Category: Uncategorised

Windows 10 on Ubuntu 20.04 with VirtualBox

It is tax season again in Canada. In the past I had a VirtualBox virtual machine that I would only bring up for the purpose of running the Windows version of TurboTax because the member of our family who files the taxes dislike the too simplified online version.

Unfortunately VirtualBox refuses to come up on macOS BigSur due to new security considerations enforced by macOS. The new System Integrity Protection (SIP) disallows the kernel extension required for VirtualBox. Instead of going around SIP via the crsutil disable command, I decided to move all of my virtual machines that is currently sitting on my Mac to my Ubuntu NAS, since the Ubuntu box is up 24 x 7 and should be more convenient.

Below is what I had to do on my Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS server.

Add the apt source where we can get VirtualBox.

sudo wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox_2016.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -

echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian focal contrib" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/virtualbox.list

sudo apt update

Install Virtual Box and our user to the vboxusers group.

sudo apt install --yes virtualbox-6.1
sudo systemctl status vboxdrv

sudo usermod -aG vboxusers $USER

We then need to install the extension that enables RDP. The virtual machine is going to be hosted on a server without a graphics user interface, so we have to use a Remote Desktop Client (from Microsoft) on another machine (e.g. my Mac) to gain access.

VBOXVER=`vboxmanage -v | cut -dr -f1`
wget -P /tmp \
https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/$VBOXVER/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-$VBOXVER.vbox-extpack

vboxmanage extpack install /tmp/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-$VBOXVER.vbox-extpack

I tried to import my existing Windows VM without much success, so I decided to create a new one from scratch and reinstalled Windows 10 Pro.

vboxmanage createvm --ostype Windows10_64 --basefolder "/home/kang/VirtualBox" --register --name "win10"

vboxmanage modifyvm "win10" --memory 4096 --nic1 bridged --bridgeadapter1 em1 --vrde on --vrdeport 3389

vboxmanage createhd --filename "/home/kang/VirtualBox/win10/win10.vdi" --format VDI --size 100000

vboxmanage storagectl "win10" --name "SATA" --add sata

vboxmanage storageattach "win10" --storagectl SATA --port 0 --type hdd --medium "/home/kang/VirtualBox/win10/win10.vdi"

vboxmanage storageattach "win10" --storagectl SATA --port 15 --type dvddrive --medium /home/kang/VirtualBox/en_windows_10_consumer_editions_version_2004_updated_feb_2021_x64_dvd_f42b7d6d.iso

vboxmanage storageattach "win10" --storagectl SATA --port 14 --type dvddrive --medium /home/kang/VirtualBox/VBoxGuestAdditions_6.1.18.iso

Note that I had to pre-download the Windows 10 ISO and VBoxGuestAdditions ISO files. The guest additions iso file was available from this site.

https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/6.1.18/

For some reason my motherboard did not have the cpu virtualization mode enabled, so I had to do that with my BIOS settings. It was cryptically called AMD SVM (secure virtual machine).

I started the virtual machine with:

vboxmanage startvm win10 --type headless

However, I had issues with remote desktop. I had to set some permissions with the VirtualBox extensions. The following commands were executed to create a user and its password for Remote Desktop access.

vboxmanage shutdown win10 

vboxmanage setproperty vrdeauthlibrary VBoxAuthSimple

vboxmanage modifyvm "win10" --vrdeauthtype external

vboxmanage internalcommands passwordhash YOUR_PASSWORD
Password hash: 1ffc0406b9891fcd265a225e83a668fa045f1282588f80c8d11c029bad156d85

vboxmanage setextradata "win10" "VBoxAuthSimple/users/tax" 1ffc0406b9891fcd265a225e83a668fa045f1282588f80c8d11c029bad156d85

Now, I can access the VM through Remote Desktop from my Mac. I continue through the process of installing Windows 10, and the VirtualBox guest additions.

The rest is pretty simple. Install Chrome, Buy TurboTax for 2020 tax year, and we are all set!

One final note, I shared a macOS folder to the VM using normal SMB protocol, so that once my taxes are completed, this VM is a throw away, until next year!

The Day After: Installed a security update in regards to virtualbox-dkvm and VirtualBox now refuses to boot from any bootable iso. I gave up and used Parallels on my MacBook Pro. I may try kvm later.

Covid-19 Vaccine Appointment

Today marks the opening day at York Region where appointments will be taken for covid-19 vaccine appointments for people who are 80+ years of age. We were instructed to visit the following link (york.ca/covid19vaccine).

