not better. As it's getting very popular, there are some works our customers might need us to do.

Some people might ask why bother? Well, it's not just because of good old memories like the Windows 95/98 or even before, there are rare cases that your customer has brought in a good iMac but still running Snow Leopard 10.6.8 with heaps of old AppleWorks 6 documents.

For average users you won't have problem install Windows 7 with help of bootcamp assuming that Apple provides the Windows 7 drivers for your mac. What if you want to install multiple OS X and plus a Ubuntu alongside Windows on your Mac?

We all know that Apple encourage people to upgrade all the time and to buy new product, just like the Windows 10 on Bootcamp, any Macbook Pro, Air, Mini server before 2012 is not supported and Mac Pro before 2013 is not supported as well.

This has been tested with a Raspberry Pi Model B revision 2.0 on Raspbian Stretch Lite Release date: 2017-08-16,  Kernel version: 4.9

There are good reasons you want to run raspberry pi on an USB stick instead of SD card:

There are times when you plug in your friend's external hard drive on the iMac or Macbook Pro, you can only read the drive but cannot transfer your files to the external hard drive. You will see the File System is Windows(NTFS) if you go to Disk Utility -> Info

We had a customer coming with infected laptop last month and the laptop was actually remotely controlled by the cybercriminal without her awareness. She didn't know how this happened, but after analyzing her recent activities, she realized it was just an email sent from the "friend".

Here is a demonstration how the Trojans get into our Windows computers by emails.

An email came in this morning declaring "Remittance copy from bank". I was interested in this kind of emails while expecting some payments.

Optus BYO modem
vDSL
MPoA: enabled
Encapsulation: LLC or VC-MUX, bridged or routed
VPI/VCI: doesn't matter
WAN IP: Obtain address automcatically.

Southernphone
vDSL
Custom VLAN tag: 100
PPPoE:Username/Password