Dissociating Windows 10 account with Microsoft (online) account

I’ve recently closed my Microsoft account (finding big tech too intrusive and too eager to make users subjects of their social experiments, aka data harvesting) and do not want Windows to link to it.

After tons of research on forums, I’ve found that Microsoft removed “Sign in with a local account instead” button/link in “Settings->Accounts->Your Info” page since 2017. So this method won’t work anymore:

So far nobody offered a solution that does not involve starting over with a new local account, but in involves moving your user specific settings and desktop folders, which is a pain in the butt.

After exhausting publicly available avenues so that I’m not reinventing the wheel, I decided to go back to first principles trying to ‘crack the code’. The first thing I thought of, based off my intuition about Windows system since middle school, is to search for my associated Microsoft Account ID (the email account string) in the registry. Turns out it only appears only in two keys (branches):

#1: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\IdentityCRL\UserExtendedProperties\{Microsoft ID}

#2: HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\IdentityCRL\StoredIdentities\{Microsoft ID}
#3: HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\IdentityCRL\StoredIdentities\{Microsoft ID}\{SID}

Replace {Microsoft ID} with your Microsoft (Web) Account Email address. {SID} is the security identifier of the underlying local/domain user account (starts with “S-1-” followed by a long string of numbers with dashes)

If your Microsoft (Web) account is associated with only one local/domain account (SID), simply delete the two registry branches (called keys) #1 and #2 that ends with your {Microsoft ID}. The line #3 is just a sub-key (sub-folder/ranch) under line #2, so if you delete the whole line #2 branch, the rest below it is gone.


Given the registry key structure, I’d anticipate that if you have associated the same {Microsoft ID} to a few windows local/domain accounts, and only wanted to just break its link to specific local/domain accounts without affecting the rest, you might want to just get rid of this

HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\IdentityCRL\StoredIdentities\{Microsoft ID}\{SID}

instead of the first two registry paths that covers information about the {Microsoft ID} unrelated to the local/domain account. To find out which {SID} refers to the local/domain account you want to delete, go to command prompt and type this

WMIC useraccount get name,sid

and it will show you a table that maps your Windows local/domain account name to SIDs so you can pick out the right registry key path (#3) to delete.

Of course, after you’ve deleted the last SID associating {Microsoft ID} on your computer, you might as well delete all references to the {Microsoft ID} to avoid orphan registry keys that confuse people.

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HP 54003-61617 Probe = HP 10017A

I have a 54003-61617 probe lying around and I never got a chance to find out what bandwidth so I rarely used it. After some digging, thanks to searchable PDFs, I found on 1986-04 edition of HP Journal (Archived copy here) that 54003-61617 probe is equivalent to 10017A:

By the way I noticed HP Labs still had the old HP Journal PDF files hosted on the website except without indexing: https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/pdfs/IssuePDFs/YYYY-MM.pdf, replace YYYY with year and MM with month.

HP Journal (hparchive.com has an excellent collection) is an excellent source of hard-core electronic engineering education materials, better than anything you can get in colleges because electronic circuit design (not IC designs) is not an academic research area anymore. As of 2000, the only way to get into this area is to work at companies (apprenticeships) instead of formal training like classes. There’s a little problem though because this specialty (analog electronics) is so disorganized, very often even veterans in analog electronics has blind spots like not taking advantage of math tools/thinking enough (they tend to be very good at back-of-envelope calculations).

Finding the specs for 10400A series (10017A) is not easy either because the datasheet is not on Keysight (the new name for HP’s instrument division). It’s listed in an 1998 catalog “How to Select A Probe” kindly hosted by Marc Mislanghe (who passed away in 2014) as HPMemoryProject.org that listed the specs of 10017A in attempt to find an approximate ‘modern’ substitute:

HP 10017A (54003-61617) mini-probe has the following specs:

  • Attenuation: 10:1
  • Input Capacitance: 8pF
  • Input Resistance: 1MOhm
  • Bandwidth: 300Mhz
  • Compensation range: 9~14pF
  • Takes up to 300V
  • 1 meter long cable

Even older record, Operating Note Part No. 5955-6270 courtesy of HParchive.com shows:

I bought a bunch of snap-on ground lead alligator clips (MP2+MP3) and grabbers (MP7) for the probe

Figure 2. 100XXA probe with hook tip or grabber

The snap-on alligator ground clip actually has two parts: the alligator clip (MP2, 5061-1258) and the snap-on ground lead (MP3, 10006-61301) and they are screw-mated :

I happened to have bought a pack of multiple new ground leads and grabbers (MP7, 10017-69501) for this model series, more than what I’d need. They’ll fit miniature probes models 10017A, 10018A, 10040A, 10041A, 10042A.

These accessories will also fit 10021A, 10022A, 10026A, (10027A?), 10032A, 10033A as well.

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Updates to Linux on Pogoplug v4

I have an old Pogoplug v4 series hacked to install Debian Linux based on this instruction long ago: http://blog.qnology.com/2014/07/hacking-pogoplug-v4-series-4-and-mobile.html
which boots on an SD card, which I used as a no-ip update client.

I realized some of the URLs to the package servers are broken. So here’s my notes to update it.

First apt-get doesn’t work anymore because the files has been moved to the archive package server. The solution is to replace all the contents (now obsolete) in /etc/apt/sources.list by this line:

deb http://archive.debian.org/debian wheezy main

Then you update the package manager (apt-get) with this command:

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

Note that it’s still Debian 7 and it will not work with new software that requires later versions

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NextCloud quirks – moving folder breaks the site

I changed the folder of where my NextCloud files is and got this error.

Adding the “.ocdata” dummy file there doesn’t work. The message is cryptic. I tried to run occ at the root folder (hoping it’s some sort of management tool) by running this at the command/SSH prompt:

php ./occ

and it spits out:

Your data directory is invalid
Ensure there is a file called ".ocdata" in the root of the data directory.

An unhandled exception has been thrown:
Exception: Environment not properly prepared. in 
{New Folder}/lib/private/Console/Application.php:168
Stack trace:
#0 {New Folder}/console.php(99): ...

I replaced my actual path for the new location of the NextCloud files with {New Folder}, so you get the idea.

I also noticed the old path was regenerated with just a /data folder with two files

This means some programmer got lazy and hard-coded the path somewhere!

Line 99 of console.php didn’t give too much hint so I looked at the code around for some sort of config-related operations before. Then I noticed this:

So I searched for config.php and found it’s located in /config/config.php. Bingo!

<?php
$CONFIG = array (
...
  'trusted_domains' => 
  array (
    0 => '{Old URL}',
  ),
  'datadirectory' => '{Old Path}/data',
...
  'overwrite.cli.url' => 'https://{Old URL}',
...
);

And to my horror the SQL password is stored in plain text in config.php! WTF! I’ll choose a password that’s dedicated to one use and not shared!

I recalled a when I rename WordPress databases, I have to manually edit the changes in wp-config.php. Turns out nobody warned us about that for NextCloud! That config file also contain database settings, so I bet if I change the database names or database usernames, I’ll have to come back and edit it manually too.

The site is working after I made the migration changes, all in /config/config.php.

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Linux setup notes – hostname to communicate with Windows computer

In Debian, the hostname is located in /etc/hostname. The name won’t show up on my router (linux firmware) until I’ve got the right hosts order:

# /etc/nsswitch.conf
hosts:          files dns wins

However, Windows doesn’t recognize the hostname since it uses NetBIOS, which means I need nmbd in sambapackage:

apt-get install samba

Install it and I can ping right away and use the SMB shares!

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