Since both of my parents are within this age group, I proceeded to the site this morning at 8am sharp to book their appointments. No surprise, the site was not available and I saw this:

At around 8:10am, the site was finally active. It was not immediately apparent to me how to book the vaccine, but after more reading, menu hunting, and a few clicks later I finally figured out. I had to choose the location first and then proceed to book an “activity” at that location.

At first, I was delighted to find out that there were hundreds of spots available at Richmond Green, a community facility just 10 minutes walk from our place. Unfortunately, when I proceeded with the booking, I had to create an account first. By the time I created the account, all the spots at Richmond Green were gone, and I had to book elsewhere. At around 9am, all spots from all locations were gone.

My advice is that if you don’t have a york.ca account now, go and create one before you make a booking.

Below is a video that may be useful to others showing how I navigated their web site to get to the booking. Good luck with your bookings!

Weaponizing Social Media & Revolving Governments

If you asked me 10 years ago, I would be a strong proponent of democracy and how the Internet and social media will harmonize and amplify our inherent goodness of the majority and make the world a better place. Of course, I can see this is now totally incorrect. I now see modern mass media technology is being weaponized to promote ideas that benefits those who want to seek or stay in power. Perhaps I would further suggest that any communication advancements will ultimately be utilized in such fashion. Think about how consumer marketing has evolved with communication tech.

When you couple the power of what I described above with the modern liberal democracy ideals of, “everyone should have a voice”, you have a perfect storm fostering opposing, divisive, and influential views, which creates ever growing friction in the efficiency of governing within a democratic process. Decisions at the grass roots levels tend to be more emotional and less pragmatic. The current pandemic reaction from the liberal West can be viewed as a barometer of this effect. Also the leadership is representative of a mass emotional breakdown.

Recently I have become blasé to the instruments of government. Instead of focusing on how a government should work, we should treat it like a product which we the people all consume. Is it a good product and are we happy with it?

People are advocating or dear I say “preaching” one form of government as better than another instead of looking at the actual results of governing and people’s livelihoods. If you look at it from a high enough level, I come to the realization that modern advocacy of liberal democracy has become a religious crusade, one that seeks the conversion of all non-believers.

I am now toying with the realization that governments like all products will evolve or revolve on the changing needs of the consumer. I am not saying a simple change in leadership of a static system, but a massive reformulation of the government itself.

Perhaps we as a race have already figured it out, and the solution is already naturally practiced. Instead of our myopic planning horizons of every four years, or a life span, perhaps the fabric of governance is working through generations.

In essence every government is a crude form of true democracy. Everyone has the ability to vote, of sorts. When life gets too tough to tolerate and you blame the government and leadership for it, you vote by rebelling. This mechanism is of course called a revolution. Instead of an election that temporarily appeases the mass population, the mass population revolts and overturns the government and reinvents it. Social content settles to a new way of governing and the population is content until the next revolution. There is a natural social contract between leaders and those being governed. The votes will truly matter because they are being offered by sweat and blood, and not some, “going through the motion of an election turn out”.

So if you look at it from this granularity, it is somewhat immaterial to continue to debate on which type of government is a better or best government. The people will ultimately decides which government is best for them over the course of time.

In between revolutions, and we don’t feel like “voting / rebelling”, the best we can do is to play the current game that was established in the previous revolution.

Having said all of this, I do think a hierarchical structure of leadership properly established through merit vs a representation of a popular vote is probably more stable and beneficial. A party is in the depth of hypocrisy when it preaches for democracy that is infrequently practiced at intervals of spanning from 2 to 6 years, while we all goto work under a hierarchical structure with clear master/slave relationships for the majority of our working hours of our day.

Notes: I wrote the above in response to a Quora post here.

Trying out Apple Fitness+

I’ve switched to indoor cycling since mid-November when it got too cold and windy to perform an outdoor ride.

My indoor routine is to typically hop on my road bike which is affixed to a trainer (Kinetic Road Machine), and watched an Electronic Dance Music (EDM) filled with either English or Chinese dance mixes.

For each workout, I do my own HIIT sessions that usually last for about an hour or so. A typical session looks something like this recording on Strava. I try different things on different rides. Sometimes I do 1:1 intervals, sometimes I do 1:4 intervals on rest days, and other rides I do pyramid build ups, etc. I try to do an hour and at least for 45 min. The intervals can be between 30 seconds to 5 min depending on how I feel.

Yesterday Apple released their Fitness+ service. Since I’m part of their Apple One subscription, we get the service along with the subscription, so I figure I give it a go.

Today, I did two workouts, one 45 min with Emily and another by the same trainer for another 20 min. I think these workouts are nice for those who wants to get moving, but I personally found it hard to my liking.

The trainer is motivating, and upbeat. The workout is of a lower cadence than I am use to. The only lead in that you get is from the trainer, so there is no visual cue to help you with the next set of effort, or prep you how much rest you are going to get before the next hard effort. I also missed the power and cadence reading on the screen. For those measurements, I have to look down to my Garmin unit.

In short, at least for cycling, these programs are not going to replace Zwift and TrainerRoad. They are good for those who want to replace their typical gym classes. I may give other forms of exercises a shot later on.

Overall I think many will like the service. The integration with Apple Watch is pretty seamless and super friendly. However for cycling, I’ll probably continue with my EDM videos.

Covid-19 Alert App and Scheduling Tests

The Government of Canada has been recommending the Covert-19 Alert App for quite some time now. This is an app that is installed on your smart phone and in a confidential, and anonymous manner, logs proximity interactions between your phone and other phones without sharing any elements of your personal identity or confidential information. If users of the app ended up testing positive for Covid-19, it is up to the users to share their diagnosis with the app in a confidential manner. Once the diagnosis is shared, all the historical phone interactions within the last 14 days that were within 2 meters for 15 minutes will be notified. This in theory should expedite contact tracing with other exposed users.

Any users receiving a notification should get tested before interacting with others or self-isolate for a period of 2 weeks, so I assumed.

I recently schedule a Covid-19 test on behalf of a friend who received such a notification. However, the person who is registering the tests, try to persuade me that a test may not be necessary. Although this person may be correct under certain circumstances, I personally think it is the wrong message to send. First I don’t think the user who is at risk should judge in which circumstances a test is not required. That is simply too much to ask.

I detected a tone of mistrust on the app itself. The person told me the app is “unreliable”. Being in the app business myself, I was curious as why it is unreliable, so I asked the person. They said that many people get an alert because they recently visited a hospital or other high risk areas. I stopped my questioning there, because I did not want to offend the very person who I want to schedule a Covid-19 test with, but in my mind, I am yelling, “WHAT THE HELL! That is precisely the point!”

The idea is to detect a level of risk, and if the threshold (within 2 meters for 15 minutes) is exceeded, then it is best to get tested so that we prevent a possible walking virus breeder. What am I missing here? Instead I get the feeling of, Covid-19 tests are extremely precious, and you should not waste them. The interface that we are using to schedule a test, is discrediting the Covid-19 Alert App, which I think will hinder the prevention of virus spread.

If I did not continue to persuade her that a test is necessary, she could have convinced me not to take the test. This could potentially be poor judgement risking exposures to others.

This is why we do not have this under control people! Our prevention protocols are like sifting baking flour with a tennis racket. This is absolutely crazy!

Getting Tested for Covid-19

Last night I received a call from the vice-principal of one of my son’s high school. They indicated that my son had an indirect contact with a Covid positive individual. That individual was not a member of the school, but is a family member of a classmate.

As a result of this discovery, his entire class now requires isolation and a Covid-19 test is strongly recommended.

Mackenzie Health, located on 10 Trench St., Richmond Hill, ON. is about 10 minutes drive from our house. It just so happens they have a Covid-19 Assessment Centre there. In Ontario, all Covid-19 tests are conducted at these assessment centres, and at the time of this writing, an appointment is required.

I called 905-417-2004 at 8am sharp this morning and ended up first in the queue to make an appointment. I had my son’s Health Card ready, and is the first thing they ask for. They have all of our information once I gave them my son’s Health Card number. They collected his email address so that they can register him through MyChart, an online site where you can get your test results once it is ready.

If you are already a patient at Mackenzie Health, and already have a MyChart account, you can schedule a test online without having the need to call in.

The appointment was for 4:20pm this afternoon, and we arrived at around 5 minutes early. We park in the A-Wing parking lot. They will give you a voucher / ticket to get out of the parking lot, so you do not need to pay for parking.

Here is a top down satellite photo to show precisely where you need to go and park and where the walk-in entrance is.

Satellite Photo (Up is North) – click to enlarge

There was only about 2 to 3 groups ahead of us in line, so the wait was a matter of couple of minutes. At registration, they ask you to change your mask to the ones they provided. The test was completed in less than 15 minutes. They had 8 stations performing the tests in parallel.

The cotton swab test was a bit uncomfortable for my son. He characterized it as a bit of a burning sensation afterwards.

Overall the process is fairly simple and straight forward. Now we await the good news in 2 to 3 days.

Converting iPhone 12 HDR Videos to SDR with FFMpeg

In a previous post, I talked about how to view HDR (High Dynamic Range) videos from the iPhone 12 on my OLED TV. However, sometimes I like to take that HDR video and converted into SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) videos for posting or distribution.

During the course of experimenting with FFMpeg, as the primary tool for this purpose, I found out that it is not always necessary to convert the video depending on where you are going to use the video. For example, uploading the raw HDR footage from the iPhone 12 to YouTube works just fine. However posting HDR video footage to Instagram currently yields a very washed out result.

I personally prefer to store all my raw footage in its high resolution 4K HDR goodness. However, I also keep a rendered down SDR version for practical use. How does one get an SDR video from an HDR source? This is what FFMpeg is for.

All the command line instructions below have been tested on the macOS, and it is assumed that you already have brew installed.

You will need to install a version of FFMpeg that has the zscale filter. If you have a previous version installed without this filter, then you will have to uninstall it first.

brew uninstall --ignore-dependencies ffmpeg

And then we install the version with the filter from the homebrew-ffmpeg tap.

brew install homebrew-ffmpeg/ffmpeg/ffmpeg --with-fdk-aac --with-libbluray --with-libbs2b --with-libcaca --with-libgsm --with-libmodplug --with-librsvg --with-libsoxr --with-libssh --with-libvidstab --with-libvmaf --with-libxml2 --with-opencore-amr --with-openh264 --with-openjpeg --with-openssl --with-openssl@1.1 --with-rav1e --with-rtmpdump --with-rubberband --with-speex --with-srt --with-tesseract --with-two-lame --with-wavpack --with-webp --with-xvid --with-zeromq --with-zimg

I recorded a sample video from my iPhone 12 Pro, below is the raw footage.

The included videos in this article are all HEVC encoded. If your browser does not support this encoding, then you will not be able to play the videos. Safari has no issues. If you have Windows 10, then you can install an extension. How the videos are displayed also depend on the quality and capability of your monitor.

Raw footage from iPhone 12 (4K HDR 60fps) – 92M in size

If you just perform a simple conversion, you will get the washed up version:

ffmpeg -y -i raw.mov -map v:0 -map 0:a -c:v hevc -preset veryfast -tag:v hvc1 -c:a copy sdr_washed_out.mp4
Simple conversion without filters gets a bland result – 5.8M in size

The HDR colours have to be appropriately mapped using some filter trickery with FFMpeg. I found these filter settings about two years ago when trying to convert HDR videos from YouTube in the BT2020 space to BT709. Below is the set of filters used:

ffmpeg -y -i raw.mov -filter_complex "[0:v]zscale=t=linear:npl=100,format=gbrpf32le,zscale=p=bt709,tonemap=tonemap=hable:desat=0,zscale=t=bt709:m=bt709:r=tv,format=yuv420p[v]" -map "[v]" -map 0:a -c:v hevc -preset veryfast -tag:v hvc1 -c:a copy sdr.mp4
SDR result with filter – 5.6M in size

As you can see the SDR version with filter is a lot closer to the original one.

These FFMpeg conversions require a lot of CPU horse power, so beware that they will take a long time. Let me know if there is a better way, as I’m always open to optimize this workflow.

Best Way to Play Dolby Vision Videos from your iPhone 12

Last week our iPhone 12 Pro arrived.

One of the many highlights of owning the new iPhone 12 Pro is the new Dolby Vision videos one can take. I took some footage of Darci our cat using the 4K 60FPS mode. The footage looked stunning on the iPhone itself. However, the small screen of the iPhone is less compelling than our 65″ LG OLED B7 TV that we have in the living room.

The question is, “What is the best way to get these new recordings on the TV and is our 3 year old TV compatible with the new Dolby Vision format?”

My first instinct is to slap it on to my Plex server and play it with the Apple TV 4K Plex App. This was terrible. It was like watching the video in slow motion.

Then I try the Plex App on the LG TV. This was better. The image was sharp, and the colour was vivid. However, the TV buffers every 5 to 7 seconds causing the video to pause or stutter. Not ideal!

I gave up on Plex, and went back to basics. I copied the video file to a NTFS formatted USB drive, that I previously AirDrop’ed from the iPhone to my Mac. The TV only understands FAT or NTFS, and FAT is pretty much useless because it has a file size limit of 4GB. I also tried exFAT but the TV did not like that format either. The video played flawlessly directly from the USB drive. So from this exercise, I knew the TV was compatible with the Dolby Digital format from the iPhone. Hurray!

Now, is there a way to direct stream the video to the TV from our NAS storage that the Plex Media Server is referencing. The LG is DLNA compatible, so I enabled the DLNA feature on my Plex server and voila.

The Plex Server Setting Screen used to enable DLNA

Below is a video showing the steps that I took on the LG OLED TV.

It is too bad that the Plex App on both the TV and the Apple TV cannot make it work. I hope this will be remedy with a future release.

York Region Covid-19 Communication Issues

We are parents of a son who has opted for choosing the in-person learning format this fall in Richmond Green Secondary School. With the recent rises in Covid-19 cases in recent weeks, we have been monitoring new developments continuously. We attempt to monitor new information on regional news via mostly online resources.

However, recent school communication has gotten us pretty confused and frustrated which prompted me, admittedly, ranting about this here. I do hope to provide some constructive feedback, so let me set this up.

On October the 18th, we received the following form letter via an email from the principal.

From: Richmond Green SS xxxxx.yyyyyyy.zz@yrdsb.ca
Subject: COVID-19 Notice of exposure – Richmond Green Secondary School
Date: October 26, 2020 at 1:33 AM 
To: xxxxxxxxx@gmail.com

To: xxxxxxxxx@gmail.com

Dear Parents & Guardians

Please find attached a notification from York Region Public Health. We ask that you please read the attached letter carefully as it contains important information regarding COVID-19.

Sincerely

X. YYYYYY
Principal

email: xxxxxx.yyyyy@yrdsb.ca

The attached notification PDF file is here. The last paragraph of the letter is:

If you have any questions or concerns, please visit york.ca/covid19 or contact York Region Public Health at 1-877-464-9675.

When you click on the above link, I had to do this (follow my navigation by viewing the video below):

So you can see from the above video, that it was not immediately apparent how to get to the information. It took some hunting and exploring. You almost wish that the link that they had will bring you directly to:

School Covid Information

Life would be so much simpler!

If you are trying to access the york.ca/covid19 site on your mobile phone, then the user experience is worse than using a desktop browser.

I understand that they are trying to reuse their existing dashboard information, but frankly speaking this is just throwing data into a big pile and asking people to go to the pile and hunt for the relevant needle that you want, and call it job done.

On top of this, we got the exactly the same email yesterday on October 27th. I am sorry, but now we are being spammed by our schools without net added information, which simply causes more confusion. These guys are responsible for the education of our kids, and yet their form of communication and distributing information is second rate to industry norms. It is sad to see.

I want to be clear that I am criticizing the system and the process, and not laying any blame to the principal who may simply be a conduit in all of this. I know we are in a pandemic and we are all under stress. However, we can use this as an excuse, or we can use this opportunity to bring out the best in us.

Maybe I’m simply being too picky. Let me know what you think.

Update 2020-10-27 8:20PM:

Our York Region, Dave Barrow, has provided an alternative link york.ca/covid19data, which actually work so much better on my mobile phone.

I think the team must have modified something. Kudos to a team for a rapid response.

Pandemic Travel Booking and Refund

Before the Covid-19 pandemic we had booked travel to Mauritius for the entire month of July. The idea is to bring the kids to Mauritius for a very nice summer vacation in paradise. Of course this did not go as plan as the entire world went into lockdown in March and travel everywhere was curtailed.

Not seeing any end in sight for the pandemic, I decided to cancel our flights to Mauritius and seek a full refund in May. At first I was not sure whether we would be able to obtain a refund. As I read more and more articles regarding this topic, such as the CBC article linked here, I felt more empowered to seek a refund. I decided to take a dual prong approach. First I filed a travel insurance claim with TD Visa, and second I requested a refund with Expedia for TD.

I was very encouraged by the fact that Expedia for TD sent me an email in May indicating that my refund is being processed. However, I got heard from no one from May until August. When I look up Air France’s schedule, they have shown that our original flights have all been cancelled. I decided to call Expedia for TD and ask for an update on the matter.

Long story short, it took them until the end of August to refund 4 out of 5 tickets on the itinerary. The last ticket was recently refunded and it my credit card statement yesterday. I made a total of 7 calls to Expedia for TD, the shortest was about 20 minutes, but more often than not it was between 30 minutes to an hour. The good news is that the on hold time was less than 5 minutes for all the calls that I made from August. Here is a summary of all the calls that I’ve made:

    • August 4
    • August 14
    • August 26 (4 of 5 tickets were refunded at this time)
    • September 11
    • September 21
    • September 22
    • September 30 (last ticket acknowledged to be in processed)
    • Last refund hit my credit card on October 1

So you can see from above, that a fair bit of persistence is required to obtain your traveler’s rights during these times. If you are still in the midst of finalizing your travel situation that has been impacted by the pandemic, then I urge you to keep at it. It will pay off.